What is a cultural policy? Why is culture political? And what is political in culture?

All culture is political because it imposes rules of belonging and worldviews. Exploring this dimension illuminates the democratic stakes of cultural policies.

Why is culture necessarily political?

The answer is obvious. A culture represents a worldview that has been shaped and shared. Whether legitimate or transgressive, official or secret, artistic, sporting, academic or geographical, culture constitutes what unites human beings within diverse communities: Olympique de Marseille supporters, Dalida fans, baroque music lovers, choir members, World of Warcraft players, or manga enthusiasts with their countless sub-communities.

Culture thus creates communities. It may seem difficult, at first glance, to discern a political dimension in these unifying cultures. Stuart Hall, a figure of cultural studies and British sociology professor of Jamaican origin, renewed the understanding of culture by insisting on its conflictual and political dimension. According to him, culture is not simply a set of practices but a “terrain of struggle” where meanings and identities are negotiated. In his book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997), he writes:

Culture is that place of sharing, negotiation and sometimes conflict where meanings are constructed and contested. It is a terrain of struggle where different groups attempt to impose their own worldviews, their values and their identities.

Stuart Hall reminds us that cultural belonging, far from being neutral, is always traversed by issues of power and recognition, both collectively and individually. Thus, when I evoke the unifying function, I am not limiting myself to its collective social dimension. I also include its intimate personal dimension: that feeling of belonging to a community of lovers of a certain musical style, for example, which persists even when we don’t personally know any other lover of this music. We nevertheless identify with this community through its shared culture.

The political dimension inherent to all culture

How does this cultural belonging take on a political dimension? Every culture contains, consciously or not, a set of rules that evolve over time. As Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated in Distinction (1979), these rules constitute a “habitus” that structures our practices and representations. Sarah Thornton, in her book Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995), shows how “subcultural capitals” function as systems of distinction within alternative communities themselves. For those who freely choose their cultural belonging, these rules are not perceived as constraining but rather as emancipating.

Let’s take the example of punk culture. If I identify with this community and share its codes, my way of dressing and my lifestyle become conscious choices of belonging that participate in the construction of my identity. Naturally, I can simultaneously belong to the punk community and that of baroque music lovers: cultures never mutually exclude each other.

Cultures generally show themselves to be very welcoming to newcomers. If someone shows interest in industrial metal music by buying records or streams, the actors of this culture - musicians, producers, distributors - will gladly accompany them in their deeper discovery of this musical universe. This openness exists, however, only on condition of respecting the implicit codes of the culture in question. Nancy Duxbury, a Portuguese professor and researcher specializing in cultural policies and sustainable development, shows that cultural openness is inseparable from respect for the codes and values specific to each community:

The processes of inclusion and exclusion in cultural participation are often implicit, embedded in social norms and expectations that determine who is considered a “legitimate participant” in a given context. These mechanisms, although subtle, profoundly shape access to culture, recognition of diverse voices, and the ability of newcomers to integrate into established cultural practices.
Article “Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development: Four Strategic Paths” (International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 27, 2021)

Transgressing these rules leads to integration difficulties. One can then feel dissident, marginal, or marginalized, sometimes by oneself, sometimes by others, often by both simultaneously. A double phenomenon can occur: we may have the impression of not respecting all the rules of a culture we wish to integrate into, feeling a problem of legitimacy, while others perceive us as perfectly integrated. Conversely, we may feel fully adherent to a culture while being rejected by certain community members, who feel we take up too much space or don’t meet their expectations. Each community indeed has its spaces of power, its hierarchies and its internal conflicts.

Cultural rules as political system

This analysis progressively reveals, I hope, the political dimension of culture, because we see that belonging to a culture depends on respecting its rules. Now, a set of rules constitutes precisely a political device: an organizational system allowing the functioning of a collective, of which culture forms the symbolic cement, that is, what unites and represents the members of the community. This perspective aligns with the work of American sociologist Howard Becker (1982) on “art worlds” as cooperation systems organized around shared conventions. He writes:

All collective activities, and art is no exception, are organized around conventions, that is, tacit or explicit agreements about how things should be done. These conventions make cooperation possible between different participants, each knowing what others expect of them and what they can expect from others.
Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 1982.

Becker shows that art and culture, far from being simple additions of individual practices, are the product of cooperation between multiple actors, united around shared conventions that structure their collective activity, which relies on the acceptance and reproduction of common rules.

Even voluntarily apolitical cultures intrinsically contain this political dimension. Consider the culture of public theater, bringing together lovers of contemporary authors, innovative stagings and new theatrical aesthetics. This culture, which perceives itself as open and intended for open-mindedness, democratic, progressive and inclusive, nevertheless imposes a complex set of rules, particularly behavioral, during performances.

These rules go far beyond the simple framework of the performance hall. The way of behaving at the theater reveals representations of the world and establishes implicit hierarchies. It notably presupposes the privileged place of the artist, the admiration due to them, and their role as society’s scout. Behind the spectator’s postures lies an entire system of organization and social roles. These are not simple behavioral conventions but a full and complete worldview, a genuine political system.

The revealing example of cinema: France and India

The comparison between French and Indian film cultures perfectly illustrates this political dimension. In Indian theaters, films last several hours and spectators talk, eat, debate, leave and enter freely. In France, silence is the rule. This difference reveals radically different conceptions of the role of art and the artist.

In India, cinema integrates into daily life as a form of community dialogue. In France, we adopt a position of spectator certainly active in their reception, but silent, experiencing the film as a parenthesis in daily life. These approaches differently define the value given to the spectacle. In India, the emphasis is on community gathering around a work that takes this into account: films adopt a slower pace, multiply information repetitions, knowing that attention will not be constant. This approach is in no way perceived as problematic.

These are indeed two distinct relational and democratic policies. Note that I’m speaking here of mainstream Indian cinema; other cinematic forms coexist in India, carrying other cultural policies.

Cultural policy: an eminently political choice

I hope to have demonstrated the intrinsically political character of all culture. Let’s now address the notion of “cultural policy,” where the terms are reversed. This refers to choices made with public money to support and disseminate certain cultures to citizens who finance them through taxes.

Cultural policy may seem independent of partisan politics, because elected officials from both right and left often program the same shows and share the same artistic tastes. Yet, by legitimizing and bringing into existence specific cultures, themselves carriers of particular worldviews and democratic systems, these choices produce profoundly political effects. Cultural policy therefore constitutes a political and not cultural choice, contrary to appearances. Left or right elected officials carry a common political culture, because they defend the same institutions, inherited from the French Revolution, which was a “bourgeois revolution,” a “notaries’ revolution” based on property rights. The institutional, legal and ideological bases are common references of both the French right and left: national sovereignty, equality before the law, citizenship, individualism, secularism, and the nation-state. Of course, each camp proposes a different reading and implementation, but none of them are either libertarian or anarchist for example! So the programmed shows can never be anarchist. Or if they are, they will be framed in cultural protocols (if only the customs of entering the theater, paying for the seat, silence in the hall, etc.) that are anything but anarchist, so these artists and shows will be instrumentalized by the bourgeois reproduction system.

Let’s take the counter-example of Isabelle Attard: in her book “How I Became an Anarchist” (2019), she traces her path of political transformation from her activist origins, daughter of an ecologist and archaeozoologist by training, to her adherence to anarchism. Elected as an EELV ecologist deputy in 2012 in Calvados after local engagement in Bayeux, she discovers with disgust the dysfunctions of the parliamentary system, which she calls a “particle accelerator” for her awareness. This experience at the National Assembly, marked by corruption and the impossibility of changing the system “from within,” pushes her after her mandate toward a period of introspection where she immerses herself in the texts of Malatesta, Proudhon, Louise Michel and Murray Bookchin. She discovers that anarchism, far from the chaos associated with it, means absence of domination and organization without centralized power, in perfect coherence with ecology and feminism. Inspired by concrete examples of self-management like the Paris Commune or Rojava, she now campaigns in Brittany within local anarchist collectives. She campaigns to deconstruct prejudices and encourage everyone to question political dogmas that present themselves as the alpha and omega.

The illusion of cultural diversity

It is often claimed that cultural policy supports creation and diversity. This assertion is at best wishful thinking, at worst a lie. As Tony Bennett analyzes in The Birth of the Museum (1995), cultural institutions participate in the construction of an “exhibitionary complex” that normalizes certain practices while excluding others. The work of Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre on the “enrichment economy” (Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, 2017) shows how cultural policies participate in the selective valorization of certain cultural goods and practices.

Those who claim there is diversity in cultural proposals financed by public service either lack lucidity and a minimum of critical distance, or knowingly conceal reality. The reality is that a cultural policy cannot truly support diversity, because it proceeds from necessarily restricted political choices. It is impossible to simultaneously embrace all representations of the world. Each vision, even an open one, can radically oppose others, and these different political visions generate fundamentally distinct cultures.

Recognizing this structural lack of cultural diversity paradoxically allows us to better identify possible openings and existing biases, rather than deluding ourselves about false diversity and manufacturing in good conscience a dominating hypocrisy.

Faced with the argument of good conscience and professionalism of cultural actors, I oppose the observation of the flagrant disconnection between public cultural proposals and a large part of citizens. The worldviews conveyed by these cultural policies radically differ from those of the majority of the population. This problematic joins the analyses carried by the cultural rights movement, which criticizes the paradigm of “cultural democratization” in favor of a “cultural democracy,” recognizing the legitimacy of all cultural expressions and weaving links between them.

One could accuse me of advocating a race to the bottom or demagogy, arguing that it’s easy to propose what pleases the greatest number. This is not at all my position. My proposal is rather to disseminate real diversity through new links woven voluntarily and tirelessly. Because nothing pleases everyone. Even football, which gathers crowds and unleashes passions, leaves some indifferent and repulses others. No cultural policy can reach all citizens or allow real diversity in the political sense of the term: let’s scatter it, in terms of artistic forms, forms of financing and forms of mediation; let’s invent, instead of reproducing.

Toward a democratic opening: cultural rights

How then to reconcile an ethical aspiration for truly diversified cultural policies with an attachment to the democratic model, which allows for funding from tax collection? (let’s not forget that, all taxes combined, including VAT for example, which is invisible but very present, the “poor” pay on average 50% of their income in taxes today, compared to 26% for the “rich”)

The first step consists of becoming aware of the political closure inherent to any cultural policy. The second involves respecting the cultural rights of all citizens. This approach is in line with the work of Patrice Meyer-Bisch on cultural rights, which derive from fundamental human rights, and echoes the Fribourg Declaration (2007), which a group I’m part of is updating, which affirms that “everyone has the right to choose and have respected their cultural identity in the diversity of its modes of expression.”

For those who occupy positions of power, this means actively taking interest in citizens whose cultures are foreign to us and rest on different political bases from ours. It’s about accomplishing this work of openness for which we are remunerated by the taxes of all citizens, and not just for the benefit of those who share our culture.

Cultural rights thus constitute a tool for openness, transformation and mutual enrichment. They can progressively evolve the paradigms of cultural policies toward forms we cannot yet imagine, necessarily diversified and specific according to the cultures encountered, respected and recognized as authentic cultural and political enrichments. We will all grow from this, and cultural professionals, mediators and artists first, if they accept the questioning, sometimes very profound, of some of their certainties or expert postures. And we will secure future funding for the cultural sector, which can refound its political purpose there, in the sense of a contribution to the life of the city.