A clear conscience as a system

The most resilient structures of domination are sometimes the ones their beneficiaries believe they are fighting. The subsidised performing arts sector, of which I am part, offers a ground for observing this, and I want to share that observation here, including myself in it.

The revolution dreamed up for other people

There is a question that some people in the subsidised performing arts sector really do ask themselves, because they want their works to have an effect on those who receive them: does what we do produce the effects we want it to produce? The question is rarely put in those terms, but it works quietly beneath many practices, often as an intention rather than as an examination, sometimes as a certainty. One can be convinced that the quality of one’s work will, by itself, transform people.

Wajdi Mouawad can say in public that he wants the audiences of his plays, after seeing them, to make a revolution, leave their partners, rise up. What presents itself in the guise of political commitment, of radicalism, almost of a poetry of revolt, is at the same time a belief that one knows better than others what is good for them. The question of the impact of works is therefore raised, but it is often raised as a projection of oneself, as a conviction that what one makes will provoke thought, will change the world.

I want to dig into what is at play behind this intention, because what lodges there is not always what one thinks. Mouawad is perhaps sincere, perhaps convinced of what he says, and genuinely wants to change the world. And without realising it, in the very form of his address, he occupies a position of domination. Because he presents himself as a committed figure, he is admired for it, admired for what is also a form of domination, and the emancipation he promises is expected from him. The bourgeois audiences who come to these plays will not make a revolution; they will dabble a little, and the evening will reassure their political good conscience.

The gap between what a person believes they are doing and what they actually do is documented by several disciplines, which converge on the same observation. In psychology, Leon Festinger showed as early as 1957, with his theory of cognitive dissonance, that faced with the tension between their convictions and their acts, an individual rarely changes their acts; they adjust their convictions after the fact, through a labour of rationalisation, until they convince themselves retrospectively that they always acted in keeping with their values. In sociology, Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), describes how each person manages a front, a presentation of self aimed at an audience, which can diverge deeply from actual conduct without the person experiencing themselves as a liar. And in ethnology, the gap between the discourse groups hold about their practices and what observation of those practices reveals is a long-standing finding of the discipline; Pierre Bourdieu made it one of the mainsprings of Le Sens pratique (1980), showing that the account a group gives of its own rules is itself a social operation, often far removed from the actual logic of conduct. I am not saying for all that that artists are hypocrites. All of this is no doubt unconscious. But it matters to understand it, because in believing one is doing well one sometimes ends up doing the opposite of what one believes one is doing. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and it seems useful to me to think about this together. I fully include myself in this reflection; I do not start from the premise that I, for my part, have understood everything. My role, as both artist and researcher, is to reflect on my own practices and to share that reflection.

Artists funded by the power they denounce

In July 2023, after the death of Nahel M., the director Eva Doumbia and the visual artist Kader Attia published in the review AOC a text entitled “De l’inefficacité de nos œuvres dans la vie réelle” (On the ineffectiveness of our works in real life), drawing on exchanges with artists mostly from post-colonial immigration, among them Mohamed El Khatib, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Penda Diouf and Alice Diop. These artists have worked for decades on police violence and discrimination, in the hope that their works would alter collective imaginaries. The death of this seventeen-year-old boy, like what they once were, made them measure that their applauded shows, their signed op-eds, their minutes of silence at the start of performances had prevented nothing.

The mechanism they describe is precise. The power that funds artists so that they criticise it turns their works into the reserved space where critique is deposited without spilling over into the real. By subsidising dissent, it confines it to the stage; by celebrating the committed artist, it makes sure that commitment remains a performance. Public subsidy is therefore not a guarantee of emancipation; it can even produce a façade of emancipation that keeps the system in place by allowing it to give itself a good conscience.

Thirty years of analyses with no effect on practices

Michel Schneider, in La comédie de la culture (1993), describes with relentless dryness the pact between political power and cultural power: it holds as long as each legitimises the other at the expense of the citizens in whose name the two claim to act. This analysis dates from 1993, it has not aged, and it has been largely ignored by those it addressed, through a mechanism Schneider himself identified. Good conscience works like armour. It allows one to believe oneself on the side of change while reproducing the structures of domination, to speak of farmers in the name of humanist values while rendering them anonymous, to perform “in people’s homes” while bringing one’s own set, to criticise extractivism while practising it.

Jean Dubuffet had put it differently in Asphyxiante culture (1968), showing that the official cultural system works because it absorbs its critics. It welcomes apparently subversive forms, apparently dissenting discourses, apparently committed artists, as long as they go through the panels, obtain the labels and produce works identifiable as legitimate art. Marjorie Glas, in Quand l’art chasse le populaire (2023), traces for her part how the popular roots of public theatre were evacuated, not through a decision, but through an accumulation of small aesthetic, institutional and professional choices, each justifiable in itself, whose cumulative effect was to exclude.

These analyses are published, awarded, taught, cited at professional gatherings, and they have not transformed practices. This ineffectiveness of critique is itself a piece of information, because it indicates that we are not dealing with individual faults that it would suffice to correct, but with a system that feeds on its own critique. A sector that reads Glas, that circulates the text by Doumbia and Attia, that nods in conference, and that carries on: this is the object that must be thought.

A hypocrisy with no hypocrite

One could call this hypocrisy, and collectively, it is one. But at the scale of each person, the word does not fit, because hypocrisy presupposes that one perceives the gap between what one says and what one does, whereas good conscience erases that gap sincerely. The theatre director, the actress, the director who tell me in training “I create things of the highest possible quality and I want to offer them to people, that’s my job” are sincere, and their artistic demand is real. Good conscience is this strange configuration in which each individual honestly believes they are doing well, while the collective knowledge of the opposite circulates freely in conferences, books and bar conversations after performances. Hypocrisy is nowhere in the people and everywhere in the system.

I have worked on this question in my writings on compromise, and this detour sheds light on our subject. We all live in the dissonance between our principles and our acts, the environmentalist at the petrol pump, the critic of social media who spends hours on Instagram, and it is through a permanent exercise of compromise that we manage to live with these contradictions. The danger is not so much compromise itself, which is a condition of existence, as its denial. When we tell ourselves we are consistent, we become like a blind pilot holding a course with no awareness of the obstacles, neither around him nor within him.

I have also proposed to distinguish political conscience from political good conscience. Political conscience is an anchoring in oneself that makes one capable of taking a social risk to defend one’s convictions. Political good conscience is an attachment to reassuring discourses that give the feeling of belonging to a protective community, and the illusion of being on the side of good through mere conformism; it reveals itself only under the test of critical situations, when coherence with one’s ideas would require taking a real risk, before a funder, a management, an elected official, a professional network. The good conscience of the cultural sector is, I believe, the form this denial of compromise takes when it is shared by a whole profession. Each person knows the system excludes, and each person tells themselves that their own work, at least, emancipates. The way out is not purity, which does not exist, but lucidity about one’s own contradictions, which allows, with fewer lies to oneself, better choices to be made.

In La Distinction (1979), Pierre Bourdieu describes how symbolic hierarchies become naturalised, how they cease to appear as choices and come to appear as necessities, and how, once naturalised, they become hard to see, especially for those who claim to be the system’s harshest critics. The artist who thinks of themselves as engaged in a democratic approach sometimes has more trouble seeing their own hierarchies than the one who claims nothing of the sort, because good conscience tells them they are already on the right side.

The ticked box and the twenty-four invisible journeys

Awareness of this mechanism is uncomfortable, all the more so because it does not by itself produce a way out. One can understand how good conscience works and still go on benefiting from it, because the structures within which one operates require it, because funders, a management, an elected official, a professional network reward conformity more than departure from it.

I often give a tiny example in training where the whole mechanism can be seen. An adult, a teacher or an artist in mediation, asks a class what racism is. A pupil gives the right definition. The adult has ticked the box, they are reassured, the information has got through. But they know nothing of the journey of the other twenty-four pupils, and the right answer obtained speaks of the adult, of their need to be reassured, not of the children. Good conscience works this way at every scale of the sector: the apparatus produces the proof we need, the full house, the activity report rendered not to citizens but to the supervising authority or authorities, the workshop “that went well”, and this proof informs us about ourselves, not about the people our work claims to serve. What those people actually lived through matures in them over timescales no one controls, sometimes ten years later, prompted by a life experience that reawakens a moment of theatre. We cannot evaluate it, and they cannot either at the time. What we can honestly evaluate is our own posture, whether or not we listened to singular people rather than to a group.

What this awareness can produce is a transformation of methods rather than a transformation of intentions, which are often already good. How do we build our shows, with whom, for whom? Who decides what is kept and what is erased? Who is named and who is rendered anonymous? These questions have concrete answers, which do not necessarily require more budget, but which require giving up a certain form of power.

The privilege of critical distance

This freedom to question the frame within which one works is itself a privilege. Feeling free to take a critical distance on what one is living through is proportional to the level of privilege one holds. For someone with little of it, contesting a frame, even a coercive one, is socially far less possible, because a transgression can mean exclusion from the social body, social disappearance, danger to oneself and sometimes to one’s whole family.

The cultural sector itself is run through with very unequal levels of privilege. It is easy, for the director of an organisation, to carry great democratic ideas, to speak of openness, freedom, horizontality, because they have the privilege of being able to do so. It is far less easy for the person who, in the same theatre, runs the box office and must be on time: if they arrive late, the audience is not received at the door, the evening is disrupted, and they commit a professional fault. The management, in order to defend its great ideas, needs the organisation to function as an efficient tool, and so it relies on a partly coercive frame, which contradicts the ideas of openness it defends. The freedom it grants itself has as its condition the constraint it imposes on others.

Responsibility for coherence between values and acts therefore falls first to those who hold power over others. The person in a position of management exercises power over their teams, without those teams exercising any over them. Their role, given this asymmetry, is to become aware of their own privileges, to recognise that others do not have the same, and to increase the rights and the free will of the people they manage, so that each can exercise their share of responsibility. I think of someone deeply committed to cultural rights, who organised ambitious professional gatherings on the subject, but who, wanting to do well, ran them at full tilt within their organisation without asking the staff of that organisation for their views. Cultural rights were therefore not respected inside the very event that celebrated them. The advance I am calling for, so that there is less good conscience and more coherence, comes above all from those who are in positions of power, whether the management of an organisation or of one of its departments.

That said, this responsibility cannot be assigned to management alone. The political, as I understand it, is the possibility for any person, whatever their place, to exercise their free will within the system in which they find themselves, to be present in the situation, and to offer that presence to others. One is always free, even under constraint, even with budgets, supervising authorities, colleagues or leaders who are not heading in the right direction. This is easy to say and hard to do, I know it from experience, and that is precisely why this responsibility belongs to each person, in their place, the box office included.

The making, the address, the welcome, the content

Theatre professionals have a competence that few trades possess: they can recognise a staging. As I developed in my article Theatre and life, theatre is not found only on stages, it structures life as a whole, the professional codes, the rituals of entering venues, the roles distributed within teams, and the difference between what we perceive as fiction and what we perceive as reality depends on our degree of awareness of the staging. The transformation I propose consists in turning this professional competence back towards one’s own working frames, in four places.

• The making of the show. To produce a show on feminism, have the relations of domination within the working team been thought through? For a show on social inequalities, has anyone taken an interest in the social inequalities within the team itself? Who decides what is kept and what is erased, who is named in the programme and who remains anonymous? These questions do not require more budget, they require giving up a share of power, which is more costly.
• The address to the audience. Rereading one’s communication through the eyes of those it claims to invite. In most towns, the majority of residents do not know the theatre exists, or are convinced it does not concern them, and they need only read the season brochure to feel it is not addressed to them, even though their taxes help fund it. Who does our address really speak to, and to whom does it give, without saying so, the feeling of not being expected?
• The welcome. The lobby, the box office, the rituals of entry are a staging that says who is expected and who is not. In my interventions, I begin by shaking the hand of each person who enters, telling them my name, asking for theirs and repeating it. It takes five minutes and it changes everyone’s place, because each person is recognised as an individual and not as an element of a group to be processed. The question, for a venue, is to seek the equivalent of this gesture at its own scale, in the concrete organisation of the welcome.
• The content. Are the people whose lives the show recounts present, associated, named, paid? Doumbia and Attia recall that the families of victims are the absent ones in the places where they are recounted. Before carrying a word “about”, look for how to do it “with”, and accept that this transforms not only the work, but also the methods of production and distribution, which are often what one protects most.

This work of becoming aware of the codes cannot be an individual virtue, because the codes are collective. It is carried out as a team, in a network, between organisations. The most honest starting point is an uncertainty: do the people my work claims to serve, excluded audiences, residents of an area, schoolchildren, farmers, workers, have something different in their lives thanks to it? Not necessarily something measurable or immediate, but something real. If the answer is uncertain, that is a good beginning, because uncertainty about one’s own effects is more productive than the certainty of being on the right side, and it opens the next question, that of what could be done differently so that the answer would be more surely yes.

These questions I apply to myself as much as to those I support. My work supporting the cultural sector has its own blind spots and its own mechanisms of reproduction. It is by identifying them in my research work, which I share in these articles, that I seek to see them. This does not place me above the problem; it places me inside it, with everyone else.