An institution is a place of power, through its financial means and its symbolic position. Revolt against it often goes hand in hand with the desire to run it, a link that sociology and psychology alike have documented, and one that operates in perfectly good conscience. I offer here some tools for working on oneself and taking action, and I defend, drawing on Kropotkin and institutional therapy, an art that is created with the people present, lived once only, and whose uniqueness is its strength.
Those who criticize the institution often dream of joining it
I notice a paradox, in the live performance sector, among the people who criticize the institution most fiercely. Very often, they would like to work in it, to work for it, and sometimes to run it. And many already work there, and voice their criticism from the inside, without this position seeming to contradict their discourse. The same person can denounce the major establishments and apply to run one without feeling any contradiction, because their criticism seems to them to justify their application.
To understand this paradox, we first need to ask what an institution is. To my mind, an institution is a place of power, and this power rests on two resources that reinforce each other. It is not only about money; there is also the symbol. Financial means make it possible to produce, to employ, to programme, to pay. The symbolic position operates more discreetly: what is shown in an institution exists in everyone’s eyes, while what does not enter it remains in the shadows. Whoever runs a national theatre has a budget, and also occupies a position from which they help define what counts as art. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named these two resources economic capital and symbolic capital, and he showed that the second is all the more effective for being less visible.
An artist who runs a national theatre and publicly declares the wish that their spectators, on leaving their plays, would “set everything on fire”, embodies this paradox. Their revolt is real in its affect, and it is functionally neutralized by their position. There is no bad faith here, rather a structural condition that they can hardly see from the inside. The stage director Eva Doumbia and the visual artist Kader Attia described this mechanism in “De l’inefficacité de nos œuvres dans la vie réelle” (On the ineffectiveness of our works in real life, AOC, 2023), and I analysed in the article A clear conscience as a system how power, by funding its own contestation, confines it to the stage. Here I would like to dig into another side of the same paradox, one less often examined, the desire for power that can inhabit revolt itself, and above all to draw from it tools for reflection and for working on oneself. I do not speak as a sociologist, I speak as a practitioner. My aim is to help each of us, and I include myself in that, to act in coherence with ourselves, and to spot the contradictions that cancel out all coherence even as we believe ourselves aligned.
Robert Michels’ iron law
The sociologist Robert Michels studied, in Political Parties (1911), the organization that in his day displayed the most explicit democratic and egalitarian ideal, German social democracy. He observed that every organization, even one founded to fight domination, produces a ruling minority, that this minority develops interests of its own, and that its first interest becomes its own preservation. He called this the iron law of oligarchy. The people who carried the revolt against the established order become, once organized, the managers of a new order, and they become so without conscious betrayal, through the simple exercise of their functions.
Albert Camus followed the same movement on the philosophical level in The Rebel (1951). He analyses there how revolts that turn into total revolutions come to sacrifice the people present in the name of humanity to come. The one who rose up against oppression ends up exercising it, with the sincere feeling of serving justice, because they have arrogated to themselves the right to define alone what justice requires. Revolt, for Camus, keeps a measure, a limit it forbids itself to cross; the revolution that makes itself absolute loses this measure and decides for others what is good for them.
We find the same movement, on a more modest scale, in the cultural sector. Contesting the institution can be the shortest path towards it. Whoever criticizes with talent gets noticed, and what gets noticed ends up being invited, then appointed. This trajectory can be lived in perfectly good conscience, because one tells oneself that once in power, one will at last be able to bring about the changes the world needs. Except that these changes are ones we decide for others. Whatever the generosity on display, changes decided for others remain authoritarian changes.
Activism as a vehicle for the ego
Psychology has begun to document this link between revolt and the desire for power. Ann Krispenz and Alex Bertrams, both researchers in psychology at the University of Bern, published in 2023, in the journal Current Psychology, a series of studies on the motivations of people engaged in activism. In one of them, they observe that adherence to what they call anti-hierarchical aggression, that is, the idea that violent revolution against existing structures is legitimate, is correlated with antagonistic narcissistic traits and with psychopathic traits, and that it is correlated neither with altruism nor with commitment to social justice. From these results, they drew a hypothesis they call the dark-ego-vehicle principle: for certain people with so-called dark personality traits, activism functions as a vehicle serving self-centred needs, status, dominance, the display of moral superiority, rather than serving the movement’s stated goals.
These studies must be handled with care, and their authors say so themselves. They do not establish that activism is narcissistic in itself; most people who commit themselves do so for sincere reasons. They establish that some people invest contestation movements for what these movements bring them, and that these people readily seek to take the lead. A century after Michels, an experimental method thus finds again what he had observed through sociological inquiry.
The sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello described, for their part, in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), the economic system’s capacity to absorb what they call the artistic critique, that demand for authenticity and liberation carried by artists, and to turn it into a management argument. Revolt can therefore carry an unacknowledged desire for power, and the system, for its part, knows how to make use of revolt.
What institutions do to those who want to change them
The anthropologist David Graeber analysed, in The Utopia of Rules (2015), the way institutions absorb and neutralize the energies that threaten them. This absorption is nothing like a conscious strategy; it comes from the workings of any structure that seeks to perpetuate itself. People who enter an institution wanting to change it generally end up being changed by it, because institutional constraints, conditional funding, partners’ expectations, career logics, performance requirements, progressively shape behaviour.
I want to be clear on one point. There is a great deal of sincerity and goodwill among the people who work in cultural institutions. Many do good things there, with the margin of power at their disposal, and everyone always has a boss. What I am talking about targets no one. What I am talking about is the very form of the institution, which produces certain relational modalities independently of the quality of the people who work there. From the inside, one can change the way decisions are made in a team, modify the criteria for selecting projects, transform evaluation practices, allocate the resources of an existing budget differently. It is, on the other hand, very difficult to question the fundamental mission of the institution as it is funded, to overturn the symbolic hierarchy between artists and audiences, or to refuse the criteria of legitimacy that condition funding. Methods can be worked on; foundations resist.
I want to make clear, as I do every time I venture onto this ground, that naming these structural mechanisms is not an argument for reducing public funding for the arts. It is an argument for making it fairer, that is, for questioning what it actually produces in the people in whose name it is raised.
Healing the institution itself
There is a tradition that has taken this problem head on, and that shows that the institutional form can be worked on. Institutional psychotherapy was born in psychiatric hospitals, around the psychiatrist Jean Oury, founder in 1953 of the La Borde clinic. Its starting point lies in a realization: the institution programmes everything, it assigns everyone to a fixed position, carers care, patients are cared for, the timetable decides, and this fixity prevents the very psychic movement that a place of care exists to serve, since to care is to produce change in a person. The answer of institutional psychotherapy is to heal the institution itself, that is, to work on its rules, its roles, its spaces, its rhythms, involving everyone, carers and patients alike. This teaching seems to me to matter far beyond the field of care.
Fernand Oury, his brother, a schoolteacher, drew from it institutional pedagogy, in the wake of Célestin Freinet. This is what I practise and defend in artistic practices, and I detailed in the article The framework that authorizes what these two traditions bring to cultural mediation. Instead of assigning positions in a compulsory way, the institution pre-exists and hands each person theirs, we negotiate, we take the time to define the positions, to understand what each person contributes to the project we are doing together, to work at one’s own measure and in one’s own place. The word says pedagogy, but it is a tool for artistic creation. Much of it passes through the relation to a third-party object, and through each person’s desire, which is born of their encounter with this object and their wish to make it their own and to transform it.
In the digital cultural classroom I led in 2025-2026 at the Erasme innovation laboratory of the Lyon metropolitan area, this is what I did at the start of each working day. Making sure that each person knew what they had to do, in a place they had decided on themselves; we had defined the project’s needs together, and we invented functions to fit the people. This may seem far from the institutionalized rebel, and yet it is its exact reverse. Emancipation does not pass through identification with a rebel figure, it passes through the co-construction of an emancipation that is both collective and personal. It requires a person who places themselves not in the position of a rebel, but in a position of freedom, and who makes sure that everyone can do their part within the institution, and do their part to transform the institution.
An art created with the people present
The geographer and anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), developed a line of thought that runs in the opposite direction to the conquest of institutions. The most robust and lasting forms of cooperation, he shows through a wealth of historical examples, emerge from the shared practice of ordinary people, far more than from the centres of power that claim to organize them. What the anarchist tradition brings here is not a political programme but an analytical lens, made of a fundamental scepticism towards the idea that institutions reform themselves from within, and a well-argued confidence in what people gathered together can build without waiting for permission.
From this line of thought, I draw a precise practice, one I would like to defend. You bring together the conditions, a place, a time, people, an artistic skill, and you create something with the people who are there. This is not improvisation theatre. Things are put in place, rehearsed, something is built that makes sense for the people present, and it is perhaps created and lived once only. This uniqueness is not a lack. This group, these people, in this place: it happens only once and will never happen again, and that is where the experience draws its strength. I often say this to the people with whom I make a collective film, and I see it borne out every time. In this way we step out of the productivist metaphor that dominates the cultural sector, that of the great show that would have to tour the largest stages, and whose value would be measured by the number of dates.
This is what I live through with the moving screenings. A small group of people prepares a cinematographic show together, one that often includes theatrical parts, in the way the films are presented, in the way the audience is led from one place to another over the course of the evening. This small group prepares a gift for others, and it is also its members who mobilize the audience, their friends, their families, their loved ones, the loved ones of their loved ones. The energy of the evening is that of a moment of encounter. It is not a show that would need to be admired, it is a gesture addressed to the people who are there. I have led groups doing this a great many times, I will do it again in a few months, and I observe the same thing every time. This unique moment, invested from both sides, stays in people’s memories. It is a ritual, exceptional and unique, and we embrace it as such.
This practice has a history in the theatre. Jacques Copeau, in 1924, left the direction of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which he had founded, at the height of his recognition, to settle in Burgundy with young actors and actresses, the Copiaus, and create shows nourished by local life, performed in the villages, tied to their festivals and their seasons. The poet and playwright Armand Gatti, from 1973 onwards, devoted himself to creative experiments with those he called his “loulous”, unemployed people, prisoners, young people facing exclusion, gathered around the Parole errante in Montreuil. Months of work, of writing workshops, of rehearsals, for a few performances, sometimes only one, and Gatti claimed this theatre as “the university of the poor”. Neither Copeau nor Gatti was doing outreach activities. They put their art, whole, at the service of what could be born with the people present.
The true role of professional artists, to my mind, lies there. It is not to manufacture the most magnificent and most expensive objects and send them on tour before awestruck audiences. It is to bring that particular experience and skill, the skill of making something possible. Knowing how to bring conditions together, hold a frame, give a form, make it so that a group of people who did not know each other the day before creates together something that belongs to them. I developed in the articles You don’t prepare a creation, you prepare yourself for creation and What Professional Artists Can Learn from the Amateur Model what this availability requires and what amateur practices teach us about it. This role demands as much craft as a major stage production. It perhaps demands more, because there you are protected by no apparatus.
Does my presence change anything?
At the end of this reflection, one question remains, which every professional can ask themselves. Does my presence in this institution change anything in what it does to the people it claims to serve? Not in theory, not in the discourse, in observable reality. If the answer is yes, even partially, there is a reason to stay and to carry on. If the answer is honestly no, or if keeping the position requires never asking this question, that is precious information. Not in order to make an immediate decision, but in order to know what one is devoting one’s energy to, and for what.
A few concrete leads for working on this question:
- Look at observable effects rather than intentions. Over the past twelve months, what has changed for the people the organization claims to serve, and what share of that change comes from my presence?
- Set down in writing what belongs to methods, which can be changed from the inside, and what belongs to the mission as it is funded. Choose your battles in the first column, and stop wearing yourself out on the second.
- When I catch in myself the dream of running the organization I criticize, name that desire for what it is, without shame. The desire for power is not a fault, but an unacknowledged desire for power turns criticism into a career strategy.
- In the projects we lead, take the time to negotiate positions instead of assigning them. Define the needs together, invent functions to fit the people, and check that everyone knows what they contribute to the shared project.
- Set aside each year a part of your activity for a creation carried out with the people present, with no distribution goal, and observe what this experience does to your practice.
- Measure success differently, by the number of people who have created rather than by the number of dates performed.
