In cultural policy, we debate the definitions of cultural democratization, cultural democracy and cultural rights as if a single one would eventually have to prevail. I propose another reading. Each of us builds our definitions from the position we occupy, and two divergent definitions can both be right. Agreement is to be sought elsewhere, in the horizon we aim at: more equality, more democracy, more respect for everyone’s dignity.
A disagreement that resists goodwill
It regularly happens, in conversations with colleagues who are, like me, committed to cultural rights, that I find we do not mean the same thing by the same words. One places participation on the side of cultural democratization and cooperation on the side of cultural democracy. Another places participation within cultural democracy itself, as citizens’ expression and initiative, and reserves cooperation for governance, that is, for the collective definition of the framework. We listen to each other again, we rephrase, and the disagreement remains, even though we are plainly aiming at the same thing.
The usual professional reflex is to treat this disagreement as a problem to be solved. We would have to agree on the right definition, that of the Fribourg Declaration, that of a given report, that of a given expert. This reflex is understandable, and the reference texts are precious. But after many such conversations, I have come to another hypothesis: we forge these definitions from different positions, and each is right in its own position.
The position one speaks from
The philosopher of science Donna Haraway defended, in a 1988 text that has become a classic, the notion of “situated knowledges”: all knowledge is produced from a partial, embodied point of view, and it is this acknowledged partiality that grounds its objectivity, against the illusion of a view from nowhere that would take in everything. I believe the definitions of our professions belong to this epistemology.
A person who acts within a public institution with resources, rooted in a territory, defines cultural democracy from what they can actually do: opening the governance of a venue to local residents, making room for citizens’ initiatives in a programme, transforming inherited forms from within. Seen from that position, a library belongs to cultural democratization, in the most honourable sense of the term: it builds collections and makes them accessible to as many people as possible, and the work consists in giving an ever larger place to residents’ participation and to co-construction. This definition is relevant for whoever occupies that position, because it matches what that person can actually act upon.
As for me, I most often act from outside institutions, at their margins, through projects set in frameworks that differ every time. I owe this position to my personal history: I saw very early, in the world of cinema, how much those who decide which “great works” are to be transmitted exercise a form of domination, often without knowing it, and how much each of us can take part in it without realizing. From that position, I build other definitions.
Profaning cultural democratization
For me, cultural rights and cultural democracy require calling into question cultural democratization and its meritocratic myth. The word deconstruction, often used to name this gesture, seems to me less accurate than profanation, in the sense Giorgio Agamben gives it in “In Praise of Profanation” (2005): to profane is to return to common use what had been set apart, made sacred, placed out of reach. Walter Benjamin described a neighbouring movement, the decline of the aura of the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility (1939), and contrary to the nostalgia often attributed to him, he welcomed that decline. To profane cultural democratization is to reappropriate, on an equal footing, the great works of humanity themselves: to have access to them in a way that allows one to intervene, to really receive something from them, because one stands as an equal to them and to those who transmit them.
My definition, too, is situated. It comes from what I have lived and seen, and from the way in which, from my earliest days, I sought to share the most fragile works without their having a lower social status than better-funded ones. A person who has not lived this, and who can act differently from me, has no reason to define cultural democratization as I do.
An objection is regularly put to me, and I take it seriously because it comes from that other position. Profaning would be too strong a word; desacralizing would be enough. And the experience through the body and the emotions that I call for (I come back to it below) is already given by cultural democratization: entering a museum, taking a book from a library shelf, is living something, without anyone explaining it to you. I agree, for those who enter. But many people will never enter a library to open a book, let alone a museum, because they do not even know whether they are allowed to. There is no need to please everyone, and very different cultural forms can coexist; but this division between those who know they are allowed and those who do not is a hierarchy, and a hierarchy is a system of domination. This is why the strong word seems necessary to me: desacralizing leaves the threshold in place, profaning brings it down. And it falls to those who run these places to welcome such questioning, even when it is very forceful: they are already in a position of power, so it is up to them to be open and flexible, and it is the job of all of us, as professionals, to be so. This answer does not close the disagreement; it moves it to the right place, to what each of us sees from our position: the people who come in, or those who stay outside.
The same words in different apparatuses
I find a confirmation of this reading in pedagogy. Jacques Rancière shows in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” (1987) that the one who explains assigns the other a position of inferiority, and that this assignment matters more than the content of the explanation. Tim Ingold, in “Anthropology and/as Education” (2018), says something close to it: we learn what we live, in our bodies and our emotions, far more than what we are told. A person sitting in a room, to whom someone explains participation from the height of a podium, is in fact placed in a dominated position, whatever the words spoken. And a person who hears the same words in another setting of exchange may be transformed by them. The lived meaning of words depends on the apparatus in which they are uttered, to use the word apparatus that Giorgio Agamben took over from Foucault. On this point, the coherence between what one says and how one says it is for me what matters most in transmitting cultural rights.
By this detour, I return to the disagreement over definitions. If we experience the same words differently according to the apparatuses in which we receive them, coherence between discourse and action obliges each of us to define words according to the apparatuses in which we actually act. The person who works within the institution and I who work at its margins, if we are each coherent with our positions, cannot arrive at the same definitions. Our definitions diverge precisely because we are coherent.
Questioning the rules, together
John Dewey, an inspirer of cultural rights, characterizes in “The Public and Its Problems” (1927) a democratic system by its capacity to collectively question its own rules. Now, in cultural democratization, we do not submit to this collective examination the criteria that designate which works are to be transmitted; in democracy, we must do so constantly. Refusing to give programming instructions, in the name of artistic freedom, does not place one outside the rules: the shared codes that Pierre Bourdieu described in “Distinction” (1979) go on deciding what gets programmed, without anyone having discussed them. Working on definitions is therefore part of democracy itself, not a technical preliminary to be settled once and for all before acting. Regularly undoing the small powers that always rebuild themselves, including in our own words, is part of democratic work, and we can carry out this work gently and with respect.
This is the meaning I give, in hindsight, to the alphabet book of cultural policy words that I made at the Cerisy conference in June 2026: one hundred and forty words, and for each of them several definitions according to points of view, none of which is presented as the best. I wanted the very form of the object to give body to this plurality.
A tool for acting where one is
With the colleagues whose definitions differ from mine, I share a horizon: more equality, more democracy, more respect for everyone’s dignity. To move towards that horizon from different positions, we build different definitions. A definition, in our professions, is less an exact photograph of a thing than a tool each of us carves in order to act where they are.
What remains, then, is to make this divergence of definitions a source of richness: sharing one’s situated view without seeking to impose it, listening to the other’s definition in order to understand the position from which it was forged, accepting to unsettle one another, as long as this is done with respect. In the training sessions and professional gatherings I lead, I look for this balance: bringing ideas that shake things up, while taking care not to provoke confrontation. And I learn a great deal from other people’s definitions, precisely because they are not mine.
Over the course of these conversations, I have shifted my question. I was looking for the right definition; I now ask myself what a definition is.
