Cultural rights are often presented as rights of access to culture, which each person could claim. I propose here a definition that reverses this reading. Cultural rights are addressed first and foremost to people in positions of power, and ask two things of them: to presume the competence of others, that is, to hold them capable of enriching us, and to create the conditions for others to recognise competences in themselves. Dignity then ceases to be a declaration and becomes work.
Rights that bind those in power
The Fribourg Declaration (2007) sets out cultural rights as human rights: the right to choose one’s cultural identity, to take part in cultural life, to access heritage. This formulation is accurate, and it has a practical consequence that receives little attention. A person alone, facing an institution, almost never has the means to claim these rights. The resident of a neighbourhood does not file a complaint because the local theatre programmes its season without them. A person following a training course does not interrupt the trainer to demand recognition of their culture. If cultural rights lived only through the claims of those they protect, they would remain a dead letter.
This is why I propose to define them from the other end. Cultural rights are addressed to people who are in positions of power. In every cultural, educational or social situation there is an asymmetry: between the person who programmes and the person who attends, between the person who trains and those being trained, between the local authority officer and the residents, between the teacher and the pupils. Cultural rights ask something of the person who, within this relationship, holds power. They operate as an obligation weighing on that person, before operating as a right the other would claim. This shift has immediate practical consequences. The question is no longer “how do we bring people to culture”; it becomes “what does my position require me to transform in the way I look and act”.
Participation or cooperation
This reversal helps distinguish two political projects that are often confused, cultural democratisation and cultural democracy, whose history I traced in Democratisation or cultural democracy : what these two words do to theatre. Two words make it possible to hold the distinction: participation and cooperation.
Cultural democratisation offers participation. The framework is already defined, the works that matter are already chosen, and people are invited to step in: attend the venue, follow the workshop designed for them, discover the masterpieces. This participation can be warm and sincere; it leaves intact the definition of what has value.
Cultural democracy requires cooperation, that is, building this very definition together. And cooperating presupposes a condition that is rarely stated: one must hold the other capable of bringing us something we do not have. If I think the person in front of me has nothing to teach me, I can have them participate, but I cannot cooperate with them. This is what I call the presumption of competence, as one speaks in law of the presumption of innocence: a prerequisite that makes everything that follows possible. Cultural rights thus legitimise each person’s expertise and mutual enrichment, and this is how they ground cultural democracy, where democratisation could do without it.
Dignity as work
The central word of the Fribourg Declaration is dignity. Yet it is not enough to declare “I respect your dignity”. Decades of symbolic hierarchy have taught people that their culture does not count, and this knowledge is internalised: “it’s not for me”, “I have nothing interesting to say”, “I’m not creative”. This self-censorship excludes more surely than ticket prices or distance. The person who holds competences does not recognise them in themselves, and no declaration of respect is enough to convince them otherwise.
Respecting the dignity of others is therefore work. This work consists of creating the conditions for a person to envisage their own dignity, recognise competences in themselves, and only then share them. These conditions play out in the details: the way a room is laid out, the order in which voices circulate, what is done with contributions once they have been entrusted, the time allowed, the forms of expression on offer. In Cultural rights and professional postures I described tools for this work, and in The political dimension of organisational frameworks I showed how a framework can contradict its stated intentions.
Here one understands why cultural rights, in my view, disqualify cultural democratisation rather than complementing it. Democratisation offered access to riches defined elsewhere. The work of dignity allows the recognition of riches already there, in people whom everything had taught not to see them.
The test case of youth
A contemporary example gives flesh to this definition: the case being built against young people. Young people are declared incapable of concentrating, dumbed down by social media, soon to be finished off by artificial intelligence. In Young people have not lost their heads I examined what researchers actually say about these claims: eight years of measurements carried out in Finland on a cohort of adolescents, recent research syntheses and a rereading of Michel Serres converge on the same finding: the diagnosis of dumbing down stems from a very old reflex of power far more than from an established fact. Declaring a generation incompetent spares one from listening to it, and leaves adults with the last word on what counts.
This case also shows what the opposite presumption makes possible. When young people are held to be interlocutors capable of understanding how an interface was designed, one can work with them on the mechanisms that capture attention, instead of treating them as victims to be protected. Presuming competence opens access to the real problems that the discourse of incapacity concealed.
The aesthetics of the relationship
There remains the objection I am regularly confronted with: this definition would amount to giving up artistic rigor. Everything I have observed over the years points the other way. Real work is only asked of a person one believes capable. And when rigor bears on the depth and sincerity of the bond between people, remarkable works come out of workshops, whatever the context, whatever the means. I developed this point in Where rigor belongs. The disappointing projects one encounters in cultural action are almost always projects where the bond itself was poor, and rarely projects where people lacked talent.
This is what I call the aesthetics of the relationship: shifting the criteria towards the quality of the bond, of which the quality of the works is a consequence. The definition I propose ultimately holds in a few words. Cultural rights ask whoever holds power to presume the competence of others, and to create the conditions for others to recognise it in themselves. Each of us can make it a daily working tool, by asking, before every choice of organisation, programming or facilitation, whether this act presumes people’s competence or their incapacity. In my experience, the people concerned perceive the answer well before it is put into words for them, in the very details of what they are offered.
