In a training course or a support programme on cultural rights, we do more than pass on notions. We ask each person present to re-examine assumptions that are part of their professional identity, and this re-examination produces resistance, projections onto the person facilitating, and discomforts that often have nowhere to be voiced. I propose here to understand this process and why it is normal, and then to draw from it, with the institutional psychotherapy of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury and with the council of institutional pedagogy, a way of instituting regulation while things are happening, with the facilitators included. Transmitting cultural rights and the way of doing it are one and the same question.
A long history for a short sentence
Cultural rights do not begin with the Fribourg Declaration. In 1948, article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone is entitled to the realisation of the “economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity”, and article 27 that everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community. In 1966, this right appears in article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty which, unlike the Declaration, is binding on the States that ratify it. In 1982, the UNESCO world conference meeting in Mexico City adopted a broad definition of culture, as the whole set of features that characterise a society or a social group, ways of life and value systems included, and no longer only the arts and letters. With this definition, culture becomes first of all what each person carries, before being what an institution brings to them.
The philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch organised a symposium in Fribourg in 1991 whose title states the problem: “Cultural rights, an underdeveloped category of human rights”. The international working group that grew out of it, the Fribourg Group, worked for sixteen years before publishing the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights in 2007. In the meantime, UNESCO adopted in 2001 the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which states that cultural rights are an integral part of human rights, then in 2005 the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and the Council of Europe opened for signature in Faro, the same year, a convention recognising everyone’s right to cultural heritage. In 2009, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights published its General Comment No. 21, which spells out what States owe to the right to take part in cultural life. In France, the NOTRe law of 2015 and then the LCAP law of 2016 wrote respect for cultural rights into the missions of local authorities and of the State. In a working paper prepared for that Committee in 2008, Meyer-Bisch sums up what this long history says about its object:
“But this is not yet very explicit; the coherence of cultural rights is insufficient: their definition is fragmented, they are pulled between civil and political rights and economic and social rights, and still often reduced to the rights of minorities. The Fribourg Declaration gathers and makes explicit the rights already recognised in scattered form in many instruments.”
Patrice Meyer-Bisch, “Le droit de participer à la vie culturelle”, working paper for the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 2008.
An underdeveloped category for sixty years, fragmented, pulled apart, reduced to minorities: if these rights were so hard to write down, it is because they touch what each person holds most intimate, and the places that institutions distribute. A declaration of rights would not need to exist if there were no real problems to address. The work that cultural rights require consists in making visible relations of domination that the ordinary functioning of the sector takes for granted; I described in the article Domination at the Heart of Culture how this domination is exercised in the very name of culture.
The assumptions that cultural rights call into question
In the cultural field, the assumptions in question are the ones we were taught and that shaped us: that some works are worth more than others, that some people have access to culture and others must be brought to it, that professionals know and audiences receive. The sector has been built on these assumptions for sixty years, in its training, its vocabulary and its institutions, and they have been carried by people sincerely committed to the common good. Cultural rights nevertheless require us to re-examine them one by one, because a hierarchy of persons hides in them beneath a hierarchy of works.
Jean Oury, psychiatrist, founder of the La Borde clinic, describes in a 1993 text setting out the concepts of institutional psychotherapy a form of alienation that I recognise in our field:
“As for ’paternalism’, it is the most common form of alienation in contemporary society, presenting itself as disguised contempt, pity, false charity, abusive protection.”
Jean Oury, “Psychanalyse, psychiatrie et psychothérapie institutionnelles”, 1993, reprinted in the journal VST, 2007.
He is speaking of the psychiatric hospital, but the description holds word for word for part of the history of cultural democratisation: bringing people towards what is good for them, benevolently, without asking them what they know or what they already do. Cultural rights ask professionals to recognise this paternalism in their own gestures, and one can understand that this is not comfortable.
Why identity is touched
My convictions about my profession are part of what I am. A mediator who has spent fifteen years “bringing distant audiences to culture” does not hold this phrase as one opinion among others: it is the meaning of his days, the reason he chose this work, what he answers when asked what he does for a living. When a cultural rights training course shows him that this phrase separates, without his having wanted it, those who would be beings of culture from those who would not yet be, he receives the idea as a challenge to his person. His first reaction is not to want to. He looks for arguments to justify what he thought before, he finds that the person speaking exaggerates, does not know his field, that it is all theory. This reaction is normal. Every person protects what constitutes them when they feel attacked, and protects it all the harder when the attack comes from a place where they were not expecting it. I described in the article On Being a Good Enough Professional the vertigo of lost meaning that accompanies this discovery; it takes time and support to get through it.
I have met this movement many times, and not only among mediators. When I train artists to work in the social field, I propose projects in which they do not transmit their technique, in which the point is not to teach engraving or video to the people welcomed there, but to create with them from what they already know. I recounted in the article Working with Artists in the Social Field how much this proposal unsettles them: these artists confuse what they are with what they know how to do, and one touches their identity by asking them not to teach. I am not immune to this movement myself. I have created festivals with prize lists, and each time I have met the suffering of those who lose, without giving up ranking for all that: it took me time, and the experience of a jury in which the last prize had been lived as a humiliation, before I proposed instead thematic prizes that recognise each film for a quality of its own. And when I ran an awareness day for the team of a performing arts production office, recounted in the article Transmitting cultural rights : a question of coherence, the moment when the afternoon discussion left my timed programme so that people could speak about themselves required me to give up what I had prepared, that is, part of what reassured me in my place as trainer.
Places that hold the collective together, and crush it
This destabilisation takes place in an institution, a theatre, a library, a cultural department, a festival, where each person has received a place, a status, a function, and has learned to merge with them. Tosquelles and Oury speak of double alienation to hold together psychic alienation, the kind that comes from each person’s history, and social alienation, the kind that comes from the institutional milieu. Oury insists on this point in the same 1993 text:
“Each person in a position of responsibility must maintain the distance between ’status’, ’role’ and ’function’… That the nurse takes himself for ’the nurse’, the cook for ’the cook’, and the doctor for ’the doctor’ is unfortunately a worldwide disease! Everyone tends to identify with their ’status’.”
Jean Oury, “Psychanalyse, psychiatrie et psychothérapie institutionnelles”, 1993, reprinted in the journal VST, 2007.
This sentence must be read carefully, because Oury is not saying that places are bad. A collective holds together because people occupy distinct and complementary roles in it: someone programmes, someone welcomes, someone runs the technical desk, someone keeps the accounts, and it is this complementarity that allows a theatre to open its doors in the evening. What Oury calls a disease is identification with status, that is, the moment when the place stops being a function I perform for the collective and becomes what I am. And in the usual institution, this moment arrives by a precise route: the place is handed down from above, with its job description, its perimeter and its hierarchy, without anyone asking the person what they wish to do with it. When the place is imposed, the person holds back. She does not bring to the collective what else she could have brought, she experiences the slightest step aside as a transgression, and when she feels cramped in it, she suffers a violence that nobody decided, but that the organisation exercises on their behalf.
This is what institutional psychotherapy is for, and it has to be said so that one understands why I call on it in an article about cultural rights. When the institution is recreated together, as the teams at Saint-Alban and then at La Borde did by deciding collectively on everyone’s roles, the aim is not to abolish places; the aim is for each person to find the purpose of their place, that is, to understand what it is for, for the others, and to be able to put something of themselves into it. When one invents the institution instead of receiving it, each person’s desire plays a part in it, and the collective becomes rich with the individualities that compose it instead of levelling them. A living institution is one in which the roles hold because people have chosen them, and in which they can move because people have moved. Cultural rights, by asking that each person be recognised as a subject of culture, ask this of cultural organisations, and this is why a support programme that sought only to convince individuals, without touching the way the organisation distributes places, would miss the very object of the work.
The transference onto the person facilitating
The people taking part in a training course or a support programme have, most of the time, chosen to come. They expect the person facilitating to enrich them. But if what she brings unsettles too much, if it damages the image they have of themselves, the person protects herself, and this protection needs a target. The person facilitating is the natural target, because she in fact occupies a position of authority, and because she is the one who set in motion what disturbs. Psychoanalysts call transference this depositing, onto a person, of affects and expectations that come from elsewhere, from each person’s history, from the authority figures they have known, from the wounds they carry; and they call countertransference the reactions this deposit provokes in the one who receives it, the urge to convince, the guilt in the face of dissatisfaction, the need to be liked by the group. Through countertransference, we incline to interpret a group’s silence as agreement or its irritation as an injustice. All of this is entirely normal. Where there is no transference at all, it is likely that nothing has moved.
The methodological question then becomes what to do with this movement, and I see two possible answers. The first consists in leaving it to the sole sensitivity of the person facilitating, who will sense, or will not sense, that something is wrong. The second consists in giving it an instituted place and time, where the whole group, facilitation included, can look at what is happening while it is happening. The second is the one I defend, and it is in institutional psychotherapy that I learned to formulate it.
Setting a framework is not enough
I argued in the article The framework that authorizes for a framework that makes expression possible instead of merely containing it. The framework I am talking about does not consist of prohibitions and sanctions. I showed in that same article, drawing on Olivier Houdé’s work on inhibition, that fear blocks all learning: when a person feels threatened, even symbolically, their brain disarms the functions they would need in order to think, learn and express themselves. A framework made of threats therefore produces the opposite of what is expected of it. The framework that authorises is set beforehand, in the preparation and in the first minutes of a meeting, when we state the intentions, the rules and the conditions of participation, and it serves to signal to people that what they are going to dare will not be punished by rejection.
Yet a living collective situation always produces the unforeseen, and all the more so when it touches people’s identity: an instruction understood differently from how we meant it, an exercise that puts someone in difficulty, a word that wounds without our having wanted it, a fundamental disagreement that cannot find its form. Regulation names the activity that allows the process to be adjusted while it is taking place, on the basis of what people are actually experiencing. A framework without regulation risks becoming an alibi. One can always reply to a person in difficulty that the rules had been announced. And when regulation has neither a planned place nor a planned time, it rests entirely on individual courage: one has to dare to interrupt, to raise a hand, to contradict the facilitator in public. This courage has a very unequal cost depending on each person’s position and their ease in speaking in public. Reserving regulation, in practice, for the most self-assured contradicts the cultural rights in whose name the meeting was organised. Hence my proposal: regulation must be instituted, that is, given places, times and forms planned in advance, and it must be able to bear on everyone, including those who facilitate.
Caring for the institution so that it can respect people
Institutional psychotherapy was born of a movement of the same order as that of cultural rights. I recounted in the article The One Who Makes Nothing François Tosquelles’ arrival at the Saint-Alban hospital in 1940, carrying in his luggage Hermann Simon’s book, from which he drew the idea that one must treat the hospital before treating people, and in the article Instituting oneself in one’s rights the way in which, at La Borde, carers and patients decide together on everyone’s roles. Tosquelles’ starting point fits in one sentence, which Jean Oury and Danielle Roulot placed on the back cover of their “Dialogues à La Borde”:
“Without the recognition of the human value of madness, it is man himself who disappears.”
François Tosquelles, quoted by Jean Oury and Danielle Roulot, “Dialogues à La Borde”, 2008.
To recognise the patient as a subject, the whole institution had to be transformed, its hierarchies, the place of the doctors, the circulation of speech, because the asylum’s entire organisation served to confine. Cultural rights ask the same thing of the cultural sector: to recognise the human value of each person’s culture, and to transform as much of the institution as is needed for this recognition to be possible. In both cases, one cannot ask the institution to remain intact, nor the people who bring it to life to change on their own.
In his Sainte-Anne seminar devoted to the collective, Oury says:
“What matters most is that there should be, there, in that place, a space for saying, that there should be a possibility of expressing oneself, even if one says nothing; that there should be something there, a way of being at ease.”
Jean Oury, “Le Collectif. Le séminaire de Sainte-Anne”, 1986.
The space for saying, as I understand it, is the possibility, installed in the place and in the time, that what needs to be said can be said, including by those who will say nothing. Oury and Danielle Roulot, in “Dialogues à La Borde”, defend the preservation of this space against what they call a managerial logic that nobody any longer knows who is directing. I read in this defence a description of what is missing from most of our training courses and professional meetings. Its most common form is the projected presentation, in which everything is planned in advance, slide after slide, and in which the person speaking moves through a sequence that no word from the room will be able to bend. Everything there has been decided before the people arrive, and one thus cancels, before even beginning, the possibility of being enriched by those who are present. For something to be said during, one has to have put the why before the how: to know what we are looking for together, and to let the way of reaching it be built with the people present.
I would like to sharpen this point with a distinction that the Fribourg Declaration contains without underlining it. Among the eight rights it sets out, which I proposed as a reading grid in the article Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration, two look alike and do not have the same meaning: the right to take part in cultural life (article 5) and the right to take part in the development of cultural cooperation (article 8). To participate is to take part in something that already exists; to cooperate, literally to operate together, is to build the thing itself with others. In a training course where one participates, one can ask questions about what has been planned; in a training course where one cooperates, the process itself is built with the people present, and only on this condition do their culture, their knowledge and their ways of doing things enter into what is being made.
Oury adds a requirement that directly concerns those who facilitate. The fundamental question that everyone must ask themselves in an institution, he repeated endlessly, in his Sainte-Anne seminars as in the one he held every week at La Borde, is “What the hell am I doing here?” Pierre Delion, a psychiatrist who trained with him, says this about it:
“It really was one of his great questions, which required, he said, an ’absolute phenomenological reduction’. It is a question that seems like nothing – many found that it did not look serious – but it nonetheless triggers an avalanche of concepts that it overdetermines…”
Pierre Delion, “Oury, donc”, 2022.
It is addressed to patients and to participants alike, but first of all to carers, to trainers, to the people who hold the framework. To ask oneself this question is to refuse to take oneself for one’s status, and to accept that one’s own place can be discussed.
Fernand Oury’s council
The most precise tool for this work comes from the school. Fernand Oury, Jean’s brother, a primary school teacher trained in Freinet techniques, and Aïda Vasquez, a psychologist, published in 1967 “Vers une pédagogie institutionnelle”, in which they describe the classroom as a micro-society that makes its own rules and can change them. Its central institution is the council: a regular meeting in which the pupils and the teacher examine together the rules, the conflicts, the decisions and the responsibilities. The teacher takes part as a member, subject to the common rules, and his own decisions can be discussed there. Fernand Oury left a few formulas that he displayed as maxims of the trade:
“Say nothing that we have not done. Speech is not given, it is taken. Places, limits, laws: that is the possibility of language and of education. Keep quiet in order to hear better.”
Fernand Oury, maxims of institutional pedagogy, as reported by Jacques Pain.
The council is the instituted place in which to take the floor, so that this taking does not depend on anyone’s courage or status; and places, limits and laws are what make this taking possible, because speech needs a framework solid enough for one to be able to oppose it. The two brothers, moreover, worked together: from 1980, the seminar Jean Oury ran at Sainte-Anne brought together carers and teachers, among them Fernand and Aïda Vasquez.
A seminar, a training course, an artistic practice workshop are ephemeral institutions, and I hold that they deserve the same care as lasting ones. The council transposes to them without any difficulty of principle; what is missing is the habit.
Nobody regulates the people who facilitate
In the training courses and professional meetings of the cultural sector, we evaluate, but almost always afterwards. Participants fill in the satisfaction questionnaire when everything is over, and the organiser reads it, not the group that lived through the situation. During the process, the person facilitating holds the speech about the process, and nothing, in most settings, allows participants to work on the spot on the transference I described above.
A situation recomposed from several that I have lived through or been told about illustrates the problem. During a training course, a facilitator proposes an exercise that engages the body, without specifying that everyone may take it up or not. Several participants are uncomfortable. Some comply, others step aside in silence, and nobody has planned a moment in the schedule when this discomfort could be voiced. These people will voice it weeks later, elsewhere, and in their accounts the whole course will have become suspect, and the person who ran it the figure of everything that disturbed. The problem is structural far more than moral. The person facilitating may have been attentive and well-meaning; but nobody sees everything, and, through countertransference, we tend to take a group’s silence for agreement. Regulation therefore cannot remain a favour that the facilitator grants when she senses it is necessary, precisely because it is her sensitivity that is failing at those moments. It must be an instituted right.
Instituting regulation without turning it into a tribunal
From institutional psychotherapy, from institutional pedagogy and from my own practice, I draw a few reference points. I am not saying that this is how it must be done; these are ways of doing things that I have tested and that I propose:
- Plan short, regular times devoted to the process itself. Announced from the opening, distinct from the closing round, for example a quarter of an hour at midday where the question asked is not “are you satisfied” but “does something need adjusting”. This is Oury’s council, brought down to the length of a day.
- Repeat, with every proposed activity, that everyone may take it up or not. This permission wears out quickly if it has been given only once, and it is at the moment of the exercise, more than at the opening, that it counts.
- Diversify the channels of regulation. Add to speech in the full group written forms or small-committee forms, so that regulation does not depend on ease in speaking. I described in the article Activating collective intelligence with digital tools how a shared writing medium allows those who would not otherwise speak up to contribute.
- State explicitly, as the person facilitating, that one submits to the rules one proposes. And that the adjustments requested may bear on one’s own way of doing things. This is the teacher’s place in Oury’s council, and it is what makes the rest credible.
- Name the destabilisation at the moment it appears. When a group resists, saying that this resistance is expected, that it is the sign that something real is at stake, and that it has the right to be expressed here, often allows it to turn into work instead of turning into a hostile account afterwards.
There is a way of doing things that I have practised for a long time and that I call weaving. While a day unfolds, I comment on what is happening at the moment it happens: I say that we have just changed subject, that the room has gone quiet, that the last question shifted something. And I say what I think people are feeling, making it clear that it is a hypothesis: that this exercise may have seemed intrusive, that the questioning of a while ago may still be there, that such an intervention may have been heard as a reproach. I am often wrong about the detail, and it does not matter, because the essential lies elsewhere: people hear that what they are experiencing is being taken into account, including what they have not said. With each comment, I connect a moment to the previous one, one remark to another, a discomfort to what produced it, and this makes a weaving in which each person finds their thread again. A person unsettled by what they have just heard is no longer alone with their destabilisation; they are in a common space where this destabilisation has been named, where others may have recognised it, and this common space is reassuring enough for the work to continue. Weaving is bringing Oury’s space for saying to life with the facilitator’s voice, without waiting for someone to have the courage to open it.
Part of regulation can only take place later, because some things can only be formulated after the event. Peer practice-analysis groups, heirs to the discussion groups that the psychoanalyst Michael Balint ran with general practitioners in London in the 1950s, play this role of deferred regulation for those who facilitate. In every case, the aim remains that of Oury’s council, which decides and repairs but does not condemn. Through regulation, one seeks adjustment rather than judgement, and one protects those who facilitate as much as those who take part.
Not pretending
There remains a matter of credibility. Oury wrote, about the activities that make up the life of a caring institution:
“All these activities that make up institutional life must not belong to the category of ’pretending’. The ethical position of the therapists therefore implies that they be responsible for the responsibility of others, including in moments of violence. Otherwise, one slides towards a patronage activity.”
Jean Oury, “Psychanalyse, psychiatrie et psychothérapie institutionnelles”, 1993, reprinted in the journal VST, 2007.
When a training course is run in the name of cultural rights without any space being planned in which to question it, people are asked to take on trust what they are being promised, and one slides towards the patronage Oury speaks of. Instituting regulation means giving the group the means to verify, in the situation itself, that the principles announced also apply to those who announce them.
There is a broader reason to do it. Cultural projects change, because audiences have new needs and new ways of doing things, which I have often discussed on this site with regard to teenagers and digital technology. When projects change, the ways work is organised change with them: the roles, the places, the ways of deciding, the institution itself. If the people who bring a cultural organisation to life cannot reinvent their places, they will not be able to follow the people for whom the organisation exists. Learning, in a one-day training course, to put the process and the place of the person who holds it up for discussion, is practising in small what cultural rights ask in large. Transmitting cultural rights and the way of doing it form a mise en abyme, and that is where their credibility is decided.
