In culture, social work and care, many professionals hold positions that are right, yet that they cannot put into words. Research has established that this silent knowledge is real knowledge; it nevertheless carries almost no weight in an institutional meeting. I would like to understand this asymmetry, then propose ways of arming oneself, among them cultural rights.
The day management asks for an explanation
The issue I want to discuss always arises in the same way. A professional refuses something their institution asks of them, or proposes something their institution has not planned for. Refusing to enter children into a competitive scheme. Refusing to take over a piece of work made by participants so that it becomes presentable. Refusing to meet a group having already read the people’s files. These positions are right, they are held by people whose fieldwork is sure-handed, and they rest on a knowledge these people cannot name. When asked what grounds their refusal, they answer that it is instinctive, that it just came to them.
One day, management will ask them to explain themselves. And on that day, intuition will count for nothing. In an institutional meeting, the words of a professional who says “this is how I feel it” stand against a decision from above, a committed budget, a communication campaign already launched — in other words, against arguments that have a form the institution recognises. The asymmetry is not about who is right, but about the languages present, that of feeling and that of argument, only one of which is legal tender in the space where decisions are made. A position that cannot be stated in that language ends up giving way, worn down, however solid the person holding it may be.
This moment has a name, it seems to me. It is the moment when practice becomes political. As long as you run a workshop in your own corner, intuition is largely enough. As soon as you say no to an institution, challenge a scheme, propose something else, you enter a space of power relations where you will be attacked — on your age, your inexperience, your idealism, your ignorance of the constraints. On a degree jury, I once met a young professional whose every refusal was right and who could ground none of them. She made me want to write this text.
“We can know more than we can tell”
One thing must be stated first, because everything else depends on it. The knowledge of these practitioners is real knowledge, and this statement is not a courtesy, it is a finding of research.
The philosopher of science Michael Polanyi devoted a book, The Tacit Dimension (1966), to what he calls tacit knowledge. His opening formula has become famous: “we can know more than we can tell.” We recognise a face among a thousand without being able to state the rules of that recognition; we keep our balance on a bicycle without being able to formulate the physics that holds us up. Polanyi shows that this silent, personal, embodied knowledge is not a remainder or a waste product of explicit knowledge, but its foundation, including in science, where the researcher’s flair precedes and guides formalisation.
Donald Schön extended this idea onto the ground that concerns us here, that of professions. In The Reflective Practitioner (1983), he observes architects, psychotherapists, town planners, managers, and finds that in order to face the singular situations of their practice, good professionals rely less on the formulas learned in training than on a capacity for improvisation built up in action. He calls this knowing-in-action. This knowledge shows itself in gestures, in decisions taken in the heat of the moment, and it remains largely unarticulated, even for the person who possesses it. From this Schön draws a critique of the dominant conception of the professions, that of a practice which would be the application of a body of theory constituted beforehand, whereas his observations show the opposite movement: a knowledge that builds itself in the doing, which formalisation then tries to catch up with.
These two authors give intuitive practitioners something precious: the certainty that their knowledge is knowledge. But they also make it possible to locate the problem exactly. The institution operates in the explicit language, that of procedures, indicators, argued cases. Tacit knowledge, by definition, does not circulate in that language. What these professionals lack is not knowing what to do — they know, often better than people armed with references. What they lack is being able to say what they know in a language the institution recognises, and that is something else. This is the shift that has to be made, from knowledge to the sayable.
“I came to theory because I was hurting”
bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress (1994), opens the chapter she devotes to theory with this sentence. She recounts that she came to it as a child, desperate, because the pain was too great and she was trying to understand what was happening to her. What she draws from this speaks precisely to our subject. Theory, she writes, is not in itself healing, or liberatory, or revolutionary; it fulfils these functions only when we ask it to, when we direct our theorising towards that end. Theory has no virtue of its own. It is a tool, and it is worth what we make of it.
In the same text, hooks attacks the stereotype according to which dominated people belong to the side of the concrete, the lived, the experiential, while theory belongs to those who dominate. This division, she says, disarms precisely those who most need to be armed. It assigns practitioners to the authenticity of experience and reserves for others the language in which decisions are made. I see this division at work constantly in the social and medico-social field. On one side there would be the people in the field, generous, intuitive, in touch with the real; on the other, theorists cut off from things. This opposition flatters the former and weakens them, and that is perhaps no accident.
We therefore have to reverse the way theory is usually presented to practitioners. It is presented to them as a foundation, something one ought to have read before acting and which would make the action legitimate. This presentation intimidates and discourages them, because it assumes that without it they would know nothing. Polanyi and Schön, whose work on tacit knowledge and knowing-in-action I have just set out, show that the truth is the reverse: they know. What should be offered to them instead is theory as armour, something you go and fetch after having acted, in order to defend what you have done. And then you discover, almost always, that others have thought it before us and that they offer us the words we were missing.
Cultural rights, a language for defending what one already does
When professionals ask me where to begin, I answer: with cultural rights, and I always present them in the same way. Cultural rights are, first of all, for you, a way of arguing for and defending what you do intuitively.
Cultural rights were formulated in the Fribourg Declaration (2007), coordinated by the philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch. They affirm the right of every person to live their cultural identity, to take part in cultural life, to be recognised in their dignity. And they have entered French law, with the NOTRe law in 2015 and then the 2016 law on freedom of creation, architecture and heritage, which oblige public policies to be conducted in accordance with them. I developed this approach in the article Cultural rights and professional postures, and I return to it here only from the angle that concerns us, that of defence.
For here is what this backing changes, concretely, for a professional summoned to explain herself. When the reference is external, the objection ceases to be personal. It is no longer “I disagree”, it is “this scheme contravenes cultural rights, which have been in the law since 2015”. The conversation changes in nature, because the other party can no longer reduce it to a matter of sensitivity. A young professional who refuses a competition in the name of her instinct is an idealist to be brought back into line; the same professional, refusing the same competition in the name of the respect for people’s dignity written into the law, is a professional who knows the framework of her trade. She has not changed position, she has changed language.
And it is worth taking the measure of what makes this language particular. Cultural rights do not ask practitioners to transform their practice in order to comply. In the vast majority of cases, they name what practitioners of sound judgement already do: welcoming each person in their dignity, starting from what they bring, not ranking forms of expression. This is why they are an armour and not a doctrine. They give a legal, defensible form to intuitions that were already there.
It is worth specifying which intuitions these are, because it is no accident that they are the ones in need of armour. The intuitions I see being held in the field almost always run in the direction of respect for the other, for their dignity, their rhythm, their freedom to do or not to do. And what they come up against are systems that hold all the institutional legitimacy — assessment, selection, competition, a project’s yield, the file read before the meeting — but that are less human. The ordinary balance of power thus pits an untitled intuition against a titled system. Cultural rights reverse that balance. They place respect for people on the side of the law, and the system that ranks or instrumentalises now finds itself having to justify itself. The professional no longer opposes her humanity to the institution’s legitimacy; she opposes one legitimacy to another, and hers is now the better founded.
This language also makes possible something very practical, which goes beyond the moment of defence. What can be named can be written, and what can be written can go into a funding application. Since cultural rights are in the law, a funding request that leans on them is not asking for a favour; it is proposing that a public authority fulfil an obligation that is already its own. Ways of working that existed only in the silence of workshops become fundable, and one can then build more ambitious projects around what, in the practice itself, will remain intuitive. The armour is not only for protection; it is for building.
Naming a mechanism, redoing a line of reasoning, writing after the fact
Cultural rights are the most immediate support, but the arming goes wider. I propose four gestures, which can be practised in any order:
- Naming a mechanism. A professional who can say that a competition produces a ranking of persons, and that the individual choice of whether or not to take part protects no one, since abstention is itself a result within the ranking, is no longer merely refusing: she is describing. A description cannot be brushed aside like a reluctance. I analysed this mechanism in the article Building, Not Valorizing; what matters here is the gesture — turning an unease into the description of a mechanism at work.
- Redoing a line of reasoning in one’s own words. What arms you is not having read; it is understanding a line of reasoning to the point of being able to rebuild it yourself, in front of someone who disagrees. A dissertation that lines up authors’ names to ratify what has already been decided arms no one; those supporting quotations, gathered after the fact, serve only as decoration. The difference between decorating and arming oneself can be tested simply, in the capacity to sustain the argument when you are contradicted.
- Writing after the action. Schön calls reflection-on-action that return in which the practitioner mentally relives a situation to draw out what was at stake in it. This is the moment when tacit knowledge begins to become sayable. Keeping a written record of one’s refusals and their reasons, however clumsy, gradually builds up the material of one’s own defence, and it is in trying to write that one discovers the authors who put words on what one has lived through.
- Identifying what is negotiable. A professional who does not know why she refuses cannot tell what is negotiable from what is not, and she risks holding everything with the same rigidity, or letting everything go at once. Knowing where one can yield is a direct effect of arming oneself, and not the least of them, because it is what makes it possible to last inside an institution without breaking against it.
A final word on duration, precisely. An instinctive position wears out under repeated contradiction. An argued position can be defended several times, passed on to colleagues, taken up again in another institution. The armour does not serve only on the day of the difficult meeting; it serves through all the years of practice that follow.
A politics for oneself
Everything above presents this arming as turned outwards, towards the management that demands an account, towards the funder who reads the application. But naming what one does has another effect, turned inwards, and it is perhaps just as important. A practitioner who puts words on her refusals and her gestures legitimises her practice in her own eyes. She stops living it as a string of happy reflexes she could not account for, and begins to see it as work that has its own coherence, that can be questioned, refined, matured. The gesture that was only felt becomes a gesture one can repeat while understanding it, and so a gesture that can grow. It is a politics for oneself, in the end: the patient building of a relationship of trust with one’s own work, which no longer depends entirely on the gaze of institutions.
There is, however, a trap in this movement, and I want to name it too. An intuition that has found its words can harden into a method, and a hardened method ceases to be precisely what made it right. What made these professionals precious was their capacity to feel the present situation, not to apply a doctrine, even one of their own. So both must be held together: arming oneself with words in order to defend and to build, and continuing to let work within oneself what is not yet named. In the article The Fertile Margin I proposed thinking of the margin as the place from which one acts with the greatest freedom and pertinence; this is true inside a practice as well. The framework, once built and funded, needs intuitions to keep being born in its margins, otherwise it becomes in its turn one of those legitimate and less human systems against which it had built itself. That is how the framework stays alive.
Going to fetch what it takes to hold
I am not telling professionals that they should first read, then act. They act, they act well, and it is from their practice that theory must set out. What I tell them, and what I would like to say in particular to young professionals whose intuitions are right, can be said in few words. Your intuitions are right, and they will not be enough on the day you are asked to account for them. Go and fetch what it takes to hold them — in cultural rights, in those who have thought about practitioners’ knowledge, in your own writings from after the action. Not in order to become theorists, but in order to remain what you are on the day you are asked to give it up.
