The political dimension of organisational frameworks

We talk about cultural democracy, horizontality, cultural rights. But the concrete frameworks we put in place often tell a very different story. This inconsistency, which I have observed for years in my own practice and in that of my peers, reproduces the very patterns of domination we claim to deconstruct. This article proposes to look squarely at what our organisational choices reveal about our real conceptions of power and relationship. And I must say from the outset that this demand applies to me too, including in the writing of this text: it would be contradictory to denounce positions of authority while adopting a peremptory tone oneself. What I am offering here are lines of reflection shaped by my practice, not certainties delivered from a position of expertise.

A backdrop of democracy, practices of domination

A professional study day on cultural mediation organised by a regional agency. The announced theme: “Towards democratic practices in cultural action.” The format: three hours of lectures, four speakers, three audience questions at the end. The speakers cite researchers’ names without explaining who they are. The framework reproduces exactly what it claims to critique: a top-down, closed logic in which a few experts deliver their knowledge to a passive audience.

I have experienced this scene dozens of times. And I have often found myself in the position of someone reproducing what they criticise. What I have learned is that the contradiction is not an accident: it is the norm in the cultural sector. Everywhere, people invoke cultural rights, participation, emancipation. But the concrete ways in which collective gatherings are organised belie these intentions.

What strikes me is that we do not realise the political significance of the social framework we establish. This political dimension of organisation is present in every situation: a meeting, a workshop, a professional study day, a festival. Each time we organise a collective moment, we establish a relationship to the world, to others, to knowledge, to power. And it is precisely this relationship that constitutes, in my practice of cultural rights, the heart of the matter.

Organising is not a secondary act

There is a stubborn belief in the cultural sector: that organisation is a technical, ancillary competence, separate from the “real” cultural work. Artistic programming, mediation, creation are seen as the core of the profession. The organisation of collective time is considered mere logistics, a constraint to manage so that the real work can take place.

This separation is deeply problematic. And I speak from experience, because my practice of cultural rights has led me to work as much on audience relationships as on the ways professionals work together. In both cases, the same issues are at play. Cultural sector workers spend a considerable amount of their professional time organising and facilitating collective moments: team meetings, steering committees, working groups, meetings with partners, preparation time with artists, mediation workshops, audience reception. In all these moments, something fundamental for democracy is at stake.

Let us consider an ordinary team meeting. Who speaks first? Who has the right to interrupt? How much time can each person take? Are decisions made before or during the meeting? Do those with the least social legitimacy dare to speak up? Is there a written record, and who writes it? These seemingly trivial questions determine whether we establish verticality or horizontality, domination or cooperation. This is not a metaphor. It is a concrete political reality.

Let us imagine a typical meeting. The director calls it. An agenda is sent the day before, with six items to cover in one hour. The meeting opens with a presentation by the director. Everyone is invited to react. The most socially comfortable people monopolise the discussion. Others agree or remain silent. After forty minutes, only two items have been addressed. The director postpones the rest. No synthesis, no collective validation, no clear decision.

This same meeting could be organised differently. An agenda co-constructed in advance. Documents sent a week before. An opening moment where each person shares how they are feeling. An explicit methodology for speaking: round table, moving debate, small group work. A collective synthesis. Decisions taken with validation by all. Minutes written during the session, visible to everyone.

This second form of organisation does not necessarily take more time. It requires a different awareness of what is at play. As Joëlle Zask emphasises in Participer (2011), genuine participation cannot exist without a transformation of interaction frameworks. This transformation presupposes an acute awareness of what our organisational modalities produce in terms of social relations.

Yet this competence is largely absent from initial and continuing training in the cultural sector. People are trained in art history, project management, mediation. But they are not trained to think politically about interaction frameworks. It is assumed that “knowing how to organise” is a natural competence that everyone possesses intuitively. Or that it can be delegated to an “organiser,” as if organisation were separable from the political substance of cultural work. The result is a reproduction of inherited formats, without critical distance. We hold meetings the way we have always seen meetings held. We organise professional study days on the model of the academic conferences we attended. We never question what these formats produce.

The insularity of the “culture crowd”: when vocabulary becomes a barrier

Another aspect of this inconsistency manifests in institutional discourse. Heads of organisations, elected officials, agency directors speak of “cultural rights.” The term is cited, repeated, like an open sesame. But rarely defined.

I have often observed this situation: in the room, a significant proportion of those present clearly do not understand what is being discussed. But no one asks the question. The term has become a kind of opaque injunction that everyone is supposed to understand without it ever being made explicit. And when someone takes the time to define what the notion covers (for example, recognising that every person has their own cultural legitimacy, that the role of public service is not to culturally elevate populations but to support the expression of their existing cultural practices), one sometimes hears in response: “It’s good that this is spelled out.” As if this definition were a pleasant supplement rather than a fundamental democratic necessity.

For my part, when I speak in a professional setting, I systematically take the time to define clearly and simply what cultural rights are. This is not a pedagogical detail; it is a matter of coherence: if cultural rights aim at emancipation and the recognition of each person, using the term without defining it amounts to turning it into an instrument of distinction between those who know and those who do not. It means reproducing, in language itself, the very process of domination that cultural rights are supposed to combat. We must be coherent with the values we defend in all the spaces of our human interactions.

Patrice Meyer-Bisch, who has contributed extensively to theorising cultural rights, insists in Cultural Rights, an Underdeveloped Category of Human Rights (2010) that cultural rights can only be effective if they are understood and appropriated by all stakeholders. Yet we turn them into specialist jargon, a vocabulary that signals belonging to a milieu rather than serving as a tool for collective emancipation.

This insularity is not limited to vocabulary. The names of choreographers, directors, theorists that we cite without ever contextualising them. The references we assume to be shared when they exclude most of the people we are speaking to. The dress codes, the social venues, the ways of speaking that mark belonging to the cultural milieu. I am not saying everything should be simplified. I am saying that we must be aware of the boundaries our linguistic and social practices create. That we must actively choose to open or close, rather than thoughtlessly reproducing codes of exclusion while claiming to work for inclusion.

This is a subject I have explored through analysing the way performances are presented in institutional texts: the way these texts address only the initiated, accumulating symbolic capital (prestigious training, collaborations with “recognised masters”) without ever asking what such discourse says to an ordinary citizen. Giorgio Agamben, in What Is an Apparatus? (2007), helps us understand how these linguistic frameworks function as apparatuses of capture that orient conduct and thought. Our professional vocabulary is an apparatus in Agamben’s sense: it captures those who master it and excludes the rest.

Boring professional study days: a symptom

There is something telling in the fact that so many professional study days, seminars, and gatherings in the cultural sector are, let us be frank, boring. Not because the subjects are uninteresting, nor because the speakers are incompetent. But because these events are poorly organised.

This organisational mediocrity reveals an inability to think about the conditions for living speech, collective intelligence, shared elaboration. Organisers stack formats without thinking about transitions, energy, rhythms. They design programmes that look coherent on paper but, in their actual unfolding, generate frustration and passivity.

A recurring example: programmes where time slots are compressed, breaks eliminated, exchange moments shortened in favour of top-down presentations. Organisers fail to grasp that a break is not wasted time but time for appropriation. That a two-hour workshop cannot fit into one hour. That the informal is as important as the formal for learning and building connections.

How can one work in the cultural sector, in professions concerned with human experience, aesthetics, the creation of forms, and be so insensitive to the quality of the experience one provides to the participants of a professional study day? This insensitivity stems from the mental separation between the “real” work (artistic programming, cultural mediation) and the organisation of professional gatherings, regarded as ancillary. Yet everything produces meaning. A poorly designed programme says something about our relationship to time, to others, to collective speech.

The work of John Dewey on art as experience, which I have drawn on in other texts, applies fully here. Dewey reminds us that the value of experience lies not only in the ideals it reveals but in its power to disclose diverse ideals. A professional study day is an experience. It reveals our organisational ideals, our conception of the professional collective, our relationship to speech and knowledge. When this experience produces boredom and frustration, it directly contradicts the discourse we hold about participation and cultural democracy.

Structural inconsistency: talking about democracy in authoritarian formats

What seems most troubling to me is that we reproduce these patterns even when the subject of our discussion is precisely democracy, horizontality, participation. We talk about cultural rights in a top-down lecture format. We hold forth on participation within a framework that does not allow for participation.

This inconsistency is more than a blunder. It testifies to a deep difficulty in transforming our professional postures. Chantal Mouffe, in Agonistics (2014), develops the idea that democracy requires the creation of forms of collective identification around egalitarian democratic positions. Yet we continue to create forms of identification around positions of expertise, authority, and institutional legitimacy.

In my own practice, I have observed that the same content, delivered in a top-down format or in a participatory format, does not produce the same experience, does not generate the same learning, does not establish the same relationship to knowledge and power. This is precisely the fundamental principle of all artistic work: form is meaning. And it is also the heart of what I have developed around the concept of “free institution”: creating frameworks that authorise, that legitimise before people have even created anything, rather than frameworks that control and filter. When I have people work autonomously in my workshops, I am the first spectator of what they produce. I have not guided anyone step by step: I have provided a framework, and creation happened autonomously. This is the principle I apply to the question of organising collective professional time.

There is a fundamental training issue here. We do not give cultural sector professionals the tools to design formats that genuinely establish horizontality. Yet these competences are not a supplement to be added to existing skills. They run through the entire profession. A cultural worker who does not know how to organise a meeting democratically lacks an essential competence, just as a mediator who cannot speak in public does.

This training should include very concrete dimensions: how to think about time, space, and speaking protocols. How to create conditions for those with the least social legitimacy to express themselves. How to organise the informal, which is often where real learning happens. But it should also include a reflexive dimension: what do my organisational choices reveal about my conception of power, knowledge, legitimacy? Am I coherent between my stated intentions and my actual practices? I ask these questions knowing they apply to me first and foremost, and that my own answers remain imperfect.

Organisation as an aesthetics of relationship

What I am defending is an approach to organisation as an aesthetics of relationship. Not merely as logistics, technique, or constraint, but as the creation of a sensory form, a lived experience, a relationship to the world and to others. And this approach is not separate from artistic or cultural work: it is its natural extension.

Nicolas Bourriaud, in Relational Aesthetics (1998), proposes an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and their social context. The organisation of a collective gathering falls precisely within this relational aesthetics. It is compositional work: thinking about rhythms, energies, transitions, the conditions for speech to circulate and collective intelligence to unfold. This sensitivity requires the same attention as artistic creation.

Yet cultural sector workers, who readily recognise their own competence in appreciating a work of art, designing a scenography, or conceiving a mediation programme, do not recognise this same competence in organising interaction frameworks. They think it is something technical rather than artistic, logistical rather than aesthetic. This separation is artificial. It echoes what I have analysed regarding the separation between technicians and artists in the performing arts: we build walls between activities that belong to the same gesture, that of creating the conditions for a shared experience.

Recognising this aesthetic dimension also transforms our relationship to evaluation. We no longer ask only “were the objectives achieved?” but “what experience did the participants have? What happened in the relationship? What kind of collective rapport was established?” These questions are not secondary. They are constitutive of what it means to do quality cultural work.

Sharing information and autonomy: two political principles

Awareness alone is not enough. We must also develop concrete competences. Two principles seem fundamental to me, which I have tested both in my creative workshops and in supporting professional teams: the sharing of information and autonomy in decision-making.

Sharing information means making visible to all participants the objectives, constraints, and choices that structure the collective time. It means making the programme, intentions, and methods explicit. It means creating a transparency that allows each person to understand the framework within which they operate and to contribute actively. Autonomy in decision-making means trusting people’s ability to organise themselves, to adapt, to invent. It means not locking everything down, not controlling everything. It means creating a framework structured enough for freedom to unfold within it.

These two principles are not “facilitation techniques” to be applied in a rote fashion. They are political postures. And they apply as much to a team meeting as to a mediation framework, an artistic production, or a professional study day.

Experience consistently shows the same thing: when information flows and autonomy is real, collectives are more alive, more creative, more engaged. People feel recognised in their ability to contribute. They develop a sense of belonging and responsibility. This is what I observe in the creative workshops I have been facilitating for years: when I provide a clear framework and let participants work autonomously, the results surprise me, and it is precisely this surprise that gives the framework its value.

Conversely, when information is opaque and everything is decided in advance, collectives become apathetic. People feel instrumentalised, used as adjustment variables in a programme that exceeds them. Bernard Stiegler, in Taking Care (2008), develops the idea that taking care of the other means taking care of the other’s attention. Organising a collective gathering is exactly that: creating the conditions for participants to be fully present, engaged, and contributory.

Coherence as a condition for legitimacy

What I am arguing for here, fundamentally, is coherence between our discourse and our practices. If we speak of cultural democracy, let us organise our collective time democratically. If we speak of participation, let us create its real conditions. If we speak of cultural rights, let us respect every person’s right to understand what is being discussed and to contribute to the reflection.

A programmer who does not ask what kind of social relationship their audience reception framework establishes is practising their profession incompletely. A mediator who reproduces top-down formats in a rote fashion misses the emancipatory dimension of mediation. A director who runs team meetings vertically while advocating horizontality in the organisation’s projects lives a contradiction that undermines the credibility of their discourse. I know these pitfalls await me too. Writing this does not protect me from them, but at least it makes explicit the standard I am trying to hold myself to.

This transformation requires work on oneself, on one’s representations, on one’s postures. It requires giving up certain forms of power, control, and legitimacy. It requires accepting uncertainty, the unexpected, the apparent disorder that emerges when one lets go of total control. But it is a condition of our professional legitimacy. For we cannot go on much longer speaking of cultural democracy while reproducing authoritarian frameworks. Participants feel it in their boredom. Teams perceive it in the gap between stated values and actual practices. Audiences detect it in frameworks that claim to include them while reproducing logics of exclusion.

This is why it seems important to me to begin concretely, from the next team meeting, the next workshop, the next professional study day, by questioning the framework we put in place, by seeking coherence between what we say and what we make people experience, by creating the conditions for our forms to embody our intentions. Not with the certainty of someone who would know how to do it, but with the tentative attention of someone who knows the question is right, even if the answers remain to be invented.

This transformation will not come through grand speeches or structural reforms, but through each meeting conducted a little differently, each workshop designed with a sharper awareness of what it establishes, each collective gathering conceived as a modest and sincere democratic laboratory. It is a long-term, patient, demanding endeavour.

And it is also, I believe, the only way to restore the cultural sector’s political legitimacy. Not by defending its funding through grand speeches about the importance of culture (I have developed this idea in other texts: culture must serve republican democratic missions, not defend itself as a sector with an intrinsic right to exist), but by demonstrating through our concrete organisational practices that we know how to create spaces where horizontality, participation, and collective intelligence are genuinely experienced. Our work is not limited to programming works of art. It consists fundamentally in organising interaction frameworks that transform social relations and build the commons. And this coherence, between our values and our most everyday gestures, remains a horizon to move towards, with the humility of knowing that the path is also the work.