My argument is divided into two parts: the first develops a sense of the “technical game” (Rottenburg 2009, 2015) played in cultural policy, drawing on historical records from UNESCO and examples from French, British, and Swedish cultural policy in the 1960s and 70s. The historical context will establish how cultural policy has problematized art and culture in terms of social cohesion from its inception. It will also demonstrate how cultural policy has generated “a specific language,” enabling “transfers, comparisons, aggregations, and manipulations standardized by calculations, and routine interpretations” (Desrosières 2015: 334). This “language” is at odds with legal practice and aesthetic philosophy. A central foundation in legal and philosophical definitions of art is that it engages us in ways that cannot be reduced to a set of propositions or measured in exact proportions. This undecidability also defines how courts in the US and Western Europe have approached art. Cultural policy breaks with this tradition, exacting a kind of normative expediency on art and culture that turns it into a political technology facing the problematics of the population.

 

The second section develops a sense of how this “technical game” of cultural policy shifts the focus of art and culture from Enlightenment understandings of individual Bildung and competence-based sociability (Geselligkeit) to a “problematics of the population.” Here, the connection between cultural policy, immigrants, and social cohesion is made. The early development of cultural policy in Europe focused on accessibility and democratization. However, because the policies of accessibility failed, a discourse around the idea of a “cultural deficit” developed (Daboo 2018). When cultural policy shifted the focus of accessibility from the working classes to the immigrants, the “cultural deficit” mutated into “a culture of deficit.” Here I discuss the inadvertent connections between cultural policy and racialization. Theoretically, I will bring cultural policy’s conceptualization of “what art does” to bear on what Loïc Wacquant calls “the diagonal of racialization” (Wacquant 2022). I will attempt to show how the competence-based sociability envisioned in the legal and philosophical formulations of art has, in the hands of cultural policy, become grounds for a boundary-making. When cast together with inequalities of, for example, class, gender, age, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and locality, this new formulation of the aesthetic is co-producing what I call “racial archipelagoes.” I end by suggesting that the current production of these racial archipelagoes will become tomorrow’s seeds of “urban rage” (Dikeç 2017).