Perhaps we’re the minority after all.

It's no coincidence that with the advance of digitalization the discourse about large numbers has reached areas that were spared in better times. The new and not-so-new technologies have long been able to measure majorities better than we can; they calculate every average in a flash and force their way into every debate that mentions so-called “normal” people or, God forbid, the will of the people. Even the rhetoric of groups that were formerly unrepresentative or state-supporting such as independent artists or Green ministers of culture is now guided by the quietly adopted law of the biggest possible size. Culture saves democracy, was Claudia Roth's theme in virtually every speech she gave, and for many in the independent performing arts, the motto seemed to be: We are the many.

However, two hard truths are now becoming apparent, as we are unfortunately seeing in the brutal, unfinished austerity debates and in the current not anti-racist vibe shift to the right. On the one hand, as could be seen in the modest demonstrations against short-sighted and incompetently managed cutbacks to culture, most people don't really care about culture (polls sometimes say otherwise, but what is a click compared to solidarity on the streets?). The marginalization of culture was already noticeable during the pandemic with the unfortunate discussions about “systemic relevance,” when the clever cultural actors tended to back off talking about their interests because they knew that the others didn’t want to hear first and foremost about how much theater, for example, secures our coexistence. We are not the many, we are the few – a little more realism instead of idealism could help in the struggles to come.

The second mistake concerns the very nature of democracy itself. Ideally, democracy is a form of government that protects minorities and doesn’t leave everything to the will of the majority. This is often the case in Germany, not least in the funding of culture itself, which supports many things that are of no interest to the majority (which is why it is funded and not left to market forces).

So, how could a way of thinking become so dominant, even in the minority pool of the independent arts, to the extent that it grants only the majority, or at least the very many, the right to attention, protection and even funding? Why did so many of those working in the cultural sector believe themselves to be in a position of numerical strength that rarely had anything to do with political realities? Where did the desire to belong to a political or moral or artistic majority come from in the first place, for example by wanting to include everyone, even those who never wanted to be included, such as the truck drivers on Germany's motorways, most of whom don’t speak German because they transport our goods from our eastern neighbors for the lowest wages? So where does this strange prioritization of the majority come from in a societal niche such as the arts, especially the independent arts?

The first incarnation of the recurring concept of majority among those on the cultural left can be traced back to Italy in the 1920s, and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who significantly influenced the concept of “cultural hegemony,” or “dominance.” Gramsci developed his theories during his long imprisonment, when Mussolini put the physically disabled and ill philosopher and journalist in various prisons for a decade from the end of 1926 until shortly before his death. The scattered “prison notebooks,” which were added to over time, still influence our understanding of why the conditions for political majorities can be created in culture. Cultural hegemony refers to the occupation of the so-called “pre-political space,” particularly cultural spaces, where hard political issues can be articulated in a comparatively soft way and, if desired, find their way into the minds of consumers and voters.

That’s why those on the far right, as well as those who don’t yet know they are, go rhetorically berserk when some characters in Disney remakes have a different skin color. Or no longer say things that many today consider racist or sexist. How far this caution or fear on the part of global entertainment companies has sometimes overshot the mark is another issue entirely. Regardless of the political spectrum, however, cultural hegemony and the path to it through culture wars describe the dream of being able to make unpopular politics with the popular arts.

But Gramsci needs to be viewed through the lens of his own era. He writes a lot about the Italian literature of the Risorgimento in the 19th century, the period of the never quite successful project of Italian cultural unity. Why were large sections of the population uninterested in the upheavals of this period, Gramsci asks. His recurring answer is that this was also due to the lack of popular arts. For him, cultural hegemony means reaching out to the working class and farmers, and to all those for whom Dante's songs have become too complex and Verdi's operas too socially distant. Gramsci looks back to the 19th century on the one hand, and to his own present in the 1920s and 1930s on the other, when the popular art forms were serialized novels in newspapers or the cinema. Neither were taken seriously by critics or academia. And in Italy, contemporary popular literature was almost entirely absent, much to Gramsci’s lament.

Was Gramsci concerned with the democratization of culture, with participation and access, as we say today? Does he speak directly to us in this sense? Not only, not entirely. For, unlike 100 years ago, we truly have no shortage of popular contemporary arts today, and even in the theater we no longer have the dominance of unchallenged canonical texts that no one understands. Above all, the most recent culture wars have shown how much today’s principle of cultural hegemony better suits the goals of the New Right and all those who don’t yet know they are on the right or don’t dare to say so. For today, the rules about who should speak and how, and how culture should be produced come from the right (the most avid readers of Gramsci today are mainly found among far-right strategists, such as Götz Kubitschek's Antaios publishing house). Banning gender neutral language or the vague threat of doing so in Germany, from Bavaria to some federal ministries, the shameless attacks on institutions in the US under Trump: These are attempts at cultural hegemony in its purest and, therefore, most authoritarian form. It is a form of authoritarianism that was not unknown in historical Marxism, but must seem wrong when it comes to democratic thinking. Why on earth must everyone say, hear, see, and think the same thing? And why must everyone understand everything in the arts? 
When we talk about social inclusion, we often discuss reach and differ only slightly from the rhetoric of management consultants such as McKinsey who entered the theater world in the 1990s. It remains an unresolved question whether the current focus on reach and the conviction that theater must be completely understandable even without prior knowledge also conceals ordinary anti-intellectual impulses. In the past, at least in the theaters, this was clear to everyone.

But in order to formulate a cultural policy that includes growth, we need a realistic assessment of the current situation, of who we are producing for and who we are perhaps not producing for. 

There are certainly several factors that have led to this return of the dream of a majority and the desire for cultural hegemony. Presumably, there are even older ghosts than Antonio Gramsci, such as bourgeois morality, which wanted to educate people for a new society in the theater. And today, it doesn't really matter whether you vote right or left; practicing digital skills affects all groups and classes: “pay for the ride, not for the car,” as a car-sharing company says. Only pay for what you immediately need, not for the infrastructure. This way of thinking, reinforced and normalized by digitalization, is also directed against public broadcasters and, in many areas, against any kind of public institution, such as a municipal theater, a museum, or a production company. By this logic, the largest number always wins, and the goal, at least in the car-sharing market, is to knock all other competitors out of the race or take them over. I pay for what I use myself, and nothing more. From here, it's not much of a leap to rejecting taxes.

The forces of technological upheaval are much greater than anything we can do. It doesn't always help to look for the fault in ourselves. It’s certainly a problem that particular theatrical aesthetics find fewer audiences or don't even attempt to perform on larger stages and in larger halls. One reason for this is that it discourages the idea of breaking through the glass ceiling and believing in the possibility of filling the largest theaters, even without drugs. But the force with which digitally-fueled celebrity culture and the worship of extreme wealth have taken hold in a wide variety of milieus is probably contributing more to the marginalization of the independent arts than anything else.

In my relative youth, the robust aesthetics of money were consumed at best with ironic causticity, as in the early days of Castorf’s Volksbühne, or seen as camp, as a trashy, carnivalesque reversal of the real conditions, as a playful appropriation of the declassed, as in the sexually transgressive divas of black house music. But these fractured perspectives were mostly held by only a few. In the mainstream, well, it never worked for the majority. Techno parades ultimately provided sexy images, and whether Castorf's fundamentally pornographic women's wardrobe was really so empowering for everyone is now open to question, even in Berlin, without Volksbühne ultras dousing you with beer.

So, there are technological, political and artistic reasons why this thinking in terms of large numbers and majorities has taken hold even in the subsidized arts, even where it cannot describe reality. Now, I am by no means calling for self-diminishment. But in order to formulate a cultural policy that includes growth, we need a realistic assessment of the current situation, of who we are producing for and who we are perhaps not producing for. The diminishment of the independent arts may have consisted precisely in considering it particularly relevant, important to a majority, and this self-deception sometimes led to paralysis. When the veil of this illusion falls away, self-confidence can grow again. And that is always one of the most important prerequisites for being able to negotiate well.