In The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart, Jay Caspian Kang uses a sporting anomaly to describe a broader moral transformation. In the NBA, some teams lose on purpose because the incentive system converts present defeat into future advantage. The practice is not new; what is decisive is that it no longer seems necessary to conceal it: if losing offers a higher expected return than competing, losing is presented as rational.
Kang adopts an expression from Domonique Foxworth to name this regime: the culture of optimisation, the idea that the competition to optimise has eliminated the boundaries once provided by shame. Under this regime, decisions are no longer evaluated by their relationship to a shared duty, a tradition, a profession, a bond, or an idea of the common good. They are judged by their performance. The question is no longer what we ought to do, but what produces the best result for me or for my organisation. A rationality born in business and finance extends to sport, education, care, politics, personal relationships, and identity itself.
Kang adds a caveat worth preserving: shame contains opportunism, but it has also served to discipline those who deviated from oppressive norms. He describes it as a mode by which groups mediate their standards without recourse to the State, and he warns that this is not always beneficial. His text opens a series rather than closing a verdict, so I do not attribute a predetermined conclusion to him. What is clearly posed is the problem: if shame functioned as a mechanism by which a community imposed norms without recourse to the law, its erosion is not explained by social media, nor can it be repaired solely by administrative regulation. What must be reconstructed is not the old community sanctions, but the capacity to distinguish between the profitable and the valuable. That is where the question of culture begins, and that is where the difficulty lies, because that question is usually answered poorly.
Reducing neoliberalism to privatisations, deregulation or austerity prevents an understanding of its force. It is also a rationality, in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault in his 1978-79 course on the birth of biopolitics, by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval when describing competition as a universal norm of conduct, and by Wendy Brown: an economisation of spheres that are not economic, which reconfigures people as human capital obliged to invest in themselves, compete, exhibit themselves and individually assume risks that were previously distributed. For Brown, it is not a matter of everything being literally sold, but of everything being reconstructed and evaluated through an economic rationale. The worker becomes human capital; the citizen, a consumer; education, an investment; leisure time, an opportunity for improvement; friendship, a network of contacts; creation, content.
This rationality does not need to prohibit other forms of value. It suffices to force them to justify themselves in its language. A library must demonstrate economic impact. A museum must attract tourism. An orchestra must reinforce the city's brand. A community project must produce rapid and scalable indicators. Even the defence of culture adopts the vocabulary that subordinates it: profitability, audience, competitiveness, employability, innovation, return on investment. Elizabeth Anderson gave this problem its philosophical formulation. Valuing is not about assigning more or less of the same value: there are qualitatively different ways of relating to goods, and the market expresses only one of them, which treats things as objects of utility. Her position is not that this mode should not exist, but to question why it has become the only translatable one, such that goods appropriate to love, respect, or admiration are poorly served when subjected to market norms. The problem is not measuring or managing, though it appears when only the measurable counts, and that which does not generate immediate profit must apologise for its existence.
The fertile intuition does not refer to shame, but to boundaries. Every society reserves spheres that should not be organised entirely as markets. Care, education, justice, childhood, nature, or democratic deliberation lose part of their meaning when subjected entirely to prices and incentives. The culture of optimisation dissolves those boundaries because it treats any moral reserve as an inefficiency. If a care home can reduce staff without breaking the law, the reduction appears as good management. If a platform can capture more attention through indignation, it will do so. If a cultural institution gains visibility by replacing research and mediation with photographable experiences, the indicators will reward it. The decision may be rational for each actor and disastrous for the whole.
Shame was one possible deterrent, though neither the only nor the most effective one. Professional standards, public institutions, historical memory, pride in a job well done, mutual recognition, and the capacity to imagine the consequences of our actions on the lives of others also serve to curb abuse. These are all cultural resources, and their erosion leaves legal regulation alone to face actors with enormous incentives to exploit any loophole. However, this diagnosis remains insufficient as long as it speaks only of deterrents. A brake implies that the direction is correct and only the speed is excessive. What is occurring is different: the unit of measurement has been unified. It is not that we have lost the modesty to do what we always knew was wrong; it is that we possess only one way to justify anything, and no shared way to explain why something should not be done even if it proves profitable.
A piece is missing, and it is the one that explains why optimisation fails not due to an excess of efficacy, but due to its own logic. Hartmut Rosa formulates this with two concepts. Resonance denotes a mode of relationship in which the subject and the world respond to and transform one another: a conversation that you do not know how it will end, a piece of music that dismantles you, a landscape you had not foreseen. Unavailability denotes the condition of that relationship: resonance cannot be manufactured, forced, or predicted with certainty. Subjected to control, it fades. Both are opposed to what Rosa calls dynamic stabilisation: late modernity must grow, accelerate, and innovate without rest simply to remain stable.
From this follows something that the discourse of cultural well-being overlooks. An experience programmed to produce social cohesion will struggle to do so, because cohesion emerges in relationships that the participants do not entirely control. A work conceived to fulfil an indicator cannot generate what that indicator measures. An encounter designed to maximise a bond almost always produces only the representation of that bond. This is not a eulogy for improvisation nor an excuse against planning. It is a criterion: there are goods that are only obtained when they are not the stated objective of the procedure that produces them. And these are precisely the goods that the culture of optimisation promises to manage better.
The predictable approach here would be to enumerate what culture and art can contribute. Autonomy, authenticity, attention, memory, non-hierarchical cooperation, the imagination of alternatives. The list writes itself, and that is the problem. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello distinguish two historical critiques of capitalism. Social critique denounces poverty, inequality, and selfishness. Artistic critique denounces disenchantment, inauthenticity, and the oppression of administered life. Their analysis shows that late twentieth-century corporate management responded to demands for autonomy, creativity, and the rejection of hierarchy by integrating them into the new discourse of network management, while weakening the collective securities that social critique defended. The inventory of the new spirit that the authors reconstruct from management literature, and which I translate from their version, includes autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomatic capacity, multitasking, conviviality, openness to others and to novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience, receptivity, and the pursuit of interpersonal contacts. It is the lexicon of artistic critique converted into a management manual. And it is, almost term for term, the vocabulary with which culture is defended today.
The art market provides the clearest demonstration. A work that destroys its own status as a commodity in front of the buyer multiplies its price. Institutional critique is collected as a matter of course. Art that denounces speculation is a speculative asset. What the market buys is not despite the critique: it is the critique, as an accredited sign of autonomy and seriousness. Outside the market, the same occurs under a different name. Stephen Pritchard has documented artwashing: participatory artistic projects that prepare and legitimise processes of neighbourhood displacement, with art functioning as a social licence. Cooperation becomes an input for real estate revaluation. No one is lying, and everything works. The conclusion is that cultural critique of neoliberalism, taken as content, is easily incorporated. And it is incorporated.
If the objection is correct, the question changes. Not what culture can contribute in the face of neoliberalism, but which forms of culture resist incorporation. And I maintain that the capacity of a cultural practice to resist the logic of optimisation does not depend on what the work says, but on the circuit in which it is produced and circulates. Critique is absorbed without difficulty. What is not absorbed with the same ease is a different regime of ownership, decision-making, and labour. A self-managed neighbourhood choir and a sponsored biennial may say the same thing about care and belonging. Only one of the two practises it. The difference is not in the discourse: it is in who owns, who decides, and who is paid.
From this arise three questions applicable to any cultural project. If the result can be converted into a transferable asset, a unique work allows for this, while a shared process does so far less, meaning that incorporability begins with the form of the product, not its message. If one asks who controls the resources, the decisions and the narrative, it is not enough to include a community in a project: it matters whether that community defines the problem, manages the budget, retains the rights and decides what remains when the project ends. And if the work is remunerated or paid for with visibility, the answer separates a cultural practice from its promotional imitation, and real autonomy from autonomy as discourse. Maurizio Lazzarato made this same move in 2007, when objecting to Boltanski and Chiapello that the two critiques are not incompatible. His case was the French movement of the intermittents du spectacle, cultural workers who defended both the singularity of their work and their right to social protection. It follows, even if he does not formulate it as a slogan, that claiming autonomy without claiming material security surrenders the usable half of the critique and retains only the decorative.
Once this criterion is applied, the customary list of cultural virtues is reordered. Non-translatable values persist, yet only as experience rather than as message: a novel does not prove through a formula that a life holds more value than its productivity; it introduces us to that life and renders its reduction to a figure intolerable. Its efficacy arises from not offering a managed conclusion. When that same value is enunciated as an institutional declaration—a campaign regarding care or a report speaking of dignity—it becomes the most easily recyclable material in existence. Political imagination is the most fragile: art may denaturalise the order and demonstrate that economic institutions are not inevitable, yet denunciation is precisely the content the circuit incorporates most effectively. A well-placed critical work gains value by being so, meaning that what persists is not the critique, but the critique that also alters who decides.
Shared practices persist when the circuit provides support. A choir, a theatre group, a writing workshop, a local library, a popular festival, or a memory project compel the coordination of time, the listening to diverse capabilities, and the production of something that no individual would achieve in isolation. Available evidence associates cultural participation with civic engagement, trust, and cohesion, and points to plausible mechanisms: creative involvement in common spaces, co-creation, rootedness in identities and traditions, and the formation of lasting relationships. With two caveats. The association is correlational, and those who participate in culture are typically those who already vote and associate for other reasons. Furthermore, inward-facing bonds, without outward bridges, may reinforce inequality rather than correct it. More than a decade ago, Claire Bishop added an aesthetic objection that remains valid: participatory art may produce genuine cooperation or the mere staging of it, and these are difficult to distinguish from the outside. The decisive distinction is that which separates cultural consumption from participation. Purchasing a ticket may be valuable, but intervening in the selection, creation, or governance of an activity develops distinct capabilities. It is not the activity that decides: it is the distribution of the decision.
Attention persists, with a caveat. Platforms convert it into a commercial resource: they reward immediate reaction, comparison, and conflict because these prolong usage and generate data. Reading, drawing, rehearsing, dancing, or contemplating demand time, repetition, and openness to the unforeseen, and they train faculties that optimisation weakens. The trap lies in the fact that the restoration of attention is already marketed as a wellness and performance product: managed disconnection is an industry. Yves Citton offers a way out by conceiving of attention in collective and ecological terms, rather than as an individual resource that each person must manage more effectively. The difference between the two versions is, once again, one of circuit.
Memory forces us to acknowledge an important objection. Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have described an economy of enrichment that extracts value precisely from heritage, memory, and narrative: the collection form values objects for their place within a set and for the narrative that justifies them, not for their utility. Memory is not a refuge from valorisation; it is one of its contemporary raw materials. What it does preserve—and this is not insignificant—is the constancy that common institutions were constructed slowly and may be destroyed rapidly, which prevents the presentation of every privatisation as an unprecedented innovation. However, it cannot be offered as a free territory.
Cultural commons are what persist most effectively, and for structural, not moral, reasons. A resource whose access, care, and governance are organised collectively is not defined by being free of charge. It requires a community, rules of participation, responsibilities, and a genuine capacity for decision-making, which is precisely what the valorisation circuit cannot absorb without destroying it. Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that these institutions exist, function, and are distinct from both the market and the State. Faced with the narrow alternative between one and the other, the commons experiment with forms of ownership and governance based on reciprocity. Above the list lies the criterion itself: the redistribution of the capacity for representation. Art may render excluded experiences visible and allow individuals to construct their own representation, yet it may also appropriate those experiences, aestheticise harm, or use participation as a form of legitimation. The question is not whether a voice is given, but who defines the problem, who controls the narrative, who receives the resources, who retains the rights, and what remains within the community once the project concludes.
It would be contradictory to combat the economic instrumentalisation of art with a moral one. Culture is not a universal remedy. It can reproduce inequality, elitism and competition. Cities use it to drive up the cost of living in neighbourhoods. Institutions replace social rights with low-cost participatory projects. Artists are pushed to turn their entire lives into a personal brand, and that point deserves more than a mention. Angela McRobbie has described how the apparatus of creativity accustoms young people to a working future without the security conquered in the past, replacing rights with passion. Gregory Sholette has called the invisible cultural labour upon which the visible art world depends 'dark matter'. The cultural world is not merely a victim of the regime of optimisation: in many respects, it is its laboratory and its model. No defence of culture against neoliberalism is credible if it does not begin there. Nor is it reasonable to demand verifiable and immediate political effects from a work of art. Artistic autonomy matters because it preserves a zone of experimentation that obeys neither the market nor the programme of a government or a movement. Culture contributes to democracy when it can also discomfort those who fund it and when it admits uncertain results. The practical conclusion is twofold: art requires autonomy from power and the material conditions that make it possible. Without time, income, space, education and freedom of expression, the invitation to create is a privilege for those who can finance their own precariousness.
If the criterion is the circuit, cultural policy ceases to be an appendix to the argument and becomes its consequence, and measures are ordered according to three questions. Regarding the form of the product: funding processes and not just products and events, because trust, mediation and rootedness require years, whereas short-term calls for proposals reward visibility; strengthening everyday infrastructure—libraries, art schools, community centres, archives, rehearsal spaces, community media—rather than the accumulation of exceptional events; and evaluating without reducing, by combining data with narratives, observation, deliberation and long-term horizons. Regarding the control of resources: moving from audience to governance, with real participation in priorities, budgets, programming and evaluation; protecting diversity and dissent, because a healthy cultural sphere does not manufacture consensus but rather the conditions for conflict to be expressed; and recognising culture as a right and a public good, so that access and the capacity to intervene do not depend on income or territory. Regarding labour: fees, social protection, transparent contracting and institutional continuity, which is the condition of possibility for all of the above and the point where declarations are put to the test.
The framework exists. The MONDIACULT Declaration, adopted by States in Mexico City in 2022 and reaffirmed and expanded in Barcelona in 2025, recognises culture as a global public good of intrinsic value. In Spain, the 2025-2030 Cultural Rights Plan, presented on 8 July 2025, adopts a rights-based approach and contains 146 measures. It must be stated what this plan is and what it is not. It is not a law: it is a ministerial plan whose execution depends on the annual budgetary allocation and the collaboration of autonomous communities that participated unevenly in its drafting. Its potential will depend on rights being translated into stable budgets, territorial equity, effective participation and working conditions, and on culture not being subordinated once again to its capacity to generate tourism, branding or growth. The very criterion of the circuit serves to evaluate it in two years' time: not by how many activities it has funded, but by how much decision-making power it has transferred.
A problem remains that it would be dishonest to gloss over. That which is least incorporable is also the least scalable, the least visible and the worst funded. A neighbourhood choir that governs its own resources does not produce headlines, does not generate a city brand, does not fit into an eighteen-month call for proposals and does not appear in impact statistics. Everything that makes it resilient also makes it invisible to the systems that distribute money. I cannot think of an elegant way out of this. The only honest one is to acknowledge that the defence of these practices cannot be supported by their performance, because their performance is low according to any metric that the system itself accepts. It must be supported by an argument of rights, which is what the language of cultural rights permits and that of impact does not.
The culture of optimisation does not prevail because people have lost their decency. It prevails because institutions, metrics and incentives teach them to behave as if every moral restriction were naive and every missed opportunity a failure. Asking for shame to return is equivalent to demanding a brake without rebuilding the road. The alternative is not a society governed by guilt, nor a culture tasked with making bearable what other policies destroy. It is a society capable of setting limits because it recognises what deserves to be cared for, and cultural practices whose way of organising themselves is, in itself, an example of that limit.
What art says matters less than we tend to assume. It matters far more how it is produced, who decides upon it and who is paid to do so.
On the open conversation
This essay begins with an article by Jay Caspian Kang on what Domonique Foxworth called the culture of optimisation, and shifts the question from the loss of shame to a structural problem: the disappearance of limits in the face of a single unit of measurement. I maintain that the capacity of a cultural practice to resist that logic does not depend on what it says, but on the circuit of ownership, decision-making and labour in which it is produced. I have endeavoured to address the objection that criticism is easily incorporated, rather than avoiding it. I carefully distinguish what each author maintains from my own elaboration, and I have noted a piece of data pending confirmation (the endowment of the Cultural Rights Plan). If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of cultural policy, the sociology of art or the management of the commons, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Starting point: Jay Caspian Kang, 'The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart', The New Yorker, Fault Lines section, 8 September 2026. The expression 'culture of optimisation' comes from Domonique Foxworth, cited by Kang; the article opens a series and does not close with a normative conclusion.
Neoliberalism as rationality: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Zone Books, 2015, esp. p. 31, on the economisation of all domains and homo oeconomicus) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019); Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979 (Gallimard/Seuil, 2004); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde (La Découverte, 2009), on competition as a universal norm; Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1993), on the plurality of modes of valuation; Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Caja Negra, 2016).
Optimisation, resonance and unavailability: Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz (Suhrkamp, 2016; English trans. Polity, 2019), The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020) and his formulation of 'dynamic stabilisation' in Questions de communication, 31 (2017); Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (Verso, 2013); Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention (Seuil, 2014).
Incorporation of critique: Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Gallimard, 1999); Ève Chiapello, 'Evolution and co-optation', Third Text 18(6), 2004; Maurizio Lazzarato, 'The Misfortunes of the “Artistic Critique” and of Cultural Employment' (transversal/eipcp, 2007); Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (Polity, 2020), on the economy of enrichment and the collection form; Stephen Pritchard, 'The Artwashing of Gentrification and Social Cleansing', in The Handbook of Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Cultural work and precarity: Angela McRobbie, Be Creative (Polity, 2016); Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter (Pluto Press, 2011); Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work (Zero Books, 2015); Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds.), Critique of Creativity (MayFlyBooks, 2011).
Participation, commons and evidence: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (Verso, 2012); Daisy Fancourt and Saoirse Finn, What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? (WHO Europe, HEN synthesis report 67, 2019), which brought together more than 900 publications, some 200 of them reviews and meta-analyses synthesising over 3,000 studies, in addition to more than 700 individual studies; Stephen Clift, Kate Phillips and Stephen Pritchard, 'The need for robust critique of research on social and health impacts of the arts', Cultural Trends 30(5), 2021, with the methodological critique of that review.
Market limits and cultural rights: Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy (Debate, 2013); Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale (Oxford University Press, 2010); Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (Verso, 2022); Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit (Princeton University Press, 2010); Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007); UNESCO, Final Declaration of MONDIACULT 2022 (Mexico City) and final document of MONDIACULT 2025 (Barcelona); Ministry of Culture, 2025-2030 Cultural Rights Plan (presented on 8 July 2025).
Methodological note
The text distinguishes three levels: art as an aesthetic experience, culture as a set of shared practices and meanings, and cultural policy as the public organisation of rights, resources and institutions.
The associations between cultural participation, well-being and civic engagement are correlational, and none of the sources claim causality. The 2019 WHO review has received published methodological criticism for failing to evaluate the quality of the reviews it aggregated, and it is cited with that caveat.
Invoking impact reports to justify culture entails subjecting it to the regime of measurement that this text calls into question. Evidence is used here to defuse the budgetary argument, not to establish the value of culture. That value, if the argument is correct, cannot be established in the language that measures it.