Connection as Ideology

Within European cultural policy, a strikingly uniform vocabulary has taken hold in recent years. Culture is expected to connect people, strengthen social cohesion, counter polarization, build bridges between communities and enhance democratic resilience. In France, culture is deployed as a lever for lien social; in Germany it is associated with Zusammenhalt in Vielfalt; in Spain and Italy it appears in similar terms as an instrument of social cohesion; at the European level, too, culture is increasingly presented as a force of connectedness, resilience and democracy. The political intentions behind this discourse are generally understandable and often sympathetic. Precisely for that reason, the tacit assumptions underlying it are easily overlooked. ‘Connection’ functions not only as a description of a possible effect of cultural practices, but increasingly as a social value taken for granted in advance — as though more connection automatically meant more democracy.

How readily that equation can be established became almost paradigmatically visible on 28 January 2026 in De Afspraak, a debate programme on the Dutch-language Belgian public broadcaster VRT. Geert Mak, a Dutch writer and historical chronicler, and Christophe Busch, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute and a researcher of collective violence, discussed the authoritarian developments in the United States. Mak described these developments as a fascist process approaching a possible point of no return; Busch associated such a tipping point, among other things, with the possibility that the forthcoming elections might be manipulated, obstructed or postponed. Their comparison with twentieth-century European fascism was not without nuance. They also pointed to differences between the two historical constellations and to the possible resistance of judges, individual states and other democratic institutions. Later in the same broadcast, actress and writer Ruth Becquart presented the programme of Filmfestival Oostende under the heading ‘the stories that connect us’. Film and culture appeared as forces capable of generating empathy, bringing people together and counteracting social division; the other guests welcomed the idea without noticeable reservation. What is striking is not that they valued cultural encounter, but how effortlessly the analysis of fascism gave way to a plea for connection through culture. Whereas democratic resilience had first been linked to institutions, countervailing powers and enduring political conflict, it subsequently appeared as a matter of social cohesion — as though the capacity to unite people were automatically on the side of democracy.

The twentieth century provides an uncomfortable counter-test to that assumption. The fascist movements of the period were not only unparalleled in their capacity to exclude, persecute and destroy people; they were also exceptionally powerful machines of social integration, collective identification and cultural community-building. Under National Socialism, this movement found its most radical form in the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft: social, political and cultural differences were to be subordinated to the image of a single racially defined people. Connection and exclusion were not opposing processes. The community was formed in part by determining who did not belong to it. Culture played no secondary role in this. Through Gleichschaltung, cultural institutions, professional organizations, music, film, theatre, literature and the visual arts were brought into line with the objectives of the regime; the Reichskulturkammer helped determine who was permitted to work within cultural life, while the exhibition Entartete Kunst made visible which art was placed outside the desired cultural order. Fascist Italy developed a related logic. The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro brought cultural, sporting and recreational associations together under regime control and turned leisure into an instrument of social integration and political incorporation. The relevant question, therefore, is not whether culture can connect. It undoubtedly can. The question is what kind of community it forms, around which images and narratives, which differences can continue to exist within it — and who or what ends up outside that community.

Already in the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville saw that democracy is threatened not only by a power standing above society, but also by the possibility that the majority might identify itself with the whole. Against this ‘tyranny of the majority’, he did not set an ideal of consensus, but a dense fabric of institutions, local autonomy, voluntary associations and public counterforces through which social power can be dispersed and limited.

If connection is not in itself a democratic norm, the question arises as to what distinguishes democratic forms of community from their authoritarian counterparts. The answer does not lie in stronger unity, but in the capacity to allow differences to persist without letting them turn into enmity. For Hannah Arendt, plurality is not an obstacle to the political but one of its conditions: people share a world without therefore speaking or acting from the same standpoint. The common world does not arise because differences disappear, but because they can appear alongside one another within a public space. Such a space does not exist by itself. It must be politically constructed and protected by institutions that prevent any one position from identifying itself with the whole.

Chantal Mouffe makes this institutional dimension even more explicit. Democracy, in her account, does not presuppose that fundamental oppositions can ultimately be resolved in consensus; it requires practices and institutions that shape antagonisms in such a way that political opponents continue to recognize one another not as enemies to be eliminated but as legitimate adversaries. Courts, parliamentary procedures, elections, the distribution of power and other institutional counterweights are, from this perspective, not external safeguards of an already existing democratic community: they belong to the mechanisms through which political division can continue to function democratically. Social conflict is therefore not necessarily a deficiency that culture must overcome. It can also be the visible sign of a plurality that must be democratically organized, bounded and sustained. The distinction between democratic and authoritarian politics then lies less in the amount of connection they produce than in whether difference, conflict and dissent can continue to exist institutionally within the community without being neutralized or expelled.

One of the films with which Filmfestival Oostende illustrates its programme around connection ironically reveals why the concept says too little. Bram Stoker’s Dracula can undoubtedly produce a shared experience: in a cinema, fear itself is shared, and the simultaneous confrontation with fear and horror can temporarily constitute a public. But this still tells us little about the political meaning of that connection. More interesting is what the film itself does with boundaries and identities. In a Žižek-inspired reading, Dracula appears as a figure who cannot be stably contained within the oppositions on which an order rests: living and dead, familiar and foreign, attraction and repulsion. The vampire is not an element ultimately absorbed harmoniously into a community, but a persistent remainder that makes its boundaries visible and unstable. Gothic fiction can thus open a space in which conflicting positions are not necessarily reconciled, but continue to coexist and unsettle one another. Perhaps precisely here lies a different political possibility of art: not only in its capacity to produce a shared affect, but in its capacity to confront us with what cannot be incorporated without remainder into a common narrative.

This brings us from the political meaning of connection to the position of art itself. Contemporary discourse readily speaks of ‘culture’ as though it denoted a single coherent social instrument, even though cultural practices, community-building and artistic production do not simply coincide. For Adorno, art is by no means sealed off from society: it arises within social relations and carries their contradictions within itself. Yet its critical potential rests precisely on a relative autonomy vis-à-vis social functions and ends. Art can connect, generate insight, alter political sensibilities or unsettle existing communities; the problem arises when such possible effects are normatively fixed as that against which its social significance is measured. National Socialist cultural policy shows in extreme form what happens when social objectives become the criterion by which art is judged.

The problem, moreover, is not confined to the contemporary vocabulary of social cohesion. In an earlier intervention, Interstice pointed to a related movement in the editorial ‘What is called thinking?’ in the Dutch-language art journal De Witte Raaf. There, art and culture were incorporated into a programme of ‘better thinking’ that was to bring a ‘better life’ within reach — remarkably, with Adorno as one of its philosophical authorities. Where the aim differs — intellectual improvement there, social connection here — the formal movement shows a clear affinity: a social potential is attributed to art and subsequently read in the direction of a desired outcome. That art can connect people or change thought gives it undeniable social significance. When such possible effects, however, structure our approach to art in advance as normative expectations, art is read from the outset according to a heteronomous criterion. Precisely where art cannot be fully reduced to such expectations, something may become visible of what Adorno calls the non-identical: that which cannot be absorbed without remainder into our concepts, functions and expectations.

Here, the non-identical intersects with Adorno’s conception of the autonomy of art. To the extent that art can be said to have a social function at all, that function lies paradoxically in its functionlessness: in the fact that it cannot be fully subordinated to the ends and forms of use of the social order of which it is nevertheless a part. Precisely for this reason it can act as the ‘social antithesis of society’. Its social force lies not in answering to a normative interpretive framework, but in its capacity to withdraw from it and render visible what, within the existing social order, resists identification without remainder.

Against this background, the striking convergence within contemporary European cultural policy takes on a different weight. The French government explicitly describes artistic and cultural practices as powerful levers of cohésion sociale; in Germany, the federally supported Initiative kulturelle Integration, under the motto Zusammenhalt in Vielfalt, explores how culture can foster coexistence within a plural society; in Spain, culture is presented by the ministry as an axis of territorial connectedness and social cohesion; a recent Italian programme explicitly describes culture as an instrument for strengthening social cohesion and civic participation. The European Union likewise links culture in its Culture Compass directly to resilience, social and territorial cohesion and democratic development. What is striking is not that these policy programmes are identical — they are not — but that different political and cultural traditions repeatedly converge on a comparable expectation: culture is called upon to help produce cohesion, mutual understanding, participation, resilience and a shared public world.

There lies a further risk. When cultural institutions, funding mechanisms and policy frameworks systematically assign value to work that can demonstrate connection, participation, empathy or social cohesion, a preference emerges for art that can inscribe itself within such objectives. This does not necessarily occur through explicit exclusion; it can operate just as effectively through programming, funding and the language in which artistic relevance is assessed. Precisely for this reason, the space available to work that offers no solution, founds no community and converts no antagonism into a shared narrative risks shrinking. From Mouffe’s conception of democracy, this is anything but a secondary loss: democracy needs places where conflict and difference can remain visible and contestable. From Adorno’s perspective, something similar holds for art: its social force lies precisely in what escapes a function desired in advance.

The objection, then, is not directed against thought, connection, empathy or democratic resilience as possible effects of art. On the contrary. The question is what happens when such possible effects are turned into expectations, tasks or criteria of cultural value. Political, economic and social relations produce antagonisms that must be dealt with institutionally; when culture is subsequently asked to soften those tensions affectively or reconcile them symbolically, a political problem shifts into the cultural domain. Culture then risks becoming less a place where social contradictions can remain visible and palpable than a means by which their consequences are made more bearable.

Connection can be valuable, but it is politically indeterminate. Democracy does not require maximum connection, but institutions and cultural forms within which differences can continue to exist. Art can connect, but its democratic significance may equally lie in its capacity to refuse connection, disrupt community or leave contradictions unreconciled.