The End of Reasonable Times—A Study in Civility and Collapse

Luigi Vitali in conversation with Kirsty Sedgman

This conversation took place during Prada Mode London, the thirteenth edition of the house’s travelling cultural platform. For four days, the newly restored Town Hall in King’s Cross turned into a living reflection on what it means to be an audience today: how we look, how we gather, and how we respond. Curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, the event—titled The Audience—transformed the act of watching into a social experiment, blurring the line between spectator and spectacle.

We spoke with Kirsty Sedgman, who opened the programme. A cultural theorist specialising in audience research and author of On Being Unreasonable (2023) and The Reasonable Audience (2018), she investigates how civility and so‑called good behaviour are shaped—and often weaponised—by power. For Sedgman, what society deems “reasonable” has always been a matter of politics: it defines who speaks, who is heard, and who is silenced. Her work exposes how reasonableness, long dressed as virtue, has served as a mechanism of control: determining whose voices count and whose emotions are dismissed.

Our conversation explores the invisible architecture of the social contract and why it must be constantly renegotiated. The fragile agreement that allows us to coexist begins to fracture when the rules of participation no longer feel fair or shared. From theatres to timelines, Sedgman sees audiences as the frontline of this rupture, where frustration, exclusion, and inequality increasingly erupt into anger—and at times, violence.

In a world where outrage is rewarded and empathy feels like a liability, Sedgman argues that reason isn’t dead, it’s overdue for reinvention. From theatre etiquette to the politics of attention, from social media to the wider crisis of reason itself, we discuss what happens when the crowd stops listening and the audience becomes the story.

Luigi Vitali — Let’s start from the basics: how do we define an audience?

Kirsty Sedgman — Audience is an all-encompassing term. Theatre, live performance, art exhibitions, museums, sporting events, even reading books or using social media—they are all forms of cultural engagement. It’s a participatory kind of audiencehood, but really, we’re all audiences all the time, constantly consuming art, culture, and everything in between.

L.V. — If we look back historically—from ancient Greeks and Romans to Elizabethan playgoers at the Globe, to 19th-century opera audiences—what has changed, and what has persisted in how audiences behave?

K.S. — We’ve been asking whether audiences are getting worse for two thousand years. Plato, for instance, complained about what he called “vicious theatrocracy,” where audiences who once sat quietly had become unruly and outspoken.

What interested me is how we went from those rowdy crowds—Shakespeare’s audiences, for example, sitting on stage, eating, drinking, being seen—to today’s model of an audience as quiet, seated, reverent. That shift happened in the 19th century.

In the 1860s, the famous polemicist and cultural critic Matthew Arnold argued that society was collapsing into anarchy, as the Industrial Revolution drove mass migration to urban centres of industry. Those once small and neatly ordered communities began to break apart as people flooded in. Faced with this chaos, elites like Arnold started to panic, convinced that anarchy was the inevitable future of civilisation.

But Arnold had a solution. “Don’t worry,” he said, ”the antidote to anarchy is culture”, which he defined as “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” He believed that if audiences could be retrained—those rowdy crowds who once sat on the stage to see and be seen, consuming art alongside more bodily pleasures like eating, drinking, and doing other things in the stalls (which I’m not suggesting we revive)—then society could be steered back from chaos.

That was the moment when Arnold and his contemporaries, such as Richard Wagner, collectively decided that audiences needed to be trained into a new model of spectatorship: sitting in reverent silence and immersing themselves in the total perfection of art. Only that, they believed, could train the masses out of anarchy and into civilisation. This became known as the culture and civilisation movement, and it occurred alongside technological shifts, such as the introduction of stage lighting, which meant that audiences and performers were no longer lit at the same level. Audiences could now be plunged into darkness, which really helped foster that sense of spectatorship as a homogenised, de-individualised body. But this was also a deliberate, coordinated campaign by elites to retrain the newly imagined mass audience into new models of behaviour to civilise people.

L.V. — So they defined what a “good audience” and a “bad audience” are,  and that judgment embeds bias and power structures that we continue to reiterate today.

K.S. — What we now consider “appropriate” behaviour in the arts is a relatively recent invention—one imposed from above by cultural authorities. My academic book, The Reasonable Audience, examines the power behind the concept of the reasonable audience: the individuals who believe they alone possess the correct way to appreciate art.

That book was written for scholars and students. Then, in On Being Unreasonable—published by Faber in 2023—I expanded this to society at large. Written accessibly, for regular readers, On Being Unreasonable uses audiences as a lens to study the social contract: that web of norms guiding what’s considered acceptable behaviour. Every society needs such boundaries, but who decides them, and whom do they serve? 

L.V. — Those rules were, in the end, written by men: wealthy, highly-educated, white European men. That’s the framework we’ve inherited.

K.S. — Yes. And that’s why I’ve become fascinated by the word reasonable itself. It sits at the core of our moral and legal systems—from “reasonable doubt” to “reasonable force.” Yet the original legal standard was literally “the reasonable man.” It was assumed this hypothetical figure’s judgments were universal when, in fact, they reflected the worldview of privileged men.

In fields like sexual assault law or disability rights, we now see how this supposedly neutral standard perpetuates bias: the reasonable person” is rarely a woman, a disabled person, or anyone outside the dominant group. We still need shared mechanisms for judgment, but we must constantly interrogate who that imagined reasonable person is.

When I started to think more broadly about who sets those rules, my main question was how do we draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable, right and wrong, reasonable and unreasonable? Because we do need those lines to function, as a society, we have to have mechanisms to draw them.

But who have been the people whose bodies and identities have historically been treated as unreasonably disruptive: hysterical, possessed, unruly, unstable? It tends to be working-class people, people of colour, women, disabled people, neurodivergent people, fat people, children, young people; those who, very often, have been branded unreasonable even when behaving exactly like the rich, older white person sitting next to them.

So, my interest is in how those lines get drawn, and who they’re really built to serve. Which rules genuinely make public life safer and more accessible for everyone, and which were never really built to serve us as a community at all, but rather to preserve the comfort of a particular slice of society?

L.V. — I’d like to understand this through the prism of politics, particularly within progressive politics. There’s that famous moment from the 2016 presidential campaign when Hillary Clinton called Trump’s voters basket of deplorables.” It was described as a major communication mistake. The reaction showed that those people didn’t want to be judged by elite values, and the backlash ended up hurting her. What does this episode tell us about the concept of reasonableness?

K.S. — It shows how careful we need to be when framing others as enemies who need to be defeated. That approach doesn’t create the kind of nourishing conversations we need to bring about what philosophers like John Rawls have called “public reason”, which are the kinds of discussions in which each side is committed to working towards mutual understanding. But there’s another side to it too: we also have to be wary of forcing marginalised people into a “reasonable” model of discourse, expecting them to speak calmly, never raise their voices, and engage politely with those who fundamentally oppose their basic human rights.

In On Being Unreasonable, I explain this by drawing on the sociologist Norbert Elias, who fled Nazi Germany and wrote The Civilizing Process. He warned against confusing the appearance of reasonableness—polished manners, measured voices, cultivated tastes in art and dress—with genuine moral reasonableness. Nazi Germany, after all, weaponised the very idea of civilisation. And history is full of examples: the European colonialist sitting on a veranda in India sipping tea, or the genteel Southern man presiding over a lynching. That veneer of civility often conceals moral horror.

So I argue that we need to focus on the substance of reasonableness—truth, justice, equality for all—rather than its surface performance. We can’t assume that something looks polite and therefore is good.

L.V. — Absolutely. We can also see how that same idea of “reasonableness,” sitting at the core of our moral and legal systems, can be weaponised—or at least end up paralysing them. International law, for instance, defines what counts as “reasonable” action or self-defence. Yet, that very framework has left Western democracies frozen in the face of recent atrocities like genocide, unable to intervene or to redefine what “reasonable promptly” should entail. In that sense, it often seems that real change can only come from the bottom—from people willing to pressure institutions by pushing against the boundaries of the “reasonable.”

K.S. — Exactly. In the manifesto at the end of the book, I use Donald Rumsfeld’s framework—“known knowns” and “known unknowns”—to make a similar point. No one is calling for more unreasonably unreasonable people: those who destroy for the sake of it or harm others. But particularly on the left, there’s often such fear of becoming that kind of person that it leads to what I call unreasonably reasonable behaviour, where tone-policing and a surface veneer of manners become more important than making the social and political changes we actually need.

History shows that progress often depends on what I call the reasonably unreasonable: people who, in their own time, were dismissed as disruptive nuisances but who, in retrospect, transformed society. The suffragettes are one clear example; when polite persuasion failed, they moved from words to deeds, and only then did change begin. We can see this too in how dramatically public opinion shifted from condemning the actions of Rosa Parks and her contemporaries, which we can see in overwhelmingly negative public polls at the time, to celebrating this as an example of reasonable democratic protest.

So I often ask: who will be seen in the future as the reasonably unreasonable of our time? Perhaps the peaceful mass protests we’re witnessing today—often discouraged or criminalised by governments—are yet driven by people demanding accountability and change. And also the climate justice protesters condemned for throwing soup at a painting or setting off chalk dust in public spaces—acts that cause no lasting harm but ignite moral outrage. History may remember them as the ones who refused to stay quiet when politeness demanded their silence.

L.V. — It feels like, by 2025, we’ve moved beyond the era of calm, civil debate—the kind of reasoned discussion that’s increasingly seen as controlled by those in power. What we see instead, across the spectrum, is disruption being claimed as a political strategy—by the left and by the right. In this climate, how do we redraw the boundaries of what counts as “reasonable”?

K.S. — The question of boundaries is really at the heart of what I study—how we decide what’s acceptable or unacceptable, appropriate or inappropriate. Protest movements are where that language of boundary-drawing becomes most visible. People say, “I support the cause, but not like that,” or “they’ve gone too far.” But who gets to decide where that line should be drawn in the pursuit of justice?

Sometimes we have to ask whether it’s acceptable to act “unreasonably” in the service of a morally reasonable goal. In 2020, when activists toppled the Colston statue here in Bristol or smashed a few windows, those acts were condemned as unreasonable, but maybe they were necessary. Campaigners had spent decades trying to play by the rules, setting up petitions, trying to persuade, and being ignored. Perhaps that kind of disruption was the only way left to make society pay attention. And who, ultimately, gets to define that?

L.V. — That’s the big question of our time: how disruption can still produce transformation without collapsing into violence. Which is becoming frightening, a sign of how unwell our societies are.

K.S. — It does worry me how quickly we turn to violence now, and I often see those shifts first in audiences. That’s why I pay attention to them. Take something as simple as The Bodyguard musical: a woman sang along, was asked to stop, and instead of calming down, she got aggressive. Punches were thrown. Ushers—the lowest-paid staff in the venue—had to step in. It’s a small example, but it mirrors a broader social trend.

What’s changed, I think, is what I call “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-itism.” During lockdown, people watched those in power break their own rules and still benefit. That shattered faith in the social contract, the idea that we should moderate our behaviour not just for ourselves but for the common good. If the powerful ignore the rules, why should anyone else follow them?

So we end up with people coming into public spaces saying, “I paid for this experience; I’ll do what I want.” And when someone asks them to stop—to respect the shared space—the reaction is often hostility, even violence. That quick escalation, that erosion of restraint, is what worries me most. And again, audiences are the first place where we can see it happening.

L.V. — You’ve seen these tensions surface first in theatres and concert halls—but online, that stage has expanded to include all of us. Through social media, society itself has become one vast, restless audience, driven less by reason than by emotion, performance, and irrationality. If the Enlightenment ideal of rational citizenship still defines what we call ‘good’ behaviour, can that framework survive in a space built to reward impulse and outrage?

K.S. — Social media and, more broadly, neoliberal politics rest on a belief in individualism over community, perfectly captured in Margaret Thatcher’s claim: “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families looking out for themselves and people they deem to be ‘like them’.” That whole system, reinforced by algorithms designed to amplify outrage because anger drives clicks, rewards argument over understanding. It’s not about building meaningful community; it’s about monetising division.

I call it the Disconnection Economy, because we’re being actively incentivised to disconnect—from each other, from our bodies, and even from the natural world.

And when I talk about the culture and civilisation movement, I see the same ideological structure at work. The way we judge expression—online or off—still reflects that colonial hierarchy of reason over emotion. The colonial project was built on the same moral order. Explorers like Charles Darwin and Captain Cook travelled the world observing ritual and dance, and they wrote home in horrified tones about what they saw—what Barbara Ehrenreich, in Dancing in the Streets, calls the “grotesquery” of singing and dancing bodies. Those firelit, rhythmic gatherings—what Émile Durkheim later described as collective effervescence—were dismissed as barbaric precisely because they celebrated emotion, embodiment, and togetherness.

Colonialism defined reason as the preservation of the white, educated European man. Everyone else—colonised peoples abroad, working-class crowds at home—was cast as emotional, childlike, incapable of self-control, and therefore unfit to govern. “Civilisation” became the project of training others into reasonableness.

L.V. — I get that when we label behaviour as “disruptive” or “uncivil,” we’re really making political judgments. But online, where hate speech and hostility are rampant, those same labels often seem necessary. How do we question them there?

K.S. — I look at two ideas that first appeared in the 19th century, when that mass migration to cities changed how people gathered. Gustave Le Bon wrote The Madness of Crowds, arguing that people, when collected together, experience a kind of contagious irrationality. However, later thinkers, such as James Surowiecki, described the wisdom of crowds—the idea that collectively, we can be smarter than any individual.

When I think about social media, I see both of those forces at work. It’s tempting to say social media is a great societal ill, but that’s too simplistic. These platforms are tools. By themselves, they’re value-neutral; what matters is how we use them. On one hand, as I’ve said, they’ve been weaponised to drive us apart, designed to reward argument and outrage rather than nourishing forms of communication that could strengthen the social contract. Yet they’ve also opened space for marginalised voices that were long shut out of traditional media. So it’s not either-or; what worries me is how these systems are deliberately built to make finding common ground harder, not easier.

L.V. — Populist movements on the right thrive on this model, shaping moods rather than consciousness; they speak an emotional, instinctive language that goes straight to the gut. Meanwhile, progressive politics still relies on the old language of reason, debate, and Enlightenment ideals. How can the anti-populist front reevaluate its engagement strategy to reconnect with people emotionally and regain influence?

K.S. — I think progressives could learn a lot from how effectively the populist right appeals to emotion. Those sharp, emotionally charged sound bites work not just because they’re simple, but because they resonate viscerally. The left often underestimates that power.

I’m still an optimist. I believe that, deep down, most people share a core sense of moral reasonableness: a belief in fairness, equality, and the right to a good life. Some may increasingly want that good life only for themselves and others who they see as ‘like them’, which is terrifying, but many simply hold different understandings of what fairness means and how it should work. Appealing to those shared feelings, instead of lecturing or shaming, might help build bridges again. We won’t change minds by shouting at people, but we might by touching on what they already care about.

L.V. — In this sense, language has become another battleground; especially around so-called woke discourse, where terms once meant to elevate awareness are now weaponised or emptied out. How does this war over words reshape what’s considered reasonable—or even sayable—in public life?

K.S. — That co-option of genuinely important language worries me. When words like privilege or cancel culture get twisted and stretched to mean everything, they end up meaning nothing. The same is true of “woke,” which began as a Black American term describing the moment of becoming aware of structural disadvantage—who society uplifts and whom it holds down. It was once a valuable way to describe the process of awakening to injustice. Still, it has since been applied so indiscriminately that it’s no longer useful to the communities that coined it. And that’s dangerous. If we lose a shared language, how can we communicate at all? That brings us back to John Rawls’s term ‘public reason’, often described as taking place in a space—the ‘marketplace of ideas’—where people with different views can come together to debate and build understanding. Social media was once hailed as precisely that, but Rawls’s vision only works under ideal conditions.

Even ancient civilisations understood that free speech needed limits to remain free. In Greece, parrhesia—the right to speak truth to power—came with conditions: you had to “punch up,” not down, and you had to be committed to truth. Ancient Indian philosophy had a similar model, distinguishing between good, bad, and ugly forms of speech. The good kind sought understanding and cooperation; the bad and ugly kinds used tricks or aimed only to win, often deliberately destroying the very idea of truth in the process.

That’s the problem with our public sphere today. We’ve sometimes confused freedom of speech with the right to say anything, regardless of truth or consequence. Debate has become combat—people enter not to understand, but to win—and that’s a dangerous foundation for any society.

L.V. — That’s what’s driving the polarisation we’re living through. Reaching understanding isn’t profitable anymore; it’s all about constant engagement and winning at any cost.

K.S. — Absolutely. And we can see this reflected in how we think and communicate. For instance, we often describe arguments as a form of war: “I attacked his point,” “I won the debate.” It feels natural because we believe that’s the only way debate works. But in ancient Greece, argument was often described not as battle but as dance —a shared choreography of thought, where the goal was to make the most pleasing rhetorical moves together and create something beautiful in the space between.

Imagine if we could learn to engage with each other like that again, not as combatants, but as members of a community.

L.V. — Polarisation persists because it serves those in power—while we’re busy fighting each other, they’re quietly reshaping the world above our heads. Perhaps our true generational task is to put an end to the infighting and find a way to communicate again.

K.S. — That’s the point. People often think that when I challenge a specific norm, I’m rejecting all norms. I’m not. We need to believe in the value of having a social contract and of moderating our own behaviour to fit. Still, it’s crucial that the social contract evolves. Every civilisation has had to renegotiate what’s considered acceptable as values shift. In a world where it’s getting harder and harder to have genuine intra-community conversations, it’s important we decide which norms we want to keep and which we might finally need to let go.

L.V. — So, where do you actually see that renegotiation of the social contract taking place?

K.S. — It may seem marginal, but for me it would be audiences, and that’s why I study them: they’re where the hierarchies of behaviour first take shape. Audiences are the canary in the coal mine, where social tensions, inequalities, and frustrations tend to erupt before anywhere else. In live performance spaces, a growing conflict—often even among theatre professionals—exists over what the experience should be. Some find the model of total silence and stillness overly restrictive, even deadening. Others see the joy of live performance in that moment of quiet focus, free from distraction. For others, it’s about collective effervescence: a sociable, more exuberant kind of engagement that takes us back to the crowds of Shakespeare’s time. Many people say that’s why they love sports events: you’re allowed to shout, to cheer, to participate in the atmosphere rather than just observe it.

It’s also important to remember that some people simply can’t force their bodies into that normative model of silent stillness. Activists like Jess Thom, known as the Touretteshero, have led the “Relaxed Performance” movement: spaces where people can move, make sounds, bring babies, and be present without shame. Playwright Dominique Morisseau compares it to a church in Black communities: a place of collective call-and-response and joy. That’s still respect, it’s just a different form of it.

So theatre audiences, I think, are one of the few spaces where the social contract is being visibly renegotiated in real time, and that’s why we’re seeing so many moments of friction, even outrage, between people who want very different things from the same shared space.

L.V. — And in this situation, how can we update our sense of reasonableness?

K.S. — Maybe instead of reasonableness, we could adopt three principles that also begin with R: respect, reciprocity, and renewal. Respect follows the golden rule: don’t judge until you’ve tried to understand. Reciprocity means that respect must go both ways; it can’t exist when power imbalances silence one side. And renewal is about remembering that the social contract was never meant to be static. We must continue to find ways to bridge our differences, to decide together what we want public life to be like, and how we wish to coexist with one another.