Creativity as a political weapon against the society of the spectacle

Media education cannot be limited to decoding messages. It must enable people to create, experiment, and think for themselves in the face of the spectacular flow that colonizes our consciousness.

The Media Spectacle as a Totalizing System

When Guy Debord wrote in 1967 in The Society of the Spectacle that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”, he was already announcing the colonization of our existence by media representation. What we experience today exceeds even his predictions: we no longer simply endure the spectacle, we produce it ourselves, constantly, and this can occur within a permanent injunction to visibility. Social networks have democratized image production, certainly, but within a framework that remains deeply structured by the spectacular logics that Debord described.

Niklas Luhmann, in The Reality of the Mass Media (1996), develops a complementary analysis: for him, the media do not transmit reality, they construct it. This construction obeys specific codes (novelty, conflict, quantification) that shape our perception of the world. Mass media do not necessarily lie, but they create a second reality that ends up replacing direct experience. Luhmann insists on the fact that this media reality functions self-referentially: the media talk about the media, creating a closed universe where the distinction between reality and representation becomes impossible. We can clearly see this if we watch television in a foreign country—it is very difficult to understand what is being said because we don’t know the self-references.

The blurring of reality and fiction is not an individual cognitive problem; it is a systemic condition of our contemporary relationship to the world. Peter Watkins (who has recently passed away) analyzed this in Media Crisis (2004): he showed how the monolinear form of media narrative, this uninterrupted succession of information without pause or reflection, just successions of opinions, prevents any critical thinking. The media flow does not leave time for “intellectual digestion,” even if it offers a simulacrum of it.

The Failure of the Journalistic Model in Critical Education

This question has concerned me for years: how can we entrust media education to journalists themselves? It would be like asking a pharmaceutical industry to train citizens in the critical use of medications! There is a fundamental conflict of interest here that no one seems to see or want to look at. Journalists are the primary producers of the media reality to which we are exposed. How could they objectively deconstruct the mechanisms they employ daily and on which their social legitimacy depends? But it is quite natural that they wish to be actors in media education, not to stimulate critical thinking about their practices, but rather to legitimize them.

Pierre Bourdieu already explained this in 1996 in On Television: journalists have particular “glasses” that make them see certain things and not others, and see in a certain way the things they do see. They perform a selection and construction of what they encounter. This criticism remains entirely relevant. I have experienced this personally on numerous occasions: I have systematically observed that journalists arrive with preconceptions about their subject, a thesis already sold to their editorial team. They are not so much seeking to investigate as to confirm a pre-established narrative, through interviews that they take for investigations, but which are not, since they use them not to discover, but to validate.

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in Manufacturing Consent (1988), demonstrated with implacable rigor how the economic and political structures of media condition the production of information. Their propaganda model identifies five filters that shape media content:

1. ownership concentration,
2. dependence on advertising,
3. privileged information sources,
4. pressures and threats,
5. and anti-communism (which today we could broaden to any form of dissident thought).

These filters do not arise from conscious conspiracy, but from a systemic logic that naturally orients information production toward dominant interests. It is moreover astonishing and interesting that Noam Chomsky allowed himself to be manipulated by the Covid narrative, becoming a promoter of vaccination, a mass manipulation device in the service of capitalism, orchestrated exactly in the manner he had himself explained point by point thirty years earlier. This is interesting because it shows how fragile critical thinking (that is, thinking for oneself) is, always needing to be put back on the workbench.

Aude Lancelin, in Thought Under Siege: Intellectually Arming Oneself Against Dominant Media (2018), updates this analysis by showing how French media, largely concentrated in the hands of industrialists and financiers, produce a single thought that marginalizes any dissident voice. She describes with precision the mechanisms of this capture: domination by journalistic personnel from the same schools and sharing the same codes, promotion of intellectuals who serve the interests of power, systematic disqualification of critical thoughts through clever and manipulative rhetorical procedures. This reality of the subordinate salary relationship frontally contradicts the myth of journalistic independence. How, under these conditions, could a journalist embody the critical spirit they claim to teach?

David Colon, in Propaganda: Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World (2019), extends this reflection by showing that propaganda techniques did not disappear with the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century; they have become more sophisticated. Democratic governments and private companies today use psychological manipulation tools of unprecedented effectiveness, particularly thanks to neuroscience and social media algorithms. Contemporary propaganda no longer presents itself as such; it conceals itself under the appearances of objective information or harmless entertainment. And its actors are convinced of its merit because it is “to defend democracy.” This is what makes it so dangerous and so difficult to deconstruct.

Creating to Think: Artistic Practice as Emancipation

Faced with this observation, if not this impasse, what can be done? My answer comes down to one word: create. Not creating with the sole objective of producing works, but creating to think. Artistic practice, the sensory experience of creation, personal and collective, represents in my view the most powerful tool of emancipation against the grip of dominant media on our thoughts. Why? Because creating means concretely experiencing that all representation is construction, that every image is choice, conscious or unconscious, that every message is orientation.

I have developed pedagogical methodologies over the years that proceed through creativity rather than through analysis of existing media productions. An example: the personal creation of a photo, without a title, the photos then being shared collectively to share the multiple interpretations they elicit. This approach, nourished by Roland Barthes’s thinking on the semiology of the image, allows one to concretely experience the polysemy inherent in any representation. Participants discover through experience that the same image can generate radically different meanings depending on context, experience, and each person’s culture. No single truth emerges, no objective interpretation. This awareness is infinitely more powerful than any theoretical discourse on media subjectivity.

Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), reminds us that “no one educates anyone, no one educates themselves alone, human beings educate each other through the mediation of the world”. This phrase perfectly summarizes the spirit of my workshops. It is not about transmitting constituted knowledge about media, but about creating the conditions for personal and collective elaboration of critical thinking. Creativity plays a central role because it forces one to take a position, to make choices, to assume subjectivity, to dare to risk the gaze of others.

Methodologies of Collective Intelligence Against Dominant Media

Concretely, how does this translate in the field? I would like to share some methodological principles from my twenty-five years of experimentation in this domain, whether with middle school students, librarians, Youth Justice educators, cultural professionals, young people in neighborhoods, travelers, etc.

• First principle: start with creation, not analysis. Too often, media education begins by showing examples of “fake news” or media manipulations, then asks participants to identify them. This approach reproduces a passive posture toward media: something is shown to you, you must judge whether it is true or false. I prefer the opposite: start by creating collectively, then analyze what has been produced. For example, making together a “false” (or true) piece of information on a given subject, with image, title, text. Participants then discover how easy it is to construct a credible narrative, how the same techniques as those of professional media can serve any purpose. This experience vaccinates them infinitely better against manipulation than any moralizing lesson.

• Second principle: value the multiplicity of perspectives. Niklas Luhmann insists on the fact that media construction of reality is always reductive; it selects certain aspects and obscures others. To counter this reduction, my workshops systematically cultivate the plurality of interpretations. When a group creates an image, I then ask other groups to comment on it, without knowing the creators’ initial intention. The gaps between intention and reception become material for collective reflection. This confrontation of subjectivities brings forth an acute awareness of the constructed, negotiated character of all meaning.

• Third principle: create without hierarchy of competence. In my workshops, there is no “good” or “bad” image, no predefined aesthetic criterion. This may seem simplistic, but it is fundamental. Dominant media function on a logic of distinction between legitimate professionals and incompetent amateurs. By removing this hierarchy in the creative process, I allow everyone to experience themselves as legitimate producers of images and meaning. This horizontality is not just a benevolent pedagogical posture; it is a political act of redistribution of symbolic powers, as well as an opening to empowerment.

• Fourth principle: use the tools of the present. I do not believe in nostalgic discourses that would oppose good old cinema to bad new media. Smartphones, social networks, artificial intelligence are our contemporary tools for image production. We must use them, divert them, play with their codes rather than morally reject them. When I work on generative AI for images with middle school students, I don’t give them a lecture on the dangers of technology. I have them experiment with the limits and biases of these tools: why do certain images systematically emerge? What stereotypes are reproduced? How can we subvert them? It is by manipulating these technologies that we understand how they manipulate us.

• Fifth principle: assume the political dimension. Aude Lancelin shows how dominant media systematically depoliticize issues, transforming them into technical or individual moral questions. My workshops do exactly the opposite: they repoliticize the question of images by connecting it to power relations, economic interests, social structures. When we create a film together in a working-class neighborhood, we cannot avoid talking about who has the right to represent whom, what image of the suburbs circulates in mainstream media, how residents are rarely authors of their own representation. This collective consciousness-raising transforms artistic creation into a tool of political emancipation.

Collective Intelligence Against Media Monologue

What fundamentally interests me is substituting for the dominant model of the “knower” who transmits knowledge to “ignorant ones,” that of collective intelligence that develops horizontally. David Colon shows how contemporary propaganda isolates individuals to better manipulate them. The antidote is precisely the reconstitution of thinking collectives, capable of collectively elaborating, through the encouragement of subjective and situated perspectives, a critical reading of the world—that is, a diversified one.

In my training sessions with librarians, for example, I do not bring them a corpus of pre-established knowledge on “how to do media education”; I create the conditions for them to experiment themselves with creative approaches, then exchange about what they experienced, the emotions traversed, the difficulties encountered, the learnings, the possible adjustments. It is from this collective elaboration, anchored in each person’s sensory experience, that genuine critical competence is born. A competence that is not abstract knowledge imposed from outside, but an embodied, living, open, evolving capacity.

Guy Debord wrote that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image”. Faced with this spectacular power of capital, resistance can only come from collective practices that recreate the common, shared experience that is not mediated, or rather, mediated differently, through common creation. My workshops constitute temporary islands of non-spectacular experience, where participants are no longer summoned to consume images but invited to produce them collectively, in a framework that values process over result.

Toward Cultural Sovereignty Through Practice

The final issue, it seems to me, is that of cultural sovereignty. Peter Watkins insists on the way mass media, controlled by a few transnational conglomerates, impose a uniform worldview that crushes local cultures, minority knowledge, singular experiences. The media education through creativity that I advocate aims precisely to reconquer a capacity for cultural self-determination.

When residents of a neighborhood create a film together about their territory, they take back power over the narration of their own existence. They are no longer objects of the external media gaze, but subjects of their own representation. This apparently modest gesture, making a short film with rudimentary means, actually constitutes an act of political resistance against the spectacular colonization of our imaginations.

Niklas Luhmann reminds us that mass media create a “second-order reality” that substitutes for direct experience. Collective creation allows us to short-circuit this process: it reconstructs a non-mediated relationship to the world, or rather a relationship where mediation is assumed, conscious, chosen, and not passively endured. It is this reconquest of agency, the capacity to act on one’s conditions of existence rather than endure them, that constitutes the true emancipatory horizon of media education.

I think of Paulo Freire and his distinction between “banking” education (which deposits knowledge into empty heads) and “problem-posing” education (which starts from lived situations to collectively construct knowledge). Dominant media education too often falls under the banking model: you are explained how media work, you are taught to spot fake news, you are transmitted constituted knowledge. The approach I advocate falls under the problem-posing model: we experiment together with image production, we confront our subjectivities, we collectively question what we have just experienced. The knowledge that emerges from this process is no less rigorous, but it is living, appropriable, transformable, therefore transformative.

For a Creative Insurrection Against the Spectacle

Faced with the society of the spectacle and the grip of dominant media, we need a true creative insurrection. Not a violent revolution, but a profound transformation of our relationship to images, a reconquest of our capacity to produce meaning rather than passively consume it. Media education, as it is predominantly practiced today, often participates in perpetuating the system it claims to criticize. By entrusting this mission to journalists, by centering the approach on the analysis of existing media productions, by aiming to identify the “true” and the “false,” it reproduces the spectacular logic: legitimate producers on one side, consumers who must learn to consume well on the other.

I propose an entirely different path: that of collective and playful creativity as a tool of political emancipation. A path that goes through sensory experience, through joyful confrontation of subjectivities, through embodied learning of the mechanisms of meaning construction. A path that recognizes that we are all legitimate in producing images, telling stories, constructing representations of the world. A path that refuses the delegation of our critical capacity to self-proclaimed experts and bets on collective intelligence.

This approach requires rethinking pedagogical arrangements, training educators in participatory methods, creating spaces of trust where creation can emerge without judgment. It also requires us, intellectuals and educators, to abandon our posture as knowers to become facilitators of collective experiences. It is difficult, it is long, it is uncertain. But it is the only path that seems truly emancipatory to me.

We can create together, experiment with other ways of producing and sharing images, patiently build the conditions for a truly democratic culture, not a culture that professional producers generously transmit to us, but a culture that we collectively elaborate, in the fertile confrontation of our experiences and our imaginations. This is the wager I have been making for more than twenty-five years, in each workshop, in each training session. A wager on the capacity of human beings to think for themselves, together, through the mediation of the sensory world and its creative shaping.