The media need faces: for every notion that enters public debate, they install a designated specialist, invited onto every talk show. This way of operating has a little-noticed effect: the concept freezes publicly in the state in which its spokesperson popularised it, while research goes on without the public being informed. I analyse this mechanism through the case of resilience, and I draw from it a consequence that goes beyond the media: the concepts we take to be objective are dated representations, with which we make our choices and judge ourselves.
The good booking
Pierre Bourdieu described the economy that governs media speech in On Television (Liber-Raisons d’agir, 1996), a short book drawn from two lectures at the Collège de France. His starting point connects time and thought: one cannot think in a state of urgency, because it takes time to undo received ideas before building anything, and the urgency of television studios makes this work impossible. Newsrooms therefore select speakers capable of producing immediately receivable speech, whom Bourdieu calls “fast-thinkers”, “thinkers who think faster than their own shadow”. Their fluency, he writes, comes from the fact that they think in received ideas, ideas already received by everyone, whose reception demands no work from those who hear them. The journalistic world calls these regulars “good bookings”: their availability and their efficiency count for more than their scientific representativeness. Added to this is what Bourdieu calls the circular circulation of information, which I detailed in the article The Journalist and His Mirror: newsrooms read each other, invite the same guests, and the address book is copied from one media outlet to the next, until it forms what Bourdieu describes as a closed world of mutual acquaintance, where the same people meet, oppose each other in conventional ways and mutually confirm each other’s positions. The result is a de facto system of spokespersonship: one notion, one face, one telephone number. This system is convenient for everyone, the newsroom that saves time, the public that gains a landmark, the specialist who gains a platform. Its cost is invisible: it is paid in years of conceptual lag.
Speaking for, speaking in place of
Twelve years before On Television, Bourdieu had analysed the very mechanics of the spokesperson, in a 1983 lecture published under the title “Delegation and Political Fetishism” (Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 52-53, June 1984). He speaks there of parties and trade unions, but I believe his analysis also sheds light on the public destiny of concepts. A group, he shows, only accedes to public existence by giving itself a spokesperson, and this spokesperson ends up substituting himself for what he represents: speaking for becomes speaking in place of. Bourdieu calls the oracle effect the trick by which the spokesperson makes the group in whose name he speaks appear to speak, and he notes that the representative comes to appear as the source of what, in reality, brings him into existence. I transpose: the researchers of a field only enter public debate through a face, and this face ends up standing in for the entire field. With one difference that aggravates the mechanism, for a union can dismiss its delegate, whereas researchers cannot revoke their media spokesperson: nobody elected them, and newsrooms alone decide who speaks in the name of what. The public then takes the state of the concept in its spokesperson for the concept itself, and this state dates from the moment of media consecration.
The case of resilience
Resilience offers a French textbook case. The notion was popularised in the 1990s and 2000s in a precise form, centred on the individual and on a two-stage pattern, trauma then reconstruction, notably through the considerable success of Boris Cyrulnik’s books (Un merveilleux malheur, Odile Jacob, 1999). This work of popularisation was real and useful: it gave a word and a hope to millions of people. But the media system made this version the official and lasting definition of the notion, while research, in France and elsewhere, was shifting it towards prevention, social dimensions, then collective approaches; I retraced this history and its disputes in the article Robustness, antifragility, resilience, and Serge Tisseron extends this shift towards co-resilience in the opinion piece I presented in the article Building Co-Resilience. The most striking thing is that the frozen version does not even correspond to the thought of its spokesperson, since Boris Cyrulnik has always described resilience as a process knitted together with those around us, and yet it is an individual strength that the public retained. For years, the gap widened between the public state of the concept and its scholarly state, with practical consequences: as long as resilience remained publicly an individual matter of reconstruction after the blow, the management of collective risks could be left to each person’s initiatives. Nobody is guilty of this immobilisation, not even the spokesperson, whose public speech was itself frozen by his media exposure: the mechanism described by Bourdieu produces this effect without any of its actors wanting it. I described in the article The Lies of Experts the figure of the media expert who asserts false certainties; spokespersonship is a different mechanism, one that also freezes the speech of the most sincere researchers.
A general mechanism
The case of resilience is not isolated. On climate, a small number of figures long carried scientific speech alone in the French media, with the same effects of lasting simplification. On artificial intelligence, we can see the system re-establishing itself today in real time: the same three or four faces on every talk show, the same repertoire of worries and promises, which I analysed in the article Six Fears About AI, Six Shifts in Thinking, and a public debate that freezes as it settles in. Each time, the structure is identical: the media concept becomes a doxa, a self-evidence that nobody questions any more, while the scholarly concept goes on living in spaces the public does not frequent. The distance between the two is not a mere information lag, it is a political stake, because public decisions rest on the media state of concepts, not on their scholarly state.
Psychoanalysis turned into rumour
The media mechanism does not explain everything, for a concept is already transformed as it passes into the public, even without a designated spokesperson. The social psychologist Serge Moscovici established this in his doctoral thesis, La psychanalyse, son image et son public (PUF, 1961), by studying how psychoanalysis, a still marginal scholarly theory, had become in 1950s France a matter of everyday conversation. He analysed hundreds of press articles and interviewed more than two thousand people, and he described two operations: objectification, through which the abstract theory condenses into concrete images (the complex, repression, the unconscious conceived as a place in the head), and anchoring, through which people attach these images to the frames of thought they already possess, confession for some, medicine for others. Moscovici shows that this transformation proceeds through partial and selected information, through what he calls the channels of rumour, and that the libido, central in Freud, almost entirely disappears from the public version. The psychoanalysis that circulates in society is therefore a social representation, collectively fabricated from the theory and noticeably different from it. The same goes for all concepts that pass into everyday language: public resilience, public climate, public artificial intelligence are representations, reshaped by their circulation. Media spokespersonship adds one thing to this already known process: by entrusting the representation to a face, newsrooms date it, they arrest it in the state in which the spokesperson carried it.
Judging ourselves with a frozen concept
This analysis directly concerns the way each of us goes through hardship. When a crisis strikes me, I do not measure myself against resilience as research thinks it today, I measure myself against the representation of it that I carry, the one I absorbed without deciding to, through years of programmes, articles and conversations. If, in that representation, resilience is an individual strength of bouncing back after the blow, then I require myself to hold on alone, I put off preparation since everything would supposedly play out after the fact, and I may judge myself deficient if I do not “bounce back”. If I know, on the contrary, that this version dates from a state of research a quarter of a century old, and that others exist, preventive, social, collective, then other ways of doing open up: preparing with others, asking for help without seeing it as a failure, considering that my solidity also depends on that of the people around me, what Serge Tisseron calls co-resilience. Knowing that a concept is a dated representation, and not an objective truth, is therefore in itself a resource: we recover the choice of the representation with which we think about ourselves. Media education here touches on care: our ways of thinking, including of thinking about ourselves, have been shaped by this system without our having decided it, and when we see the mechanism, we take back a share of that choice.
Unfreezing
The ways out seem to me to lie in three practices:
- On the newsrooms’ side, systematically pluralise: for any established notion, look for who else is working on it, which schools oppose each other, what has changed in the past ten years, and consider that a concept without visible controversy is a poorly covered concept.
- On the researchers’ side, resist the position of sole spokesperson when it presents itself, name one’s sources, debts and disagreements on air, which requires real courage because the system rewards the opposite.
- On the public’s side, a media education reflex: faced with any designated specialist, ask who else works on this question, when the version of the concept being presented to us dates from, and what we will end up believing about ourselves if we adopt it without knowing it.
A living concept is a concept that several voices have the right to modify publicly; it is by this criterion, more than by the prestige of its spokesperson, that the health of a debate can be measured.
