Dominating Intelligence and Democratic Intelligence: Two Regimes of Thought

A thought can be transmitted in two ways. In the first, someone states their ideas from a position of height, and those who receive them, even when the ideas are valuable, are placed in a position of being dominated, their freedom diminished. In the second, those same people become free to enrich the ideas and to contribute to them, which gives rise to ideas far greater and far more useful to the common good. I call these two regimes dominating intelligence and democratic intelligence. The first is not devoid of intelligence, but it confines it. The second sets it free. This is the stake I want to name, for it decides who is entitled to think, and all that a group deprives itself of discovering when a few think in place of the rest.

Receiving an Idea Freely, or Receiving It in a Dominated Position

There are two ways of circulating a thought among human beings. The first brings it down from the one who knows toward those who listen. The second lets it take shape among everyone present. I call the first a dominating intelligence and the second a democratic intelligence. What separates them is not the quality of the ideas, which can be great in both cases, but what becomes of the freedom of those who receive, and thereby what the group finds itself able to think. I am not trying to discredit what has been thought within the dominating regime, which has produced works of great reach. I am trying to situate it politically, to show what it costs and what it leaves aside, because that cost is almost never spoken.

In the dominating regime, an idea prevails because the one who states it occupies a position that guarantees it. Title, academic chair, reputation, visible mastery of the subject all ground the authority of what is said. A thought is recognised by the standing of the one who holds it. France offers a particular, almost caricatural version of this. Very old people, who have published dozens of books and built an entire body of work, still cite the competitive examination they passed and the school they entered at twenty. A whole life of work weighs less than that diploma of youth. Legitimacy stays attached to an initial act of institution, as though thought drew its value from a seal stamped once and for all, and not from what it has since sought and found. Yet the most important point lies elsewhere. It lies in what happens to the person who listens. Even when the idea received is true and beautiful, they receive it from below, as something they have no right to discuss as an equal, and that position diminishes them. Their freedom to think is curtailed at the very moment a knowledge is handed to them. This is the hidden price of the regime, and it is heavy, for an intelligence received in submission does not unfold.

In the democratic regime, an idea is worth what it opens. A word is good if it allows the one who hears it to take their own, to take up the idea, to contest it, to enrich it. Those who were merely recipients become contributors. And here the decisive thing occurs: when everyone can bring something, common thought goes far beyond what the most brilliant of isolated minds would have found. The dominating regime relies on a few heads and leaves the others at rest. The democratic regime sets a whole group to work, and what it builds is of another magnitude. Democracy, then, is not only more just, it is more intelligent, and what it brings into being benefits the common good more fully.

But one must know how to go about it, and this is where everything becomes difficult. We are so little trained in this democratic intelligence, it is so rare in our ways of doing things, that most of the time we do not know how to bring it about. Nothing is less spontaneous. One can have the best will in the world, sincerely wish to open a space of collective intelligence, and obtain only a semblance of it, for lack of method. Many believe they are doing it and are not, because the thing cannot be improvised and owes nothing to magic. This is why I have been experimenting with such arrangements, patiently, for years. And each time I see their effect, I am surprised, when it ought to seem ordinary to me. That repeated surprise is itself the sign of how unaccustomed we are: we have so thoroughly absorbed the idea that thinking happens from above that the fruitfulness of sharing still astonishes us.

Trusting Someone Increases Their Capacity to Think

Here is what I have observed, over the years I have spent leading sessions of collective intelligence. When you place a person in a position of legitimacy, when you show that you trust them, they deploy capacities far beyond what they would have believed themselves able to produce. Trust does not accompany thought, it makes it possible. A person held to be incapable experiences themselves as incapable, and becomes so, not for lack of means but for lack of authorisation.

This is why democracy is not reducible to a question of justice, to a decent way of distributing the right to speak. It changes the very quality of what is thought. An arrangement that grants people legitimacy obtains a depth, a rootedness, a solidity of thought that the dominating arrangement does not reach, because the latter leaves most intelligences as an unused reserve. Democracy is therefore not worth only as a moral demand. It thinks better, provided one knows how to bring its conditions together.

I see it all the time in my work. When I have people create after first putting them at ease, they make magnificent things. I have accompanied thousands of creations, by thousands of people, and the observation never varies. In the professional training I lead, as soon as I open genuine spaces of contribution, where the participants start from their own ideas and where I give them the confidence to dig into them in earnest, they bring forth precious things. It often goes further than what I would have found alone. I do not say this to belittle myself, I have my expertise, but my work consists precisely in authorising others to deploy theirs.

I can open the window a little onto what I have learned, through my own methods. They are mine, there are surely others, and I do not claim to hold the solution. Here is simply how I go about it. I first have people speak and I note their words, in a mind map projected before their eyes. Seeing one’s words transcribed and made visible changes one’s relation to them. What I said counted, since it is written down. Once the frame is set together, and confidence is installed in what each person has to bring, I invite the participants to write, to contribute through a very simple digital tool, at the same moment, all in the same boat. Many are surprised, they thought they had until the following week. It is this very briskness that authorises them to dare, because the difficulty is shared and no one stands above the others. This frame is not one animation technique among others, it is the concrete form of a choice about what gives a thought its value.

I did not invent this intuition. Paulo Freire opposed the education he called banking, where the teacher believes they can deposit a knowledge into heads treated as empty receptacles, to an education in which teacher and pupil become, for one another, teacher and pupil. His formula holds in a single sentence: “No one educates anyone else, no one educates themselves alone, people educate one another through the medium of the world.” Knowledge does not descend there from a knower toward an ignorant, it is fashioned among people who take up the real together as their object. John Dewey, who preceded and inspired him, saw in democracy not a form of government but an inquiry conducted in common, a continuous experimentation in which the public recovers a power and competences that the complexity of the age tends to strip from it. He noted that conceptions forged by the most gifted minds run short the moment they are worked out far from the experience they claim to state. Thought that cuts itself off from those it speaks of loses in accuracy what it gains in elevation. This is what I observe on a small scale, in the groups I accompany.

Jacques Rancière pushed the analysis further still, and more radically. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, he shows that the gesture of explaining, which passes for the height of pedagogical generosity, is in reality the mainspring of intellectual domination. “There is stultification,” he writes, “wherever one intelligence is subordinated to another intelligence.” The explicator is not the bad master, he is all the more effective for being learned and acting in good faith, for in explaining he signifies to the other that they would not understand without him, and settles them into dependence. Each of us has felt it. Someone explains a thing to us, we understand nothing of it, we think ourselves stupid. Then one day we grasp that thing by ourselves, and there it is, simpler than everything we were being worn out with. What stood in the way was the explanation, which imposed a mode of thought foreign to our own. For each of us thinks in their own way, and instead of enriching one another with these different ways, the explicating master locks us into his. To this Rancière opposes the equality of intelligences, the wager that the same intelligence is at work in everyone.

The Thinking Machine of Geddes, the Décades of Desjardins, and the Milieu of Latour

Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and town planner who died in 1932, took as his motto Vivendo discimus, we learn by living. Struck blind for several weeks in Mexico, deprived of the microscope that was his tool, he began in the dark to connect his thoughts by means of folded sheets divided into cells, which he called his Thinking Machines, and which we would today call mind maps. The loss of a sense led him toward a form of thought that no longer isolates objects but sets them side by side. He made a whole method of this intuition. His Outlook Tower in Edinburgh worked less as a museum where one contemplates than as a laboratory where ordinary people learned to see their own city in order to act upon it and take part in its government. From 1887 to 1903, his Summer Meetings gathered each summer, around subjects on the border of art and science, poets, botanists, artists and linguists, but also anyone whom it interested. Geddes did not broadcast a knowledge toward the ignorant. He built the conditions in which each person became able to think and to transform their milieu.

This thought directly nourished Cerisy. The château of Cerisy-la-Salle, in Normandy, has housed since the nineteen-fifties an international cultural centre where multi-day colloquia are held each summer, residential gatherings that bring together researchers, writers and artists around a theme. These colloquia carry on the Décades de Pontigny, founded by Paul Desjardins, of whom Cerisy is the direct heir. Now Desjardins had met Geddes in the eighteen-nineties and taken part in his Edinburgh meetings. Historians have established that the Scottish Summer Meetings served as the model for the Décades. Desjardins had also founded a School of Common Culture where one learned through contact with the real, without lectures or professing professors, with young people drawn from different trades. Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at Aberdeen, in Scotland like Geddes, defends the same idea today in Anthropology and/as Education. He titles it “against transmission”: to educate is not to pour information from a full mind into an empty one, it is to learn to attend to the world and to enter into correspondence with it and with others. One does not learn by receiving, one learns by attuning oneself to what surrounds us. The democratic intention is there, undeniable, and it comes from Geddes. Yet the two men did not set the cursor in the same place. Geddes opened his summers to anyone and made the observation of the milieu a tool of social emancipation. Desjardins gathered for ten days the intellectual elite of Europe, and witnesses describe him directing the exchanges with a discreet authority, steering the debates through measured interventions. The same gesture of opening can therefore remain governed from a centre. The generosity of the frame does not prevent elevation from persisting, and the freedom a facilitator grants to others remains a conceded freedom so long as he keeps his hand on what may be said and on what counts.

Geddes brings something more, which Bruno Latour elaborated much later. His triad Place, Work, Folk, in which he had replaced the family with the folk of a place, and which structured his thinking machines, already set the human within a fabric of relations of which the milieu is part. Latour pushed this idea as far as counting among the actors of a situation the non-humans, the objects, the rivers, the devices, everything that produces an effect without having an intention. To think democratically is not only to have all the people present speak. It is to map the real forces that compose a situation, and to accept that the common be built rather than decreed from a position that would overhang the network. Democratic thought is in this sense a thought of the milieu, one that knows itself caught in what it describes rather than set above it.

This is the dividing line that interests me. Geddes, Desjardins and Latour all sought to draw thought out of the academic chairs and to set it back within the fabric of living relations. Some went further than others toward effacing their own position. The question their example leaves me holds for anyone who leads a collective, myself included. How far am I prepared to give up the place from which my word would draw its authority?

Why a Word That Does Not Dominate Threatens Those Who Dominate

It remains to understand why this democratic intelligence is received not merely as strange but as a threat by those who live within the dominating regime. The reason lies in the place that speech occupies in that regime. To take the floor there is the sign and the privilege of those who dominate. The others listen, and are not deemed entitled to speak. They are indeed granted the right to ask questions, and this is the ritual of every lecture: the talk first, then the questions to which the one who knows brings answers. But that very exchange rests entirely on asymmetry. The expert figure is at the front of the stage, one questions them, they settle the matter. Should someone in the audience dare, instead of a question, a genuine contribution, they are at once frowned upon, who do they think they are? Within this tacit grammar, not to dominate is to side with those who keep silent, and so to renounce speech.

When someone nevertheless takes the floor without dominating, and does so while truly leaving room for the others, they introduce a figure the grammar does not provide for. They speak, but without occupying the position from which one is supposed to speak. They do not put forward one more thesis in the debate, to which another thesis might reply. They make visible the rule itself, the one that wanted speech reserved for those above. And a rule, so long as it remains tacit, governs without being discussed. To make it visible is already to shake it.

I have seen the reverse of this scene. In a gathering whose context she did not know well, a university scholar accustomed to lecturing intervened as before students, in a tone that talked down to us. What she advanced was questionable, and some questioned it. But she, in her usual setting, did not have to argue, her standing sufficed to carry her points. This time the standing no longer carried anything, because the context was not the one she believed, and her discourse, stripped of the platform that ordinarily upheld it, appeared for what it was, shallow and poorly supported. Her word held only through domination. Outside it, it no longer held.

I have felt the other side of this at my own expense. It has happened to me to enter a place where only dominating words circulated, and to take the floor there differently, without seeking to impose myself, by proposing and by opening to others. The person who ran the place could not bear that I should speak in this way. Not because of what I said, which pleased many, but because of the manner. My way of taking the floor without dominating called into question the very mainspring of their power. As long as speech remains the privilege of a few, the one who holds its keys keeps their authority. Someone who speaks in order to open it to all takes that authority from them without even aiming at it.

This is why it strikes those who dominate at the most sensitive point. Their authority rests less on the quality of their ideas than on their position. If one can think with finesse without that position, without platform and without elevation, then position ceases to be the source of value. What legitimated them turns out to be incidental. Someone who would dominate in turn would not really worry them, for they would remain legible within their world, would offer a succession, one could fall in behind them as behind a new power. The one who refuses to dominate offers no succession. They do not take their place, they strip that place of its reason for being. It is a dispossession more radical than rivalry, and it is felt as a violence, even though democratic thought seeks in no way to bring them down. Its aim is to open speech, not to overthrow anyone. But to open speech to all is enough to undo an order that rested on its scarcity. The danger comes from no hostile intention, it arises from the sole effect of a displacement, and that effect is all the harder to bear for those whose identity has merged with their function.

Walter Benjamin described this mechanism in another domain, that of art, and his essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility throws light on ours. The unique work, he said, possesses an aura, a prestige bound to its singular presence, to its inscription in a place and a ritual. Now this aura is not innocent: it places the public in a posture of devotion before a sacred object, and that posture is, politically, a posture of domination inherited from cult. When the work is reproduced, by photography or cinema, it loses that aura, and this is precisely what Benjamin holds to be a liberation. Stripped of its sacred halo, the work becomes accessible, it passes into the hands of all, the masses cease to be held at a distance and become active. Benjamin is very often cited against his meaning, to mourn the loss of the aura as the end of an authentic art cheapened by reproduction. He says the exact opposite. The aura was the name of elevation, and its loss is an emancipation. This inversion of his point is a fine example of how a thought gets recuperated by the very camp it aimed at.

Bachelard the Postal Clerk, and the Suspicion I Must Turn Against Myself

I know where I hold this conviction from. It took me a very long time to feel intellectually legitimate, because I do not legitimate myself through domination, and because in the dominating regime the one who does not dominate is not recognised as thinking. I had to lead a considerable number of training sessions, not in a posture of domination but with a concern to make others capable, before daring my own word. It was by thus putting my non-dominating logic to the test, by making a real place for those present to contribute, that I saw its effect. This took nothing from my expertise, on the contrary: my expertise is precisely to know how to bring together the conditions of confidence that allow each person, as I described above, to enrich the common intelligence powerfully. That delay owed less, then, to a lack of capacity than to a refusal, the refusal to seek my legitimacy where I was being offered it, in elevation.

My difficulty is in no way exceptional, the history of thought is steeped in it. Gaston Bachelard was a postal clerk until his thirties, studying in the evening after work, before becoming one of the great French philosophers of science and of the imagination. His freest thought, the one that describes how the mind forms itself by breaking with its own self-evidences, was worked out from a path the institution did not provide for. The detour through a working life, far from having disqualified him, perhaps nourished his so concrete way of thinking knowledge as a conquest never secured. His trajectory says that a thought can be built elsewhere than in the ways laid out for it, and that the time taken to gain recognition is not a measure of its worth.

I want nonetheless to guard against too comfortable a certainty. I believe I work for the common good, for the emancipation of persons, and that is sincere. But the impression of doing good does not prove that one does not dominate. It is even most often under cover of that impression that domination maintains itself, convinced that it is generosity. Were someone one day to tell me that my way of doing things produces, unbeknownst to me, domination, I can imagine how violent it would be to hear, because it would discredit what I have built. No one stands outside the system they describe, and I escape it no more than anyone else.

This is why the criterion cannot rest on intentions, which deceive and reassure themselves. It must bear on what is done and what is produced. One does not measure an invisible effect, one looks at what has been created, the texts written, the works made, the processes lived through, the place that has been given to each person. There lies the sign, in what comes out of work carried on together and in the way it was carried on. In my professional training, when people have the space, the time and above all the legitimacy I grant them to contribute, we produce documentation of a richness that far surpasses what I would have written alone. It shows at once, it is concrete. And at a recent colloquium in Cerisy, where I intervened a great deal, I proposed on many occasions to open things to everyone’s contributions and to grant ourselves the right to discuss everything, not in order to take power over the other, but in order to let ourselves be touched and enriched by their thought. It is there, in what takes shape when each person feels authorised to bring something, that a democratic intelligence is recognised. An idea is judged by the dignity of the other, a practice by what it allows to come into being in those it touches. A thought of domination can be brilliant, yet it stays poor in all that it prevents others from bringing, whereas a thought of emancipation welcomes the intelligence of all and goes, for that reason, further. What separates them is played out in the place from which they speak and in what they let come to be. To hold to this distinction gives one the means to choose, with each arrangement one sets up, which of the two regimes one nourishes, and that is what matters to me, far more than settling a score. It is from there, and not from above, that I would wish to go on thinking and speaking.