The Implementation of Methods

Methods often fail because they remain discursive. Advocating for cooperation while dominating, speaking of ecology while imposing: the incoherence between words and how they are carried cancels out their effect. Pathways forward.

The Constitutive Incoherence of Transmission Mechanisms

In the field of professional training as well as in cooperative encounters between actors in the same sector, we work on methods—on ways of doing, organizing, and cooperating. Similarly, numerous books and conferences propose methods. Yet the recurring problem with these approaches lies in their very nature: they most often rely on verbal explication, but these words are not always coherent with the manner in which they are carried, which ultimately produces ineffectiveness.

Consider the case of a speaker who would advocate for cooperation and collective intelligence, but who would do so in a completely top-down, imperative, even condescending manner toward their audience. The people in a listening position would find themselves infantilized by the very mediation mechanism, which presupposes that someone is supposed to have more knowledge or power than others. And this contradicts the very content of what is being said, canceling its impact. Public speech is not problematic in itself, but it can provoke unspoken effects that contradict the explicit message.

This is why, before each of my public speeches, I specify that this is a role I occupy in the present moment—that of carrying public speech—but that any person present in the audience could entirely occupy this same place and enrich others with their knowledge and skills. This rhetorical precaution aims to avoid the abuse of power and the belief that one would be “knowledgeable,” which reduces the emancipatory capacities of listeners, even though the discourse claims to increase them. Power intoxicates, blinds, cuts us off from our humanity. If we truly want to advance the implementation of methods, work that must always be resumed is necessary: that of letting go of power, as emphasized in reflections on horizontal governance developed in many experiences of cultural cooperation.

Methods as Lived Experiences: Beyond Willpower

Methods are above all lived experiences. A method is truly integrated when, in our actions, we can put it into practice, when this method has transformed us. Yet transformation does not happen through willpower alone. Believing that words are sufficient is an error. Words are indispensable for thinking, certainly, but they only anchor themselves in reality and transform it if they are accompanied by lived experiences.

Let’s take an example from the health field: how many people tirelessly diet yet remain overweight their entire lives? The words are there, the methods are there, the workshops, the medical advice too, which are undoubtedly relevant, but yet these people do not change position or lifestyle. This example precisely illustrates, in the health domain, what I evoke in the domain of professional practices.

Let’s deepen this analogy. These people wish to be in better physical health, and moral health in the image they have of themselves. They consider that they are not in a satisfactory situation—overweight, poor self-image—and they also confront real health problems. Indeed, being overweight linked to poor diet severely burdens health. I specify that this is absolutely not to stigmatize overweight people, because some people are not overweight and yet have equally deplorable diets, putting themselves just as much at risk. Diet interacts differently with each person’s metabolism.

Precisely, escaping and emancipating oneself from a culture that places us in these deleterious and destructive habits, supported with complete hypocrisy by industries, represents a major challenge. The food industry generates considerable profits thanks to ultra-processed foods whose manufacturing cost is extremely low, but which prove deplorable in nutritional terms. People chronically ill because of these “dead” foods then feed the pharmaceutical industry—an industry of illness rather than an industry of health, that is, an industry in which sick people are treated rather than accompanying people toward good health (because that’s much less profitable, obviously).

Fasting as an Example of Lived Transformation

How to proceed, then? In the case of being overweight and dieting, methods and words are manifestly insufficient. They are even ineffective, except to feed the support industry, pharmaceuticals, and medicine to treat the numerous induced illnesses. Perhaps even if diets weren’t there, the injunction would decrease, nervous tension too, self-judgment as well, and people would paradoxically perhaps have better lifestyle habits, in a relaxed state! They would undoubtedly maintain some excess weight, because our Western culture and economy push us toward it, but would perhaps be less sick, would have less tendency to make themselves sick, and would ultimately have better balance. Words and methods, even with good intentions, can often produce the opposite of what they state. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Thus, rather than proposing methods through words, why not propose methods through lived experiences? Therapeutic fasting constitutes a paradigmatic example. In fasting, people live a transformative experience where eating habits are suspended. It’s not a diet but a complete cessation of eating for a determined period, preferably under professional supervision. This experience provokes a real transformation of one’s relationship to food, not through willpower or discourse, but through the bodily and psychic lived experience of another relationship to food, to hunger, to pleasure. On one hand there is cellular autophagy that “detoxifies” the organism, which is the direct contribution of fasting to health, and there is also the renewal of intestinal microbiota, which means that after fasting the body no longer has the same dietary needs, and this naturally, without needing to force anything.

People who have experienced therapeutic fasting often testify to a profound transformation: they discover what hunger truly is, different from the desire to eat; they become aware of emotional compensation mechanisms; they experience another relationship to the body. This transformation does not happen through words or prescriptive methods, but through a lived experience that profoundly modifies representations, but also metabolism itself and therefore future practices, almost naturally, no longer needing words. Fasting doesn’t guarantee that people will completely change their eating habits, but it opens a space of possible transformation, anchored in the reality of the body and experience, with the body deciding, below the level of willpower.

Examples That Embody Transformation Through Lived Experience

Let’s take some concrete examples in the cultural field, to illustrate this necessity of going through lived experience rather than discourse alone. The association Derrière le hublot, created in 1996 in Capdenac-Gare by a group of young people, constitutes an exemplary case. To the founding members, steeped in the values of popular education, many other residents came to join. As volunteers, they host artists, participate in artistic projects, get involved far beyond what they had sometimes imagined and thought themselves capable of doing. They thus acquire their power to act socially. As Fred Sancère, director of the association, says: “Proximity and involvement are at the heart of the artistic and cultural approach that we could qualify as contextual and participatory. This approach is political and not merely artistic. It is resistance because it gives the possibility to act and accompanies the power to act in a system that promotes consumerism.”

Another telling example: the Manège de Châteauneuf-sur-Loire project. Laurent Cadilhac, plastic artist-sculptor, and residents created together a carousel now installed in a city park. From drawings of mobile animals with schoolchildren to cutting and welding workshops open to all, two and a half years, 2.5 tons of steel, and 357 grinding discs made it possible to realize this bestial and collective adventure. The testimony of a participant perfectly summarizes this process: “There were no rules, we were asked to invent things that don’t exist, we worked for pleasure. Laurent, he needed us to bring him ideas, and we needed him to help us make them.” Here is a transformation that doesn’t happen through words but through doing together, through a lived crossing.

The 2^nd Cultural Biennale in Maurienne offers another perspective. Géraldine Bénichou, who coordinated this project, recounts: “We assumed the responsibility that the artistic project serve the political objectives of the Syndicat du Pays de Maurienne, and be totally appropriated by residents and elected officials. If it is legitimate that neither artists nor residents feel instrumentalized in this type of project whose primary political stake is the cultural development of a territory, it is equally legitimate that artists not themselves instrumentalize the project and its participants in service of their creation. Our imagination and our commitment as artists constitute our strength to overcome antagonisms of objectives and postures.” This is precisely the delicate balance I’m talking about, this rightness to be found that can only be learned through lived experience, not through top-down methods.

Tools in Service of Collective Lived Experience

Beyond these “large” projects, there also exist concrete methodological tools that, when well used, allow people to live collective intelligence rather than simply talk about it. Photolangage, for example, allows sharing representations by relying on emotion and intuition rather than rationality alone. Metaplan collects individual viewpoints to elaborate a common vision, without pre-established hierarchy of voices. Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats method invites collectively reviewing different viewpoints: that of organization, analytical fact, emotion or intuition, negative critique, optimistic critique, and creativity. These tools, among others, derived from popular education, foster collective intelligence and can help bring together knowledge and expectations, provided they are truly lived and not simply applied mechanically.

These examples show that when we take the time for experimentation, co-construction, genuine involvement, we transform not only projects but also people. Residents “enrich themselves, flourish, acquire their power to act socially”, as the association Derrière le hublot formulates it. They don’t consume culture, they make it, live it, transform it and are transformed by contact with it.

This question of self-questioning, of risk-taking within the groups we’re part of, of experimenting with new methods, of daring to live different interaction mechanisms, proves essential. Power intoxicates, power blinds, power cuts us off from our humanity. If we truly want to advance the implementation of methods, work that must always be resumed is necessary: that of letting go of power.