Place as an Operative Concept for an Emancipatory Cultural Mediation

“What place for young people?” The question is wrongly framed. Place is not a position to occupy, it is the capacity to move within a relational and symbolic space. I propose here a conceptual reversal that changes, very concretely, our cultural mediation practices.

What place are we talking about?

The question of “the place of young people” runs through every discourse on education, cultural mediation, and cultural policy. This very formulation deserves to be interrogated, for it covers two very different conceptions. Is place a position to occupy within a pre-established social order, or is it a dynamic capacity to situate oneself and to move within a relational and symbolic space? The distinction is not semantic, it engages radically different conceptions of the subject, of learning, and of emancipation.

I propose here a conceptualization of place as a capacity for displacement, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, sociology, and the pedagogies of emancipation. Beyond theoretical reflection, I aim to make this concept useful to the everyday work of mediation, of accompanying young people, and of building institutions.

1. The Traps of Assignment

Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a first illumination through the notion of object relations. In this configuration, the other is not recognized as a desiring subject but as the object of the projections of whoever is looking at them. Jacques Lacan radically distinguishes the dyadic relation, which encloses one in the imaginary and in narcissistic capture, from the symbolic relation, which passes through the mediation of language and of the Law. In the dyadic relation, the other becomes the receptacle of my fantasies, my expectations, my fears, I do not see who they are but what I project onto them.

This dynamic takes on particular intensity in relations between adults and young people. When a mediator, a teacher, or an educator approaches a young person “knowing” what is good for them, presuming their tastes, needs, and shortcomings, they inscribe that young person in an object relation. The young person then finds themselves assigned to a place defined by adult projections (“young people like this,” “you should do that,” “it’s for your own good”). However well-intentioned such formulations may be, they constitute what Alice Miller called “poisonous pedagogy” in For Your Own Good (1980), an educational violence disguised as solicitude, which denies the very subjectivity of the child or adolescent.

Contemporary sociology likewise dismantles the idea of a homogeneity in youth practices and tastes. Camille Peugny, in Pour une politique de la jeunesse (2022), shows the extreme diversity of cultural practices, correlated with social belonging and individual trajectories. Salomé Saqué, in Sois jeune et tais-toi (2021), documents the recurring stigmatization that, since antiquity, constructs “youth” as the figure of a disquieting otherness. Posing the question “what place for young people?” as if a homogeneous collective subject existed amounts to a double violence, that of abusive generalization and that of identity assignment. “Young people” do not exist as a culturally coherent category, there are singular individuals traversed by multiple and shifting affiliations.

2. Place as Verb, Not Noun

Place, as commonly understood, designates a fixed position: “having one’s place,” “finding one’s place,” “occupying a place.” This conception rests on a static ontology, as if place were a thing, a location to be conquered or received. I invert this logic. Place is not a noun but a verb, not a state but a process. To take one’s place is not to occupy a defined position, it is to develop the capacity to move within a relational and symbolic space.

This reversal begins with a simple observation: we are systematically assigned to places by others. Parents, institutions, professionals assign us positions according to their categories, expectations, and projections. These assignments function as apparatuses of capture, in the sense Giorgio Agamben gives the term in What Is an Apparatus? (2007), they orient, determine, and limit our possible movements. In this configuration, we are not subjects but objects, objects of gazes, of discourses, of the expectations of others.

True place, the one that corresponds to emancipation, therefore does not consist in accepting or negotiating the assignment, but in developing the capacity to disengage from it in order to circulate. This capacity is not an erratic nomadism nor a refusal of all belonging, it is the possibility of situating oneself, of choosing one’s affiliations, of constructing one’s own relation to the social and cultural space. In this sense, having a place is not being fixed somewhere, it is being able to move.

The dyadic relation is the first obstacle to this mobility. It transforms the other into the object of projections, in a play of mirrors where everyone seeks to recognize themselves in the gaze of the other and thereby loses their singularity. In an educational or cultural context, this yields familiar situations: the artist-in-residence who “knows” what young people should create, the mediator who presupposes the tastes of their audience, the teacher who anticipates the difficulties of their students. Faced with these projections, the young person finds themselves in an impossible alternative, either they conform to what is expected (thereby losing their subjectivity), or they oppose frontally (entering a logic of conflict that remains a prisoner of duality). In both cases, no displacement is possible.

Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, formulates this with clarity: I never really know what the other meant to do or what their intention was. To say “you hurt me” amounts to claiming to know the intentionality of the other, which is impossible. This impossibility is not a regrettable obstacle, it is the very condition of respect for otherness. To recognize that I do not know what the other thinks or wants is to recognize them as an opaque subject, irreducible to my categories, it is to leave them the space of their own place.

3. The Symbolic Third, Operator of Displacement

The dyadic relation encloses, and to escape it one must introduce a third. This third, which psychoanalysis calls symbolic, is not a third person but a mediator, a common object, a shared project, a collective creation, a language. It interposes itself between the two protagonists and deflects the projections, instead of projecting onto each other, the subjects project onto this third object, which creates a play space where everyone can remain a subject.

Donald Woods Winnicott had formalized this configuration with his concept of transitional space in Playing and Reality (1971), that intermediate space between inside and outside, between the self and the non-self, where the child can explore without danger because it is neither them nor the other but a neutral ground. In cultural mediation practices, the symbolic third takes multiple forms: a film to make together, an artwork to discover, a show to create, a technique to explore. What matters is that this object not be the pretext for a vertical transmission but the support for a shared exploration. I develop this mechanism in other articles of this section, notably “Inventer avec les gens” and “La création, source d’énergie de la médiation culturelle.” What interests me here is the link between this third and the notion of place.

Agamben, again in What Is an Apparatus? (2007), proposes a valuable concept, profanation. To profane is not to destroy an apparatus, it is to deactivate it, to render it inoperative, so that people may freely reappropriate what had been confiscated from them. The symbolic third performs this profanation, it deactivates institutional assignments and opens a space where free use becomes possible.

Consider a filmmaking workshop in a community center. In the logic of the classical apparatus, roles are fixed, the artist-in-residence is the one who knows (technique, language, cultural legitimacy), the young people are those who learn. This configuration assigns places and immobilizes. But if the common object truly becomes a film to create together, and not “a film I am teaching you to make,” then the places become mobile. The artist may not know, may be surprised, may learn from the young people. The young people become fully creative, their intuitions, their references, their ways of doing things become legitimate resources. The film, as a third, creates a profaned space where everyone can move.

From this analysis emerges a formulation I take to be central: when you are invested in without there being expectations, you have the space to take your place. This may seem paradoxical, since investing in someone seems necessarily to imply expecting something. The distinction is nevertheless crucial, between investing and projecting. To invest is to give the means, create the conditions, offer resources. To have expectations is to pre-determine what the other must do with that investment. I can give a tool without fearing that it be “badly” used, propose a framework without imposing the content, recognize the legitimacy of a cultural practice without judging it by my own criteria. This is exactly the shift from cultural democratization to cultural democracy, an unconditional investment, which trusts people to build their own paths.

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), had already formulated this de-centering, art is not the work (the institutionally legitimized object) but the experience lived by the subject. This perspective shifts the center of gravity from the object to the subject, from reception to appropriation. There is no “good” way to experience art, there are singular experiences, all legitimate in their singularity, and it is this respect that makes displacement possible.

4. What the Pedagogies of Emancipation Teach Me

The pedagogies of emancipation (Célestin Freinet, Paulo Freire, bell hooks) share a common principle that resonates with this conceptualization of place. They refuse the vertical teacher-pupil relation in order to create spaces in which the learner is recognized as a subject, and all of them rely on symbolic thirds.

Freinet, with his “natural method,” posits that the child learns through experimental groping in a rich environment. The printing press becomes the third that organizes learning, children write in order to be read, compose in order to be printed, correct in order to be understood. It is not the teacher who says “you must write correctly,” it is the necessity of real communication that imposes it. The child can thus move within the learning of writing without being assigned to the place of “the one who does not yet know.”

Freire, in Pedagogy of Freedom (1996), insists that the educator does not transmit constituted knowledge but accompanies a process of conscientization. “Limit-situations” become the third of pedagogical work, learners do not receive a truth from on high, they construct their understanding of the world by analyzing their own reality. I am no longer the ignorant one facing the one who knows, I am a thinking subject developing my own reading of the world.

bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress (1994), articulates this pedagogy with questions of race, gender, and class. For her, the classroom must become a place of creative transgression where assigned identities can be questioned and transformed. Academic knowledge, mobilized as a tool of liberation rather than of domination, becomes the third that allows students to move in relation to the social assignments of which they are victims.

5. Documenting the Journey, Not Just the Result

A practical stake arises for every mediator: reconciling the institutional demand for visible results (a public showing, a performance, an exhibition) with respect for singular processes of appropriation. This tension often produces perverse effects. Under pressure for “the project to succeed,” the practitioner ends up taking back control, doing things in the young people’s place, formatting their creations so that they match institutional expectations. The place promised to the young people is then confiscated, in the very name of the project’s quality.

One path lies in documenting the process. Rather than presenting only the final result, it is a matter of documenting and valuing the journey, the steps, the hesitations, the choices, the discussions, the learnings. A photographic logbook, video recordings of working sessions, interviews with participants, exhibition of drafts alongside the finished works. This practice transforms the evaluation of the project, one no longer judges only the aesthetic quality of the produced object, but the richness of the process, the quality of the relationships developed, the transformations experienced.

One then becomes, to borrow Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion, antifragile, which means that one does not merely resist shocks but is strengthened by them. A project that documents its process becomes antifragile because it can no longer be delegitimized by the mere critique of its result. What is valued is an aesthetics of relation, as much as an aesthetics of the object.

This documentation must not be the monopoly of the adult. Entrusting cameras to young people, proposing they keep a journal, inviting them to interview their peers and to comment on the ongoing process, these practices produce several displacements at once. Young people are no longer only “doing” but also “observing what they are doing.” They become the legitimate narrators of the experience. And these practices develop transversal skills (a photographic eye, writing, synthesis, digital tools) without these learnings being explicit objectives. The symbolic third becomes the vehicle of multiple learnings, through use in real situations.

6. Belonging and Differentiation, the Dialectic

To have a place is neither to fuse (losing one’s singularity in collective belonging) nor to be excluded (asserting one’s singularity at the cost of the bond). It is to maintain a productive tension between two poles, belonging (being recognized, having one’s place in a collective) and differentiation (being other, being able to move, asserting one’s singularity).

This dialectic lies at the heart of the process of individuation. In psychoanalysis, it is the separation-individuation described by Margaret Mahler. In sociology, it is the tension between social integration and individual autonomy analyzed by Émile Durkheim and then by Norbert Elias. In anthropology, it is the dynamic between cultural belonging and singular identity construction.

In every case, two risks. The first is fusion, the individual loses themselves in the group, adopts its norms without distance, can no longer think for themselves. Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), describes this mechanism, faced with the anxiety of freedom, the person may seek refuge in submission or in conformity. They then have an assigned, stable place, but they have lost their capacity to move. The second risk is exclusion, the individual asserts their singularity so radically that they break every bond, they wander without anchor, in a pseudo-freedom that is in fact disconnection and isolation.

The symbolic third plays an essential role here, it maintains the productive tension by preventing both fusion and exclusion, by creating a common space that does not demand uniformity. In a collective creation workshop, the shared project creates a common frame, we are together around this object, I am recognized as a legitimate participant. At the same time, this third solicits the diversity of contributions, everyone can bring their singularity (their ideas, their style, their references) without breaking the bond. The frame is common, the contributions are diverse. This is what I would call a community of differences, a collective where belonging does not demand identity but allows otherness.

One final dimension, place as capacity for displacement is never definitively acquired. It is not a stable state one would reach once and for all, but a permanent process, a conquest always to be renewed. Bernard Stiegler, in his work on individuation, calls transindividuation this process that never stops, in which the individual and the collective continually co-constitute each other. This has a direct practical implication, a project, a workshop, a cultural action does not have as its objective to “give a place” to young people, as if this place, once given, were acquired. They create the conditions for a displacement, they open possibilities, their aim has no predetermined end.

7. What This Changes for Institutions

This conceptualization also engages a transformation of evaluation modalities. Current systems focus on measurable results, number of participants, quality of productions, satisfaction rates. These indicators have their utility but miss the essential when it comes to emancipation, because a capacity for displacement is not measured with such tools. Indicators must shift from product to process, from quantitative to qualitative, with qualitative interviews before and after, photographic and video documentation, collective self-evaluations, reflective logbooks. These tools, often deemed time-consuming or subjective, are in fact the only ones capable of grasping what is really at stake.

This also demands a specific professional posture, rarely taught in initial training, the capacity to not know (suspending one’s certainties about what the other must learn or become), the ability to create frames without imposing contents, the competence to value processes as much as results, the acceptance of being oneself transformed by the encounter. These skills are not transmitted through lectures but through accompanied experimentation. Training programs should multiply situations in which future practitioners themselves experience what it means to be accompanied without being directed, to create without being judged, to move without losing the bond.

Finally, institutional architecture itself gains from being rethought in this light. Cultural institutions traditionally function as apparatuses of assignment, they distribute places (artists and audiences, knowers and learners, producers and consumers) and organize vertical relations. A few paths for transforming them: multiply bodies of co-construction where young people are not consulted after the fact but associated from the design stage onward; recognize and program adolescent and popular cultures as legitimate cultural practices; develop an institutional memory at the service of cultural rights, by documenting people’s cultural trajectories over time rather than drowning them in a succession of one-off and anonymous interactions.

Place as Praxis

The question “what place for young people?” is wrongly framed. The right question would rather be: how to create the conditions for young people, and for adults, and for all subjects, to move and to construct their own places, plural and mobile. Not to assign but to accompany, not to impose but to recognize, not to transmit but to create the conditions for appropriation. It is in this space of accompanied freedom that a real cultural emancipation can emerge.

For mediators, for teachers, for those who accompany, this framework offers both a tool of analysis and a guide for action. To analyze is to identify the moments when relations become dyadic, to spot the assignments of places, to diagnose the absence of a symbolic third. To act is to build apparatuses that create play space, to train teams in these postures, to transform evaluation in order to value processes.

Place is not a location to occupy, it is a movement to make possible. My entire practice rests on this reversal.

Selective bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio (2009). What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Dewey, John (1934/2005). Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.
• Freinet, Célestin (1964). Les invariants pédagogiques. Cannes: Bibliothèque de l’École Moderne.
• Freire, Paulo (1996/2000). Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Fromm, Erich (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
• hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
• Lacan, Jacques (1955). “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or on the Nature of Language,” in The Seminar, Book II.
• Meyer-Bisch, Patrice (ed.) (2007). Les droits culturels, une catégorie sous-développée de droits de l’homme. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires.
• Miller, Alice (1980/2002). For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Peugny, Camille (2022). Pour une politique de la jeunesse. Paris: Seuil.
• Rosenberg, Marshall (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas: PuddleDancer Press.
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• Stiegler, Bernard (2004/2014). Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Cambridge: Polity.
• Winnicott, Donald Woods (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.