In the article The One Who Makes Nothing, I showed how, in a workshop, the person who accompanies a group without making anything with their own hands ends up looking down on the others without meaning to, simply because of where they stand. Here I would like to take up the other side of the question, that of authority, which seems to me decisive in cultural mediation. A creative workshop only makes sense if it is a genuine space of expression for the participants, where people dare because they know they will be neither judged nor humiliated. That space is not obtained through firmness, but because the person leading the workshop takes the risk of accepting that things will turn out differently than planned, and, by putting themselves on the line before anyone else, opens a way that no one else can open.
A rigid framework betrays a fear
We often think that to hold a group well, one needs an authoritarian position. In practice, that position usually turns into authoritarianism, and it is a sign of our own fragility. When we need to act in an authoritarian way, it is because we are fragile ourselves, and because in our methods we are looking not for ways of accompanying people but for ways of reassuring ourselves. What we take for rigour, because it is fixed, because it is imposed on others and that alone makes it seem legitimate, is in fact the trace of a fear. And the paradox is that this fragility is passed on. Because the framework is fragile, the others must not stray from it by an inch, or everything collapses; the person leading then lives in dread of having it respected, the participants in fear of stepping out of it, and the project holds only through this shared tension. A framework that has to be defended at every moment shows its fragility, and that is why it turns into authoritarianism.
It is quite different with the framework that authorizes. It allows people to put a piece of their life into what they create at that moment, and to dare because they know they will not be judged. When we are afraid of being judged, we do not express ourselves, we protect ourselves. When we are not afraid, we go for it. And this absence of fear cannot be decreed by the person leading the workshop; they can only show that one can go ahead in spite of fear, by putting themselves on the line. If they are afraid to do it, because they feel fragile and fear losing their authority, they will not do it, and no one will, since the others have even more reason than they do to be afraid. If they do it, energies no one suspected can be released. It is not even a matter of setting an example, but of opening the way.
All this depends on how we see the place of the person who leads. Traditionally, we are the ones who know better than the others, and the method is there to hand that knowledge down to the group. I believe we only hold a temporary function, that of leading this group, on this day, for this particular thing, and that this function does not say who we are. Many people reassure themselves with this kind of method; they persuade themselves that they are important people who know better than the others. They know what they know, and they can pass it on within that framework. But the others know a great many things that could be passed on in the other direction, and that the person leading does not know. Once we have understood this, and everyone has their place in a setting that is not about power, very powerful things can happen there, things that are never obtained in an authoritarian setting, because expression has been authorized.
Where force is used, authority has failed
Hannah Arendt devoted an essay to this confusion between authority and coercion, “What Is Authority?”, collected in Between Past and Future (1961):
“Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.”
Hannah Arendt, “Between Past and Future”, 1961.
Arendt adds that authority is just as incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through argument; what the one who commands and the one who obeys have in common is a hierarchy whose legitimacy both recognize, and in which each has a place fixed in advance. The authoritarian framework I was describing is, in her words, one in which authority has already failed and force, however gentle, has taken its place. The temporary function of the workshop leader, accepted by the group because someone has to keep to the protocol that day, is on the contrary, in my view, quite close to what Arendt calls authority, since it does not need to be imposed or justified; and this is why the person who holds it can afford to put themselves on the line.
As early as the 1930s, psychologists observed the effects of leadership style on a group. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White had children’s clubs led by adults who adopted three styles in turn: autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire. The groups led in an autocratic way worked as long as the adult was present and stopped as soon as he left; they showed either aggression, often displaced onto a scapegoat, or apathy. The groups led democratically kept working in the adult’s absence, produced more original work, and their members talked to one another instead of addressing the leader. This 1939 study has been discussed and refined since, but its main finding has not been refuted: dependence on the leader arises from the leadership style, and it disappears when that style changes.
Wilfred Bion, in Experiences in Groups (1961), described from the side of the unconscious what Lewin observed in behaviour. A group, he says, works on two levels at once: the work group, turned towards the task, and basic assumptions that divert it from the task, the first of which is dependency, the expectation of a leader who will provide everything, protect the group and know on its behalf. If the person leading accepts this place, because it reassures them, they feed the dependency assumption and weaken the work group. If they refuse it, show that they are fallible and put themselves on the line, they frustrate this expectation and oblige the group to work for itself. Didier Anzieu, in The Group and the Unconscious (1975), described the opposite temptation, the group illusion, in which the group experiences itself as wonderful and its monitor as the guarantor of that wonder, and he showed that this illusion, however pleasant, is a defence against the anxieties the group arouses, one that diverts it from its task. In the authoritarian setting as in the fusional one, the person leading avoids putting themselves on the line.
Subjects who will no longer need us
Cornelius Castoriadis, taking up Freud’s remark about the three impossible professions, set out what distinguishes pedagogy, psychoanalysis and politics from other activities: they are practices whose end is the autonomy of the people they concern, and in which the task is therefore, starting from a relationship that is at first asymmetrical, to form subjects who will no longer need it. He writes in “Psychoanalysis and Politics”, collected in World in Fragments, that the object of pedagogy is not to teach particular subjects but to develop the subject’s capacity to learn: “learning to learn, learning to discover, learning to invent”. If the person leading installs dependence, they have reversed end and means: they use the workshop to make themselves indispensable. Paulo Freire had said the same thing from the side of popular education, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), contrasting “banking” education, in which one person deposits knowledge in another, with dialogical education:
“No one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world.”
Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, 2000.
Jean Caune, finally, thought of cultural mediation as a relationship rather than a transmission. In Culture et communication (1995), he sees culture as a mediation between the individual, the manifestations that express them and the world in which they enter into relation with others, and in Pour une éthique de la médiation (1999), he insists that mediation works through contact and connection, in a symbolic space where the mediator is a third party. In La Démocratisation culturelle, une médiation à bout de souffle (2006), he shows that the top-down model, in which those who know bring culture to those who lack it, is exhausted, and that it must give way to a mediation in which people are recognized as bearers of culture. Putting yourself on the line before the others means carrying out this reversal for the length of a session: you stop bringing, and you enter the relationship before the others do.
Breaking the ice
I would like to show how this works in practice, with examples taken from very different workshops, because the approach is the same whatever the audience.
When I suggest lending a voice to an object, I explain that one should not be afraid of overdoing the emotion, and I demonstrate it myself with the first object that comes to hand, a tambourine for example. First in a neutral voice, so that everyone can hear that it does not work. Then by announcing that I am ashamed of what I am about to do, and doing it anyway, with boundless vanity. People laugh, someone says it reassures them, and I understood long ago that this is all I have to do at that moment. Everyone grasped the technique from the first sentence. With this demonstration, what I give above all is permission: the person who is supposed to know has just done something slightly ridiculous in front of everyone, saying they were ashamed, and from then on no one can be more ridiculous than they were.
In collective single-shot films, I am a participant. I film the title, I make my object speak, I pass the camera on, and I am in the film just like everyone else. In Bounces, shot in 2022 in a former library, you can hear me asking whether I am being too serious, and I build my part from a photograph that another participant had taken the day before and considered a failure; I had the same material as everyone else and the same uncertainty. This changes the nature of the moment when we watch the film together. No one stands above the others to judge; everyone has taken the same risk, and there is no longer any room for judgment.
For several months I led a workshop with autistic children in a day hospital, and I told the story in Letting autistic children make images. One day, the tables we had planned on had not arrived yet, but we had yoga mats, and we did everything on the floor; the children took off their shoes, and I took off mine. That day, the group I had left the freest was the one that created the most sound sequences. Another time, I had put a filter on the camera so that we could play with it; the children took it off, and took it off again when I put it back. It was not my job to cling to my idea, but to welcome their refusal and let them take the setup wherever they wanted.
And there are the times when I did not dare, which teach me just as much. One morning, to introduce an animation setup, I launched a collective improvisation without a starting situation, and no one dared, myself included. There was a long silence; the characters looked at one another. I stopped, and said that I had not dared either, that this was normal, and that it taught us something for what came next. We did the improvisation again with a situation, and this time it worked. Had I watched the group not daring, I could have drawn a lesson for myself alone; since I had not dared either, the lesson held for everyone, and the group clearly felt it. I showed in You are in a position of domination. Now what ? that denying one’s dominant position does not make it go away, and in Suspending Roles that the suspension of roles is prepared before the session, with the team; it is not enough to tell the group that everyone is equal in front of the camera. It takes an act to shift people’s places, and the most effective one I know is to put yourself on the line before the others. Each of these acts costs the person leading something, and it is this price that gives them their value: the group sees that they have paid, and it can pay in turn.
The points not to miss
- Do yourself what you ask of others, before you ask it. The ridiculous voice, the photograph, your part of the film. Not to show how, but to show that it can be done.
- Say you feel awkward at the very moment you overcome it. “I’m ashamed of doing this, but I’m going to do it.” This sentence is worth all the instructions about kindness; it shows that fear does not stop you from going ahead.
- Be in the film you are going to watch. When the person leading has their share in what everyone watches together, there is no more room for judgment from above.
- Admit in front of everyone that you did not dare, or that you were wrong. The failed improvisation, the idea the group turns down, the setup that has to be changed along the way. If you say it out loud, everyone learns from it, whereas if you keep quiet about it, you turn it into a fault to be hidden.
- Distinguish within yourself what serves to accompany and what serves to reassure. Before each rule you are about to set, ask whether it serves people or whether it serves to keep you from being afraid. The rules we always defend most fiercely are the ones that keep us from being afraid.
- Hold the protocol, let go of the content. Instructions concern the framework, the camera being passed on, the time, the voice; never what people should say or think. This is the framework that authorizes: firm on form, open to whatever people put into it.
- Welcome disagreement from the start. Say during the opening round that it is fine to disagree, and say it again when someone does. If you cannot bear disagreement, the framework is fragile, and the group knows it.
- Learn something from the participants. In every session, notice at least one thing you did not know and that someone in the group brought, and say so.
- Remember that the function is temporary. You are leading this group, on this day, for this thing. It says nothing about who you are, and that is restful.
- Do not confuse caution with professionalism. Constant reserve passes for rigour; it is often a way of protecting yourself, and the group then learns to protect itself too.
I consider this article one of the most important in this section, because it touches on what many people who lead workshops take for their own solidity.
