All publications

Here you’ll find all the publications on this website, sorted by date, starting with the most recent.

Domination at the Heart of Culture

How laudatory terms mask power relations in the cultural sector.
The praise we bestow upon “great artists” reveals, beneath its flattering appearances, a structure of domination. Behind admiration lies the legitimization of a power (…)

4 January 2026

The Present of the Future

From the critique of technological mythologies to the responsibility of action.
Criticizing the mythological discourses of AI giants from a position of superiority is not enough. The challenge is to act in the present to build the future we want. (…)

3 January 2026

Critical Thinking Against Archetypes

How the greatest minds can fall into obscurantism, and why understanding this matters for forgiveness.
Rigorous scientists can defend irrational and inhumane positions, devoid of any ethics, on certain subjects. This paradox reveals the deep mechanisms of conformism (…)

2 January 2026

For a Permanent Cultural Transformation

Moving beyond political infantilization to rebuild our institutions.
Faced with budget cuts in arts education, cultural actors appeal to those in power. This posture of supplication reveals, in my view, a dead end. It is time to think (…)

1 January 2026

Feminism and Free Love

From 19^th-century anarchist feminists to contemporary decolonial perspectives.
Feminism has maintained a relationship with free love as ancient as it is fruitful, traversed by tensions that remain unresolved and that I believe are important to (…)

31 December 2025

The Dead End of Digital Conscientious Objection

On the necessity of inhabiting our technological environments rather than fleeing them.
Faced with the deployment of generative AI, some researchers proclaim conscientious objection. I defend instead the requirement of critical presence and empowerment (…)

30 December 2025

Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Actors: The Laws of Creative Transformation

When the precise definition of artistic desire meets algorithmic power.
Cultural institutions that passively wait without embracing artificial intelligence could see their neighbors transform in just a few months. The difference would (…)

29 December 2025

Is Culture Serving the Public?

Reflections on the dead ends of French cultural policy.
Do the 4 billion euros of the national culture budget truly serve the general interest? This question deserves to be asked pointedly, as budget cuts continue to (…)

28 December 2025

Engagement in Time

What matters in cultural mediation is not the duration of actions, but the quality of shared time.
The duration of cultural actions is often considered a guarantee of quality. I defend here a different approach: what transforms people lies in the intensity of (…)

27 December 2025

“Create Your AI Girlfriend”

Virtual romantic relationships, between projection and relational singularity.
Advertisements for “virtual girlfriends” reveal a major anthropological shift. These propositions of relationships through projection question the very nature of (…)

26 December 2025

Definition of Cultural Mediation

An ethics of relationship in service of singular experience.
Cultural mediation is often reduced to a set of transmission techniques. Here I propose a definition that places the person at the center: an ethics of relationship (…)

25 December 2025

The True False Cultural Freedom

When defending creative freedom masks a corporatist conflict.
Faced with recent film deprogrammings by elected officials from various political sides, a collective statement expresses outrage at political interference in (…)

24 December 2025

The Hypocrisy of Cultural Actors’ Independence

When the fear of political alternation reveals the unspoken truths of the French cultural sector.
Cultural actors have been regularly mobilizing for some time against an alleged threat to their programming and creative freedom. But does this independence they (…)

23 December 2025

Artificial Intelligence, Work and Professions

For a Redefinition of the Human Place in the Era of Cognitive Machines
Artificial intelligence does not threaten professions: it forces us to finally distinguish what belongs to the task, the profession, the job, and the work. This (…)

22 December 2025

The False Public-Private Debate in the Cultural Sector

What is at stake in cultural policies is not the public-private opposition, but a transformation in what we expect from culture.
The rhetoric of scarcity masks deliberate political choices. Deconstructing the false public-private debate allows us to think differently about the place of cultural (…)

21 December 2025

Writing Without Writing To Oneself

When perfectionism stifles the creative voice.
Writing often begins precisely where the fear of writing poorly prevents it. This tension between creative impulse and formal demands shapes the relationship each (…)

20 December 2025

Defending culture differently: methods for tomorrow

Free book by Benoît Labourdette (PDF, 520 pages, 2025). BIP Éditions.
Download the book for freeThis book, based on my regular posts on my website, is addressed to those who work daily in the French cultural sector and who, faced (…)

19 December 2025

Writing as a Living Source: Thinking Through the Industrialization of Thought in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

When experience becomes the heart of intellectual production work.
The arrival of artificial intelligences transforms the very nature of writing and intellectual production in general. I propose here a reflection on a rich and (…)

18 December 2025

Media Reassurance

When a barometer on youth trust mainly reveals journalism’s blind spots.
The magazine L’Étudiant publishes a study claiming that 83% of young people trust traditional media. But behind these reassuring figures lies a troubling absence of (…)

17 December 2025

Making Room for Adolescents: Rethinking Our Approaches in Cultural Action

From democratisation to cultural democracy.
Cultural action and mediation with adolescents challenge the foundations of our practices: between framework and transgression, between physical presence and digital (…)

16 December 2025

The Simplifying False Nuance

Or how the most brilliant intellectuals can construct their own blind spots.
The most critical minds are not immune to denial. Why do some intellectuals exercise complex thinking on certain subjects while falling into simplification elsewhere? (…)

15 December 2025

INSERM’s Anti-Fake News Campaign

When public health adopts the methods of propaganda.
In October 2025, an advertising campaign by INSERM against “health fake news” illustrates, in my view, the dead ends of public communication that, by reproducing (…)

14 December 2025

Filme Tout Court: Account of a First Collective Experience in Villetaneuse

When expert guidance creates the conditions for a successful cultural experience.
Invited as a jury member for a smartphone short film competition in Villetaneuse, I discovered how technical mishaps and collective adjustments transform an event (…)

13 December 2025

Reflections on a professional training session at ESRA for camera operators (OPV).

Retour sur une formation professionnelle à l’ESRA pour des OPV (Opérateur·ice·s de prise de vue).
Moving tables to shift perspectives: the story of a day where we browsed, photographed, and created together to question what technologies do to our ways of working (…)

12 December 2025

The Digital as Living Environment: Rethinking Cultural Practices in the Anthropocene Era

Presentation by Benoît Labourdette at the Graduate Schools Seminar “Imaginaries of the Anthropocene and New Contexts” (University of Burgundy, December 11, 2025).
On December 11, 2025, at the invitation of Alain Chenevez, Senior Lecturer (HDR) in Sociology at the University of Burgundy, I spoke alongside Olivier Servais, (…)

11 December 2025

Ethnographic Collection as a Tool for Media Education

Learning to listen in order to learn to see: a method of gathering speech radically different from journalism.
Ethnographic collection offers a powerful alternative to journalistic interviewing. Rather than confirming what we think we already know, it opens us to the discovery (…)

10 December 2025

Presence and Social Space

The theatricality of everyday life or the art of being a spectator of the world.
At the Avignon Festival, every street becomes a stage, every encounter a performance. Between official theater and the theater of life unfolds a multiplicity of (…)

9 December 2025

The Time of Work

Reinventing work beyond employment: toward an economy of human transformation.
When we debate working time, we always speak of subordinate employment. Never of domestic work, volunteering, personal creation, or work on oneself. This reduction (…)

8 December 2025

The Implementation of Methods

When Words Are No Longer Enough: Toward an Embodied Transformation of Professional Practices
Methods often fail because they remain discursive. Advocating for cooperation while dominating, speaking of ecology while imposing: the incoherence between words and (…)

7 December 2025

The Broken Heart That Beats: Dialectic of Solitude and Connection

Self-elaboration in openness to the other, after the unthinkable.
Between relational permeability and necessary withdrawal, one can sketch a philosophy of existence that refuses the alternative between fusion and isolation. This (…)

6 December 2025

Amorous Permeability

Between self-dissolution and emancipation through pleasure.
How can we fully inhabit the intensity of an amorous bond without dissolving into it? This tension runs through the experience of every strong relationship: the (…)

5 December 2025

The Free Institution

Opening spaces for creation outside the logics of cultural domination.
For thirty-five years, in response to the systems of domination that structure the cultural field, I have been proposing an alternative approach: the free (…)

4 December 2025

Are Polls and Surveys Objective?

Toward a Sociological Critique of Information Production Devices.
Presented as objective data, polls nonetheless shape the reality they claim to measure. An analysis of the mechanisms at work. The Illusion of Media Objectivity (…)

3 December 2025

Image Education and Citizenship: When Youth Professionals Rethink Their Practices

{{Reflections on the “Out-of-School Time” professional day that I co-designed with ALCA and the Gironde Departmental Council.}}
On December 2, 2025, around a hundred youth, animation, and culture professionals gathered at the MECA auditorium in Bordeaux to explore together the contemporary (…)

2 December 2025

Six Fears About AI, Six Shifts in Thinking

Responding to defensive rhetoric with a philosophy of transformation.
Surveillance, relational isolation, environmental destruction, robotic warfare, existential threat, billionaire power: the dominant discourse on AI accumulates (…)

1 December 2025

What defines us as human beings

Cultivating empathy and sensitivity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has now occupied our daily lives since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. How can we produce critical thinking about what is (…)

30 November 2025

The Journalist and His Mirror

An Epistemological Critique of Media Literacy Education by Those Who Produce Media.
Media and Information Literacy (MIL) entrusted to journalists poses a structural problem that media sociology has documented: how could those who produce information (…)

29 November 2025

Working with Artists in the Social Field

An account of a training session for Cultures du Cœur on setting up artistic workshops in collaboration with artists.
How can artistic practice and social support be combined? This question drives social work professionals seeking to integrate culture into their practices. A look (…)

28 November 2025

Art and Culture in the Service of Psychosocial Skills

Account of a founding seminar for professionals of the Judicial Protection of Youth in Limousin.
On November 27, 2025, the Limousin Regional Directorate of PJJ brought together its teams for a half-day of collective reflection on psychosocial skills, the first (…)

27 November 2025

Training Eyes in the Age of AI: A Day to Rethink Image Education

Account of a professional training day where teachers, librarians, and young people in civic service explored the challenges of artificial intelligence through creation and critical debate.
On November 26, 2025, in Reims, around sixty education professionals gathered for a training day entitled “Training Eyes in the Age of AI.” I contributed to its (…)

26 November 2025

Why Are Cultural Actors So Fragile?

A plea for a democratic refoundation of cultural institutions in the face of political arbitrariness.
From Arcadi in Île-de-France in 2018 to the Agence culturelle Grand Est in 2025, cultural agencies are disappearing into indifference. Beyond the observation, a (…)

25 November 2025

Social Networks and Cultural Institutions: Breaking the Strategic Deadlock

Towards a digital policy that renounces communication in favor of citizen empowerment.
Local authorities are massively investing in their presence on social networks without questioning the relevance of this approach, and are generally losing resources (…)

24 November 2025

Presence and Comparison

Or how the quest for superiority diverts us from the essential.
I postulate that our obsession with comparison distances us from the only authentic way of existing: presence to oneself. This presence is not a passive contemplative (…)

23 November 2025

Market before

Series of 66 photographs taken while walking forward.
Walk through the market before it becomes the market, where you encounter walkers from before.

22 November 2025

Homophotography

Series of 39 self-portraits on tiles.
Looking at yourself is never seeing yourself; it’s transforming yourself into how you want to see yourself, and that depends on the weather.

21 November 2025

Reflection or presence

Series of 111 intertwined photographs.
Presence and erasure merge, overlap, and blur each other, obscured by fluctuating and troubled memory.

20 November 2025

When Cultural Professionals Question Their Approaches to Adolescents

Reflections on a day of professional cross-fertilization.
An interprofessional day organized by the Réseau Jeune Public au Centre at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux on November 19, 2025, which I co-designed and (…)

19 November 2025

Bleached floor

Series of 45 painted photographs.
When we spread out, we create ripples without oil, we change perspectives, even if we are not human.

18 November 2025

Political Fiction

When narratives shape reality beyond truth and falsehood.
Politics is not played out solely in the arena of budgetary or social decisions, but on the media stage. This staging is not just an appearance; it constitutes the (…)

17 November 2025

Moving forward into the impossible

A film by Benoît Labourdette (4’54s, 2025).
After the negation of life, how can we move forward, in the impossible?

16 November 2025