style="font-size:15px;"> 233
221
234 222
235 223
236 224
237 225
238 226
239 227
240 228
241 229
242 230
243 231
Communication Approaches to Commercial Mediation Set
coordinated by
Caroline Marti
Volume 1
Cultural Mediations of Brands
Unadvertization and Quest for Authority
Caroline Marti
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
London SW19 4EU
UK
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Caroline Marti to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951298
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-457-5
Foreword
The Economy in its Culture
Walter Benjamin wrote, in the preparatory notes of his Arcades Project: “Marx exposes the causal relationship between economics and culture. What matters here is the expressive correlation. It is no longer necessary to present the economic genesis of culture, but the expression of the economy in its culture” (Benjamin 1989, p. 476). The project to which this book makes a rich and structured contribution cannot be better defined.
To conduct a critical and comprehensive analysis of the relationships between the economy and culture, it is necessary to begin by resisting the temptation to see them as two domains that are foreign to each other. To study the economy in its culture is to understand why the actors of capitalism, brands and market industries cannot deploy their strategy, which is foreign or even indifferent in itself, to the democratic, patrimonial and above all culturally emancipatory project, without claiming to be actors of culture themselves, in the social sense of the term. And, above all, without interfering in the sharing between the multiple meanings of this complex and controversial notion, its practices, its values and its knowledge.
Even if Benjamin distanced himself from Marx, it must be remembered that he had insisted on the fact that there is no exchange value without use value, which can be understood in not only practical but also symbolic terms. Nor is it communicative: there is no production of exchange value, in the financial sense of the term, without an investment in the richness of the exchange, in the dialogical, symbolic, and poetic sense of the term. This does not mean, however, that we should deny the conflicting nature of these relationships, nor the difference between the definitions of culture and its values promoted by brands and those that cultural institutions, the symbolic values of the school, the museum, and the publishing industry have patiently built in the public space. The exhibition organized in the name of an industrial company, the magazine created to ensure the diffusion of a brand’s lifestyle, and the diffuse educational work of actions and desires carried out by consumer figures that compete and threaten the symbolic operability of the museum, the media and the school, while claiming what their authority is based on is a strategy that profoundly determines the logic of unadvertization, open denunciation of the promotional logic of advertising that ensures its continuation by other means. Making an exhibition, magazine or brand repository is not enough to make the brand a museum, media or school.
It is this adjustment and tension that Caroline Marti describes here in a relaxed, nuanced, but also forthright way when necessary, based on a considerable number of concrete situations that she has patiently observed over time as a researcher, teacher, and thesis supervisor in diverse organizations. This empirical density of continuous observation of practices is what gives strength to the bold action of creating a synthetic picture of the economy in its culture. This particular relationship between two components of a research practice, active observation and problematization, gives this view an originality, four aspects of which I will highlight here, as those that seem to me to be the most demonstrative of the challenges of market mediation research.
The first choice consists of finding, in Barthes’ legacy – whose interpretation illuminates all these pages – the way to keep the balance between the analyst’s lucidity and the experience of the life of signs. We have not finished drawing lessons from the Mythologies, which close with this aporia with which we all struggle: “we ceaselessly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its totality: for if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and, if we leave its weight, we respect it, but we restore it still mystified” (Barthes 1970, p. 247). In this case, it is a question of denaturalizing the brand, as a social being endowed with individuality, intentions, powers, and even virtues, while understanding how the brand managers manage to bring this symbolic actor to life, through the situations, devices, and discourses they imagine and implement, thanks to the means at their disposal, which are considerably more substantial than those of
