This leads to another bias which is just as difficult and equally a balancing act, which is to view from a distance the assimilation of the economy into its culture and especially into the whole range of issues it raises, with a single discipline, management sciences, and in particular the particular version called “marketing”, while taking into account the way in which the knowledge developed in this particular framework – this scientific discipline which is also a platform for market efficiency – affects conduct, values, and social creations in reality. Here again, it is the way in which the experience is combined with a viewpoint with distance that is precious. Caroline Marti knows how it works. She knows, from experience, how communication campaigns are orchestrated. She can study not only the way in which the devices unfold, but, above all, the “reason for the effects” that guides this unfolding: the conception of the symbolic order, the situations of communication, the power of signs that circulates in this professional environment and that feeds a certain conception, strange but not without effectiveness, of the “semiotic management” of the public space.
This problem has the advantage of a space focusing our view on in the dynamics of territories, confrontations and attempts at annexation. The analysis of the economy’s claims in its culture does not mask their real efficiency, nor the reasons why they cannot be fully successful. Indeed, what makes the incomparable value of symbolic relationships unique, what in a way makes them “capital” (which some even try to quantify), is precisely what the purely economic conception of the world, which governs the objective functioning of market companies, cannot respect. This living contradiction, which is as important to understand for cultural institutions seized by marketing as it is for economic actors, engaged in a headlong rush towards a definition of culture that is increasingly difficult to accept, and above all for those involved in the management of brands that are increasingly threatened by a confusion of identity, appears clearly in this book only and precisely because the space it considers is open, and that it has not been previously divided according to “specialities” and “professions”, but that it is constantly reconfiguring itself before our eyes as readers.
Finally, this analysis brilliantly questions the role of communication sciences in relation to the situation of a society in the grip of its destiny, between the radical pragmatism of an economic rationality to which no one gives the capacity to define a history, and a stubborn determination of men to invent and preserve the symbolic dimension of their existence. This book clearly demonstrates the lucidity that can be brought to us by the communicative requalification of realities that have been preempted for decades by conceptions that deny the importance of communication, even when they claim to use it. But it also shows that all the categories on which the scientific analysis of communication has been built for half a century, the public space, information, the media, the communication process itself, far from being merely the framework for the confrontation between conceptions of society, are at stake, because it is around their definitions that battles are fought. By hijacking Foucault, we can see that in the field of commercial mediation, too, “[communication] is not only what translates the struggles or systems of domination, but that for which, that with which we struggle, the power we seek to seize” (Foucault 1971, p. 12).
The social sciences, increasingly subject to evaluation standards and practiced in a professional context in which time for writing is often the least important part, are concentrated on “qualifying” journal articles. This is probably very useful, if only to lead the continuous observation of a world governed by permanent innovation. But some questions that are transversal, not specific to a field or profession, crossing society and requiring the effort of a step back, can only really be asked in a book.
It is this book that Caroline Marti offers us.
Yves JEANNERET
Emeritus Professor in Information and Communication Sciences
GRIPIC, CELSA
Sorbonne University
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my family and friends for their loving support, which was so precious for the development of this book, both in Bordeaux and Paris. Special thanks to my son, Felix, for his precious help with translation matters.
I am very grateful to Yves Jeanneret, the inspiring guarantor of HDR, for our long-term exchanges, which have nourished me so much.
I would like to thank my students and professional speakers at CELSA Sorbonne University for often drawing my attention to productive cases.
I owe a lot to the exchanges within the “ICS family”, whose scope and openness I appreciate so much, and in particular that of GRIPIC, which is always stimulating.
Introduction
“Any other authority comes from another origin than nature. If one seriously considers this matter, one will always go back to one of these two sources: either the force and violence of an individual who has seized it, or the consent of those who have submitted to it by a contract made or assumed between them and the individual on whom they have bestowed authority.”
(Diderot 1995 [1751–1765])
I.1. Cultural proposals and commercial mediation
I.1.1. A strange mediation
Rodin’s The Thinker explodes onto the front page of the French newspaper, Le Monde1. The famous sculpture is represented with an IV drip in the arm. Below, a sentence comments: “What if a crisis was the worst time to sacrifice culture?” This is a communication from the E. Leclerc group that implicitly poses as a defender of culture.
This advertisement, published in December 2013, seems very far from the somewhat earlier November 2013 issue of Le Monde, referring to the decision of the Ministers of Economy and Consumer Affairs to take action against the distribution group for “imbalance” in its relationships with its suppliers2, a decision followed by the group’s condemnation in January 2014.
After having distinguished itself as an economic player involved in particularly tough negotiations, the E. Leclerc company soon became a brand that defended the common good of culture. The announcement was in line with E. Leclerc’s strategy, an entity concerned with positioning itself on the defense of low prices, which is both the objective and pretext for its practices. It illustrates the promise of access to culture for the greatest number of people, thanks to the prices charged by E. Leclerc in its “cultural spaces”. The brand, which in 2018 claimed to be “the second largest bookshop in France”, has since then consistently promoted its role as an intermediary for access to culture, going so far as to invest the new literary year, in 2016, with the creation of the Landerneau readers’ prize3.
Admittedly, the culture in question here corresponds to the commercial activity of the brand, but one can be struck by the position that the brand attributes to itself. By choosing to refer more broadly to “culture”, it goes beyond its role as a seller of products, books, CDs, films, etc. Indeed, it adopts a critical stance induced by the evocation of the “worst time” and expresses a political and societal point of view that is normally the prerogative of legal and mandated bodies for this purpose.
How does delivering products designed by cultural industries make it possible to take a look at culture? Certainly, there is a slippage, a classic figure of advertising
