Cultural Mediations of Brands. Caroline Marti
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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
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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