Cultural Mediations of Brands. Caroline Marti

Cultural Mediations of Brands - Caroline Marti


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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 the actors whose historical role is to institute the mediations of culture.

      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.

      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.1.1. A strange mediation


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