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

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