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 rhetoric that would seem banal if the media insertion of the ad were different. The gap between the Le Monde audience and the nature of the targeting that could be expected from an advertisement really intended to attract guests to cultural spaces is due to the institutional objective of this communication. Its objectives are to challenge decision-makers and public authorities, with whom the brand is regularly in tension, but also to highlight the brand’s social mission. Culture is represented as sick and The Thinker as needing care. The image is captured, but the hyperbola deflates at the same time as it is expressed, the drip seeming unsuitable for a bronze statue.

This anecdotal detour into E. Leclerc makes it possible to point out a phenomenon that goes beyond the limited scope of this example: that of the propensity of brands to embrace fields beyond those normally given to them, in order to adopt a broader societal and social point of view. In his speech in Le Monde, E. Leclerc claims to be an actor capable of counteracting the effects of the crisis and ensuring that everyone’s cultural life is not affected. No matter how artificial the nature of this claim, what matters to me in this case lies neither in the commercial ambition, nor in the power relations with suppliers, nor in the interpellation of the public authorities on which E. Leclerc regularly exerts pressure, as in November 2013 with regard to VAT.

What seems to me to be major in this example is the expression attributed to a brand in the public space to affirm it as a social actor and, in particular, as a kind of cultural mediator here. Both a challenge to the authorities in power and diffuse traditional powers, and an ambitious position, this example testifies to a characteristic contemporary trait, since it seems so recurrent and large: brands are more and more linked to social life. Admittedly, while the cultural industries continue their dynamic of industrialization, non-cultural products are being culturalized (Bouquillion et al. 2013), but what I depict goes beyond that.

Far from limiting themselves to the functions assigned to them by theorists over time, which can be summarized by the functions of signaling, differentiation, and then symbolization of offers, brands seem to be becoming autonomous, far from the monolithism of a mission of strictly supporting transactions to take on new responsibilities. Regularly visiting brands for many years, thanks to my duties as a teacher-researcher at CELSA, has enabled me to observe a change in their communication, with the intense development of cultural proposals aimed at the target audience.

I.1.2. From cultural proposals to unadvertization and figuration

The term proposal is not very precise, but it is practical for the first approach for a phenomenon that is neither circumscribed nor homogeneous, but representative of an address to its recipient. A proposal has neither the commitment of the promise, which is the expression of a willingness to share a belief with those for whom it is intended, nor the connotation of the offer that shows its intent. This is a euphemization of a form of address to consumers, but an intense form of address to individuals seized as audiences, or users of culture. This is a question of a transformation of the traditional communication places of the interlocutors of commercial exchanges. These cultural proposals remain to be defined and this will be the challenge of the following chapters, but before entering the forest of their modalities, to specify the paths of their stakes and scope, we can give a general outline.

I first identified these cultural proposals by working on a doctoral thesis carried out at CELSA and defended in 2005 on brand magazines – magazines built to promote brands (Montety 2005). As emblematic objects of a cultural position, they seemed particularly interesting to me to question and analyze in order to identify the approaches of the project owners and the constraints of the project owners, to understand the hybridizations at work, the arbitrations necessary to develop editorial lines combining advertising requirements and informational rigor. Finally, they seemed particularly valuable to me for taking a first look at the conceptions of communication at work in these pages given to unsure reader-consumers. It is in this context of doctoral research that I have put forward the notion of “unadvertization” to designate the propensity to promote a brand, without looking like it, by distinguishing oneself from standardized advertising formats to assume the role of cultural actor.

This first experience of in-depth research was followed by many others, conducted alone and in groups, thanks to the companionship within GRIPIC4 with Karine Berthelot-Guiet and Valérie Patrin-Leclère, which collaboration resulted in the publication of a collective work (Patrin-Leclère et al. 2014), our points of view being both convergent and complementary. Indeed, our points of view converged because all three of us were very attached to ICS (information and communication sciences), shared a common dynamic, nourished by shared readings and methodologies, but also the same emotions and curiosity for contemporary changes in brands and the media. Indeed, our points of view were complementary, because our views remain singular, even on similar fields.

Valérie Patrin-Leclère, a media specialist, worked particularly on the phenomena of publicizing (that is, publicitarisation in French) devoting a combined semiotic, technical, and economic perspective to media plasticity in her relationship to advertising, while Karine Berthelot-Guiet, an advertising specialist, focused on uncovering the substantial advertising core – both substrate and social circulation – of publicizing (that is, publicitarité in French). For my part, I was absorbed in the phenomena of unadvertization, which refers to the tactics of advertisers, who aim to distinguish themselves from the most recognizable forms of advertising and replace them with forms of communication that are supposed to be more discreet5. I identified and explored media and, more generally, cultural appropriations of brands appearing as operators of these productions on their own account: brand magazines, films and brand series, museums and brand exhibitions, brand books, etc., all intended to bypass advertising as a professional qualification while focusing on advertising practice, in the second meaning of the term, referring to making something known in the public sphere (Habermas 1988). The corollary of this phenomenon is hyperpublicitarianism, with an...