Cultural Mediations of Brands

7The Institutionalized Didactic Position: The Masterly Hold

From the act of learning to school, there is only a small logical step, but it is a big step from the point of view of social penetration.

The operations described in this chapter extend the advertising rhetoric, mentioned by Baudrillard when he reproduced the economic function of advertising “following its overall social function”:

[…] to free itself from economic constraints and to feed the fiction of a game, a celebration, a charitable institution, a selfless social service. The ostentation of disinterest plays as a social function of wealth (Veblen) and as a factor of integration. (Baudrillard 2001a, pp. 263–264)

This chapter questions, beyond advertising rhetoric, the relational modalities of the didactic position and observes its deviation and reinvestment in a symbolic space: the school, a legitimate institution for the diffusion of knowledge, used by brands to reinforce their pre-eminence and authority in the social space.

This shift from a relational mode to a mode of exercising authority raises questions about the claim of professional practices dedicated to brands, but also about the social authorizations offered, negotiated or withdrawn, which allow such a shift.

The following examples present different ways of penetrating the educational institution in the service of brands. They follow one another in such a way as to show the intensification of institutional mobilization and its systematization with ...