Cultural Mediations of Brands

9Cultural Mediation: Regulating the Circulation of Knowledge in the Public Space

Brands are established as cultural actors; they re-qualify their relationships with audiences. We will analyze this relationship in its ambition and cultural scope. But approaching this relationship does not mean resolving to observe it from an exclusively sociological point of view. The productions worked on by professionals involve a connection to real devices, built by or in the manner of cultural actors.

Trademarks can only be displayed as legitimate cultural actors if they are embodied in material devices and devices that are known and recognized as cultural. I use this term “device”, the definition of which was put forward by Foucault (in French, dispositif) to designate a group with a dominant strategic function:

[…] a resolutely heterogeneous whole comprising speeches, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic proposals; in short, of what is said as well as what is not said – these are the elements of the system. The device itself is the network that is established between these elements […] (Foucault 2001, p. 299).

The statement at the heart of these devices is major, because the disposition of the statement, worked on in particular by Louis Marin or Eliseo Verón, makes it possible to focus on the changes in position of announcers in the representations to which they are subject. ...