David Looseley

Making an ‘impact’ Some personal reflections on the Humanities in the UK

This article brings together reflections on the impact agenda from two separate sources: a conference at the University of Warwick in August 2009, and a speech given at the University of Leeds some weeks before. It develops these reflections with particular reference to Modern Languages, reviewing how the Humanities probe other value systems, deal with the singular and provisional, and take discourse as their product and process in ways that offer both theoretical and pragmatic benefits. The article suggests that, rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon of ‘measurement’ and the market where impact is concerned, the Humanities should explore ways of rethinking the outdated, simplistic ‘marketmimicry’ that Michael Sandel critiqued in his 2009 Reith lectures.

THE RETURN OF THE SOCIAL: Thinking postcolonially about French cultural policy

This article is concerned with the social exclusion agenda in contemporary French cultural policy, exploring the relevance of aspects of postcolonial theory to an understanding of that agenda. The tensions involved in recent attempts to evolve policies addressing interculturalism, integration and “emergent” cultures (such as hip‐hop) while also staying true to the French republican tradition of universalism are illuminated by France’s problematic relationship with its colonial past. They are also shown to be related to a wider movement of post‐industrial, postmodern experimentation with aesthetic forms, from video and computer art to street arts, free parties and electronic dance music.

Back to the future: Rethinking French cultural policy, 1997-2002

The article examines cultural policy in France during the third Socialist quinquennium, discussing the degree of conceptual change which took place in relation to the Ministry of Cultures two most prominent past incumbents, André Malraux and Jack Lang. It looks particularly at what positions were adopted by the Socialist Ministers of Culture Catherine Trautmann and Catherine Tasca with regard to Lang, their only Socialist predecessor. These positions are summarised as building on his achievements but attempting to move on from them, towards a modernised policy which, nonetheless, looked back to the first principles of cultural action (public service, education, animation ). The analysis concludes, however, by suggesting that policy was reconfigured rather than fundamentally rethought.

Notions of popular culture in cultural policy: a comparative history of France and Britain

The Devlin and Hoyle report, Committing to culture: arts funding in France and Britain, argues that the cultural policies of these two European neighbours have been steadily converging since the mid‐1990s but that their social and economic contexts are now quite different (e.g. youth unemployment, GDP, disposable income). The paper addresses this convergence‐within‐divergence by comparing how policy discourses have conceptualised popular culture in the two countries. It investigates the hypothesis that, in both, an engagement with popular culture has in fact been an important driver of change, albeit at different times and with different taxonomies. And it asks what light this comparison might shed on cultural policy thinking in the twenty‐first century.

Fabricating Johnny French popular music and national culture

This article takes Johnny Hallyday’s current status as a national icon as the starting point for an investigation of the relationship between popular music, authenticity and national culture in contemporary France. Public representations of Hallyday at the time of his sixtieth birthday in June 2003 were very different from those prevailing at the start of his career, when he scandalised the cultural establishment by appearing as the conduit for US-style rock’n’roll, which seemed to symbolise the Americanisation of French cultural values. Today, he is portrayed as belonging squarely to the canonical French chanson tradition and even as the incarnation of l’exception culturelle française. This discursive transformation testifies to a parallel mutation in the status of pop music in France, which the article traces.

Antoine Hennion and the sociology of music

The article examines the work of the sociologist of music Antoine Hennion and its relevance to cultural policy today. Beginning with a general consideration of his problematic status as an intellectual and his growing international reputation as a cultural theorist, it goes on to analyse his complex position on the music–society nexus, from which he posits the indivisibility of music and its uses. This leads him to develop a “pragmatics of taste”, from which a set of largely theoretical implications for cultural policy can be deduced. Hennion’s pragmatism suggests a relativization of genre, though not, he argues, an ethical or aesthetic relativism. Its application to the institutionalization of music, and of culture generally, also points to a possible third phase in the evolution of cultural studies.

Cultural policy in the twenty-first century: issues, debates and discourse

Over the last twelve years, the French Ministry of Culture has become a focus of both controversy and consensus. The controversy has mainly centred on Jack Lang’s high-profile recognition of pop music, comic strips and other popular forms previously considered minor. In 1987, Alain Finkielkraut challenged this new orientation by speaking up in his book La D6faite de la pens6e for the universality of European high culture against a post-modern relativism which he accused Lang of legitimizing.’ Finkielkraut then launched a second offensive in 1990, after the publication of the Ministry of Culture’s sociological survey Les Pratiques culturelles des Frangais which included in its purview not only pop and BD but leisure pursuits like holidays, eating out, and knitting.2 A year later, Marc Fumaroli

Conceptualising Youth Culture in Postwar France

The article discusses the meanings of youth culture, and particularly music, in contemporary France, in the light of the Ministry of Cultures adoption a quarter of a century ago of a sympathetic discourse towards it. Contrasting similarly sympathetic French sociological analyses with the seminal work undertaken in Anglophone cultural studies on subcultures, it argues that the variable nomenclature of youth culture in French public discourse is founded on two fundamental ways of conceptualising youth culture, to which the work of Pierre Mayol draws attention. While la culture des jeunes, denoting the leisure practices of 15- to 24-year-olds, connotes a culture existing in an ephemeral, ghettoised present, la culture jeune has undergone the process that Bourdieu calls legitimation. The article concludes by asking whether these dual meanings of youth culture may ultimately be mapped on to the republican opposition between particularism and universalism.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France, suite et début

Abstract The article discusses Frances new national library, the BNF, due to open in stages between 1996 and 1997. It begins by completing an earlier account, published in Modern & Contemporary France, of the Librarys inception, and in particular of the controversy to which it gave rise. It goes on to describe the BNFs appearance, facilities and internal organisation as they stood shortly before opening. It then examines the three theoretical principles on which current Library discourse is founded: democratisation, technology and encyclopedisme. It concludes with the view that the Library has in fact served as a kind of cultural laboratory for a number of issues facing contemporary French culture on the threshold of the new millennium, including an implied challenge to post‐modernist discourse by means of a reaffirmation of Enlightenment universalism.

Speaking of Impact: Languages and the Utility of the Humanities

Impact today is something of a hot potato in the United Kingdom. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, or AHRC (2006: 1), the funding council for arts and humanities research, has identified a ‘mounting concern to understand the distribution, utility and influence of research findings in non-academic contexts’; and, accordingly, it now declares itself concerned with ‘the outcomes of AHRC research and knowledge transfer activity, and benefits for UK cultural, social and economic well-being’ (AHRC 2006: 2). Impact has also become part of a wider government demand that the public sector demonstrate ‘public value’ — a stirring but slippery notion drawn from public-management theory.