Jeremy Ahearne

Cultural policy explicit and implicit : a distinction and some uses

This paper develops a distinction between ‘explicit’ or ‘nominal’ cultural policies (policies that are explicitly labelled as ‘cultural’) and ‘implicit’ or ‘effective’ cultural policies (policies that are not labelled manifestly as ‘cultural’, but that work to prescribe or shape cultural attitudes and habits over given territories). It begins by defining the distinction through reference to a suggestive inconsistency located within the work of the French thinker Régis Debray. It then specifies the distinction further in relation to certain anglophone references in cultural policy studies and wider political thinking (Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole, Raymond Williams, Joseph Nye). Finally, it explores the history of laicity in France conceived initially in terms of a conflict between the implicit cultural policies of the Catholic Church and the republican State, as well as certain tensions implied by the realpolitik of laicity.

Notes from a French perspective

This article uses John Kingdons “multiple streams” model of the policy process to explore the role of French public intellectuals in processes of cultural and educational policy formation. The relative autonomy attributed by Kingdon to the “primeval soup” of ideas constituted by the policy stream (as distinct from the “problems” and “politics” streams posited by his model) provides the basis for this exploration. However, Kingdons model is not developed with any reference to France, public intellectuals or cultural policy. The corresponding adjustments required are themselves enlightening. Public intellectuals must thus be distinguished from policy experts. They are characterised by their public visibility, the broad frame of reference that they bring to bear on the issues of the moment, certain limitations in technical expertise, and a capacity not simply to work through policy alternatives, but also to project their own counter‐agendas. These issues are explored particularly in relation to a selection of policy reports produced by public intellectuals.

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND CULTURAL POLICY IN FRANCE

The notion of the public intellectual in France represents a form of extra‐governmental cultural politics in its own right. This article begins, however, by exploring three sets of reasons that can account for the aversion of French intellectuals under the Fifth Republic to involvement in State cultural policy processes. These are: the historical counter‐examples represented by intellectuals’ involvement in the policy apparatuses of the Vichy regime and the French Communist Party; the positive tradition of laicity, or of a realm of free inquiry politically set off from the political field; and the often detrimental effects on academic prestige of involvement in policy processes. It then traces the incentives and institutional channels through which some public intellectuals have nonetheless been brought into the processes of cultural and educational policy development over recent decades. It concludes by suggesting how intellectuals may be conceived not simply as architects or critics, but also as objects of cultural policy.

Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life

by Michel de Certeau, translated by S. Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984 (original French edition 1980), 229 pp., paperback, ISBN 0‐520‐06168‐3 The Practice of Everyday Life i...

Questions of religion and cultural policy in France

This article explores how questions of religion have impinged on or informed various dimensions of culture‐shaping policy in France. Firstly, it considers not only how religious references have been orchestrated in high‐level attempts to frame secular national identities, but also how such processes have assumed quasi‐religious forms and functions. Secondly, it analyses the changing place of religion in French educational curricula and recent contested endeavours to introduce it as a cultural ‘fact’ into those curricula. Thirdly, the article examines influential framings of art policies in their relation to religion. It considers the pivotal function of religious fragments and debris in Malraux’s vision of the imaginary museum and the use by Bourdieu of sustained religious metaphors to describe the sacralizing dynamics of secular art world. Finally, the article examines, in a long‐term perspective, the implicit and explicit cultural policies of religious bodies themselves in their attempts to act upon prevailing cultures.

Designs on the popular: framings of general, universal and common culture in French educational policy

This article examines the culture‐shaping strategies pursued through French educational policies. It traces the process through which the republican education system claimed legitimacy to bring all citizens into its universalising embrace and to institute a form of national popular culture. At the same time, the article shows how specifications of esoterically ‘universal’ and ‘general’ curricular content were used to maintain barriers between elite and popular classes. The article then explores endeavours since the 1940s to delineate more democratically framed notions of ‘general’ or ‘common’ culture, and the difficulties that have accompanied the integration of such perspectives into mass secondary schooling since the 1960s. In particular, one sees in France persistent disjunctions between the ‘universal’ cultures carried by academic curricula and contemporary popular cultures and experience (though the balance of power between these poles has shifted in some respects).

Laïcité: A parallel French cultural policy (2002–2007)

The recasting of laïcité in France between 2002 and 2012 constituted a channel through which succeeding right-wing governments endeavoured to secure a form of cultural hegemony. This article focuses on the period 2002–7. The process leading to the anti-veil legislation of 2004 under President Chirac revealed how this symbolically charged motif once associated with the left had been displaced and integrated into a traditional and restrictive right-wing culture-shaping programme. Interior minister Sarkozy’s endeavours between 2002 and 2004 to fashion an institutional dialogue with Islam in France were initially at odds with Chirac’s programme. However, by 2007, Sarkozy had changed tack to produce an alternative reframing of laïcité, ‘positively’ celebrating the intertwining of national and Catholic cultures, whilst using Islam as a negative foil for the projection of that identity. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent hardening of laïcité debates and the appropriation of the term by the far right.

International recognition regimes and the projection of France

Abstract The recent turn to substantial theories of ‘recognition’ in international relations is of considerable interest for the study of international cultural relations. France provides a revealing case study due to the historical importance of culture as such in its foreign policies. Its ‘diplomacies of influence’ can be understood as forms of recognition-seeking across shifting international ‘regimes of recognition’ (Ringmar). France once played a leading role in shaping the global templates for cultural recognition between states. In recent decades, it has had to adapt to the terms of new recognition templates established elsewhere, either via forms of institutional imitation, or by seeking to inflect these new templates (notably in a self-ascribed role as global champion of cultural diversity). These dynamics can be traced in a series of official reports on France’s external cultural policies, notably across the sectors of language policy, arts diplomacy, higher education mobility and global news projection. The reports’ deliberation on these processes opens a space for critical discussion concerning the contemporary operation of international regimes of recognition.

Cultural insecurity and its discursive crystallisation in contemporary France

Abstract This article analyses the emergence in French public discourse since 2010 of the term ‘insécurité culturelle’ (‘cultural insecurity’). It traces firstly the take-up of the term outside France since the 1980s in anglophone written news media. It establishes four received meanings for the term: a ‘pure’ cultural insecurity expressing simply a relation to the arts world; a nationally refracted cultural insecurity that expresses that relation through the prism of relations between nations; an anthropologico-political conception; and a conception related to the human development paradigm. The take-up in France of the term has conformed to the anthropologico-political conception. Developments after 2002 in France created propitious conditions for coupling the semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ‘insecurity’. The term itself was launched from 2010 through the work of two quite different ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ associated with the erstwhile ‘popular left’ current close to the French Socialist Party (Christophe Guilluy and Laurent Bouvet). The article analyses in both linguistic and political perspectives how the expression has been taken up since 2012 in the national press in France. In particular, it explores the debate concerning the purchase of the term on reality, and its current discursive fit with the agendas of the mainstream and far right.

Cultural policy through the prism of fiction (Michel Houellebecq)

Cultural policy studies tends to talk about fiction without actually using it. A typical move is to place it in an aesthetic realm to be protected, situated and/or critiqued. This is an eminently worthwhile activity. However, this paper explores some ways in which works of fiction may, following their own dynamic, yield significant perspectives upon the world of cultural policy itself. In what ways do fictional works offer us prisms through which to reappraise the worlds of cultural policy? What are the effects of the reconfigurative imaginative play to which they subject the institutions of that world? How are the discourses of cultural policy reframed when redeployed by novelists within free indirect style or internal monologue? The article begins by distinguishing four broad modes in which fictional works refract the world of cultural policy, and then analyses in more fine-grained detail two novels by the leading French writer Michel Houellebecq.