Cultural policy explicit and implicit: a distinction and some uses

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• implicit cultural policy
• laicity
• soft power

Notes

1. The distinction has been taken up in the International Journal of Cultural Policy’s definition of its aims and scope, and was likewise deployed in the call for papers of the Fifth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research held at Istanbul in 2008. I am grateful to Oliver Bennett for first suggesting that the distinction could be more comprehensively developed, and for his comments, along with those of David Looseley and Clive Gray, on earlier drafts of this paper.

2. ‘Laicity’ denotes in general terms the independence of State institutions from religious control.

3. For the application of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to the study of cultural policy, see Tony Bennett (1998).

4. Cf. Finkielkraut (1987), Fumaroli (1992), Schneider (1993). On pamphlets targeting cultural policy as a ‘genre’ emerging towards the end of Lang’s period of ministerial office, see Dubois (1999, pp. 293–298).

5. On ‘bullshit’ in cultural policy discourse more generally, cf. Belfiore (2008).

6. Jack Lang was Mitterrand’s Minister of Culture between 1981 and 1986 and then again between 1988 and 1993.

7. It should be noted that Debray’s critique is formulated in a less ad hominem manner than others. He observed that Lang was one of the few ministers he knew who devoted himself wholeheartedly to his brief (rather than seeing this as a staging post to higher things). He has also gone beyond the bien‐pensant irony that Malraux routinely provokes to explore the considerable if elliptic insights contained in his work (see Debray 1986, pp. 109–146, 1999, pp. 179–190).

8. For a succinct overview, see Jones (1994, pp. 48–73).

9. Two of the most stimulating studies of French cultural policy to have appeared over recent years have adopted for methodological purposes – and justifiably, given the results it produces – what I have defined here as a nominalist approach – see Urfalino (2004, cf. notably pp. 9, 13–14) and Dubois (1999, cf. notably pp. 7–8). This should not discourage us from using the term in a broader sense.

10. Although he does not use the terms, there is in Debray’s oeuvre much that can enlighten us on the procedures and conditions of ‘effective’ or ‘implicit’ policies of cultural transmission, from those of the French State since early modern times (e.g. Debray 1993) to those of the Catholic Church since its foundation (e.g. Debray 1991, pp. 123–157, 1992, pp. 75–107). For a synthesis, see Ahearne (2004, pp. 112–136).

11. McGuigan actually attributes this distinction to Williams, but Williams does not seem to have used it himself.

12. The reference here is to Edgar Allen Poe’s classic 1844 short story ‘The Purloined Letter’.

13. On the Catholic Church as an agent of implicit cultural policy, see in this issue, O. Bennett (2009).

14. Insofar as this approach might need legitimatory authority, cf. John Dewey’s analogous deployment of the term ‘State’ and his associated comments in Dewey (1989, pp. 65–66).

15. On the republican educational reforms of the 1870s and 1880s, see, e.g., Mayeur (2004, pp. 581–608); on the role of affordable national and provincial newspapers, see Martin (1997, pp. 15–107).