Call for communication

Call for communication

 proposal submission deadline : 15 juillet 2018

In May 1968, a French national forum for culture was held at the Théâtre de la Cité de Villeurbanne, with Roger Planchon and Francis Jeanson at the forefront: a landmark manifesto was drafted, entitled Déclaration de Villeurbanne. Lyrical and forward-looking, the Declaration was the creation of a collective authority made up of twenty-three directors of popular theaters and cultural centers. Together, they supported a plan to break with the past as well as gain power, while describing a fragmented public arena – in short, a sort of political ethic. The document was destined for a special fate, both as a focal point and a variable point in political discourse on culture and the social role of art, especially regarding the theater (Delhalle 2006, 2017).

The Declaration is still used today, though ambiguous and prone to varying interpretation, helping us reflect on the continuities and breaks that influence contemporary cultural practices, policies and productions. Yet if we are to look critically at current affairs in the art world and cultural initiatives, we need to do away with meaningless categorizations and begin working together to denaturalize lingering, resistant language and practices that in a variety of ways declare democratization, emancipation and the alternative. Other themes may provide food for thought: the concept of risk, for example (what about involvement today or the conformism of cultural actors?) ; the issue of globalization (what about the internationalization of practices and the rise of local?) ; or the very process of politicization (what about culture’s political role in the face of economic arguments?).

Much research has been conducted on these topics in multiple fields of knowledge: theater studies, information and communication technology, sociology, history, political science, etc.In keeping with this research, the symposium is open to contributions from a variety of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. These contributions will take a critical, problem-focused look at cultural policies, productions and/or practices, regardless of the artistic or cultural sector in question (performing arts, circus arts, heritage, books, etc.). They will fall within one or several of the three focus areas presented below.

1.   Public, operators, artists: protagonists on the path to specialization

If the word culture can still be taken seriously, it is insofar as it implies the demand for an effective intervention tending to modify current relations between people, and consequently, for an active investigation going from individual to individual, and seeking to take everyone into account – in other words, in the end, an authentic form of cultural action (Declaration of Villeurbanne). The fact nevertheless remains that the ways in which this basic orientation will be put into practice must be defined in close consultation with those concerned, that is: firstly with the staff of our respective enterprises, and secondly with the different sections of the population, the “non-public” (through intermediaries of all kinds who, by going from one individual to the next, allow us to reach them), students, and the public we have already established (Declaration of Villeurbanne).

Fifty years after the Declaration, France has around 250 master’s level courses in “cultural management”, “cultural development”, “cultural engineering”, etc. While the names of the courses may change, in line with changes in ideologies of cultural action (masters in “cultural entrepreneurship” have been appearing over the last few years), they all relate to a single movement that involves qualifying, specializing and professionalizing the actors of the world of culture. These fall into three categories: “staff of our respective enterprises”, in other words cultural “operators”; artists; and audiences (or the public). In this trilogy, by building themselves a social, professional, or political position, each category of actors makes a statement about their relationship to the two others. Joëlle Le Marec, for example, clearly demonstrated how changes to the training of museum visitor experience managers, and the arrival of people with a marketing background in these departments in particular, have contributed to creating an image of the public as the target of supposedly effective communication (Le Marec, 2007).

On a different note, the legal, economic and political statuses of creators are changing. Amongst others, instrumental conceptions are under development that make artists archetypes or pathfinders for contemporary forms of work (Menger, 2005) in a society where creativity is promoted as a source of value and “individuals”, instead of the “public”, are all potentially creative. In the end, the recipients of cultural action are constantly being (re)qualified by research in social sciences, as well as by political discourse and cultural actors. From the notion of “non-public”, which appears in the Declarationas a standard to be followed, to that of “population” expressed by Catherine Trautmann in 1998 in the French public service mission statement for the performing arts, and the euphemized notions of “publics spécifiques” [specific audiences], “public du champ social” [audiences of social concern], “public empêché” [inhibited audiences], and “public éloigné” [remote audiences], these categories reflect intense work to specialize the relationship between artworks and their social appropriation, while continuing to produce dismissals, disagreements and paradoxes (Ghebaur, 2014; Rancière, 2008).

This topic area will involve reflecting on the trajectories of actors in cultural affairs, the processes of category specialization and the effects of these forms of professionalization. The complex movements covered by these terms call for an examination of the new configurations of authority in cultural matters, but also its filiation, both direct and indirect, and particularly the role of cultural public policy in the updating of benchmarks and frameworks of cultural action in the context of “innovation”.

2.   Regions and places: geographical and symbolic issues

The directors of popular theaters and cultural centers [...] protest against the unjustifiable disparities prevailing both among the subsidies given to the diverse national institutions based in Paris, and between these subsidies and those given to equivalent institutions in the suburbs and provinces, as such disparities call into question the very idea of decentralization (Declaration of Villeurbanne)

Cultural actors are faced with the rise of urbanization and loss of impetus of national cultural policies, in terms of artistic production and cultural dissemination alike. This is reflected in the issue of cultural municipalization from the 1970s, as shown in the Rencontres d’Avignon held from 1964 to 1970 chaired by Jean Vilar, with themes like “Cultural policy in cities” (1967) and “Cultural policy in seven cities” (1969).

Some key terms or concepts thus became essential to the construction and depiction of professional identities and cultural activities: “Cultural democratization”, “regional planning”, “ecological transition”, “cultural development”, “Agenda 21 for culture”, among others. These labels, some of whose origins date back to the 1960s, echo those that are now firmly established in describing new urban dynamics and cultural policies: “Global city”, “Intercultural city”, “Creative cluster” and “Participatory city”. But these terms also cause tensions: dismissed by cultural actors, imposed by the State or demanded by local authorities, they reveal the balance of power between actors of cultural action since 1970.

This topic area will involve identifying new intervention methods and the positioning of actors, not just with a globalized, generic approach and rationale in the current context of internationalization and industrialization of the artistic and cultural sectors, but also in their territorialization(s).

3.   Formal frameworks and leading figures in cultural action: (re)forms, pathways

and omissions

For Jacques Rancière (2004), politics is the moment you begin to account for the uncounted, in other words entering instituting frameworks, classifications and concepts, correct expressions, to turn them into criticisms (Farge, 1992). By which mechanisms and via which pathways through time and space do cultural policies form the place of cultural politicization, or is it the opposite, do they hinder it?

The document Declaration of Villeurbanne– far from being smooth and consistent – leaves room for multiple interpretations that echo the not always compatible positions of those who produced it. This constitutive ambivalence has not hindered the widespread distribution of the document and (some of) its proposals. Some statements taken from the Declaration stand out and circulate like “formulas” (Krieg- Planque, 2009), gradually relieving the text of its local anchorage and political force in favor of rhetoric and stories whose origins have been forgotten. But at the same time, the text is mentioned regularly and referred to as a foundational moment (Schlanger, 1992) that reiterated or reconstructed origins and filiation.