Looking For Non-publics

Introduction - Looking for Non-Publics

IntRoDUCtIon lOOking fOr nOn-publics Daniel Jacobi and Jason Luckerhoff editors How important is artistic or literary creation to the public? Are cultural quality and creativity in any way related to the nature of the target public? Why should the quality of art depend on the size of viewership? And what does being a member of the public entail? Is it sufficient to attend, witness or participate in order to be considered part of the public? What are the implicit conditions to be a member of the public – in terms of taste, knowledge of rules and deportment which, beyond simple know-how, define a relationship with a cultural sphere, whether the relationship be detached, eclectic or passionate? Is taste for artistic and literary creation spontaneous, or is it simply the result of intense and steady practice? In the case of cultural heritage, what comprises the opposition between public and non-public? Is it the same as in any segment of high culture? What really differentiates public from non-public? Do members of the public feel they belong to a cultural elite? Is it possible to define the basic conditions of being part of the public? Are those massive crowds drawn towards major monuments in cities an indication of a burst of interest in culture? For years researchers have grappled with the notion of public. Indeed, from a theoretical perspective (the opposition between production and reception implies specific research focusing on readership, listenership and viewership) and the perspective of media economy (audience measurement requires developing quantitative tools to control and measure audience size), the relevance of this type of research is self-evident. 2 | Looking for non-pubLics Immediately following the publication of Daniel Dayan’s article, “À la recherche du public,” appearing in an issue of Hermes (1993), researchers pinpointed the arbitrariness and very conventional aspect of the notion of public. In fact, the articles in this issue depict audience behaviour as a heterogeneous reception limited neither to the confines of compliant ratification of media content offerings nor to the plethora of attitudes and postures prevailing among those adverse to the media. What is the thrust of the notion of public? How does an arbitrary heterogeneous aggregation of individuals of diverse origins manage to exhibit commonality and cohesion to the point of constituting a public? As a social entity, the public – so called, and rightly so because it does indeed exist in the here and now as participants in a cultural happening – is different from the rest of the population, which on the converse, is not present and not part of the happening. Considerations of public with regard to high culture (theatre, museums and art exhibitions, classical music, dance, avant-garde films, etc.) are rather different. A long-standing debate over unequal accessibility to this sophisticated form of culture still prevails. The main preoccupation of culture experts has been to foster what has been referred to as the democratization of a form of culture that, in their opinion, is too often, and very unfairly so, reserved for the elite. In this vein, the Declaration of Villeurbanne (1968) written by Francis Jeanson in France introduced the notion of non-public, which has since been the subject of discussion and debate, dating back to 2001 in a publication in two volumes (Les non-publics: les arts en receptions, coedited by Ancel and Pessin, and published by L’Harmattan, 2004). Consisting of contributions from the symposium, Sociologie de l’art held in Grenoble, they address a sociological reality and empirical research, hence the shift from the notion of potential public to that of non-public entailing an imperceptible shift from a probabilistic to an investigable world (Fleury, 2004). The invention of the notion of non-public and, on a wider scale, the issue surrounding non-publics have given rise to much debate: Target of advertising campaigns, communication research subject, object and essence of public policy, this notion refers to something that doesn’t exist (Ethis, 2004) and “attests to a hierarchical categorization. . . of publics as good or bad” (Pérez, Soldini, & Vitale, 2004). In other words, identifying and considering a small group as a public is tantamount to declaring the rest of the population a non-public (even though the latter constitutes a larger segment of the population). A priori, non-public should basically be defined as that portion of the population, that despite having the possibility of enjoying cultural offerings, does not partake of them in any way, shape or form. The notion...