by Fabien Granjon , published on 8.11.2009

Le butinage – literally “pollen-gathering” – we mentioned in our last post is probably akin to the phenomenon of “cultural eclecticism”. And cultural eclecticism may be considered the French version of the phenomenon referred to in North American analyses as “omnivorism”. Richard Peterson, to whom we owe what were probably the first important analyses of the phenomenon, uses omnivorism to describe the transition from highbrow snobbery, based on the glorification of the arts and disdain for popular entertainment, to a cultural capital that appears more and more like an aptitude for appreciating the different aesthetics of a wide range of cultural forms, encompassing not only the arts, but also a whole panoply of popular and folkloric expressions.

In France, it was the analyses of Olivier Donnat’s survey of French cultural practices (the results of the last wave of surveys should be out shortly) that underscored, from the early 1990s, this trend towards the hybridization of discrete cultural domains. The concept describes practices in which various forms of interpenetration are observable between certain contents that are highly legitimized in the “dominant” cultural circles and others that as a rule are not.

Though there is now a vast array of scholarship attesting to this phenomenon, there are two analytical currents that tend to disagree on the degree of its prevalence. The first considers that, on the whole, the blending of cultural repertoires chiefly obtains in the dominant, cultivated classes (aesthetic tolerance as the new standard of good taste), whereas the lower and less educated social segments remain stuck within more narrowly circumscribed and homogeneous repertoires marked by consonant tastes of scant legitimacy. From this point of view, Olivier Donnat argues that this strain on the “high culture” model and the overhaul of the related mechanisms that sanction and legitimize cultural contents are in large measure the upshot of the development of mass culture and, specifically, of “screen-based culture”.

A more radical view, set forth by Bernard Lahire in particular, posits the existence of an eclecticism that spreads across the entire social spectrum and affects a much wider swath of society: dissonant cultural repertoires being more the rule than the exception. In the middle and working classes, the tacit, even reverential, acceptance of cultural domination seems less in evidence nowadays, particularly because the norms of dominant cultural legitimacy are less and less effectively inculcated by the school system.

Schools face de facto “competition” from potent media-based values, which contribute, more now than in the past, to the “construction of the self” and the expression of personal identity. For one thing, the arts industries, the whole media/advertising realm and the spread of information and communication technologies are shoring up the foundations of a new order of cultural participation. For another, they are helping to alleviate the stigmatization of the culturally deprived and the complexes of the working classes, which now share a minimum cultural capital and some tastes with an increasingly large part of the population.

The transmedia perspective should definitely explore the range of cultural heterogeneity, by analyzing, for example, the way audiovisual contents are concretely utilized: Whether we pore over a B series movie attentively or ironically, after ample preparation and with due documentation in hand, or, on the contrary, watch an Italian cinema classic intermittently, erratically, while multitasking, don’t these activities reveal discordant forms of appropriation that influence and reconfigure the “original” legitimacy of the contents in question? It could prove equally rewarding to look at the way in which practices are shared with other people and consider the collective dimension of “genre mixing”. This would not be a simple undertaking, but it would at the very least prove an exciting challenge.

To delve further:
Lahire, Bernard. La culture des individus. Dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi. Paris: La Découverte, 2004.
Bergé, Armelle, and Fabien Granjon. “Éclectisme culturel et sociabilités. La dimension collective du mélange des genres chez trois jeunes usagers des écrans”. In Terrains & Travaux, No. 12, pp. 195–215.

http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_REVUE=TT&ID_NUMPUBLIE=TT_012&ID_ARTICLE=TT_012_0195.