Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth: The Taste of the World

By Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie Octobre

By examining cultural consumption, tastes and imaginaries as a means of relating to the world, this book describes the effects of globalization on young people from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. It employs the concept of aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism to analyse the emergence of an aesthetic openness to alterity as a new generational "good taste".

Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth critically examines the consumption of cultural products and imaginaries that provide genuine insight into social change, particularly in regards to young people, who play the largest role in cultural circulation. This book will be of interest to students and academics across a wide range of readers, including cultural theorists, and students engaged in debates on cultural consumption, the globalization of culture and transnational aesthetic codes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319663111

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie OctobreAesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French YouthConsumption and Public Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66311-1_1

1. How Young People Develop a Taste for the World

Vincenzo Cicchelli¹  and Sylvie Octobre¹

(1)

GEMASS, CNRS/University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France

Cultural products are increasingly subject to wider and wider circulation throughout the world. For example, the television show Game of Thrones ¹ shattered all previous audience records, through a combination of those watching the show live, as well as those streaming or downloading it. Shakira, a Colombian singer turned pop star in the United States, lent her voice to the official song of the 2010 Football World Cup held in South Africa, a tune that was inspired by African music. Naruto ² has become a childhood hero for many young French people, alongside more traditional national figures like Astérix . The song Gangnam Style, performed by the South Korean singer Psy (sung in Korean and complemented by all the aesthetic trappings of K-pop) was downloaded over 2.9 billion times,³ causing YouTube counters to explode. In France, the song was most often downloaded by young individuals with no cultural ties to Korea. These cultural products belong to a number of French youth cultural repertoires, present alongside the Assassin’s Creed video games,⁴ Daft Punk albums,⁵ and David Guetta chart-toppers,⁶ among many other French contributions to the international scene. Over the past several decades, the sites of cultural production have proliferated, while cultural products have benefited from a greater circulation. There are countless examples: the diffusion of Japanese manga and karaoke , Latin American telenovelas , Egyptian and Turkish television series, Algerian raï music, K-pop and Korean films, Scandinavian crime novels, Bollywood and Nollywood cinema (from India and Nigeria, respectively), and so on. Similarly, as the sphere of recognized artistic production has expanded, high culture has also increasingly opened its doors to artists in all media from different geographical backgrounds and cultural traditions. Some of these artists have moreover become media darlings, either posthumously or during their lifetime—there are countless film adaptations of the work of Alexandre Dumas , and the success of the Harry Potter franchise is truly global⁷—and their works are, in turn, referenced and revisited in contemporary productions, thus continuing to shape transnational cultural imaginaries beyond their own lifespan.

The globalization of cultural industries and the growing circulation of cultural products, facilitated by the rise of digital technologies and social networks, are also major factors contributing to the internationalization of youth cultural repertoires and consumption patterns. Thanks to the many films and manga depicting Japanese warriors, what young French person cannot recognize the figure of the samurai? Who has no idea what the Egyptian pyramids look like? Who does not associate New York City with the Statue of Liberty? And who, setting foot on the American continent for the first time, will not be struck by a strange sense of déjà vu? These examples highlight just to what extent contacts with cultural products and artworks fashioned abroad that shape cultural imaginaries as well as taste profiles are important for us to examine, as they inform how individuals receive cultural products, and in turn, use them to shape their vision of the world (Cicchelli and Octobre 2013).

1 Beyond Cultural Homogenization

Many things have been said about the role of foreign cultural products in France. The French cultural exception was, in part, developed as a defensive strategy against (primarily North American) cultural imperialism and its supposed homogenization of culture, whereas the argument for cultural diversity emerged to promote cultural products from less geopolitically prominent regions. As early as 1946, when the Blum-Byrnes agreement established a quota system that limited the number of foreign (mostly American) films that would be shown in France each year, American cultural hegemony became a topic of criticism, in turn justifying a number of policies to support the production and diffusion of national products through quotas and financial subsidies. In France, vociferous critics of cultural homogenization condemned the rise of monoculture or world culture (Martel 2010), while English-language publications researched the McDonaldization , Americanization , Disneyfication , and Coca-Colonization of culture (Ritzer 1993; Ritzer and Liska 1997; Ritzer and Stillman 2003; Wagnleitner 1994).

This calls for a couple of remarks to be made, however. Without denying the importance of major American cultural industries with regard to the international circulation of cultural products, it is nonetheless possible to avoid reducing the globalization of culture to the sole problem of North American hegemony. Rejecting the idea that local and national cultures have disappeared entirely, many scholars have argued that globalization has, in fact, spearheaded the proliferation of cultural identities—variously suggesting that this proliferation is the result of the promotion of local identities as a form of resistance to hegemony, of the hybridization of existing cultures, or of the local appropriation of global products (Amselle 2001; Canclini 1995; Castells 2010; Hannerz 1992; Pieterse 2009; Robertson 1995; Tomlinson 2003). In other words, for many scholars, cultural dynamics are a foundational element of globalization, a vast phenomenon that cannot be reduced to its economic dimension alone.

At the same time, however, studies of cultural practices have seldom examined the role played by globalization. Numerous scholars have investigated the changing relationships of individuals to culture, framed as shifts in cultural capital—in particular, Richard A. Peterson (1992), as well as Olivier Donnat (1994), Bernard Lahire (2004), and Philippe Coulangeon (2011)—or from a reception perspective—in particular, Henry Jenkins (1992), as well as Patrice Flichy (2010), and Antoine Hennion (2015). Such works have attempted to investigate the relationship between socio-demographic changes (rising education levels, the feminization of the workforce, prolonged adolescence and youth) and cultural transformations (in particular, the increasingly blurry distinction between legitimate highbrow culture and popular culture). Nonetheless, they have, for the overwhelming majority, overlooked the fact that as cultural products circulate more and more widely, they alter youth cultural references and repertoires, thus producing a significant transformation with regard to their relationship to the world. Nowadays, the first contact that young individuals have with a foreign culture most frequently occurs through television series, movies, or music—much more frequently than through books, as was the case for the travellers of Grand Tour in the nineteenth century—long before travel would allow them to experience alterity directly.

2 Ordinary Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism

Several researchers have proposed the concept of cosmopolitanism (Beck 2006; Kendall et al. 2009; Skrbis and Woodward, 2013) to describe how individuals relate to globalization, in particular, by analysing migratory flows and voluntary mobility, the pervasiveness of global media, and public awareness of global risks. However, this concept has rarely been used to understand cultural consumption practices and patterns (Sassatelli 2012). While it has been the subject of theoretical discussion, aesthetic cosmopolitanism remains largely unexplored from an empirical perspective (Hannerz 1990; Urry 1995), save for a handful of qualitative studies (Regev 2013; Bookman 2013) and quantitative analyses based on the secondary exploitation of survey data, devoid of an original focus on the subject (Coulangeon 2017). Certain studies have argued that aesthetic cosmopolitanism is a product of the transformation of aesthetic classifications , resulting from the growing diversity of social groups and the shifting boundaries that these groups establish to differentiate themselves (DiMaggio 1987, 1992). Others have suggested that a new form of multicultural capital implies a certain openness to cultural diversity (Ollivier 2008), more frequently observed among the upper classes (Khan 2011).

The concept of aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism will be used in this volume to go beyond the internationalization of consumption patterns and to analyse the shifting preferences, knowledge, and imaginaries that stem from cultural consumption and which have an impact on individual understanding of ethno-national alterity. The existing research is usually careful to separate aesthetic cosmopolitanism from its cultural variant, associating the former with a taste for alterity and the latter with an understanding of alterity, arguing that the former refers to consumption, strictly speaking, whereas the later encompasses intercultural and interpersonal contact and exchange (Cicchelli 2016). The uniqueness of the approach presented in this volume is that it views acts of cultural consumption as opportunities for contact (either virtual or mediated) and takes into consideration not only cultural behaviours but also cultural imaginaries, thus elaborating an aesthetico-cultural approach. This approach is used to analyse globalization as a transnational cultural process that does not erase local cultures, but transmutes a sentiment of national cultural uniqueness through the emergence of an aesthetic and cultural openness to alterity (Regev 2007).

In this context, the mode of consumption (e.g., in the original language or not), as well as stated preferences (for foreign or national products and artworks) are the key to describing how individuals appropriate the products of cultural globalization. It is useful here to refer to Pierre Bourdieu’s (2002) early works on consumption (in particular, to his analysis of peasants in the Béarn region, where he describes how one’s manner of eating matters as much as what one is eating), as well as to Michel de Certeau’s concept of the arts of doing (1984), adapting both of these approaches to the context of the globalization of culture. In so doing, we distinguish what ensues from the structural effects of globalization—it is nearly impossible for a young person in France to have completely escaped the reach of K-pop (e.g., Gangnam Style), international pop music (Shakira), or Japanese manga (Naruto)—from an intentionally cosmopolitan orientation and appropriation.

At the individual level, aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism must thus be seen as a a cultural disposition involving an intellectual and aesthetic stance of ‘openness’ towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially those from different ‘nations’ (Szerszynski and Urry 2002, p. 468). Such cosmopolitanism manifests itself in curiosity and interest towards products and practices whose aesthetic and cultural codes are situated outside of an individual’s national aesthetic canon and cultural corpus. These foreign cultural products and practices can sometimes have localized connotations, whether these draw on pre-existing traditions or are invented from scratch, and their circulation can lead to hybridization with local cultural forms.

In examining young people’s taste for the world (Cicchelli and Octobre forthcoming), our work focuses on the everyday consumption of cultural products by youth (media consumption taken in the broadest sense). We have therefore excluded the more exceptional forms of cultural participation, such as going to the theatre, visiting museums, or playing a musical instrument. Global media products are a unifying factor in the sense that all young people are exposed to global cultural flows, but this exposure is in no way a natural or neutral phenomenon. The role of the media is, in fact, doubly central: first, because cultural media industries reformulate cultural legitimacy , especially among young people, as evidenced by the emergence of the sériephilia , or a passion for television series (Glévarec 2012); and second, because digital technology and the internet have emphasized the various points of connection between groups and cultures, as well as multiplied the media’s impact on individual and collective imaginaries, as shown by Arjun Appadurai (1996).

As a result, we shall sidestep more traditional analyses framed in terms of cultural legitimacy and distinction, as well as classic interpretations of cosmopolitanism broadly based on an opposition between the elites and the masses. In the sociology of cultural practices, discussions of legitimacy are often based on the opposition between high culture (museums, theatre, literature) and low culture (television in particular). Bourdieu’s (1984) theory presupposes a cultural hierarchy of cultural practices and aesthetic genres, which establishes a dichotomy between rare, perhaps exceptional, practices and widespread consumption—this hierarchy merely reflecting the existing social hierarchy. In studies on cosmopolitanism, we likewise often find a cleavage between those who argue that cosmopolitanism is the hallmark of the elites, applying primarily to cases of exceptional mobility and contact with otherness—such as opportunities to study abroad, overseas job transfers, and voluntary expatriation—and those for whom cosmopolitanism can also be seen in the everyday life of ordinary folks who are not a part of the transnational, intellectual bourgeoisie (Calhoun 2002; Lamont and Aksartova 2002; Skrbis and Woodward 2007).

There are four distinct reasons for which we have decided to focus on everyday consumption choices. First of all, the consumption of movies, television series, music, books, magazines, and websites is widespread: it informs most young people’s relationship to culture, and consequently, their view of the world, whereas their attendance at cultural performances of various kinds has a much more marginal—albeit still pertinent—impact on their openness to the world. Second, acts of cultural consumption are in no way banal or trivial, as they engage young people both emotionally and cognitively (Jost 2007). Third, widespread quotidian consumption does not erase social inequalities and national variations (Kuipers and de Kloet 2009), as suggested by Dick Hebdige (1990) when he argues that most people experience some form of cosmopolitanism in their everyday lives. And finally, the cultural flows stemming from certain countries are representations of their geopolitical relations, which some authors have termed soft power (Iwabuchi 2002). We shall attempt to determine the truth in all of this, seeking to define youth aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism in an era of cultural globalization and to identify the factors governing this form of cosmopolitanism and its means of implementation.

3 A Doubly Unique Protocol

There are disappointingly few studies, in particular, quantitative ones,⁸ which examine how a population appropriates foreign cultural products. To address this lack, a unique protocol was developed (see Annex 1) that deals exclusively with the question of cosmopolitanism and combines:

(1)

An in-person survey conducted in France in 2015 among a representative sample of 1605 young adults aged 18 to 29 years, specially designed to understand how young people appropriate internationally disseminated cultural products (Annex 2). The survey included 157 questions on five main themes:

(a)

Media consumption included: movies, television series, television programming (other than series), recorded music, radio programming, video games, comic books/graphic novels, magazines, books, websites, blogs, and social media. For each category, the proportion of products according to national origin, preferences for consumption in the language(s) of origin or French, and preferences for products according to their national origin were specified, as well as the frequency of consumption and preference for specific genres;

(b)

Aesthetic and cultural imaginaries across three dimensions: degree of familiarity, stated preference (like/dislike), and value attributed according to different value registers, ranging from the local to the global and the individual to the universal scale. These imaginaries included global icons such as artists and monuments but also (for the sake of comparison) historical, scientific, and sports figures;

(c)

Language skills : languages used, languages of origin for the young person in question and his/her immediate family;

(d)

Mobility of the young person in question and his/her immediate family, either real or desired, and feelings of belonging;

(e)

Interest in other countries.

To these five themes, we added socio-demographic data about the young person in question, as his/her parents and spouse, if applicable.

(2)

Second, interviews were conducted with 43 young people of the same age (Annex 3), in order to create a narrative that ties together the themes addressed in the questionnaire and explores with greater nuance the cognitive and emotional dynamics related to cultural consumption in the context of cultural globalization. The reflexivity and open, contradictory, and reversible nature of the cosmopolitan relationship to the world of youth today was analysed in-depth, thanks to this protocol, which includes:

(a)

A description of cultural repertoires and forms of appropriation (in particular regarding linguistic choices);

(b)

An analysis of various global imaginaries (attraction/repulsion towards certain countries and cultural regions), feelings of affiliation and belonging;

(c)

An investigation of several important global themes (risks, international solidarity, ethics).

These interviews were conducted between 2012 and 2015 with young individuals who were primarily from urban areas, but from a variety of social backgrounds.

Bibliography

Amselle, Jean-Loup. 2001. Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 2006. A Cosmopolitan Vision. London: Polity.

Bookman, Sonia. 2013. Branded Cosmopolitanisms: Global Coffee Brands and the Co-creation of ‘Cosmopolitan Cool’. Cultural Sociology 7 (1): 56–72.Crossref

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

———. 2002. Le bal des célibataires. Paris: Seuil.

Calhoun, Craig. 2002. The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism. South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): 869–897.Crossref

Canclini, Nestor Garcia. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Castells, Manuel. 2010. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cicchelli, Vincenzo. 2016. Pluriel et commun. Sociologie d’un monde cosmopolite. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Cicchelli, Vincenzo, and Sylvie Octobre. 2013. A Cosmopolitan Perspective of Globalization: Cultural and Aesthetic Consumption Among Young People. Study of Changing Societies: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Focus 3 (7): 3–23.

———. Forthcoming. Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism: A New Kind of ‘Good Taste’ Among French Youth. In Cosmopolitanism, Markets and Consumption. A Critical Global Perspective, ed. Julie Emontspool and Ian Woodward. London: Palgrave.

Coulangeon, Philippe. 2011. Les métamorphoses de la légitimité culturelle, Inégalités culturelles dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Grasset.

———. 2017. Cultural Openness as an Emerging form of Capital in Contemporary France. Cultural Sociology 11 (2): 145–164.Crossref

DiMaggio, Paul. 1987. Classification in Art. American Sociological Review 52 (4): 440–455.Crossref

———. 1992. Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera and the Dance, 1900–1940. In Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michèle Lamont and Michel Fournier, 21–57. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Donnat, Olivier. 1994. Les Français face à la culture, de l’exclusion à l’éclectisme. Paris: Éditions La Découverte.

Flichy, Patrice. 2010. Le sacre de l’amateur, sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique. Paris: Seuil.

Glévarec, Hervé. 2012. La sériephilie. Sociologie d’un attachement culturel. Paris: Ellipses.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. Theory, Culture and Society 7 (2–3): 237–251.Crossref

———. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hebdige, Dick. 1990. Fax to the Future. Marxism Today, January, 18–23.

Hennion, Antoine. 2015. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. London: Routledge.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. From Western Gaze to Global Gaze: Japanese Cultural Presence in Asia. In Global Culture. Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane, 256–273. New York: Nabuko Kawashima and Kenichi Kawasaki.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge.

Jost, François. 2007. Le culte du banal. De Duchamp à la télé-réalité. Paris: CNRS Éditions.

Kendall, Gavin, et al. 2009. The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Crossref

Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kuipers, Giselinde, and Jeroen de Kloet. 2009. Banal Cosmopolitanism and The Lord of the Rings: The Limited Role of National Differences in Global Media Consumption. Poetics 37 (2): 99–118.Crossref

Lahire, Bernard. 2004. La culture des individus. Paris: Éditions La Découverte.

Lamont, Michèle, and Sada Aksartova. 2002. Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms. Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries Among Working-Class Men. Theory Culture Society 19 (1): 1–25.Crossref

Martel, Frédéric. 2010. Mainstream. Enquête sur cette culture qui plaît à tout le monde. Paris: Flammarion.

Ollivier, Michèle. 2008. Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical and Indifferent. Poetics 36 (2–3): 120–147.Crossref

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2009. Globalization and Culture. Global Mélange. New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publisher.

Robertson, Roland. 1995. Glocalisation: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity. In Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, 23–44. London: Sage.

Sassatelli, Monica. 2012. Festivals, Museums, Exhibitions. Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in the Cultural Public Sphere. In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. by Gerard Delanty, 232–244. London: Routledge.

Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. 2007. The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness. The Sociological Review 55 (4): 730–747.Crossref

———. 2013. Cosmopolitanism. Uses of the Idea. London: Sage.Crossref

Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. 2002. Cultures of Cosmopolitanism. Sociological Review 50: 461–481.Crossref

Regev, Motti. 2007. Ethno-national Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Made from Within. Cultural Sociology 1 (3): 317–341.Crossref

———. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Ritzer, George. 1993. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Ritzer, George, and Allan Liska. 1997. ‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’. In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry, 96–109. London: Routledge.

Ritzer, George, and Todd Stillman. 2003. Assessing McDonaldization, Americanization and Globalization. In Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization, ed. Ulrich Beck, Natan Sznaider, and Rainer Winter, 23–44. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press.

Tomlinson, John. 2003. Globalization and Cultural Identity. In The Global Transformations Reader, ed. David Held et al., 269–278. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Urry, John. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge.

Footnotes

1

An American medieval fantasy television drama that is an adaptation of George R. R. Martin ’s series of fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire , broadcast on HBO since 2011. The critically acclaimed series has received many awards, including the dubious honour of becoming the most illegally downloaded show.

2

The hero’s name in the eponymous manga series written and illustrated by Masahi Kishimoto , which recounts the adventures of a teenager who seeks to become the Hokage, that is, the protector and greatest shinobi of his village.

3

As of September 2017.

4

A series of historical action adventure video games created and edited by the French company Ubisoft .

5

A French electronic music group, founded in 1993, which helped to create the French Touch style of French house music.

6

David Guetta is a French DJ, record producer, remixer, and songwriter, who started djing when he was a teenager in the 1980s. A global icon of French house music, David Guetta wrote the official song for the UEFA Euro 2016.

7

A series of seven fantasy novels written by J. K. Rowling and published between 1997 and 2007, which chronicles the life of a young wizard named Harry Potter. The series achieved worldwide success and gave rise to eight movies, as well as a number of other derived products (video games, fan fiction, etc.).

8

The Eurobarometer survey Cultural access and participation thus concluded that, for the general population, certain forms of consumption have become internationalized—in particular, television and books (about one-third). Cultural access and participation, Eurobarometer, 2013. http://​ec.​europa.​eu/​public_​opinion/​archives/​ebs/​ebs_​399_​fact_​fr_​en.​pdf. Access on June 2016.

Part IPart I

Configurations of a Taste for the World

Introduction to Part I: Beyond the Internationalization of Cultural Consumption Patterns

As is defined in this volume, aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism is the contemporary juvenile standard of consumption. Young people primarily experience otherness through the consumption of foreign cultural products; moreover, it is considered in good taste to boast of one’s diverse personal interests, even if, in reality, the diversity of products consumed is, at times, relatively limited.

In this text, aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism is broken down into two types: openness to foreign cultural products and openness to global imaginaries. The first is examined by considering the proportion of products by national origin; linguistic preferences for French versus the original language of production; and stated preferences for products according to their national origin. The second is analysed using a list of national and international artists and monuments to obtain information on three different aspects: degree of familiarity; likes and dislikes; the attribution of value to artists and monuments according to various value registers: the aesthetic register (beauty, genius); the cultural register (defining one’s vision of the world); the national register (representative of a country); and the universal register (belonging to human heritage). By looking at the choices made with regards to forms of consumption and the aesthetic value awarded according to varying registers, we are thus able to simultaneously measure the degree of internationalization of cultural repertoires and imaginaries, based on the consumption of foreign products and taste for authentic mode of appropriation, familiarity with and preferences for certain artists and monuments, and the strength of these imaginaries in terms of appreciation/rejection.

The three chapters that follow examine aesthetic and cultural openness, first looking at consumption (Chap. 2), and then, at imaginaries (Chap. 3). We shall examine whether all cultural products encourage the same kind of openness to others and how artistic and cultural imaginaries help individuals to fashion their world view. We shall then investigate whether the far-reaching power of American cultural industries means that all other world views have been eliminated. Finally, we shall describe aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism as a continuum of configurations (Chap. 4).

© The Author(s) 2018

Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie OctobreAesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French YouthConsumption and Public Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66311-1_2

2. The Morphology of Cultural Consumption Repertoires

Vincenzo Cicchelli¹  and Sylvie Octobre¹

(1)

GEMASS, CNRS/University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France

A number of different studies have illustrated the growing internationalization of youth cultural consumption patterns over the past several decades. Since the 1960s, English-language music has played an important role in youth culture , a trend that has only become more pronounced. According to the periodic survey conducted by the French Ministry of Culture (Pratiques culturelles des Français), in 1998, 50% of individuals aged 15–29 said that they liked international pop music (a category largely dominated by English-language music); in 2008, 55% made the same statement, making international pop music the most listened-to genre among young people (Donnat 1999, 2009). A similar phenomenon can be observed with regard to cinema: young people today are one of the first generations to express a preference for American films; they are, likewise, huge fans of American television series. Even reading has not escaped this trend: the results of the Enfance des loisirs study (Octobre et al. 2010), which looked at reading preferences among 11–17-year-olds, revealed that youngsters overwhelmingly preferred Anglo-American books, Harry Potter leading the pack, followed by a number of Asian titles, especially manga.

Despite being the result of studies that were not focused on cosmopolitanism , these findings invite us to look more closely at the growing internationalization of cultural consumption patterns. We shall examine the nature and limits of openness to foreign cultural production, in terms of consumption repertoires and preferences (foreign or domestic) and modes of consumption (in the original language or not). In doing so, we shall be careful to distinguish the structural effects of globalization (which mean that almost everyone is forced into contact with products from all corners of the globe) from individual openness to or rejection of others that is the intentional result of consumption patterns. These three indicators shall allow us to describe young individuals’ curiosity and interest towards foreign aesthetics—or, on the contrary, their preference for national cultural products.

1 The Globalization of Culture

The globalization of culture has the potential to put young people in contact with products and artworks from a wide variety of backgrounds, thanks in particular to globalized cultural industries , as well as networks, which are transnational by nature.

1.1 Consumption of National and Foreign Products

Youth media consumption patterns have largely become internationalized (Table 2.1), especially with regard to television series, movies, recorded music, and video games. However, young people still tend to prefer national products when reading, watching other television programming, or listening to the radio; in the case of comic books, this national preference can at least be partially explained by the presence of the rich Franco-Belgian tradition of bandes dessinées .

Table 2.1

Distribution of cultural consumption patterns according to national origin

Sample: All the young individuals interviewed

Note for the reader: 14% of individuals aged 18–29 exclusively watch foreign TV series, 54% primarily watch foreign TV series, 15% watch an equal number of foreign and French series, 5% primarily watch French TV series, 6% exclusively watch French TV series and 6% do not watch TV series at all

As a result, only 12% of young people do not watch foreign TV series (6% not watching any TV series and 6% only watching French TV series)

As for social media, this figure was calculated based on the proportion of friends/contacts living in France or abroad. With regard to websites and blogs, this figure was calculated based on whether the websites consulted were in French or a foreign language

However, the most frequent mode of cultural consumption among French youth still takes place in French (Table 2.2). When individuals consume a large number of foreign cultural products, the majority of these are nonetheless consumed primarily in French (in dubbed version for movies and TV series, in translation for books). Let us look, for example, at Nazim,¹ who loves Naruto, but does not speak Japanese. He looks for scans of the manga online:

I read the scans, in fact these are chapters that are published in Japan and Japanese people scan the pages to share them with the rest of the world, and afterwards some other people translate them into French, which means that we’re super behind compared to the Japanese version, because there’s a huge lag between publication in Japan and publication in France, I think we’re about a full year behind and it’s just not possible to get the rest of the story, you have to wait a whole year, it’s just impossible, so I read the scans.

Table 2.2

Language of consumption

Sample: All the young people interviewed

Note for the reader: 54% of individuals aged 18–29 years old watch TV series exclusively in French

The same applies to American television series, which are translated the night that they come out by enthusiastic fans in the United States, and then, published the next day on the internet.

For recorded music , the situation is slightly different, because there is no perfect overlap between the country of origin and the language used: some French musicians and bands sing in English, while many African, Canadian, and Belgian musicians sing in French. Although one-fourth of French youth listen to music exclusively in French, that does not mean that the music itself was produced in France. Sylvain² is quick to point out this difference when describing his eclectic musical tastes, starting with a broad consumption of mainstream artists (he mentions David Guetta for electronic music, as well as Kyo ³ and the French group Skip the Use ,⁴ which sings in English), but then, branches out into French-language reggae such as Tiken Jah Fakoly .⁵

As for Tiken Jah Fakoly , I don’t know if they’re African or Jamaican. They sing in French but otherwise, I’m not sure, I haven’t really thought about it. But they do sing in French, and they talk a little bit about Africa and the current situation there.

Unsurprisingly, the results show that English is the foreign language most frequently used to consume cultural products: 91% of foreign music consumption occurs at least partially in English, while 43% of movies, 38% of TV series, 15% of magazines and newspapers, 11% of other television programming, 11% of books, 4% of radio programming, and 4% of comic books are likewise consumed in English. In addition, English is also the primary language of communication and exchange for young people aged 18–29 years old when engaging in their leisure activities, since 30% of them use it to consult websites, 24% to use social media, and 21% to play video games. More interesting, perhaps, are the dynamics of migration revealed by the use of languages other than English: 7% of young people listen to music in Arabic (2% watch TV in Arabic and use Arabic on social media platforms), while 6% of them watch movies in Spanish, 3% in German, and 2% in Italian. In addition, our findings reveal the growing role of non-Western cultural products: 5% of young individuals watch films and 3% watch TV series in Japanese.

1.2 Different Combinations in Individual Cultural Repertoires

In the majority of cases, youth cultural repertoires combine national and foreign cultural products,⁶ and these combinations vary in terms of volume and composition. Less than 2% of young people stated that they only consumed foreign products across all or almost all of the 11 categories of consumption considered (which is approximately the same proportion of young people who stated that they consumed no or almost no foreign products at all). Moreover, the distribution of those individuals who consume foreign products reveals that individual openness is witnessed in four to seven consumption practices on average, thus allowing for significant behavioural variability. Regional (or local) products occupy a marginal position in these combinations: 11% of young individuals stated that they listened to regional music, 4% watch regional television channels, and 3% listen to regional radio programming.

These combinations are not all equiprobable: generally speaking, there are more young people who exclusively favour national content than young people who exclusively consume foreign cultural products—except in the case of television series and video games. Moreover, the consumption of foreign cultural content is not systematically correlated with the most engaged consumers, as often suggested by sociological studies, especially those drawing connections between omnivorism, youth, and aesthetico-cultural openness (Peterson 1992; Peterson and Kern 1996). If we