Romain Laufer

The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle of freedom which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism.

La confiance devient une préoccupation centrale dans un monde dominé par l'incertitude. Mettre la confiance en question c'est tenter de dépasser ce que peut avoir d'incantatoire et de quasi magique l'évocation de cette notion rassurante et familière. C'est accepter de se tourner vers les interrogations qu'elle suscite tant au niveau théorique qu'au niveau pratique. Successivement seront traitées la question de la définition de la confiance, la question du lien entre confiance et institutions (à travers les exemples du droit, de la science et de la monnaie), la question du lien entre confiance et conventions (à travers l'étude de la façon dont elle se manifeste dans la vie des organisations) et enfin la question éminemment pratique des moyens de production de la confiance. L'élucidation d'une notion aussi complexe exige une approche pluridisciplinaire.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:New Rhetoric's Empire:Pragmatism, Dogmatism, and SophismRomain LauferPragmatism vs. RationalismThere are at least two reasons to devote some attention to sophism when dealing with the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the context of Franco-American intellectual exchanges. The first reason is that it lies at the very origin of classical philosophy which could be described as resulting directly from the way in which Plato and Aristotle succeeded in separating the realm of rhetoric from the realm of philosophy. The second reason arises out of the way in which Durkheim, the founder of French academic sociology, thought it necessary to establish a clear distinction between sociology and pragmatism. This was done in a course given at the Sorbonne during the academic year 1913–14. The course could be considered a direct answer to the lectures on pragmatism given by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1906–7 (Durkheim 1955).From the very beginning of his talk, Durkheim expresses an extremely ambivalent point of view. On the one hand, pragmatism, better than any other doctrine, allows one to feel the necessity of reforming or renovating the type of "traditional rationalism" that dominated the French intellectual atmosphere of the time. On the other hand, it represents a real threat for this same rationalist tradition. Is it not a declaration of war that pragmatism launches on rationalism when William James writes that "against [End Page 326] rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and militant" (1975, 32)? In the face of this attack Durkheim declares that what is at stake are the very foundations of French culture: "Our whole French culture is essentially based on rationalism. Here the eighteenth century lives on. Thus, a radical negation of rationalism would constitute a danger: it would imply a complete disruption of our national culture. The whole French spirit would have to be transformed if the form of irrationalism that pragmatism represents were to be admitted" (1955, 28). Durkheim adds that this threat is not limited to the French tradition: "Not only our culture but the whole of the philosophical tradition has been, since the very beginnings of philosophical speculation—apart from a single exception that will be dealt with later—of a rationalist tendency. Therefore it is toward the disruption of all this tradition that one would have to proceed if pragmatism were valid" (1955, 28).Durkheim insists that what pragmatism tends to destroy is the "cult of truth," the fact that there are judgments that are necessary, which he will allude to throughout his analysis as corresponding to a dogmatic conception of truth that is repeatedly criticized by William James. James writes in his lectures on pragmatism that "rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions[;]... objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be the absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality.... Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!" (1975, 38).This allows Durkheim to declare that by stating that the human mind is free in front of the truth, pragmatism approaches the single exception he mentioned, namely, sophism, which in a similar manner negated truth. This connection is not arbitrary: it is avowed by the pragmatists themselves (1955, 28–29). Thus F. C. S. Schiller proclaims himself a "Protagorean" and recalls the axiom that "man is the measure of all things."Thus the debate between rationalism and pragmatism—between, according to Durkheim, a French philosophical tradition characterized by its link with a Cartesian dogmatic form of rationalism and an American philosophy characterized by its link with pragmatism—can be seen as the continuation of the debate between Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and the Sophists, on the other, at the origin of Western philosophy. Moreover, Durkheim tells us that the resurgence of the debate between pragmatism and philosophy corresponds to a historical transformation that affects the whole Western world. Pragmatism is becoming the only and dominant philosophy of the time. The central trait of this intellectual orientation is its [End Page 327] focus on action, a focus it shares with sociology itself: both are "daughters of...

The expression, ‘the culture of the artificial’ results from the confusion between nature and culture, when nature mingles with culture to produce the ‘artificial’ and science becomes ‘the science of the artificial’. Artificial intelligence can thus be defined as the ultimate expression of the crisis affecting the very foundation of the system of legitimacy in Western society, i.e. Reason, and more precisely, Scientific Reason. The discussion focuses on the emergence of the culture of the artificial and the radical forms of pragmatism, sophism and marketing from a French philosophical perspective. The paper suggests that in the postmodern age of the ‘the crisis of the systems of legitimacy’, the question of social acceptability of any action, especially actions arising out of the application of AI, cannot be avoided