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A Brief Theory of the Captation

of Publics
Understanding the market with Little Red
Riding Hood

Franck Cochoy

One sees here that some children,

Particularly young girls,
Beautiful, well formed, and nice,
Make the mistake of listening to all kinds of people
And it is not surprising
That there are so many who are devoured by the Wolf.

I say wolf, yet wolves are not all alike;

There are those who are quite charming,
Quietly spoken, without malice and without anger,
Civil, obliging and pleasant,
Who follow the young maidens
Right up to the houses, and the lanes;
But alas! who does not know that these sweet-talking wolves
Are the most dangerous ones.
(Perrault, 1991: 260)

T
HE NEW economic sociology has had the great merit of demonstrating
how much economic action depends on relational forms (Granovetter,
1985). Yet, what are these connections and how are they formed? Is
exchange always dependent on social ties that are external and prior to it,
or does it not itself contribute to the construction of bonds which are proper
to it? In order to understand economic action, would it not be an advantage
to study the sociality which is established in the course of relations amongst

Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 24(78): 203223
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084704
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204 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

strangers and to invert the sense of the explanation so that economic activity
itself can be thought as manipulating the bonds and producing them? In
answering such questions, one must be interested in the possibility that the
actors of exchange put into place relational techniques which are supposed
to establish a new connection between them. Such a direction for research
joins up with works that pay attention to the definition of the social as an
art of association (Latour, 2005), to the performative character of economic
knowledge and management (Callon, 1998), but also to the technologization
of market relations (Callon et al., 2007).
Here we propose to observe the way in which an individual or collec-
tive actor goes about having a hold on their publics. More precisely, it is a
matter of studying the actants and the dispositifs (devices) which allow the
opposite poles of the organization and the market, the institution and public
space to be brought together, and of trying to understand their modes of
articulation. We aim to show how and by what means a regulated context,
dominated by management or administrative procedures, attempts to exert
a hold on these less understood, more fleeting, more fluid, collectivities that
we know as citizens, users, electors, buyers, consumers, clients (Cochoy,
2005). To do this, we shall focus upon the study of a central figure of
relational work, which we call the captation of the public. By captation (a
French word which has no satisfactory English equivalent), we mean the
ensemble of the operations which try to exert a hold over, or attract to
oneself, or retain those one has attracted.
We shall see that the captation of publics consists in putting to work
dispositifs which attempt to profit from dispositions that one attributes to
persons in order to shift their trajectories, to remove them from the external
space and exercise control over them. The example of the different modal-
ities of captation or the sting put in place by the wolf in Little Red Riding
Hood will enable us to reflect upon the machinery specific to these dis-
positifs, but also to sketch a typology of these dispositifs as they are
encountered in the market and in public space today.
The Captation of Publics: The Articulation of Dispositifs and
Dispositions

Captation: An Attempt at a Definition

What is captation? Given the absence of literature, and before proceeding,
we shall have recourse to the sensible method of starting with several prior
meanings of the French word captation: to the official meaning of embez-
zlement, which is included in the notion of captation dhritage (misappro-
priation of inheritance), one can add other older meanings such as captatio
benevolentiae, that figure of rhetoric which consists in capturing the
sympathy of an audience by playing on empathy and appeal to indulgence,
and a whole series of more current synonyms such as seduction, adduction,
capturing the interest, recruitment, encirclement, securing loyalty, framing,
derivation, interception, even the slang capter (to receive), which means to
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 205

understand, to get the drift of ones interlocutor. In the background of capta-

tion and its possible substitutes, one can discern the will to encircle, to
surround, to enrol, to deflect, to catch, to include or to seduce users, clients,
consumers, in short, all the likely actors from whom money can be made by
captation, but a priori outside their control. From this point of view, and
amongst all the synonyms, seduction is doubtless one of the best, to the
extent that this word designates the affective, symbolic and cultural mech-
anisms in the process, beyond rational forms of gain, while placing the
emphasis on the deviation from the path, on the deviation inherent in this
kind of operation.
The disordered collection of terms which circumscribe the semantic
field of captation enables one to target what is fundamentally at stake in the
notion, namely, that it is a matter of having a hold over something that one
does not, or rather not yet, completely control. In captation, one thus meets
a figure which applies to hunting, to war, to love, in politics or concerning
the market: the care and the effort put into establishing a bond without any
guarantee of succeeding. Captation appropriately finds its origin in the
liminal recognition of the flight of publics, of the elusive character of
demand, of the growing opaqueness of what citizens expect. Capter, to lure
to oneself, is thus to paradoxically accept the possibility of strangeness, of
departure or indifference, and even to allow ones target freedom: one has
a greater chance of holding on to ones prey or game, ones mistress or lover,
a client or an elector, if the latter has the feeling that she is able to leave,
to be unconcerned, to pass by. Captation supposes an opening, mastery
implies dispossession; this is the paradox on which a whole series of devices
for the captation of customers has relied for quite some time: the historical
innovation of satisfaction or return (Strasser, 1989), the backgrounding of
the seller, the setting up of no purchase exit zones, automatic entrances
and exits in stores, etc.
The punter comes more readily to market the more she feels she can
emerge incognito: in shops where the seller awaits like a spider at the edge
of its web, one hesitates to enter. One learns thus that the functioning of the
free market supposes its scrupulous orchestration: one must vigorously
supply the means to allow flight, to ensure free movement, anonymity, to
reduce the importance of engagements. There is no contradiction in the
expression management of the market (Cochoy, 1998): much as at the
macro level the market needed the state to be instituted (Polanyi, 1971), it
needs management to exist at the micro level (and to exist as a free environ-
ment, in which one contrives the absence of organization). After the illusion
of laissez-faire that liberals hold dear, after the alternative between making
something oneself (faire) and subcontracting (faire faire) introduced by the
new institutional economy, it is perhaps a matter of understanding that
marketing action consists equally in mobilizing the art of making free
market behaviour (faire laissez-faire) in staging very tightly the freedom of
actor while at the same time respecting it deeply. It follows that one must
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206 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

have recourse to captation (the sting), in the sense of persuasion (rhetoric)

and seduction (erotic), of the mobilization of speech and of body.
At this stage of our account, an important question emerges: does
dealing with captation amount to another way of speaking about manipu-
lation? In a sense yes, if one understands manipulation to mean what Jean-
Leon Beauvois and Robert-Vincent Joule (1987) indicate in their wonderful
Petit trait de manipulation lusage des honntes gens (Little Treatise on
Manipulation for Honest Folk), that is to say, in short, all the techniques,
all the knowledges, all the stratagems which enable one to bring someone
to freely make a decision that she would not have made had she known from
the beginning all the data upon which it is based. As an example, one could
cite the technique of a-foot-in-the-door, which consists of:
. . . extracting from the subject an unproblematic and not costly conduct,
clearly in a context of free choice. . . . Once this preparatory conduct has been
secured, a request is explicitly made to the subject inviting her to produce a
new conduct, more costly, and which stood little chance of being sponta-
neously secured. . . . The effect of foot-in-the-door translates . . . an effect of
preserving a prior decision, for subjects committed to a first freely chosen
conduct accept more easily a later request compatible with the earlier one,
although obviously more costly. (Beauvois and Joule, 1987: 98, 99)

To illustrate this technique of foot-in-the-door, one can cite the classic

strategy of the car salesman who promises a significant rebate on the cost
of buying a car, only to reveal at the end of negotiations that the percent-
age mentioned only applies to part of the new car. If one follows the authors
theory, the chances are high that the buyer will continue with her initial
choice, in spite of the disclosure of this unexpected condition, because of
the strong commitment inscribed in the spiral of negotiation. The profusion
of figures of manipulation provided by Beauvois and Joule allows us to see
the combination of a calculation which quickly becomes a habit, which gets
stuck in an initial option and shows itself unable to integrate surprises that
emerge along the different stages of the process of decision-making.
But if, in line with our interest, captation encompasses well enough
this kind of cognitive mechanism, it seems that it cannot be reduced to it
in any way. In fact, the term is appropriate in designating not only manipu-
lation as understood by Beauvois and Joule, but at least three other situ-
ations and modalities of relations to publics which are not covered by that
notion: to begin with, captation lets us apprehend techniques of instant
engagement, which exclude the sequential processes the authors deal with.
Moreover, the notion of captation enables us to address situations where
reciprocal manipulation by actors in play is at work.1 Finally, and above all,
this idea of captation has the great advantage of also designating relations
of attraction independent of, or even alien to, the risk that the target may
escape that is associated with the idea of manipulation: to entrap is not
necessarily to manipulate; for example, to respond favourably to infor-
mation, an advert, a commercial offer (to be captured) does not necessarily
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 207

proceed from an error, a mistake in understanding or a cognitive imperfec-

tion, as is implicitly assumed by the notion of manipulation, but can result
from the likely neutral assessment between a ready-to-choose dispositif
(perhaps deceiving, disappointing or unsuitable, but which improves
comfort and the period of decision) and an independent personal choice
(perhaps more adequate, more exciting or personal, but very costly in invest-
ment of time and thinking, and itself potentially fallible too) (Barrey et al.,
2000).
The Two Supports of Captation
Given that there is no captation without any ad hoc devices, captation has
this particular advantage, specific to it, which is that of demonstrating better
than any other object that dispositifs (techniques) maintain a very close
relation to dispositions (social).
The emergence (or rather the return)2 of the notion of dispositifs in
sociological literature owes a lot to the convergent research of anthropolo-
gists of science and technology and of specialists in situated/distributed
cognition who, in their own way during the last 25 years, have contributed
to do justice to the role of objects in action (Latour, 1996a), to show the
extent to which the arrangement (agencement) of material elements that are
sometimes commonplace, such as plans, sketches or lists, can play a central
role in the configuration of human activity (Hutchins, 1994; Lave, 1988;
Norman, 1988).3 The study of dispositions is older and has aimed to show,
for instance under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, the extent to which the
incorporation of schemes of action inherited from practice shapes conduct,
conditions the reproduction of ways of doing, being or thinking, by way of
the mediation of the habitus, that structured-structurizing structure gener-
ative of practice (Bourdieu, 1998).4
These two traditions have barely crossed each others paths: while
sociologists of objects never cease to speak of dispositifs (devices), soci-
ologists of the social only speak of dispositions. The two proposed models
seem even to exclude each other, as the expert discussion around the notion
of routine seems to show: the routine incorporated in a subject is shown as
opposed to the routine supported by things; the social subjectivist expla-
nation of circular conduct in terms of the theory of habitus is opposed to
the objectivist explanation, which grounds the repetition of action in the
material supports that are its foundation, as for example the green button
which one sees every day on ones photocopier and that commands the
gesture that puts in motion the photocopying (Suchman, 1987).
Yet the study of the operation of captation enables one to bring together
dispositifs and dispositions, by founding this rapprochement not on a theor-
etical argument, but on an empirical observation: as soon as one is inter-
ested in actions that aim to seduce/displace (capter) a public, one notices that
these actions usually find support in ad hoc dispositifs, the main character-
istic of which is to bring into play the dispositions that one connects (which
one assumes or which one attributes) to the targeted public. To illustrate this
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208 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

fact, I will start by invoking four examples of dispositifs of captation. These

examples will allow us to list some of the dispositions upon which particu-
lar dispositifs rely, but equally to begin to reflect upon the way in which
captation articulates these two notions, and what is to be made of this.
Dispositifs. Let us take an old example: that of the introduction of the
potato in France. In order to develop the use of a little-known product, the
agricultural engineer Parmentier had the idea not so much of commercial-
izing it but, on the contrary, of forbidding it and placing a deliberately inter-
mittently vigilant guard around it. Some curious robbers, taking advantage
of the lapses of the guards, soon enough stole the product to try it out; then
they went on to disseminate their impression and thus bring about the
generalization of the product. A modern variant of such a dispositif of
captation lies in the marketing policy which consists in selling at an artifi-
cially inflated price the product that one hopes to make popular, betting on
the effects of mechanisms of distinction (Bourdieu, 2002): wealthier people
are inclined to appropriate the scarcest goods, and the poorest are driven
to acquire the goods owned by the rich. Finally, let us mention two more
recent examples. The first case is that of a poster campaign for Siemens
mobile phones: in March 2001 the ads of this firm put their faith in slogans
like Spread love or Give in to temptation. The last example is that of
programmes for securing the loyalty of customers (Blanc, 2001; Barrey,
2004; Kjellberg and Liljenberg, 2003). This type of programme rests on the
expert combination of several dispositifs: for example, a registered card
entitles the customer to claim reductions, to obtain credit or have priority
accounts on leaving the store, but the same card gives the same store access
to information, to statistics and priority access to the customer, who then
receives offers targeted according to her shopping pattern. This exchange
of service then reinforces the double bind (Callon et al., 2001) of the
customer to her trademark and the latter to the customer.
The point that interests us here is this. Each of these dispositifs puts
to work a strategic use of dispositions: the first gambles on curiosity, the
second on the anxiety about distinction, the third on love and/or temptation,
the last on loyalty. These four examples thus show us that the sociology of
merchants is sometimes richer than that of economists or even sociologists:
there exists amongst market professionals a greater degree of calculation
and more information on the mechanisms of social action than in many trea-
tises in economy and sociology! These professionals play not only on the
price and thus on the anthropology of interest which economists value
or on belonging and thus on the ethnography of the habitus which sociol-
ogists hold dear but they rely also on a wider number and/or more subtle
cogs such as love, curiosity, temptation, loyalty, as Mallard (2007) found in
his study of consumerism. The latter, for instance, which appears a priori
to be closely related to habit, is on the contrary, considered by market actors
as an object which it is difficult to secure, requiring the instrumental and
managerial support of a whole series of relatively unreliable dispositifs
(Blanc, 2001). On the scene of the market, if one pays attention to the
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 209

incorporated schemes of action, this often happens in the sense of in-

corporated by, or schemes that are candidates for incorporation; in terms
of the market, incorporation, far from being a passive and spontaneous
mechanism for the absorption of the social, is the object of a whole theory
and practice of marketing work.
Dispositions. The opposition, the struggle between economy and
sociology has been much commented upon. Even so, it has been little
noticed how much each discipline has pursued a parallel effort to suppress,
each in its own way, human passions, in order to promote, on the one hand,
a model of the rationally interested actor, and on the other hand, a model
of the disciplined and habit-dependent actor. On the one side, Albert
Hirschman (2002) has brilliantly shown how liberal economy has gradually
managed to fold passions back into the single dimension of interest, to thus
form a foundation of calculation, to make conduct predictable, and to realize
the tour de force that amounts to the containment of the disorder of passions
while liberating oneself from the authority of older political and religious
guardianship. Similarly, one could show how much the kind of society
described by Norbert Elias (1975), as well as the sociology that Bourdieu
(1998) formalizes, have succeeded in folding conduct onto the single dimen-
sion of self-control (Elias) and of the habitus (Bourdieu), in order to form a
foundation for civil action, social belonging, and reflexive acts; equally, it
is a matter of making conduct predictable without having to propose any
other hypothesis except the existence of a linear mechanism for channelling
or incorporating schemes of action (if need be, reinforced by ad hoc insti-
tutions such as the school, the family or the state).
The problem posed by the empirical analysis of the market is thus
precisely the place of the subject and of his or her passions. The crucial
question is this: has the double vaccine of interest and habitus succeeded
in eradicating the virus of passions? The opposition between interest and
habitus is a sign of this potential failure: if there are two vaccines, is it not
because we are faced with having to combat at least two sources of infec-
tion? This means that we need to investigate the state of the subject, the
nature of the forces that could motivate her.
In fact, a brief observation of the market and of the world shows us
that what used to contain the passions no longer works. The double vaccine
of interest and habitus is increasingly less effective; everywhere around us
we see passions erupt; interest gives way to compassion, habit to phantasm,
civility to hubris, etc. Their mode of acting has become so mixed that
passions have mutated, they have become resistant: interest is opposed to
habit while habit undermines interest. It may well be that the coexistence
of habit and interests has become the fundamental driving force of the
market: marketing activity, on the side of supply as much as demand,
consists not only in looking for the best opportunities, but also to reduce
the cost of research and cognition, and thus to preserve standard and
stabilized solutions, even to delegate the exercise of ones rationality to tools
of calculation, dispositifs such as buying guides, or experts such as
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210 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

journalists of consumer associations who specialize in this delegation of

market rationality (Callon, 1998; Cochoy, 2002; Karpik, 2000; Mallard,
2007).
Captation functions as hinge for these two contradictory drives: the
captation of a clientele or a public plays strongly both on competition
captation assumes one allows the market to be open, free, accessible and
upon its suspension: to take things back to oneself, to keep and hold on to
ones customers. It is precisely this double action of pulling out and digging
in performed by captation which breaks up the two black boxes, the two
models, the two vaccines of calculation and habit, and sets free all the
cogwheels whose action they had halted: pleasure, self-esteem, envy, all
these passions so well analysed by 17th-century moralists and which at last
find their place in the marketplace.
In loosening these two constraints, the role of marketing dispositifs
is central. Contrary to what one had thought for a long time, the market
is not necessarily the best basis for interest: it is often in the interest of
traders to turn against interest! Operators in the market have for a long
time used pressure to remove their operations and their audience from
the dimension of calculation, displacing economic cognition onto the
register of quality (Karpik, 1989), or qualities (Callon et al., 2001), or
onto what I call qualculation, in order that competition be engaged not
on a suicidal reduction of prices for a given quality, but on a constant
redefinition of the appearance of a product, as the car market demon-
strates (Cochoy, 2002). In a symmetrical way, the dispositifs of the market
craftily misuse and mobilize the register of habit. The dispositifs misuse
habit because competitive techniques have always aimed to destroy belong-
ings and prior routines in order to capture a new clientele, which is often
the neighbours: but the marketing dispositifs also mobilize habits, since it
is equally a matter of doing everything possible to hold on to a clientele, to
secure its loyalty (Blanc, 2001), once it has been captured/seduced, in short
to inculcate habits.
These two symmetrical drives of interest for disinterestedness and of
propensity for change are inscribed in dispositifs that find support in a wide
of range of dispositions. I could mention weariness, which is the exact
antidote of habit, or curiosity, which is characterized by the surprising
propensity of each of us to forget oneself, to come out of oneself, to allow
oneself to be surprised. The whole of modern publicity has recognized the
force of these two springs of action, which has the great advantage of being
inscribed in individuals while allowing their ex-centredness.
Under the influence of practices for the management of markets, the
economy, cleansed of the passions which Hirschman (2002) described,
speaking about conditions specific to capitalism in its highest state, does
not quite correspond to that of today, for the latter is once again crossed by
plural passions and values. Similarly, the policed society which Elias
described is no longer like ours, because, to begin with, the forms of control
have become displaced away from the subject, namely, in technical devices
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 211

which increasingly free us from the burden of morality and discipline; for
example, hotel keys, weighted with a heavy appendage, that converts the
altruism one owes to the hotel keeper into egoism, turned towards the preser-
vation of our pockets (Latour, 1993). Furthermore, the former self-controlled
society is no longer ours because appeals to let oneself go, to throw away
caution and to become committed are increasingly frequent, as is shown by
the case of advertising appeals to unleash our passions and by the market-
ing of causes (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 1999): from now on we live as much
in a world of constraints, asceticism, savings, calculation and interest, as in
a world of temptation, pleasure, dream, but of altruism and social values
too.
Faced with this situation, the sociology of the market must evolve. The
recognition of the proliferation of dispositifs meant to incite a multiplicity
of dispositions should lead us to question the way current market sociology
utilizes this term. Generally the term disposition is only used to designate
conservative modalities of action. To use a Bourdieusian style, one never
ceases to be surprised by the (sociological) habits resulting from the incor-
poration of the model of the habitus, which leads one never to be surprised
by this surprising sociological world in which actors are never surprised,
but remain faithful to themselves in their square box. They live without
experiencing any weariness, curiosity or temptation to move out of such
confinement (except when they follow the one-dimensional logics of
distinction and struggle of places, which consist in sliding from one social
confinement to another, or rather to confirm the inescapable confinement in
the social order).
The habitual circumscription of dispositions by the tyranny of habits
probably owes a lot to the methodological routine which consists in avoiding
the observation of common sense and of spontaneous sociology. Yet, paying
the briefest attention to spontaneous sociologies indicates the extent to
which it is a mistake to spurn common sense: taking into account social
theories developed by actors themselves shows on the one hand that theories
have wider claims than the indexicalized routines of Garfinkel (1967), and
on the other hand that these spontaneous sociologies are extraordinarily
plural, as summarized in Latours formula: given a number of actants, one
has as many theories of action (Latour, 1996b).
Fortunately, the proliferation of these theories, particularly their
ability to performatively enact the economy, management and the market
(Callon, 1998), have ended up being noticed and triggering the emergence
of a whole series of coherent as well as convergent advances. The need for
actants today to act in a plurality of worlds has led Boltanski and Thvenot
(2006) to bring to light the argumentative capabilities of actors, and to show,
for instance, the extent to which people mobilize competences relating to
love or justice to extend their capacity for action, to reach a critical
consciousness and to justify themselves (Boltanski, 1990).
In the wake of this set of work, the assessment of the break-up of
sociology has radically changed: the troubling existence of a plurality of
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212 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

sociologies where previously one found a unique theory of the social is no

longer interpreted as a sign of crisis, but rather as an effect of the field:
once one accepts that each sociology is not trying to give an exogenous and
overarching account of the ensemble of conduct, but is trying to restore the
logic of action endogenous to the social world, one can regard theories of
the social as at once multiple, performed or performative, possessing their
own zone of validity, each located in actants and/or specific compartments
of the social (Latour, 2005). Thanks to this approach, one can now study the
competition and the combination of theories, and one can practise more fully
this relationalist sociology which Latour (1996b) has sketched.
However, the market and the operations of captation offer an appro-
priate observational site to study how the different logics of action combine
(Cochoy, 2004a). Because by definition it concerns the encounter of
different universes and actants, the marketing scene enables one to observe
the extent to which some people try to be more capable than others, or to
rely on the amplifying capacity of others to achieve their aim and/or to let
themselves be carried away. Finally, the market and its dispositifs of
captation enable one to study how those actants are coordinated with
variable ontologies that Latour (1996b) had discovered while examining
the vicissitudes of a failed technical project.
The market form of captation teaches us that dispositions are mostly
on the demand side, and that dispositifs/strategy can be seen in action
mostly on the supply side. This fact provides interesting information on the
unequal social distribution of theories and technologies of action, on the
stratagem which involves circumscribing some actants in a mechanical or
unreflexive model so that strategy and calculation can be better and more
easily deployed. In other words, one often notices on the scene of the market
self-seeking actors (Friedberg, 1996) (on the supply side) who covet attrac-
tive agents (on the demand side). In the background to this observation, one
can surmise the existence of a political stake regarding the possible re-
balancing of the two spheres, as evidenced in recent studies concerning
political consumerism (Micheletti, 2003).5 In order to clarify and develop
these stakes, I would finally like to uncover the fundamental mechanisms
of the dispositifs of captation by focusing, for pedagogical reasons, on a
familiar story: that of Little Red Riding Hood.
Captation as Calculation of Predictable Trajectories:
Little Red Riding Hood Revisited
We could say that captation is about observing the path of a target, to antici-
pate its trajectory, to try and join up with it, to accompany it, to encircle it
and to guess it in order to then attract it or intercept it. This way of acting
corresponds quite precisely to the strategy of the wolf in the story of Little
Red Riding Hood. Since this tale has particular heuristic value in highlight-
ing the process and the dispositifs of captation, we will analyse it in some
detail. The story is played out in three episodes: the first episode stages the
encounter between the little girl and the wolf in the woods; the second is
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 213

the confrontation between the wolf, the grandmother, then Little Red Riding
Hood on either side of the door; the third scene plays out the third meeting
between the beast and the child in the grandmothers bed.
The first episode would not have happened without its prior prep-
aration, had her mother not asked the little girl to take a cake and a little
pot of butter to her sick grandmother. This mission which gives its thrust
to the story and determines the little girls route, folds Little Red Riding
Hood onto the model of action guided by the habitus: the whole tale places
the little girl between her mother and her grandmother, it thus closely
inscribes the gestures and the courses to follow within the circular and
closed register of kinship, gift, reciprocity and obligations owed to family
ties: one goes from one place to another to return to it, to accomplish ones
destiny, to follow a lineage, to be faithful and to help each other, to offset
the weakness of the grandmother by the courage of the girl, allowing the
self-enclosed circulation of domestic products well outside the sphere of
the market.
Does the encounter with the wolf break this neat logic of social deter-
mination? Not at all. Of course Little Red Riding Hood, due to the wolfs
intervention, will take another route. But if the girl follows the wolf and
deviates from the path, it is not because she had forgotten the imperatives
of her destiny, it is because, on the contrary, she is trying to conform to it,
though without having control over all the elements of the situation: the devi-
ation is involuntary, Little Red Riding Hood takes the road indicated by the
wolf because she believes the choice of route makes no difference; the only
mistake she makes with regard to her family is not a deviance but a delay;
the problem is not located in space but in time; the error is to have taken
too long, to have done other things on the way.
What is the place, the role and the action of the wolf in this first
episode? The story puts in play a wolf who is trying hard not to be like a
wolf at all. The contrast between the two adversaries is striking: while the
one openly and naively reveals the almost animal nature and logic of the
action which motivates her (repeating what we know already is the point of
her task), the wolf hides its true nature under human appearances: instead
of giving out information on its identity and its animal drives by growling
or baring its teeth it politely requests information by asking questions
and giving advice as people do. In masking its intentions, the wolf is of
course being a manipulator, but taking care to avoid violence, it tries not to
act as predator. This way of acting is typical of captation. We could say that
in the first episode, the wolf poses as the sensor (capteur in French): it only
wants to be in the right place, to do nothing other than to gather information,
making itself as discreet, as invisible, as human as possible: during the first
episode, there is no need for disguise, since adopting the polite manners of
human society is enough to make one forget the long arms, the big eyes and
the large teeth. From the side of the wolf, information gathering (capter)
precedes predation (capture): by this action, the imposter will secure two
meals (the little girl and her grandmother).
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214 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

The second episode presents us with a dazzling exchange of positions

and dispositions on either side of the locked door which serves as obstacle
and occasion for this inversion. Indeed, in this episode the wolf disguises
itself twice, as the little girl in order to eat the grandmother, and as the
grandmother in order to devour the little girl. The two scenes are exactly
symmetrical, save for the inversion of positions, a symmetry the hinge of
which is clearly the door and its play of bolt and latch, this obstacle twice
overcome to show us that we are dealing with the register of repetition (in
time) and of symmetry (in space). The grandmother, the girl and the wolf
who comes between them know who they are and how to proceed: one to get
the door open (thus: Its your grand daughter, Little Red Riding Hood . . .
who brings you a cake and a pot of butter which Mother sends you), the
third to inveigle (capter) the knowledge, the consent, then the flesh of the
other two. Repetition here shows us the at once efficient and fragile
character of the dispositifs of captation put into place by the wolf. Efficient,
since the stratagem succeeds twice, including in the case of an elder who
is a priori more careful and experienced. Fragile, for reasons we shall soon
see.
In the second episode, the sting no longer rests on the logic of the
sensor, but on that of the reflector: the information winkled out is rein-
vested to build a picture, a model, a mirror effect in which the target vaguely
recognizes herself and towards which she moves without appearing to
change place, since for her it is a matter of returning to herself. Let us
observe the fascinating precision/efficiency of the dispositif: what the wolf
tells the grandmother while playing the part of the little girl (Its your grand-
daughter . . .) is exactly, with nearly the right accent (the wolf says imitat-
ing her voice) what the little girl says to the wolf a few minutes later;
similarly, what the grandmother tells the wolf (pull the bolt out . . .) is
precisely what the wolf will order the girl to do (The wolf shouted mellow-
ing its voice). One notices here a double captation in the sense of capti-
vation and of fascination, the effect of aiming (mirror and target), and an
enticement effect (bird mirror). The device of reflector consists in return-
ing to the subject the image of its own identity or belonging; it is a matter
of attracting a subject to oneself by persuading her that she is only going
towards herself, that she is expressing her identity rather than moving
towards otherness. In such a scheme, the captor does not put himself
forward, he maintains discretion, appears absent behind the subject on
whom all his action is directed. One comes across this logic of the reflec-
tor in the world of advertising (with slogans like LOral, because I deserve
it or I dreamt about it, Sony made it), or in Customer Relationship
Management, which consists in configuring commercial offers in a specular
fashion, reflecting for the customer the very expression of her previous
choices.
Let us nevertheless notice the difficulty of the exercise: we had
stressed that, at each intervention by the wolf (in front of and then behind
the door), the substantial identity of the message had for counterpart a
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 215

formal imperfection of the enunciation (the wolf said, changing its voice/
shouted the wolf, mellowing its voice). One learns thus that, among the
ensemble of the likely devices for captation, one must take account of
corporeal devices, of the presentation of face and tone of voice. Yet these
dispositifs are fragile: the wolf before eating a second time must counter the
growing astonishment of the youngster whose doubt gradually increases with
each new test as she senses that something is not right, that the message
and soon the clothes do not add up to the grandmother: while the elder
relation opens the door without concern, the younger relation paradoxically
proves to be less nave. One comes then to the third episode which drives
the wolf to put an end to this tale, to abandon the subtle ruse of human
conduct followed by that of technique, and to resort to the more brutal
character of appetite.
The third episode is played out in the bed and shifts from the efficiency
of dispositifs to their fragility. There are two explanations for this fragility.
The first relates to the change in circumstance which accompanies the wolfs
action: when the latter finds itself in bed next to the little girl, it is the third
time it is in a situation of encounter with her. Yet, the ingenuity has nothing
to do with the repetition of the encounters; the reinforcement of the polite
attitude expressed in the first episode by the donning of human clothes in
the third encounter is not enough to replay the scene of seduction, manage
the sting, with the same degree of success. One thus incidentally learns that
the efficiency of any dispositif of captation is eroded in time and through
repetition, and that readjustments do not always work. The second expla-
nation has more to do with the internal limits of the dispositifs employed.
The action of the wolf in the first two episodes involved a transformation
into a captor/sensor (to gather information in order to know how to act subse-
quently) and a reflector (sending back information in order to secure
complete ultimate success). Yet, in the end, the surprise of the child points
to and exposes the winning cards of the captor and the efficiency of the
reflector: the series of questions Grandma what long arms/long legs/big
ears/big eyes/large teeth you have lists nearly all the senses of the wolf,
everything which enables it to see and know the target. But such questions
expose the power of the wolf to the extent that every captor is able to capture,
each reflector is able to reflect, the more it is able to operate by stealth,
without the target knowing that she is being observed, judged, tasted, simu-
lated, nor how and through what channel. From one episode to the next, the
inversion is striking: the one who is asking the questions has changed camp.
The nave and almost natural questions of Little Red Riding Hood have
been followed by the animal or visceral responses of the wolf (hold, hear,
see, eat . . .) to questions from the girl as her suspicion quickly grows: how
can one reduce a grandmother to a series of gestures which predominantly
connote predation? The third episode obliges the wolf-captor to make itself
a reflector, then interactor, to engage in a question-and-answer game which
it can no longer control, except by resorting to force and thus by leaving
behind the play of captation for sheer capture.
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216 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

Contrary to appearances, this story has not one but three morals. The
first is of course the one addressed to young girls in Perraults conclusion
in the aphorism at the start of this article. The moral seems pretty clear; the
whole story is aimed at teaching us its meaning and demonstrating its solid
base: children should be wary of strangers. Yet, as Soriano (1968) amply
demonstrated, Perrault, in combining scrupulous respect for the oral tale
with the staging of a subtle writing, has introduced in his own retelling a
particular ambiguity. The figure of the wolf relates to two distinct referents.
Contrary to what readers today might think, the animal does refer to a real
wolf, which used to be the cause of many accidents when the tale was in
common circulation, as a way of warning children. But the wolf also refers
to another figure, suggested by Perrault throughout the story and confirmed
in the final moral: that of a male human subject who lusts after the bodies
of nave young girls: I say wolf, yet not all wolves are alike;/There are those
who are quite charming/. . . civil, obliging, and pleasant,/Who follow young
maidens/Right up to the houses and the lanes. The coexistence of these two
readings is fascinating, for it points to two economic interpretations of the
story. The first, which we have favoured till now, is that of captation
interception. The second, which the moral of the story stresses at the end,
is that of captationseduction. While the former operation is unilateral,
placing an active captor against a passive predictable target, whose partici-
pation is hardly needed, the second is more symmetrical: if Little Red
Riding Hood follows the wolf to the end, it may well be because she is
accomplishing her fate, but it could also be because she is attracted by this
wolf she has met along the way. There is a double attraction: if it is possible
that the game between the girl and the predator relates to the discovery of
amorous feelings and sexual desire, it is also the case that the relation
between the two characters draws on the fascination with what frightens,
which we find in the text and outside it, between the young reader and the
story she reads. However, this double reading finds its equivalence on the
scene of the market, where captation equally hesitates between predation
and seduction: on the one hand, the merchant will be led to rely on one or
the other register, depending on the relative predictability or resistance of
the target; on the other hand, the customer will soon live the market relation
in a passive register, because of lack of ingenuity or implication, or by habit,
or else on an active register that then crosses into defiance and fascination.
The market relation is unsettling because the customer knows very well that
she is involved in a zero sum game in which the profit of the merchant is
proportional to her own expenditure, and in which, as Adam Smith has
shown, the concern of the supplier is but the social expression of his own
interest. But the market relation fascinates also, since the relation to objects
of exchange is caught up in a game of mutual attraction and seduction, in
which each party plays the game, drawn by the hope of either gain or satis-
faction depending on which side they are on, but also by the search for a
perhaps fragile relation of trust, of sociability, of a possible though often
disappointing or risky sociality.
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 217

That first moral in fact anticipates the second, which is a more discreet
moral directed to the wolf by Little Red Riding Hood herself, perhaps in
spite of Perrault: the ingenuity of little girls does not last, captors are
perhaps as fragile as maidens; as soon as the public speaks, overturns the
order between the questioner and the questioned, the three dispositifs of
captation put in place by the wolf captor, reflector, interactor collapse:
the little girl dies of course but wiser; and although the wolf triumphs, it
does so as wolf, while losing the humanity it believed it had found. In a
symmetrical way, Little Red Riding Hood or rather the little girl who
identifies with this character has learned to read, she has devoured the
story of the wolf beyond possibly Perraults aims, opening out onto the new
figure of the captor-captured, as the splendid publicity of the Book Fair and
Youth Press illustrates so well (see Figure 1, p. 228).6 One of the mechan-
isms of the tale is indeed to give to the young reader the pleasure and the
dread of anticipating what Little Red Riding Hood understands too late, no
doubt because the education of the reader will be all the more complete if
she discovers by herself the meaning of the story. One finds here the
temporal fragility of dispositifs of captation, which weaken with repetition.
A device only works for a while, so that actors in the markets must cease-
lessly abandon obsolete dispositifs and invent new ones to renew the terms
of the relation.
The third moral is the one which reveals the closeness of the first two.
The lesson Perrault teaches and the growing awareness of the little girl are
contradictory: the second emerges in spite of the first. Because of this
contradiction, and thanks to the belated resistance of the little girl, we
discover, after nearly getting caught ourselves, that one wolf can hide
another. What Perrault teaches us about wolves applies equally to himself:
the author of the tale corresponds better than anyone to the stereotypical
picture of the quiet, obliging and pleasant wolves who are capable of
assuming the voice of grandmother as reader of tale to join the youngsters
in bed and better insert their moral. Through Perrault we incidentally
discover one of the most twisted features of captation, what we will call the
deflector: this type of dispositif works by diverting attention, by designat-
ing a particular dispositif (here the wolf) in order to better preserve the
efficiency of another. On the scene of the market, a clear example of this
procedure involves the hiking of ones value by denigrating that of a
competitor.
The Perrault tale makes it possible for us to better understand the deep
mechanisms of captation. Every operation of captation involves the actor
undertaking it having to deal with two apparently contradictory hypotheses:
an hypothesis of predictable trajectory; an hypothesis according to which the
same trajectory can be deviated, or cut off. Faced with a mobile target, the
wolf assumes that Little Red Riding Hood has motives for her actions and
proceeds accordingly, gathering signs, information, data, in order to
construct a model that helps to anticipate the path of the adversary. But the
wolf is able to do this because it is also convinced that nothing is fixed, that
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218 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

Figure 1
203-223 084704 Cochoy (D) 15/2/08 09:24 Page 219

Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 219

every trajectory can be intercepted or diverted. The tale thus gives one an
insight into the combination of the model of an actant centred on action,
strategy and calculation, and a model of agency based on the predictability
of practices, the incorporation of action schemes and habitus, so that we can
observe quite clearly the fundamental logic at work in any dispositif of
captation.
On the basis of the kind of figures and facts discussed earlier, one can
sketch a typology of dispositifs, ordered around two axes (visible/invisible,
mobile/immobile), in which one can locate more modern dispositifs of capta-
tion (Table 1). Thus to understand the market, one must study neither the
customers nor the producers, but the work aimed at equipping the market
relation played out between them (Cochoy, 2007; Cochoy and Grandcl-
ment, 2005; Du Gay, 2004). What is at stake in a sociology of captation is
precisely the need for an inventory of the endeavours all the competences
and all the dispositifs noted earlier which make it possible to maintain a
hold on the public and to seduce it (and therefore to realize/reinforce/
modify/develop the skills of supply; and to displace/attract/redefine the
identity of the public).
The study of captation, of its actants and its dispositifs relates to three
stakes. The first stake concerns economic sociology, in which this study is
located (though captation does not relate entirely to the economic domain).
When one approaches captation as a figure of relational work, one is able
to examine elements neglected by the sociology of networks. While the latter
often assumes that networks are already in place or stabilized, and thus
privileges the study of the morphology and socio-economic incidence of
nets, captation on the contrary emphasizes the construction of networks as
a problem and a dynamic central to the functioning of markets; it proposes
that interest should focus on embedding as a dynamic process, and suggests
that one studies in some way the operations of networking as much as the
configurations of social networks. The second stake concerns the sociology
of work and organizations. Because it radicalizes the opposition between

Table 1

Dispositif Visible Invisible

Mobile Beaters: vouchers, loyalty cards, Followers: bar codes, cookies,

tie-in mechanisms, buying search systems (visible but often
guides, recommendations, coded)
representatives
Immobile Interactor/attractor: hot lines, Captor/reflector/deflector/
games, free call numbers, selector: customer data base,
packaging, publicity, voice mails, Customer Relations,
web sites management, comparative or
speculative publicity, scanners
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220 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

management and its domain of application, because it underlines the will

to control and the fleeting character of the target, markets can bring to atten-
tion processes which one tends to ignore, yet which run through organiz-
ations today (such as the inscription of cognitive speculations and schemes
in material dispositifs). The third stake concerns sociology generally, and
relates not only to the plurality of registers for action, but particularly to the
need to take account of the possible strategic use of this plurality (or else
of the inscription of strategic models in routines). The study of the way in
which actants gamble on their capabilities for action, combine cognitive
registers, indeed, invent tools and instruments for channelling their conduct
and redefine their place and their respective advantages, is an urgent task,
given the importance of the political stakes raised.
Translated by Couze Venn

Acknowledgement
This article is a shortened, updated and translated version of the introduction of a
collective book of essays (Cochoy, 2004b).

Notes
1. As we shall see in the case of market captation, the buyer (demand), as much
as the seller (supply), can often appear in the role of captor; this is suggested besides
by the etymological connection between the verbs acheter (to buy) and capter (to
capture), since to buy comes from the Latin accapare, from captare, which means
attempting to take.
2. The term dispositif has notably been mobilized in Foucauldian theory, where
it sometimes designates rather extended arrangements (agencements) of composite
elements (texts, rules, plans, statements, etc.) that serve to support effects of domi-
nation (Foucault, 1994, 1995).
3. An excellent overview of the development of the notion of dispositif in the social
sciences is Beuscart and Peerbaye (2006).
4. As Franois Hran (1987: 393) has summarized it:
The term disposition as Bourdieu (1972: 247, n. 28) emphasized, is particu-
larly useful for expressing what the concept of habitus encompasses: it is to
begin with the result of an organizing action, it is also an habitual state, a
way of being, and finally a predisposition, a tendency, a propensity.
5. The rise of political consumerism, and the concern with the empowerment of
consumers, poses a whole series of problems: does the rebalancing of power necess-
arily mean the hyper-rationalization of consumers and the reduction of the share of
dreams inscribed in consumer objects, as consumerism tries to do? In many ways
consumerism conveys a rather strange notion of critique, for it seems to contest
calculation by extending it even further (Mallard, 2007).
6. What is striking about this publicity is its reflexive character, its ability to fold
back the Little Red Riding Hood story and uncover its critical purchase, yet re-use
it as a different commercial captation strategy aimed at children, although it is about
books which are meant to teach them about the many dangers in life, the risks of
captation inherent in the adult world.
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Cochoy A Brief Theory of the Captation of Publics 221

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Franck Cochoy is Professor of Sociology at the Universit de Toulouse II

and member of the CERTOP, a CNRS research laboratory. His work on the
sociology of markets focuses on the different mediations that frame the
relation between supply and demand, such as packaging, marketing and
standardization. He is the author of Une histoire du marketing (Presses
Universitaires de France, 1999) and Une sociologie du packaging ou lne
de Buridan face au march (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), and
the editor of La Captation des publics (Presses Universitaires du Mirail,
2004).