Occitan in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: Digital Revitalization and the Failure of Affective Capture

Etienne Rougier, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

During fieldwork on an Occitan-funded cultural event, an artist unconnected to activist circles asked me: "But when you speak Occitan, isn't it just to talk about Occitan?" The question named something no ideological or political-economic account of language revitalization fully explains: a language that, despite sustained public investment, functions largely as its own metalanguage, circulating almost exclusively among those already committed to its survival.

I would like to theorize that failure through a Spinozist framework of affect and institution, read via Lordon's extension of Spinoza to collective structures. For Spinoza, all beings persevere in their being (conatus), and this striving is always already affective, shaped by encounters that increase or diminish one's power to act. Lordon (2013) argues that institutions do not simply channel pre-existing desire but actively capture it, enrolling individual conatus into a common structure by redirecting affects — fear, hope, attachment — toward the institution's own reproduction. Institutions, on this view, are affective before they are administrative: they hold together only insofar as they successfully align individual strivings with a collective one.

I apply this framework to a set of digital revitalization projects funded by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region (an online dictionary, a training platform, a digital catalogue, a cultural marketplace) treating their platform architectures, funding agreements, and editorial choices not as neutral tools but as affective configurations, and institutional form itself as analytical evidence. Activists bring anger and nostalgia; new speakers bring anxiety and aspiration; institutions bring reparative guilt. These affects are genuinely mobilized, yet the central claim here is that they are not redistributed outward into a collective increase of conatus : they are absorbed by the very form of the devices meant to carry them, above all by the inter-dialectal compromises required to build tools claiming to transcend dialectal boundaries within the constraints of regional funding. Who decides how the language appears on a digital interface is therefore not a technical detail but the site where affective and institutional pressures crystallize in the material form of the language.

This diagnosis extends Robert Lafont's account of Occitan as a language whose institutionalization has historically preceded, rather than followed, its existence as a shared instrument of collective enunciation. Where Lafont located the failure of Occitan standardization in the absence of a unified speech community able to underwrite a common language, we try to relocate that failure inside the affective economy of institutions built to compensate for it: the digital devices simulate the collective subject they presuppose rather than constructing it. Read against cases in the broader volume where affective capture does succeed in establishing lasting linguistic institutions (cf. Michel , Takeda), the Occitan case shows that capture, recruitment, and redistribution can operate intensely without producing consolidation (cf. Gavi), an institution that holds, but only for those already inside it, and a structural, not accidental, outcome of the very mechanisms that make it possible at all.

Bio: Etienne Rougier is a PhD student in linguistic anthropology at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He works on the revitalization of Occitan in its peripheral areas and on its contentious institutionalization.