Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 13

Social actors, whether they are buying or selling, are constantly immersed in the universe of commodities. Indeed, their experience of what they conceive to be reality depends to a large extent on this universe, often more than they would care to admit. The order of commodities –things in circulation – emerges in a process through which each thing is assigned a price in monetary terms every time it changes hands. At the same time, the things in question remain diverse, so that the universe of commodities is perceived not as an opaque totality – that would make it impenetrable – but as a structured whole. Reference to the structures of this whole makes it possible to identify each of the things exchanged. In addition, because social actors have internalized a tacit competence for dealing with these structures, they are able to orient themselves in the universe of commodities: they can participate in commerce, and, most importantly, they can pass judgment on the relationship between things and their prices.

Nevertheless, these structures, along with the relations they institute between things, their prices, and the value attributed to them, draw on differences anchored in space and in history. They are modified over time in keeping with shifts in the form of capitalism. In most contemporary societies, capitalism imposes its straitjacket on commerce in things; in this regard, Walter Benjamin’s analyses offer a striking framework for contrasting the structures of merchandise that subtend trade in much of twenty-first-century Europe, and perhaps in the world, with those of the nineteenth century. In “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin nourished his meditation on history and his critique of a commodity-focused representation of civilization with a reflection on merchandise in the era of triumphant capitalism. Commodities are manifested in the immediacy of perceptible presence and indissociably – he says – as “phantasmagoria” to which strollers, flâneurs, yield, seeking “refuge in the crowd.”¹ Benjamin stressed the forms taken by the world city, radically new forms at the time, in which were concentrated not only finance, luxury, and fashion but also the revolutionary bohemian life emblematized by Auguste Blanqui, along with industry and, above all, the proletariat. Benjamin’s primary interest lay in showing how beings in this context – persons and things existing in a common space – embodied a radical break with the past. This break, marked by the creation of industrial and financial capital, was manifested concretely in the destruction brought about in Paris by Baron Haussmann’s reforms and the concomitant reorganization of the urban fabric. The age of the “commodity fetish” sought to base its legitimacy on a futuristic staging of the benefits of technology; blind trust in “progress” was the instrument by means of which historians identified with victors. “And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers.”²

But the figure of the flâneur, when transposed to twenty-first-century Paris, is immersed in an entirely different reality. This new reality is no less capitalist than the one faced by Benjamin’s flâneur. However, “luxury” no longer boasts of being “industrial.” On the contrary, it strives to make us forget that its roots lie in a specific framework of production, one all the more easily brushed aside in that it is largely delocalized, confined to the orbits of other, faraway “world cities.” Capitalist accumulation is ongoing and even intensifying, but it relies on new economic arrangements and is associated with a diversification of the cosmos of commodities that depends on the modalities according to which value is assigned to them. The present study aims to describe this transformation, which is particularly apparent in the countries that have been the cradles of European industrial power, and above all in France; we shall analyze the way commodities are distributed among several different forms of valuation – that is, according to the way the price attached to a given commodity is justified or critiqued.

Our work will thus be oriented in two directions, whose relations we shall try to characterize. The first is chiefly historical. The object of this aspect of our study is an economic change that, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, has profoundly modified the way wealth is created in the countries of Western Europe. These countries have been marked both by deindustrialization and by an increased exploitation of certain resources that, without being entirely new, have taken on unprecedented importance. In our view, the scope of the change becomes apparent only when domains generally considered separate are brought together – most notably the arts, especially the plastic arts, and other cultural manifestations, trade in ancient objects, the creation of foundations and museums, the luxury industry, heritage creation, and tourism. We shall try to show that the constant interactions among these different domains make it possible to understand the way each one produces profits. Our argument will be based on their common exploitation of an underlying stratum that is purely and simply the past.

We shall use the term “enrichment economy” to designate this type of economy, playing on the ambiguity of the word “enrichment.” On the one hand, we use the word in the sense in which one speaks of enriching a metal, enhancing a lifestyle or a cultural asset, showcasing an article of clothing, or bringing together a set of objects in a collection, to emphasize the fact that this economy is based less on the production of new things than on an effort to enrich things that already exist, especially by associating them with narratives. On the other hand, the term “enrichment” refers to one of the specific characteristics of this economy, namely, that it draws upon trade in things that are intended above all for the wealthy and that thus also constitute a supplementary source of enrichment for the wealthy people who deal in them. It seems to us that this enrichment economy and its effects have to be taken into account if we are to grasp the transformations of contemporary society and some of the tensions that permeate it.

Our second orientation is more analytical. It seeks to comprehend how very diverse forms of commodities can give rise to transactions that, at least in most instances, will strike the actors who participate in them – either as purveyors or as customers – as normal activities, more or less in keeping with previously constituted expectations. By the term “commodity,” we designate everything to which a price is attached when its ownership changes hands. Given its phenomenal diversity, if the cosmos of commodities were not structured by modes of organization that are partly implicit, it would be hard to understand how the actors could orient themselves in it. The commercial dexterity of the various actors is quite uneven, to be sure, and depends on their experience as buyers or sellers. Nevertheless, without a minimal degree of competence, actors would simply be lost and unable to make their way in the world, given the importance that the role and the quantity of commercial transactions have taken on in modern societies. It is in this sense that we shall speak of commodity structures.

By relying on these underlying structures, the actors can reflect on the relation between two types of heterogeneous entities – things on the one hand, prices on the other – whose union constitutes commodities as such, instead of simply receiving this assemblage synthetically and passively submitting to its effects. But to understand the way a rational actor can seek to grasp the relation between things and their prices, we must take into account a third type of entity, which we shall designate by the term actors use – the indigenous term, as it were – namely, the polysemic term of value. It is in fact very generally the substance of a thing that is understood to constitute its “value”; in this sense, the relation between the thing and its price becomes subject to reflection, whether it is a matter of critiquing the price or justifying it. Rather than taking value as a property of things that is at once substantive and mysterious – a way of looking at things that has permeated classical economics and that continues to operate – we shall treat value as an arrangement for justifying or critiquing the price of things. The structures we shall seek to identify divide up the universe of commodities by distributing the entire set of marketable objects among various ways of justifying (or critiquing) their prices – that is, among different ways of assigning value to things. We shall see that the diverse methods for establishing value present differential relations that result from permutations of basic oppositions so that we can describe them as a transformation group in Lévi-Strauss’s sense.³ This makes it possible to reconcile the homogeneity of the cosmos of commodities (which encompasses every entity to which a price is attached when it changes hands) with the diversity of objects that comprise it, on the basis of the way that price is justified.

It is by being attentive to the dynamics of capitalism that we shall seek to connect the two approaches, historical and analytical, that have guided our work. We shall look at capitalism through the lens of commerce rather than focusing on the changes that have affected production and thus also labor – changes that, along with increased unemployment, have been the primary focus of analyses of capitalism. In this project we have benefited greatly from (re)reading Fernand Braudel, whose seminal book on capitalism puts commodities and commerce at the heart of his analyses; these entities are similarly central to studies – especially those of Giovanni Arrighi – that have sought to extend Braudel’s perspective into the present day. Commodity structures have to be analyzed in historical terms precisely because they have been inserted into the dynamics of capitalism and into the link between order and disorder that is the driving force behind capitalism. On the one hand, capitalist accumulation has to be able to rely on shared expectations, and thus on commodity structures, in particular so as to limit transaction costs. On the other hand, the very logic of that accumulation means that capitalism must constantly shift its position in order to benefit from the commodification of new objects, thereby subverting its own structures.

Because it depended most notably, in an initial phase, on the development of industry, capitalism had to shift its position so as to draw the greatest possible benefit from the commodification of new objects, as opportunities to profit from the exploitation of industrial labor began to diminish. The formation of the commodity structures we see today can thus be linked to the development of an enrichment economy. The existence of a plurality of forms for making things valuable, forms that are at once isomorphic and differentiated, allows diverse things to change hands with the hope that they will be sold each time at the highest possible price so as to generate the greatest possible profit, or at least to limit losses. If there were only one way to refer to the value of things in order to justify their prices, a great number of objects that are exchanged for high prices today would find themselves depreciated. The diversification of commodity structures goes hand in hand with diversification of the gaps that commodities come to fill. In this way commodity structures tend to shape both specific things and the lack of these things, so that they are maintained in order to avoid their being neither entirely objective nor entirely subjective. It is in this respect that they contribute in a major way to shaping what is called reality, inasmuch as reality depends on what Wittgenstein called language games, linguistic maneuvers that allow actors to grasp experience through reflection.

To carry out our project, we have navigated among several different disciplines, methods, and fields of inquiry. Our displacements were not premeditated but, rather, imposed on us, as it were, by the logic of a study whose specific object became clear to us only gradually, as the findings that seemed to answer the questions we were asking brought forth new questions, drawing us toward new investigations.

With regard to disciplines, then, we followed a path that led us from sociology and anthropology toward various strands of history (the history of art, the history of technology, political and social history), political philosophy, and, especially, economics. In this last field, which is no more unified than sociology and which encompasses quite diverse tendencies (schools that disagree even about the label “economics”), our readings and borrowings led us sometimes toward works situated more or less within the neoclassical tradition and sometimes, instead, toward works associated with heterodox or critical approaches; the differences among these works appeared less clear-cut to us on the level of documentary or even theoretical contributions than on the level of institutional affiliations and conflicts between schools. It seemed to us that the most striking difference separating the “orthodox” from the “heterodox” outlooks had to do in particular with the relation that these varying styles of economics maintained with sociology: the former sought to defend the autonomy of economics – an autonomy marked most notably by the space given to translating models into one or another of the languages stemming from mathematics – while the latter did not hesitate to draw upon data produced by the other social sciences.

Our primary concern has been to disentangle ourselves from the often difficult relations maintained between sociology and anthropology on the one hand and economics on the other. Thus, at times, sociologists and anthropologists are led to neglect economics (as if relations of symbolic exchanges had an autonomous existence entirely distinct from relations of exchanges of goods); at other times, they tend to seize hastily upon models originating in economics and apply them to their own objects and thereby to justify decisions on economic policy concerning those objects; in still other instances, they are inclined to develop a critical attitude toward economics in general, as if sociology and anthropology alone had access to some truth about human relations that the science of economics, tainted by inhumanity, could not grasp. While critique is by no means absent from our work, it is aimed at contemporary capitalism and not at economics as such. Our intention has thus been to extend the efforts of scholars – undoubtedly more numerous in a not-so-remote past than they are today – who have worked toward unifying the social sciences, contesting all forms of disciplinary orthodoxy. Today, in our view, this effort must entail moving beyond the tensions between, on the one hand, approaches inherited chiefly from positivism (which are frequent in economics) and, on the other hand, approaches that stem principally from constructionism (more frequent in sociology). We have sought to move forward along this path by developing a pragmatic structuralism. This approach makes it possible to combine a social history with an analysis of the cognitive skills that actors use in order to act.

As far as our methods of inquiry are concerned, we have been highly eclectic in our choices, operating like gleaners, as it were. Although we have occasionally included examples from other countries to show that we are talking about a process that can be disseminated, we have focused on the case of France, which is unquestionably one of the countries in which the transformations we have sought to bring to light are most clearly manifested. Our sources were numerous and wideranging. We collected sets of existing statistics; we conducted formal or informal interviews, both with informants invested with institutional authority and with so-called ordinary actors, such as artists, or collectors of various things ranging from works of contemporary art to football club insignia; we went through reams of documents produced for commercial or self-promotional purposes that we found either in print form or on the Internet; we analyzed marketing manuals for luxury items, tourism, art, and culture; and we undertook to produce an ethnography of places where the formation of an enrichment economy in France could be grasped “in real time” (for example, in the Aubrac region or in Arles).

The pages that follow are thus the result of a sort of artisanal approach that was once frequently practiced in the social sciences – and in social anthropology or in history more than in sociology – but that tends to be condemned today, even though it offers great advantages in terms of freedom and especially flexibility. Since our project was free of any constraints that might have been imposed by dependence on outside financing, it could be continually redefined and reoriented in response to the results obtained. It is too often forgotten that, by limiting oneself to work based on “big data,” one rediscovers an object that has already been socially constructed, and one rules out the possibility of introducing both the cognitive behavior of actors and the social changes that have not yet been subject to taxonomic identification or to technical and institutional recognition.

The process of collecting materials was all the more demanding in that what gradually turned out to be our key objects of inquiry – that is, on the one hand, the formation of an economy of enrichment and, on the other, the current state of commodity structures and of the skills that allow actors to orient themselves in this economy – have not in either case yielded, up to now, outcomes that would allow for a global, and in particular a statistical, overview. There are no data-processing or administrative centers that would collect, sift, and shape data covering the entire set of domains that must be taken into account, as we see it, if one is to grasp features in contemporary socio-economic developments that we believe to be very important. Thus we have had to criss-cross a large number of areas, from contemporary art to the luxury industry, from the national patrimony to tourism, and so on. Each of these areas calls for further study; our book as a whole can be read as an invitation to work in a new field of research. Our hope, then, is that the task will be taken up again by others who will be able to flesh out the results and further develop the hypotheses presented here.