Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 18

The fields within which the enrichment economy is deployed are hard to describe synthetically, because their substantive diversity is not reduced by their inclusion in a broad category that would allow us to bring out their connections and designate them with a single term or formula. The semantic, legal, and statistical frameworks on which description of the economic and social world relies have been forged in order to give authorities a grip on an economy that is principally industrial. Thus at present there are no categorial arrangements or accounting frameworks that would allow us to determine with relative precision either the economic importance taken on by the nebulous phenomenon whose contours we are seeking to sketch here or the number of persons whose primary activity is connected with that phenomenon. This is the case in particular because the phenomenon brings together sectors (such as art and tourism), activities (as diverse as heading museums and manufacturing alligator handbags), statuses (such as short-term worker, stable wage-earner, government employee, or person of private means), and professions that are dispersed in statistical nomenclatures among sets constructed according to different logical principles, more in accordance with the old classifications of the industrial world.¹⁶

In addition, the existing frameworks deal with employment using two approaches whose results are difficult to put together, for some researchers look at individually declared professions, while others examine the economic sectors taken into account by national statistics; this makes it hard to analyze the indirect and induced effects of each type of activity and/or profession. As a result, we lack statistical data in support of generalizations that would allow us to highlight and follow the specific processes at the heart of this evolution. This is why, in contemporary economic literature, presentation of the economic reorientation toward the wealthy is distributed among various domains; these are apprehended according to diverse accounting forms that often rely on inconsistent definitions and categories, making an overall grasp quite difficult. The absence of an accounting framework and of categories unifying the enrichment economy is not accidental, nor does it stem from a delay in the systematic institutional registration of changes in reality; it will be understood, at the end of our analysis, as one of the conditions that make this economy profitable.

In order to indicate how the sphere of the enrichment economy is constituted so that readers will be able to follow us while relying on their ordinary sense of social reality, we must begin by turning to the objects themselves. A first indication will hold our attention: the growing visibility given to objects that are exchanged at high or very high prices in comparison with the prevailing norms. This visibility is most pronounced in major metropolitan centers, but it can also be found in a number of restored and protected sites or villages whose activity had been primarily industrial. It is prominent as well, for example, in media targeting an audience that, although fairly well-to-do, is not sufficiently wealthy, on average, to acquire many of the things that are on display not only in advertisements but also in the content presented.

In France and elsewhere, the principal organs of the daily or weekly press – whose readership is increasingly limited – offer supplements on the same themes so as to draw funds from the luxury industry that will allow at least some of these economically threatened publications to continue to exist. Among these, we find How to Spend It, put out in London by the Financial Times; T Magazine of the New York Times; and the weekly M Le magazine of the French newspaper of record Le Monde. These leisure-oriented magazines are aimed at a public with fuzzy contours but whose members, finding themselves mirrored in the magazines’ pages, can see themselves appreciatively as both cultivated and wealthy. Airline magazines are another case in point: for example, Air France Magazine, published by Gallimard, is offered to the airline’s clients free of charge. Publications like these have the advantage, for our purposes, of displaying advertisements for luxury items (watches, perfumes, clothing, real estate, upscale hotels, and the like) in close proximity to articles discussing trendy, vintage, or “design” objects, sites whose ancestral and historical values are highlighted, works of art, exhibits, and artists, and (especially in France) high-level gastronomy construed as part of the country’s “non-material heritage.” In these magazines, the various topics presented in ads and articles are treated without distinction, as if they were inseparable components of one and the same universe.

These media present objects chosen not so much for their usefulness or their sturdiness, as would be the case for common industrial items, as for their intrinsic preciousness, or simply for their difference, and also, inevitably, for their price. These objects are often associated with national or regional markers of identity that are supposed to guarantee their authenticity (even if their manufacture can be discreetly outsourced, as happens with ordinary objects, to countries with low wages). The fascination that these objects are meant to exercise is thought to depend on a sort of aura that surrounds them, conferring on them a touch of exceptionality that destines them to be appreciated by an elite. The objects may be antiques or items produced by luxury firms; they are often presented as handmade. They are linked to the fashion sector in many instances (watches, jewelry, handbags, and clothing), but they also may be outstanding wines or food items produced in identified and protected terroirs or contemporary artworks presented in galleries, at art fairs, or at auctions that attract attention through their cultural and economic dimensions alike.¹⁷

In these presentations, increasing importance is attributed not only to the objects themselves but also to the universes in which the objects are conceived and in which they circulate – and above all to the human beings surrounding them, whether these be “creators,” such as designers, dressmakers, cooks, antique dealers, hairdressers, collectors, exhibit organizers, and so on, or “personalities,” noteworthy in themselves, who associate their names and images with these exceptional items (this is the case for example with the “inspirers” of haute couture or perfumes). All of these “actors” behind “fashion, culture, and taste” are mentioned very frequently and depicted in portraits in which they rub shoulders with artists in the classic sense of the term, such as painters or sculptors. Attention is thus drawn directly toward a relatively heteroclite set of objects treated as though they occupied the same plane (a “plane of immanence,” as Deleuze might say): these can be items of apparel, furniture, decorative objects, vintage items, or works of ancient or contemporary art.

The kind of profound mutation at issue here is embodied in a single building in Turin. A big Fiat factory opened in the Lingotto district there in 1922; it closed in 1982. Since then, the building has been converted into galleries featuring shops, hotels, restaurants, and a conference center. As the high point of what was one of the emblematic sites in the world of labor, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli was inaugurated in 2002, designed by the star Italian architect Renzo Piano, who already had many museums to his credit, including the Pompidou Center in Paris. In the white raised gallery of the Pinacoteca, viewers now crowd around to admire works from the collection of paintings of a former leader of Italy. How have we come from mass production of standard automobiles and the heated workers’ struggles associated with the site to the silent and respectful contemplation of works of art acquired by the CEO?