Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 29

To what extent can we see in the contemporary development of an enrichment economy a process clearly marking the shift from the twentieth century to the twenty-first? It can certainly be argued that the domains we have chosen as examples to indicate the contours of such a process (the luxury economy, works of art and antiquities, historical monuments, tourism, culture, contemporary art) are in no way really new. For each of these domains there is an abundant historiography – indeed, one that has been considerably enriched in recent decades – focusing on the way processes rather similar to the ones that interest us were deployed in earlier times, especially in Italy, Great Britain, and France. Exemplary studies have shed light on the luxury economies in Italian courts during the Renaissance,¹⁶ the spread of luxury in eighteenth-century Paris,¹⁷ the luxury industries in nineteenth-century France,¹⁸ and the links between heritage creation, the development of museums, and the formation of national or regional identities in France, especially since the Revolution. Other studies have looked at the way tourism was stimulated, in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, by the Romantic quest for the sublime and the picturesque; beginning in literary and artistic circles,¹⁹ this tendency was extended in the first half of the twentieth century by efforts on the part of local elites to highlight the identity of a given region by celebrating both its natural beauty and its rich folklore.²⁰ As for the domains of art and culture, both popular and elite forms came to the fore in the preoccupations of historians, partly owing to the latter’s fascination with social anthropology, especially in the second half of the twentieth century – all this to the detriment of factual political history, denounced as “event-driven.”

We could invoke the increase in digital resources in the domains that interest us, of course, and stress the intensification of the economic role of these domains. But, as is always the case when one is dealing with phenomena unfolding gradually over time, the threshold effects are hard to distinguish. This is why we rely in particular on indices that point to converging changes in the way these domains have been apprehended by different types of actors operating in the political, cultural, or economic spheres, and on the way these changes have interacted. In France, as we see it, these changes began to take hold between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. During that period, which was marked by declining industrial employment (after 1975) and increasing unemployment, new preoccupations and new horizons started to emerge.

To simplify, we can say that this same period was marked by a decline of hope in the unlimited development of industry on the national level. During the previous decades, industrial development had been an objective shared by the Gaullist and post-Gaullist right, which had focused exclusively on the necessity of growth,²¹ and the communist and socialist left, whose progressivist and reformist critique bore essentially on the uneven and unjust way the “fruits” of this growth were distributed among the various social classes.²² The turn away from faith in industrial progress led not to the abandonment of progressivism but, rather, to a profound reorientation of that outlook, stimulated by the recent spread of ecological awareness²³ that was developing on the libertarian, anti-productivist left, in both scholarly and popular forms.²⁴

Whereas the progressivism of the decades following the Second World War was centered on devaluation of the past, and most forcefully of rural areas and the agrarian way of life, the new progressivism that emerged during the subsequent period went hand in hand with rehabilitation of the past: emphasis on the past was viewed as one of the conditions for thinking ahead and, indeed, for the very possibility of a future. This development tended to modify the connotations of the reference to national heritage and, most notably, to orient that reference toward the left. One example among many: the destruction of eleven of the twelve Baltard pavilions constituting Les Halles that had been built between 1850 and 1870 to house the central food markets in Paris. These historic structures were demolished following a decision made in the late 1950s to transfer the markets to Rungis. (The sole surviving pavilion was dismantled before being purchased in 1976 by the city of Nogent-sur-Marne.) The destruction, which began in 1971, was undertaken in a spirit of modernization (the construction of a shopping complex, the Forum des Halles), despite a very powerful protest movement during which the site was occupied and used as a space for cultural events by the alternative left; a petition to save the pavilions drew 100,000 signatures. It is highly probable that, ten years later, the pavilions would not have been destroyed but, rather, “rehabilitated,” not only preserved as testimonies to history but remodeled so as to be used in new ways.

It is as though the turn toward an enrichment economy had been imagined and anticipated, at least in part, after the socialist government took over in 1981, as one of the available means to compensate for a possible industrial decline. By contrast, other industrial nations tended to develop financial centers (London, for the United Kingdom) as a way of confronting the expected catastrophe, namely, the extension of unemployment beyond the categories that had been most seriously affected to that point (lower-class youth without educational credentials, workers over the age of fifty, who received special governmental support) to include young people with post-secondary education. Representing the upper class for the most part, but including more and more middle- and even lower-class youth, this cohort of educated young people had increased in number considerably²⁵ with the “democratization of access to higher education” that had been an important objective in the preceding period in response to critics who denounced the unequal distribution of the “fruits” of the recent economic expansion. During the 1980s, big businesses were being reorganized according to emerging management precepts: the outsourcing of numerous functions, a renewed focus on the company’s original activities, just-in-time manufacturing, subcontracting, multiplication of sites identified as profit centers, networked companies, a shifting of responsibilities to operators, a flattening of hierarchies, and project-based production.²⁶ These reorganizations, which were clearly intended to increase productivity, weaken the labor unions, augment profits, and reinforce the power of stockholders, resulted in the firing of a very large number of workers judged “unemployable.” Hiring went down, and the reshaping of the relation between educational levels and job openings led to a devaluation of post-secondary diplomas.²⁷

One major difference between managing companies and managing countries, even though the latter increasingly import their management methods from business, is that the former can distribute their activities over large geographical areas, even worldwide, and above all can get rid of workers they deem superfluous in certain cases, or on certain sites, by reconfiguring themselves spatially. By contrast, it is much more difficult for nations to exclude citizens from their territory, even temporarily, in that the very existence of a nation is justified by the population for which it is responsible. Nevertheless, until relatively recently, nations have sometimes adopted policies leading to the exclusion of certain subsets of their population. The organized departure of large numbers of inhabitants of a country, whether it came about because the central government chose to offer incentives to the most fortunate members of the group or because it forcefully excluded the poorest members, was possible in the late nineteenth century; it took the form of emigration to the New World or, in the first half of the twentieth century, to the colonies with the encouragement of the mother countries. But although the number of workers, especially educated workers, who decided on their own to go abroad was still high in the 1980s, such an exodus was no longer conceivable in the form of national policy on a grand scale; departures were signs that the home country was less attractive than the destination country.²⁸ The question of how to employ young diploma-holders, especially those who had studied literature or the social sciences and were largely scorned by businesses, became a problem for national governments. In France, this problem came on top of other issues involving the organization of the national territory that had accompanied and followed the 1982 decentralization law and the transfer of roughly two-thirds of the public financing of culture to local governments, in view of fostering a better regional distribution of cultural activities. It is in the context we have just evoked that the problems linked to the relation between culture and the economy were significantly reconceived, and that cultural development came to be viewed, from the standpoint of the national government, no longer just as the moral necessity of maintaining the national memory, or as a requirement connected with the democratization of knowledge (which had previously been the case), but as an economic asset of prime importance.

Jack Lang, who served as minister of culture during François Mitterrand’s presidency, became the principal interpreter of this transformation, displacing the conception of culture – thematized by André Malraux but also by communist intellectuals – that had predominated during the preceding period, when the state had assumed significant legal and financial responsibility for cultural activities. The progressives who had been active in the Resistance during the war considered culture in terms of a pair of oppositions that, in their eyes, justified its “democratization” – its transmission to workers. The first was the opposition between culture and the economy, mirroring the opposition between the soul and the body. Workers, who are the foundation of the economy, and especially those workers whose labor makes heavy demands on the body, must have access to culture because they (too) have souls. Culture is in some sense their due: the economy is necessary, of course, but subordinate. Culture, to play its role, must be removed from the economic sphere. The second opposition is between high or elite culture, supported by “noble” institutions (museums, universities, and so on), and low or mass culture (industrial culture, cultural commodities, or culture at the service of the commodity cosmos); the latter was viewed with loathing by elitists and reactionaries, but it was also regarded with repulsion by certain thinkers on the left inspired in particular by the Frankfurt School.²⁹ Seen in this spirit, cultural democratization was aimed at extracting the masses from the grip of low culture and raising them up toward high culture.

These are the oppositions that Jack Lang took it upon himself to deconstruct in a public way, beginning with a speech in Mexico City in 1982 that drew a lot of attention. On the one hand (the first opposition), he asserted that the ties between culture and the economy were not scandalous sources of corruption but normal and even indispensable. The economy does not pervert culture; culture requires the economy. Without an economy, there is no culture. Conversely, he predicted that it would be through cultural inventiveness that the economies of the world would be revitalized, and that “conquering unemployment is a cultural change that comes about through a change in cultural policy.”³⁰ Culture is and must be at the service of the economy (above all thanks to tourism). On the other hand (the second opposition), Lang opened up the definitions of the term “culture” (following the lead of anthropology and sociology in this respect) in such a way as to break down the border between high and low culture. The concept of culture would henceforth include the so-called industrial arts, such as fashion and design, and also the popular arts, for example songs, comic books, and street art. Similarly, a nation’s heritage would include, on equal footing, long-standing historical monuments recognized as such and industrial complexes showcased by the eco-museums under development at the time³¹ (Lang had fought the destruction of the Baltard pavilions, which he had wanted to transform into a cultural center). Now anything could become culture, and every individual could become a creator if he or she were recognized as such. Lang proposed to replace the “democratization of culture” by “cultural democracy,” which would privilege the processes – very numerous, as it turned out – known as “artification.”³² Thus the power to bestow recognition on works of art that had long belonged to agencies such as museums, academic institutions, and critics had to be transferred to public financing agencies, whether these depended on the central government or on local authorities.

This new line was not just a matter of words. Lang’s argument was accompanied by concrete measures such as the creation of regional foundations for contemporary art (FRACs), which escaped the control of museum conservators,³³ or the National Association for the Development of the Arts of Fashion (in 1989). These measures provoked outrage among the defenders of culture “in the noble sense”; beginning in the 1980s, the authorities implementing the new measures were accused of “relativism,” an anathema that was to resurface in force later on, when “values” became a central issue in political disputes.³⁴ The FRACs were different from museums in the sense that their mission was to constitute collections and to organize itinerant exhibits. These innovations disrupted the hierarchy of intermediaries in the plastic arts – a hierarchy dominated up to that point by museum officials – while giving important roles to actors who had not been certified by any official title and who enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy with respect to institutions.³⁵ They accompanied a proliferation of exhibit organizers (“curators”), who worked on “projects” without answering to any hierarchical body; this often went hand in hand with considerable economic insecurity and an increased dependence on major collectors and galleries.

This redefinition of culture and the measures that accompanied it were undergirded by a philosophy that has been expressed in part by Félix Guattari,³⁶ in a theory that associates the processes of creation and the constitution of value with the expression of differences of any order, whether the object in question is new (for example, an industrial wasteland whose beauty can suddenly be revealed) or old (for example, a Romanesque church), differences that can modify the perception of the world shared by the people to whom they are pointed out. “What can be done to ensure that music, dance, creation, all forms of sensibility, belong by rights to the entire set of social components?,” Guattari asks.³⁷ The response lies in the conception according to which all human beings are creators whenever they realize their humanity by paying attention to differences in which they recognize themselves, and when they manifest a desire to share with others both the recognition of those differences and the recognition of their humanity inasmuch as their humanity is expressed in the attention paid to the differences. Thus everyone turns out to be oriented toward a goal, which is to interest other people, to arouse their curiosity, and this process is at the root of the formation of communities constituted around encounters among distinct beings, each of whom intends to share with the others the differences that constitute his or her singularity. From this perspective (which Philippe Urfalino judiciously characterizes as vitalist),³⁸ the mission of cultural agencies – above all, the agencies that distribute the funding that cultural activities need – is to put people into circulation and bring them into contact, to organize encounters in order to promote the exchange of identities and differences.

Money is the energy that allows such encounters to take place, through the financing of travel, performances, colloquia, festivals, and so on. But these encounters produce an energy that generates money in its turn, so that the economy – the libidinal economy, as it were – of exchanges of energy among actors, who are all animated by the same desire to awaken the curiosity of others by deploying their own differences while awakening themselves through contact with the differences manifested by others, rejoins the economy as understood by economists. In order to function, this generalized economy thus presupposes, on the one hand, that the participants will limit or delay the selection process, for one cannot know a priori what will arouse the curiosity and the creativity of others – that is, where the liberation of energy will come from – and, on the other hand, that participants will not fear excess, profusion, loss, or expenditures, for, in the absence of these, no energy can be produced. A conception to which disconsolate souls, unable to think in terms other than those of management control, object that money spent on culture – input – can easily be accounted for, and that it often leads to losses, and that the energy that culture is supposed to generate not only eludes accountability but also resists any other form of objectivization. This is the case up to the point when the importance of what geographers call the residential economy is recognized, and when mayors in urban agglomerations realize that cultural investment in the broad sense constitutes a solid asset for attracting qualified workers, tourists, foreign residents, or wealthy retirees to their cities – and also, increasingly, businesses specialized in exploiting the type of resources on which an enrichment economy is based.