Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 34

In the effort to understand the formation of an enrichment economy, we must go beyond a sociology or ethnology of the rich,⁷⁴ of their way of life, their patterns of consumption,⁷⁵ their tastes, their preference for luxury goods, and more generally everything in their behavior and approach to life that is rooted in a quest for distinction so as to maintain the gap that separates them from the other social classes.⁷⁶ As useful as it may be, such an approach often tends to take an atemporal turn, if only insofar as one can bring to light traits that characterize the dominant classes, whatever the period or even the culture considered. What is required for our purposes is a dynamic analysis of the relation between different ways of generating wealth. This detour constitutes a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the changes over the last few decades that have affected not only the dominant classes – for which the term “bourgeoisie,” inherited from the nineteenth century,⁷⁷ hardly suffices to evoke the most contemporary features – but also the overall divisions of society.

For, as has been demonstrated by an overabundant historiography focused on the decline of agrarian feudalism and the formation of industrial societies, while the defining features of social divisions clearly depend in part on their anchoring in specific political configurations, these divisions are fundamentally based on the way wealth is generated. This is why we have begun not with the study of people, and particularly the wealthiest (the top 10 percent), for whom the objects we have mentioned as examples seemed to be chiefly intended – the analysis of their tastes, their conspicuous consumption, or the role played in the exercise of their domination by the symbolic markers that surround them – but with the objects themselves and the way they have been invested with their particular value – that is, with the processes through which they acquire the status of wealth. We shall thus focus primarily on the processes through which things possessed, things that count as heritage objects, are transformed into capital, in the sense that they are integrated, through exchange, into a process of circulation that aims at accumulation and profit.⁷⁸

Considered in terms of the formation of a specific sphere of wealth creation, the development of an enrichment economy is manifested as much by the intensification of the relations woven among these sectors as by the growth in each of the sectors we have mentioned, taken separately. Thus, for example, the development of trade in luxury goods maintains close ties, on the one hand, with an increase in public attention to cultural and artistic activities, considered in their conjoined aesthetic and commercial dimensions, and, on the other, with the growth of tourism and heritage creation, two processes that mutually stimulate each other. The multiplication of such links seems to us to be the most striking phenomenon, for it attests to the orientation of contemporary capitalism toward a systematic exploitation of wealth relying on the exploitation of “tradition” and, more generally, of the past.

This change tends not only to affect the structure of society in certain ways that may be deemed local or sectorial but also to modify the cognitive operators on which actors rely to form a representation of social space and to orient themselves within it. Some three decades ago, given the gradual disappearance of the French peasantry, these cognitive operators were still centered largely around positions of managers and engineers, workers and employees, which constituted its poles of attraction, or, one might say, its attractors – that is, they were centered around activities connected to varying degrees with productive work, dependent either on private firms or on organizations linked to a central government. Lately, these operators seem to have reorganized themselves around business, as attested for example by the proliferation of business schools.⁷⁹ But, if we go deeper into the details, we can see that this change in orientation has tended also to modify the nature of the activities that played the role of attractor, at least on a symbolic level, partly because the role of these activities was increasingly important but also doubtless because they were subjected to an intense work of representation. Thus we find in the position of attractor, on one side, the fuzzy notion of creator and, on the other, a category of increasing importance in ordinary social taxonomies whose label is essentially pejorative: in French, the category bobo, which can be associated with the English “hipster.”⁸⁰ The success of these terms is probably connected to the fact that this category emphasized a new social configuration, bringing together within the same persons traits that had been viewed as socially antagonistic, some having to do with commerce and others with intellectual and cultural life. This is why the extension of bobo is extremely variable and its definition extremely fuzzy, allowing it to encompass all cultural actors down to the most subaltern, for this category serves as a channel connecting the world of the “rich” to that of the “creators.” In addition, it serves increasingly as a basis for critiques of the “system”: this term, used in the 1930s to designate the despised “elites,” is coming back into use today.

Given the importance, in an enrichment economy, of the circulation of objects that are promoted through reference to the past, whether these objects already exist or whether they have allegedly been manufactured through “traditional” procedures, we shall approach this economy by returning to the things themselves – that is, by stressing the modalities of their valorization and the forms that support their circulation and make them estimable in terms of wealth. We shall contemplate these things especially in the particular moments of their “social life” (to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s expression),⁸¹ in which they circulate, change hands, and are objects of commerce (taken in its broad sense, which can include conversational exchange) – that is, when they are exchanged for money or for other objects or advantages, or when they are transmitted through inheritance or through donations, particularly to institutions. These are the moments par excellence in which things are subjected to a test⁸² during which the question of their value arises, a question made manifest either in the form of a price, in the case of direct sales, or in the form of an estimate made by relying on the commercial exchange of things deemed similar.