Enrichment. Luc Boltanski

adopted for getting out of the crisis that capitalism underwent from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, roughly speaking. Often analyzed in terms of a decline in productivity and an excess in productive capacities with respect to the demand among those who can afford to buy, and the resulting steady erosion in profits from the production of manufactured goods,⁶ the delocalization movement also has political roots. For the big companies, it has been a way to escape from the fiscal constraints of nation-states, and it has also constituted a response to the mobilization of the European proletariat, particularly during the decade following the upheavals of May 1968. One of the consequences of this process, but perhaps also one of its unacknowledged objectives, has been to pacify or even suppress a working class that, in the 1960s and 1970s, had proved particularly combative, especially in France and Italy. Nevertheless, the delocalization movement could not have occurred at the same pace or to the same degree without the measures of financial deregulation adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, measures that favored transfers of capital from the old industrial countries toward the so-called emerging countries, thus stimulating the creation, in countries with low wage scales, of subcontracting firms that were largely dependent on orders from companies based in the major European or North American cities.

Old and new sites of prosperity

      In France, the loss of industrial jobs chiefly affected areas in which industry was the main source of wealth, thus especially the northern and northeastern regions,⁷ precisely the areas in which, as numerous studies attempting to connect regional geography, economics, and political science have shown, the extreme right is achieving its best electoral results. Still, other regions where industry had played a less important role at the beginning of the period in question have become wealthy even though they have not escaped deindustrialization. This phenomenon is all the more troubling in that it is found in many rural regions that had already suffered from a weakening of the agricultural sector during the 1960s: the collapse of small farming had also led to the decline of small and medium-sized cities, leading to virtual desertification in some areas. But it is as though these regions had profited from the increased commodification of domains previously deemed marginal, as if they had reoriented themselves toward exploitation of new strata of resources: to their benefit, a number of objects, places, and even experiences that had for a long time played only a background role with respect to the primordial interests of capitalism were transformed into sources of potential wealth.

Economic geography does not allow a direct approach to this second movement because, in the absence of categories dedicated to the analysis of the process, it cannot turn to statistical data as solidly established as those for industry. Nevertheless, the field has a particularly relevant contribution to make to our research. As has been shown by Vincent Hecquet, who began with a statistical approach, and Laurent Davezies,⁸ who focused on geography, the wealth of the various regions in France does not depend exclusively on the degree of development of the productive sphere – far from it; thus “the new economic geography” can separate “the territories’ contribution to growth” from “the territories’ social development.”⁹ The decline of the industrial regions in fact contrasts sharply with the growing prosperity of regions situated especially along the coasts, in the west or in the south, where population growth has been pronounced and employment and wages have increased. These regions, with greater and greater commercial activity, are developing on a basis that, if we adopt the classification used by geographers, is not “productive” but “residential.”¹⁰ These same regions include a great many retirees (49 percent of all retirees in France) who are by and large better off financially than the average,¹¹ large numbers of vacation homes (66 percent), intermittent or “shuttle” residents who work and live part of the time in large cities in France or elsewhere, and a number of persons who are unemployed and/or dependent on social services who find “odd jobs” in these areas, jobs roughly equivalent to work in private homes. According to Hecquet, Davezies, and others, these are “dynamic non-commercial territories” characterized by what they identify as “development without growth” based on “residential economies.” In these territories, which are among the most “dynamic” and most “attractive” in France (encompassing 44 percent of the population) and which offer “residential advantages,” tourism and the restaurant business are developing along with the maintenance of real-estate stock that had been in decline until recently. In the rural areas of these Atlantic and Mediterranean regions, the arrival of new residents has led to a significant increase in construction.¹² Whereas the employment base is shrinking in the industrial regions, the development of these “residential” territories is creating many new jobs in domestic service, including manual laborers, but “in local sectors oriented toward local demands (sectors that are tied by and large to specific locales).”¹³

      Movements of this sort have stimulated the coalescence and deployment of forms of valorization that, although they were not unknown and not negligible, had remained in an embryonic state, since they had not been sufficiently integrated into business practices. The enrichment economy is one component of a social world struggling with a form of capitalism that we characterize as integral, in the sense that various ways of creating value are integrated within it. In this social world, buying and selling mass-produced objects, and especially artifacts that incorporate a high level of technology, have continued to have primacy, for objects of this type account for the vast majority of commercial exchanges. But there are many indications attesting to the fact that commodification has also been oriented, more intensely and more visibly than before, in new directions. Unlike what was labeled “consumer society” and subjected to critique in the 1960s and 1970s, when buyers were often represented as “passive, manipulated, and impulsive,” one of the characteristics of integral capitalism is that it strongly stimulated and compensated commercial dexterity and had as its horizon the fact that everyone is not only a consumer but also a merchant. Following this perspective to its extreme limit, we shall deal thus with merchandise – commodities – without assuming that merchants need to be studied as a separate category.¹⁴

The extension of capitalism has been translated through the more pronounced and broadened role played by fashion effects, as attested, for example, by the importance attached to brands, and especially by what sociological literature often calls the culture of celebrity, whose social role has been examined in a number of studies starting in the 1960s,¹⁵ and whose economic dimension has recently received increased attention, facilitated in particular by the development of the Internet. Similarly, the commercial importance of cultural activities has taken on unprecedented salience, as exemplified for instance by the flurry of record-breaking prices at art auctions, a phenomenon that has been compared to the processes of financializing the economy. We ourselves, however, intend to stress the development of an economy of attention, which leads a growing number of persons to seek objects that are valued less for their direct utility than for their expressive charge and for the narratives that accompany their circulation. These things reveal themselves to the observer in what is specific about them – that is, in their differences as compared to other more or less similar things; in somewhat the same way, collectors accumulate and bring together objects that have a family resemblance to one another, as if to enjoy the tension between their similarity and their diversity.

      As a provisional indication of a change in the attention paid to things, we can single out the importance of the practice of collecting over the last few decades. The growing diffusion and internalization of a type of attention to things associated with the ethos of collecting cannot be evaluated solely by taking into account the number of modest collections and collectors. The schemas on which the practice of collecting rests, often described in cognitive and affective terms, also have a particular economic dimension that is especially evident if we turn to the transactions to which the exceptional items sought by a well-to-do public give rise – transactions involving, for example, art objects or antiquities, luxury goods, houses associated with artists or architects, and so on. Now, objects of this type, and the arrangements that make it possible to attach value to them, are at the heart of an enrichment economy. In this regard, we may wonder whether collecting, less as a specific practice than as a generative form involving a certain way of being with things, might not constitute a sort of