2 Toward Enrichment
The characteristics of an enrichment economy
The domains covered by an enrichment economy are not simply appended to the sectors of an industrial economy as add-ons that contribute, each in its own way, to a global bottom line. The enrichment economy is characterized by special features that have wide-reaching economic and social consequences. It is based on mechanisms that are in many respects quite different from those of an industrial economy. To prepare for the detailed analyses that follow, let us begin with an overview and several examples.
The prices of industrial products – articles intended for use – tend to go down sharply over time; the uses made of them are presumed to reduce their performance (used cars are exemplary in this respect). The short- or long-term fate of a standard industrial product is to become trash. This is so much the case that the question of trash and its disposal has become a major concern for industrial societies.
Conversely, the things at the heart of the enrichment economy may have long been treated as trash – forgotten, left behind in attics, abandoned in basements, or buried in the ground. A large percentage of the things we admire in museums or in other places where precious collections are displayed, perhaps even all such things, as the anthropologist Michael Thomson suggests in his seminal work Rubbish Theory,1 have been treated as trash at one point or another. More generally, the most pertinent things in an enrichment economy may see their prices go up over time – the opposite of what happens to industrial products. It is precisely the work of selection between what is destined to be abandoned or destroyed and what is destined to be preserved that is at the heart of the activities, and the anxieties, of those responsible for taking inventories of a given heritage, those who, confronted with any of the objects belonging to the unlimited universe of things that are candidates for survival, have to make crucial decisions concerning their fate.2
In fact, the objects of the highest value in an enrichment economy are not intended to meet needs or even, in many cases, to be used; instead, they take on their importance with reference to a different configuration in which the logic of collection is central. This is true for objects from antiquity and for works of art, of course. But it is also true for many products of the luxury industry. Even if the latter may episodically satisfy a need, they are not primarily acquired to be used. Those who acquire them often already own a number of functionally similar objects (several high-end automobiles, for example, or a large number of handbags from the top designers); they are accustomed to surrounding themselves with expensive objects and putting themselves on display in front of others. Going back at least to Thorstein Veblen,3 sociologists and economists, while denouncing the conspicuous consumption of luxury products, have sought motives behind the phenomenon. One such motive is clearly the “distinction effect,” the desire to set oneself apart, to stand out. Nevertheless, it seems that expensive items are often stored away without being exposed to the eyes of others, and, when serious collectors are involved, even out of the owner’s sight, since there are so many of them. It would appear, then, that such objects are accumulated mainly to be kept, sometimes to be contemplated in solitude, and placed in relations of proximity with other objects of the same kind in a logic that closely resembles the logic of collecting for its own sake.
Filling cellars with extraordinary wines offers a particularly striking illustration of this type of accumulative behavior. Aimed at acquiring complete series, the behavior is driven by a concern with filling gaps within sets that are being constituted. Wine collectors will seek, for example, to acquire all the vintages that were produced between two selected dates, or that meet certain standards, or that come from certain vineyards.4 The desire to possess specific items to fill gaps defined with reference to an ideal totality constitutes one of the principal motives governing behaviors in communities of collectors. These behaviors are particularly striking when they concern beverages, because in this case they have a paradoxical character. Either the content of the bottle is used – that is, consumed – which means an indefinite delay in the formation of a complete collection, or else the collection is kept more as a collection of labels than as a collection of wines as such. Indeed, with great wines, whose nature is profoundly modified by the conditions of aging, the referential relation between the words printed on the label and the content of the bottle always has some degree of uncertainty. Similarly, to take a different example, let us consider the type of collector at whom sales of high-end leather goods are aimed (Hermès handbags, for instance). Although these goods have been manufactured relatively recently, they are sold by major auction houses that deal primarily in antiquities and works of art, in old models of watches, jewelry, clothing, “designer” furnishings, or in certain brands of automobiles that have become collectors’ items. In this logic, the demand for a thing does not decrease when one approaches the satiation point, as is the case for things corresponding to needs; on the contrary, it tends – as we see especially in the case of collections – to increase as the collection grows. The most coveted item of all will be the one required for the completion of a set.
How is the value of the most sought-after objects established in an enrichment economy? Or, rather, how are the arguments that justify the price constructed? Production costs are not a primary factor: these costs are either non-existent, as in the case of ancient objects dug out of the ground, or secondary, as for example with high-end perfumes in which the content of the flask represents less than 10 percent of the selling price in shops. If we want to refer to costs, we must take into account not so much the production costs per se, in the case of ancient objects, as the costs of restoration and preservation5 and, more generally, what can be called the showcasing costs.
As the foregoing remarks suggest, we can offer a schematic sketch of two ideal types of economy. An economy centered on industrial production can be contrasted with an economy based on what one might call processes of enriching things. Let us recall that the term “enrichment” is used not only to indicate that the things on which this economy is based are intended chiefly for the rich but also to designate the operations carried out on the things themselves in order to increase their value and their prices.
The term “enrichment economy” seems preferable to “symbolic economy,” a term used more frequently in works that seek to pinpoint the specificity of a “cultural” socio-economy,6 often with reference to the seminal works of Pierre Bourdieu.7 The label “symbolic” strikes us as both too broad and too vague to designate the type of operation on which we want to focus. When the differentiating functions of cultural goods – the “distinction effects” – considered from the consumer’s standpoint are stressed, the various lacks that these goods are intended to fill are reduced to a single dimension, which is that of prestige or social distinction, while the standpoint of the actor offering these goods, who has to stress differences among them in order to be more competitive, is underestimated or absent. But, more broadly speaking, everything that is inserted into relationships among human persons and grasped by language will have a “symbolic” dimension. Similar observations can be made about the way Jean Baudrillard used the term “sign” and his project of developing a general semiology of objects.8 Likewise, every operation involving symbols or signs has its underpinnings and its consequences in the world of objects. By privileging the opposition between “material” and “immaterial” entities (an opposition often attributed, mistakenly, to Marx), this approach tends to ignore the fact that everything that is inserted into an economy can be envisaged in both these lights.9 It then becomes difficult to analyze the various ways in which different types of economies combine them. Yet these combinations, in their specificity, characterize different ways of giving form and value to what will give rise to commerce – that is, to different economies. As for the notion of “art world,” introduced by Howard Becker to designate “all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which this world, and perhaps others as well, define as art,”10 it has the disadvantage of being too restrictive and at the same time of overemphasizing human activity, while virtually