There is nothing that cannot be enriched, whether it comes from a more or less ancient past or is a contemporary object enriched in the process of fabrication. But a thing – any “thing” at all – can be enriched in various ways. It can be enriched physically (for example, in the case of an old house or apartment, by making the beams or joists visible) and/or culturally (for example, by relating the object to other things with which it has a certain harmony). Cultural enrichment of the latter sort always presupposes using a narrative structure in order to select, from within the multiplicity of potentially relatable phenomena, the differences presented by the object in question that can be considered especially pertinent and that must therefore be singled out and highlighted in the discourses that accompany the object’s circulation. In this sense, enrichment economies have as their principal resource the creation and shaping of differences and identities.
Dormant resources in the enrichment economy
In the effort to understand how an enrichment economy is formed, France offers a paradigmatic example, owing to the simultaneously local and global character of its economy. The development of an enrichment economy can also be observed elsewhere, in Italy or Spain, for instance; on a more local scale, it can be studied in cities or even in districts within cities, for example, in the area around the High Line in New York.11 It is worth noting that changes of the type we are trying to pinpoint are always rooted in an “enrichment basin” offering favorable geographical and historical conditions.
We can thus attempt to look at the formation of an enrichment economy in the way certain historians have looked at changes that have affected certain regions of Great Britain, initially on the local level, between the late eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth, changes that marked what has been called the first industrial revolution. As Edward Anthony Wrigley, a specialist in demographic history, has argued, this “revolution” was not simply the result of a change in the distribution of the workforce.12 An additional and perhaps a primary cause was a change in the resources exploited for the purpose of creating wealth. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the principal source of wealth creation was essentially organic: agriculture, livestock, wool, wood, the use of animals for hauling, and so on. According to Wrigley, this is why the great classical economists, from Adam Smith to Malthus and Ricardo, maintained a pessimistic vision of the future, for the exploitation of additional land would not be able to compensate for population growth, as they saw it: the best lands were already being cultivated, and any new ones would produce diminishing returns. In fact, in Wrigley’s view, it was the increasingly extensive exploitation of fossil deposits, and especially coal (it too was of organic origin, of course, but embedded in such a remote past), that gave the lie to the pessimistic prophecy. Coal extraction thus constituted the defining feature of industrial society. A quantitative historian, Wrigley brought to light the new role attributed to this resource in energy on which the development of mechanization depended; he analyzed the financial flows that shifted rapidly from agriculture toward mines and manufacturing, attesting to the importance quickly granted by holders of capital to this major source of wealth creation. For reasons stemming not from the nature of this wealth but from the forms of domination that influenced its distribution, industrial mechanization did not prevent inequalities from remaining as pronounced as they had been in the previous century – and indeed, for several decades, they were exacerbated. The expansion of inequality and impoverishment might have continued indefinitely had it not provoked renewed criticism from the increasingly powerful labor movement.
One can hypothesize an analogy between the phenomenon whose contours and processes we have just recalled and a phenomenon we are witnessing in contemporary France. The enrichment economy corresponds not only to growing specialization in the realm of culture and in the increasingly apparent symbiosis between the cultural realm and that of business but also to an original mode of wealth creation based on the exploitation – much more intensive than before – of specific deposits built up over time and for which narrativity constitutes a privileged mode of adding value. This is an economy that derives its substance from the past. Thus it relies primarily not on industrial mass production of standardized products that are sold when they are new but, rather, on the addition of value to things already present, such as objects from antiquity, “vintage” items from a less remote past, or monuments, buildings, or sites – in short, everything that makes up the vast domain of a country’s heritage. But this also holds true for works of art that, even when they are by contemporary artists, are presumed, if their value is recognized, to be inscribed in a temporality that pulls them out of the present and considers them from a vanishing point in the future, as if they already belonged to the past, or, to put it another way, to confer on them a sort of immortality, since they are destined to be preserved indefinitely; this is the role assigned to museums.
Let us note, however, that exploitation of this type of wealth has so far been quite uneven from country to country, in relation to variables of which the primary one is obviously the degree to which, in the various nation-states, the holders of capital could count on a workforce that was readily exploitable even though its members had no special skills or training. While direct investments abroad were made chiefly in emerging countries with an abundant proletariat accustomed to low wages, investments in the enrichment economy were oriented primarily toward the countries of Western Europe. These countries were marked by a very substantial expansion of secondary and especially higher education in the 1960s, thus making a large, well-trained, and completely unorganized labor force available to the enrichment economy. Its members, especially when their competencies were mainly in literary or artistic areas, had trouble rising to stable salaried positions in large industrial, commercial, or financial companies, so that, facing the threat of unemployment, they tended to be willing to accept temporary, unstable, and poorly paid jobs which were often below the level they should have been able to expect based on their diplomas (that is, based on what the same diplomas had been worth in the previous job market), as long as those jobs corresponded to the cultural aspirations they had nurtured during their studies.
But a second factor also came into play: the existence, in Western European countries, of abundant strata of heritage sites. Resources constituted much earlier had been systematically exploited, preserved, and rehabilitated – in France, this process has been under way since the Revolution – because the central government saw them as internal instruments fostering national unification and as external instruments fostering national prestige; efforts to develop museums and catalog their holdings through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exemplify this movement.13 The resources exploited by an enrichment economy are never simply warehouses full of old things; they always require efforts to highlight the past, endeavors that rely on more or less consistent traces but that, in principle, any political entity should be able to undertake, insofar as that entity bases its legitimacy on a past that it can then exploit.
It must be noted, however, that, in France, this highlighting of what came to be called the national patrimony14 also stemmed from what we may call – paraphrasing Marx – a primitive accumulation of cultural capital. The latter, on the same basis as the form of capital Marx discusses, did not have a purely commercial origin. It resulted to a significant extent from violence – that is, from the military and predatory action of the central government, which, in France, especially after the Revolution and the imperial wars, proceeded to dismantle large numbers of chateaux, abbeys, churches, and other sites and to loot the countries it had conquered and/or colonized. As Bénédicte Savoy shows, in the early nineteenth century the first director of the Louvre Museum, Vivant Denon, orchestrated the transfer to Paris of a great number of works of art that had belonged to the German nobility, with the justification that, because “works of art” were “the fruit of the spirit of freedom,” they ought naturally to “reside in the country of freedom.”15
Changes in French cultural policy
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?