Luc Boltanski - Enrichment

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, 16the spread of luxury in eighteenth-century Paris, 17the luxury industries in nineteenth-century France, 18and 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, 19this 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. 20As 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, 21and 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. 22The 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 awareness 23that 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 considerably 25with 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. 26These 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. 28The 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.