the pressure of competition and protest, changes direction, these relations break down. Public goods are ill-defined and their provision contentious, as are the terms of exchange. It becomes difficult even to discern, as we see in the arc of Boltanski’s work, who is participating in the economy and what it means to participate. The terms of exchange are too ambiguous and incomplete to suggest clues about the nature of the emerging structures, and the structures too fluid to point to reliable terms of exchange.
Under these circumstances an analytic response – the one pursued in The New Spirit of Capitalism and Enrichment – is to identify those terms and structures in each new configuration that are mutually supportive and, on the basis of this accord, to define new types of capitalism. The risk is that understandings based on emerging agreements will ignore, like the agreements themselves, the embryonic disaccord from which indignation and protest spring.
But facing the same ambiguity of terms and fluidity of structure, the actors’ practical response is to look to allies outside the sphere of exchange to articulate new understandings that make sense – including moral sense – of the confusion. In a word, the actors turn to politics: the marketplace politics of politicians and parties but also to the backstage politics of institutional and legal reforms, successful and botched, and to the fumbling adjustment of established policies and programs to new conditions. It is a mistake, or, rather, an artifact of many kinds of retrospective analysis, to conclude that this jumble of initiatives and accommodations simply clears the way for and helps support new capitalisms. The same pile of discordant bric-à-brac can be the source of renewed conceptions of markets, public powers, and public goods that make exchange among individuals and groups morally intelligible and therefore legitimate again. Politics is always also a fight about which usage will prevail, and in moments of general breakdown, like the present, these stakes are sensed by all. When moral protest disappears from the sphere of exchange, or seems excluded from it, it is often on the way to such political fights.
Let me put this point generally, as my own reading of the thrust of Boltanski’s reading of the last decades of capitalist development and critique of it: in times of crisis and confusion, the only way to understand structures is to see them as mutable and in motion – that is, not as structures at all; and the only way to grasp the potential of these mobile and mutable structures is to see them in the light of possible political alternatives, each associating a distinct group of allies with a bundle of institutional reforms in a constellation prefiguring new terms of exchange. This perspective, venturing further, is at once analytic and practical, or, if you like, cognitive and moral. It is the vantage point from which the observer can best understand what matters and why, and the moral agent can find and help create the rudiments of order amid tumult. In the terms Boltanski develops in On Critique, the turn to politics allows the actors to escape the necessarily local limits of their practical judgments without yet requiring they have access to the “overarching” or “totalizing” understanding of structures that some kinds of sociology and social criticism claim to possess.
But while a preface is perhaps a place to formulate such questions and speculations, it is certainly not the place to pretend to conclusions. Besides, you likely have this book before you because you already have these sorts of questions, and many others, in mind, along with provisional answers. You already sense how little the critiques we have speak to the problems we face, and yet how we struggle to fashion even those. So you knew too that criticism is a labor of Sisyphus. As encouragement and consolation, therefore, it may help to recall Camus’ observation (from an essay published in 1942, the very darkest of times) that, in the hour of returning down the slope to push the boulder up again, Sisyphus was fully conscious of the task before him, most human in his consciousness, and, yes, happy in his humanity.
Introduction
Social actors, whether they are buying or selling, are constantly immersed in the universe of commodities. Indeed, their experience of what they conceive to be reality depends to a large extent on this universe, often more than they would care to admit. The order of commodities –things in circulation – emerges in a process through which each thing is assigned a price in monetary terms every time it changes hands. At the same time, the things in question remain diverse, so that the universe of commodities is perceived not as an opaque totality – that would make it impenetrable – but as a structured whole. Reference to the structures of this whole makes it possible to identify each of the things exchanged. In addition, because social actors have internalized a tacit competence for dealing with these structures, they are able to orient themselves in the universe of commodities: they can participate in commerce, and, most importantly, they can pass judgment on the relationship between things and their prices.
Nevertheless, these structures, along with the relations they institute between things, their prices, and the value attributed to them, draw on differences anchored in space and in history. They are modified over time in keeping with shifts in the form of capitalism. In most contemporary societies, capitalism imposes its straitjacket on commerce in things; in this regard, Walter Benjamin’s analyses offer a striking framework for contrasting the structures of merchandise that subtend trade in much of twenty-first-century Europe, and perhaps in the world, with those of the nineteenth century. In “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin nourished his meditation on history and his critique of a commodity-focused representation of civilization with a reflection on merchandise in the era of triumphant capitalism. Commodities are manifested in the immediacy of perceptible presence and indissociably – he says – as “phantasmagoria” to which strollers, flâneurs, yield, seeking “refuge in the crowd.”1 Benjamin stressed the forms taken by the world city, radically new forms at the time, in which were concentrated not only finance, luxury, and fashion but also the revolutionary bohemian life emblematized by Auguste Blanqui, along with industry and, above all, the proletariat. Benjamin’s primary interest lay in showing how beings in this context – persons and things existing in a common space – embodied a radical break with the past. This break, marked by the creation of industrial and financial capital, was manifested concretely in the destruction brought about in Paris by Baron Haussmann’s reforms and the concomitant reorganization of the urban fabric. The age of the “commodity fetish” sought to base its legitimacy on a futuristic staging of the benefits of technology; blind trust in “progress” was the instrument by means of which historians identified with victors. “And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers.”2
But the figure of the flâneur, when transposed to twenty-first-century Paris, is immersed in an entirely different reality. This new reality is no less capitalist than the one faced by Benjamin’s flâneur. However, “luxury” no longer boasts of being “industrial.” On the contrary, it strives to make us forget that its roots lie in a specific framework of production, one all the more easily brushed aside in that it is largely delocalized, confined to the orbits of other, faraway “world cities.” Capitalist accumulation is ongoing and even intensifying, but it relies on new economic arrangements and is associated with a diversification of the cosmos of commodities that depends on the modalities according to which value is assigned to them. The present study aims to describe this transformation, which is particularly apparent in the countries that have been the cradles of European industrial power, and above all in France; we shall analyze the way commodities are distributed among several different forms of valuation – that is, according to the way the price attached to a given commodity is justified or critiqued.
Our work will thus be oriented in two directions, whose relations we shall try to characterize. The first is chiefly historical. The object of this aspect of our study is an economic change that, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, has profoundly modified the way wealth is created in the countries of Western Europe. These countries have been marked both by deindustrialization and by an increased exploitation of certain resources that, without being entirely new, have taken on unprecedented importance. In our view, the scope
