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 operator making it possible to establish a relationship between the various realms of commercial activities on which the enrichment economy is based.
For an initial characterization of these realms, we shall focus chiefly on the case of France, which constitutes a privileged vantage point from which to observe phenomena whose presence is attested in numerous places around the world. Like the industrial economy, the enrichment economy is very unevenly distributed in spatial terms: it occupies large territories in certain countries, but it can be reduced to the scale of a quarter of a big city in other places where intensive agriculture, industry, or service activities predominate. In this sense, the spatial distribution of the enrichment economy must be conceived in terms of density rather than in terms of national boundaries, for nations are apt to evolve; as we know, such a shift occurred in the case of large-scale industrial production, which started in a few counties of rural England and ended up conquering many regions of the world. Just as we might speak of an industrial basin, we can speak of an enrichment basin, a space that is often established by drawing on a concentration of religious buildings (such as the Romanesque or Gothic churches in many Italian cities or, in Japan, the temples in Kyoto).
The omnipresence of enriched objects
The fields within which the enrichment economy is deployed are hard to describe synthetically, because their substantive diversity is not reduced by their inclusion in a broad category that would allow us to bring out their connections and designate them with a single term or formula. The semantic, legal, and statistical frameworks on which description of the economic and social world relies have been forged in order to give authorities a grip on an economy that is principally industrial. Thus at present there are no categorial arrangements or accounting frameworks that would allow us to determine with relative precision either the economic importance taken on by the nebulous phenomenon whose contours we are seeking to sketch here or the number of persons whose primary activity is connected with that phenomenon. This is the case in particular because the phenomenon brings together sectors (such as art and tourism), activities (as diverse as heading museums and manufacturing alligator handbags), statuses (such as short-term worker, stable wage-earner, government employee, or person of private means), and professions that are dispersed in statistical nomenclatures among sets constructed according to different logical principles, more in accordance with the old classifications of the industrial world.16
In addition, the existing frameworks deal with employment using two approaches whose results are difficult to put together, for some researchers look at individually declared professions, while others examine the economic sectors taken into account by national statistics; this makes it hard to analyze the indirect and induced effects of each type of activity and/or profession. As a result, we lack statistical data in support of generalizations that would allow us to highlight and follow the specific processes at the heart of this evolution. This is why, in contemporary economic literature, presentation of the economic reorientation toward the wealthy is distributed among various domains; these are apprehended according to diverse accounting forms that often rely on inconsistent definitions and categories, making an overall grasp quite difficult. The absence of an accounting framework and of categories unifying the enrichment economy is not accidental, nor does it stem from a delay in the systematic institutional registration of changes in reality; it will be understood, at the end of our analysis, as one of the conditions that make this economy profitable.
In order to indicate how the sphere of the enrichment economy is constituted so that readers will be able to follow us while relying on their ordinary sense of social reality, we must begin by turning to the objects themselves. A first indication will hold our attention: the growing visibility given to objects that are exchanged at high or very high prices in comparison with the prevailing norms. This visibility is most pronounced in major metropolitan centers, but it can also be found in a number of restored and protected sites or villages whose activity had been primarily industrial. It is prominent as well, for example, in media targeting an audience that, although fairly well-to-do, is not sufficiently wealthy, on average, to acquire many of the things that are on display not only in advertisements but also in the content presented.
In France and elsewhere, the principal organs of the daily or weekly press – whose readership is increasingly limited – offer supplements on the same themes so as to draw funds from the luxury industry that will allow at least some of these economically threatened publications to continue to exist. Among these, we find How to Spend It, put out in London by the Financial Times; T Magazine of the New York Times; and the weekly M Le magazine of the French newspaper of record Le Monde. These leisure-oriented magazines are aimed at a public with fuzzy contours but whose members, finding themselves mirrored in the magazines’ pages, can see themselves appreciatively as both cultivated and wealthy. Airline magazines are another case in point: for example, Air France Magazine, published by Gallimard, is offered to the airline’s clients free of charge. Publications like these have the advantage, for our purposes, of displaying advertisements for luxury items (watches, perfumes, clothing, real estate, upscale hotels, and the like) in close proximity to articles discussing trendy, vintage, or “design” objects, sites whose ancestral and historical values are highlighted, works of art, exhibits, and artists, and (especially in France) high-level gastronomy construed as part of the country’s “non-material heritage.” In these magazines, the various topics presented in ads and articles are treated without distinction, as if they were inseparable components of one and the same universe.
These media present objects chosen not so much for their usefulness or their sturdiness, as would be the case for common industrial items, as for their intrinsic preciousness, or simply for their difference, and also, inevitably, for their price. These objects are often associated with national or regional markers of identity that are supposed to guarantee their authenticity (even if their manufacture can be discreetly outsourced, as happens with ordinary objects, to countries with low wages). The fascination that these objects are meant to exercise is thought to depend on a sort of aura that surrounds them, conferring on them a touch of exceptionality that destines them to be appreciated by an elite. The objects may be antiques or items produced by luxury firms; they are often presented as handmade. They are linked to the fashion sector in many instances (watches, jewelry, handbags, and clothing), but they also may be outstanding wines or food items produced in identified and protected terroirs or contemporary artworks presented in galleries, at art fairs, or at auctions that attract attention through their cultural and economic dimensions alike.17
In these presentations, increasing importance is attributed not only to the objects themselves but also to the universes in which
