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 ignoring the way things circulate, their prices and their value.
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
