who enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy with respect to institutions.35 They accompanied a proliferation of exhibit organizers (“curators”), who worked on “projects” without answering to any hierarchical body; this often went hand in hand with considerable economic insecurity and an increased dependence on major collectors and galleries.
This redefinition of culture and the measures that accompanied it were undergirded by a philosophy that has been expressed in part by Félix Guattari,36 in a theory that associates the processes of creation and the constitution of value with the expression of differences of any order, whether the object in question is new (for example, an industrial wasteland whose beauty can suddenly be revealed) or old (for example, a Romanesque church), differences that can modify the perception of the world shared by the people to whom they are pointed out. “What can be done to ensure that music, dance, creation, all forms of sensibility, belong by rights to the entire set of social components?,” Guattari asks.37 The response lies in the conception according to which all human beings are creators whenever they realize their humanity by paying attention to differences in which they recognize themselves, and when they manifest a desire to share with others both the recognition of those differences and the recognition of their humanity inasmuch as their humanity is expressed in the attention paid to the differences. Thus everyone turns out to be oriented toward a goal, which is to interest other people, to arouse their curiosity, and this process is at the root of the formation of communities constituted around encounters among distinct beings, each of whom intends to share with the others the differences that constitute his or her singularity. From this perspective (which Philippe Urfalino judiciously characterizes as vitalist),38 the mission of cultural agencies – above all, the agencies that distribute the funding that cultural activities need – is to put people into circulation and bring them into contact, to organize encounters in order to promote the exchange of identities and differences.
Money is the energy that allows such encounters to take place, through the financing of travel, performances, colloquia, festivals, and so on. But these encounters produce an energy that generates money in its turn, so that the economy – the libidinal economy, as it were – of exchanges of energy among actors, who are all animated by the same desire to awaken the curiosity of others by deploying their own differences while awakening themselves through contact with the differences manifested by others, rejoins the economy as understood by economists. In order to function, this generalized economy thus presupposes, on the one hand, that the participants will limit or delay the selection process, for one cannot know a priori what will arouse the curiosity and the creativity of others – that is, where the liberation of energy will come from – and, on the other hand, that participants will not fear excess, profusion, loss, or expenditures, for, in the absence of these, no energy can be produced. A conception to which disconsolate souls, unable to think in terms other than those of management control, object that money spent on culture – input – can easily be accounted for, and that it often leads to losses, and that the energy that culture is supposed to generate not only eludes accountability but also resists any other form of objectivization. This is the case up to the point when the importance of what geographers call the residential economy is recognized, and when mayors in urban agglomerations realize that cultural investment in the broad sense constitutes a solid asset for attracting qualified workers, tourists, foreign residents, or wealthy retirees to their cities – and also, increasingly, businesses specialized in exploiting the type of resources on which an enrichment economy is based.
A new perspective in economic analysis
Jack Lang’s directives, which he implemented when the left came to power in France in 1981, accompanied and sometimes preceded a turn that was taking place among economists, especially among those who had been influenced by Marxism or by the economic outlook of the radical American left. A number of the latter thinkers had worked in French research organizations, especially INSEE. Their work accompanied the planning that took place in the 1960s and, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, their models sought to integrate the effects of international competition on an economy that had been conceived, after the Second World War, primarily within national frameworks.39 In the 1980s, these economists shared a serious concern about competitiveness, but they also agreed that the economic models centered on the major industrial firms were being exhausted, although they did not give up on the project of a public framing structure for the economy. That project led them to resist the economic trend that was fast becoming dominant, the trend toward placing particular stress on demand and on the dynamics of international commerce. The work of these economists is relevant to the genealogy of the enrichment economy that we are trying to depict in broad strokes, because, even though they still concentrated on production rather than on the exchange and circulation of things, they sought to multiply the directions that competition and growth could take by tracing paths that deviated from that of the mass industrial economy. This orientation gave them common ground with economists who were attentive to sociology and, more generally, to the social and political sciences that were developing a new orientation in the second half of the 1980s: the economics of conventions.40
As one example of this new approach, we can look at a work by Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, published in the United States in 1984 and in 1989 in French translation as Les chemins de la prospérité: de la production de masse à la spécialisation souple (The paths of prosperity: from mass production to supple specialization). The book was highly influential in Europe, especially in France and Italy, among scholars who focused on small, networked, sometimes family-run businesses, on the dynamics of proximity, and on local development policies centered in regional agencies and industrial districts.41 In the preface to the French edition, Piore and Sabel undertook to show that the opposition on which their book was based, between “two antagonistic modes of technological progress” (assembly-line production on the one hand, an artisanal economy on the other), is particularly valid for France. While “nineteenth-century France appeared as a country with an artisanal economy par excellence,” unlike “its rivals in industrial competition” Great Britain and the United States, France transformed itself after the Second World War, by a deliberate political choice on the part of its leaders, into a prototypical mass production economy rivaled only by that of the United States.42
The economic model that Piore and Sabel sought to promote in the mid-1980s was supposed to be valid for any type of production. But companies that had turned toward a luxury economy served as their primary models, and it was chiefly with respect to the manufacture of exceptional products that the turn advocated by the authors proved to be realistic. A case in point can be found in the textile district of Prato, in Tuscany. Faced with competition from less expensive textiles made in Japan and Eastern Europe, Prato became a paradigmatic example of local development based on networked small businesses. It succeeded owing to two factors: “a long-term shift from standard to fashionable fabrics, and a corresponding reorganization of production from large integrated mills to technologically sophisticated shops specializing in various phases of production.”43 Lyon offers a counter-example: it had stopped producing artisanal silk in the late nineteenth century in favor of industrial spinning mills, and it saw its textile industry disappear in the late 1950s. In the context of the “industrial districts” of “the third Italy,” middle-sized factories benefited from the activation of familial and political solidarities in an environment shaped by dynamic regional entities; this explains the success of clothing companies such as Benetton or, later, Diesel, both of which attained the status of worldwide groups.44
As a second example, we can consider a book published in 1993 by Robert Salais and Michael Storper, Les mondes de production: enquête sur l’identité économique en France.45 This work is particularly relevant to our effort to grasp the moment at which the orientation toward exceptional goods with a strongly cultural tenor was beginning to be considered as a way to compensate for the decline in mass production that was affecting the industrial regions in France. By relying on the notion of “possible worlds,” borrowed from the economy of conventions, the authors distinguished between an industrial world in which
