increasingly as a basis for critiques of the “system”: this term, used in the 1930s to designate the despised “elites,” is coming back into use today.
Given the importance, in an enrichment economy, of the circulation of objects that are promoted through reference to the past, whether these objects already exist or whether they have allegedly been manufactured through “traditional” procedures, we shall approach this economy by returning to the things themselves – that is, by stressing the modalities of their valorization and the forms that support their circulation and make them estimable in terms of wealth. We shall contemplate these things especially in the particular moments of their “social life” (to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s expression),81 in which they circulate, change hands, and are objects of commerce (taken in its broad sense, which can include conversational exchange) – that is, when they are exchanged for money or for other objects or advantages, or when they are transmitted through inheritance or through donations, particularly to institutions. These are the moments par excellence in which things are subjected to a test82 during which the question of their value arises, a question made manifest either in the form of a price, in the case of direct sales, or in the form of an estimate made by relying on the commercial exchange of things deemed similar.
Notes
1 1. Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
2 2. See Michel Melot, Mirabilia: essai sur l’inventaire général du patrimoine culturel (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), and, for an ethnography of the selection processes, Nathalie Heinich, La fabrique du patrimoine (Paris: Éditions de la MSH, 2009).
3 3. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, [1899] 1979).
4 4. See Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Le marché de l’excellence: les grands crus à l’épreuve de la mondialisation (Paris: Seuil, 2009).
5 5. Jean-Pierre Cometti ignores this problem when he addresses the question: see Jean-Pierre Cometti, Conserver/restaurer: l’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa préservation technique (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).
6 6. This theme has been developed in American sociology; see especially Paul DiMaggio, “Classification in Art,” American Sociological Review, 52/4 (1987): 440–55; Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 79–108; on the notion of “symbolic goods,” see Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
7 7. Pierre Bourdieu, “Le marché des biens symboliques,” L’Année sociologique 22 (1971): 49–126.
8 8. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, [1968] 1996).
9 9. Here we follow Cornelius Castoriadis in The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1975] 1987): “Everything that is presented to us in the social–historical world is inextricably tied to the symbolic. … the innumerable material products without which no society could live even an instant, are not (not always, not directly) symbols. All of these, however, would be impossible outside of a symbolic network” (p. 117). According to Castoriadis, the “symbolic” can neither be treated (as it often is) as a mere neutral cloak nor as stemming from a “logic” properly speaking that would be superimposed on another kind of order known as “rational” (pp. 117–27).
10 10. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 34.
11 11. A nineteenth-century elevated railroad track converted in the early twenty-first century to a space for strolling enhanced by contemporary art works, the High Line is in a former industrial district that has become a center for art galleries and luxury shops. See David Halle and Elisabeth Tiso, New York’s New Edge: Contemporary Art, the High Line, and Urban Megaprojects on the Far West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
12 12. See Edward Anthony Wrigley, Continuity, Chance & Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
13 13. See Dominique Poulot, Une histoire des musées en France (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).
14 14. On the constitution of the French national patrimony, see Alexandra Kowalski, “The Nation, Rescaled: Theorizing the Decentralization of Memory in Contemporary France,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54/2 (2012): 308–31; and “State Power as Field Work: Culture and Practice in the French Survey of Historic Landmarks,” in Richard Sennett and Craig Calhoun, eds, Practicing Culture (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 82–104.
15 15. Bénédicte Savoy, Patrimoine annexé: les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions de la MSH, 2003).
16 16 Guido Guerzoni, Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700, trans. Amanda George (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, [2006] 2011).
17 17. Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 228–48.
18 18. Louis Bergeron, Les industries du luxe en France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).
19 19. See Eric Zuelow, ed., Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
20 20. Alain Croix, ed., Initiateurs et entrepreneurs culturels du tourisme (1850–1950), Actes du colloque de Saint-Brieuc, June 2–4, 2010 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011).
21 21. See Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, La production de l’idéologie dominante (Paris: Demopolis, [1976] 2008).
22 22. A good indicator is the work Le partage des bénéfices, published under the collective name of Darras, which brings together the contributions to a colloquium organized by Pierre Bourdieu in 1965 by sociologists and anthropologists (P. Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon, C. Durand, R. Sainsaulieu, J. Lautman, J. Cuisenier), economists (J.-P. Pagé, C. Gruson, M. Praderie), and statisticians from INSEE (A. Darbel, C. Seibel, J.-P. Ruault). Prefaced by Claude Gruson, a Keynesian economist influenced by social Christianity, then director of INSEE, the work dealt with the fact that “expansion” had not managed to reduce inequality envisaged on several levels: employment, agriculture, schooling, and so on. The papers tended to stress the need for “social mobility.” See Darras, Le partage des bénéfices, expansion et inégalités en France (Paris: Minuit, 1966).
23 23. After the first report of the Club of Rome, in 1972, titled “The Limits to Growth.” See Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), pp. 49–52.
24 24. See for example La Gueule ouverte, a successful periodical similar to Charlie Hebdo, published by Pierre Fournier with contributions by Cavanna, Wolinski, Reiser, and Cabu; and also Alain Hervé’s Le Sauvage, similar to Le Nouvel Observateur, where André Gorz was a journalist.
25 25. The number of students grew sixfold between the early 1960s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, from 215,000 to 1.3 million. In 1982, among French people between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four who were working or actively seeking employment, 2.1 million – that is, 13 percent of this age group – had degrees attesting to post-secondary education. In 2010, the number with similar degrees reached 8 million, or four
