Abstract
If you take a train from London’s Marylebone Station to Oxford, you will be informed, in English, Japanese and Chinese, of a stop at Bicester Village. This shopping complex, resembling a Disneyfied New England street, is one of currently 11 such ‘villages’ or ‘chic outlets’ across (Western) Europe (Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Madrid, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, and Brussels), and China (Shanghai and Suzhou), selling ‘leading fashion brands at discounted prices’. The designer-labelled underwear may not be cotton-enriched, but the commodities are, offering affordable chic clothing combined with a kind of tourism.
This is a good illustration of what Boltanski and Esquerre describe as an economy of enrichment, which they see as displacing the industrial economy based on standardized wage labour and the mass production of standard goods, symbolized by the Model T Ford. This ‘standard form’ has given way to a set of three alternative forms of valorization (mise en valeur) of commodities (and sometimes those who produce them). One of these alternative forms, governing the way in which objects are to be perceived (p. 154), is that of ‘collection’, in which an object such as a used book becomes defined as ‘collectible’ and its price correspondingly inflated. Boltanski and Esquerre (2014) recently published an article on this form in Les Temps Modernes (no. 679, pp. 5–72; cf. Boltanski and Esquerre, 2016a, 2016b).
The two other, related forms they term ‘tendency’ and ‘active’. The first is essentially the ‘luxury’ brand as vulgarized and discounted in the Bicester Villages, but also a real or pretended connection to a prominent figure, or even a valorized site, such as ‘France’ for perfumes sold under that label in China. Then there is the ‘active’ form, in which objects are bought with a view to their subsequent resale or at least in the expectation that their value will increase. These forms differ in part in their relation to time: last year’s designer dress will lose its ‘value’, unless it belonged to a celebrity, in which case it may be a profitable investment. These three forms are, then, interrelated and, as with the six forms of justification in one of Boltanski’s earlier works (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991), we may wonder why there are just this number, but the contrast with the standard form is clear enough.
What, then, is value (valeur)? The authors define it as a mechanism (dispositif) of justifying prices. As well as the real prices at which goods are exchanged, there are ‘meta-prices’, ideal estimates of an underlying ‘value’, as established by judgement and negotiation. As in Boltanski’s earlier work, the notion of the ‘test’ (épreuve) plays an important part – most obviously when the value imputed to an object is tested in a sale or an auction, where the ‘reserve price’ corresponds to a metaprice.
So far in this review I have concentrated on material objects, but the notion of enrichment also applies to places and people. The authors address what they call ‘patrimonialisation’, in which districts and houses are enriched by their location in or proximity to historic sites, and the rise of tourism and its extension to previously neglected sites or those which are obliged, like Arles with the loss of its locomotive building industry, to trade on earlier history and artistic innovation. They also cite a less successful example, that of Salon-de-Provence, which attempted to recreate itself on the basis of its connection to Nostradamus (p. 449). (The United Kingdom is currently experiencing similar attempts to increase the touristic potential of cities like Birmingham and Bradford.)
As for people, a chapter towards the end of the book examines what have been called the ‘creative classes’, noting that cultural workers can often achieve an adequate living, though at a much lower level than cadres in the private or public sector, thanks to family property or other wealth. Pace Richard Florida, these groups do not constitute a class (pp. 479–81): they are too diverse and their conditions of life are too uncertain. Those who fail will tend to be forced out from the centre to more peripheral parts of France to eke out a living in the margins of tourism, gentrification, and ‘greentryfication’ – an awful Franglais word, which I have not encountered in English, but which captures the links between agri-tourism, environmental concerns, second homes, and retirement migration.
Where does all this leave the critique of capitalism, which Boltanski had addressed with Ève Chiapello in their book of 1999 (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999)? The authors stress that the economy of enrichment lies in a natural line of development of capitalism to extract profit from new sources. At the same time, it suffers from instability, relying on the manipulation of economic differentials between world regions – a form of rent-seeking which is time-limited. Intellectual property – which the authors do not discuss, except in the context of cultural producers – would be a good example. This review, or for that matter a book, may be available free on the web or for a stiff price from the publisher. We may be learning to live with such uncertainties, knowing that the same journey by plane or even train may cost anything from 40 to 400 euros. Computing software is either massively overpriced or…free. As in Georg Simmel’s time, we marvel at things for being so cheap or for being so expensive.
The critique of capitalism has traditionally been focussed, as in social democracy, on the struggle against commodification (p. 492), but this is increasingly pushed into resistance at the margin against the patenting of organisms or the sale of human body parts. (When I first played Monopoly, the idea that an electricity company, waterworks, or rail station could be bought and sold seemed a quaint bit of history …) The only hope seems to be that a world in which people had to pay a royalty ‘every time they touched an object or uttered a word would be liveable only for the holders of these rights and therefore unliveable’ (p. 494.) The authors hopefully quote the Richemont president in 2015: ‘If 0.1% of the richest 0.1% snaffle everything, even if they are our clients, it is unjust and not sustainable in the long term’ (p. 495).
The book concludes with some rather weak and familiar remarks on action and structure and the way in which the authors’ ‘pragmatic structuralism’ links the two. A mathematical appendix by Guillaume Couffignal formalizes the model of forms in category theory in a way which is far beyond the capacity of this reviewer.
Overall this book is a major achievement, the argument massively buttressed by a huge range of literature in French, English, and German. Yet, Georges Perec’s (1965) nice little book Les choses. Une histoire des années soixante is absent, as is (if we are going to worry about classical sociologists) Simmel, except for a passing mention (p. 112) in relation to money. More seriously, I missed any discussion of the recent massive expansion of leasing to private retail customers, giving them access in particular to new cars they could not otherwise afford, at the risk of brewing another crisis of capitalism in some states comparable to that unleashed by the housing market 10 years ago. More optimistically, we may be moving towards an economy based less on ownership of commodities and more on sharing or, in the more capitalist version, leasing. Either way, the model of enrichment seems a useful and illuminating one.