Enrichment by Luc Boltanski;Arnaud Esquerre; & Arnaud Esquerre

Author:Luc Boltanski;Arnaud Esquerre; & Arnaud Esquerre [Boltanski, Luc & Esquerre, Arnaud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509528745
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2020-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Collection and Enrichment

The usefulness of useless things

It would clearly be quite a stretch to suppose that the development of an enrichment economy depended on the increase in the number, activity, and wealth of collectors, in the proper sense of the term. And this is why the relation we have posited between the formal arrangement of collecting, on the one hand, and what we have called the collection form as a modality of valorization, on the other, shifts according to the particular case along an axis that goes from literal application to synecdoche. Still, the shift of capitalism toward new domains of activity, as the opportunities for profit offered by mass production were tending toward exhaustion (at least in Western Europe – that is, in the countries where capitalism was born), would have been difficult without the recourse to new forms of valorization, forms with dual roles.

These forms had to supply a structural base favoring large-scale commercialization of things characterized by their “singularity” and by their “scarcity,” two qualifications that stemmed from the fact that they had been identified through opposition to standard objects. Things said to be “exceptional,” whose “scarcity” was considered “natural” and “absolute” (by David Ricardo,1 for example) because they were not reproducible, were once viewed not only as being relatively marginal but especially as constituting exceptions to the “economic laws” that had been established through reference to industrial production. These things, as they were transformed into layers whose exploitation could create wealth, had to find a language in which they could be appreciated: that is, they had to be associated with arrangements that could establish their prices and, especially, make those prices justifiable on the basis of arguments that would reveal their value.

But at the same time these specific forms of valuation were also charged with making the prices of objects that were being extracted from such buried layers intelligible in relation to the prices of things stemming from other forms: standard objects first of all, but also fashionable objects – those appreciated in the trend form – and objects appreciated as assets.

Thus while, as we have seen, an enrichment economy is by no means addressed solely to “collectors,” the collection form is a cognitive operator that makes it possible to appreciate the value of things judged “exceptional” by envisaging them from a point of view comparable to the one from which a “collector” would consider them, a collector being a fervent accumulator of things that are no longer useful but are appreciated both because they have been bequeathed by the past and because they lend themselves to being organized in a serial mode that articulates their similarities and differences.

The practice of collection has generally been considered a pastime or hobby and, consequently, as a marginal or even parasitic activity grafted onto other modalities of access to wealth, whether these modalities come from inheritance, from work, or from financial operations. It is moreover precisely because the activities involved in collecting are presented as hobbies – that is,

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