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Part I
The House Market
There is no critique of the assumptions of economics, no challenge to its shortcomings and limitations, that has not been expressed somewhere or other by an economist. This is why, rather than follow so many other writers and indulge in ineffective, sterile questionings of economic principles that are certain in the end to appear either ignorant or unjust, I have ventured here to confront an object that is typically assigned to the economy, namely, the production and marketing of single-family houses, and to do so using the weapons of social science, causing to emerge in the process, over and above these immediate concerns, as it were, a set of questions relating to the anthropological vision the majority of economists deploy in their practice.
Economic choices in respect of housing, whether to buy or to rent, whether to buy an old house or a new one and, in the latter case, whether to buy a traditionally built house or an ‘industrial’ one, depend, on the one hand, on the (socially constituted) economic dispositions of the agents – particularly on their tastes – and the economic resources they can summon and, on the other, on the state of supply of dwellings. But the two terms of the canonical relationship, which neoclassical economic theory treats as unconditioned givens, depend in turn, more or less directly, on a whole set of economic and social conditions produced by ‘housing policy’. In effect, the state – and those who are able to impose their views through it – contributes very substantially to producing the state of the housing market, doing this largely through all the forms of regulation and financial assistance aimed at promoting particular ways of bringing tastes to fruition in terms of housing, through assistance to builders or private individuals, such as loans, tax exemptions, cheap credit, etc. And it does this, particularly, by directly or indirectly guiding the financial – and also emotional – investments of the various social categories in respect of housing. For example, every measure aimed at diminishing the supply of accessible rented property – by reducing the funds allotted to the production of low-cost social housing – redirects a section of potential tenants towards home ownership, which is itself varyingly attractive depending on the level of personal financial assistance available and the cost of credit. Similarly, a policy such as that laid down in the French housing law of 1977 was the culmination of a whole set of initiatives aimed at steering towards ownership the ‘choices’ of those social categories who were up to that point the least inclined to satisfy their housing needs in this way, and at making access to the ownership of their dwellings a major form of financial investment for them. (In the minds of some who were behind this policy, who associated social housing with collectivism or socialism, this also meant directing them towards a lasting attachment to the established order and hence towards a form of conservatism.)
In short, the market in single-family houses is (as all markets no doubt are to varying degrees) the product of a twofold social construction to which the state contributes crucially: the construction of demand, through the production of individual dispositions and, more precisely, of systems of individual preferences – most importantly regarding ownership or renting – and also through the allotting of the necessary resources, that is to say, state assistance for building or for housing, as defined in laws and regulations whose genesis can also be described; the construction of supply, through the policy of the state (or the banks) in respect of credit to building companies, which contributes, together with the nature of the means of production used, to defining conditions of access to the market and, more precisely, a company’s position within the structure of the – highly dispersed – field of house builders and, hence, the structural constraints applying to the decisions made by each of them with regard to production and advertising. And one has only to take the analysis a step further to discover that demand is only specified and defined fully in relation to a particular state of supply and also of social (and, particularly, legal) conditions (building regulations, planning permissions, etc.) which allow it to be satisfied.
One can hardly fail to see, particularly where the purchase of a product so laden with meaning as a house is concerned, that the ‘subject’ of economic action has about it nothing of the pure consciousness of the subject of orthodox theory, a consciousness wholly devoid of a past, and that economic strategies, which, through the dispositions responsible for them, are very deeply rooted in the individual and collective past, are most often integrated into a complex system of strategies of reproduction and are thus laden with the whole history of that which they aim to perpetuate – namely, the domestic unit, itself the product of a work of collective construction which is once again largely attributable to the state; and that, correlatively, economic decisions are not taken by isolated economic agents, but by a collective, group, family or enterprise functioning as a field.
It must be the aim of analysis, then, to describe the structure of the field of production and the mechanisms that determine its functioning (instead of being content with the mere recording, which would itself require explanation, of statistical co-variations between variables and events) and also the structure of the distribution of economic dispositions and, more especially, of tastes in respect of housing; not forgetting to establish, by a historical analysis, the social conditions of the production of this particular field and of the dispositions able to find more or less complete fulfilment in it.
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1
Dispositions of the Agents and
the Structure of the Field of
Production
Many of the particularities of the production of dwellings and of the relationships formed between construction firms result from the particular characteristics of this product, which has a particularly substantial symbolic component. As a material good which (like clothing) is exposed to the general gaze, and is so on a lasting basis, this form of property expresses or betrays, in a more decisive way than many other goods, the social being of its owners, the extent of their ‘means’, as we say; but it also reveals their taste, the classification system they deploy in their acts of appropriation and which, in assuming objective form in visible goods, provides a purchase for the symbolic appropriations of others, who are thereby enabled to situate the owners in social space by situating them within the space of tastes.1 Moreover, it is the occasion of particularly substantial investments, both economic and affective:2 as a consumer good which, by its high cost, constitutes one of the most difficult economic decisions of a whole domestic life-cycle, a decision fraught with enormous consequences, it is also an ‘investment’ in the sense of being a non-financial form of saving and an investment good, and as such is expected to retain or enhance its value, while at the same time affording immediate satisfactions.3 In this regard, it is the central element in a patrimony, which is expected to last at least as long as its owners, and even to survive them as a transmissible heritage.
The mythology of the ‘house’
However, one can fully understand the investments of all kinds made in the house – in money, labour, time and emotion – only when one sees, as the double meaning of the word ‘house’ reminds us, referring as it does both to the dwelling and the totality of its inhabitants, that it is inseparable from the household as a durable social group and from the collective project of perpetuating that household. We know, indeed, that in some cultural traditions, particularly in peasant and aristocratic usage, the word ‘house’ refers both to the material residence and to the family which lived, lives or will live there, a social entity whose transcendence in relation to individual persons asserts itself precisely in the fact that it has at its disposal a patrimony of material and symbolic goods – and, particularly, a name, which is, in many cases, different from that of its members – handed down directly from one generation to the next.4 In many societies, building a new house is, as in old Kabylia, a collective enterprise, mobilizing the entire agnatic group in a voluntary corvée (particularly, for the transporting of the beams) that coincides with the founding of a new family. And even today, a ‘building’ project is almost always associated with the project of ‘starting a home’ (or enlarging one), of building a house in the sense of a household – in other words, the creation of a social group united by bonds of alliance and kinship, reinforced by the ties of cohabitation.5
So, to treat the house as a mere capital good, characterized by a particular rate of amortization, and to view the purchase of a house as an economic strategy in the narrow sense of the term, ignoring the system of reproduction strategies of which it is one instrument, would be to strip the product and the economic act of all the historical properties, effective in certain historical conditions, which they owe to their insertion in a historical fabric, and which ought to be written into the science, because they are built into the reality in which its object is steeped. What is being tacitly asserted through the creation of a house is the will to create a permanent group, united by stable social relations, a lineage capable of perpetuating itself over time in a manner similar to the durable, stable, unchangeable residence. It is a collective project for, or wager on, the future of the domestic unit, that is, on its cohesion, its integration or, if one prefers, on its capacity to resist break-up and dispersal. And the very undertaking that consists in choosing a house together, fitting it out, decorating it and, in short, making it a ‘home’ that feels to be truly a ‘home of one’s own’ – among other reasons because one loves in it the sacrifices of time and effort it has cost, and also because, as a visible attestation of the success of a shared project carried out in common, it is the ever renewed source of a shared satisfaction – is a product of affective cohesion which in its turn intensifies and reinforces that cohesion.
An anthropological analysis of what is invested in houses should also take into account the inherited fund of collective or private (and particularly literary) mythologies which attaches to them and which, as we shall see, is constantly evoked, revived and reactivated by the rhetoric of advertising.6 However, in reminding ourselves of the anthropological constants which, even today, underlie the dominant representation, we should also not forget the variations of signification and function of houses depending on the milieu and the moment. The social use of the house as the stable, long-standing residence of the household presupposes the tradition of settlement (as opposed to all the various forms of temporary or permanent nomadism) specific to agrarian economies, favouring rootedness to a particular piece of land and immutability over time. This ties in with a conservative view of the world that values all forms of rootedness (the Heimat and the heimlich, which völkisch ideology contrasts with ‘wandering’ and rootlessness) and extols the enchanted social relations, conceived on the model of an integrated family, of the idealized agrarian ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft).
The purchase of a house, being connected with the family as household, and with its permanence over time, which it presupposes and also aims to guarantee, is both an economic investment – or at least a form of accumulation of capital as an element of a lasting, transmissible patrimony – and a social one, in so far as it contains within it a wager on the future or, more exactly, a biological and social reproduction project. The house is inextricably linked with the family as a social unit oriented towards its own biological reproduction: it is an element, as a necessary, but not sufficient condition, in child-rearing plans; and as a unit oriented also towards its social reproduction: it is one of the chief means by which the domestic unit ensures that a certain transmissible heritage is accumulated and preserved. It follows that changes in the traditions by which the domestic unit is constituted or dissolved (in particular, the rise in the divorce rate and a decline in the practice of different generations living under one roof) are liable to affect, more or less directly, strategies with regard to housing – particularly the choice between home ownership and renting.
The more or less unconscious dispositions which lead to the house being constituted in practice as the stable residence of a permanent household mean that, where houses are concerned, no doubt by a metonymic contamination of container by content and mode of production by product, most economic agents have a preference for a technology of manufacture that has no equivalent except in some food products and, more generally, in all luxury goods. Being attached to a so-called traditional mode of production, conceived as a guarantee not just of technical quality but also of symbolic authenticity, they are almost always inclined to favour the ‘handmade’ house, built in the old style, either in reality or in imitation mode (the ‘mason-built house’7 made of breeze blocks, produced on industrial lines), individually owned and situated in an authentically or fictively rural setting (housing estate), over the industrially built house (or accommodation in a jointly owned block). And, as we shall see below, this socially constituted housing need is particularly developed among the consumers most imbued with successoral traditions, whose aim is to perpetuate the ‘house’, particularly through the privilege accorded to the eldest of the descendants.
A full definition of the properties of the product requires an appreciation of the relationship between its objective characteristics, both technical and formal, and the inseparably aesthetic and ethical patterns of the habitus that structures the perception and appreciation of it. It is this which defines the real demand with which producers have to contend. And the economic constraints or attractions that lead to the observed purchasing decisions are established as such only in the relationship between a certain state of supply proposed by the field of production and a certain state of the requirements registered in the dispositions of the buyers, who thus contribute to the constraints to which they are subject. As a consequence, we have to conceive supply and demand, and the relationship between them, in entirely new terms. At a given moment, supply presents itself as a differentiated and structured space of competing suppliers whose strategies depend on the other suppliers (and not as an aggregated total of independent suppliers). And it is because it is itself structured (particularly by state intervention) that supply can satisfy and exploit the demand, also differentiated and structured, which it has in part contributed to creating.
Though it is not incorrect to say that production produces consumption, supply, by the very fact that it tends to eliminate some or all of the other possible ways of satisfying housing need (for example, the renting of single-family houses), contributes to imposing a particular way of satisfying this need, while apparently respecting the rights of the sovereign consumer; and, similarly, the firms capable of organizing their activity in such a way as to confer the appearance of traditional craft work on industrial mass production can succeed only to the extent that they manage to make consumers pay very dearly for their more or less phantasmic desire for a detached, durable, transmissible, ‘hand-made’ house. (It is no doubt in this respect that the housing market shares in the characteristic logic of the art market, in which there is also a preference for a technology dominated by the cult of the authenticity of ‘manifattura’, as guaranteed by the signature, which affords proof that the work is made by the hand of the ‘master’ and is, consequently, ‘master-built’).
Advertising is so effective only because it panders to pre-existing dispositions in order the better to exploit them, subjecting the consumer to its demands and expectations in the guise of serving those dispositions (by contrast with a political policy, which might be said to use a realistic knowledge of dispositions to work to transform them or displace them on to other objects).8 To this end it uses effects which we must, at the risk of shocking the reader, term ‘poetic’. Like poetry, and with quite similar means, it plays on the connotations of the message, systematically drawing on the power of poetic language to evoke lived experiences, ‘specific to all individuals, variable between individuals, and variable also in the same individual between one moment and another’.9 It mobilizes words or images capable of summoning up the experiences associated with houses, which we may describe, without contradiction, as both shared and individual, commonplace and unique. They are shared in as much as they owe something to cultural tradition, and, in particular, to inherited cognitive structures, such as those brought out by the structural analysis of the internal space of houses or of the relationship between domestic and public...
