1 Claire Pignol University Paris 1 - Phare Things

INDIVIDUAL CHOICE AND HAPPINESS:
THE MISFORTUNE OF DESIRE FOR UNLIMITED WEALTH IN G.PEREC’S T H I N G S .
Claire Pignol
University Paris 1 - Phare
INTRODUCTION
Things: a story of the sixties, the novel that G. Perec published in 1965, will be read here as the
narration of an experience of the desire for wealth and consumption, and it will be confronted
with the microeconomic theory of consumer’s choice. Such a reading is not obvious since Perec
is not a social scientist taking scrupulously note of the results of an experience, but a writer, as he
emphasized himself: “I am not a sociologist. When I wrote Things, my plan wasn’t to describe the
civilization of plenty. It was to describe the image I, myself, had of happiness, and of the
contradiction it implies. I didn’t know that 250 000 French would immediately lay hands on it. I
didn’t intend to deliver a truth; I simply intended to describe a stage of what I felt” (Perec, 2003,
p.741). Nevertheless, two arguments can justify our use of his novel. The first is his claim of
having written Things as a personal adventure, a kind of introspection (see Perec 2003, p.39, p.47),
which allows us to confront it to the subjective aspect of consumer’s theory. The second is the
great success the novel met – even if it may be based on a misunderstanding. This success
indicates that his characters have been felt by his contemporaries as the spokesman and woman
of a generation, who experienced a relation to consumption shared by many people, in this
period of great increase in the production of ‘things’. That is why we will consider Perec’s
characters as an expression of the economic agent, to which we will compare the traditional
notion of the rational agent maximizing his/her well-being.
Such a story appears to be an enigma for the micro-economist: because it raises questions and
suggests objections to the standard theory of rational choice. After having shown the main
features of this “puzzling case” (I), we turn to two alternative interpretations (II), the first
proposed by Galbraith in The affluent society, the second by Sen and Hirschman with the concept
of metapreferences. Both interpretations concentrate on an important feature of Perec’s
characters: changing preferences. We will see that only the second one – metapreferences or
meta-rankings – is likely to offer a theoretical explanation of the phenomena described in the
novel. However, Perec’s story suggests feelings and behaviours that perhaps exceed the notion of
ranking.
I.
A PUZZLING CASE
Perec in Things describes a gap, a disagreement, between the consumer’s desires, his/her
choice and the happiness which results from choice. Paradoxically, when the agents’ wealth
increases, the gap grows due to a desire for an infinite wealth, and causes both their deep
misfortune and their apathetic behaviour. The main characters of the novel are a young couple,
Jérôme and Sylvie, representative of the generation of sixties, fascinated with ‘things’. But the
acquisition and the use of the things they buy leaves them unsatisfied, since their enjoyment in
using their belongings is always lower than the frustration of seeing ‘things’ which remain beyond
their budget constraint. The novel is the narration of this frustration which leads to what Perec
calls a “quiet and very gentle tragedy” (Perec, 1990, p.119). Through the narration of this
1
All quotations taken from the ‘Entretiens et conférences’ are only available in French and translated by myself.
1
particular misfortune, Perec offers a puzzling case for the sagacity of micro-economists: the
characters of Jérôme and Sylvie allow us to identify a type of misfortune which questions the
relation between individual choice and happiness in consumption. This misfortune, which does
not correspond to what is usually called poverty (1), is a desire of satiation that can never be
reached (2) and prevents them from being able to make any satisfying choice (3).
1.
Not poverty but frustration
The first thing to notice is that the difficulty faced by Jérôme and Sylvie is not what is usually
called poverty: their misfortune can’t be attributed to particularly low endowments. Of course, it
results from an inferiority of wealth compared to desires, but the characters are not described in
terms indicating that they are especially poor. They belong to the middle class and their
misfortune comes precisely from the fact that they are not poor, says the narrator: They are not
hungry, have all that could be considered necessary, live in a “quaint, low-ceilinged and tiny flat
overlooking in a garden” (1990, p.28), and don’t even face precariousness: « it was the start of a
fine career: it held out good prospects for them” (1990, p.62). Furthermore, the difficulty of their
situation arises from their relative richness: “For this young couple who were not rich but who
wanted to be, simply because they were not poor, there could be no situation more awkward”
(1990, p.27). The poor, whose expenses are constrained by necessity, wouldn’t have such a
discomfort:
“It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or
hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet,
slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because their too rich, from the start, to understand the
import or even the meaning of such a distinction [the opposition between work and freedom]. But
nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of
wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortune begins” (1990, p.63)
Their situation is therefore neither an absolute poverty, nor a relative one. One could say that
they suffer not from low endowments but from expensive and extravagant tastes. For theorists of
distributive justice (Dworkin, 1981, 2003), this suffering questions the individual’s responsibility
in preferences. Dworkin opposes means to ambitions and judges that, if too low means can be
compensated by transfers, too high ambitions can not. Perec’s characters are conscious of that,
but, of course, that is not a consolation for them:
“They wanted to fight and to win. But how could they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a
strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the
bewitching traps of comfort and happiness. Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past
men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not
quite believe you could go into a battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner
which they would have enlisted most readily » (1990, p.77).
That’s why the question dealt with in the novel belongs neither to the field of production theory – it isn’t
due to an insufficient production – nor to the field of justice (or distribution) theory – they don’t suffer
from an unequal or unfair distribution of wealth – but to the field of consumption theory: “My first
concern, says Perec in a interview, has been to describe our modern world, which doesn’t square
with the image of (…) absolute pauperization” (2003, p.55). It deals not with the distribution of
wealth among the members of the society but with the desire for wealth of each individual, and
focuses on its relation with happiness.
2
We must add that the frustration felt by the characters is not linked with the particular feeling
called envy and resulting from the comparison with other’s wealth. Jérôme and Sylvie neither
suffer from envy towards those who are richer than they are, nor search social status through the
things they desire to possess. Of course, their dissatisfaction arises from a comparison between
what they have and what they desire; of course, their desire is increased at the sight of other’s
wealth. But this feeling doesn’t take the form of maliciousness, rivalry and malevolence involved
by envy, in both philosophical and economical definitions of the word2. Similarly, Perec doesn’t
depict his characters as sensitive to, or moved by, the search of status:
“They were changing, becoming other people. It wasn’t so much because of their (nonetheless
genuine) need to differentiate themselves from the people it was their job to interview, to impress without
overwhelming them” (Perec, 1990, p.40).
Even in their relations with their friends, sometimes difficult or aggressive, what they reproach
their friends – who have renounced to liberty to acquire wealth – is not for being richer than they
are than for behaving as deceptive models. They suffer from isolation, not from envy. They look
for wealth, not for domination. They only want to reach a happiness which, they believe, can be
brought by beautiful things:
“Sometimes it would seem to them that a whole life could be led harmoniously between these booklined walls, amongst these objects so perfectly domesticated that they would have ended up believing
these bright, soft, simple and beautiful things had only ever been made for their sole use” (Perec, 1990,
p.25).
More precisely, this desire is a desire of satiation, expressed since the end of the first chapter of the
novel. This chapter concludes on the description of such a satiation feeling, taking the form of
equilibrium, of equality between means and desires:
“their means and their desires would always match in all ways. They would call this balance happiness
and, with their freedom, with their wisdom and their culture, they would know how to retain and to reveal
in every moment of their living, together” (Perec, 1990, p.26).
2.
A desire of satiation never satisfied: means and ends
What they suffer from is the absence of such a feeling of satiety, since their desires increase
along with their wealth, the former always exceeding the latter, and the difference leaving them in
desperation:
“They were thrown, when already they were dreaming of space, light, silence, back to reality, which
was not even miserable, but simply cramped (and that was perhaps even worse), of their tiny flat, of their
everyday meals, of their puny holidays. (…) The horizon of their desires was mercilessly blocked. Their
great impossible dreams belonged only to utopia” (1990, p.26-27).
2
For the presence of maliciousness, of rivalry, of malevolence in envy, as it is defined in philosophical tradition, see
the book devoted to the subject by Helmut Schoeck (1980). From an economic point of view, two definitions
must be distinguished: the first, nearer to the philosophical meaning, developed notably by Sussangkarn and
Goldman (1983), expresses envy as a negative externality arising from the sight of other’s wealth or happiness;
the second, developed in equity’s theory, notably by Varian (1974, 1975), defines envy to propose a criterion of
fairness. Perec’s narration offers no similarity with any of these definitions.
3
This despair is the leitmotiv of the novel. What might first surprise the standard microeconomist is less the fact of non-satiation than the desire of satiation. In standard microeconomic
theory, the desires of any economic agent are possibly infinite – notice that the non-satiety
assumption is required in Arrow-Debreu’s proof of existence of a competitive equilibrium. Utility
is a quantity to be maximized, and as often as not, the standard agent would be more satisfied if
he/she were be richer than he/she is. But a quantitative difference between two levels of wealth
and satisfaction is not at the origin of a suffering. What distinguishes Perec’s characters from the
standard agent is therefore not the objective situation in which they are – infinite desire in front
of finite resources – but the feeling of misery coming from such a situation. In microeconomic
terms, Jérôme and Sylvie want not only to maximize their utility given a preference ordering but,
and that’s the crucial point, they want to reach satiation in consumption; situation in which they
believe happiness would result from the feeling that nothing misses, that it couldn’t be increased
by anything else. The difficulty they meet is that this satiation in consumption, if it exists as they
believe, moves away as their wealth increases, just as the horizon: the more they have and
consume, the more they desire. And the more they desire, the more they are obsessed and
desperate by things:
“Money, sometimes, consumed them entirely. They did not stop thinking about it. (…) Money stood
like a barrier between them (…). It was something worse than poverty: a narrow, straitened, exiguous
absence of ease. They inhabited the closed world of their closed lives, without a future, without openings
other than impossible miracles, stupid dreams which wouldn’t hold water. They were suffocating. They
felt they were sinking” (1990, p.66-7).
Their life, previously full of different desires and activities – political engagement against the
Algeria’s war, friendship of student life – contracts to its economic dimension. At the opposite of
the equilibrium between means and ends they however desire, their desire for enrichment has no
end: it moves away as their means increase. This doesn’t mean only that wealth creates an habit,
an adaptation of desires – sometimes named ‘addiction to income’ – that increases desires as well
as income and produces a function of happiness independent of income3. Jérôme and Sylvie’s
feeling isn’t described by Perec through such a quantitative function, exhibiting a paradoxical
decrease of satisfaction in spite of an increase of possessions. What Perec describes is, more
deeply, an obsession of the desire for things, and a collapse of the whole personality of his
characters.
This description can be compared with the analysis of the ‘bad chrematistic’, usually called
‘bad infinite’, based on an unlimited desire for wealth Aristotle describes in first book of the
Politics (chapter 9, 1256-1258, Aristotle, 1990, p.115-120). But the unlimited desire for wealth
present in Things, at the opposite of the Aristotelian analysis, is not associated with money.
Moreover, the danger of chrematistic is well-known by Perec’s characters, and this knowing
doesn’t help them. Ironically, the narrator expresses the uselessness of the critic of the confusion
between means and ends implied by chrematistic: “The others ended up seeing wealth as an end
in itself, but as for them, they didn’t have money at all” (1990, p.65). From the beginning, Jérôme
and Sylvie are conscious that their happiness requires limited desires but this consciousness
doesn’t help them to escape frustration, to prevent themselves from unlimited desires:
“They would be carried away by great surges. Sometimes, for hours on end, for days at a stretch, a
frenzy of desire to be rich, immediately, enormously and for ever, would seize them and hold them in its
grip. It was an insane, unwholesome, oppressive desire which seemed to control their slightest movement.
Fortune became their opium. It intoxicated them. They surrendered unreservedly to the delirium of their
3
For the treatment of these questions from an economical or psychological viewpoint, see Layard, 2005, chapter 4.
4
fantasies. Wherever they went they paid heed only to money. They had nightmares of millions of gems”
(Perec, 1990, p.84-5).
3.
Apathy and impossible choice
Not only the image of wealth supplies an infinite desire invading their whole life and
provoking a feeling of misery, but it paradoxically renders unable of making rational choices. The
first and simplest example of such incapacity is about the renewals which could improve their
apartment, and they can not resolve to begin:
“The mere prospect of the work involved scared them. They should have had to borrow, to save, to
invest. They could not bring themselves to do it. Their hearts weren’t in it: they thought only in terms of
all or nothing (…) the temporary, the provisional held absolute sway. They were in wait only of a miracle”
(1990, p.30).
A second and more general case of impossible choice is the trade-off between consumption
and leisure or, in Perec’s terms, between things and liberty, lengthily discussed by the characters,
who are at the very moment of deciding whether to pursue a professional career or continue their
student life. Here again, they don’t decide to choose, since even if their desire for wealth could be
satisfied with the good career perspective before them, they can’t renounce the leisure of a
student life: “they liked their long days of idleness, their lazy wakings, their mornings in bed (…).
They liked their walks in the night, down by the riverside, and the almost elating sense of
freedom that they felt on some days” (1990, p.62). Notice the fact that the novel doesn’t expose a
“bad choice” – the choice of future wealth instead of present enjoyment of leisure – in a way
similar to Smith’s parable of the poor man’s son in the Theory of Moral sentiments (Smith, 1976,
p.181-3). It shows the impossible trade-off between leisure and consumption, because of the
absence of a satisfying choice for those who think that wealth is desirable:
« People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are
rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who only want to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom,
the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate
enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world (…) such people will always be unhappy” (1990, p.63).
Jérôme and Sylvie’s feeling of misfortune doesn’t come from the choice of accumulation
instead of enjoyment of present life – as the poor man’s son – or from the choice of immediate
satisfaction, but from their vain effort to reconcile two contradictory desires, as Perec explains:
“It’s the story of a couple, halfway between student life and professional life, who tries, in vain, to
reconcile freedom, work and comfort” (2003, p.28). That reconciliation should result from a
trade-off between leisure and consumption – to say it in standard economic terms – or between
liberty and things – to say it in Perec’s words. Such a trade-off appears here to be impossible.
A third example can be found at the end of the novel, when Jérôme and Sylvie, exhausted by
the tension between desires and means, dream to escape this word and have a “calm and frugal
life” (1990, p.99). They leave to Sfax, in Tunisia, happy to flee their life that “had been only a
kind of endless tightrope walk leading nowhere: empty appetite, naked desire without bounds or
props” (1990, p.102). But if they are no longer sick with desires, they are less appeased than died
down. The world around them is no longer frustrating but they are no longer interested in
anything: “They had stopped wanting. An indifferent world. (…) They were walkings in their
sleep. They no longer knew what they wanted. They were dispossessed.” (1990, p.118-9) Being
free of the “frenzy of desire to be rich” (p.84) is less a relief than a “quiet tragedy” (1990, p.119).
Their life in Paris combined inflation of desires with paralysis of acts, in a permanent hesitation
5
which led them nowhere. But the desire disappeared and they are not happier. Even when they
modify voluntarily their own desires, they fail to reach happiness. What is at stake is their ability
to know what is good for them, what choices can make their happiness, what desires they should
follow.
Is it an impossible choice, or a personal inability to choose? On one hand, Perec doesn’t
describe his characters’ situation as a norm, to which everybody would always be confronted, but
describes pathology in desire for wealth. In that sense, the choice is not, in itself, impossible, but
becomes impossible because of this pathological desire. But on the other hand, the novel doesn’t
expose a ‘bad behaviour’ to which it would be easy to oppose a ‘good behavior’: the reader feels
invaded by this desire as well as the heroes, and Perec’s testimony about his own desire for
wealth is here exemplary, not only because he says that he wrote “with anger, with peevishness,
this story which is a bit mine” (2003, p.29) 4, but because he relates precisely the forms of his
desire. The starting point of the novel was the story of a hold-up, committed by young people
who made inquiries about bankers and finished by dreaming of stealing them. His own desire for
wealth had given to him this idea of hold-up, or the desire to win with national lottery. The
source of the novel was the question to know why he himself had desired enrichment in such an
unreasonable and impossible way. He wanted through this novel « dismantle the mechanism of
this fascination” (2003, p.39). Because of their ‘fascinated desires’, economic choices which are
usually easy to make, become impossible: « the vastness of their desires paralysed them” (1990,
p.31). The problem lies inside the agents: “the enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was
within them. It had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away” (1990, p.78). Our second part
will then be devoted to the analysis of desires felt as enemies.
II.
GENESIS OF DESIRES AND METAPREFERENCES
Two main features of Perec’s characters must be emphasized: the first, presented previously, is
the fact that their dream of wealth is associated with an idea of satiation; the second which will be
discussed here is the endogenous nature of their desires. It’s the conjunction of these two
opposing forces that creates a craving leading them to despair.
Of course, Jérôme and Sylvie’s desires grow more and more under the effect of social
solicitations, among those advertising:
“In the world that was theirs, it was almost a regulation to wish for more than you could have. It was
not they who had decreed it; it was a social law, a fact of life, which advertising in general, magazines,
window displays, the street scene and even, in a certain sense, all those productions which in common
parlance constitute cultural life, expressed most authentically” (1990, p.49).
That’s why, instead of being happier with their growing belongings, they are desperate by the
increasing gap between desires and wealth: “And they grasped – since all around them,
everywhere, everything made them grasp, since slogans, posters, neon-lit signs and floodlit shop
windows drummed it into their heads from morning to night – that they were for ever one rung
down on the ladder, always one rung too low” (p.50). At first glance, the situation makes us think
of Galbraith’s affluent society which denounces artificial wants, created by the process that satisfied
them. Perec’s novel has often been interpreted this way. But we’ll see that, paradoxically, his
narration is nearer to Hayek’s reply to Galbraith that to Galbraith’s viewpoint. Nevertheless,
4
He adds: « by writing, I have gradually broken away, I arrived to a sort of ‘desensitization’ or, one can say, of
‘indifference’. That will be the subject of my next novel » (2003, p.29), novel which will be A man asleep.
6
Hayek’s stand escapes the difficulty of the situation Perec describes. That’s why we will then turn
to the concept of metapreference.
1.
Acquired tastes: the limits of the galbraithian viewpoint
Galbraith in his essay which sometimes sounds like a lampoon against the consumption
society denounces firms as producers of needs instead of producers of goods satisfying existing
needs. He then questions the relevance of the consumer’s sovereignty when preferences can be
modeled by producers, in particular through advertising (Galbraith, 1958). Perec’s narration and
his comments on the novel don’t follow Galbraith’s reasoning. Indeed, Perec’s objective is not
exactly to denounce advertising, as he explains to an interviewer who remarks that the cineaste
Jean-Luc Godard also criticizes advertising. Perec replies that Godard “holds advertising in
contempt. For my part, he adds, I feel engaged in this world and I try to think about it and to
give a rather clear image of it” (2003, p.55).
Surprisingly, even if the novel is the narration of a deception towards wealth, this deception
isn’t attributed to the uselessness of wealth with regard to happiness. The heroes’ belief about the
capacity of ‘things’ to bring them happiness isn’t claimed to be false. The narrator doesn’t suggest
that the search of happiness through wealth would be a false or absurd goal. If it were, it would
be easier, both for the characters to escape their unhappiness, and for the economist to explain it.
But Perec doesn’t contest that things can bring a form of happiness and, on the contrary, claims
that the relation between wealth and happiness assumed by the characters exists and judges
normal to associate money and the things it can buy with a form of happiness: “there is, I think,
between the things of the modern word and happiness, an inevitable connection. A form of
wealth of our civilization makes possible a type of happiness” (Perec, 2003, p.29)5. What makes
Jérôme and Sylvie unhappy is not to search happiness where it cannot be found. Moreover, Perec
says that they are “gifted for happiness”: “there is in them greediness for happiness, they wait for
it, they watch for it. Wherever they can find it, they do” (2003, p.46). As Perec emphasizes, and
even if his novel illustrates the difficulties implied by the consumption society6, it cannot be read
only as a condemnation of this society: “those who thought that I condemned consumption
society have misunderstood my book” (2003, p.29).
Furthermore, Perec’s arguments can be compared to Hayek’s reply to Galbraith. Hayek argues
that, even if most of the desires for the amenities of civilization come from our living in a society
in which others provide them, even if we learn to desire because we see others enjoying various
things, we should not deduce from that a disqualification of such ‘acquired tastes’: “to say that a
desire is not important because it is not innate is to say that the whole cultural achievement of
man is not important” (Hayek, 1961, p.346). Hayek asserts then that “Galbraith’s argument could
be easily employed, without any change of the essential terms, to demonstrate the worthlessness
of literature or any form of art: surely an individual’s want for literature is not original with
5
To the question « Are you against wealth?” Perec replies: “No, I love cars, country houses, well, things.”
(2003, p.29)
6
He summarizes the false situation in which this society puts everybody by the image of a chair being always taken
off: “the worry is that we are well seated, and all happens as if someone took out the chair continually. We have
the right to touch, to admire, but not the right to take. We are given a lot of things to desire but, finally, we
don’t possess anything, and we feel bound by the fact that we desire to possess” (2003, p.59).
7
himself in the sense that he would experience it if literature were not produced.” There is in art
and literature “a want creation by the producer”. “Is this want reprehensible?” asks Hayek,
showing the legitimacy of acquired tastes.
Joining the two questions of culture and of consumption, Hayek proposes a comparison close
to Perec’s narration, in which consumption is linked to a form of culture: this link is suggested
when Perec evokes, among “advertising in general” and its various forms (“magazines, window
displays, the street scene”) “all those productions which in common parlance constitute cultural
life, expressed most authentically” (1990, p.49) This is emphasized in the explanations he gives of
his characters’ desires: if they love so much the beautiful and rich things of the world, it’s because
the use of wealth is associated with an education, with a culture, even with a virtue, and because
their desire for wealth is a desire to acquire the aesthetic and moral qualities they associate with
wealth:
“They would have loved to be rich. They believed they would have been up to it. They would have
known how to dress, how to look and how to smile like rich people. They would have had the requisite
tact and discretion (…). Their pleasures would have been intense. They would have liked to wander, to
dawdle, to choose, to savour. They would have liked to live. Their lives would have been an art of living.”
(1990, p.27)
The happiness expected from the use of things is neither bounded to material comfort –
“their pleasure was cerebral” (p.32) writes Perec - nor restricted to ostentatious consumption:
Hayek and Perec share the idea that “the cultural origin of practically all the needs of civilized life
must not be confused with the fact that there are some desires which aim, not a satisfaction
derived directly from the use of an object, but only from the status which its consumption is
expected to confer” (Hayek, p.346). Perec, we have already said it, doesn’t present his characters
as essentially moved by envy, snobbery or research of status. The important feature of their
desires is the fact that their tastes result from a patient learning, from a conquest:
“They had learned to wait, and how to grow accustomed. Their taste matured slowly, became firmer,
more balanced. Their desires had time to ripen; their greed became less sour. (…) It was pleasant for them
to reflect that the picture they had of life had slowly been stripped of all its more aggressive showy and
occasionally juvenile trappings” (1990, p.33).
Through these tastes and their evolution, Jérôme and Sylvie express no less than a system of
values, aesthetic and even ethic.
Of course, Perec’s novel questions the capacity advertising has to create desires, but its
originality and force is to show how the goods offered to everyone’s desires are indeed desirable.
He doesn’t condemn acquired desires but, on the contrary, claims how his characters’ desires are
well-founded and shared, by him and probably by many of his contemporaries – what explains
the success of the novel. “I have written with anger, with peevishness, this story which is also a
bit mine” (2003, p.29), and even ours: “I think the reader feels engaged because the book
describes not human beings but a relation. And almost all of us have such a relation with the
things” (2003, p.51). That’s why his narration cannot be read as a condemnation of the mass
consumption society and in particular of advertising. But, at the same time, Perec doesn’t share
Hayek’s point of view, according to which nothing the consumer’s choices can not be
questioned: the absence of the condemnation of the desire for wealth is not equivalent to the
acceptance of this desire, since, precisely, the novel presents the deception it produces.
2.
Evaluating changing preferences through metapreferences
8
What perhaps makes the most important and original feature of Perec’s novel, as regard with
the question of genesis of desires, is that it sounds like an introspective thought process: “I
intended to describe a stage of what I felt”, explained Perec; “My plan (…) was to describe the
image I had of happiness and of the contradiction it implies” (2003, p.74). The reader is put in
the heroes’ mind, and appreciates their changing preferences, their increasing and devouring
desires, not from an external point of view, as Galbraith does, but from an internal one. Now, if
Galbraith argument’s isn’t convincing here, since it doesn’t enter in the agents’ mind, Hayek’s
argument is no more satisfying since he refuses to consider the possibility for consumers to be
deceived by their own desires. If Perec affirms the legitimacy of their desires, claims how they are
shared by everybody in our society, and thinks that happiness is possible in the use of things, he
also expresses the deception produced by such desires. It’s at this stage of our reasoning that the
concept of metapreference appears to be useful.
First introduced by Sen (1977) and Hirschman (1984), the concept of metapreference doesn’t
contest the relationship between preferences and choice (George, 1984, p.92) and, more
generally, the revealed preferences approach, but proposes an original way to evaluate the agents’
preferences. What is contested in the standard approach is “the idea that the only way of
understanding a person’s real preference is to examine his actual choices” and that “there is no
choice-independent way of understanding someone’s attitude towards alternatives » (Sen, 1977,
p.323). In standard approach, a preference ordering “is supposed to reflect (someone’s) interests,
represent his welfare, summarize his idea of what should be done, and describe his actual choices
and behaviour. Can one preference ordering do all these things?” asks Sen before proposing
“rankings of preference rankings” or “meta-rankings” (Sen, 1977, p.335-7). The simplest example
is the smoker, who prefers smoking than not smoking, but who would prefer not to be a smoker.
The concept of metapreference can then express and explain the feeling of regret, even if choices
respect preferences.
To what extent does this concept allow us to answer the previous questions and objections
addressed to the standard theory of rational choice, and to escape the limits of the Galbraithian
stand? To what extent can it be proposed as a theoretical expression of the phenomena described
by Perec?
The first reason for our use of the concept of metapreference here is the fact that it not only
refers to changing preferences – as Galbraith’s analysis – but pretends to evaluate these changing
preferences. As D. George explains, the changing nature of preferences isn’t contested by most
economists7 (1984). Before Galbraith, J.M. Clark wrote that “our wants are moulded by our
environment just as are the means of satisfaction” (Clark, 1918; George 1984, p.92). But fewer
economists “would draw any welfare implications from the whole business of changing
preferences” (George, 1984, p.92), the reason of this reticence being the disqualification of
interpersonal comparisons of utility8: “Attempts to assess whether the individual was becoming
better or worse off as his tastes changed were therefore deemed impossible” concludes George
(1984, p.93) who presents metapreferences as the appropriate tool to solve this impossibility to
evaluate changing preferences, and to reconcile the phenomenon of regret with the assumption
of rational choice. Indeed, a choice may be rational, that is consistent with first-order preferences,
and at the same time deceptive, when first-order preferences are not the preferred preferences,
according to metapreferences.
7
“There are few economists who seriously challenge the assertion that an individual’s preferences are influenced by
the environment” (George, 1984, p.92)
8
Beginning with Pareto, these comparisons became an exercise reduced to the ranks of the unscientific.
9
The second reason for what metapreferences are better suited to explain Perec’s story than
Galbraith’s analysis, is that metapreferences conciliate choices and preferences and evaluate
preferences from the agent’s point of view. Unlike Galbraith who, by adopting ‘innate desires’ as
a reference point, implicitly contests the evolution of preferences from an outside viewpoint, in
this case it is the choosing agent’s preferences that determine the relative goodness of the ‘firstorder preferences’ (George, 1998, p.191). But unlike Hayek’s attitude and, more generally, the
traditional neoclassical approach, metapreferences make possible an evaluation of preferences, in
terms of well-being.
Does such an explanation suit our case? In a sense, it can be claimed that meta-rankings
express Perec’s characters’ interior conflict: the desire they express for a feeling of equilibrium
between “means and desires”9 can be understood as a metapreference for a utility function which
exhibits a satiety point. They are desperate of not being able to reach such a point, in spite of
their efforts, because of their increasing desires. According to this interpretation, their problem is
the impossibility to make coincide first-order preferences (where no satiety point would be
accessible) with second-order preferences (where a satiety point would exist and be accessible). In
other words, they want ‘not to always desire more’ (second order preferences) but couldn’t stand
desiring more (first-order preferences) and that would be the reason of their misfortune. The
problem would come from their incapacity to act on their first-order preferences, and, even
worse, from the fact that their preference shift in a way opposite to their desires.
Moreover, our heroes not only desire ‘things’, but “a relation to things”, as Perec
emphasizes10. Their dissatisfaction, called ‘regret’ in the metapreferences approach, comes from
the disagreement between preferences they have and preferences they want. This interpretation is
closed to Hirschman’s analysis of metapreferences. According to this analysis, the
metapreferences approach is interesting when preferences and metapreferences don’t coincide11
but when, at the same time, agents strive to reconcile preferences and metapreferences12. This is
exactly what our characters do, as we can observe twice: at the beginning of the novel, when they
model their tastes13; and at the end when they decide to change their life in order to “start life
afresh on new foundations” (p.114). In both cases, their misfortune can be expressed by
Hirschman’s characterization of the situation described through metapreferences: they are not “at
peace with themselves” (Hirschman, 1984, p.89). In both cases however, they turn their efforts in
order to reconcile preferences and metapreferences. The critical point of the concept of
metapreference isn’t to assume a stability of meta-ranking, compared to a volatility of first-order
9
“Their means and their desires would always match in all ways. They would call this balance happiness and, with
their freedom, with their wisdom and their culture, they would know how to retain and to reveal in every
moment of their living, together” (1990, p.26)
10
“I think the reader feels engaged because the book describes not human beings but a relation. And almost all of us
have such a relation with things” (2003, p.51).
11
“if preferences and metapreferences coincide so that the agent is permanently at peace with himself, no matter
what choices he makes, then the metapreferences are mere shadows of the preferences” (Hirschman, 1984,
p.89)
12
« If, on the other hand, the two kinds of preferences are permanently at odds so that the agent acts against ‘his
better judgment’, then again the metapreference can not only be dismissed as wholly ineffective” (Hirschman,
1984, p.89).
13
« It seemed to them that they were progressively mastering their desires: they knew what they wanted; they had
clear ideas. They knew what their happiness, their freedom would be” (Perec, 1990, p.34).
10
rankings, since, as Hahn remarks, metapreferences can change as well as preferences (1982,
p.192), but to stress the agents’ efforts to adopt preferences suited to their metapreferences. The
impossibility to realize this conciliation would then be the explanation of their misfortune.
3. Beyond metapreferences?
But perhaps Things cannot be interpreted only through metapreferences: in spite of the
similarities, small differences can be noticed between the feelings of Perec’s characters, and those
of the agent of the metapreferences approach: metapreferences explain regret, whereas Perec’s
characters, at the end of the novel, are not regretful, because they don’t even know what they
want. Metapreferences introduce a notion of reference, according to which the agents regret to
act as they do. But Perec’s characters are regretful according to nothing. It seems to the reader
that they would not choose something else if they had to make their choice again. They are lost in
their choices. They don’t regret the preferences they have acquired. On the contrary, they have
made efforts to acquire these preferences and they are proud of them. But this acquisition isn’t
sufficient for their happiness and that’s why they are desperate. So they (and we) do not know
what they regret exactly. Perhaps we could say that, finally, in their meta-ranking, they would
prefer to be indifferent to wealth, but it wouldn’t be true, since they manage to become
indifferent to wealth, which doesn’t satisfy them either.
Is their problem beyond a metapreferences problem? Could it be a third-order preference
problem, in which they don’t know what preferences they desire to have? Not only their
metapreferences are not stable, but they don’t know what metapreferences they desire either.
George (1998) evokes the possibility of third-order analysis, which evaluates the second-order
preferences, and gives the example of a gay person (who, according to his first-order preferences,
prefers men to women), and who has a socially inculcated second-order preference to prefer
women. He might prefer to prefer to prefer men. Such cases of conflicts at a higher-order are
rare, says George following Frankfurt (1971), “particularly in the realm of decision making
economists are prone to focus” (1998, p.192). Should we conclude from the reading of Things
that they are not so rare and, on the contrary, should be brought to the forefront of
consumption’s analysis? The relation between consumption and culture should support this
conclusion: the agents’ efforts and deception can’t be understood if we forget that their
preferences are modeled by a desire for culture, i.e. are the result of a deeper metapreference. The
dissatisfaction they feel expresses their doubt about their own metapreferences.
Alternatively, we could say that the notion of ranking, even taken in the superior sense –
ranking of ranking or even third-order ranking – can not express something which is not a
question of preference, of order, of ranking: the important thing, which the characters fail to
achieve, is not exactly to have made a choice consistent to their own preferences or
metapreferences, but to be happy about one’s choice, in a sense different from the usual one. The
usual sense is: do I regret my choice? If the answer is negative, the agent is said happy of his
choice. Perec’s characters are not happy, but we can not say that they regret their choice in the
sense that they would choose something else if they could choose again. If Things illustrates the
pathological form of the desire for wealth, called chrematistic, it exemplifies not a notion or a
theory but a contradiction in the desire for happiness. One of the most surprising aspects is
perhaps the fact that the agents here don’t want to accumulate money and are conscious, since
the beginning of the novel, that their satisfaction implies a feeling of sufficiency. But
accumulation is linked, paradoxically, to the desire for happiness, as Perec explains: “They are
taken, almost in spite of themselves, in a sort of chain. Happiness is a process which is, at the
11
end, similar to accumulation: we can not stop from being happy” (2003, p.47). This contradiction
and the unhappiness towards which it leads seems to escape the concept of metapreference.
But such a conclusion may be not so surprising and can alternatively be expressed in terms of
freedom. As Frankfurt, Hirschman and more recently George emphasized, the concept of
metapreference is based on a notion of freedom of will. According to them, “the ability to
experience a meta-preference ranking distinguishes human from non-human animals” (George
1984, p.95), and having a free will is equivalent to enjoying the freedom to choose one’s preferred
preference14. Perec’s characters obviously express a desire for experiencing free choices, i.e. to
behave in accord with the will they have. But they fail, and their situation can be compared with
the non-coincidence between preferences and metapreferences, which, said Hirschman, prevents
the agent from being in peace with himself (1984, p.89). If we follow Frankfurt’s terminology
which distinguishes wantons – creatures without judgment on their own tastes – and human
beings experiencing free will, their unlimited desire for wealth changes them in wantons and
makes disappear the notion of metapreference.
CONCLUSION : HAPPINESS AND FREEDOM IN T H I N G S
Perec’s novel can then be read in the light of the rawlsian opposition between liberalism of
freedom and liberalism of happiness. Obviously, happiness expected from the use of wealth is
the main question in Things, the role of freedom being less obvious, whatever meaning we
have of the word: Perec’s characters are too much invaded by economics to have a political
existence, too much contrained by their environment and desires to be able to make free
choices. However, Perec associates their dream of happiness with a desire for freedom: « It
seemed to them that they were progressively mastering their desires: they knew what they
wanted; they had clear ideas. They knew what their happiness, their freedom would be”
(1990, p.34). Their ideal is expressed as reconciliation between happiness and freedom, their
misfortune as the failure of this hope15: they are trapped by the « prisons of plenty » (1990,
p.77). Wealth, instead of bringing the feeling of freedom they expect, imprisons them. The
perverted desire for wealth called chrematistic produces not only unhappiness but the
impossibility to exercise a free will.
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See first part, §3.
12
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