Category: The professions

Disparate Economies (3): Fame (Honor, Meritocracy, Status)

This post will be even more tentative than most.  I am not very certain of how to distinguish fame from status.  Probably I should just accept that they overlap in various ways, even as I resist the idea that they are synonymous.

In any case, let me try to articulate my basic intuitions about what differentiates them while also attending to what they share.  I do want to stick to the notion that status is restricted to circumscribed groups while fame aims for the regard of more heterogeneous and less well-formed multitudes. 

The quest for status is a quest a) for inclusion into a certain group and b) subsequently, for respect within that group.  First one needs to have been granted entry, to become a member.  Then one can strive for a “high place” in the group’s own hierarchy.  With status, social power comes in two forms: a) the power to confer membership on those desiring it, and b) the power that comes with being deemed a particularly esteemed member of the group.

It’s easiest to see how this works with professional cadres.  All professions control their own credentialing procedures, the rites and hurdles that must be endured to be granted membership.  Once within the profession, relative standing is supposed to accrue to the most accomplished, the most competent. But other factors—such as networked relations, where one received one’s credentials, sheer economic resources etc.—can also influence standing.  Such non-accomplishment based “boosts” to status will often be decried as illegitimate, even corrupt, once the notion of meritocracy has taken hold.

Of course, tying status to merit is a new idea historically, dating back to 1750 at the earliest.  Austen’s partial, but fairly fervent, endorsement of meritocracy is evident in her novels, which in many ways trace the transition from other sources of status to claims based on merit.  Once “careers are open to talent” the army and the church will no longer only be open to “gentlemen,” to those who can buy their commissions or convince the local squire to appoint one as the pastor in a parish within his (the squire’s) “gift.”  The transition to meritocracy was long and arduous—and a pure meritocracy never achieved.

The opponents of meritocracy have two major complaints against it.  The first is the Tory Radical distaste for the competition of all against all that “careers open to talent” initiates.  It’s a mad scramble for economic and status once determinants like family origins, whom one knows, and other non-economic and non-accomplishment markers of distinction are cast aside.  This is the traditionalist, conservative case against capitalism—and against democracy.  We get a good taste of it in Tocqueville’s reaction to America.  He is aghast at the way that economic success becomes just about the only measure of a person’s worth once traditional ranks are abolished in favor a general “equality.”  And is equally aghast at the chaos of the generalized competition that ensues once everyone is told they can aspire to anything.  No bars to advancement beyond what the individual can procure for himself (or herself). (I must note that Tocqueville struggles hard to master his antipathy to democratic equality because he is convinced it is the future. Thus we must learn some way to live with it.) A suspicion of what one has solely earned for oneself is Lady Catherine’s objection to Elizabeth.  How dare she presume herself fully worthy of Darcy simply on the basis of her beauty and wit.  Austen allows Elizabeth’s personal qualifications to carry all before them.  The legitimacy of any social impediment to her match with Darcy is fiercely denied. We might call this a rejection of the relevance of any “preexisting conditions.”

The second objection to meritocracy is that it threatens to obliterate “honor” or “character.”  This, of course, is where Austen (to some extent) plays both sides of the fence.  Elizabeth deserves her reward precisely because she is honorable.  She rejects the enormous economic prize that would follow from marrying Darcy because her integrity demands that she marry someone she loves and respects.  Her refusal of his first proposal proves her character.  What appalled Tocqueville, contrastingly, was the shamelessness, the ignorance of and contempt for any form of “honor,” that characterized the (to him, mad) scramble for economic success.  Where such success is the only goal and the only marker of social standing, people will stoop to anything.  All notions of personal integrity as absolutely essential to one’s own self-regard as well as to the regard of others will disappear.  And when we consider the shamelessness of many people of wealth and of many politicians—and of those less successful who ape them—Tocqueville would seem to have a point.  Where success is the only goal, moral considerations are merely an annoyance to be brushed aside whenever and wherever one can get away with it.  To bring up such peccadilloes is to be a killjoy, or a sententious bore (like sister Mary in Pride and Prejudice).  There is nothing quite so old-fashioned as hammering on about integrity or character or how someone should be ashamed of themselves.  Such objections will be easily dismissed as envy, at the scold’s inability to play the game.

It seems to me a fair historical generalization (again in relation to England, France, and the US, the only societies I am in any position to opine about) that “fame” was the prevalent concept used to discuss such matters before 1750 while “status” (although the term itself is not often invoked until the sociologists emerge in the very late nineteenth century) more accurately describes the situation after 1750.  In other words, once some ideology of “equality” (however, imperfect and non-inclusive since women and non-whites were decidedly not “equal”) emerges, the general competition for eminence that Tocqueville observed is on.  That’s what generates the “social” novels of the 19th century (of which Proust’s novel is the great culmination) in which “social climbing” is the master passion of so many characters.  Rastignac in Balzac’s Pere Goriot is not seeking fame; he is seeking status, which means acceptance into a Paris that is closed to him as young man newly arrived from the provinces.  Goriot’s master passion is parental love, which motivates his sacrificing contact with his daughters because they believe they must disavow him to maintain their newly won—and very precarious—toehold in the social circles they wish to be members of.  Swann, by way of contrast, already has membership in the most exclusive circles—and his presence there (as a Jew and a commoner) attests to the fact such circles can be penetrated by outsiders and to the qualities of his character since only its agreeableness (what Austen calls “amiability”—literally lovable) could assure him the access and esteem he enjoys.

Swann shows that, in the informal world of “the social,” as contrasted to the more structured world of “the economic” (where money provides an “objective” marker of success), character can still count.  In other words, the social in the 19th century tries to hold out against the complete triumph of the economic.  Tocqueville is saying, among other things, that the social is much weaker in America than in France.  There is not the prejudice against trade, against the vulgarities of “conspicuous consumption,” against the sharp tricks of commerce in America that there is in France.  Yes, as Edith Wharton shows, there are some pockets of resistance in “old New York” and perhaps in Brahman Boston, but both are reckoned anomalies and doomed to extinction.  Of course, Proust is also an elegist; he knows that the world he describes is not long for this world. 

Meritocracy, as measured by economic success, will sweep all before it. That is actually too monolithic a view.  Sub-groups will continue to form, with different criteria of entry.  And as I noted in the previous posts, those sub-groups in contemporary America are generally distinguished along lines of taste.  Thus, a huge divide between the rich who go in for the competition over who has the biggest, most luxurious, yachts and the rich who scorn such displays.  Or, much further down the economic scale, between those devoted to footballs and NASCAR and those who go to the opera and theater.  To the bemusement of leftists everywhere, contemporary politics in the US and Britain certainly, a bit less so in France, follows the lines of these taste divides, not class divides (where class is a technical term designating whether one earns one’s living primarily from the ownership of capital or primarily as income for labor preformed.)  That members of taste cultures that are deemed less prestigious are “looked down upon” by their presumptuous betters motivates voters more than any economic hurt they receive from those who possess economic power (as employers or as the providers of necessities).  In America, this divide is particularly aggravated by the feeling among less prestigious sub-groups that they are constantly being accused of being “racist,” a charge they vehemently deny and deeply, deeply resent.  The cultural elite are thus perceived as those sanctimonious scolds who moralize as just another way (along with their scorn for NASCAR and Burger King) to assert their (unjustified) belief in their superiority.  When taste is moralized—or to say it another way, when meritocracy extends to taste (i.e. some tastes are more meritorious than others, and tastes themselves become forms of merit)—social and political toxicity/animosity appears to reign almost free of any check.

All of which is to say that the desire to be esteemed by one’s peers is pretty basic.  And that desire encompasses the complexity of determining whom one’s peers are even as scorn is often directed at those who are not deemed my peers—and who, even worse, might be trying to pretend to be or to thrust themselves upon me as my peers.  That’s what snobbery is: I scorn the temerity with which you claim the right to associate with me as an equal.  You are beneath my notice. And snobbery, in contemporary America, rankles with an intensity hard to overestimate.

Fame is a bit different it seems to me.  Crucially, fame like status can only be conferred on someone by others.  All discussions of fame are troubled by this fact: that it is fickle and that it rests on nothing other than being noticed and known by others.  There seems nothing substantial about it—and moralists from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the present day warn us that it is a cheat.  To pursue it is madness—and to believe one’s press notices (as the saying goes) true insanity.  Still, the moralists have no effect on the minority who crave fame.  (How big is that minority?  Who knows? But a desire for fame is among the prime motivators of human agents.) 

Commentators prior to 1750 had more good to say of fame than ones after that date.  Despite warnings about its possible deceptions, the desire for fame has a nobility about it which various writers commend.  It is the spur to ambition, it raises the level of one’s game.  (Is it fair to say that competition is now seen to play that role: as the pathway to upping one’s game?  Of course, competition for fame can be one form competition takes.  In any case, encomiums to the benefits of competition are rare before 1750.)  Just as Austen delineates the positives that come from a “justified” pride in Pride and Prejudice even while denouncing the ill effects of pride and the bad behavior of the prideful, so writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Edmund Burke offer qualified praise for the desire for fame.

To anchor that praise, of course, one has to try to give fame some substance.  It can’t just be gaining the attention of the fickle crowd.  It must be based on real accomplishment.  And here, I think, is where the difference between fame and status resides.  It’s a matter of scale.  Status is confined to one’s contemporaries and to confined groups identified as one’s peers.  Hence the idea of a “succès d’estime, or of a “poet’s poet.”  Esteem is not fame.  Fame is more general; it is being known beyond the circle of those devoted to your kind of accomplishment.  The sports blogger Joe Posnanski is currently trying to rank the 50 most famous baseball plays of the last fifty years.  His criteria is that these players must be known through their accomplishments on the field, but (crucially) are known to even the most casual fan and even to those who do not follow baseball at all.  Thus he is clear that he is not identifying the 50 “best” players of the stated time frame, but the 50 “most famous.”  To take an earlier example (i.e. prior to 1973) Mickey Mantle was certainly more famous in the 1950s than Henry Aaron or Stan Musial, but it is debatable that he was a better player.  So it was possible that Mantle was less esteemed by his fellow players than Musial even though he was more famous.

Similar effects are often seen in cultural matters.  Mailer is more famous than Roth, but I think it fair to say Roth is more esteemed among the cultural cognoscenti. Of course, such distinctions provide fodder for snobbery.  Those “in the know” can scorn someone who declares Mailer a better writer than Roth. 

Still, especially for the pre-1750 writers, fame’s larger scale recommends it.  The seeker of fame is daring to play in the largest game.  Milton aspires to be one of the immortals, remembered for all time as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are.  Hence the nobility of the quest for fame: it is to risk all, it is to aspire to be among the greats, and, thus, to hold oneself to the standard set by the greats.  Such ambition is certainly presumptuous, but only such presumption yields the highest results.

A poet friend of mine once remarked that he wrote for posterity; his great desire was that his poetry would “last,” that it would still be read after his death.  The remark made me consider my own ambitions—which upon reflection I had to realize were of a much different cast.  I wanted to be read in my own time, to garner responses from my peers (readers of similar interests) and, in my wildest dreams, of a wider readership.  I would have loved to write a best-seller.  If I wanted to be “known,” it was by my contemporaries.  I have no interest in, no desire for, readers after my death.

Partly that lack of desire is that I won’t be around to enjoy the attention of others once I am dead.  I can’t have a desire for something I will not experience.  But the lack of desire is also diffidence, an inability to take my chances in a larger game.  My poet friend is playing for higher stakes than I am—and that very fact surely shapes how he goes about his work in contrast to how I go about mine.  His ambitions do appear more noble than mine—even if negative words like “grandiose” and “presumptuous” could also be used to describe his aims.

To end by returning to economy.  The competition for fame differs from the competition for status, then, mostly as a matter of scale.  The seeker of fame wants, to be very extreme about it, to be “known” by everyone, even by people who will be alive after he is dead.  The downside of fame (as all the moralists point out) is that is can be empty.  To be famous is not necessarily to be esteemed, while it is certainly true that the more people “know” who you are, the fewer of those among that number are actually in a position to “esteem” you, to judge with any degree of accuracy the quality of the achievements that made you known.  And fame is notoriously self-referential.  Your achievements, after all, may have various effects in the world; they accomplish something.  But fame accomplishes nothing.  It is just a garnish on top of your actual deeds.  And this garnish is something you can strive to bring about, but which you cannot command.  It is offered entirely on the whim of others, manufactured by the various engines of publicity that a given society possesses. 

To be concrete: I can work at and make myself an adept at hitting a baseball.  I can make that happen as a consequence of my actions.  Success in that endeavor is much more under my control than making myself famous, which is more a by-product of my accomplishments than a product.  Of course, I can do various things in the way of self-publicity to achieve fame, but such work is often deemed vulgar.  Which returns us to the issue of shamelessness.  Shameless self-promotion is often scorned—but can still be fairly successful for all that.  As Tocqueville saw with a shiver, shamelessness pays.  Which is why the economy of fame is always viewed with some suspicion.

Disparate Economies

In the course of my reading group’s discussion of Pride and Prejudice the other night, I commented that there are always two economies: one of wealth, the other of status.  The rankings that competition for preeminence on those scales produces do not (in many cases) coincide.  This is particularly obvious in Austen’s world, where fortunes made from “trade” do not secure the kind of social status that gentry like the Bennetts enjoy, despite their fairly modest wealth.

But money and status are not entirely disconnected.  Bingley (who eventually marries the eldest Bennett daughter, Jane) is the beneficiary of his father’s success in trade—and is in the process of “laundering” the substantial wealth that he has inherited.  He will marry a daughter from the gentry (basically, people whose money derives from land and who have the financial wherewithal to not have to work) and is looking around to purchase an “estate.”  His family will move from the world of trade to the status of “landed” in one generation.  The novel makes it clear that Darcy’s family made a similar move a generation or two back.  Lady Catherine (Darcy’s obnoxious aunt) is not “old” aristocracy; her title only goes back two generations.

[An important sidenote: the supposed firewall between money gained through “trade” and the “old money” of the landed aristocracy was more fiction than fact. Those safe five percent returning investments on which the gentry lived only partially derived from their English estates, with their rent paying tenants and agricultural products. Their money was also invested–as Austen registers in Mansfield Park–in the plantations worked by slaves to produce sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Americas. Similarly, of course, the great textile factories of the Industrial Revolution depended on cotton produced by slaves. On top of all that, until just about exactly the time of Austen’s death, there were the incomes and profits generated directly by the slave trade.]

The relative openness of British society, especially in exactly Austen’s lifetime (1775-1817), to such status enhancement is often cited as one reason the British never suffered the kind of revolution that unfolded in France.  The new wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution could buy status as well as all the other goodies money can buy.  The aristocracy was not closed (as it was in France).  The novel’s example is the Lucas family.  The father is knighted for giving a pretty speech when the king comes to town.  And the novel pokes (fairly gentle) fun at the newly minted Sir William’s pretensions to status—especially since his household is dirt poor. 

The Lucas sub-plot indicates (as does Lady Catherine’s efforts to prevent the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy) that snobbery is rife.  Social climbing (the use of money and marriage to launder one’s declassé origins) is always vulnerable to those who will sneer at the pretensions of the newcomers.  The charge of vulgarity always lurks.  Which is why “manners” are so crucial in the novel—and in its assessment of the character of its characters.  Elizabeth may be technically right when she insists to Lady Catherine that she is Darcy’s social equal in every respect.  But the behavior of her mother and of her sisters, of which Elizabeth is deeply ashamed, puts the lie to that courageous assertion.  One has to act one’s status—or the game is lost.  That’s why the real sting in Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s first proposal comes when she tells him his manner has been ungentlemanly.  Just as Elizabeth cannot gainsay what Darcy has to say about her family in that proposal, he cannot deny, upon reflection, that she is right to say he has not acted like a gentleman.

All of this is to say that for Austen, status has substance.  She is not blind to the absurdities of status—both of the naked efforts to attain it and the pufferies practiced by those who think they have it (pufferies, as in Lady Catherine’s and Sir William’s cases, that stem from insecurity about actually possessing the status they nominally possess.  After all, why would Lady Catherine suffer the obsequies of Mr. Collins unless she needed to be constantly assured of her eminence?)

Still, Austen also respects status even as she mocks how people strive for it—and inhabit it once attained.  She believes in the codes of the gentleman, in the codes of what the French call politesse, because they enable social intercourse along lines that she desires.  She is well aware that civility often masks indifference and even outright hostility (as in the case of Bingley’s sisters and their behavior toward Jane and Elizabeth Bennett), but she greatly prefers that hypocrisy (the tribute vice pays to virtue) to the outright vulgarity of Mrs. Bennett.  A world in which hostility and hatred must be veiled is a better world than one of direct (to the mattresses) competition. 

Everything is doubled in Austen.  She sees the utility (to use a vulgar word she would never use) of the “ways” of her world even as she satirizes the deficiencies of those “ways” and is keenly aware of how people use them to serve selfish, even nefarious, ends.  Thus the novel warns us against taking “manners” at face value.  They can be a mask, as they are in the case of Wickham.  The substance of status can be a lie as well.  Judgment of others is the primary—and incredibly difficult—task for everyone in Austen’s novels, but for no one more than her heroines.  To make a mistake in whom one marries is, particularly for women (but also for men as Mr. Bennett’s case shows), an utter disaster.  But it is incredibly difficult to know who another truly is.  Status and manners are only partial clues and can be deceiving.  Austen is very severe on characters she deems “stupid.”  Stupidity, in her novels, it seems to me, is evidenced most directly in either lacking any interest in judging/interpreting the character of others (Mr. Collins is too self-involved in putting forward his own pretensions to ever see another person) or in blindly accepting at face value worldly markers of character (Mrs. Bennett, for whom a man’s fortune is all you need to know.) To take either money or social status as an accurate marker of character, of someone’s true worth, is a grievous mistake.

How does this translate to today’s world?  Not very directly, but it’s not irrelevant either.  The competition for money is more direct today—and there is not much social stigma attached to the source of one’s wealth or to engagement in direct, undisguised, efforts to accumulate money.  It would be tempting to say that money and status are more directly aligned in today’s America than it was in Austen’s England. That is, because gaining money is not stigmatized, to become wealthy is also to achieve status. To some extent that is true.  But it is still complicated.  There is not a one-to-one correspondence.  We still utilize a concept of “vulgarity”—the obverse of which might be captured in terms like “esteem” or “respect.” And we have our own laundering system, primarily in our prestige obsessed system of higher education. The newly rich want to send their children to the Ivies or other prestigious private universities (with maybe three or four public flagships also acceptable) as markers of having “made it.”

The obvious case for the still incomplete alignment of money and status is Donald Trump.  Long before he got involved in politics, Trump was a by-word for vulgarity.  And there is a decent case to be made that he only got involved in politics out of resentment at being laughed at by Barack Obama.  Certainly, resentment against Obama (a “class act” if there ever was one) is a major motivator for Trump.  Another, somewhat different case, would be Brittney Spears.  If the notion of “nouveau riche” or parvenu haunts Trump, the specter of “white trash” hovers over Spears.  And it seems pretty obvious that philanthropy to prestigious cultural institutions—the Ivy league universities, the operas in NYC and San Francisco, art museums and the like—are a contemporary way to launder money, to use it to attain status, entrance into the right social circles.

I am always befuddled when I read all those “social” novels—by Thackeray, Proust, Edith Wharton among others—where social climbing is the dominant motive driving the characters’ actions.  In the worlds I inhabit, such ambitions seem utterly absent.  In contemporary America, where is “society” of that sort even to be found? If you wanted to “climb,” where would you go and what would you do?  Who (like Proust’s Verdurins and Guermantes) are today’s social arbiters?  Outside of NYC and San Francisco, are there really social hierarchies, exclusive events/salons/balls that outsiders fervently dream of getting access to—and people who do anything and everything to gain that access?  It just doesn’t seem the way life in present day USA is organized.  I have no doubt that some philanthropy is driven by the desire to be associated with other donors whom one wants to hang with, but I have also known and worked with other philanthropists to whom attaining some increase in social status is of no interest to them.

So I am left with the puzzle of how the economies of wealth and status work today.  What are the terms of competition for these goods?  I won’t talk about competition for wealth here today, although that’s an interesting topic to which I would like to return.  Partly because I think some roads to wealth today rely on the kinds of media that have also greatly altered the forms status now takes and the ways to gain it.  (What I have in mind is the competition for venture capital—and the ways in which style over substance can win the day as in the cases of WeWork, FX, and Thanatos.) 

Anyway, here’s my suspicion. The economy of status has been altered drastically by the nature of publicity.  Let’s assume that the desire for status is a desire to be seen, to be known, and to be esteemed.  One wants to be recognized as a member in good standing of a certain social set.  My skepticism about the kinds of social climbing found in the classic novels as existing today stems from the difficulty of identifying social sets in today’s world.  Where is this “society” that you are trying to attain status in? 

One answer to that question is the “set” established by your profession.  An artist strives for respect and standing in the “art world”; a university professor wants standing in her “field”; and business people want esteem among their peers.  There are, in other words, professional hierarchies—and these hierarchies are not primarily tracked by money.  As a business person once told me, the money’s not primary, but it is a way of keeping score.  So money is not unrelated to the rankings in the hierarchy, but non-monetary achievements are (ideally) the “real” determinant of status.  The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen have a standing superior to Neil Diamond irrespective of the fortunes accumulated by each. We don’t reference how much money they each have when ranking them.

Here, however, is where I think the distortions of the media come into play.  In the classic social novels, no one is pursuing fame or celebrity.  Modern media mean that you can play for standing in society as a whole, not in some particular subset.  Everyone knows who Donald Trump is (even long before he ran for president) just as everyone knows who Michael Jackson is.  Competition for standing in that amorphous, but all-encompassing, world is competition for attention.  It has become a cliché, but still true, that we now live in an attention economy.  What is disturbing to old-liners like me is that attention seems substance-free.  No such thing as bad publicity.  Celebrity is being famous for being famous.  The celebrity doesn’t have to bring any goods to market (think of Elizabeth Holmes); she just has to be good at attracting eyes—and in Holmes’ case (as in many others) the money will follow the eyes.

How long can you get away with this?  Crypto is indicating you can get away with it for quite some time.  On the other hand, there are still some (even if feeble) quality controls.  Bruce Springsteen, for the most part, manages to sidestep the attention economy.  He has never descended into tabloid hell the way Brittney Spears has—and the almost universal respect he has garnered remains tied to his achievements, not to his being a celebrity.  Or think of Dolly Parton as contrasted to Tammy Wynette (despite some recent attempts to recalibrate our understanding of Tammy.)  Dolly has slowly but surely moved from being a cartoonish character to a revered one.  That’s partly because of her ability to make fun of her white trash look (“it takes a lot of money to look this cheap”), and her avoiding the tabloid fodder of Wynette’s drug problems and multiple divorces, along with a rise in cultural status of country music over the past forty years.

Taylor Swift is an interesting case along these lines.  There’s a substantial body of work there (even if this old fogey can’t judge the quality of it), but her fame has now thrown her into the media frenzy where her actual music is mostly irrelevant.  Will she be able to avoid descending into tabloid hell?  Will she continue to produce her music?  When you think of it, it is a miracle that the Beatles, once Beatlemania hit, actually continued to develop musically and produced work in 1967 that was superior to the work that gained them fame in 1964.  It’s only worse now in terms of how the attention world will eat its young.  Maybe Taylor Swift will manage not to get swallowed up on the basis of this fame coming to her (unlike the Beatles) relatively late.  She was known before of course, but not “known” like this—and let’s hope the ballast of being 33, not 17 like Brittney Spears, sees her through.

In sum, “status” seems to have exploded in today’s world, having to a large extent collapsed into something better described as “fame” or “celebrity.”  Yet, there are still circumscribed social sets in which people strive for status, in which there are fairly well defined markers for garnering respect.  But there’s now another game in town, one where a person becomes famous not relative to a defined set, but for society in general.  Donald Trump, we might justly say, failed to garner any respect in the closed sets of NYC society or the business world (his skills as a businessman are laughable, non-existent; he fooled no one in that world).  But he was a winner in the other (larger?) game of becoming known, if not quite respected, in society at large.  And you can cash in that kind of success, not just in dollars but in other perks as well.

You can’t have that larger game without the media through which one’s image is offered to millions.  We have multiple media of that type now (not just the newspapers of the 19th century) and the frenzied effort to garner attention feels like the defining characteristic of our era.  That so much of that effort is also light on content (to put it charitably) is deeply disturbing to old fogeys like myself.

I am generally skeptical of claims that our times are radically different than times past—and hate positions that rely on claiming our times are much worse than times past.  So I want to register a caveat at the end of this post—and a promissory note.  The desire for fame as contrasted to status is not a new phenomenon, so I need to think about how fame was understood and pursued prior to the media tools currently deployed in seeking it.  And as long as I am trying to track “economies,” there are at least two other competitive spheres that should be considered:  struggles for power and the competition for sexual success (this last returning us to an Austen focused interest in the marriage market, but influenced now by the Darwinian concept of sexual selection.)  But enough for today.

Crisis of Conscience in the Arts and Humanities

The current crises (multiple) in the US and the world has generated a very specific crisis of conscience among practitioners in the arts and humanities.  From the Mellon Foundation’s shift in funding priorities to my daughter-in-law’s small theater company and the anguished discussion on Victorian studies listservs about justifications for teaching/studying Dickens, those practitioners are agonizing over how their work (which they enjoy and want to continue doing) contributes to social justice.  “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” troubles people of good will with special urgency in the current moment.

Retirement is a time for reflection.  I think of what I have done with my life, of the choices I made.  Those choices were, in one way, quite haphazard.  I did not have a plan; I was opportunistic.  I knocked on the doors that presented themselves and walked through the ones that opened. I almost never turned down an invitation to do something—and one thing led to another.  All of it, however, was within the structures of an academic career, and constituted advances along fairly clearly mapped out career paths.  Once having secured tenure, the choices I made were all safe ones.  I never put myself at serious risk in terms of financial and career security, even as I did not stick to a field or a discipline.  I was more of a free-floating intellectual, but within an institutional place where that carried no significant risks.  In that sense, I was less “careerist” than many academics, but my being a bit of a maverick came at no cost and was hardly anything like significant rebellion.  I maintained a steady distaste for, even contempt of, much academic business as usual, but let my colleagues go their way so long as they let me go mine.

What did I accomplish besides garnering my fair share of rewards?  Not much.  Tops among the rewards was working with students—and enabling some of them to go on to their own successes.  When the fairly obvious paths for a career began to close down, making the possible way forward to students increasingly murky, much of the joy of my work began to dissipate.  I couldn’t justify what I was doing in terms of the ways it provided opportunities for my students to advance.  And while the scholarship itself (as evidenced by this blog), my engagement with ideas and arguments, continued (and continue) to interest me, that pursuit seemed more and more like self-indulgence.  It does no good to anyone—a fitting way to spend my retired time if I wish, but hardly an activity that society should feel any need or responsibility to support.  I am cultivating my own garden, which seems a betrayal of our needy world.  But I can’t figure out where my efforts could be better directed.

All of this as a long preamble to an email I recently sent to a former student, now a professor of Victorian studies, when she wrote to me about the current discussion on those listserv about reading/teaching/studying Dickens.  Here’s what I wrote back”

 

“As for studying Dickens, I share your inability to think straight on the topic.  I have two fairly recent posts on my blog–the titles include the terms “cakes and ale” so searching that way will get you the posts–that are relevant.  I think people will keep reading Dickens in the wider world no matter what the academy does, whereas I think some authors–Smollett, Oliphant, Meredith–would disappear altogether if there weren’t scholars reading and writing on them.

But whether the academy should devote resources to scholarship on Dickens and have courses where students are made to read him is a much tougher question.  I do think it highly, highly likely that Victorian studies will slowly fade out of existence–and I do think that’s a mostly bad thing even though I also understand that Victorian studies does little, if anything, to address the massive problems that our world faces.  That’s the dilemma my posts try to address: how to justify activities and scholarship that are not necessary in the sense of not directed toward issues of social justice.  “Not directed” meaning that, even if that scholarship talks about social justice, it is not doing anything concrete to bring social justice about.

My advice for you remains the same.  Play the game by the rules that currently apply.  Get tenure.  And then, with that security obtained, consider what work you can do with a good conscience, making you feel you are contributing toward something you can affirm.  For me, that mostly meant helping my students make their way forward in the world while writing and reading about things I felt germane to articulating a vision of what we should want a democratic society look like.

But all that definitely often felt very removed from making the world a better place.  The helplessness of looking on, and the guilt of doing that looking on from a secure place, did often make me accuse myself of cowardice.  I should have been putting myself on the line and doing something direct instead of pursuing my very pleasant indirect path.

There is a question of temperament here–although it can also seem a question of selfishness.  I have worked in political campaigns since I was 18, and I find I am not suited to it.  I believe much of what campaigns do is futile make-work (phone banks and canvassing, of which I have done a fair amount without any sense that it is effective) and I also find the focus on winning the election at the expense of much investment in what one is winning the election to achieve troubling.  Finally, in my one experience dealing with Congress (I was part of a team trying to influence the writing of a legal aid bill), the compromises we had to swallow and the pettiness and ignorance of the representatives we had to deal with was a massive turn-off.  The political process–no surprise–is very broken.  So a retreat back into academia, where at least I could control my relations to my colleagues and students, and act in ways I could affirm toward them, was a huge relief.

More than you wanted to hear doubtless.  But how to make one’s way through a life lived in a corrupt and cruel society is a real dilemma.  How to maintain self-respect and some sense of investment in what one is doing day in and day out even as you bemoan the state of the world and feel you should contribute to making it better.  Not a trivial problem. “

 

Trying to Understand Practice

I think it fair to say that the rejection of the term “experience” in favor of talking about “practices” is motivated by the worry that “experience” does not take the social dimensions of human being-in-the-world adequately into account.

A preference for the term “practices” can often be traced back to the influence of Wittgenstein.  Certainly, many of the puzzles surrounding practices were enunciated by Wittgenstein and still trouble those who want to use that concept.

I don’t think Wittgenstein uses the term “practices” himself.  He talks of “forms of life” and “language games” in ways that would align with some understandings of “practices.”  I don’t know where the current use of the term “practices” comes from.  Kant wrote about the difference between “theory and practice” and Marx used the term “praxis,” but those usages are not quite the same as the full-blown “social theory of practices” (the title of a useful book by Stephen Turner (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Important for me is that a reliance on the concept of practice goes hand-in-hand with pluralism.  There are multiple practices—and that would be one objection to the Deweyean concept of “experience.”  Dewey seems to insist that all experiences have the same basic traits, which is why (for instance) he tries to make the “esthetic” (in Art As Experience) continuous with experience tout court instead of deeming the aesthetic a distinctive kind of experience with its own features.

My understanding of practice is derived from Wittgenstein, Bourdieu (key texts: Outline of a Theory of Practice [Cambridge UP, 1977] and The Logic of Practice [Stanford UP, 1990]), John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality [Simon and Shuster, 1995], Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice [University of Chicago Press, 1995], and Bruno Latour, Science in Action [Harvard UP, 1987]. I also learned a lot from a collection of essays gathered together under the title of The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. by Theordore Schatzki et. al. [Routledge, 2001].  As you can tell from the dates on these sources, I was working on this topic in the 1990s—and taught a grad seminar on theories of action in 2002.  That work culminated in my essay “Action as Meaningful Behavior” (which can be accessed through the “Public Essays” tab on the front page of this blog)—an essay that does not use the term “practice” but which does touch on some of themes I will consider in this post.

Enough throat clearing. What is a “practice”?  Not an easy question to answer since there are some very different things that can be collected under the term.  Let’s start with a fairly straight-forward example: playing the piano.  This is an activity that takes place within a structured field.  The “social” element of the practice, then, is the existence of that field.  There has to be the edifice of Western music, with the way it organizes sound into notes and also motivates the production of the instrument, the piano, that produces the appropriate notes. (Chinese music is differently structured and the piano is an instrument that is irrelevant to, useless for playing, Chinese music.)

There also has to be a practitioner—the one who plays the piano.  Crucially, there also has to be a process of education.  You can’t just sit down to a piano and play it.  It takes years of training—and of practice.  You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book.  You need to actually physically do it, moving from a starting point of almost complete ineptitude toward dizzying heights of proficiency on the part of those who become virtuosos.

The practice of piano playing spawns various social formations.  There will be professional organizations of practitioners; there will be institutions like conservatories; there will be networks of managers, agents, impressarios, philanthropists, and others who arrange for and publicize performances. There will be concert halls.  There will be critics who evaluate performances, scholars who study the history of the practice, and theorists who try to determine its enabling and generating conditions.  This is Latour territory, thinking about the multiple agents, with varying roles, required to maintain a practice—where “maintain” also entails a certain kind of communal policing of “what counts” as a valid example of the practice, what innovations are accepted, which ones rejected, and which enactments are deemed “better” or “worse.”

Dewey’s notion of “experience” fails to take into account what we might call the inevitable human audience for our actions, for our ways of interacting with the environment.  We are judged constantly by others—and the standards for that judgment are relative to the practice we are seen as participating in.  A good parent is distinct from a good piano player.  It is within the understood parameters of the relevant practice that a performance is understood (i.e. the very meaning of the performed action only makes sense in relation to the practice) and judged.  In other words, we have to name what the action is in general terms—parenting, playing the piano—before we have any way of assessing it, or even comprehending it.  What is she doing?, we might ask in puzzlement.  The answer to that question will (in most cases) gives us the name of a practice.

For Bourdieu (and many others, going back to Wittgenstein’s interest in games), the best way to think about practices is through the example of games.  A game is an activity that is structured by rules, but (crucially) not governed by rules.  The rule in baseball is that three strikes and you are out.  But the rules say nothing about the strategies, the techniques, a pitcher might employ in the effort to achieve a strike-out.  And the rules are not the source of the motivation.  The players play to win—and there are various socially provided rewards for winning—but the degree of compulsion leveraged to make someone play a game and care about its outcomes differs from one social setting to another.  Students are often forced to engage in athletic games they would rather give a miss.  More broadly, the structured field of economic competition for incomes within a capitalist society is a game few can avoid playing.

To think of the market economy as a game brings up many of the complications of “practices.”  Yes, there are identifiable rules in such a society—starting with the legal definition of and protection of “property.”  There is also the social institution of money itself.  Searle, in a formula I adapt in my essay on action, says that fields are structured in the following way: A counts as B under conditions C.  Searle mostly applies this formula to the establishment of social institutions, but I use it somewhat differently.  Money is a key example for Searle.  This piece of paper only counts (only functions) as legal tender under very elaborate conditions. There is a kind of magic about the social transformation that turns something into something else.  Games make this magic very obvious.  I step across a line carrying an oblong ball.  A perfectly ordinary action.  But under a set of very elaborate conditions that action “counts” as a touchdown.  The conditions?  I have to be playing a game of American football; time must be “in,”; the “play” has to have been “run” within the rules (no penalty flags), etc. etc.  Football, like money, is socially instituted.

Practices, then, are actions taken within conditioned circumstances, where the conditions are socially generated.  Searle focuses on the structure of that conditioning.  Latour focuses on the multiple agents and their ongoing actions required to keep the conditioned field operating.  Bourdieu focuses on two things: the strategies employed by agents to gain prominence, acclaim, financial rewards and the like within the game, and the ways agents are habituated to the games they play, taking them mostly for granted.  He adapts from Aristotle the term habitus, which he defines as a primarily unconscious “disposition” carried in our very bodies.  Thus, the trained pianist doesn’t think about her performance.  In fact, thinking most likely would only lead to mucking things up.  She has to let her body take over.

More generally, within a society’s field of social interactions there are unwritten rules, but they are clearly perceptible to one who looks, rules about tone of voice, how close to stand to some one else, how loud to talk etc.  The discomfort generated by some one who breaks that rules—or the embarrassment felt if one breaks them one self—are instances of the body’s having acquired the habits, or dispositions, appropriate to a set of social norms.  Thus, our interactions with the environment are mediated through socially generated notions of decorum, just as the scientist’s interaction with nature is mediated through her long training in the protocols of her disciplinary practice.  The internalization of those protocols is what Bourdieu calls “habitus.”  They become “second nature,” barely registered, taken for granted.

Several problems arise at this point.  For starters, few practices have a clear initiating moment when the rule book, the foundational conditions C, are enunciated.  Basketball is the exception, not the rule.  (Basketball was invented out of whole cloth by a man named Naimsmith—although the game he devised has been fairly radically altered over the years.) The US Constitution is a similar exception—and runs alongside common case law in its setting of legal/political conditions.  Much more frequent is an activity taking and changing shape through the course of actual interactions.  The game of baseball existed long before its rules were codified and formalized.  But if that is the case, then how can we say the practice is dependent on the structuring conditions—since the practice seems to predate the structure?

This puzzle also afflicts the use of language.  A child certainly has to learn how to speak.  But that learning does not appear dependent on knowing the structures of language or the rules for correct usage.  The child “norms” herself—in terms of pronunciation, and using words the ways others use them—through various feedback received from other users, not through being versed in the “rules.”  In fact, a good case can be made that there are no rules of grammar.  The so-called rules of grammar are just reports on the regularities that have emerged through speakers of a language “norming” themselves to one another in order to facilitate communication.  And that absence of rules explains why languages are constantly changing even if the pace of change is slowed down by the contrary pressures of conformity in order to enhance mutual comprehension.

In short, there is no instituting moment for a language, in which it was laid down that the pronounced sound “dog” (A) would count as referring to a particular sort of animal (B) under the condition that we were speaking English (C).  The same applies to syntactical rules.  In this vision of language, it is all pragmatics—with “rules” (regularities plus all those troublesome “irregular” verbs and other forms) generated by usage, not the other way around (i.e. usage enabled and generated by the structuring rules).  Hence Wittgenstein’s emphasis on “use” and his general skepticism about “following a rule” as any kind of explanation for how one proceeds, how one “goes on.”  (I am pushing here a contested reading of Wittgenstein since various commentators read him in exactly the opposite way, seeing him as determined to identify the rules underlying practices such as language use.  I think those commentators are hostages to the tradition’s search for certainty and transcendental conditions—exactly the parts of the tradition that I think Wittgenstein [like Dewey] was trying to overcome.  I take it as ironic—and evidence of the tradition’s mesmeric powers—that Wittgenstein’s critique of it is read as yet another engagement with its obsessive concerns.)

Wittgenstein thus leads us to the idea that we are making up our practices as we go along.  The image he uses is the repair of a ship even as it is sailing. There is no rule book for courtship, for economic activities (capitalist or otherwise), or for speaking a language the way that there are rule books for games. Games, it turns out, are a bad analogy for practices because practices are more chaotic, more free-form, more open, and more dynamic than structured fields.  Better to talk of a continuum here—and to locate the continual efforts (some more successful than others) to police practices, to gain some handle over their chaotic potential.  Thus, a “discipline” can be understood as a way of deploying authority (and/or power) to designate which activities “count” as legitimate within the relevant practice.  “Outlaw” or heterodox practitioners find it difficult to make headway against the organized forces of orthodoxy—and we can recognize the stratagems (from drastic to petty, yet cruel) used to stifle heretics (the inquisition, the denial of tenure, the cutting off of funding and access to jobs within the practice, the mocking of those who don’t exhibit good breeding or good usage). Of course, the heretics are often later hailed as “innovators,” as those who introduced needed reforms and novelties.

Thus, even in the absence of formalized and structuring rules, the notion of practice seems useful because it points us toward the organizations of practitioners (sometimes with credentialing powers and almost always with the power of accepting or rejecting someone as a fellow practitioner) and institutions that enable the practice to continue (by arranging for its public performances and garnering the financial and other resources –including physical spaces—for its enactments).  In short, unlike the term “experience,” practices points us toward all the social pieces that need to be in place for many (I don’t think all) interactions.

I will end with one recurring puzzle.  If, as I am inclined to believe, practices are not very rule bound, how does one learn them?  How does one acquire “a feel” for the game?  This brings us back to my quarrel with Joseph North.  There is no “method” for learning how to produce a compelling “close reading.” You don’t learn to play baseball by reading the rule book. And you certainly don’t find happiness in love or discover the secret to being a great writer by reading the manual.  (The wild success of self-help books attests to the unkillable wish that how-to guides could do the trick.)

There are techniques, tricks of the trade, that have emerged out of the ways previous practitioners have performed that activity. It helps to have a teacher who knows those techniques. But the only way to learn is to wade in oneself and have a go.  And then your performance will receive the feedback from others that leads you to do it somewhat differently next time around.  That’s how the child learns to speak.  By doing it—and by being corrected in some instances, understood in others, and even applauded in some.  Trial by doing—within a field with no set determinants, but with both centrifugal and centripetal forces influencing its present day norms and regularities.  That’s the field that Latour wants to describe in his work—taking into account what motivates scientists, the kinds of feedback they receive from both human and non-human interlocutors, the institutions within which the work takes place, the credentialing and other ways of distinguishing legitimate from unacknowledged work,  the instruments that mediate the interactions with the non-human, and the uses to which what scientists produce are put.