Theory BLEG: Consumption Communities and Cultural Capital

Today's post is a blog beg. I first forwarded the following naked question at the USIH Facebook page a few days ago. But here I offer more context (or textiles, to follow a clothing metaphor) and a connected concern. The question:

Beyond Daniel Boorstin himself, where have you seen the best critical discussion of his idea of "consumption communities"?*

In addition, I'm particularly interested in any past historical-theoretical discussions linking Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital to Boorstin's theoretical tool (which prominently appeared in The Americans: The Democratic Experience). The links seem, to me, fairly straightforward:

Boorstin first defined a consumption community, in 1969, as a group that "consists of people who have a feeling of shared well-being, shared risks, common interests and common concerns that come from consuming the same kinds of objects."** The goods around which these communities gather mostly qualify, I'm thinking, as things that are beyond the bare necessities (i.e. immaterial and higher order material goods). So despite Boorstin's implied premise of shared and common culture, that leaves room for class and inequality. Enter Bourdieu. He first developed the theory of cultural capital in the 1960s, but it seems to have not entered the American cultural lexicon until the 1980s.*** At any rate, cultural capital can help explain the inequalities that remain in those consumption communities when income/expenditures by each member are held equal.

After seeing the question on Facebook, USIH friend Michael Kramer informed me of an article by one of our respected senior colleagues, David Steigerwald, that offers further discussion of Boorstin's concept. David's article appeared in the Journal of American History, and here's the relevant passage:

Yet just as the premise of the critical consumer drives writers to untenable positions, so has the premise of the enduring community encouraged many consumer historians to see group existence in modern America as a process of negotiation with mass media in which the community often had the upper hand. Like those who deploy the critical consumer, the social historians of consumption often see the process as at least potentially liberating. Daniel J. Boorstin, whose 1973The Americans: The Democratic Experience was the first true consumer history, enthusiastically linked the rise of mass marketing to "consumption communities" as a form of liberation from provincialism. According to Boorstin, once-isolated late nineteenth-century Americans were gently gathered into communities of "customer-millions who would never see one another but who still somehow leaned on one another." Because they were abstract, those communities of choice were "milder, less exclusive" than the rigid communities of the past. Members had an ease of entry and exit, like the urban shopper who could stroll through the department store and stay or leave at will. If the consumer communities were a bit "attenuated," they were also vehicles of liberation from the stifling confines of the village.

Boorstin created a formula in which the consumption of mass-produced goods created new communities built on the abstract foundation of choice. He worked out a dialectic in which integration into the world of mass consumption actually generated a countervailing diversity, and that dialectic reverberates throughout studies of consumption and leisure in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.****

As always, David raises interesting questions. Here and in the article he is explicitly criticizing the positive association of consumer choice and liberation. He wonders about the chains from which we are escaping, and into what new chains we are freely bonding ourselves. These are important points, even if they don't directly help me with my questions about connections between Bourdieu and Boorstin.

Two interesting expansions on Boorstin and Bourdieu in relation to my topics of concern have appeared outside of historical literature, in the Journal of Consumer Research. The first appeared in June 1998. It was authored by Douglas B. Holt and is titled "Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption" (Vol. 25, no. 1). The next appeared in 2001. It was authored by Albert M. Muniz, Jr., and Thomas C. O'Guinn, and is titled "Brand Community" (Vol. 27, no. 4).

Because these concepts are now dated (if still useful!), I feel sure that others have done the spade work. I'd like to be able to credit those folks and build on their thinking.

Can anyone help with my question, or at least further the discussion? - TL

-------------------------------------

* And no, I do not mean asylums for people with tuberculosis. :)

** Daniel Boorstin, "Welcome to the Consumption Community," in The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today (New York: Random House, 1969), 22; Michael Davis, "Boorstin Proposes New Concept Of 'Communities Of Consumption'," Rice Thresher [Rice University Student Newspaper] 53, no. 12 (December 9, 1965): 3. He put his idea to work in The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1974), Part Two passim.

*** In these two works: Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in Power and Ideology in Education, eds. Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 487-511, and "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 242-258.

**** David Steigerwald, "All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought," Journal of American History 93, no. 2 (September 2006): 399-400. The article covers pp. 385-403.

James Livingston's Comedy of History

[Today I offer you a guest post from long-time USIH blog and conference participant, William "Bill" Fine. Enjoy! - TL]

In reviewing Jim Livingston’s recent USIH articles and a few posts in his Politics and Letters blog* I’m persuaded that he speaks out of a deeply personal desire to advance a view of history that supports present and future hopes---in spite of his assertion that the priority must be on “going back” to recover historical contexts. [“Museum”]

Livingston might be seen to contradict himself in declaring that the past both exists and does not exist, or that history can be a guide and yet be open to whatever meanings we might project onto it. For him, knowledge of reality is mediated by language and other cultural forms, it’s “what we can act upon,” so “the past as such [is] indistinguishable from what we have said about it.” At the same time, he makes numerous truth-claims. For example, he’s annoyed that Paul Murphy allegedly didn’t practice sufficient “estrangement” from the ‘20s context, on the assumption that it’s a foreign world. But the warrant for that truism isn’t obvious. It’s not that Murphy draws lessons from the past, it’s that he misunderstands its relation to our “different” historical moment, and so draws the wrong lessons. Maybe we can’t understand ‘20s intellectuals without “going back,” but we have to understand them before we can assume the need to do so. [“Museum”]

Both Livingston and his interlocutors soften contradictions into paradoxes that seem to capture the multi-dimensional character of historical practice. Two of Livingston’s best are: “You can’t ‘go back’ to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased”; and “the past is both real and artificial. Like God, it’s consequential because we created it. The past is what we make of it…but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us.” [“Museum”]


Ray Haberski generously finds in the latter a way “around” the either/or of determinism versus freedom, while Dan Wickberg opines that inconsistency is a matter of perception, and at least our modern critical tools protect us from the temptations of totalism. [“Museum”] Along similar lines, William Cronon, in “Loving History,” in Perspectives on History, sees “two fundamentally competing orientations for approaching history”---summarized as "how did things get to be this way?" and “the past is a foreign country.” But he concludes that, if history is to retain its attraction for professionals and others, “we need them both.” What Livingston said of the Rutgers conference on W.A. Williams into might apply here: “there was too much consensus, too little conflict.”

We could shift from logic to rhetoric, to see where and how Livingston deploys points that otherwise might be thought irreconcilable. Sometimes, in criticizing another historian, such as Paul Murphy, or advancing his own positions, he implies a fairly certain knowledge, saying that some views “deny reality,” while others accord with “the world as it actually exists.” There is no particular reason not to take him at his word, as others do in responding to his truth-claims. But at other junctures, to defend against the charge he isn’t a proper historian, he adopts a different rhetoric, asserting at one point that there’s no “practical difference between history, the past as such, and historiography, our interpretations of the past, because all we actually know about the past is contained in those interpretations.” [“Williams”]

The past has a number of discrete though related meanings in his work. Sometimes it’s the almost infinitely plastic material we shape in acts of knowing, as if the very idea of representation implies a closed reality. At other times the past possesses “legibility,” a metaphor he uses repeatedly. The term implies something pre-constituted as text-like, decipherable by historical actors and historians. So, for ‘20s intellectuals, the divide between traditional and modern “became legible…as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.” [“Museum”] In his article on W.A. Williams, “historical circumstances” themselves are described as directly legible, as are both the “original intent” of the Open Door and the immanence of our “ethical principles” in that setting.

On the other hand, the past is presented as virtually created and cumulatively enriched through narrativizing. In his blog, discussing Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels dealing with the trauma of a main character raped by his father, Livingston criticizes those who say it’s a denial of real suffering to read such events as only “fantasy,” since in themselves they are “meaningless.” [“Pol and Letters” - 5.2.12]. Some might insist instead that human events are by definition meaningful, though it’s not clear how much difference it makes -- to the traumatized, for instance---whether stories recount things that actually occurred. Still, if events lack their own legibility, in what sense can they be “falsified” by narratives, except by contrast to some other unnamed device? In any case, here narratives produced over time by different actors accumulate richer meanings, redeeming traumatic pasts, rendering events “significant…as moments in a meaningful sequence,” a story that can be retold. [“Politics and Letters” - 5.18.12]

Livingston’s freewheeling constructionism implies an ontological and epistemological pluralism that stands over against what he calls “metaphysical” accounts that presume an objective, realist history, a “Totalism” or “Absolute”; monolithic, deterministic, and typically declensionist. As he puts it at one point, “the truth of historical reality is always plural. The rhetorics are the reality.” [“Museum”] Perhaps he tends to universalize the interpretive chaos of our historical moment; either way, that wouldn’t prove we don’t live in a block universe after all.

Sometimes he goes further, insisting that good history confirms an emancipatory potential immanent in the historical process, and that history tends toward the good---or will if we think and act properly. For example, in his article on Williams, Livingston writes approvingly that:

“Williams assumed that a post-imperialist future was legible in the original intent of what he called the “imperialism of idealism” and in the real differences over diplomatic means and ends…. Without that assumption,…his critique…stops making sense because its fulfillment would then require the evasion of the world as it actually exists [which] would not allow for history as a way of learning. If the ethical principles of a post-imperialist future do not reside in the historical circumstances…then our only honorable recourse is to repudiate and escape those circumstances….”

Later, in the same essay, he generalizes what’s at stake:

“When people start wishing that things were better and assuring you that they won’t be, largely because nothing has ever changed except for the worse, you know that you’re in the presence of Kantian radicals who lack, or despise, historical consciousness---you’re in the presence of metaphysicians who know the past cannot be a guide to the present because it is the repository of myths, lies, deceptions, and their attendant moral atrocities.”

Livingston is fond of drawing a contrast between Kant and Hegel [though he seems to mention the former by name more than the latter], which he understands in part as the contrast between a morality that stands apart from and tries to impose itself on the world, and one that sees morality to “reside in and flow from historical circumstances,” as he wrote in his “Response to Cotkin.” [JHI 69, 1, April 2008] This may be taken as a descriptive sociological point---and Livingston among others have shown how “the social self” developed out of the interaction of Hegelian idealism and pragmatism, along with feminism. But to me this is quite different than using it to build a philosophy of history.

In “Socialism Without Socialists” [“Politics and Letters” - 7.25.12] Livingston challenges the pessimists of the left, using the terms of Kant vs Hegel to frame a stark choice: one embraces the present, recognizes that the left is everywhere, and “sees the ethical principles of socialism residing in and flowing from historical circumstances…not as ideas imposed from elsewhere,” partly because cultural has replaced political change. The other, from a fixed point of moralistic purity, gives up on a hopeless world, taking refuge in a saving remnant with no one to save, “leading us away from the world as it is.”

Whatever case might be made for Livingston’s argument that the left has been victorious, here he gives full-out expression to a historical teleology almost beyond intention or agency, a progressive conductorless orchestration that “recognize[s] what we ought to be doing in what we’re already doing.” [cf. his quotation of an early, still very Hegelian Dewey in the Williams article] Unless we accept these ideas, we’re denying reality and destroying all hope and possibility; the study of the past must affirm what present circumstances demand.

At the outset I speculated that Livingston is motivated by “deeply personal desire,” which of course goes far beyond what I could know, much less demonstrate, and it’s not terribly relevant anyway in assessing his work. I’m not sure how much is accountable as an act of will in depressing times, and how much flows from a secure confidence in his comic-religious, metaphysical vision. Because he so often frames his arguments in terms of the either/or of hope vs. despair, my guess is that there’s a good bit of trying in his believing. His efforts to show empirically that left-liberalism has “won” notwithstanding, my guess is that most people will see it as a framework brought to history---a leap of sorts---rather than supported by it. Indeed, if he is as much of a Hegelian as I think, it’s not easy to see how it ever could be, partly because we’re not done yet.

Anyway, seeing what comedy sometimes makes of irony, I miss a sense of the obdurate, of difficult trade-offs, the complexities of unintended consequences, the limitations of narrative----and a sense of the past as/in the present, the world to which we accommodate ourselves. I’m inclined to read his comic teleology as more a reflex of its historical moment than a way beyond.

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 * I draw on the following sources and indicate them following quotations:

 USIH

- “Near Dark at the Museum,” 7/12/12; and
- “William Appleman Williams: Fifty Years After His Book on the Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” 7/19/12.

Politics and Letters

a. “The Weight of the Past,” Part 1 (4/22/12), Part 2 (5/2/12), and Part 3 (5/18/12);

b.  “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” 7/25/12.

Referential Slipperiness: Bourgeois, Bourgoisie, And American Class Anti-Intellectualism

Long-time USIH reader Varad Mehta posted this piece from Slate---"Is 'Middlebrow' Still an Insult?" by David Haglund---on our Facebook page. He added this short article from Maria Popova as a supplemental read. Both intelligently discuss now well-known problems of the high, middle, and low cultural distinction tropes (i.e. these categories are historically shifting matters of perception, made problematic by the advent of mass culture and the ongoing development of democratic cultural forms in the twentieth century).

The occasion for Haglund's post is that The New York Review of Books is issuing a new collection of Dwight Macdonald's classic essays, titled Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.* It will be of interest to USIH readers that the editor is John Summers, and the collection contains an introduction by Louis Menand. [*Who knew that NYRB published books, let alone essay collections and "classics"?]

Haglund's article is a first-rate abstract on the history and usage of the "brow hierarachy" for cultural theory novices. Explore all the links if you have some time. Otherwise, near the top Haglund refers to a line from Menand in the collection, about "Masscult and Midcult," that reads as follows: "Louis Menand...calls the title essay 'a kind of summa of the New York highbrow’s contempt for bourgeois culture.' "

This created an immediate disjunct for me; the line derailed me from finishing the article for another 15-20 minutes. Why? Far be it from me to question the thinking and prose of Menand (I bow at his feet...seriously), but aren't "the highbrow," as a class, either overlapping or the same as the bourgeoisie? After a bit I realized that this muddled use of the term "bourgeois"---especially in relation to American class categories---has bothered me for some time. As a quick and dirty reference* and review, I scanned Wikipedia's entry for bourgeois---which immediately redirected me to its entry for bourgeoisie. [*I'm shocked with myself that I had never tried to explore this etymology before, but that's a question I'll leave for another day---chalking it up, for now, to the usual professional distractions.]

The opening line of the Wikipedia piece reminds us that bourgeois and bourgeoisie are moving targets---as nouns representative of groups of people over time. It's a fairly obvious point, and I knew that Marx's bourgeoisie was not the same as bourgeois described by communists, socialists, and class-aware academic types all through the twentieth century. In other words, I knew the term did not strictly describe a group that owns the means of production---that bourgeois describes an attitude, a disposition, or a cultural matrix, and not just one's economic means.

What has bothered me for so long, however, is the inbred, slippery nature of the term bourgeois when it's used as a pejorative. Those who use the term are usually of an upper-middle (economic) class background, or of a minority of disaffected upper class, and they use it to describe the materialism of their hereditary social set. It's those who, by training or empathetic moral sensibilities, use the term to describe the lack of a true Christian gentility in their peers (i.e. modern condescension).

Proof the term's inbred nature lies in the fact that it feels awkward to imagine lower or working-class folks accusing those of relatively higher classes of being bourgeois. First, it's not a regular part of lower class or lower middle class vocabulary, at least as I've experienced, first-hand, those categories of income/wealth. Furthermore, the inherent American anti-intellectualism of large swaths of the American working class preclude use of the term: you would be "putting on airs" by using three-syllable word when you can use the one-syllable "snob."

Consulting a common reference book, the online Merriam-Webster (MW) dictionary, we find this definition of "bourgeoisie":

1. Middle class; also plural in construction : members of the middle class
2. A social order dominated by bourgeois

And here's MW's definition of bourgeois:

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class
2. Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
3. Dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic

So if we strictly followed MW's normalization of both terms, we would not use either term to describe America's upper classes of capital owners and accumulators.

Things get more confusing, or slippery, when we recall that Americans normalize "middle class" to include large swaths of the upper and working classes; it's used by both of the latter as a term of humility and aspiration, respectively.

In other words, the American bourgeois and/or bourgeoisie includes---by definition (literally above) and convention (usage of the terms)---probably 75-80 percent of the American populace. Even so, we hardly ever observe the terms in use except, as noted above, in upper-middle and upper class circles. In those circles it's a pejorative, not a class descriptor.

In sum, in American culture and history the terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie have no stable meaning in relation to communicating real economic information across American classes. If you use these terms, you're likely to confuse your audience---especially those in America's bourgeois middle class. We don't even have, or teach, the baseline knowledge of Marx to utilize as a referential starting point. We are so startlingly and willfully blind to class distinctions in our education establishment (not in everyday life, where we are acutely aware of them) that we have no shared vocabulary to discuss inequality. Our "economic class anti-intellectualism" prevents us from understanding the nature of the bourgeoisie as Marx communicated the term.

There's much more we can say about this topic, but I'll stop now to let you take over. What have I missed? What have I exaggerated? How am I missing the larger picture?* - TL

[*I'm serious here because I wrote this post while in a late-night, post-midterm grading haze of exhaustion.]

A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging

In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):

- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.

So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?

Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.

Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL

A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging

In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):

- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.

So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?

Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.

Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (3/11/2010)

1. Thinking About Public Intellectuals: Harvard is hosting a conference on public intellectuals next month with the theme "Speaking Truth to Power." In the late afternoon on the first day is a symposium that looks to be a future-oriented reprise of our USIH Wingspread panel from last November. Otherwise, the program looks excellent.

2. A Useful Derrida? Or should I say a Derrida that might become useful to historians? Andrew Dunstall, a USIH 2.0 participant last fall, wonders about a new, materialist approach--a retranslation, if you will---to reading Derrida's writing and thinking.

3. The Meaning of the Tea Party: About a week ago David Brooks the amateur political-intellectual historian (again) paralleled the Tea Party to the New Left of the 1960s. (Aside: I agree with his observation about both ~not~ being conservative movements.) Brooks' column came on the heels of a Michael Lind article in Salon the week before where Lind called Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman. A few days after Brooks' piece, Todd Gitlin refuted him in a post at Talking Points Memo. I don't have a dog in this fight because I have no stake in protecting either the Tea Party or the reputation of the sixties New Left. Still, it's an interesting intellectual history discussion because it speaks to how we define both ideology (e.g. paranoia), anti-intellectualism (e.g. paranoia again, radical anti-statism), and atavism as a historiographical causal issue (cyclical-ness).

4. A New Lead-Off Hitter for Grad School Historiography Courses? All intellectual historians love reading about historiography (right?). With that in mind, Adam Arenson makes the case, at Making History Podcast: The Blog, that Allan Megill’s Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (U of C Press, 2007) should replace Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. Discuss. ...In the meantime, it looks like I have yet another book to add to my infinitely expanding reading list.

5. Off-Topic: It looks like expectations for "treatment" by the nursing profession in Amsterdam are on the rise. Boy oh boy. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (3/11/2010)

1. Thinking About Public Intellectuals: Harvard is hosting a conference on public intellectuals next month with the theme "Speaking Truth to Power." In the late afternoon on the first day is a symposium that looks to be a future-oriented reprise of our USIH Wingspread panel from last November. Otherwise, the program looks excellent.

2. A Useful Derrida? Or should I say a Derrida that might become useful to historians? Andrew Dunstall, a USIH 2.0 participant last fall, wonders about a new, materialist approach--a retranslation, if you will---to reading Derrida's writing and thinking.

3. The Meaning of the Tea Party: About a week ago David Brooks the amateur political-intellectual historian (again) paralleled the Tea Party to the New Left of the 1960s. (Aside: I agree with his observation about both ~not~ being conservative movements.) Brooks' column came on the heels of a Michael Lind article in Salon the week before where Lind called Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman. A few days after Brooks' piece, Todd Gitlin refuted him in a post at Talking Points Memo. I don't have a dog in this fight because I have no stake in protecting either the Tea Party or the reputation of the sixties New Left. Still, it's an interesting intellectual history discussion because it speaks to how we define both ideology (e.g. paranoia), anti-intellectualism (e.g. paranoia again, radical anti-statism), and atavism as a historiographical causal issue (cyclical-ness).

4. A New Lead-Off Hitter for Grad School Historiography Courses? All intellectual historians love reading about historiography (right?). With that in mind, Adam Arenson makes the case, at Making History Podcast: The Blog, that Allan Megill’s Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (U of C Press, 2007) should replace Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. Discuss. ...In the meantime, it looks like I have yet another book to add to my infinitely expanding reading list.

5. Off-Topic: It looks like expectations for "treatment" by the nursing profession in Amsterdam are on the rise. Boy oh boy. - TL

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.