Thanks to Piers Fawkes and a press pass from PSFK, I attended a media event last night sponsored by Reuters called The Cult of the Celebrity – Who’s Using Whom? It was held in the Reuters building on Time Square in NYC, and it brought together the following experts:

Jessica Coen, Gawker.com

Janice Min, US Weekly

Paul Holmes, Reuters

Ken Sunshine, Ken Sunshine Consultants

Anne Thompson, The Hollywood Reporter

Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair

What a dog’s breakfast! By one reckoning, the celebrity culture has been with us since the late 19th century (Dickens in England, Hugo in France, Twain/Clemens in the US). So we’ve had roughly 135 years to think about the question. Listening to the Reuters event, you might think the topic was brand new, a nascent puzzle like Web 2.0. Not only were arguments wildly divergent, but manifestly bad ideas won enthusiastic patrons and audience assent.

Let’s start telegraphically. Janice Min was good. Jessica Coen was bad. Michael Wolff had several good moments and otherwise careened from one bad idea to another like a drunk on the A train. Ken Sunshine and Anne Thompson wandered from good points to bad points somewhat less dramatically.  (Ok, so I have a hard time staying telegraphic.)

More generally, the discussion of celebrity is haunted by a couple of approaches that really get in the way. First, there is an inclination for people of words and ideas to mock the idea of celebrity, and the fact of celebrities and their adoration, the better to show that they are serious as idea wranglers, and not so witless as to have been taken captive by media hype. There were moments when Reuters seemed to be taking pains to show that they were more serious than the topic at hand. (Um, why stage the event, then?)

Another unhappy tendency for journalists (and not just journalists) is to take up the discussion of celebrity with a kind of campy, ironic, "we-all-know-what’s-going-on-here-don’t-we?". This turns out to be Jessica Coen’s posture, and it made for an embarrassing performance. At one point, Coen insisted that Gawker is dedicated to mocking journalists for taking celebrities seriously…as if it were possible to salvage dignity at a remove. Sunshine called this for the nonsense it manifestly is.

The last error is the one that says that we care about celebrities because they are commodities driven by marketing, or as Coen rather tragically put it, "they are everywhere because they are selling everything." This is a complicated issue and let’s not make it worse with fashionable arguments that obscure the difference between carts and horses. More exactly, celebrities must exist as such before they are pressed into service by the marketing system.

Min seemed, most of all, to understand the ideas and the postures that are likely to serve us as we try to understand the celebrity phenomenon. She took fans seriously, noting the intimacy of the bond between fan and star, and she suggested that we think about the star as a kind of elected official, someone who relies on the good will of the public.

The larger question (who is using whom) is clear enough. According to Min’s formula, stars must be prepared to relinquish some of their private lives in return for fan support and media attention. But surely, as Sunshine pointed out, they deserve to keep some of this privacy for themselves. This is true because privacy is an essential resource, for want of which anyone of us might very well lose our wits. (Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make famous.) Second, no one who is maximally invasive of celebrity privacy could withstand this treatment in/of their own lives. (The Golden Rule. Not just for Sunday school anymore!) Wolff booted this one badly, when he appeared to be insisted that we must doubt Ben Affleck’s motives when he goes for a Starbucks coffee.

What do you say about Michael Wolff? This is the guy who endeared himself to everyone in "new economy" circles when he invented a "long tail" argument about the future of music. (In fact, there’s an outside chance that he is the father of the long tail perspective.  Wonder what Chris Anderson would say.) Wolff made a couple of brilliant points last night, including the very sensible observation that the celebrity culture supplies stories that have the virtue of being both deeply interesting and free. Celebrities off screen create a public cinema, drama without all those costly directors, screen writers or indeed their own stratsopheric salaries. Out for a cup of coffee, they finally work for free.

In short, the evening was a pretty clear demonstration that the stars outshine the ideas we have to think about them. There was one moment when something new arrived. (New to me in any case.) Anne Thompson pointed out that she preferred the early Tom Cruise, the one who preserved a trace of mystery. And this is apt. The less specified ares star, the more roles they can take up, and the more we are free to use them as vehicles of identification on the screen. The invasion of celebrity lives, the growing revelation of their personal affairs, works to diminish this. So, we have a contradiction worth watching here. And if this contradiction is actual, we might expect to see stars wear-out more quickly as they are emptied of mystery.

It is easy for the critic to play Mr. Smarty-pants and criticize others for the modesty or the error of their position. I am happy, nay, eager to reveal my own position on this debate:

We care about stars because we identify with them, and we do this variously. We identify in a wishful, wistful way with the grandeur of the stars’ private lives, we identify in straight forward way with the creatures they become on the screen, and we identify with the difficulties and embarrassments that beset them in life and the tabloids out of genuine concern, salacious fascination, and of course scheudenfreud. (We act, that is to say, from the usual bundle of post modern motives: we revere, we mock, we scorn, but most of all we participate.)

There is a deeper answer, one that no one glimpsed last night, and this might be the cause of the ambivalence and sloppiness of the occasion. (Some truths, as Nietsche told us, are better left obscure.) Several of the interior subroutines (aka cultural scripts) that inform our experience of the world and our performance of the self were minted by Hollywood filmmakers. No one wants to hear this. It interferes with our self love, our sense of our seriousness, our belief in our own authenticity. Too bad. This is the simple truth of the matter. If you want a happier picture of yourself, go see a movie. Or, if you merely wish to obscure the this truth, stage an "examination" like the one last night. 

The MIT brand cultures laboratory is beginning to take shape. This is the brain child of Henry Jenkins and an enterprise I am honored to be part of.

The officer in charge of research initiatives, Alec Austin, wrote to ask me about research topics and I penned him this reply.

Dear Alec,

Thanks for the note, and the list of topics.

My interests are various and most of them are best pursued with a combination of industry numbers and ethnography, a sort of "Malinowski meets the Harvard case study method".

As to topics, there are, thanks to the embargo that intellectuals have imposed on popular culture as a legitimate topic of study, now hundreds of possibilities begging for scrutiny. I hardly know where to start.

Here’s one possibility. There are lots of others.

I have the distinct sense that we don’t know nearly enough about the cultural producers, especially in the film, music and magazines biz (bizes?). For instance, it would be interesting to build a statistical picture of Hollywood that begins with a calculation of "how many people think about becoming an actor" and runs all the way up to the "magic circle of 8 big stars," with all the nesting circles in between ( e.g., people who get as far as their SAG card but not much further). Finally, this would look like a hierarchy with, say, 8 to 10 worlds.(FN1)

Then we would add to this a "snakes and ladders" portrait of the fast tracks and the slippery slopes that take people suddenly up and down the hierarchy. (Sorry, I think Americans call this game "Chutes and Ladders." This is the last vestige of my Canadian upbringing.) Clearly, this is changing fast. For a movie aspirant, TV used to be one a reliable chute. These days, it’s actually a ladder. The new media will create a new recruiting system.

Until we have this picture, we can’t really answer the question, "how many are called, how many chosen?" Nor can we calculate how big a risk a would be actor is taking. We need maps of this kind for directors, producers, agents and so on. I know it sounds onerous but someone would have to go to Hollywood and start talking to people there. I am guessing agents might have the best sense of how to construct the actor map. (I think breaking into SAG headquarters might be called for. I wrote them once for numbers and was absolutely stonewalled. Clearly, the map we are talking about here would be very bad for SAG business.)

Once this map is in place, it would be interesting to do ethnographic interviews with the people who occupy these worlds, this ziggarat. I believe it’s probably true that any given actor has an imperfect, perhaps utterly mistaken, impression of the world in which he/she lives. Likely, the actors’ notion of the map underestimates the risk and so overestimates the likelihood of stardom. The thing here is to get into, and then past, the "just so" stories that aspirants use to sustain their optimism ( e.g., "You know, George Clooney waited for x years to get his first movie part and now look at him.") There are lots of things to think about here. One of them is the aspirant’s multiple selves. ‘I know I look like a waiter, but I am in fact the next Brad Pitt." It is a strange, slippery world, but I think it resembles the world of the civilian (non movie aspirant) more and more.

Normally, the producer world and the consumer world of Hollywood are separated by a silver screen. We see the actor, not the person. But there are moments when Hollywood actually makes movies about Hollywood, even when the portrait is unflattering. "Swimming with sharks," is one case in point, but of course there are plenty of others. (Altman’s The Player.) This sort of thing must filter into the aspirants’ understanding of the industry. So much of our understanding of the contemporary world is mediated by the movies, it’s inevitable that this should be true of the players’ understanding of their industry.

Finally, I am not sure this is properly designed, but something like it needs to be done for marketing, advertising, publishing, magazines, and the other cultural producers. One very last point: one of the things that I like about this topic is that it is the kind of thing that would interest a broad public, and written in an accessible way, it would give the student who undertakes it an extra-academic audience for his/her work. It should also, and this is one test of whether anthropology is well done, serve the aspirant as a useful indication of their best strategies for risk management.

Anyhow, thought I would through this on the table. Just for the record I am interested in ethnographic work with any cultural producers or consumers, but I am distinctly not interested in projects that spring from and never escape the postmodernist and "critical" banalities that govern so much work in the current social sciences. As you can see from this research vista, I believe that comprehensive, integrative models are still possible, that this culture, for all its richness, dynamism, and multiplicity, is still a culture. (It is, I believe, Rousseau’s self dramatizing conceit to think otherwise. Actually, this is the nicest thing we can say here.)

Best, Grant

Footnote 1 (FN1)

I have naively posited one world, when in fact there are many more: indie (Sundance level), indie (SxSW level), indie (someone’s basement level) and then there are the various porno demi-mondes into which some actors descend while waiting for their "break" or because they have missed it. (Notice my Victorian assumptions here. Perhaps the "adult entertainment" industry is more properly thought of as a parallel universe, not a subordinate one. Who knows.) These various pieces of the industry are sometimes interconnecting (as feeder systems, as new chutes and new ladders, etc) and sometimes they exist sui generis. And this last is really interesting. Now we have cultural production happening utterly untouched by the gravitation field and various inducements (and punishments) created by the Hollywood mainstream. Every so often one of these enterprises (an actor/director therefrom) comes to Hollywood, as if a message from "deep space," and things in the mainstream change dramatically.

Summer’s well over. There’s no use kidding myself. My book report is now due. I have to write it. Here it is.

I had a theme this summer: Elizabethan England, and three books: on Shakespeare, Drake, and Walsingham (playwrite, explorer, and spymaster respectively).

Why Elizabethan England? They’re a lot like us. Lots of assumptions suddenly in question and up for grabs. The nature of man, God, the state and nature, the rules of inquiry, the intellectual, cultural underpinings of the enterprise, all of these were being reworked.

One thing was clear: Elizabeth. So was another: that England was the object of continental ambitions and the antipathy of Rome. This little nation of 6 million people was large enough to look worth taking over or putting down, but not large enough to defend itself reliably. It had something like a navy and nothing like an army. If the Spanish could make it to shore, the invasion would be a route.

I’m no expert but I get the sense that the English went about the renovation of their world roughly the way Microsoft used to write code. Everyone worked on their own little corner of things, and leaves to someone else the task of threading everything together. Of course, this is consistent with the way the English do lots of things still, including gardening and the law. But it does mean that no one, as near as I can tell, is asking (go figure) what we might call the French questions: what difference do all these differences make? What changes if these things hold? What holds if these things change?

And it’s surely a good thing. If every Elizabethan was fully informed of the innovations being undertaken by all other Elizabethans, some of them would surely have lost their nerve, and not even the genius of Elizabeth, her courtiers and counsellors, could put humpty dumpty back together again. Cunning and courage, there was lots of that, and that was going to have to do it.

I was looking for patterns and nothing worked till I put Bacon into the set. He and Drake make a pair. Bacon used exploration as his metaphor for the new knowledge: that it would break out of the Mediterranean, once a figure for classical knowledge, but he uses the metaphor to say that only when explorers are prepared to let concept follow percept as it were, was the new knowledge possible. Shape knowledge to the world, not the world to knowledge, that kind of thing.

And Bacon really is the guy here, a man who uses a logic so contemporary you get goosebumps reading him. Everyone calls him the "father of science" but this misses it. Bacon understood (perhaps he was the first to glimpse) what Virginia Postrel calls the verge. He gets that his culture would eventually be in a state of constant reformation. He insists that the limits of what is known, done, thought and thought possible, all of this is not for stopping at but for passing trhough.

Enter Sir Francis Drake captains the little ship that Bacon puts on the edge of knowledge and he pilots it around the world, breaking out virtuoso acts of seamanship (especially coming around the horn), working his way up the west coast of the new world, well up the coast of what we now call Canada, helping himself to Spanish gold and silver as he goes. This latter he "returns" to Elizabeth who uses it to build up her navy so that when the Spanish do come finally in 1588 they are find themselves contending with the wealth they stole from South America. (It was a great time for conversions of this kind.)

Shakespeare and Walsingham make another pair (a "correspondence" in local lingo), both of them investigating the properties and the limits of a new, emergent, human nature. Shakespeare’s goal of course was entertainment, first, not foremost, but Walsingham examined men’s souls for another reason, to find out the spies that threatened England, the first invaders, as it were. And they say of Walsingham that he had a strange patience. While the Inquistors were famous for their instruments of torture that would break the vessel that kept a secret (and of course those that didn’t), Walsingham was more restrained, seeming almost to believe that if you took away their liberty, men would eventually interrogate themselves and spill…as if there was an indwelling, involuntary, (Baconian?) skepticism that could be used against the spy. It’s even possible that he entertained the possibility of a possessive individualism and the notion that men would give up their secrets to protect themselves and that you had better leave them something to protect.

When Shakespeare examined the souls of men, he found new complexity, new self awareness with which to think about it, and still less often new agency with which to make choices. His characters were not the bold portrayals of this passion or that vice. They were Lear, a man who gets to contemplate his demotion in the large scheme of things, and decide whether it means and what it means and to endure an intractible universe (his own daughters!) that does what it wants in any case.

The way Greenblatt tells the story it sounds as if the world was conspiring to give this yokel his shot at greatness. All these conditions were bestowed upon him. All now seem critical:

that he lived in the country gave him access to bodies of knowledge and points of view he might not have seen as a city boy

that his father was a mayor meant that visiting threatre companies were obliged to call on his house and ask his father for permission to play. Masterless men were feared in this period. Unless a company moved swiftly to dispell the impression, they would be taken for men inclined to mischief or worse. (Lock up your daughters.) They were in this fluid countryside a little like pirates without ships. But what Will saw, we may suppose, were adults asking permission to act like children by promising not to act like children. And this might have been proof for young Will that there were some professions in the world where childhood could be carried into maturity and, more delectably, that there were inventive exercises in which someone could bend the world to their will (sorry) with nothing more than an imagination and a band of men masterful and masterless in roughly equal proportion.

that his father suffered a sudden change of fortune and demotion in the world, which meant that Will was not shipped off to Oxford where his talent would hvae been spotted and commandeered by the church or the law.

that his family had Catholic sympathies which Greenblatt suggests got him a teaching job in the vast household of a great northern family, an enterprise so vast that it sustained its own company of players where Will, we gather, could see a theatre in small play out in a world in little.

I believe it’s correct to say that Shakespeare, Walsingham, Drake and Bacon were active in the 1580s.

References:

to be supplied when I get home

please forgive the choppiness of this post and the fact that I do not yet have a resounding finish. I have 8 minutes to catch my flight.

There was a great story about the Hollywood producer Scott Rudin in the weekend Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Rudin is famous for treating his assistants with tyrannical disregard.  He goes through them at the clip of 1 every 6 weeks.* 

Mr. Rudin may be a monster but he is a well informed monster.  And the WSJ article touches on a favorite theme of this blog: the cultural illiteracy of the corporate world.  Mr. Rudin says he is "regularly shocked by the lack of cultural knowledge" of his staff. 

What’s odd is that the article itself manages to miss the single most illuminating comparison invited by the phone-throwing, insult-delivering, threat-shrieking Mr. Rudin.  Kelly and Marr fail to mention Swimming with sharks.   (All references below.)

If I may indulge in a little tantrum of my own, anyone who has been paying attention in the last 20 years knows that movies are the lingua franca of our culture.  (This especially annoys the intellectuals who devoted their educations to print, and love nothing more than literary references.  Yes, fine, I made one to Malamud on Friday.  I am deeply, deeply sorry.)  Referencing movies (or TV) is the single, most powerful, most dependable means of communicating in our culture. 

If there is a filmic reference to make, that is to say, you simply must make it.  The journalist who can refer to Swimming with sharks must refer to Swimming with sharks.  A circuit is opened and the reader leaves the WSJ article for the movie memory and comes back again illuminated.  Now we know the kind of man Scott Rudin is with a depth and nuance we can’t have had any other way.   (Mr. Rudin, by others’ movies, we shall know you.) 

This is the newspaper and the movie world working together.  Think of it as one of those crazy division of labor things that so surprised us during the dot.com explosion.  Print didn’t disappear, bricks and mortar retail didn’t disappear.  We just found several ways to combine them with the Internet.  We discovered the internet "plays well with others."

It is possible that Kelly and Marr haven’t heard of Swimming with sharks.  But if they are under 35, this is improbable.  There is one chilling possibility here: that an editor refused the Swimming with sharks comparison on the grounds that, "no one will get it."  Oh, dear, how very depressing.  This is, after all, the new WEEKEND edition of the Wall Street Journal, the very occasion when the WSJ might think about cultivating the reader and addresses this great deficit of the corporate mind set. 

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition is now two weeks old.  There is, so far, no evidence that it will address the issue of cultural literacy.  Instead, this weekend’s edition offers detailed advice on hiking.  Surely, this is the place where we might hope this august journal to create a column on the 44 films the well informed executive must know about.  (Create a NetFlix link, and these films can begin to roll into all those Connecticut households.)  This column should probably be written by one or both of those paragons at Entertainment Weekly (Schwartzbaum and Gleiberman).  Once this has run it’s course, there should be another column, this one about the 55 players in Hollywood who matter (e.g., "What John Cusak means to Hollywood").

When will Wall Street understand that cultural literacy isn’t a matter of ornament and it certainly isn’t a matter of cool, but that it is one of the bodies of knowledge on which managerial success depends?  I guess Wall Street will get when the Wall Street Journal does.  So when is this going to happen?

References

Huang, George.  1994. Swimming with sharks.  Keystone Pictures.  (stars Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley and Benicio Del Toro.)

Kelly, Kate and Merissa Marr.  2005.  Bozz-Zilla!  Movie producer Scott Rudin may be the most feared boss in Hollywood.  But the young and ambitious line up for a chance to work for him.  Wall Street Journal.  September 24, 2005, pp. A1, A6, p. A6

Post script

* my estimate.  Assistants believe that Mr. Rudin has gone through 250 assistants in the last 5 years.  Mr. Rudin sets the figure at roughly half that. 

Angelina Jolie is the new face for St. John Knits, a cause for surprise in some circles. St. John is famous for clothing the senior executive. Their suits are favored by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Was Angelina Jolie exactly the right choice?

Allen Adamson at Landor thinks so.

"Angelina is hot right now, she’s fashionable and she’s edgy. Maybe she’s not as nice as some of her fans would like her to be. But in branding it’s better to have a bit of an edge, because you get more attention."

There is a systematic way to think about this. A celebrity endorsement is a little like a metaphor. Meanings from one term, the celebrity, are proposed for the other term, the brand. If the audience finds the comparison plausible, transfer takes place. The meaning of the brand is changed. For better or worse.

So what meanings does Angelina Jolie make available to St. John Knits? Normally, we would answer this question carefully, thoughtfully, and with the benefit of consumer and cultural research. But this is the seat-of-the-pants world of blog construction where things happen with the speed of day-time television and shameless ad-hocery of the soap opera producer. ("I know! Let’s just say he didn’t die after all!")

Hastily, then, we could say that Angelina Jolie stands for a couple of things. First, she appears to be an old fashioned Hollywood star. People do keep using this phrase, applying it to actresses as diverse as Annette Benning and Catherine Zeta Jones. Jolie’s version of the old time Hollywood star makes her a return of the voluptuous. She is an act of physical, social, and emotional extravagance. She is out of scale. Lips, hips, breasts, eyes, hair. Sometimes the actress dwarves even her roles (even when these are Lara Croft). In the 60s, we seemed to be asking that our stars return to human scale. Then we snapped out of it.

Second, the out-scaled quality of this star carries off the screen into her private life. Jolie lives large. She experiments with her sexuality. She fights with family members as if reenacting Greek myths. She plays the guardian angel to the children of the third world. She steals husbands even when they are an American sweetheart. She wrecks even the special families thta everyone wishes well. She is indifferent to bourgeois rules and regs, and happy to take her leave of them.

Third, there is to her character, on screen and off, a certain knowingness. There is none of the simple generosity that Marilyn Monroe manufactured. There is none of the matter of factness with which Pamela Anderson says she is just tagging along with her breasts. Jolie is fully observant, well informed, pretty intelligent and unforgiving witness to it all. She may mean it. She may not. She’s got that 1990s irony thing down cold. Madonna with a heart. Courtney Love with a brain. There’s someone home.

On balance, and until someone pays me a breathtaking sum of money, this can only be surmise, Angelina Jolie does not look to me the perfect choice for St. John Knits. Sure, they are trying to recruit a new consumer, someone a little younger than their present loyalist who’s about 55. But, according to Agin’s story in the WSJ, St. John wants to keep the existing constituency, women of wealth and power. For this group, I’m guessing, Jolie is a bull in the china shop. A lovely bull, but a dangerous one.

Now, in marketing, as in all else, the devil is in the details. The art of marketing is to create campaigns that help select (and exclude) certain of Jolie’s meanings so that only some of them transfer. There is "wiggle room" here. But it feels like the heart, the centre of these bundle of meanings is well off the mark.

References

Agins, Teri. 2005. A Fashion Conservative Teams Up With Tattooed Starlet. Wall Street Journal. September 15, 2005.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Who is the celebrity endorser? Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meaning, and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 97-115.

“They don’t grade fathers, but if your daughter’s a stripper, you fucked up.”

“We independent women, some mistake us for whores
I’m saying, why spend mine, when I can spend yours?
Disagree? Well, that’s you and I’m sorry
I’m a keep playing these cats out like Atari.”

The first quote is from Chris Rock. Rock’s view is the conventional one. Stripping? Bad choice. You, or your father, fucked up.

The second is a lyric from the song Lady Marmalade. It captures something tough to reckon with for the anthropologist interested in contemporary culture. In our culture, there is, whatever the conservatives insist, no single grounds, no Rock, for criticism.

We can say stripping is bad. All but zealots are inclined to give over to the sneaking supposition that this is finally for the individual to decide. These people are the authors of their lives. What stripping or prostitution means, that’s for them to say (and us to find out). We can disagree with this as much as we want, but Lil’ Kim says, with aplomb, bordering on indifference, "well, that’s you and I’m sorry.”

This isn’t relativism. I am not saying that the individual has the right to create or insist on values of their own. I am saying the individual has something like rights of ownership and with those come rights of definition. They are who they say they are. They do what they say they do. Values may or may not enter into it. The prostitute may or may not care to make moral claims about what prostitution is and isn’t.  But finally the locus of the meaning of “stripping” or “prostitution” is in the performance and the experience of the event. The actor decides, not the playwright, not the audience, not the theatrical tradition, and certainly not the critic.

My guess is that most strippers and prostitutes are not self possessed enough to exclude the conventional definitions of what they do. For some reason, I am pretty certain that there are some strippers and prostitutes who are plenty strong willed and self defined enough to insist on their own terms of reference. And to them I defer. Having to choose between my certainty and their certainty, well, they are inside the moment and they have the incumbent’s advantage. (And this is of course a recipe for that classical confrontation: the outsider who “knows” what stripping and prostitution is who finally confronts the practitioner off of whom moral certainties bounce harmlessly like so many stuffed animals. Hah, now where are you? (To be honest, my ethnographic research with these two occupational categories is non existent. But I have meant people off of whom moral certainties bounce harmlessly. I think anthropologists love these moments the way linguists love puns.)

We have lost control of this one. Polite society, church elders, teachers, artists, and other arbiters, they don’t get to say what a person is, what an action means. The right to create social identities, once the exclusive right of these several “mints,” has found its way into other hands. Try as we might we can’t get this cat back in the bag.

References

Crewe, B. and K. Nolan. n.c.,. Lady Marmalade. Additional lyrics by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya and Pink.

Chris Rock in Poniewozik, James. 2005. A Tale of Two Sitcoms. Time Magazine. September 19, 2005, pp. 67-68, p. 68.

I discovered today that George W. Bush is a better leader or a better Christian than I knew.

Here he is facing a barrage of Katrina criticism, some of it almost surely coming from the people who helped create the Katrina crisis, and what does he do?

He reaches out and thanks these people for their criticism. After his meeting with Bush, the mayor of New Orleans, Mr. C. Ray Nagin, said, "If anything, he told me he kind of appreciated my frankness and my bluntness."

This might be the triumph of a Christian generosity, a turning of the cheek. It’s hard not to notice that no one takes Bush’s Christianity seriously, unless, in my opinion, they take it too seriously. No one seems ever to read Bush’s behavior as if he were being animated by Christian beliefs or practices. Instead, people treat his Christianity as if it were somehow "part of the act," an opportunistic play for sun belt, heart land, anti-coastal voters. No one seems to believe that George W. Bush is ever actually listening when in church. He’s there as part of the theatre of his presidency, to show that he stands with certain conservative verities and against the godless Dems.

I, for one, can’t believe how sloppy, self serving and just plain reckless this is as a piece of analysis. Hey, it might be right…but I don’t believe I have heard anyone make the argument, let alone demonstrate the case. It’s as if people want this to be true so badly they mean to repeat it until alternative ideas are rendered unthinkable. (This is one way of making sure the "truth will out," by killing, that is to say, all competitors. Call this the Tudor model of the social construction of reality.*)

The key strategic question: what if you are wrong? You have given up one of the great opportunities for decoding the present presidency. (Do we know the substance of the sermons Bush hears each week? And, if we don’t, isn’t it vertiginously strange that we don’t? What, we don’t think this makes a difference? Are you kidding me?)

Or Bush’s response to the mayor of New Orleans might be a triumph of a leader’s pragmatism. It says, effectively, “your criticism helped me see the work we had to do. Thanks.” This is the selflessness of leadership. The leader accepts that people will behave badly. He/she accepts that people will behave badly at his/her expense and the expense of his/her presidency. The leader might engage in a blame game, but, really, what would that accomplish? A leader "takes the hit" and moves on to solve the problem.

Here too there is something sensationally transgressive about using the name “George W. Bush” and the word "selfless" in the same sentence. We just don’t think this way. We "know" that George Bush is a man of small motives, a man incapable of personal sacrifice, a man who seeks and uses his office to augment, never to diminish, himself. Again, how do we "know" this? Are we sure?

I know it’s not fashionable to talk this way about George W. Bush, but that should give us pause. Actually, the problem goes deeper than that. It is indeed barely intelligible to talk about George Bush this way. To refer to the kind or effect of his religious feeling, do we ever do this? To refer to the selflessness of his presidency, this too trembles on the verge of incoherence. In sum, we have read certain interpretive possibilities out of analysis before analysis has begun. And we all did it. Intellectuals all did it.  Intellectuals all did it.  (It always astonishes me to see that the intellectual is first and foremost a pack animal.)

George W. Bush, maybe for all of his take-charge, Texan, just-folk transparency, there are complexities we have not discovered. Discovering complexities, I thought this was what the chattering classes were for.

References

Johnson, Kirk.  2005.  45 Bodies Are Found in a New Orleans Hospital.  New York Times.  September 13, 2005.  here. 

(*  Henry VII is said to have secured the Tudor claim to the throne as much negatively as positively.  He eliminated almost everyone with a competing claim.)

A caveat:

This post is inspired by the memorials, performed yesterday, for the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Some readers will say that the appropriate thing to do on this occasion is to honor the memory of people who lost their lives. I respect this view. I believe this might also be an occasion for addressing the causes of terrorist attacks. It turns out, the two issues are connected.

One place anthropologists can make themselves useful is military intelligence. (That most don’t want to, that’s another question.) They can be particularly helpful with what Secretary Rumsfeld calls the “unknown unknowns.”

Unknown unknowns, these are factors we don’t know we don’t know. They are the Achilles heal of any decision making system, military or managerial. We can’t factor what we can’t fathom. We must fear things excluded from the problem set.

Sometimes, perhaps most perilously, the unknown unknowns are the assumptions with which we think. We don’t see these assumptions because, well, we’re assuming them.

That’s where anthropology comes into it: most of what the anthropologists wants to know are the cultural assumptions in the respondent’s head…hence a certainly disciplinary skill in finding these  out.

Invisible assumptions, the most pernicious unknown unknown, are trap doors an enemy may use at their discretion, a place of weakness that will never be defended against because it literally cannot be seen. Invisible assumptions played their part in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Douglas Porch and James Wirtz note that the bin Laden terrorists had discovered an invisible assumption, an unknown unknown. 

[T]he notion of "suicide bombing" is so alien to the American —indeed the Western—outlook, that we find it difficult to fathom the mindset of enemies prepared to conceive of an operation of such horrific proportions, one in which they are prepared to immolate themselves…

The 9/11 attack was hard to defend against because it violated an assumption of the American outlook.  It made combatant self sacrifice a systematic part of the attack.  Wedded as we are to the value of the individual, it was almost impossible to imagine this and other threats. 

Military intelligence cannot see some of the assumptions it entertains.  Consider the report that said some flight students were concentrating on take-off instructions and ignoring landing instructions. 

When the analyst is “crunching” vast bodies of data, each particular finding must respond almost immediately to scrutiny.   (Blink!)  The more it springs from alien assumptions, the more probably it will read as noise.  To capture the significance of the "flight student" report, the analyst would have to perform a kind of intellectual self surgery.  He or she has find and then replace the one assumption that prevents him or her from seeing the significance of the datum at hand.  And again, this has to be done in the real time race through the data that is every analyst’s necessary modus operandi. 

But this of course formidably difficult.  Chances are flight students who appear more interested in take off than landing does not “compute.”  As long as we assume the value of the individual, this datum is odd, counter intuitive, and probably noise.  The moment we make the unknown known (more exactly, the unthinkable thinkable), this piece of intelligence can now “ring a bell.” Now, the defense community is in a position to factor in, and to begin to scan for, the possibility that planes might be used as bombs. 

An American, and extra-American, point of view values the individual extraordinarily.  This was clear yesterday. Every victim of the 9/11 attacks was acknowledged individually and by name. Roughly one in five of them were acknowledged publicly, nationally, and by a member of their family.  This may be taken as a measure of the essential decency of the American approach.  But it is also the very thing that so confirms certain of our assumptions that they become unknown unknown. (Clearly, no  criticism of the memorial is intended. This is a simple  relationship: the more we use certain assumptions, the more we assume them.)

Most of what we know about invisible assumptions tells us that they are almost always impossible to identify and correct on an ad hoc, on the fly, basis. Very, very, very smart people can do this (“Santa Fe Institute smart,” probably), but the rest of us cannot capture and swap out troublesome assumptions to correct the unknown unknown problem, especially not on the fly.

The only systematic way we can deal with this problem (and I guess we can assume the Pentagon is working on this) is to task a team of people and to train them to “think like the enemy.”  It is only by routing out certain assumptions and replacing them with new ones that we can make ourselves the equal of the challenge and escape the real problem of unknown unknowns.  The anthropological task begins be decoding the enemy, discovery the assumptions he makes, building these into the skunk works team, and then recording what the team delivers as new threats that must be defended against. 

I leave for another time the dynamic version of this system, and the more daunting challenge: the system that is capable of finding and mocking up assumptions, as they shift in real time.

References

Porch, Douglas and James J. Wirtz. 2002. Surprise and Intelligence failure. Strategic Insights. I (7 September) here.

Ok, thanks to the genius of Typepad, I am posting while cut open, in surgery, under sedation, and, yes, to be really melodramatic about it, clinging to life by a thread and prayer. Ok, just a thread. (The things you have to do to ditch your prison tattoos.)

Anyhow, here from a feature in the Wall Street Journal called the ‘Stat snapshot,” are the numbers for fragrance sales through 10/31/04, broken out by gender.

Total Women’s U.S. Fragrance Sales $475.0 –
Total Men’s U.S. Fragrance Sales       $372.4 –
(Sales Through 10/31/04, in millions)

Wait. Let’s look at those again.

Total Women’s U.S. Fragrance Sales $475.0 –
Total Men’s U.S. Fragrance Sales       $372.4 –
(Sales Through 10/31/04, in millions)

That’s what I thought, too. I don’t wear a fragrance. I know you don’t wear fragrance. I don’t know anyone who does wear a fragrance. WTF?

I happen to know that Brian Williams wears fragrance. (We tried on the same jacket at a New Canaan clothing store.) But that’s it.

So what gives? WSJ reporter, Rebecca Cascade, notes that fragrance sales are down 17% since 2001 despite the wild success of fragrances by Elizabeth Taylor (White Diamonds) and J. Lo (Glow). In fact, even Michael Jordan’s cologne is on the skids.

I am soliciting explanations here. I have one idea. Unilever must be selling Axe by the tanker trailer full. 

I have high regard for Owen Gleiberman.  As a film reviewer for Entertainment Weekly, his view of Hollywood and contemporary culture is observant and thoughtful, and not infrequently illuminating.  

Gleiberman (and his colleague Lisa Schwarzbaum) represent an interesting episode in the evolution of popular culture.  Until standards rose, there was no hope that a popular magazine could attract, or would hire, critics as good as this. And once these two were in place, standards would have to rise again. Hollywood was being held to a higher standard. 

That’s why it is really very irritating that Gleiberman should have reviewed The Century of the Self in such glowing terms.  The COTS is a four-hour BBC mini-series, make in 2002 by Adam Curtis.  The terms actually do glow:

It’s rare to see a documentary that bursts your mind right open, exploding your perceptions of the world we live in. […] The Century of the Self is rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I’ve seen this decade.

Here’s the sad part. This documentary is junk social science.  It persuades Gleiberman that he has glimpsed the origins of contemporary culture when in fact he has seen yet another recitation of ideas that are shop worn and wrong.

The writer-director, Adam Curtis, crafts a vast and searching essay-mosaic to explore how the consumer culture recoded the nature of who we are inside. His film takes us back to the primal seed of modern marketing: the creation of public relations in the 1920s by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who drew on his uncle’s theories to envision a new kind of human being – not a rational citizen but an irrational consumer, enslaved by unconscious desires. Curtis uncovers how the 1939 World’s Fair, with its famous ”futurama” visions, was in fact a propaganda stunt of American business; how Joseph Goebbels drew on Bernays’ techniques to inspire the masses of the Third Reich; how the psychiatric elite, led by Anna Freud, were co-opted in secret by the corporate boardroom to create a homogenized vision of suburban normalcy.

There is so much that is sloppy, silly and exuberantly mistaken here, it’s hard to know where to begin.  But let us note three conflations: 1) marketing with public relations, 2) public relations with one practitioner thereof, 3) the idea that the 1920s represents the beginnings of marketing.  These ideas are not just incorrect, they are egregiously wrong.  They are what English school boys call “howlers.” 

Let’s press on. “Curtis uncovers how the 1939 World’s Fair…was in fact a propaganda stunt of American business.”  It is hard to reckon how thuggish you have to be as a public communicator, how openly and utterly hostile to intellectual substance and finesse, to make this claim…or report it with approval. Only a hooligan would so declare himself.  (This is self promotional of me, but there is a chapter in Culture and Consumption II that takes up this very question with a little more, oh, I don’t know, thoughtfulness.)

And finally, Gleiberman claims Curtis shows, “how the psychiatric elite, led by Anna Freud, were co-opted in secret by the corporate boardroom to create a homogenized vision of suburban normalcy.”  Well, yes, this is precisely what intellectuals thought was true of contemporary culture in the 1950s.  But in the last 50 years, we have come to a somewhat more nuanced and intelligent view of these particulars.

Here’s the deal. There was a time when Curtis’ argument was an open and lively issue in intellectual circles.  But now we know it must be wrong. Scholarship aside, there is prima facie evidence that this is so. What evidence? Magazines like Entertainment Weekly and writers like Owen Gleiberman. If our culture truly were a wasteland, neither one would or could exist.  

Contemporary culture has got better in almost all respects but the ideas with which we think about it have not.  These ideas, cultivated by the likes of David Riesman and John Kenneth Galbraith, have not caught up.  That these ideas are wrong does not discourage public critics like Bill Moyers and Bernard Barber from getting out the cardiac paddles in the hopes of animating the corpse for another 60 minutes or couple of hundred pages.  I thought critics were meant to kill bad ideas, not revive them. 

And this for me the real puzzler.  When people like Gleiberman recite this now antique, discredited and ludicrous concept of contemporary culture, they tend to do so as if it were brand new, as if it has just come to them as a wondrous revelation. They act, in sum, as if this argument has the power of an idea we have only just achieved.  But it is a long standing myth we have entertain about ourselves for at least have a century. Apparently this idea hangs out in Shangri La between airings.  Or there may be a better account for its perpetual youthfulness.  Thoughts?

That this myth, this meme, should have colonized even someone as smart and well informed as Owen Gleiberman, that’s just sad.  But there is good news: Gleiberman the critic is refutation of Gleiberman the argument.  

Post script:

It should be remembered that Adam Curtis is the documentarian who in 2004 accused British politicians of having constructed a “phantom enemy.”  Curtis called international terrorism, “a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media. … In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power." No apology for this position was forthcoming in July when “phantoms” killed more than 50 civilians in London.  

References

Anon.  2004.  The Making of the Terror Myth.  The Guardian. October 15, 2004. here.

Gleiberman, Owen. 2005. The Century of the Self: a magnetic doc about marketing’s powerful hold on us.  Entertainment Weekly. September 8, 2005, p. 60.

For citations of the academic literature at issue here, please see the bibliography in

McCracken, Grant. 2005. The culture wars continue.  This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  May 10, 2005.  here.

It is shamelessly self promotional of me, I know, but story-time today is an excerpt from my new book Culture and Consumption II.  This little essay was written some years ago while I was still living in Toronto.  I like it for a couple of reasons, but especially because it looks at the power of things. 

Uncle Meyer died in his sleep on August 4.  He was 82 and lived with his wife in a north Toronto high-rise.  He worked as a volunteer at an animal shelter.  He went for long walks.  He was a truly sweet guy, but not a very candid one.  He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.  He didn’t regale you with the “Uncle Meyer” story.

    Except once.  One night after dinner, Uncle Meyer brought out his photographs.  I froze.  This is the relative’s great fear: caught without defenses when the photographs come out.

    Uncle Meyer did it perfectly.  He just materialized at the dinner table, photos in hand.  I felt myself struggling for an excuse.  Weren’t we double-parked in a fire zone on a traffic island?  Didn’t the sitter need a drive home to Rochester?  Uncle Meyer had us.  We bowed to the hard dictates of good form.

    And there is was.  Lying under the photographs was a wine-colored canvas wallet, about the size of a paperback.  It was stitched together boldly, and in place crudely with thick green thread.  “What’s this?” I asked, already in the object’s thrall.  Uncle Meyer looked up at me and then back at the wallet.  “Oh, that,” he said and stopped.

    I picked it up, the anthropologist suddenly on alert.  The wallet was what we might call, after Proust, a “Madeleine” object: an object charged with meaning and power.

    Madeleine objects have lots of different powers.  Sometimes they cut away the present time and place, and transport us – in Proust’s case to the exquisite embrace of a childhood bed and maternal attentions.  But sometimes they have a different influence altogether.  Sometimes they come at us like something airborne and night-flying.

    Uncle Meyer’s wallet was one of these.  It reached up and gave me a crack across the snout.  The last time I’d seen anything like this, I’d been peering into a museum display case, a Yale University art historian beside me.  We have been doing what academics tend to do, parading Ivy League manners, elegant theories, and artful phrases.

    We stopped to comment airily on something, and an Inuit mask came hurling up out of the case like a shark out of water.  The voracious energy of the thing!  It consumed our manners, our theories and our language.  Hah!  Our pretensions fled in terror, and we were suddenly bewildered little men blinking stupidly.  Uncle Meyer’s canvas wallet had something of this power.  It grabbed at the senses and made the world drain away.

    These Madeleine objects are still not much understood.  We have all seen them.  But they continue to make a mockery of even our grandest theory.  Once I thought this was because they had the power of an irreducible object, a sheer “thingness” before which ideas see empty, mere, abstract.  But Uncle Meyer’s wallet made me think again.  Madeleine objects overwhelm theories because they are more powerfully abstract than any theory could ever be.  Uncle Meyer’s wallet was an open cut on the surface of our reality, a hole through which culture came spilling into life.

    But there was a more tactile power to it, too.  Somehow it managed to be both personal and completely traditional.  Obviously, someone had made it, carefully placing each stitch.  But the wallet conformed to a pattern to which generations had contributed.  It let you see both the individual and the tradition from which it came.

    All this was nothing compared to its intimacy.  This little canvas envelope somehow transmitted the emotions that were present at its making.  You could sense the care taken to create something beautiful, and the comfort it gave its maker.

    And there was anxiety.  The wallet had not been easy to make.  It told you that the maker was in the clutches of a terrible emotion that drove the stitches in one direction and then another.  In short, the wallet howled because it was charged with rich and difficult meanings that it somehow conveyed as a single sensation.  To see the object was to be invaded by its meanings. 

    Uncle Meyer was slow to tell the story, but eventually he did.  The wallet was stitched 65 years ago by his mother.  She made it to hold his passport and the Canadian visa that would see him safely out of a land of terror, pogroms, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. 

    Meyer was then 17.  He could leave Russia.  His family could not.  His father died of natural causes, he told me.  “My mother, well, the Nazis…I don’t know what happened.”

    He arrived in Canada in 1925, going first to Montreal and then to Edmonton to work for a relative.  He spent the early years moving back and forth across the country, a member of a team of Jewish roughnecks who worked on the construction of large buildings from Victoria to Kingston. 

    There was, after all, nothing dreary or domestic about Uncle Meyer’s photographs.  They were taken from the dizzying heights of construction sites: the Banff Springs Hotel, the Vancouver Medical-Dental Building, grain elevators across the prairies.  He recalled painting those elevators.  He and his pals liked to ride the wooden platforms when they banged around in high winds. 

    Meyer’s canvas wallet brought him to another country and another life.  He lived, despite his roughneck heroics, safe from harm.  He escaped the holocaust that claimed his family.

    He had come away from his home and his family with a few clothes and not much more.  As his mother prepared him for his departure, as she prepared herself for the fact that she would likely never see him again, she took up threat and canvas.  She made a wallet for his passport, so that her reckless, bounding son would not lose the paper that would see him into safety.  She produced an envelope to see Meyer into the envelope of the new world.  Meyer made it.  The wallet worked.

 

The first question for the marketer, according to Theodore Levitt, is “what business are you in?” 

 In Google’s case, this question has become more difficult to answer. 

Certainly, we could say that they are in the information or the information access business. And this is true. But it does not describe how they create value in the world…so it does not tell us how to proceed as marketers: build the brand, define the product, address promotion questions, choose targets and so on. (Clearly, Google is a marketing oddity from the start, and adjustments must be made.)

I think of Google as engaged in two larger projects. (I am now reporting my own experience of the brand. Think of this as an act of auto-ethnography. I know this sounds painful, and believe me, it is.)

Project 1: Google intelligence

Google is now my connection to internet and to this extent it is part of the exoskeleton that

amplifies my cognitive capacity. This is odd for someone born at the middle of the last century. I am inclined to suppose the boundaries of the body are the limits of my intellectual equipment. Clearly, the internet changes all that. 

At the very least, it is a better memory. I can now access a good deal of what we know about the

world. I can access much of what we think about what we know. This sort of “recall” puts to shame even the most capacious memory.

Blogging allows me to put “idle thoughts” before a formidable audience.  They help me think these thoughts. Issues of origin and ownership blur. This is a collective cognitive event

.  Now, I’m thinking outside the skull. 

Normally, I take this new endowment for granted. But then my internet connection fails. I am suddenly stupider than usual. The electronic enablement of my intellect is suddenly down. I am thinking inside the skull.

Project 2: Google sociality

Here too we are moving away from literal definitions to virtual ones. As an old fashioned model, I am inclined to think that of my friends as people I have met, spend time with, stay in touch with. The internet changes all that, too.

When I was in Korea a couple of years ago, I was interested to see teenagers using

the internet to build and maintain quite different social networks.  They were sending lots of messages to large groups of people. They were, as I came to think of it, “pinging the hive” almost constantly. Their parents had gathered a small group of friends together as they passed through high school, college, university, and so on. Korean teens were keeping many more acquaintances from every association to which they belonged. 

My group of personal friends remains small. But certainly, the internet and this

blog gives me a group of, what shall I call them? People I know quite well despite the fact we have never met. In fact, I sometimes think I can hear TBSA readers in my head as I write. I think this is called “introjection.” Normally, you introject the voice of a family member. I don’t know what kind of symptom it represents when it’s a blog reader. (You know who you are. And thanks a lot.) 

Google does really have a play here, but with things like Talk, it soon will. 

In sum

What business is Google in? If this reckoning has anything to recommend it, they are in the business of making us smarter and more social. They are helping blur the boundary between the person and the machine. This is a substantial redefinition of personhood. They are also insinuating the individual into new and larger social networks. 

From an anthropological point of view, this is interesting. It marks the reworking of cultural categories and relationships. From a marketing point of view, it’s interesting, too. It represents the creation of massive value that share price may or may not fully capture. 

Google isn’t about information everywhere.  It’s much more Gibsonian. It’s about selves

that stretch out of bodies onto the net.  It’s about friendships (or whatever we call them) entirely or largely mediated by the net.  These are more substantial value adds with which to build the brand, especially when it’s time to "get serious" in this department.  

(filed from Manhasset, Long Island)

In Dallas, on the weekend, I talked to a woman who spoke good but accented English.  She told me that spoke an aboriginal language most of her childhood. She didn’t learn English till she was about 10 years old.  She learned it from the women who came to live with the family and the 13 kids after her mother fell sick.

She didn’t have a chance to use her English outside the community until some years later.  She and her brother went in to Tucson to buy the hose and the bucket they needed to build an outdoor shower.

She went to the hardware store and placed her order.  The person behind the counter looked at her and raised his hands in the air, the sign of incomprehension.  So she tried again: "can you sell me a bucket and a hose?" She got the same reaction. 

Now she said, “What is the matter with this guy? Doesn’t he speak English?”

The man beside her looked at her with surprise and said, “Lady, you’re speaking Spanish.”

If you want to survey the experimental margin of our culture, chances are you don’t go to Dallas, Texas. Austin, with its aggressive food and film communities, maybe. But chances are you’ll stay clear of Texas altogether. It’s too large to be subtle, too monolithic to be interesting. I mean this is a place that worships football.

But we are learning that a number of unlikely places can play sunken ship—not the dead space that environments warned us against but a place diverse species congregate and multiply. Dallas might, I think, be one of those places.

My first clue was the galleria attached to my hotel. Extravagantly upscale shops all around and at the center of everything, a skating rink.  Witty!  In a land where summer temperature are measured in three digits, this is what “oasis” looks like. 

My second clue: one of the shops in the Galleria has a shoe store called Gregory’s that has devoted one window to the work of Ed Hardy: conventional baseball caps, heavily customized and each of them apparently unique.  One of them showed a skull and cross bones and the legend: “love kills slowly.”  I’m not sure who would wear this or where.  It’s too expensive and dramatic for private use.  So you wear it publicly—with a spouse? With a friend?  By yourself? It’s a little Darwinian possibly, but could we suppose this hat tells us there must be a time and a place where it can be worn and a group who would appreciate it? 

The third clue was the music in the elevator of my hotel, a Westin. Brazilian and interesting, I think, but out of my range. To be fair, my range is not very broad, but this is the first time the music in a hotel elevator has exceeded it.  (Yeah, I know. It is possible that I have finally achieved a complete cultural senescence.  Not recognizing elevator music, that would have to be the first symptom.) 

The fourth clue: Central Market, a food retail operation so aggressive that it makes Whole Foods and Trader Joes look completely pedestrian.  The place was packed with consumers, with variety (over 20 kinds of salsa), with experiments, free samples, exotics foodstuffs I did not recognize, and brands I have never heard of.  The only thing that was not jammed was the check out line.  What a novel idea. Dallas is a place with lots of experiments in the restaurant and food world.  The local notion is that “if you can make it in Dallas, you can make it anywhere.”

Some sunken ships works best when there is one very large, public, and well defined idea in place. As long as this remains in place, as an apparent consensus, the thing everyone KNOWS about Dallas, then everyone can go off and do whatever the hell they want.  And this might be the strategy by which Dallas makes itself more various and more interesting than a place like Austin with its self conscious feeling for the alternative.

This could be one of those cunning identity plays in which the background and foreground are switched.  (A Canadian example: Quebec claims to be a society with one language and culture, but in fact everyone there is bilingual. In the rest of Canada: a great show is made of being bilingual but in fact most everyone is monolingual.)  In this case: Austin is putatively experimental and ends up being a relatively small universe of well policed options while Dallas claims to be narrow and monolithic when it is in fact free wheeling and multiple.

A last note: I had dinner on Saturday with every thinking person’s notion of a power couple: Virginia and Steve Postrel.  I had just finished 7 hours of interviewing so I was pretty sure that my head was going to explode on several occasions.  But I came away with this conclusion. Every business school has the same problem: how to give the MBA student a cultural literacy and the strategic sophistication needed to act on it. I mean some of these kids are going to have to fight the cola wars, decide how Kroger should fight the Central Market threat, find a way to make design a standard part of the Detroit automotive product, or think about the difference between Dallas and Austin.  The b-school curriculum is way under weight on this one.   One way to solve this problem: hire the Postrels and give them the Coca-Cola, Kroger, General Motors Power Couple Professorship. 

(posted from Atlanta)

Yesterday, the Pope warned against "DIY" religion. The BBC represented it this way:

The Pope told the crowds there were dangers in people finding their own religious routes.

"If it is pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product," he said.

 

"People choose what they like, and some are even able to make a profit from it.

 

"But religion constructed on a ‘do-it-yourself’ basis cannot ultimately help us," he said.

"Help people to discover the true star which points out the way to us: Jesus Christ."

I understand that in matters of religious belief and doctrine, the correct interpretation is whatever authorities say it is. There is no such thing as a sensible or strategic approach. Religious leaders are obliged to represent the will of God as this has been revealed to them. 

Still, the Catholic Church has from time to time done the strategic thing rather than the orthodox one. Keith Thomas documented one historical moment of this accommodation and the adjustments were extraordinary and thoroughgoing. 

Ironically, the Pope has put his finger not just on any feature of contemporary culture when he objects to “DIY religion.” No, he has managed, no doubt in his wisdom, to identify what is perhaps the single most important feature of contemporary religiosity. 

It’s a pity then that he insists on using this particular language. To use "DYI" makes religious belief sound like a home improvement project, regrouting the bathroom, say, or building a new deck out back. (And the Pope would diminish still further by attributing a profit motive.) But it is wrong to think of the DYI aspect of our culture as self indulgent, giddily wrong headed or opportunistic. This is to miss the anthropological point, and to underestimate how formidable is DYI as a competitor for even faithful hearts and minds. 

How much better it would have been if the Pope has used a term like “chosen religiosity.” In our culture, the act of commitment (to marriage, to identity, to commitment of many kinds) almost always now begins with an act of choice. We are a culture that has moved from assignment to choice in virtually all the dimensions of personal belief. Certainly, there was a time when people were Democrats because, and so to honor the fact that, their parents were. But now this idea is unthinkable. People choose. It’s not doctrine that is obligatory. It’s choice that is. This is what it is to be a culture devoted to individualism. More simply, every one of us is more or less entirely DIY.

I understand that choice is precisely what the Reformation was for, and that the Protestant churches may be seen as so many deliberate variations on how much freedom of choice the individual may exercise. But there must be a way of making room for choice within approved options, say. Or, declaring some things open to choice (yes, “indifferent”) as long as the fundamentals are honored. The alternative is to insist that the Church knows better than the individual even when the individual is prepared, accustomed, and in many cases obliged to decide for themselves. 

References

Anon. 2005. Pope warns against ‘DIY’ religion.  BBC. here.

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Penguin.