What the hell is that? Honestly, I have ab-so-lute-ly no idea what you want to say with that haircut. Absolutely none. I say, no. Randy? Paula?
It is one of the paradoxes of popular culture that the man who serves as an arbiter of taste and a master of style sports a haircut that shows no trace of either one.
To use his voice again, Simon Cowell has the weirdest haircut I have ever seen. (This photo does not show the latest do, which still parts in the middle and has these general proportions, but packs down more tightly on all sides.)
There a couple of voices raised in protest on the internet. One asks Simon, "where [do] you come from, Crappy Haircutstan? … Do you have gardener whack your head after he finishes the hedges?" It reminds a writer for Scotsman.com of a "loo brush." These seem unduly cruel but then Simon is perhaps merely getting what he gives…and it is a truly terrible haircut.
Simon’s haircut is actually so bad it made one American Idol contestant snap. After a regrettable performance, a hairdresser named Eric Chapman rushed the podium with gel in hand, shouting that he wanted to "fix Simon’s hair." This brought out the security guards who rushed to protect the noble do.
Symbolically, it’s hard to figure. Forbes has Cowell at 29 on its "Power list" of celebrities. It tells us Cowell is paid $43 million a year. But there is no evidence of gentrification. Cowell remains loyal to the skin tight black t-shorts and other fashion signatures that would not be out of place on a bouncer at a Karaoke bar. (Oh, right.) But the haircut this season is pure hockey hooligan, as if Simon were some kind of cultural enforcer. (Oh, right.)
Symbolically, what do we say about this haircut? Is it a measure of his arrogance? Is it an act of aggression? Is an act of self defense? Is this haircut Simon’s way of giving American Idol viewers the finger? Is he taunting us?
My guess is that the truth is simpler. Simon doesn’t care what we think. He is exactly like the contestant he hates the most: that fella without a lick of talent who is prepared to make a spectacle of himself in front of the entire nation. If Simon, by some quirk in the space time continuum, should show up as a contestant on the show this year, well, let us pity him the withering reception he is going to get from that terrible Simon Cowell.
References
Anonymous. 2007. American Idol Freaks and Geeks Audition. Reality TV Updates. January 20, 2007. here.
Anonymous. n.d., Simon Cowell. Forbes Top 100 Celebrity List. here.
The "haircutstan" remark comes from a comment left on the Huggingtonpost.com posting of an article called "Simon Cowell Tells Kelly Clarkson Not to Forget Where She Came From" by David K. Li and originally published in the New York Post on January 18, 2007, but now removed.
Because, I mean, to be fair, and let’s be honest, you are a cloud. You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time. I mean your mental world. It’s all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions. You take on clarity for clients. Then you’re all “let’s get on with it” pragmatism. But normally, and for most purposes, you’re as cloudy as can be.
How do I know this? Call me your consulting anthropologist. Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group. And they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.)
I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and especially to the second. My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation.2
I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in the late 20th century, but that cloudiness was intensified by the new electronic technologies of the last 10 years. So the third anthropological question is now, “Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?” Or to put this in a more pressing form: how’d ja get so cloudy?
For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a
bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.
Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.
That was then. This is now. We are no longer “bounded,” “integrated,” “centered,” “organized” or “contrasted.” We are now blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague. We are, I would prefer to say, cloud-like. (It’s just so much more flattering. No? I mean otherwise we are merely the proverbial dog’s breakfast.)
Ok, back to the third question: Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?”
My father was a Geertzian man: centered, organized and contrasted, more or less. His self was concentric rings: family, work, interests. (Or maybe it was work, interests, family.) His life stacked. And it leaned. Like all modernist families at midcentury, it leaned into the future, towards the good life, the next house, the next job, grown children. His industry (printing) changed several times over his career, but I don’t think he was ever obliged to ask, “ok, what’s the business model?” or “ok, how does this industry work again?”
There was lots of new in my father’s life, but it was mostly shared new: space races, hi fidelity, cold wars, wreck rooms, status competition, new cars. Even the marginal stuff tended to “clot.” Not everyone heard of Area 51, but those who had tended to agree on what it was. There weren’t lots of options (no Areas 52, 53, or 54, at it were). Even in its feeling for novelty and its embrace of dynamism, there was something redundant and folded about this world. (This held until the late 60s, when many assumptions now were brought to the surface and contested. He hated this.)
For purposes of contrast, here is a brief diary of my last few days. (I offer my own example here, but I expect the reader can supply better examples of the new cloudiness.)
Friday, I had a conversation with John Deighton in which we tried to puzzle out what is an enterprise is now. (Specifically, who has to be included, in the performance of which functions, with revenue coming from what sources, driving by creativity and innovation of what kind, using what channels, anticipating what consumers, etc.) This ends up being an impossibly philosophical guestion, and just the kind of conversation to which John quickens. But it is now a standard kind of conversation now that the business world is changing so much. (Deep reflection, not just for eggheads anymore!)
It was a cloudy conversation because we were called upon to reach down to see if we were standing on an assumption that was itself in need of rethinking. It was a cloudy conversation because we were called upon to reach up and ask what, finally, was the unit of analysis and the point of the exercise. It wasn’t ever clear what was fixed and what needed scrutiny. Finally, it looked as if everything did.
Now John is a friend I have from the tradition networked world. We knew one another from conferences. Then we worked together. It’s always been a face to face relationship, one that uses the new technologies merely to “stay in touch.” But Friday, I also had occasion to see Tom Guarriello and Tom is someone I almost certainly would not know were we not fellow bloggers. In other words, electronic mediation is the necessary condition of our relationship. My relationship with John is precisely the kind that helped construct my father’s social world. My relationship with Tom is one he never would have had. Assuming similar dispositions, my social world is at least one person larger because of electronic mediation.
But we can’t proceed additively. Because my connection to Tom leads to more connections, which connections make for still more cloudiness. Friday, while talking to Tom, I had occasion to mention my long standing notion that pop music has crappy lyrics. This is one of the little things that float in my cloud of opinions of the world. It is almost always dormant, but talking to Tom, it lept into mind and speech
And this fleeting reconfiguration of mental world meant that I was primed to quicken to this line on an NPR website.
Meloy is known for using “10-dollar words” in his songs, and for “creating character studies that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Victorian novel.”
Hah, I thought, any artists who uses 10-dollar words must be departed from pop purility. And this took me into an interview between NPR’s Terry Gross and the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, the artist in question.
But before we go there, it is worth pointing out that the NPR connection came to me because I was trying out my new Google Reader, a technology that winnows the world in a way my father could never have done. My family read Time, Life, U.S. News and World Report, the standard package, I guess, for a middle class family. The number of news sources at my disposal has multiplied extraordinarily and this has encouraged the invention of things like Google Reader, which is now capable of searching this world for things I know I care about, and then to return things I have to care about.
More specifically, I used Reader to search for subscriptions by searching for “culture.” Hey, presto. A conversation with Tom had set me up to zero in an passage returned by Reader. This took me to the NPR website and the interview of Colin Meloy by Terry Gross. The cloud was multiplying. A new contact activates an old interest which helps me acquire a new interest, and I would not be surprised if this in turn helps me acquire a new contact. In a word, cloudy worlds get cloudier. My world is not just one person larger than my father’s because of electronic mediation. Each new person can have a multiplicative effect. Cloudy worlds get cloudier fast.
Now this thought (and indeed this post) is encouraged by a Yi Tan conducted by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn on Monday afternoon on the topic of social search. (I recommend these “phonecasts” for people interested in technology and change. They happen every Monday at 1:30 EST.) I am not sure that I took anything in particular away from this conversation, except of course to note that Jerry is terrifyingly articulate, and that here is another topic about which thought is called for. What kind of thought exactly? Oh precisely, that now standard Deightonian reflection where all assumptions and all objectives are up for grabs. In particular, this Yi Tan put an anthropologist on notice that social search will change the nature of the self and the group.
There is a double cloudiness. In one, let’s call it, social cloudiness, more contacts and interests open up, and more contacts and interests are made possible. And this in turn sets in train the other cloudiness, let’s call it a conceptual cloudiness, in so far as expanding social network expose us to things like the Yi Tan contemplation of social search and the recognition that there are lots of new things the proper intellectual reckoning of which will likely take the substantial relocation and renovation of our existing conceptual categories.
I don’t think my father very often got news of Yi Tan kind, of the kind that said, ok, this innovation (social search) has emerged, it is changing, we are not sure exactly which of these changes will take, and we are not sure what difference the ones that do take will make. My father wasn’t confronted by cloudiness, except perhaps at the very end of his career, when computers began to change his printing presses. (There is something magnificently literal about a mechanical press, and something equally mysterious about one that is computer based.) Conceptual cloudiness of this order only happened once in his professional world (I think) and what was called in this circumstance was a period of contemplation that would reward him with a new clarity. This moment of adjustment is precisely what is now missing. There is no stop and go, now “ok, let’s sort this out, and then get back to business as usual.” We are entering a world in which our moments of “clarificaton” are really only moments in which we are obliged to scrutinize assumptions below and objectives on high.
Back to the interview between Gross and Meloy. Part of the interview centered around a contest between Stephen Colbert and the Decemberists. Both had asked people to complete the green screen of a video, and Colbert then has accused the Decemberists of stealing his idea. The “conflict’ resulted in a “guitar challenge” that brought together the Colbert, the Decemberist’s Chris Funk, as contestants, Henry Kissenger, as a judge, Morley Safer, as the presiding 60 Minutes type host, and Peter Frampton as a ringer, filling in for the cowardly Colbert.
This activated my long standing interest consumer created content, not to mention a kind of (Henry) Jenkinsian transmediation. But because neither of these “tokens” is a perfect illustration of the “type” into which I wish to put it, I was obliged to scrutinize the difference. Was this is a useful difference (that is, something that marketing cocreation can learn from) or a trivial one. Plus, I couldn’t help but remark on that amazing little cloud of participants (Colbert, Funk, Kissinger, Safer and Frampton) and wonder: Was this one of those crazy constellations that the postmodernists say proves we are a culture in which the center does not hold. Or, could the more sober minded anthropologist build a model that made it make more sense. (Still thinking on both these questions.)
So that’s: Tom + Google Reader gives stray return from NPR website gives evidence of music, activities and constellations, any one (or all) of which can serve as an opportunity to glimpse new things, or old things in a new way. At a minimum, more social contacts leads to more interests which lead to more social contacts which lead to a cloudier self…all of which exposes us to the possibility that our categories and assumptions are up for grabs. Clearly, this is the cloudiness that bothers me most, as more and more ponderables take on the status of imponderables as we attempt to use them to get some thinking done.
If there is a takeaway here (besides a tearful descent into the accusation that the world is too much for us, I mean), it is perhaps the importance of that touchstone question. It’s good to have one.
There is another takeaway. Friday, I posted on the arrival of my new bright sticks. These are wet erase markers that let us write on glass. This post, it turns out, owes a lot to the fact that I got to scribbling on windows. Getting things out of your head onto glass feels a little like the intellectual process of getting them out of their imponderable form into something more ponderable. Sure, I frightened the neighbors, but here in Connecticut everything frightens the neighbors. Plus, it’s charming that something so low tech should be useful in dealing with a world so high tech.
Oh, and one last point, as I was scratching my ideas of a cloudy selves, groups, networks, and concepts in fluorescence onto windows, a client phoned. He wanted to know “what is a group?” (He is thinking about brand communities and how to build them.) I am so glad you asked.
Summing up. The self and the group, when electronically mediated, reaches out in all directions, embracing more topics and contacts that it might reach out and embrace still more topics and contacts. Selfhood is expanding outwards, and this be much more exciting and fun, if we did not finding ourselves expanding into a certain conceptual, categorical cloudiness and the task of thinking down to test our assumptions and up to query our purposes.
Or perhaps this is wrong. There may be a model out there that could give cloudiness a “house that Jack build” clarity. Perhaps all these things do go together and we just need to build the model that shows us how. When it works best, culture doesn’t just make the world intelligible. It gives the world a “just so” quality (and when it works really well it makes everything seems so just.) Maybe there’s a way to make this happen. Maybe you, dear reader, can explain this to me.
Footnotes
1. This question used to send us to other cultures. Now it makes us stay home. Our culture is changing selves, groups, and the groupings of groups at light speed.
2. This is the recognition that sent the post-modernists screaming into the night, epistemologically speaking. Or perhaps it was merely a culling exercise, a way to get the sheep away from the important questions. Too bad they ended up so near the students.
The interview between Terry Gross and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists here.
Acknowledgments
To Stefan Hellvkist for another magnificent cloud.
To a cloud of friends and connections: John Deighton, Ton Guarriello, Leora Kornfeld, Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, Terry Gross, Colin Meloy, gugoda, and Peter all of whom over the last couple of days forced the issue or at least raised the question: what is a self and what is a group now that we are so electronically mediated. Forgive the provincial anthropological phrasing.
Because, I mean, to be fair, and let’s be honest, you are a cloud. You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time. I mean your mental world. It’s all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions. You take on clarity for clients. Then you’re all "let’s get on with it" pragmatism. But normally, and for most purposes, you’re as cloudy as can be.
How do I know this? Call me your consulting anthropologist. (No, don’t call me. Try a blog aggregator and call me in the morning.) Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group.1 And now they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are now mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, social networks, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.)
I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and especially to the second. My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation.2
I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in the late 20th century, but that cloudiness has been intensified by the new electronic technologies of the last 10 years. So the third anthropological question is now, "Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?" Or to put this in a more pressing form: how’d ja get so cloudy?
For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of a person as a
bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.
Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie and being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.
That was then. This is now. We are no longer "bounded," "integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted." We are now blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague. We are, I prefer to say, cloud-like. (It’s just so much more flattering. I mean otherwise we are the proverbial dog’s breakfast.)
Back to the third question: Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?"
[ok, sorry, but I have run out of time, and I will have to finish up tomorrow.]
Footnotes
1 This question used to send us to other cultures. Now it makes us stay home. Our culture is changing selves, groups, and the groupings of groups at light speed.
2. This is the recognition that sent the post-modernists screaming into the night, epistemologically speaking. Or perhaps it was merely a culling exercise, a way to get the sheep away from the important questions. Too bad they ended up so near the students.
To a cloud of friends and connections: John Deighton, Tom Guarriello, Leora Kornfeld, Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, and Terry Gross, all of whom over the last couple of days forced the issue or at least raised the question: what is a self and what is a group now that we are so electronically mediated? Forgive the provincial anthropological phrasing.
Sunday Morning Shootout (SMS) has become an unexpected pleasure of cable TV and Sunday morning. It features Variety editor, Peter Bart, and producer Peter Guber, talking to one another each week about Hollywood.
Make that talkin. This is old friends schmoozing in a coffee shop. Schmoozing qua schmoozing is not interesting, because it ‘s generally so forgiving of air puffed opinion, amateur dramatics and every kind of showing off. But this schmoozing supplies depths of knowledge, a mutual respect/restraint, and conversation well stocked with insight and thoughtfulness.
Once more, cable TV (in this case AMC) aces the networks. More modest in its scale and budget than the TV tabloids, SMS still manages to tells us more about Hollywood. By contrast, Mary Hart deafens with her carney shouting and show girl smile.
Of course, there are compromises. When Peter and Peter really meet to talk, just the two of them, no cameras, no audience, things must be a bit speedier. Surely, the baud rate goes up, assumptions can be made, codes evoked, problems dispatched, conclusions reached, disagreements lodged, all of this takes place at speed. For the purposes of Sunday Morning Shootout, things are not so much broadband as DSL. Peter and Peter are making an effort to let us keep up.
It is of course a delicate balance, and an historical one. Hollywood triumphed as a cultural form precisely because it was inclusive…unlike the filmmakers of France who worked a different, more avant garde deal. The Hollywood bargain has always been, roughly, establish a perfectly transparent proposition (Gidget goes to Rome, Debbie Does Dallas) and only then, if you dare, open the film to moments of subtlety that can engage the more sophisticated viewer. It would be crazy to have a show about Hollywood to break with this bargain. And Peter and Peter don’t.
Still, we’re talking about a contemporary culture that now moves not like tectonic plates creeping by the millimeter but like LA homes coursing down a hillside. The Hollywood formula is being reworked, as movies get more difficult and viewers get more sophisticated. (The "waste land" turned out to be fertile after all.) So there is room to wonder if SMS has actually had the right balance and on one point I say, emphatically, and schmoozingly, no!
Yesterday, Peter Guber flew at Gil Cates, calling the Oscar’s the "march of the penguins," and demanding a reworking the Oscar formula. The ensuing discussion broke out the problems that threatens the Oscars now. I repeat them while initialing the originator.
1) as the grandfather of award shows, it is committed to tradition (PB)
2) it is crowded by new competitors (GC)
3) it comes late in the award show cycle (GC)
4) by the time stars get to the Oscars, their acceptance speeches are sometimes over rehearsed (GC)
5) it is obliged to include categories and recipients that have no star power (PG)
6) the pictures that get awards are smaller and less crowd pleasing, (so, like Volver, fewer people have seen them and they have smaller stars to bring to the ceremony) (PB)
7) it is too freaking long (PG)
Finally, the debate seemed to come down to this: Bart’s and Cates’ belief that Hollywood has the right once a year to dress itself up in grandeur and take a well deserved bow, versus Guber’s contention that, no, Hollywood can’t cease to be entertaining and fun just because it’s handing out awards.
But on one point, everyone agreed. The best moments on the Oscar were the moments of spontaneity, when stuff happens that plays against form, when actors play against type. Suddenly, the ceremony comes to life. Grandeur opens up and we fall right in.
And this, ironically, proves to be the thing to say not only about the Oscars but about SMS as well. The discussion with Cates was the most interesting segment in a long time, because Guber was shouting his unhappiness, Cates was deft and playful in his replies, and Barts was offering diplomatic intervention even as he smuggled in sotto voce comment. Suddenly, an interesting show became a lively show. We the audience went from looking in to being there. Yes, SMS has got things right. It represents a big advance over Mary Hartman and Entertainment Tonight. But it is still too set piece, still too true to form, still too predictable.
So it turns out SMS is not just reporting the state of Hollywood it is ever so discretely contemplating it’s most fundamental problem: that the old forms of entertainment are too overformed to engage a culture that is moving a breakneck speed towards participation and spontaneity. And this is odd because one of the real joys of schmoozing is the spontaneity.
I watched Studio 60 reruns yesterday. Sorkin’s dialog lives and breathes! The West Wing sometimes felt like a large talent trapped in a small room, a cruel "no exit" for America’s most fecund dramatist.
In episode 5, Martha O’Dell (Christine Lahti) is doing a story on head writer Matt Albie (Matthew Perry).
Matt Albie: You’ve covered presidential campaigns, you’ve covered presidents, you’ve covered wars, what are you writing about a TV show for?
Martha O’Dell: What are you writing a TV show for?
Matt Albie: I’m not. I’m watching you dust my office for prints.
Martha O’Dell: I am writing about it, because what’s happened here is important. I think what’s happening here is important. I think popular culture in general and this show in particular are important.
[a man in lobster suit enters Albie’s office]
There is something a defensive about O’Dell’s remarks…as if Presidents and elections (even on TV) are manifestly more important than comedy shows and popular culture. Sorkin protests too much.
It’s odd that so agile a mind should miss so obvious an irony. Sorkin is manifestly happier and more productive here. How could a lesser world make him a greater writer?
The West Wing was popular culture dressed up in the grandeur of politics. Perhaps Sorkin doubted that TV was worthy of his talent as a message (and not just a medium). Or perhaps, having used popular culture to enliven the tone of the White House, he now felt obliged to use politics (lower case "p") to dignify SNL.
In any case, the disdain and the dignity are now back to front. However important popular culture may be (and it is now so important, it’s time to remove the adjective), it never took itself seriously. It never took on airs. Thus did it conquer. (Thus did the French cinema fail to colonize us.)
Traditionally, there was a bargain in place. The creator may exercise an extraordinary intelligence in the creation of popular culture, but this intelligence should not be allowed to show. It’s a little like special effects, the science and technology of which are now astonishingly sophisticated. All we see, all we want to see, is the starship exploding.
And Sorkin gets this, belatedly:
I get it when people write that there’s a smugness to the show, there’s an arrogance to the show. I get it when people write that the characters on the show take doing the television show too seriously. (in Wyatt, below)
But it’s not clear that NBC did. The marketing for Studio 60 was presumptuous. It seemed to insist, "You will love this show. It comes to you in triumph," as if NBC were eager finally to show us that (finally or again?) they were no longer schlock meisters. Bad luck. Bad marketing. The writer may get it, the studio does not.
Still, it would be a pity if Sorkin dialed it back too much. For the bargain is being rewritten with every episode of The Wire and The West Wing. Slowly but surely, dialog, acting and directing is getting better. Popular culture has been letting complexity and sophistication in. Terra is forming, as better culture cultivates a more sophisticated audience who support better culture. (See Johnson, below.)
It would be tragic if Mr. Sorkin were shut out of the world he has helped create.
References
Johnson, Steven. 2006. Everything Bad is Good for You. New York: Riverhead Trade.
Sorkin, Aaron. 2006.The Long Lead story, episode 5. first aired October 16, 2006. here.
Wyatt, Edward. 2007. Shaky ‘Studio 60’ Is Counting on Romance to Rouse Ratings. The New York Times. January 18, 2007. here.
Apologies
Sorry for the Sartre reference. I mean, really, who cares?
It is an open question and a topical one: whether all cultures are equally endowed with the ability and inclination to embrace economic, political and cultural liberty.
If you are an exceptionalist, you say, "no, this is a peculiarity of the West. It does not occur indigenously and robustly in other cultures, and it’s not for exportation there. If they don’t have it, they won’t ever get it. Don’t even think about forcing it. Liberty will not take."
If you are a generalist, you say, "nonsense, every member of the species yearns for freedom. Give them an inch and, eventually, they’ll take a mile. Liberty is inevitable. Plant the seed in any soil. A mighty oak will grow."
I’m torn. Sometimes I’m an exceptionalist, sometimes a generalist. But I found myself wondering the other day whether we shouldn’t treat "touchy selfhood" as a necessary (or at least generative) condition of liberty.
Consider the moment in which someone with standing (the superordinate party) asks anyone with less standing (the subordinate party) to do something. Sometimes the subordinate party will bristle a little. He might go further than this, and resist, performing the task but doing so "ungraciously." He might actually refuse the task altogether. In all cases, he is likely to make a show of his irritation with a standard nonverbal vocabulary. He will glare, grimace and/or glower. Even when compliance is forthcoming, the superordinate party is sent a message. The subordinate resented being asked and may in fact doubt the authority and even the standing of the superordinate party.
Harrumph! When the subordinate bristles, resists or refuses, the superordinate takes umbrage, too. Other subordinates would perform this task willingly and with good grace. What’s the matter with this guy? Someone asks, "Don’t you find him a little prickly, difficult, contrary?" The answer is resounding, "Oh, totally. He’s touchy!"
This little status drama can be played out in any number of venues. The classic locus for contemporary culture is the relationship between a parent and a teenager. There is always a couple of "contested" years in which parents insist on an authority that teens are reluctant to accept. When parents persist, teens respond with spectacular displays of touchiness, complete with phrases like, "you’re not the boss of me."
When the West was more hierarchical, touchiness was the order of the day. I’m reading a biography of Samuel Pepys, the 17th century diarist, and there is lots of contretempt between Pepys the master and Jane, the servant. It surprises us to learn that Jane was Pepys’ sister. But the problem was much bigger than servants. Everyone in the hierarchical West was, with the exception of the monarch, subordinate to someone. Aristocratic touchiness was especially common when differences of rank were not clear, or when one party demanded too much deference or gave too little. It is easy to find many instances of touchiness in the historical record and it looks as if the West has been vibrating with same for many hundreds of years. Princes, punks and peddlers all have this in common.
Touchiness was (and remains) symptomatic of a certain status tenderness. It tells us that there was some question about what is owed to whom. Touchy selfhood is never quite certain what the boundaries of role and obligation are. And this lack of clarity means that everyone is inclined to wear away at the wharf to which they are tethered. Any liberty that is not nailed is snapped up. Any liberty that is disputable is disputed. Even when obligations are clear, they are still protested with a theater of gesture and attitude. Westerners chaff. What looked like bad manners or bloodymindedness is actually a collective declaration that the present "liberty allowance" is not enough, and that acts of compliance are offered under protest.
Now the question is this: is touchiness universal? You’re asking me? My guess is that it isn’t it. I would be surprised if touchiness were exclusively Western. But I would also be surprised if touchiness were exhibited equally by every culture. I think there are some cultures that refuse touchiness. And where touchiness is prevented, I think it’s probably true that liberties of every kind are harder to achieve. It could be that economic, political, and cultural liberty sometimes starts as touchiness.
In the long term, every culture must fight a war between two phrases: "don’t you know who I am?" and "who do you think you are?" It may be that the latter wins, and liberty flourishes, more surely when selves are a little touchy.
References
Tomalin. Claire. 2003. Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. London: Penguin.
Acknowledgments:
Mark Yellin
Thanks
For the image found at Fictional Cities: Florence, Venice, London here.
I have used some of these myself. And I am glad to be reminded that I’m using remaindered language, with "best used by" dates nearing expiry.
Gawker readers commented on the advisory.
Gina Tapani says,
Oh, crap. This means I actually have to think of original things to say now."
Fuzzy_Duffel_Bag says,
I think I just shit in my pants a little.
MattGaymon says,
This post made me throw up all over myself.
Twizzlers for President says that the "X is the new Y" formula is
fun to use nonsensically, as in ‘sweatpants are the new Kiera Knightley.’
What’s odd is that many of the 85 commentators exhibit a cliche of their own. Many of them use those kooky, little monikers that became so fashionable in the internet world in the 1990s.
Thus we get comments from Worker #3116 and Karen UhOh, RayGunn, Little Mintz Sunshine, girlgeorge, smashteroid, and supastah. (Only 15 of the 90 comments use the most literal choice: the author’s name.)
Here’s what makes an anthropologist nervous. At the very moment these people gather to participate in Gawker’s snootiness, they expose themselves to snootiness. (There is one magnificent exception, one that takes the smart-aleck formula and raises it to new heights: The Assimilated Negro.)
But how long can it be before Gawker blows the whistle on the banality of this naming convention? When do they turn in their readers? Would they dare? Yo, just how much journalistic integrity does Gawker have?
Gawker. 2006. Bad lingo: Blog-Media Cliches. Gawker.com. December 15, 2006. here.
I didn’t catch much of the People’s Choice Awards on Tuesday, but I did see Vince Vaughn’s acceptance speech. Unless my ears deceived me, I believe he actually called Jennifer Aniston "genuine." I believe he said, "Jennifer Aniston [is] one of the funniest, most genuine people I know."
Wow, I goggled, when was the last time I called anyone "genuine?" Well? When was the last time you called someone "genuine?" If I were Malcolm Gladwell, and I curse the Gods each day that I am not, I would have several weeks to do the linguistic detective work: where is this term from, how has its meaning changed, where is it headed? But no. I am obliged to do what every blogger does, google the heck out of the term, and see where that takes me. (What we really need is a Bletchley Park, a place dedicated to breaking the codes of popular culture.)
Finding 1
Genuine is still big in the red states. I think that’s because God and country still mean something, and sincerity, like one’s bond, is a measure of character and one of the most fungible of the capitals of social life. This could be what Vince means, but I’d be very surprised if it were. The guy is Hollywood through and through and Hollywood is a placed filled with actors who regard any manifestation of the genuine as a failure of talent. More important, Vaughn’s on-screen persona makes fun of genuine through his special brand of faux sincerity. (See for instance the Wedding Crashers.) Furthermore, Vince came up on that coastal revival of the lounge guy with rat pack attitude. (See for instance, Swingers.) When Vince calls Jen genuine, this is not the red states talking.
Finding 2
Genuine is a term people use in personals, as in, "I am looking for genuine man with a college education, an interest in the arts, and who does not mind that I share my Upper West side one-bedroom apartment with 9 cats, and a dog called Rickey." When you are looking for love in this very public way you expose yourself to people who may treat you lightly or badly. Genuine, in this case, is a code word. It sends a warning: do not trifle with my affections. Is genuine a tell tale that Vince uses the personals? Er, no.
Finding 3
The reason that genuine was strange to my ears, I think, is that it is losing ground to a new competitor, authenticity.
Listen to this passage from the internet. Genuine gets a bit part here, and no more.
I have a good friend who is the most authentic person I know. People love being around her because she is so real, with no pretence. She makes everyone feel special, not in a phoney way; she makes them feel special because she is genuinely interested in them. She values people. She values relationships, knowing that even the most causal relationship, a moment with a stranger, has the potential to gift them and us in some way. And so she lives her life day-by-day, moment-by-moment, open, honest and receptive to others. It sounds simple but it’s actually revolutionary, given that most of us approach others with an agenda of our own. The question you must ask yourself is do you value relationships? Are you willing to be authentic yourself in order to have authentic relationships?
We can see why authentic is overtaking genuine in these circles. Genuine is too often merely nice. When we apply the term to something more than nice, we are usually giving praise for the extent to which the person so called has performed the social emotion in question in precisely the right way. (He told me he was sorry my dog Rickey had died. He seemed so genuine!) Genuine is about being true to your responsibility to saying and doing and of course feeling the right thing. Being genuine is distinctly not about being interesting, unexpected, spontaneous or unorthodox. That’s authenticity’s job.
Now we’re getting somewhere. This notion of genuine does seem to correspond nicely with Jennifer Aniston’s public persona. She plays characters who are good and true and kind and solicitous, and yes, sincere, and most of all, genuine. We could call her authentic. But there is no evidence that Jen is giving us the essential self, the real her. It’s as if even her characters are playing a role. This is the path to becoming America’s sweetheart. (And the road away from same, the one taken by Julia Roberts for instance, is always roles that forsake nice for something stranger, darker, more complex, or less rule bound.) But the costs are high. Signal clarity comes at the price of a certain narrowness and predictability.
I do understand that Vaughn was laboring to find just the right word to acknowledge a person with whom he has been linked and then delinked in the public mind. Perhaps "genuine" seemed a way of giving praise without signally affection. But it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? When Vince calls Jen calls genuine, he is giving us a teleology and the very arch of the relationship?
Well, that’s it from everyone here at Bletcheley Park. Good night, every one. Drive safely!
References and acknowledgments
The quote on authenticity is from the website here.
YouTube: Vince Vaughn accepting his People’s Choice Award here.
Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. here. (I could hear myself reproducing Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity in some of this, and thought I had better give him this acknowledgment.)
I visited Allure Magazine in the Times Square building of Conde Nast last week.
I got to see what can only be described as a "photo pour." A editor works in a smallish room with her two assistants as if sitting on a rope bridge over an Andean river gushing fat with spring run off. The photos pass before her in the thousands. She is charged with making choices that she will pass upward to her editor, the editor of Allure Magazine.
I felt like shouting, "What about that one? Hey, what if you missed that one!" Ok, sure, I suffer Monk-like indecision. ("These socks or these ones?") So this is bound to impress me. But as the photos poured past us, my anxiety grew. How can the editor be sure she doesn’t want that batch. And more pressingly, how can she spot the one photo she wants as it races by? The ratio of churn to choice must be something like 2000 to 1. How can she know?
Yes, maybe it’s a matter of Gladwell’s Blink. It is also a matter of Bateson’s Ecology of the Mind. This editor’s powers of pattern recognition are porous. She has been trained, prepped by her editors, and recalibrating by last night’s 60 Minutes and this morning’s New York Times. Conscious choices are constantly being fed into the unconscious field. Most blinks start as a wink (and an editorial nod) from someone or something. This editor is programmed and self programming.
What’s weird is that the editor is not just choosing good photographs. The photos she choses have the ability to arrest our attention and program us. Ah, yes, that photo captures the celebrity of the moment, and exactly how and why she is the celebrity of the moment. Ah, here’s a photo that captures the trend that matters now, and yes, that photo helps show me what makes the trend compelling. This editor is choosing photographs that diminish the noise of contemporary culture and make good on every Conde Nast magazine’s promise: that the reader is now a little more calibrated, a little more part the loop, and a little less overwhelmed by the Andean rush of contemporary life. By choosing photographs, this editor is, in a much better than trivial sense, choosing us.
The Frank Gehry cafeteria was a revelation of its own. As if to satisfy my fondest hope of a celebrity sighting, there at the "first table" was Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. As luck would have it, Ms. Wintour was surveying the room. Now it was in the Renaissance, a very big deal for anyone at court, to fall, even for a moment, within the gaze of a monarch. Did I pass muster? Hard to know. For the record, I was wearing a black mock turtle neck, gray flannel pants, while carrying a briefcase, a green apple and a bottle of Root beer. I wish now that I had been juggling the latter but you can’t have everything. But I feel certain I made an impression. I mean who wears gray flannel pants these days? The restaurant is a kind of cafeteria, a good cafeteria to be sure, the best company food in the city, so they say at Conde Nast. And this means that people have to stand in line. And this means they have plenty of time to scope one another out. This is a "gaze economy" of major proportions.
It’s a slightly anxious place, because a) everyone looks fabulous, except of course your devoted anthropologist and, b) they are engaged in the activity that threatens their fabulousness, eating. This is a world in which a carrot stick counts as calorie loading.
Design to the rescue. Or at least Mr. Gehry to the rescue. As you leave the cafeteria, you pass a running, reflective wall that makes you look 10 pounds lighter. (This photograph, above, captures the line of the wall, but it has now been resurfaced with something silvery.) I will tell you in my mock turtle neck and my gray flannel pants, I had an anti-narcissistic moment, I can tell you, and resolved then and there to lose twenty pounds and ditch the flannels. I mean, really, who is that guy?
An anthropologist who studies America is struck by the fact that there are some people in this culture who believe they know better than other people in this culture. It’s not always a delusion and when indeed they do know better, we are well served. Smart, thoughtful people give us the benefit of their advice.
But too often the critics act as if they are they only ones who "get it," that without them the rest of us wander without light, unable to see what is wrong, unable to see that something is wrong, and certainly unable to put wrong things right.
Here is A.O. Scott in today’s New York Times.
[T]he phenomenon of family viewing – the mothers and fathers of American taking their children to the movies – has become a central cultural activity consistent with the highly participatory style of parenthood currently in vogue. I would not wish it otherwise, but I also worry that the dominance of the family film has a limiting, constraining effect of the imaginations of children.
Here the film critic presumes to know what happens in the interaction between child and family film. Mr. Scott may actually have done research here or consulted those who do, but I would be very surprised if this were the case. No, this is the almost certainly something that has just occurred to Mr. Scott. It is his little worry, a stray thought. Now, lots of us have lots of stray thoughts and some of us are shameless in our efforts to blog and flog these thoughts. But only a few of us presume to issue a "cultural advisory" of this kind, as if Mr. Scott were a tweedy version of the Director of the Center for Disease Control and called upon here to put the nation on alert. ("Honey, where’s that Jules et Jim DVD? Tommy’s seen Shrek so many times his eyes are starting to roll back in his head.")
But that the real problem is not the alert, it’s that the alert is always the same. Oh, look out, popular culture is dumbing down and bottoming out. In this case, that movies has fantastically imaginative as Nemo are putting our children at risk. Evidently, these critics believe themselves to be the canaries in the coal mine. When they exercise their higher faculties it is to see what we cannot, that our culture is in trouble. It is this presumption (this arrogation) of superior knowledge that puts my teeth on edge.
Oh, sure, I’m sure there are moments when warnings are in order. But warning is the critic’s penny whistle. Really, there are only so many tunes it can play. The trouble is there is a lot of other, more pressing, critical work to do. Indeed, the warning function of the critic is now so reflexive, it does not represent a genuinely analytical or explanatory accomplishment. Now, it’s just yet another blast on dime store plastic. The anthropologist can help feeling that there are other things to observe, but as long as the critic is captive of critical orthodoxy, the real work of anthropology (or whatever one calls one brand of pattern recognition) goes undone.
We know where this comes from the what Lionel Trilling called the “subversive” role of the critic: “to detach the reader from habits of thought, giving him ground from which to judge and condemn the culture around him.” Now that the culture has escaped the uniformities and conformities of mass culture, this work is done. (I wonder if it was ever necessary. I think popular culture rehabilitated itself. Aaron Spelling lived long enough to see TV transform itself. What displaced or at least transcended him, was the likes of Homicide’s Tom Fontana and The Wire’s David Simon, and not Lionel Trilling’s intellectuals.)
Anne Thompson has a great column today in the Hollywood Reporter. She described the new novel by Tolkin, Return of the Player. (Tolkin wrote The Player the Altman made the basis of his famous movie of the same name. Anne is very kind but it is hard not to suppose that Tolkin is not applying old model criticism to a new model world.
Return of the Player provides a moral dissection of the values of the entertainment world’s moneyed elite. It’s about how panic, selfishness, greed and fear can "drive you to do things you shouldn’t do," [Tolkin] says. "It’s about the difference between panic and social responsibility."
This is boiler plate and the very stain that every word smith wishes to inflict about tinsel town. But when we read on we discover that some of the fear and panic comes not from greed but something else.
"The entertainment industry has been unsure of where things are going, how to conduct business, what movies should be or what entertainment is. It is TV, or a download? Everyone was grabbing at what the Next Thing should be. I was interested in that anxiety, fear and panic. That’s what the book is about."
Hmm. If this is what the book is really about, it’s not about Hollywood, it’s about all the world. Everyone is grabbing at what the Next Thing will be. Our professional lives depend upon it. At least the Hollywood execs are coming to terms with the world as it is, which is more than can be said for the camp that promotes critical orthodoxy.
But am I not the author of a massive contraction? Do I not presume to know better when I criticize critics for presuming to know better? No and here’s why. I never think its my job to give warning about what is happening in contemporary culture. (Let this blog be entered into evidence.) It’s my job to describe it and to have a go at explaining it. My private feelings are a private matter. I may be appalled by My Super Sweet 16, but that doesn’t matter. The last thing the world needs is another Mr. Smarty Pants rendering judgment. I can’t believe our patience has held out so long. Surely, the time will come when we repudiate the experts. (For a wonderfully quiet act of repudiation, see the article by Chris Hedges on Mark Chrispin Miller.)
No doubt I feel too passionately about this issue because I’m Canadian. Wha? I was raised on the West coast of Canada where we were the constant recipient of moral advise and policy directives from the mandarins in Ottawa. We thanked God we were thousands of miles away from the center of things, and a little sorry that telegraph, telephone, and newspaper distribution stretched far enough to reach us. We hoped that one day Canada Post would break down, that mountain paths would fill in, that train tracks would twist and buckle, that cloud cover would prove inpenetrable, and that finally our betters would just shut up and leave us alone. I don’t know what we thought we would do with our little village in the rain forest but at least our mistakes would be our own.
But I digress. The point I wish to make here is that fantastic intellectual resources are now locked up in the "critical" school of cultural commentary. We can only release these resources when we persuade the offenders to give up judgment and take up the work of explanation, or at least investigation. More plainly, no more pony rides on the high horse of righteous indignation. No more cultural advisories from the Center for Disease Control. Cease and desist judging us from on high. Or as my dear friend Hargurchet Bhabra used to say, it isn’t popular culture anymore, it’s our culture. Judge it if you must, explain it if you can.
References
Hedges, Chris. 2001. Public Lives: Watching Bush’s Language, and Television. The New York Times. June 13, 2001. here.
Scott, A.O. 2007. And You’ll Be a Moviegoer, My Son. The New York Times. January 5, 2007. here.
Thompson, Anne. 2007. Risky business: Tolkin’s new "Player" in everyman territory. The Hollywood Reporter. January 5, 2007. here. subscription required.
Thanks to Zyra for the image. See Zyra’s website here.
I watched heroic quantities of TV over the holidays. And I was struck by how much comedy now comes from characters who are self interested, self serving, self aggrandizing.
I’m thinking of Charlie Harper played by Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, and Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother. Both Charlie and Barney are in it for themselves. They have no empathy. They have no principles. They have no shame. They are serene in the knowledge that they are without moral reflex of any kind…and that that’s ok. The rest of us a struggling to live a good life (more or less, give or take) and these guys just couldn’t care less.
There are British origins to this character, let’s call him the unapologetic male. John Cleese’s character on Fawlty Towers, Martin Clunes’ character on Men Behaving Badly, and Rickey Gervais’ character on The Office all made a contribution. It is worth pointing out that these British tokens of the type were just as likely to make us cringe as make us laugh, whereas the American instance is appealing even when appalling.
American contributions came from Phil Hartman’s character on NewsRadio, David Spade’s character on Just Shoot Me, Jack on Will and Grace, and perhaps even, and distantly, Archie Bunker from All in the Family. There is a bit of the SNL Bill Murray and a bit of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers, but there is a difference between being self possessed and being self centered. And there is a bit Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy but there’s a difference between self centered and dumb as a post. Ron Burgundy is too dim to know better. Charlie and Barnie know exactly what they’re doing.
The unapologetic male is a species that appears only in comedy. And this must be because someone who acted like this in a simulation of real life would be intolerable. He would, in fact, be Borat. The unapologetic male always exists always in a series (and not a one-off movie). We have to get to know him. We have to grow to love him. It takes awhile to forgive him. Something. But duration counts here.
The unapologetic male is a still minority face in TV comedy which continues to be dominated by characters like Frasier, The King of Queens, Old Christine, Will and Grace, or the Seinfeld crew, all of whom are usually struggling to do the right thing, and ruefully bad at it. Is it just me, but does the unapologetic male appear to be gaining on the outside. Is Charlie Harper the future of TV comedy.
Why is the unapologetic male so funny? Well, I guess that everyone likes what William James called a moral holiday, the occasional moment when the rules of decency do not apply. But Charlie Harper and Barney Stinson are always on moral holiday. Surely, we should tire of them. Why aren’t they a one-note whistle, predictable and finally annoying. But this is wrong too. Charlie and Barney are characters that comedy writers love to write for and we love to listen to. It’s as if our expectation of the wrong, selfish, abominable thing never goes for enough. Charlie and Barney are always one step ahead of us.
I think the Basil Fawlty character worked in England because the English are generally speaking more careful, more exacting in social life. Watching someone shambling and shameless is good fun. But we Americans are not so constrained. Haven’t we always been famous for our candor and freedom? Perhaps this was only the case when we didn’t really have to pay attention to different points of view and new diversity-borne delicacies in the workplace. Maybe Charlie and Barney represent the "good old" days when Americans weren’t proceeding with caution. I really hope this is not it.
We could look at the unapologetic man as progress, an evolutionary development even. Feminism demanded a more sensitive male, and the likes of Alan Alda obliged. Then Madonna sounded the all-clear signal with her "boy toy" video, and many men took this as license to retire to Morton’s, order steak and whiskey, and return to the old rules of gender. In fact, many males began to think of themselves as "dogs," as big, stupid, but lovable, brutes driven by appetite, capable of only the smallest, simplest niceties. The unapologetic male, at least he’s a step up.
The obits painted an odd picture of our culture this year.
I mean I can see how a culture could produce a James Brown. I can see how a culture could produce a Gerald Ford. But James Brown and Gerald Ford?
It’s almost impossible to think about these two in the same thought. You have to shift frames and assumptions like crazy. And sometimes you can’t. It’s like having one foot on the dock and the other in the row boat when the two suddenly part company. Mismatched pairs are hard to think.
But Brown and Ford are the only mismatched pairs for 2006.
Aaron Spelling, check. Mickey Spillane, check. But Aaron Spelling and Mickey Spillane?
Robert Altman, ok. Steve Irwin, ok. But Altman and Irwin?
Oriana Fallaci, ok. Don Knotts, ok. Fallaci and Knotts?
We are a mysterious people.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Down the Avenue for the December 31, 2006 post "Deaths, Deaths, Deaths" here.
Yesterday The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the official poster for the 79th Annual Academy Awards. The poster features phrases that have lept from the screen into life:
Here’s looking at you, kid.
How do you fight an idea?
Rosebud.
The horror. The horror.
You can’t handle the truth.
I’ll be back.
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Snap out of it.
Stella!
If you build it, they will come.
This is a brilliant bit of brand building, isn’t it? Hollywood ceased to be a matter of mere entertainment a long time ago. It is now the supplier of basic cultural materials, the very stuff of our self and collective definition. Good on the Academy for reminding us that Hollywood writers write for all of us, and that Hollywood directors direct even the details of our personal lives.
Two ethnographic notes.
1. A couple of years ago, I was searching for the ghost of Mordecai Richler in the bars of Montreal. I had found one of his favorites, a quiet, smoky place, dark wood, good scotch, and, bang, the door swung open and a man entered shouting, "yeah, baby!" If I had been visiting from the hinterland of Ethiopia, say, this might have been a baffling cultural moment. What was the shouter shouting? Why was the shouter shouting?
Everyone else knew exactly what was going on. This man was performing a phrase from an Austin Powers movie. And the odd thing was this didn’t seem the least bit odd. It wasn’t even irritating. It was our culture of the moment. All of us in the bar, even those pretending to be sophisticated Richler readers, had tried the phrase out, perhaps not at this volume or so publicly, but the phrase was part of our vocabularies too.
2. The other day I caught myself in a bit of borrowing of my own. I was reading something really stupid, and my reaction was to make precisely the sound that Alan Arkin, as Dr. Oatman, makes in Gross Pointe Blank (1997) when he’s finally had it with Martin Q. Blank. It’s a low, small phatic grunt that mixes exasperation, resignation and repudiation. What’s odd is that this proved to be EXACTLY the thing I need to "say" at the moment, despite the fact that I knew I was borrowing from Hollywood. How strange that a fragment of a movie should have lodged in me in such a way that I could summon it at the very moment I needed it. (I should say that because this is a favorite film I have seen it several times. I don’t think I ever "channel" films I’ve only seen once.)
Cultural caveat
Of course, we don’t like the sound of this one bit. We treasure the idea that we are as cultural actors autonomous, self created, self directing, self authored. The idea that we should all be captive of a phrase like "Yeah, baby" seems unlikely and offensive. The idea that some part of my personal life should have been written by Tom Jankiewicz, directed by George Armitage, and crafted by Alan Arkin, this doesn’t sit well. A little voice within takes umbrage. No, no, I am the author of Grant McCracken! Aren’t I? If I borrow from Hollywood, what does that say about my precious selfhood?
The fact of the matter is a river runs through us. (There, it happened again.) We do not just swim the media stream, it pours through us. I believe that phrases and gestures are crucial to the way we stay in touch with our dynamic culture. In the 1980s, David Letterman’s characteristic "yeah" complete with pumping hand gesture became a way that people showed their identification with the new values of the moment. The phrases, "snap out of it," and "get a life" performed this work as well. In the 1990s, a new semiotics was installed. New films prevailed.
But we appropriate gesture and language secretly. A friend of mine in Montreal openly admired how well a friend of hers could do the noise made by Martians in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. Oh, but her friend was not pleased. It was as if my friend had accused her friend of fakery or something. Apparently, we believe that our appropriation of Hollywood phrases is exactly that, not merely a robotic repetition, but a cunning redeployment. Once we take it on, it belongs to us, and expresses the authentic self, not some borrowed one. (As T.S. Eliot used to say, "bad fans imitate, good fans steal.")
What the president of the Academy, Sid Ganis, says is true. The lines on the poster are everywhere around us in “in everyday conversations, in meetings, at parties, or walking down the street. They … give us great shorthand ways to express how we feel about […] things.” And with this poster I wonder if Hollywood contemplates declaring and perhaps recapturing the highest order value it creates in our culture…as it creates our culture.
There is no danger that Hollywood will find us in copyright violation when we enter a bar shouting, "Yeah, baby!" But it does make sense that Hollywood should take credit where credit is due, for the fact that it is perhaps the most important supplier of the cultural materials with which we direct, write, and perform the details of our everyday lives.
Much is changing in Hollywood at the moment, but this "value add" grows, I believe, ever more important.
References
Melidonian, Teni. 2006 Oscar@ Gets Quoted. Press release for the Oscar poster for 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. Prefab culture. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. December 8, 2002. here. (for the role of TV in the creation of cultural materials.)
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Academy for permission to reproduce this poster.
Hats off to TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles for their work here. (If anyone knows the names of the people on the creative and account team, please let me know, and I will add them here.)
The "culture matters" theme continues to rattle around in my head. Take this theme seriously and I believe we would serve not just the corporation but the body politic. We could actually help end the culture wars.
The trouble is simple. Our culture has become profusely inventive. Trends have become more numerous. The sheer scale and variety of our cultural space has expanded.
This trouble makes trouble: people panic.
The term "moral panic" was invented by Stanley Cohen in 1972. It means
a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society."
But these days the moral panic is provoked not by a false or exaggerated perception of one group or behavior. Moral panic now exists as a generalized response to all those groups and all that behavior out there. And this means that we are looking at an order of moral panic from which most people never recover. They find menace coming at them for every quarter. Deviance blossoms before their very eyes. Poor bastards, panic is upon them all the time.
Let’s be fair. It is true that our culture is a profusion of novelty and discontinuity. All of us who are writers and readers here at the intersection of anthropology and economics are aware that the rules of marketing, among other things, are changing as we write. There are new media, new motives, new measures, new mysteries. It’s enough to make your eyes bleed, or at least water.
But everyone is surrounded by mysteries. Is Facebook or YouTube something to be reckoned with, or really nothing at all. (I guessed wrong on reality TV and game shows. Thank God, I’m not running a network.)
We keep pushing the boundary. Seinfeld was interesting. Then came Curb Your Enthusiasm. Same sensibility, but the hero is not handsome, likable or heroic. News Radio was funny in a way. The Office is funny in new ways. First there was Merv, now there is Ellen. First Peter Sellers, now Sasha Baron Cohen.
The world of possibility is expanding. There may be some people who are who understand all of this, but for most of us there are now big chucks of our culture that are terra incognito. The world is impenetrable. Parts of popular culture, once witlessly transparent, are now "grayed out" and removed from comprehension.
And we know what happens when this happens. People start posting "wild beasties" notices and raising the voice of alarm. Panic gives way to politics and religion. Before you know it, alarm starts passing laws, banning things, vilifying things like gay marriage, all in a desperate effort to legislate order. Panic turns into gated suburbs of the actual and figurative kind.
Oh, you thought I was talking about the Right. No, not at all. Well, not only. I am also talking about the Left. There is panic here too. The Left was persuaded that capitalism, like the TV that was its crudest cultural expression, was a waste land. Nothing could come of this, they assured us. And along came Silicon Valley, an improved independent film industry, and risk taking television, to name a few. Another favorite notion of the Left is that innovation and cultural commotion must come from the avant-garde, the margin of society. It cannot come from the mainstream. But now of course it comes routinely from the mainstream, which proves ever more inventive. (Scrap booking is a case in point. Women in the mainstream reinvented the photo album.)
This is not the way the world is supposed to look! And the Left has embraced a moral panic of their own, which now expresses itself in an intellectual rigidity, accusation and name calling, and extra laps on the high horse of indignation. Lewis Black is a deeply frightened man. Ranting, that’s what moral panic has induced in the Left.
Oh, but I see I have climbed up on a high horse of my own. Here’s the point I want to make: that if we were to map contemporary culture and make it less mystifying, we wouldn’t just make the corporation smarter, we would diminish the moral panic that intensifies the ideological battles of our time. A little more knowledge would make for a lot less panic. I don’t mean that we could create consensus. But if we were to create new cultural literacy for both the Right and Left, we could create common terms of reference and newly mutual understanding. We would have managed to restore some part of this culture to itself. Now if you will excuse me I will return to my riding.
But not everyone thinks so. There are marketers who neglect, diminish, or exclude culture.
Excluding culture
Christensen, Cook and Hall say the marketer’s task is "not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do." They urge the construction of "purpose brands," brands, that is to say, devoted to declaring the function of the product. In this model, function is all. Culture is excluded.
I do not mean to be discourteous or to indulge in ad hominem attack, but I believe these two things to be true: 1) that it is wrong to give advice on branding unless the speaker is knowledgeable about culture, 2) Professor Christensen knows very little about contemporary culture and nothing at all about that part of contemporary culture we call popular culture. (I am less sure of point 2, and I would be pleased to hear that I am wrong.)
There may have been a time when knowledge of culture was optional. This time has passed. Brands are made up of cultural materials. They are fashioned by the application of cultural instruments. They are constantly transformed by cultural forces.
There is now an additional reason why people interested in branding must know about culture. Indeed, we may treat this new factor in terms Christensen brought to the field. Culture is a new "disruptive technology." (I speak metaphorically. What I mean is that culture is now as disruptive as technology.) Culture contains a surface churn, a boiling innovation that helps refashion consumer taste and preference. It also contains deeper, structural changes, that are transforming the very grammars of innovation.
I believe Professor Christensen has no knowledge of the churn and no knowledge of the structure. I further believe he does not see this as an intellectual deficit, still less as an intellectual deficit that disqualifies him as a branding scholar. But it is. This is a new rule: those who suffer this deficit may not offer branding advice, instruction or models. I expect someone will rush to the Professor defense, saying "well, the guy only claims expertise in the effects of technology." But this ended when, with Cook and Hall, he offered a new model of branding.
For a more detailed version of my argument, please go here.
Another marketing scholar who excludes culture is Gerry Zaltman. Professor Zaltman believes that he may perform his "Zmet" analysis unaided by a knowledge of culture. He solicits visual metaphors from consumers and then presumes to tell us what they mean. Here it is: every single semantic and structural elements in the visual array created by a consumer comes from or has been transformed by contemporary culture. A business school professor removed from contemporary and popular culture is not just unqualified to perform the Zmet analysis, he is disqualified from performing it.
For a more extended version of this argument, please go here.
Diminishing culture
Clotaire Rapaille is famous for "cracking the code" of culture by his study of cultural archetypes. The trouble with this Jungian approach is that there are too few archetypes to decode a culture as far flung, various and changeable as our own. And in any case, Rapaille inevitable offers up a key word or phrase that is meant to stand as his moment of illumination. This is so simplifying and reductive that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have seen MBA students more intellectual depth and acuity in cracking a single case study than Rapaille’s demonstrates in "cracking" the code of India. I mean, really.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Kevin Roberts has offered a "lovemarks" model in which culture is becomes a matter of emotion, and the brand a mark of love. This is all and well, I suppose, but culture is vastly more and more complicated than anything dreamed of in Roberts philosophy. Culture helps shape and specify the emotions. It also creates the very categories of perception and conception with which the consumer perceives and conceives of the world of goods.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Cool hunters are diminishing in another way. The only part of culture that interested them are the things that a trendy and brand new. Its all the froth of the churn, with nary a thought for the deep structures. I have seen the cool hunters at work, shaming big corporations for not being hip enough. But big corporations cannot set their cycles of innovation only to the trend of the moment. They must spot deeper cycles of change. Knowing about culture can’t be a pursuit of cool.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Neglecting culture
Surely, the most recent act of neglected culture (and marketing theory and practice is of course filled with these acts) is the Blue Oceans book. This is of course a book about discovering new opportunities, blue oceans, where the enterprise may flourish without the usual rock ’em sock ’em competition that characterizes mature categories. What is odd about this book si that it does not having any systematic idea of culture, and if culture is not a domain for blue oceans, well, tell it to Steve Jobs and the creators of iPod. Yes, this is a new technology, but what gives it a blue ocean character is the extent to which it helped occupy and then transform a cultural domain. But there is another issue here. It is culture that supplies the high winds and high waters that periodically turn even the bluest waters into a treacherous place to do business.
For an extended version of this argument, please go here.
Summing up
Culture matters to marketing. But there are many, well placed and influential parties who would exclude it from the equation. I don’t believe you can do branding, unless you get culture. I don’t believe you can do marketing, but there are corners when perhaps the culturally illiterate can get away with it. For the rest of us, it is time to put this right.
It is no longer an option. Now it’s an obligation. It is time for business schools to snap out of it. It is time for senior managers, and especially CMOs, to add an investigation of culture to their due diligence. It is time for the cool hunters to cease and desist their dreadful partiality. It is time for scholars who talk about marketing without the benefit of a knowledge of culture to come to their senses. There was a time when every serious player in the world of marketing was obliged to add a knowledge of statistics to their skill set. That is we are talking about here. Culture is now standard issue marketing knowledge, and the professional world of the marketer will have to change. Some players will have to retire from the field. This rest of us will have to add a cultural competence to our skill set. Because culture matters to marketing.
A note of explanation:
Yes, that’s me in the picture. It was taken a couple of years when I was talking at PopTech (that’s the inimitable Bob Metcalfe in the background). I like it because it makes my hand look like it’s one of the weeding claws. That’s the way I think of this, the third piece, in the Culture Matters series. I’m weeding.
