Practising Culture (Taking Culture Seriously)

Practicing Culture

Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is not just products and representations but practices. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It is something people do – and do in rich variety and distinctive contexts as engaging case studies from the book reveal. For example; • • • •

In Russia’s most Western city, Kaliningrad, residents dig for artifacts symbolizing a German past – even though their parents only migrated to what was once Königsberg after WWII. From Spain to Poland to Canada advertising firms are hired to make nations into “brands,” a globally reproduced strategy for claiming to be distinctive in attractive and conventional ways. In Buenos Aires, opera listeners stand in packed galleries, listening as passionately as singers perform, closing their eyes and claiming to be elevated and remade by the music. In the U.S. fans of professional wrestling pride themselves on being smart enough to know how much is trickery and how the tricks work yet still believe in the spectacle.

Practicing Culture will reshape and invigorate the sociology of culture not only through internal development but through enhanced connections to the interdisciplinary social theory and to related fields like the Sociology of Knowledge and Ethnography. It will prove an essential tool for students and researchers of Cultural Theory, Contemporary Social Theory and Cultural Sociology. Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Science at New York University and President of the Social Science Research Council. Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and is University Professor of the Humanities at New York University.

Taking Culture Seriously is at the cutting-edge interface between sociology and culture. The books in this series shall be vital for students and researchers in sociology and closely related fields of cultural studies including communications, anthropology, history, human geography, and literary studies. Series Editors: Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett are among the contemporary leaders in bringing interdisciplinary social theory and empirical sociology of culture together.

Practicing Culture

Edited by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Practicing culture / [edited by] Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–415–41251–3 (hard cover) – ISBN 978–0–415–41250–6 (paper cover) 1. Culture. 2. Ethnology. 3. Manners and customs. 4. National characteristics. I. Calhoun, Craig J., 1952– II. Sennett, Richard, 1943– HM621.P73 2007 306.09–dc22 2007004042

ISBN 0-203-94495-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41251–X (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–41250–1 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–94495–X (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41251–3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41250–6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–94495–0 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors

vii ix

Introduction

1

CRAIG CALHOUN AND RICHARD SENNETT

1 “We have never been German”: the economy of digging in Russian Kaliningrad

13

OLGA SEZNEVA

2 Practicing poetry: a career without a job

35

AILSA CRAIG

3 Hot glass: the calorific imagination of practice in glassblowing

57

ERIN O’CONNOR

4 State power as field work: culture and practice in the French Survey of Historic Landmarks

82

ALEXANDRA KOWALSKI

5 New and improved nations: branding national identity

105

MELISSA ARONCZYK

6 Facts in the City: how London accountants simplify decisions

129

MATTHEW GILL

7 Managing doubt: professional wrestling jargon and the making of “smart fans” MARION WRENN

149

vi Contents 8 Beauty at the gallery: sentimental education and operatic community in contemporary Buenos Aires

171

CLAUDIO E. BENZECRY

9 The erotic life of electric hair clippers: a social history

193

ALTON PHILLIPS

10 Practicing authorship: the case of Brecht’s plays

215

MONIKA KRAUSE

Index

231

Illustrations

Tables 1.1 6.1 6.2

The ascending “life” of the Königsberg jetsam Champion Chicken: Profit and Loss Account Champion Chicken: Balance Sheet

19 134 135

Figures 1.1 1.2

Examples from a collection of Königsberg bric-à-brac A set of green-glass beer bottles with the engraving “Koenigsberg” 1.3 A digger resting his hands after completing the second pit 1.4 “Uncle Misha,” a senior digger, in his basement “laboratory” in which he sorts, processes and cleans the excavated junk 1.5 and 1.6 Market of Königsberg’s bric-à-brac 1.7 A collector with his collection 3.1 Sketch of penholder for a friend, Ernesto 3.2 Steps towards and of jacking 3.3 Instructor, Bill, jacking a caterpillar proficiently 3.4 and 3.5 Glass vessels in the glory hole 3.6 Subway sketches of goblets after blowing a goblet for the first time 3.7 The “globlet” 3.8 Kanik riding the bubble with the jacks 3.9 Sketch for glass vase with lip 3.10 Vase with lip 3.11 Sketch for footed low bowl 3.12 Footed low bowl 5.1 Banner of King Władysław Jagiełło (1351–1434), circa 1410 5.2 National flag of Poland constituted by Polish Parliament, circa 1919 5.3 Poland logo created by DDB Corporate Profiles, circa 2002 5.4 “Sol de Miró” logo. Courtesy Dirección General de Turespaña

17 18 21 24 25 28 60 64 64 67 69 70 73 75 75 76 76 106 106 106 108

viii Illustrations 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6

The Teatro Colón as seen from its back entrance The Opera House as seen from the gallery Leo J. Wahl’s Electric Hair Clipper, Patent Application Drawings, 1919 Manual hair clippers “Official Hair Styles for Men and Boys” “Thrifty Families Now Use Home Haircutting Kits” Elvis’s Army haircut “Beautify America – Get a Haircut”

173 186 194 198 201 202 204 206

Contributors

Melissa Aronczyk is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her dissertation research focuses on the phenomenon of nation branding and its implications for space, citizenship, and national identity. She is a 2006/07 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Fellow. Claudio E. Benzecry is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Recent publications include articles in Theory and Society, Ethnography, the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and Theory, Culture and Society. Ailsa Craig is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Fulbright Scholar. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. Her areas of interest include culture, identity, community, gender, and inequality. Matthew Gill is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The research for his chapter was conducted as part of his recent Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics, during which he is grateful to have been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Alexandra Kowalski holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Monika Krause studied at the universities of Munich, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at New York University. Her research interests include critical theory and the sociology of culture. Erin O’Connor is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her chief interests are ethnographic field methods, social theory, cultural sociology, and the

x Contributors sociology of knowledge. Her Ph.D. dissertation is an ethnography of the development of practical knowledge in glassblowing. Alton Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at New York University. His current research focuses on the social history of nevirapine and the provisioning of anti-retroviral treatment in developing and transitional economies. Olga Sezneva is a Collegiate Assistant Professor and the Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows. Her forthcoming book, Contingent Place, Tenacious Homeland, traces the conversion of the German city of Königsberg into the Soviet, and recently Russian, city of Kaliningrad. Marion Wrenn is a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University where she is working on her dissertation: Inventing Warriors: U.S. Philanthropies and the Post-War Reorientation of Foreign Journalists. She is a faculty member in New York University’s Expository Writing Program.

Introduction Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett

The interdisciplinary field of cultural studies and the disciplinary subfield of sociology of culture are both thriving intellectual enterprises. But curiously, especially in the United States, they have flourished more in parallel than in mutuality. The sociology of culture gained disciplinary recognition largely by operationalizing conventional sociological research methods for the study of specifically cultural objects of analysis – art, popular music, fashion – and by resisting interdisciplinary theoretical currents in favor of a staunchly empiricist agenda. This may have reflected disciplinary anxiety to make sure that the study of culture was not seen as “soft.” Many sociologists embraced objectivism, trying, in Durkheim’s phrase, to treat social facts as things. Their goal was an explanatory, not an interpretative science. In any case, sociologists of culture have learned less than they might have from other disciplines and interdisciplinary cultural studies. Conversely, the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies has been dominated by theoretical perspectives and largely literary analytic approaches that give too little attention to material social relations. Most work in cultural studies has been more interpretative, with the model of textual interpretation especially influential. Treat all of social life as texts, might have been the contrary motto, there is no outside of the text.1 A stronger sociological voice would have helped. But this would have required better as well as more sociology. In different ways, the two fields each helped reproduce an old notion of culture as a distinct domain, separate in particular from economy and society. This inhibited the infusion of critical cultural analysis into sociology as a whole and the integration of cultural analysis studies with political economy and structures of social relations in a more complete analytic approach. Recently cultural studies has seen more attention to political economy and a substantial turn towards ethnographic research (as indeed literary studies has turned a good deal of attention away from the close reading of texts and towards cultural history). During the same period, sociologists of culture

2 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett have both called for making cultural analysis more dynamic and attentive to creativity, action, and change; and sought to integrate it better into sociology.2 At the same time, a surge of interest in the work of Pierre Bourdieu offered the most influential approach to integrating attention to culture and society, and production and reproduction.3 The time is ripe for forging better connections. One key to making the connections stronger is the study of how culture lives in practice. The opposition between Durkheim and Derrida, between protostructuralism and poststructuralism, gets in the way of this, as more generally it gets in the way of strengthening and connecting the sociology of culture and cultural studies. An interplay between perspectives (as between fields) is much more promising. This book is the first in a series dedicated to bridge-building and two-way traffic between (1) sociology at large and the sociology of culture overly compartmentalized within it, (2) sociology and cultural studies, and (3) the U.S. and Britain. Anglo-American linkage offers a helpful reminder that the organization of sociology and its interdisciplinary relations could be different. What is often called “British cultural studies” is in fact a much more sociological version than its American counterpart, and this offers resources for better connections between the two fields. In Britain they are closely related partly because sociologists were deeply involved in the development of cultural studies, not least in the famous “Birmingham School” based at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). A close relationship to Marxist thought and especially Gramsci helped shape the British approach, underwriting a rethinking of sociology itself as well as the role of culture. The CCCS founder, Richard Hoggart, signaled the importance of embedding attention to culture in efforts to understand power and struggle in contemporary society (and vice versa). Key literary scholars such as Raymond Williams embraced a sociological orientation which both changed how they read canonical works and how they valued reading works outside the canon. For Hoggart and Williams, however, there was a critical edge to breaking down the division between high and low, elite and popular culture that was often lacking in the U.S. Hoggart’s classic book, The Uses of Literacy, analyzed the extent to which the expansion of cultural access in the postwar era had served not to provide workers and others with resources for struggle but to undermine more authentic popular cultural traditions and embed them in a mass culture.4 What became “popular culture,” in other words, ceased to be produced popularly in the communities of ordinary people and came instead to be centrally produced and distributed. But as his fellow key Birmingham researcher Stuart Hall suggested, while the reality of unequal power and capitalist organization had to be acknowledged, so did the extent to which capitalist media appropriated popular cultural forms they

Introduction 3 could not completely control, as well as the extent to which consumers of even mass culture could remake the meanings of cultural objects in practice. Audiences of mass culture were hardly passive receivers of a centrally planned message (as a generation of “audience response” analyses would attest). This work reached the U.S., interestingly, less through sociology than through cultural and media studies. These latter fields were more separate in the U.S. where new departments and schools were formed for cultural studies and communications. In America, the strongest initial base for cultural studies came from American studies, itself an amalgam of history and literature, but at least before the 1980s minimally linked to sociology (and social science more generally). It was transformed during the 1970s by an infusion of French theory, but this too came largely through literary studies (such as the Yale French Studies group within which deconstruction first became prominent). Poststructuralism did help shape a growing connection to anthropology, as did interdisciplinary appreciation of interpretative cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz. Connections to sociology remained much weaker, largely because of the dominance of so-called “positivist” methods (including not only some devaluation of interpretation in favor of treating social facts as things but also a discounting of texts in favor of other kinds of social facts, especially quantifiable ones). A sort of backdoor connection opened, however, as the field of communications expanded dramatically and incorporated media and cultural studies as central components. Sociologists had played a key role in the birth of communications studies – from Ferdinand Toennies through Robert Park on to key postwar figures such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. But the discipline of sociology didn’t wholeheartedly embrace communications research; sociologists such as Michael Schudson and Todd Gitlin moved to communications departments. This helped, however, to ensure that there would be a sociological dimension to the media and cultural studies that flourished there. The advantages of Britain’s stronger tradition of sociological cultural studies were undermined from the late 1970s onward by academic budget cuts that fell especially hard on sociology. Places for graduate students were restricted and posts for new Ph.D.s were hard to find. In 2002 the University of Birmingham closed the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (though the sociology department carries on work in the field). This reflected not only current budget priorities but also a crisis in academic reproduction that was decades in the making. Only recently has British academia begun expanding again. Meanwhile, as not altogether voluntary migrants, British sociologists (and others) helped to fuel the rise of cultural studies elsewhere. Australia became increasingly prominent in international cultural studies until undermined by its own crisis in academic financing and organization. In America, by contrast, both cultural studies and communications research grew enormously through the 1990s and the early years of the present century (and absorbed more than a few immigrants).

4 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett At the same time, the sociology of culture took off as an increasingly important subfield of American sociology. Studies of the social organizational processes involved in the “production of culture” were perhaps most prominent. Concerns ranged from gatekeeping (or the control of access to the conditions of cultural production and distribution) to distribution, to the ways these and other dimensions were integrated into overall systems of production and dissemination. Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds was perhaps the most important of the latter.5 Becker is also a reminder of the importance of symbolic interactionists and ethnographers indebted to the “Chicago School” of the earlier twentieth century. Both groups were widely mobilized in the new engagement with a sociology of culture. A section of the American Sociological Association on the sociology of culture was founded in 1988 and became one of the fastest growing. As valuable as this was, the institutionalization of the sociology of culture was itself something of an obstacle to both interdisciplinary and disciplinary connections. As we noted, it was disproportionately organized by the idea of a specific domain of cultural objects. It defined itself more by the objects of its attention than by the analytical perspective it could contribute to the analysis of all social phenomena, from class and community to work and the welfare state (and indeed the privatization movement of the last quarter century, which is as good an example as any of the need for sociology informed by both cultural analysis and political economy). As a result, it did less than it might have to spread cultural analysis throughout the discipline of sociology. The picture is far from bleak. On the contrary, much work is fascinating and connections are growing. The time is ripe, however, for more work that crosses the various problematic boundaries. The chapters in this book present such work. All are the products of graduate students and junior faculty members – a new generation that may overcome some of the boundaries its elders put in place. The boundary-making elders are roughly the age of the editors (though each thinks he has not been part of the problem). In this introduction we point to some of the resources in a still earlier generation – roughly that of our parents – which are being drawn on now to strengthen the integration of cultural analysis in sociology and forge stronger interdisciplinary relations. This series – of which this book is the first volume – presents the work of an Anglo-American research group, called NYLON because it began as a joint project of the sociology departments of New York University and the London School of Economics. Continuing to meet both separately and together, the New York and London groups have come to include people at Columbia University, the New School, Goldsmiths College and Cambridge University. Though we have guided and raised funds for this project it is to a large degree student-organized. The writers in this volume began as our students and are now our colleagues, teaching at a range of universities.

Introduction 5 We have sought in NYLON to model intellectual collaboration and international communication. We have started by bringing our own differences of intellectual perspective into the open and continued by encouraging all participants to make clear their own intellectual investments and passions and to be open to learning from those who see things differently. Students from both the U.S. and the U.K. have found it eye-opening to discover the differences in style, assumptions, and intellectual sensibilities that divide British and American sociology – even where broad orientations are similar. The studies discussed here share many concerns, thus, but not either a single topic of analysis or a single analytic perspective. What most unifies the chapters below is concern for the integration of social organization, social action, and the production of meaning – the ways in which social processes are turned by practical activity into cultural forms and in turn inform the improvisation of social practices. The objects are diverse. But in each case, the authors take up the social field within which cultural practice is situated, the narrative accounts participants give of their work and lives, the way value is constructed, and the interplay of conscious and unconscious orientations to the production of knowledge. Too often the sociology of culture takes on the static character of a sociology of cultural products. It is a study of paintings not painting; of values not valuing – or even more, of the place of markets and patrons in the circulation of paintings with too little attention to the creative processes by which they are made and engaged by viewers. In the memorable phrase of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), however, “Hunting is not those heads on the wall.”6 Jones was thinking of writing, but the point is equally true of reading, speaking, painting, playing concerts, and playing football. Culture is practice: embodied, engaged, interactive, creative, and contested.7 Moreover, the production and reproduction of culture is not confined to a specialized realm of officially cultural artifacts; it is vital to all aspects of social life. Recognizing this is part of what is meant by the phrase “cultural turn.” The cultural turn was named after an earlier and perhaps more fundamental “linguistic turn.” This centered on the recognition of linguistic practice as a form of action in which the use of words and syntax and grammar was never entirely complete or transparent, and often not adequate to the intentions of users. The ways in which language mediated human access to “reality” outside it demanded a shift of philosophical attention from “knowledge” to “meaning.” In a sense this reopened the debate between philosophers and orators that shaped arguments in ancient Greece. Was there “truth” independent of persuasion or perspective? Could humans know things directly or only in ways informed by words? It also marked a chapter in the running modern struggle over subjectivity and objectivity, the making of meaning and the certainty of facts. On the example of language, culture more generally was understood to be a matter of making meaning. Such meaning could be stabilized and

6 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett enforced by a variety of authorities and institutions, but never fixed completely. One of the delights of scholars in cultural studies was uncovering the ways in which convention and power maintained the stability of meaning – and then liberating meaning from those constraints. Meaning, on such readings, was inherently contestable. It was also never completely translatable, always at least partially context-specific and particular, and according to “strong” theories of culture “incommensurable” – a term that Thomas Kuhn had earlier borrowed from mathematics. The point was simply that sometimes one could mean something in one culture that one couldn’t quite mean in another. Such an approach always demanded some level of attention to practice. Culture was made and used (and instrumental accounts of such use were common, though they sometimes short-circuited the complexity of cultural practice).8 Culture was not uniform, many noted, but differed according to the position of the knower or speaker or creative actor. This is a key reason why an effort to make sense simultaneously of the power of culture and the place of power in sustaining and organizing culture was central to the generation of thinkers mentioned above. Even while participation in the sociology of culture grew, many American sociologists resisted the cultural turn in this sense. The sociology of culture has been shaped throughout its recent flourishing by strongly felt needs to convince sociology’s illusory “mainstream” of its empiricism and hardheaded rigor. This motivated the project, in Robert Wuthnow’s phrase, of trying to move “beyond the problem of meaning.”9 The problem of meaning signaled subjective interpretation and methodological softness, a loss of the objectivity that was to separate social science from the humanities. Many American (and other) sociologists of culture tried to stick to facts they could quantify, or which at least seemed more or less transparent. This impoverished the sociology of culture in some ways, focusing it perhaps too much on the artifacts of culture and especially patterns of access in cultural production and consumption (rather than creativity, experience, or interpretation). This is one reason why a turn to practice is particularly useful today. The contributions to this book take up especially the way culture is practiced in a range of specific occupational fields and lifestyle niches. Cultural studies and the sociology of culture have focused on identities, civilizations, texts, tastes and the production and circulation of cultural “objects.” Emphasizing practice puts each in a new light. Some ethnographers in both cultural studies and the sociology of culture have focused on practice – on ways of making things, relating to others, constituting value, and engaging performances (as a fan as well as a performer). Such practices are socially situated, and best grasped relationally. Like craft, or musical performance, they involve embodied learning and sensuous relations to the material world. The accidental pun in the phrase “practicing culture” is meaningful: it is both something one does and something one learns to do better by doing it.10

Introduction 7 As practice, culture is neither Bagehot’s “hard cake of custom” nor the realm of pure creativity idealized in notions of genius. It is made and remade in almost imperceptible small ways as well as occasional large bursts of innovation. As practice, culture is an achievement, not simply an environment. But it is an achievement of large-scale collective participation as well as of elite memory and exemplary performance. Better, perhaps, culture is an always incomplete, never entirely systematic weaving of achievements together. It is work. It is play. It is projects by which people try to persuade, entertain, lead, deceive, and arouse the passions of others. Because it exists in projects, it exists also in struggles – to get ahead, to redefine beauty, to promote morality, to resist ideological hegemony. Culture, as E. P. Thompson famously said of class, is a “happening.” It isn’t just there. It isn’t just structure. It doesn’t last forever. But neither is it altogether subject to our conscious control and creative choices. It is made, but neither under conditions of our choosing nor by individuals alone. We might have called this book “doing culture” instead of “practicing culture” but it would have made culture seem much easier to do than it really is. It takes practice. Practicing culture is never simply a matter of following rules. The philosopher Wittgenstein emphasized, for example, how the practice of speaking any language exceeds merely following the rules of its grammar. The Chinese sage Zhuangzi made the same point by evoking the impossibility of a master carpenter’s simply telling an apprentice how to use a plane. He could say, “Don’t push too hard,” but without practice the apprentice couldn’t possibly know what that means. Practice, moreover, requires an interaction with the sensible world – with other speakers of a language in Wittgenstein’s example, with wood in Zhuangzi’s. In contemporary sociology, the idea of practice is prominently associated with Pierre Bourdieu. He is perhaps its foremost modern analyst, certainly the most influential in sociology, but it is hardly an idea he invented. Like the notion of habitus – the embodied dispositions that enable us to produce practices, adjusting ourselves to new situations and material conditions on the basis of what we have learned from older ones – the concept of practice has a history stretching back in the Western tradition at least to Aristotle. It figures in accounts of practical reason and in more materialist accounts of how the world may be changed by active struggle, and how theory may gain its most significant meaning by shaping that struggle. What Bourdieu did was renew an older exploration of how practice knit together structure and action, meaning and material conditions. He made the same point as Wittgenstein and Zhuangzi through the pun in the title of his book, The Rules of Art. Art is not produced according to rules, of course, like painting by numbers. “Les règles de l’art” are those precepts one can’t understand until one has tried them in practice, like our grandmother’s advice to add a “pinch” of salt and “just enough” sugar. Bourdieu’s perspective is valuable, however, not just for insights into practice but for its situation in the production and reproduction of social

8 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett fields, as well as the struggles over different forms of capital and their transformations that organize those fields and their relations. To attend to practice is indeed to attend to the ways in which human action is embedded in social organization. Its effectiveness is made possible, as Bourdieu shows, partly by the internalization of social relationships through experience. New action is produced in structured improvisation, informed by intuitions about current social circumstances, habits, and capabilities drawn from previous ones, and cultural schemas. Culture, in this sense, figures not only as an abstract system of norms or knowledge but also as implicit, often embodied understandings of how things work. Just as action is never understandable entirely through conscious intention (but also never without an element of conscious intention), culture is both available in part to actors’ explicit knowledge and reflection and in part disclosed only in performance. Bourdieu himself was influenced by Erving Goffman as well as by ethnomethodology. Each of these is also a more general source for a performative approach to practicing culture. Bourdieu was well-versed in a linguistic tradition of attention to “doing things with words” and sought to combine structuralist accounts of the ways in which action was embedded in fields – of both meaning and power – with phenomenological accounts of intentional action. Though he incorporated insights from performative theories into his pursuit of a theory of practice, cultural sociology can draw much more from such performative perspectives. These are due for a return to sociological center stage. Kenneth Burke, though a literary and drama critic and novelist, was one of the major sociological resources for thinking about culture as performance, bringing rhetoric and dramaturgy into the analysis of social life.11 Victor Turner’s anthropological accounts of ritual as social dramas – and indeed (following Max Gluckman’s lead) of the role of social dramas in managing conflicts and organizing much of social life – are rich in sociological insight.12 Turner insisted that drama was more than metaphor; human action is dramatic and this is one source of its force. The locus classicus for a sociology of performance is Goffman’s work; and although Goffman remains an iconic figure, especially for field workers, his arguments have not been fully incorporated into sociological theory and especially not into the sociology of culture.13 Important work from other theoretical traditions, like Certeau’s account of the practice of everyday life, has not yet been integrated well with Goffman’s more sociological approach.14 This was among an explosion of studies of the quotidian that helped to expand attention to practice but for the most part restricted it to microsocial analysis. Richard Sennett extended a dramaturgical analysis of social life into a distinctive account of the public, one that contrasts with (and complements) the “discursive” account of Jürgen Habermas.15 The essays in this book are indebted to Bourdieu, thus, but also to Aristotle, and Kant and Marx, Goffman, Certeau and Sennett. There is always a danger when theoretical heroes are pulled out of their contexts for

Introduction 9 individualistic study. As important as Bourdieu is, for example, he is only one of several key figures of about the same generation whose work has been pivotal to the study of culture and society. Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Erving Goffman, and Howard Becker as well as Bourdieu were all born between 1921 and 1932.16 These were key senior figures whose work was claimed for intellectual leadership and inspiration in the creation of the new fields and subfields that revitalized the cultural study of social life and the sociological study of culture in the 1970s and 1980s. If their work was claimed by partisans of one approach or another in the development of disciplinary subfields or interdisciplinary cultural studies, it also is getting renewed attention today precisely because it predates those compartmentalizations and offers resources for breaking out of them. The pivotal senior theorists grew up steeped in functionalism, Marxism, and studies of the “high culture” canons in philosophy and literature. The “cultural turn” they helped to inform was shaped by their engagements and ultimately breaks with each. Indeed, it was largely as resources for moving beyond those dominant perspectives that a range of somewhat younger theorists appropriated, integrated, translated, and anthologized the works of these senior ones. We (your editors) represent this intermediate generation, entering the field about a decade apart, in the wake of the 1960s. One of us comes more from American studies (though combined with social psychology, music and sociology); the other has stronger roots in disciplinary sociology (but also anthropology, history, and Marxism). Both were drawn to the interdisciplinary movements of social history and social theory during the 1970s and 1980s. Both found the path of a culturally informed sociology more attractive than the project of a separate field of cultural studies or subfield of sociology of culture. But we also watched as the combination of career pressures, political engagements, and the clustering of those concerned with particular themes produced a concentration of “culturalists” in some quarters, while leaving much of sociology and social science generally untouched by the “cultural turn.” In other words, we observed a reproduction and new entrenchment of the old division between the humanities and social science – or between humanistic and “scientific” sociology – when we would rather have seen the false divide overcome. This book and this project are dedicated to what we hope many younger than us will achieve: a reintegration of cultural studies (in its range of interests) into interdisciplinary social science, and of cultural sociology not as a subfield but as a central dimension to the practice of sociology. The essays here do not cover all the terrain of “practicing culture” and do not include theoretical manifestos. Rather, they present a range of cases, each interesting in itself, each also exemplary of the insights that approaching culture as practice can offer. Embodiment is important; so are physical objects; so are passions; so is performance, and so is the constitution of value.

10 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett The practices examined are diverse and so are the settings, which include a range of different occupations, both paid employment and amateur pursuits: passionate engagement with opera in Buenos Aires, digging for buried fragments of German material culture in Russian Kaliningrad, constructing an inventory of French cultural patrimony, constructing financial facts in the City of London, making a career of poetry without making a living at it, and being a fan smart enough to see the trickery of professional wrestling and still remain a fan. Each chapter tries mainly to do justice to its particular instance of practicing culture. But taken together they are also an intervention. They suggest first, that cultural objects – artifacts – do not exhaust or even fairly represent culture. Culture is not books and CDs and paintings in museums, though it does include the production and marketing of each of these and human relations with all of them. Nor is culture some realm unto itself, a system distinct from those of society and economy, as Talcott Parsons had it. We urge a culturally serious and attentive sociology more than the sociology of culture as a separate subfield. Despite this, the studies here suggest the advantages of taking meaning seriously in cultural studies – but not necessarily on the model of textual interpretation. The passion of the opera fan, for example, is linked to the physical and emotional experience of music in important ways not readily grasped as text-like. Moreover, the metaphor of text – as valuable as it has been – can obscure the social processes through which cultural practices are produced, reproduced, and revised. The metaphor of theatre and the analysis of performance may be as valuable. Put another way, the studies collected here suggest that the study of culture as practice – and of cultural practices – may be solid terrain for building a more fruitful relationship between the sociology of culture and the other, mostly humanistic, orientations in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. This would be invigorating for both. Sociology need not involve the reductionism many in the humanities fear. Each of the chapters in this book offers an exemplary empirical case study of how culture works in practice and how practice makes and remakes culture. They thus reveal how ideas often understood abstractly from various philosophical and theoretical traditions can be put to work in empirical analyses. At the same time, the empirical cases challenge a too-easy reception of fashionable theory, demanding like all creative practical action improvisation informed by but reaching beyond received resources. In each case, actors engage in concrete projects, informed by culture but also producing and reproducing it in practice. They try to develop national identities into marketable brands, invent and reinvent the electric hair clippers and the modern male haircut, intertwine love affairs and writing. In each case, the actors are self-aware and guided by their own accounts of their practices; yet in no case are these accounts complete, nor do actors pursue their projects simply as though existing culture offered them clear rules. They improvise, but in patterned ways. The patterns reflect not

Introduction 11 only culture, but the situation of action in fields of power and competing interests. We – editors and authors – have incurred a number of debts in the course of the NYLON project and the preparation of this book. The largest are to the many participants in the NYLON workshops whose work is not published here. All acted as helpful critics and advisors. Studies by several will appear in future volumes. We are also indebted to the LSE and especially to NYU which provided the primary sponsorship. Deans Richard Foley and Catharine Stimpson have been generous supporters. Melissa Aronczyk is not only the author of one chapter but also the excellent copy editor of all. Matthew Gill and Monica Krause were the co-organizers of the workshops. Gerhard Boomgaarden of Routledge has been a supportive and patient editor.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. Derrida’s assertion is easily oversimplified when taken out of context. Not least, it is of course a pun meaning not only that there is nothing outside of the text, but that the text has no outside. 2 For several influential examples see Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot, Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jeffrey Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast (eds.), Social Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3 For discussions of the growing English-language engagement with Bourdieu and further references, see the special issue of Ethnography 5 (4) (December 2004), edited by Loïc Wacquant on Pierre Bourdieu in the Field; and Craig Calhoun, “Pierre Bourdieu,” in George Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the Major Social Theorists (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2003). 4 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). 5 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 6 Reprinted in Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1963). 7 As several of the essays collected here make clear, however, this by no means suggests that physical things or “material culture” are not important. Human engagement with materiality is central to culture. See the different arguments in Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York, Norton, 1994). See also the interrogation of the place of “the work itself” in Howard Becker’s introduction to Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds.), Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 8 See, e.g., Ann Swidler’s very influential article, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 15 (April 1986): 273–286. It introduced the phrase “culture as a tool kit,” which could be read in more complex or more narrowly instrumental ways. 9 Robert Wuthnow’s phrase, from a methodological statement – Meaning and

12 Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

Moral Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) – accords a little oddly with his own important work interpreting the meaning of a variety of patterns in cultural practice. Wuthnow equated the problem of meaning with what he saw as radical subjectivism. For the most part, approaches to practice understand culture as intersubjective, social in a way that challenges an altogether individualistic ontology. The intersubjective production of practices is thus understood to be at least analytically distinct from the actions of individuals as such. This book does not directly join this debate, though most of its authors share an orientation to the intersubjective production of social life. For a sharp critique of such views (though one focused mainly on a philosophical debate over ontology, not on sociological analysis as such) see Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Turner’s concern is to replace treatments of culture or the sharing of practices as “substance” with the study of connections. See the excellent compilation of Burke’s more sociologically relevant writings in Kenneth Burke On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). See The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Chicago: Aldine, 1972); The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1987). Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959) and Frame Analysis (New York, Harper, 1974). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf 1977); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). So were a number of other key figures in social science and the humanities whose work importantly influenced relevant discussions but was not pivotal to cultural studies or the sociology of culture as such: Marshall Sahlins, Jürgen Habermas, Dorothy Smith, Charles Taylor, Luce Irigaray, Cornelius Castoriadis, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, and Hayden White for example. We do not intend our list as definitive, just evocative.

1

“We have never been German” The economy of digging in Russian Kaliningrad Olga Sezneva1

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun. Under my window a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade, Just like his old man. My grandfather could cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, digging down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

14 Olga Sezneva Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. – Seamus Heaney, “Digging”2 He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This determines the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. They must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is merely a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later insights. True, for successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely an inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding, as well. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less of that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers. – Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle”

On things, persons, and places I am going to write about digging; real digging, into the soil, with a spade. What could bring us closer to the root than that? Excavating; reaching deeper but not too deep!; and with the lumps of soil bringing out small things, buried objects. I will treat digging as a dirty practice, in a literal sense, and later, as hard labor, to arrive at an understanding of how this practice and its object relate to the production of persons and their everyday worlds. It took me more than one trip to Kaliningrad, an urban center of an isolated Russian region on the Baltic shore also known as Königsberg, and many lengthy conversations to recognize the special status of small excavated objects from the German past. A city of cold Baltic light and solemn beauty, Königsberg was home to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and he never left his city in his life, nor after his death; there lie the remains of the great philosopher. There, in the same place, had begun another biography, that of Hannah Arendt. She came to her ancestral city Königsberg from Hanover at the age of four, leaving it in 1924 for good to become a student of Karl Jaspers in Marburg. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the city was stormed by the Soviet army and soon after it was annexed from Germany, renamed “Kaliningrad,” the Germans expelled and replaced with Russians, Ukrainians,

“We have never been German” 15 and other nationals of the Soviet Union. Forty-five years later, with the demise of the Soviet state in 1991, the region lost its contiguity with Russia, and with the recent acceptance of new members of the European Union became an alien body of one million Russians surrounded by foreign states. The changing life in the city, the ambiguous status of the region in international relations and transnational commercial networks, correlates with a cultural change – a rise in the public interest concerning the prewar, “European” history of the city. The post-socialist decade produced inventory lists containing over one thousand historical landmarks, i.e. German-period architecture, as compared to twelve when the inventory was started in 1969. Translated histories and historical accounts by local specialists of Königsberg became commercially profitable, and television documentary series about the Teutons, the Hanseatic trade, the architecture and artistic personalities appropriated prime airtime. The apparently headlong rush to convey Kaliningraders’ part in the foreign history conceived as their own could have raised concerns about certain cultural doom, the confusion of roots and origins, and the imminent identity crisis, but nothing of this kind happened. Far from being merely an instrument for exploring the German past, a new mnemonic culture unfolds as a reciprocal movement between the place and its resi-dents, between geography and history, between conventional symbols and unconventional practices, between the restructured sense of the collective whole and the subjective interest and forming personhood. The mnemonic culture – a system of images, narratives and objects related to the past and supported by the commemorative practices of historical celebrations and memorial days – has made plain that Kant, the Hansa, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Teutons are appropriated as important cultural gifts, together with the excavated debris of Königsberg’s quotidian, Russian military heroes, and selected figures of the Romanov dynasty. While its semi-kin – the museum treasures and archaeological items stolen during the war – holds the attention of corporately organized and internationally funded groups, junk – the bricà-brac from Königsberg which appears in the city’s flea markets – deserves the attention of a sociologist. Both Heaney and Benjamin treat digging as a metaphor, as a wealth of images and meaning about self, kin and cultural continuity. Both relate personal memory and collective tradition to the mundane and physical practice of digging. For Heaney, digging potatoes stands in for the entire cosmology of Irish culture: his call is to join in, to dig into the matter of things, let it be with a pen – the vocation of sons may change but the ethos of culture should pass from generation to generation. Repetition, the physical automated skill, is what matters; this is what guarantees the continuity. For Benjamin, digging is something different. It is a Freudian practice of reflexivity: the unconscious is the underground in which truth is buried. Doing one’s own rubbing of history against the grain is hardly an easy task, but one that is required in the reflexive constitution of self. Layers of recent understanding affect the architectonics of representation, and the digger needs to sharpen

16 Olga Sezneva his tools, his perception, against the voices telling him the story over and over again, to subdue his skeptical attention. Benjamin’s digging is individualistic; it constitutes a subject.3 The analysis of modalities of production, use and exchange is undertaken here in order to highlight the production of persons, social wholes, and social divisions. A set of specific characteristics of the Königsberg’s bric-à-brac denote that which is inscribed in persons, and vice versa, and the act of bringing it out and up is an act of deploying this inscription, longing for this particular exchange between humans and things. Practice, labor, exchange, and trade evoke specific and different categories of identity. Manipulation of time and space, and their interrelatedness (“historicity of a territory and territorialization of a history”) is at the core of this production (Poulantzas 2000: 114). If Benjamin’s pessimistic view of the present and the future of cultural reproduction and collective life due to the reification of time begins with the dissolution of the spatial matrix (as illustrated, for example, in his piece on the Storyteller: communities are dispersed, their sheer number is immensely greater, not to mention the disappearance of the enchanted places that are “far away” – Benjamin 1969b: 83–110), then my Kaliningrad story opens with a suggestion of the closing of spatial proximity between the real place, Kaliningrad, and one to be imagined or remembered, Königsberg. The bric-à-brac, but also the act of digging, forms the cementing substance which reverses the erosion of space through time. The farther we are away in history from Königsberg, the less influence it should have; but this is not how things appear in today’s Kaliningrad. Therefore the third and final dimension of this investigation will be discerning a variety of “intentional value” derived from “conventional value” (Sahlins 2004: 69). What we should not lose sight of, however, is that although engaged in and drawing on a collective project of place-making, each individual intention may be different, and given particular contextual meaning, the bric-à-brac always, and also, serves a particular actor’s interest. While the semantic (but also economic, as we will later see) value of Königsberg jetsam is determined by its differential relation to other objects (Soviet products, for instance), as well as to concepts (as can be Königsberg – an image, a symbol), these objects and concepts constitute a general and abstract social sense. This may be a complicated way of describing a simple idea: that the modes of obtaining, relating, and evaluating objects, and the meanings that are constituted around and with them, correlate with individual positions and forms of ownership. The mode of engagement with things and the willingness to give them a concrete value, however, is a reciprocal movement which opens up a flow of ontologies not only from people to things but also the other way around.

“We have never been German” 17

Things from the past Once, interviewing the owner of a small but fashionable restaurant in Kaliningrad, we talked about the ambiance of his place, filled with objects that predated Soviet life. The dining tables were made of the standing legs of Singer sewing machines, some of them propped up with wedges. Shelves running along the walls were crowded with empty colored glass bottles, and their unusual shapes and blistered surfaces evoked remote times and extinct places. Chipped white porcelain cups, one with a missing handle and another with a half-visible golden logotype stood between the bottles. Watercolors and miniatures hanging on the walls portrayed, respectively, a merchant fleet arriving at the docks with the all-too-familiar spire of the evangelical cathedral in the background, a profile of Immanuel Kant, and a grandiose castle recognizable from other photographs or miniatures of this kind. Street signs, scorched, cracked, and rusted, pointed the wrong way to Hufen-Allee and Hansaring, and a few other streets and places whose German names had become familiar to Kaliningraders in the last decade of post-socialism. I saw these objects in the homes of my friends and interlocutors. The unpredictable and erratic combination of things has always been a feature of their collections. The restaurant owner claimed that he had spent hundreds of dollars on these items, and thousands of rubles on vodka securing cooperation from the diggers who excavate them. He spent four years going

Figure 1.1 Examples from a collection of Königsberg bric-à-brac. Parts of the same whole, these are vivid illustrations of the random character of such collections. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

18 Olga Sezneva to a specialized market on weekends in the early 1990s, until he realized that the most valuable items would never make it to his collection. So he found a way to “infiltrate,” as he called it, a network of diggers. Now he “commissions” what he needs, and although his commissions have a high rate of success he nevertheless visits the market on Sundays “because there are always accidental players in the market who may stumble across unexpected things.” Occasionally he sells unwanted items and other times auctions rarer pieces from his collection. Bargaining is common (M, 07/2001). German objects have been part of Russian migrant lives for over half a century.4 Their use in the beginning, however, was wholly practical – nothing better was offered by the socialist economies. As long as these objects were subordinated within the sphere of domesticity, their meaning was primarily utilitarian. Beds were slept in, plates dined on, and if a street sign was found, its metal body would be used to patch a hole in the leaking roof or wall. In some ways, the excavated things make their return into the household’s daily life today as well – tin containers with minimal touch of rust store sugar or tea, and pharmaceutical equipment becomes soap dishes and dispensers. Those items which cannot “do” anything practical for their owner are still valued, but as collectibles. Here is the reconstructed tale of a typical object excavated from the Kaliningrad underground – a green-glass beer bottle with the engraving “Koenigsberg.” It sells for two dollars, the cost of ten bus rides or basic telephone service for one month in 2001. Once upon a time the beer was drunk and the empty bottle was thrown away in the city dumpster. One

Figure 1.2 A set of green-glass beer bottles with the engraving “Koenigsberg.” Such bottles are popular objects among the market buyers, as they are affordable and reusable. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

“We have never been German” 19 would have predicted a short life for the bottle based on its status as a “secondary commodity” – a container for something more valuable, beer. All this took place when the city was German, and this moment of disposal was an intended end in the life cycle of the bottle. The value of the bottle was not only close to zero, but perhaps even negative. After the “death,” the hypothetic life of the bottle would continue as follows: In the late 1960s, the bottle would be found in the ground, most likely during some construction, and preserved as a souvenir in a home collection, shown under the veil of secrecy to trusted visitors. (The Soviet state imposed political silence on the prewar history of the annexed city.) Accumulated and stored in basements, mixed with other findings like plate fragments, keys, statuettes with lost parts, street signs, and the like, the bottle would emerge at the end of perestroika from many basements as a good of a different kind. Rising demand, the nature of which will be examined later, will put it into a consumption cycle. The emergence of a market for German bottles (among other items) as commodities created a cottage industry of diggers and collectors, composed mostly of teams of unemployed men who scoured fields, abandoned estates, and closed city dumpsters. This market transformed the transient object of initially low to zero value into a homogeneous class of durable extraordinary commodities. The peculiarity of the phenomenon as a local take on a more general phenomenon of urban memorabilia should not overshadow for us its broader cultural significance. In some sense it is that – a “folk” archaeology of one’s own “home,” but it also has its own political economy unfolding within the economic and social transformations of the Russian society. A few observations can be made in this regard. First, the value of Königsberg bric-à-brac is very particular. Its circulation is geographically restricted. A plate’s fragment stamped with a manufacture’s trademark will be of zero value if it leaves the region or appears in an outsider’s hands. As a commodity, the jetsam’s value is the place effect, and is also constituted by Table 1.1 The ascending “life” of the Königsberg jetsam 2000

Phase IV: 1990s. Continuous excavation and market exchange. Durable cultural goods of increasing economic and high symbolic value. Phase III: Second Production (Excavation) – Kaliningrad Late 1960s–early 1990s. Collectible non-market goods. High symbolic, low economic value.

The Interwar period

Phase II: Discarded rubbish of zero value. Phase I: First Production – Königsberg Interwar period. Differentiated transient commodity of low economic and symbolic value.

20 Olga Sezneva the cultural competence of the trading parties. It is not marketed for outsiders and rarely circulates as a token of authentic experience of the place among Kaliningrad’s visitors. I experienced this requirement of tacit understanding of the object’s value when I accompanied one of my interlocutors to the market of Königsberg memorabilia. My endless questioning about her choices as she sorted through things laid on the traders’ tables eventually cut her patience short. Appealing to the fact that I myself was born and raised in Kaliningrad, she demanded that I apply my “own senses” as if the answers were already there, in my biography. Secondly, the German bric-à-brac circulation is organized into a reciprocal economy of moral duties: rights of possession as they relate to privileges of belonging. It is a particular quality of the relationship between the digger and his client – the commissioning collector or a random buyer on the market. This relationship is an expression of the division of labor and the monopoly of knowledge which affects the difference in class positions determined by the larger economic condition. Most diggers are unemployed or low-paid workers of the declined public sector of local economy. Collectors and regular buyers of the Königsberg memorabilia are better-off members of the intelligentsia and the professional elite, although younger and not so well paid hobbyists also raid this market in the hopes of finding a good bargain. And yet, contrary to ordinary commercial operation in which the instituted logic is that of rivalry of appropriation on the grounds of formal equality, the production and exchange of bric-à-brac in Kaliningrad establishes a concrete community of peers who define themselves as privileged by control over circulation and value-formation of a restricted corpus of goods. The stakes inherent in this particular game are the rights of belonging. One digger told me that he never sells his things to “outsiders” – to “Moscovites” or foreign tourists. Only the former Königsbergers from Germany are said to share rights of possession. A person can be identified as being from Moscow by the way she or he misrecognizes German bric-à-brac for trash. The inability to respond in the same cultural code (reflecting the incommensurability of cultural knowledge) translates into an impermeable social boundary. This cultural disconnect is made even more formidable by the “horizontal” competition among Russian cities, in which Moscow dominates, and by the increase in the flow of migrants from the former republics of the USSR since 1991. The last point brings us back to the question of what kind of commodity is represented by the Königsberg junk. Importantly, it possesses a degree of ambiguity as a commodity as it stands on the economic-cultural margin between market and non-market. On the one hand, it is now fully commoditized and traded on a kind of a flea market. And yet, hypothetically speaking, anyone could get it for free by taking a spade and putting hands into the ground. It means that the distinction between the object and the commodity, as much as between the producer and the consumer, is determined not by economic forces but by social ones.

“We have never been German” 21 In what follows I will situate the production and exchange of bric-à-brac in Kaliningrad as spheres of production of historical continuity, and elucidate the “ontological exchange” between objects and people which underlines its consumption. Here I can only cursorily point to two different usages of bricà-brac in the constitution of the local self, which, nevertheless, will open up a possibility for the future exploration of the ways in which people constitute their social worlds through things.

Digging: how it is done

Figure 1.3 A digger resting his hands after completing the second pit. The found objects are laid on the edge of his last ditch. November 2001. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

22 Olga Sezneva The ontology of junk is anchored in the act of digging. The first decision to be made is whether to dig or not to dig. And if to dig, then where? This decision is largely determined by an overall predisposition towards the value of Königsberg, its memorabilia, and the relationship that a person has to its constituted “memory.” Among those who pass this broad qualifier and decide positively on the value of German things, the differentiating principle becomes cash flow and the value of individual time. When both are low, we find the diggers, who supply the market for memorabilia. When both are high, we find intermediaries: antique and curio dealers and collectors. The second decision – where to excavate – depends on access to the city’s prewar maps and other topographical documents listing the locations of former estates and settlements. Under the Soviets, such documents were classified, and circulating them was illegal and risky. Consequently, personal connections to workers in the archives, the museum, or among official historians took on special value for the diggers. The competition for social connections and protection of these small monopolies on knowledge defined the digger economy. The change in the regime dramatically altered the knowledge flows along which this economy was organized. Maps became available, archives opened up, and history books were published that transformed the field, creating greater competition “on the ground.” The commoditization of memorabilia and the new availability of topographical resources encouraged numerous new teams to join in. These days, speed, efficiency, and networks among clientele/consumers structure the life and the work of the diggers. Digging is still a balancing act of secrecy and interdependency – of keeping secrets and information from leaking to the state and the competitors and, at the same time, of expecting generosity from the volunteer partners in the expedition: Interlocutor: You see, it is different to sit down with a friend, with a cup of tea or a bit of vodka, to discuss something, to show, to exchange – that’s a different story! But to reveal something to a stranger . . . OS: But why? Interlocutor: In a small circle it is more exciting! This is like a secret society. Besides, you know that to dig in the ground in the city limits is illegal. And whatever you find, by the law, belongs to the state. Do I want to mess with the state? (M 05/2001) Distance lends enchantment to the entire enterprise, whether set in terms of physical space by the remote and isolated location of the diggers’ market, or in social space by rules of secrecy. It simultaneously appeals to practicality. The reciprocal exchange of items or information in private spaces, away from the reach of the state, away from the public and from competitors, and almost always accompanied by vodka (a strong symbolic means of male bonding in Russia), introduces forms of mutuality and interdependency which do not eliminate the risk of exposure to state sanctions but which sig-

“We have never been German” 23 nificantly diminish it. It simultaneously increases the gravity of personal betrayal, when that occurs. Finally, the principle of secrecy contrasts sharply with the principle of transparency of scientific archaeological excavation, serving as one of the many axes of opposition structuring the field. To dig one needs a spade, a canvas bag, a flask of vodka, a sandwich and a strong back. It is men who dig. Digging is physically strenuous and demanding. It is also seasonal – breaking for the long winter when the frozen ground resists even heavy machinery. The digger starts energetically, cutting deep and in broad strokes, first a rectangular contour of the upcoming pit and simultaneously marking his turf. His team-partners do the same at a respectful distance. When his cut is about one meter deep, the real art of digging begins. The digger’s pride is not simply in the stuff he brings up or its amount. It is also in how little he cracks and breaks with his spade in the process of digging. He relies on experience and intuition, and sometimes sheer luck. So he cuts the dirt in even slices, and he carefully puts the piles side by side, taking the lumps of dirt and clay apart with his hands. If the earth is soft and dry (which happens rarely in Kaliningrad’s climate and then mostly in the summer), he may spread it thinly on the side of the pit to search for any pieces that might have come out. Vanya, a twelve-year-old boy with whom I went on a practice dig, broke two little statuettes he found that day by sinking the shovel in too deep. Uncle Misha, who coached him, consoled the boy but also was visibly displeased. None of the figurines could be salvaged and sold. Vanya learned early that the code of pride and mastery in this profession is reinforced economically. Bottles, fragments, nearly everything that is found migrates to the diggers’ basements and spends some time soaking in tubs filled with water or a weak acid solution to remove dirt buildup. If it were the 1970s and 1980s, some collections would sit in darkness, cherished and touched by their owners only. Others would attract small crowds, taken into the daylight, studied and discussed. With the liberalization of the economy in 1990s, trade in rubbish was made into a market. It transformed transient objects of initially low to zero value to a homogeneous class of durable extraordinary commodities. Prices have risen since my first visit to the market in 1999. People say that demand is growing.

From practice to labor Let us return to the restaurant owner from the opening pages and examine more closely his strategies of obtaining German objects. He first started by going to the market, on the chance of finding things of interest to him. Later, he reorganized his approach. The reliance on chance became an impediment as his business enterprise grew and the value of his time increased. Rather than going to the site of the trade, he brought it to himself. He invested in building a network of diggers and other collectors – secured in part through

Figure 1.4 “Uncle Misha,” a senior digger, in his basement “laboratory” in which he sorts, processes and cleans the excavated junk. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

Figures 1.5 and 1.6 Market of Königsberg’s bric-à-brac. Less expensive beer bottle cap collections and fragments of china (above) attract younger customers who often are at the end of the commodity chain. A still illegal fascist insignia (right) is for more “serious” and often well-off clientele, such as collectors and dealers. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

26 Olga Sezneva monetary compensation, but also through informal socializing, drinking, and conversing. The latter, he claims, has been as essential for the network as the payment, because the diggers have their own code of professional respectability and individual dignity. However, there is a transformation that takes place through this relationship which neither side is willing to acknowledge. It is a transformation of digging from practice to labor. Most of the diggers are temporarily unemployed; some left their blue-collar professions when they realized that they could make a living by digging and selling (these are mainly single men, without families). In the loosely organized economy of production and consumption of the Königsberg jetsam they hold the position of workers, without being proletarized. That is, the economy in question is reciprocal, and shielded from overt exploitation. How is it organized? Königsberg rubbish is a peculiar product. On the one hand, it has limits of production. An artifact of a particular epoch and place cannot be reproduced in a conventional way. Its value is defined by its finitude. On the other hand, its supply is unknown and the act of production – digging – creates the illusion that its product is unlimited, and that its extraction can be commissioned (almost like mining, which similarly has a horizon to its exploitation but usually one remote enough to allow for planning and prediction of the extraction). Given these ambiguous properties of the product, games of withholding, delaying, or “accidentally” delivering to competitors are easy to play. As collectors are themselves just links between the digger, the producer, and the client, their dependency on diggers is recognized and ritualistically acknowledged. One such ritual is communal drinking; another is disavowing economic interest by both parties. It is a widespread and commonly held claim that under socialism it was possible “to socialize (obschat’sya) more” and engage in activities that “feed the soul (dlya dushi)” rather than make money. The digging was one such locus of interpersonal contacts, in which interest, skill, and place meld into a community of equals. In an interview with a local daily, Kaliningrad Pravda, one digger and collector explained: “German tourists ask me to sell this thing or that. I always say to them back – this is my life what you see here, and life, as you know, is priceless!” When the adjustment to economic needs has to be made, it is often interpreted through the emotional burden of parting with the item. Often, family survival is made a priority – “If it weren’t for my wife, I would never sell it.” One digger complained: “I have had this mug since I was twenty; and now I got married and my wife says, ‘Sell it because you can make good money on it.’” Dealers or purchasers are expected to act accordingly, and both in language and action avoid exposing the dire need of the digger. Their reputations depend heavily on their skill at this task. At the same time, there is a recent and in many respects competing attitude among diggers who have effectively exploited the commodity side of the objects. Successful sales build positive reputations for their executors and

“We have never been German” 27 reinforce their masculine identity as breadwinners and businessmen. Successful traders organize their own client network (often mirroring the networks of diggers organized by collectors) and sometimes subcontract other diggers to search and deliver the goods desired by clients. Although unacknowledged by either side, this relationship of subordination prompts some diggers to strengthen their position on rubbish as a valuable non-commodity. The reality of subordination exposes their failure to adjust to the new market demands, and to ongoing class stratification. The investment in social relationships, the construction of a reliable network with the help of non-monetary investment, and the recognition of and respect for rules of secrecy are constitutive elements in this process of value formation. Another is competence. Tacit knowledge, a cultural code into which one is socialized when raised in Kaliningrad, is a central category in the classification of consumers. Contrary to the way ordinary commercial products enter commercial circulation (in which rivalry at the level of appropriation reflects formal equality among the goods), the commodities that enter the diggers’ market institute a different kind of social relationship among producers and consumers. A concrete community of peers is thus formed, who define themselves as privileged by their access to a restricted corpus of goods. Competition to excavate the “right stuff” on the part of the diggers, or hunting down the “right thing” on the part of buyers (a hunt in which a relatively large amount of social capital is involved) establishes parity between the groups as formal players in the field. This parity has little to do with the formal equality of economic competition among producers or consumers. Both parties are caught up in the illusio – a fundamental belief in the interest of the game and the value of the stakes – effectively supported by the physicality of the objects and the form of the relationships people establish with them.

Ontological exchange Why do former navy officers, engineers, laid-off workers, university professors, young professionals working for joint-stock firms and business owners invest their money and time in rubbish? What do the excavated German objects mean to them? Here are some of the reasons my interlocutors provide: “They feel better to the touch. Their surface feels different. They feel good.” “They are true, original. They come from the earth.” “They show a real quality of life.” “They are bridges to the past.” “They put you in touch with something eternal, teach you something.” “They make us normal people.”

28 Olga Sezneva

Figure 1.7 A collector with his collection. The objects have been excavated and assembled in this collection since the late 1960s, but recently the owner started presenting them to visitors from outside Kaliningrad, including German “nostalgic” tourists. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

Clearly, the Königsberg bric-à-brac stands for something bigger than simple utility. It is the exchange of values, as the theorist Margaret Morse writes, between otherwise incommensurable facets of life (Morse 1998) – in this case, place, objects, and selves. The value of bric-à-brac is that it has implications for the construction of subjectivity, relating the ontology of things to the ontology of individuals and collectivities. I witnessed the bargaining and purchasing of a porcelain cup, with a worn out but still-visible signature of a famous restaurant. The same person then bought a copper photograph frame, simple in its appearance and rather crooked. He intends to reuse both items in decorating his home. Another interlocutor, Irina, works as a German and English interpreter for foreign and joint-stock firms. She told me that she was introduced “to the world of Königsberg” through collecting green-glass beer bottles when she was an adolescent. Now that she has purchased a country house, she intends to furnish and decorate it with original German furniture and objects bought from diggers and other antique dealers. The few trips to the market that we took together netted her six heavy white ceramic mugs, Petri dishes (to be used for soap), a pitcher and a chair frame without a seat. Not impressed with the dilapidated look of these items, I asked her why she bought such stuff when Kaliningrad offers a full range of affordable, decorative household things imported from Europe. She observed that newer mass-produced things do not have as much “personality” – but explaining her aesthetic preference

“We have never been German” 29 in “objective” terms proved difficult for her. She described a difference between her purchases from the local market and the mass-produced “faceless” Western kitchenware that she can afford on her salary – a good one by local standards.5 A singular and unique mug will cost her less, while at the same time offering greater distinction. The very possibility of choice between consumer goods from the international market and singular items from the restricted local market is a privilege in itself. But the choice made in favor of German scrap cannot be reduced to its instrumentality. Indeed, Irina’s house contains a mix of contemporary Western products, items from the socialist period, and excavated memorabilia. How she selects, assembles and displays items enacts a particular construction of self: that of a contemporary professional integrated into the European way of life but with roots in a notion of authenticity that she refines with care. On the other end of the spectrum of consumption – or rather, the sentimental possession of German things – is Lidiya Timofeevna, who moved to her German two-family house in 1946, and for fifty years opposed every attempt by her family to replace the original German home appliances – the sink, the bathtub, faucets, even doorknobs and latches – with newer details and equipment. She and her husband believe in the superior quality of German things over everything Soviet or even contemporary Western. Last summer she finally conceded to her granddaughter’s desire to replace a window in her room with a modern window imported from Poland. The room has gotten colder since the replacement, she asserts. There is a not-so-subtle distinction between the ways in which the retired, modest pensioner sees her German home and the ways in which a successful entrepreneur (Irina) stuffs her new house with German things. The older woman recognizes, in the German things she tries to preserve, a preferable alternative to the unfolding of Russian-style capitalism. Her former occupation as a head nurse in a military hospital earned her both respect and the benefits of the system; the current need to economize is felt as a social setback. Her preservation of every last detail is an attempt to control her surroundings, to protect her dignity in the domestic space of her home when it no longer has a clear anchor in the outside world.

The purposes of consumption: looking for quality of life Lidiya Timofeevna’s assertion that the quality of “things” connects to a larger notion of quality of life is shared by many Kaliningraders. Their affection for German things is due to the objects’ association with a neverexperienced past mode of living in the place. The general interest in the early to mid twentieth century’s organization of leisure, consumption, and home design – in short, in urban everyday culture – is an interest in “what could be.” “What did Königsbergers do in free time from progress-making?” asks Alexandr Popadin, author of an essay in a recent, acclaimed photo album, Kaliningrad: The Twentieth Century in Photographs:

30 Olga Sezneva They take their leisure. After attending morning services, they stroll on the banks of the Castle Pond. A Herr walks hand in hand with his Frau, and the family itself swiftly flashes by with the blond heads moving back and forth around them. Occasionally, they stop to greet the Fischers, just the way their grandparents would greet the Fischers’ grandparents. “Mein Gott! What came of the tradition; what happened to stability!?,” the Father asks the Herr. “Our parents could not imagine that water would become so expensive, or that a cup of coffee would cost 5 pfennig. Where is Europe heading?” Herr Fischer’s wife purses her lips: she knows Europe is going downhill but women, when men speak, keep quiet. All she can do is to purse her lips and count in her mind the change in her embroidered purse. Still, there is coffee to drink; and besides, the men will probably order a couple of Seidel beers, and in order to get the children away from the sweets, she will have to buy them candies. (2000: 10) In this imaginary reconstruction of German daily life in the interwar period, behind its affectionate irony lurks a longing for order, tradition, and a rational organization of life. This is not accidental since Popadin labors to distill this quality of “European life,” characterized as an “ordered rational organization of routine through which subjects gain a sense of security” (06/2001). The desire to trade in history and repossess it in a new way arose at a moment of profound restructuring of social relations – the moment of postsocialist discontent. “To authenticate a past is, at the same time, to discredit the present” (Stewart 1984: 139). Here is a clue to the symbolic meaning attributed to digging and its products. As one of my interlocutors observed: “I always have to remind myself that digging up all these things and putting them around the house will not make us German. I say the same about changing the [city’s] name back: what’s the use if the name can’t make us live like Germans.”

“Authentic hybrids” Walter Benjamin’s account of book collecting provides some insight into the value of Königsberg memorabilia among a very different group to which Irina – but not Lidiya Timofeevna – belongs.6 For Benjamin, the key to collecting is ownership, which underlies the most intimate relation a collector can have with objects (Benjamin 1969a: 67). Writing in a period of historical transition, Benjamin observes that collecting is an intellectual practice of staying in touch with the past and with history. We might say that, for individuals like Irina and other buyers from the market, the capacity of objects to serve as a trace of authenticity is their chief value: they authenticate the identities of their owners. Some of these objects decorate interiors the way chachkis are displayed in American homes, and in this sense act as

“We have never been German” 31 souvenirs. They also undergo a “second-hand” return to the circuit of life, becoming part of the everyday. Against expectations, the reuse of mugs, plates and containers for storage is not a sign of poverty or economic necessity. To acquire an old book or to dig up an old cup is to give them new life. “Exhumation” is one of the diggers’ favorite metaphors for what they do. It visualizes quite precisely the after-death resurrection of things – the renewal of the world by tearing things out of their old context and reinserting them in a new one. To acquire an old book or to dig up an old cup is to give them new life. Königsberg’s discarded junk is not the only marker of Europeanness in the Kaliningraders’ construction of their identity – it is one of several. Other markers include the reinvention of the vernacular regional style in architecture, wide use of the terms “West” (vest-), “Europe” (Evropa), and “König” in business names and titles, and ideas about civilité of interpersonal interaction. Nevertheless, the junk has a distinct power to make an abstract notion of “Europeanness” concrete and particular, by virtue of its association with place. This function of these objects is similar to that of souvenirs, as analyzed by the psychoanalytic theorist Susan Stewart. In her book On Longing (1984), she suggests that souvenirs acquire value by means of their material relation to a particular location. We do not desire souvenirs of experiences that are repeatable. The discourse of authenticity frames the product as the experience of the old city becomes more and more elusive, whether as a result of neglect and destruction or the intervention of “historical renewal.” It is placed beyond the horizon of presently lived experience, made external and thus a fictive domain in which the city is articulated. The memories of the body – of climbing the crumbled walls, of descending into the underground tunnels or copying German names of shops and businesses in a notebook – are replaced by the memories of the object. People attribute meaning to things, but Königberg’s commodities are things that stabilize human relationships and congeal desire. They give a necessary objective dimension to the subjective project of the self.

On objects, lost places, and reclaimed cultures In spite of the different ways in which Irina and Lidiya Timofeevna perceive and relate to Königsberg’s excavated rubbish, they participate in the same understanding of these objects’ stance in relation to culture, and thus in the same process of cultural signification. The objects of memory in this case are simultaneously objects of practice. They are tools of “native dwelling.” This conceptualization of German artifacts as objects of ethnography reveals the object’s productive side: it stands “in contiguous relation to an absent whole that may or may not be recreated” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 388). A place and its culture can be reconstructed metonymically through interpretation of an object and its link to the cultural whole. Excavation and the reintroduction of German everyday objects to the lived

32 Olga Sezneva space of Kaliningrad, like the fraught repurposing of buildings, allow for overlap between the two cultural forms of everydayness, the German and the Russian. Unlike the way the ethnographic display of the exotic creates “fissures that offer evidence that the ordinary is really there,” and “propels the fascination with penetrating the life space of others” (KirshenblattGimblett 1998: 409), what is produced in this ethnographic engagement is “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997) – a space of shortened social distances and close proximities, notwithstanding the denial on the part of many Germans. As a visitor to Kaliningrad in 1964, Josef Brodsky wrote a dedication to Königsberg in Kaliningrad entitled Einem alten Architekten in Rom, in which spirits, shadows, and a young archaeologist collecting splinters in the hood of his field-jacket all come together in the imaginary making of Königsberg. Not so much by the force of “melancholy,” writes Brodsky, as due to some “habit” one recognizes in “the ornamental canapé of fences” in the no longer existent city (Brodsky 2000: 140–144). In less poetic and more sociological terms, the rubbish and the diggers who excavate it act as complex intermediaries in a fantasy of historical reconstruction and cultural continuity. In their mundane circulation and use, the German objects reconnect the lost sociality of Königsberg with the daily life of Kaliningrad’s contemporary residents.

Notes 1

2 3

4

This project was part of my ethnographic research on the politics of history in Kaliningrad. I thank all participants of the Culture and Politics workshop, organized, inspired, and run by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett at NYU, for their comments on the early draft of this paper; and Craig Calhoun, Monika Krause, Alexandra Kowalski, and Joe Karaganis for helping to bring this particular version to its completion. The material for this paper derives from my observation of the Königsberg jetsam market which I systematically visited between May and October 2001, and informal conversations with the traders and their clients. I also met privately with ten diggers, studied their collections and went on two excavation trips. My findings about this group of people are augmented by references about digging recorded in 45 in-depth interviews with the city’s residents. Translations of the interviews, as well as the excerpt from the photographic album are mine. In parentheses I indicate the date of an interview and gender of my interlocutor. “Digging” from Open Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, LLC. In another of his essays, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Benjamin relates the erosion of epic tradition directly to the dissociation of collective memory and personal recollections, the “privatization” of the very ability of remembering, and, as Miriam Hansen interprets it, “imagining, the different world” (Hansen 1987: 189). As much as part of Russia lives in the repopulated and renamed Königsberg, buildings, objects, and more valuable artifacts have been part of Polish lives in the “regained” Polish territories, producing complex and complicated politics.

“We have never been German” 33

5 6

Polish writer Pawel Huelle, for example, describes many inter-family and intrafamily wars in Danzig/Gdansk around German things in Polish possession (Huelle 1996). The ambiguity with which German furniture and interior apartment design have been treated in Breslau/Wroclaw is pointed to in the work of historian Gregor Thum. Both interactions were observed and recorded in July–August 2001. Walter Benjamin’s account of the book collector serves as a relevant comparison and contextualization, primarily because of his resistance to regarding “things” as morally dubious and analytically suspicious phenomena without abandoning Marxist critical tradition.

Works cited Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969a. “Unpacking My Library.” Pp. 59–68 in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. ——. 1969b. “The Storyteller.” Pp. 83–110 in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. ——. 1999. “Berlin Chronicle.” Pp. 595–637 in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2, ed. Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. London and New York: Basic Books. Brodsky, Joseph. 2000. “Einem alten Architekten in Rom” in Ostanovka v pustyne / Stop in the Desert. St. Petersburg: The Pushkin Foundation. Brown, Bill (ed.). 2004. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gellner, Ernst. 1982. In The Name of the World. Book Review. Times Literary Supplement, August 6: 844. Hansen, Miriam. 1987. “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’” New German Critique 40 (Winter): 179–224. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. Huelle, Pawel. 1996. Moving House and Other Stories. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company. Johnson, Pamela. 2001. On Arendt. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morse, Margaret. 1998. Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Popadin, Alexandr. 2000. “The Beginning of the Century: The German Province” in Königsberg Kaliningrad: XX century in photographs/Kenigsberg-Kaliningrad: XX vek v photographiyakh. Kaliningrad: Yantarnyi Skaz. Postone, Moishe, Craig Calhoun, and Edward LiPuma. 1993. Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 2000 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London and New York: Verso. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. “La Pensée Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture.” Pp. 166–217 in Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

34 Olga Sezneva —— 2004 [1981]. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. ASAO Special Publication No. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Zelizer, Vivian. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: BasicBooks.

2

Practicing poetry A career without a job1 Ailsa Craig

Poets are taken either too seriously, it seems to me, or not seriously enough. There’s still a lot of oogabooga around poetry, probably a remnant of the accurate intuition that poetry has something to do with magic. – Sharon Thesen, poet2 The poet grows no calluses, goes to no offices, punches no time-clock, gains no diploma, earns no certificate of competence. There is no current, universal measure of his success or fitness; his credentials are intangible, a passport without date, country, or occupation. Poetry is an “undefined” profession. – Robert N. Wilson, sociologist3

Is it possible to be a professional poet? How does one enter and negotiate a career that has no mandatory training, no licensing, and no chance of making a living? Most of us have some sort of image in mind when we think of a poet: a sullen sort who wears a beret and turtleneck, a romantic eccentric, a university professor. Aside from these stereotypical images, much of our information comes from biography, autobiography, or collective biography, wherein established, successful groups of poets are traced together, as in Lehman’s book on the New York School of poets, The Last Avant-Garde, or Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth, a chronicle of friendships between members of the Confessional School of poetry. While these accounts are useful for helping us understand the lives of poets who have succeeded in making their name, what is left out is an understanding of the everyday practice that fills the life of those who are poets, whether renowned or unknown. In the field of literary production, “Economic success is secondary to symbolic value, and writers compete for cultural capital in the form of recognition, reputation, and legitimacy rather than for monetary rewards” (Anheier, Gerhards, and Romo 1995: 863). Indeed, the fundamental stake is legitimacy (Bourdieu 1993: 42) and the formative tension for the literary field is that between commercial and non-commercial pursuits: art for commerce versus art for art’s sake (Bourdieu 1996: 121). Sapiro speaks of

36 Ailsa Craig poetry as a “hermetic genre practiced in the most autonomous and closed segment of the literary field in opposition to the values of the market” (2003: 448), and, indeed, many have noted that poets are perhaps the least likely of writers to have an audience outside of themselves (Bourdieu 1993, Gioia 1992, Wilson 1990).4 This chapter provides a sharper view of poets’ careers regardless of their level of success. The goal is to more clearly understand the practice and texture of this vaguely understood romantic career that lacks remunerative reward or institutional grounding. I will begin with a discussion of how poets’ careers intersect with discussions of professions and use Abbott’s work (1988) as a catalyst for better understanding the practices incumbent on poets who are deemed to be professional (rather than amateur) even though the career of poetry falls short of usual understandings of what a profession is or should be. The second section explores the trajectory of poetry careers. In order to disentangle different aspects of poets’ trajectories, I build on the work of Stebbins (1992) and suggest a four-faceted model for understanding the practice and trajectories of contemporary poets. I conclude with a discussion of artistic competition and its role in contributing to “collective cultural capital” in order to argue that the poet, far from being a reclusive introverted figure or self-indulgent marginal player, is engaged in a quintessentially social practice.

On (not) fitting into the professions At the end of his lauded book The System of Professions, Abbott concedes he has done little to pin down a definition of what a profession is – but insists that clear-cut definition is neither necessary nor particularly helpful. Like many other categories and terms, the idea of a profession is loaded with multiple meanings and connotations. It can be “a level of social deference, an association with knowledge, a way of organizing personal careers” (Abbott 1988: 318). Indeed, part of the cultural power of the concept is its multifaceted nature. With this in mind it is easy to understand the confusion surrounding using the category “professional” for particular groups or people. And because being “professional” is highly valued (and being called “unprofessional” is an insult even to those who clearly work outside the professions), the fight for inclusion or exclusion is neither transparent nor strictly definitional. As Abbott notes: “People don’t want to call automobile repair a profession because they don’t want to accord it that dignity” (1988: 8). Many have rejected the possibility of labelling poets as professionals because they do not adequately measure up to ideal typical markers. In American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900, West describes the business of authorship and its professional circumstances yet asserts that authors are “neither true professionals nor true tradesmen” (1988: 7). West argues that poets cannot be considered members of a profession because

Practicing poetry 37 there is no mandatory training, because they are not granted licenses or certifications of competence, because their relationship to their audience is not fiduciary and because they are not required to join associations or follow a written code of ethics (1988: 8–9). Wilson notes similar deficiencies in his study of poets, but, as the epigraph for this chapter shows, he is reluctant to exclude poetry from the status-realm of professions and concludes instead that, as a profession, poetry is “undefined” (1990: 147). Complicating the possibility of defining poets as members of a profession is the reality that poets are not paid a living wage – indeed, they would be foolish to think that the practice of poetry could support them financially. One poet said of the year she received a grant for her writing: I got $2,000 for my grant. And that’s the most I’ve ever made, ever . . . I make maybe $150 a year from publishing . . . with the grant for the first time I actually had a writing income and things to write off against it and my accountant said, “When you get to $30,000, you’ll have to get a GST [Canadian Goods and Services Tax] number” and I just laughed. I could not stop laughing. Here we see a disconnect between a member of a standard profession (accountant) and a poet. The accountant seems to assume that the poet’s income will increase now that she has something to show for her work in the form of a government grant – that she will indeed “get to” $30,000 – but trajectories for poets do not follow the usual track of increased payment for increased experience or status. In fact, West cites a 1979 survey which states: “authors who had won literary awards or prizes earned, on average, no more than those who had not” (1988: 20). If it seems odd to claim professional status for a career that does not pay, it may seem even odder (perhaps even perverse) to claim professionalism when one’s service may not be acknowledged in one’s lifetime – when sustained posthumous success is the brass ring of poetic accomplishment. Lawyers and doctors (whose professions often serve as the benchmark of professional status) do not reach their deathbeds unsure of their success, or expecting their careers to reach a pinnacle after they die. Freidson has addressed the seeming conundrum of committed, non-paid activity in his discussion of “labors of love” (1990),5 and, indeed, poets are a particularly good example since even those who are highly successful are unlikely to make a living from their writing alone. The concept of a labor of love is fairly self-explanatory: it is an activity to which an actor is highly committed, and the actor is not motivated by and does not receive substantial economic reward for the work performed. In my view, the problem with the concept of a labor of love is the conclusion that, if one cannot be paid, then only love of the activity itself can motivate continued involvement. No doubt, the intrinsic pleasures of writing, the immersion and sudden release of success that happens in creative work is a motivating force.

38 Ailsa Craig Csikszentmihalyi refers to the phenomenon of pleasure through absorbed immersion in an activity as “flow,” and its pull can be powerful indeed (1993: 179–204). But flow or love of an activity as motivating force does not sufficiently allow for the distinction between amateur and professional poetic pursuits. And with legitimacy being the central stake of the field, a definition that cannot account for boundaries of legitimacy is insufficient when aiming to understand poets and their practice. While the inability to make a living from writing poetry may initially prevent poets from being deemed professionals, the distinction between amateur and professional is still made in fields of poetry. And I contend that, even though one cannot make a living from poetry, a poet becomes akin to a professional when all work is oriented toward the support of writing. For poets do not decide to earn their livelihood outside their poetic pursuits (as Stebbins claims is true for amateurs) (1992: 58); there is simply no other choice. Like the philosophers studied by Becker and Carper for whom “any position which will allow continued intellectual activity, on or off the job, is considered suitable” (Becker and Carper 1956: 346), the job of a poet need provide only sufficient money to live, and time to write. One aspect of this reality of poets’ lives is that their “continuance commitment” (Stebbins 1992: 103) to being poets is tested, over and again. As the poet leaves her house each day and makes her way to her job (whether in an office, a publishing house, a restaurant or any of the other myriad possibilities) she chooses to remain a poet. It is only that daily choice to remain a poet that keeps her on the trajectory of her poet’s work, even while she boards the subway to commute to her job. If that is the case, why not just keep it simple and view poetry as a calling? Because to do so would be to believe our ears over our eyes. The concept of a calling is simply too subjective. This does not mean that people do not honestly feel called to their work, or that the experience of feeling compelled has no effect – but it does mean that the subjective experience of being called is an insufficient explanation on its own. Indeed, to rely on the concept of “calling” creates the risk of slipping into reliance on the concept of predisposition – the idea that one is made for the position, that there is an inner essence being exposed. After all, being called can have no effect if the call does not address its recipient specifically. The concept of a calling presumes the existence of an essential (and therefore inexplicable) trait. Of course, it is not only within the field of poetry production that a belief in predisposition is held. Alongside poets, other artists, some athletes, and intellectuals are often understood simply as “gifted” or “talented” in a way that shuts down the possibility of understanding them as anything but mystically accomplished as individuals. As Chambliss argues in his study of Olympic swimmers: “In the mystified notion of talent, the unanalyzed pseudo-explanation of outstanding performance, we codify our own deep psychological resistance to the simple reality of the world, to the overwhelming mundanity of excellence” (1989: 81).

Practicing poetry 39 To move outside of subjective, internal definition we need to look at how trajectories work for poets, and turn our attention to the practices of this career. While ideal typical traits can be useful analytical tools in some cases, they have limits when applied to cases where traits are viewed as part of actors’ essential identities or personal predispositions, since they do little to unpack the ways that mundane practice creates and maintains the phenomenon under observation. Abbott contends that understanding professions through ideal typical traits is problematic for different reasons. In part he objects because relying on ideal typical traits for analysis of professions assumes that different professions are independent and can be validly compared to one another as separate entities (1988: 18). With his system of professions, the concept of jurisdiction is central to understanding professions as a whole, and the competition and struggle over jurisdictions between and among professions is key. If we apply Abbott’s work to the case of poetry and ask what the jurisdiction of poets might be, we can enter into an examination where poets’ practice remains central. Is the task of the poet to write poetry? Yes, but that task is not exclusive to poets, as are the jurisdictions of more classically recognizable professions. In medicine, the tasks a doctor performs are a doctor’s own: practicing medicine is an activity exclusive to doctors. While anyone can write a poem if they feel like it, if I decide I “feel like” performing open-heart surgery, I will need the services of a lawyer. So as not to enter into age-old and perhaps insoluble questions regarding the uses of poetry, the surest approach to assessing the jurisdiction of poets is to look for where the struggles are, to pay extra attention to what is going on when a poet’s nose is put out of joint, or tempers rise in discussions of poetry. This also avoids the trap of predetermining poets’ jurisdiction before we even enter the field, allowing instead for discovery through observation. There were two central issues around which poets I interviewed expressed indignation, anger, distaste, or other strong emotion: Slam, or spokenword; and snobbery. The two are interconnected, since many of those who are critical (or dismissive) of spoken-word poetry are seen as engaging in snobbery.6 Slam and spoken-word are not the same. Slam poetry is staged as a competition, either between individuals or teams, where the audience ranks the performers and a winner is declared at the end of the night. The atmosphere is rowdy; audience participation and heckling is expected. Indeed, those who heckle can expect to be heckled themselves. Take, for example, the following excerpt from my fieldnotes after observing a semifinal team-slam competition held at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club: A young, black woman makes her way through the crowd to the stage. As she climbs the steps and turns to face the audience, a female fellow team member yells out in support: “You make me wanna be a lesbian!” Not a beat passes before an audience member shouts back to the heckler: “It’s not hard.” The second heckler wins an appreciative laugh from the

40 Ailsa Craig crowd – she has bested the heckler, invoking the antidiscriminatory politics of slam by pointing out that only homophobia makes the initial call-out amusing. Spoken-word poetry has many of the same characteristics (political, personal, and performative) as slam poetry, but is not necessarily performed in a competitive environment. While slam events first started in the 1980s, spoken-word poetry, like poetry for the page, has a long tradition and history. Indeed, some poets refer to all performed poetry as “spoken-word” and reserve the title of “slam” for performance poetry performed in a political, angry, or indignant style – even if not at a competition. It is the shared political, personal, and performative nature of slam and spoken word that groups them together as contentious within poetry communities. The following two passages from interviews illustrate the highly charged nature of the struggles around slam/spoken-word. The first is worth quoting at length: Now people are empowered by getting on stage and sharing their shit, well you know what? Let’s have empowerment readings; let’s not pretend that everyone’s a fucking poet. There are two different things happening, but we are supposed to be so invested in making everyone else feel good that we’re not allowed to say that this is of a certain quality and this is not. That’s forbidden territory. And you know I’m telling you, if we started judging things on quality then the whole fucking world of slam would collapse, because what is that? . . . At the beginning it was amazing, they were breaking all the rules and the freshest voices were right there, you never knew what you were going to hear, but that was 15 years ago. Now it’s a formula . . . You have to be a victim and preferably of color and preferably good looking because if you’re of a certain age or of a certain shape your work is not going to be wanted. But if you get up there in your push-up bra and your 20 inch waist and “You be talking about how they did me wrong” in the right cadence you’re going to win the slam. Fuck that. That’s like the Miss America pageant . . . Which is not to say that there aren’t any writers of talent there because there are . . . But let’s not even pretend that it’s connected to poetry because the criteria are not the same criteria. It’s developed into a type of political theatre that I don’t find very helpful. There’s no place for redemption in slam, it’s all about the righteous indignation and “this is how angry I am.” But you know what? Everybody’s angry, look at the world. We’re all angry. Now what? The argument here is based on judgments of quality and of originality, and the anger comes from the fact that the work is being called poetry. This second example expresses a common reaction against those who criticize spoken-word:

Practicing poetry 41 I like spoken-word, I think it’s really cool. I’m not really traditionalist, I like stuff that just fucks with everything, it’s usually pretty political and that can be really cool. Of course it’s poetry – stupid asses. Why not? Just because you don’t like it? I mean I’ve seen some pretty annoying spoken word, but I’ve read a lot of annoying books. This counter-argument claims that the standards of spoken-word are different from those of printed poetry – bad poetry is still called poetry, but bad spoken-word is shunned as being outside the realm of poetry altogether. Here, we need to look to the immediacy of delivery involved in these two forms and examine how that may relate to this site of contention. After all, if someone is performing their work, you can’t just close the book or turn the page if you don’t like it. While the printed word has a permanence that performance does not,7 performance has an insistence, a way of forcing the audience’s attention. A book of bad poetry will collect dust and sit unopened. It does not make its presence known, especially not outside the immediate field of fellow poets. It is unlikely to be stumbled upon by outsiders. A bad poetry performance, however, is written in the memory of every audience member (many of whom may be inadvertently in attendance, since events happen in bars and coffee shops) and can therefore affect outsiders’ opinions of poetry in general – it can be seen to devalue the symbolic capital of the title “poet” and impoverish the cultural capital of the field. The tension around snobbery reveals a similar dynamic, whereby the core of contention can be traced to a fear of the violation of central values, a violation that in turn affects the resources available for all. For many poets, snobbery revolves not only around genre-battles (page versus stage or experimental versus lyric) but also around other kinds of exclusionary behavior considered cliquey, elitist, or selfish. Once poets have made a name for themselves, they are expected to offer their time and assistance to other aspiring poets, regardless of their level of accomplishment. The following is from a successful young New York poet: I’m Jewish; I was not cool in high school; I know what it feels like to be excluded – as do a lot of poets – so the last thing I want to do is turn around and be an excluder and I personally make a huge effort to be welcoming . . . New people come along, and whether or not they have a book, you bring them in . . . Some people act like they are in high school for the rest of their lives. It’s a source of a lot of bad things that happen in this world, that kind of exclusionary behaviour. Interestingly, in his own analysis of why he is critical of leaving people out, he cites a core personal attribute (Judaism) and a formative experience (adolescence). This bolsters essentialist arguments that obscure the socially constructed nature of poets’ everyday practice. It does not mean that his analysis is not true to his own experience – having felt excluded is often a

42 Ailsa Craig key motivator for rejecting exclusionary behavior. But it is not a necessary causal relationship. This poet is not predetermined to be generous by his past or essential attributes, but that generosity supports and contributes to the field of poetry production as long as his generosity is genuine, and not calculated for his own benefit. As I’ll show in the discussion of poets’ trajectories below, encouragement, feedback, instruction, and introductions from better-established poets are key to the development of a poet’s trajectory, if not their craft. An established poet’s refusal to participate in these activities is not only problematic for the less-established poets who may feel personally frustrated or hurt by the social rejection; it is problematic for the continued strength of the field. Fellow poets make up the bulk of the audience for poetry, whether that is through buying books, attending readings, or subscribing to journals. To turn away an aspiring poet is to close the door to a member of the audience. And yet, this is more complicated than “market depletion.” Without an audience invested in the stakes of the poetry field, the faith that poetry is worth doing, the illusio, and the commitment to the game of poetry itself cannot be sustained. Not only can refusal to participate squelch the dreams of aspiring writers; without recognition, even if only internally, of the work poets do, there simply is no field. “It is a matter of creating the conditions of a new faith, capable of giving meaning to the art of living in this inverted world that is the artistic universe” (Bourdieu 1996: 135). This does not mean that those who are unsupportive of others will fail, or that all successful poets are supportive poets. Nor does it mean that those without the mentorship of a senior poet are unable to succeed. But it does help to explain the indignation many poets express about poets that do not fulfill this role. The slight is not just personal, it is an affront both to the rejected poet and to the values of the field. Recall that the reason for tracing these points of tension is to better understand the jurisdiction of poets. Both of these points of conflict (spokenword and snobbery) show that, for poets, the site of competition and struggle is the symbolic capital that clings to the “poet” designation. This finding supports Bourdieu’s statement that “the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy, i.e. inter alia, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers; or, to put it another way, it is the monopoly of the power to consecrate producers or products” (1993: 42). In the case of spoken-word, conflict arises because some poets deny that spoken-word poets are poets at all. In the case of snobbery, conflict arises because less-established poets feel that better-established poets unjustly exclude them. It is two sides of the same coin. And while the literary legitimacy that is at stake does affect individual access to resources, whether funding, awards, publication, opportunities to perform or simply a sense of personal confidence, it is also connected to the reinforcement and recreation of the symbolic, cultural and social capital of poetry more generally. Beyond the work of writing, therefore, we see that

Practicing poetry 43 the work of a poet includes making the claim to be a poet and the substantiation of that claim via collective recognition. This is the fuzzy line between a poet and a dilettante. Both may write poetry, but only the poet is engaged in practice that contributes to poetry as a whole – to the maintenance and re-creation of its symbolic capital and the strengthening of the poetry communities it requires to sustain itself with adequate audiences. In short, a poet’s job is to contribute to poetry and there is more to that than writing poems. In applying Abbott’s discussion of jurisdictional competition to contemporary poets, it becomes clear that, while poetry may not meet the usual definition for professions, there is a difference between the amateurs of poetry and those who make poetry a career, and that difference lies in the practices of poetry that extend beyond the page and into the larger communities and fields of poetry production.

Career trajectories The model of poets’ career trajectories I propose is a modification of Stebbins’s framework for understanding public-centered professions8 (rather than client-centered ones, like medicine or law) (Stebbins 1992). In order to better understand public-centered professions, Stebbins proposes a fivestage framework of career trajectory: beginning, development, establishment, maintenance, and decline. He eschews the concept of “recruitment” for public-centered professions since they do not maintain a monopoly of control over entry to the field (as do client-centered professions) (1992: 71). Modifying and building on Stebbins’s framework, I suggest a loose, fourfaceted model of poets’ careers: career entry, establishment, maintenance, and projection. The first facet mirrors Stebbins’s, but I have combined his stages of “development” and “establishment,” since, for poets, those two processes are inextricable (as further discussion below will illustrate). I replace “decline” with “projection” to account for the fact that poets’ careers do not have endpoints in the same way that many other careers do, since posthumous success is always a hope and possibility, even if remote. With this orientation toward posthumous success, even a poet who stops writing poetry can still hope that their career will continue via the ongoing reception of their work whether they live to witness it or not. This does not mean that poets’ careers cannot decline (since of course, the majority of poets fade into oblivion like the rest of us); rather it reflects the fact that the practice of poets is oriented toward that eternal hope, even in the face of failure. Neither does it mean that once someone enters the field they are forever a player within it – people do leave the world of poetry. My point is that unlike other areas of work, in poetry, a lack of success does not necessarily lead to practice that can be characterized as decline. I choose to call these “facets” rather than stages to better emphasize the fact that they are not temporally exclusive. That is, the practices of projection

44 Ailsa Craig do not necessarily happen only after one has established and maintained one’s career. While that is a possibility, it is more likely (and indeed, more likely to be effective) if facets of projection are included in poets’ practice throughout their careers. In addition, “establishment” and “maintenance” include many of the same practices – since continuing to do what one has done to get established is one way to maintain an established place in the field. The following section offers a brief description of each facet of the poet’s career trajectory. Career entry In a New York Times article titled “You, Too, Could Write a Poem,” David Orr reviews the annual publication The Best American Poetry. He quips about poetry: “basic participation is possible for anyone with a heartbeat and a laptop” (2004), and he is right – although the laptop isn’t really necessary. But surely writing a poem, any poem, is not sufficient practice to consider oneself to have started a career. As discussed above, the work of poetry requires that poets not only write poetry but that they make the claim to be poets and substantiate that claim through expected practices of legitimation. Making the claim is, of course, a matter of taking on the occupational identity of poet. Indeed, identification is closely linked to legitimation for the poets interviewed in this study – and that identification as a poet often extends into the past, making the act of legitimation an uncovering of that which was always already there, an affirmation or discovery of identity rather than a matter of accomplishment. This is a romantic misrecognition – and, I suspect, a collective one – but it does help create a personal history that supports a hoped for trajectory into the future. For one respondent, being a poet was “somewhere buried in me, under all the strata of things being imposed on me” while another said: “I’ve just always written it. As soon as I learned how to write I was writing poetry.” With the claim of poetry forming part of their essential identity, a cushion of security is created against possible rejection, and reassurance about the future is given support. Even those who came to poetry later in their lives (that is, as adults rather than children or teenagers) often talk of their entry into poetry as an uncovering of essential self. However, even with the strength of belief in ineffable talent and predisposition, these poets maintain their scepticism about subjective identification being sufficient for entry into a poetry career. “Was that poetry, or puberty?” I asked those who told me that they had written poetry in their teens – and each time my quip engendered a knowing laugh, since adolescence is often a time of furtive scribbling, and not only for those who mature to be poets. Becker has famously argued that behavior is not motivated by predisposition, and that “the motivation or disposition to engage in [an] activity is built up in the course of learning to engage in it and does not antedate this

Practicing poetry 45 learning process” (1953: 235). Poets’ accounts of their career beginnings usually include some form of positive reinforcement that encourages them to continue and develop their writing. In the following interview excerpt, one poet remembers both the felt necessity of poetry, and the positive reinforcements she received: I didn’t have a choice. I had paper and pen and it came out. It was just part of me and I was left scratching my head. I was very, very young – thirteen, twelve – just scratching my head. And then I started sleeping with women, and with women if you write poetry they start wanting to sleep with you more, so it’s just totally great. Okay score, this gets me sex, great. It was positive reinforcement. And then my parents started hating what I was writing because it was really personal and had a lot of stories about family and stuff – and especially when I started getting published. So that was bad too, but positive reinforcement for me. I mean, if women are digging it and my parents are hating it then that’s great. She was not the only respondent to cite the allure of crossing boundaries as a motivating force for writing poetry. I think maybe I just thought it was so out of bounds that I was attracted to it in some way. You know when you are on a really high building and you look out over the balcony and you think, you could jump . . . you know that making one decision that is so fast like that, you could create a catastrophe . . . It was the exact opposite of every value I was taught to respect. Being a poet was not on the agenda. I’m the eldest son and I was supposed to go to law school. I love words and I love books. I was drawn to this poetry and this poetry world. Of course, not all poets enter their careers in their youth, but those in my sample whose beginnings came in adulthood went through a similar process of receiving positive reinforcement that encouraged them to keep writing and eventually to seek publication.9 As Bourdieu notes, those who produce for fellow producers (like poets) are reliant on the educational system to create an audience trained to receive their work. In contrast, reception of commercial products is independent of educational level (1996: 147). That is, while children and teens may aspire to be rock stars or actors because they are exposed to them through mass media, the exposure to poetry is most often mediated through English literature classes. Indeed, those literature classes may well explain the common recruitment of poets in their youth, for, as Becker and Strauss discuss, public knowledge of an occupation affects timing of recruitment and general knowledge of an occupation can lead to earlier identification with the

46 Ailsa Craig field (1956). That is, while an eleven-year-old may never have heard of an insurance adjuster, it would be difficult to find a North American elevenyear-old never exposed to poets and poetry through standard educational curriculum. Indeed, many of the poets interviewed cited the influence of grade school or high school English teachers or professors in undergraduate English courses for encouraging them to continue their efforts in poetry. Establishment During the facet of establishment, poets work to have their writing published, to publicly read their work, submit their work for awards or contests, and sometimes even apply for government funding.10 It is also within this facet that poets apply to undergraduate creative writing programs or Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programs, since the commitment required in these endeavors presupposes identification with the occupation. The rewards for this institutional legitimation are not as lasting as those from publication, since the degree alone does not qualify one as a poet or result in any particular position within the field.11 Indeed, despite the proliferation of creative writing workshops, continuing education courses, and MFA programs, publication remains the keystone of legitimation in contemporary fields of poetry production. The value imparted to the author through publication can be viewed as a transformation of the poet’s name from signifying the poet herself to attaining the cultural capital of what Foucault has coined an author function (1984: 101–120). Although it may seem counterintuitive, the way a poet establishes herself is not exclusively connected to the poetry she writes. Importance within the field is not necessarily (or transparently) a result of the texts the author produces. Instead, a poet’s name attains an author function through all work that involves taking a position in the field, even though publication is a key achievement. For example, in making a name for oneself as poet and as publisher, reading curator, or teacher, that poet’s name can gain an author function and a level of cultural capital that can be activated in the poet’s own – or others’ – interests. Many members of poetry communities openly acknowledge the legitimating function of recognition garnered through non-poetry writing work. As one writer mused: “Poets who are important are poets who exercise some kind of influence in one way or another, and I think there are a lot of poets who teach who do that and who are not necessarily good poets.” In fact, this worries some wellestablished poets who fear that they no longer receive honest criticism of their work because of the influence they hold. The author function therefore points not to the poet but to that poet’s position in the field, and to the implications of that position. It is because of this function that someone’s name can represent a genre of work, or a point of view in an argument, or can even act as a cue for how to behave. Having one’s name achieve an author function is necessary for posthumous

Practicing poetry 47 success,12 but, unsurprisingly, it does not create any immediate tangible change in the life of the person whose name has undergone this transition. As one poet commented: There was certainly something switched in my mind when my first book came out – where I was no longer an aspiring writer, I was now actually a writer. This is interesting because it didn’t actually change anything in my life. While the poet’s work is legitimated with the immediate physical result of the book itself, it takes time and recognition from others of the shift in her position in the field for the poet to internalize the new position into her identity. The process is cumulative and interactional. As Foucault notes, to confuse the author with the person who wrote the text is erroneous. The transformation is, after all, a separation of the name from the body, through which one’s name becomes symbolic of a position in the field. Making a name for yourself is nothing more than having your position in the field become a matter of common knowledge. Paired with the common surprise that publication does very little to change a poet’s immediate circumstance is the flummoxed reaction when a poet first encounters someone who reacts to them as the symbol that their name has become, rather than as yet another person at the reading. Consider the following observation of a conversation between two poets after leaving an event: Poet 1: You know that kid I told you about from my workshop? He was there tonight and he really wanted to talk to you. Poet 2: Why didn’t he just come up and say hello? Poet 1: I told him to, but he wouldn’t. You are Gordon Thomas, after all.13 Poet 2: What the fuck is that supposed to mean? This poet has not yet become accustomed to the fact that his name no longer represents him as a person, but has shifted to acting as an indicator of social position. And the younger poet’s nervousness is understandable, given that the way in which he is received by more established poets, even in social situations, could affect his own career. To be sure, while gatekeepers are most often seen as connected to formal institutions, there is also a gatekeeping quality in mentoring relationships or friendships that happen between established and less established poets. As Wilson notes: “In a [larger] world where training and certificates abound, the poet is without diploma. This means that the kind word and gentle push of an older poet or reputable critic may fortuitously ‘make’ an artist” (1990: 154). While the mentors discussed at the level of entry into the field provided encouragement

48 Ailsa Craig and positive reinforcement, when mentorship comes from a poet who has already made a name for themselves (that is, acquired an author function), the cultural capital accumulated by the established poet makes the relationship one where the benefits of the mentorship exceed any advice or criticism provided. The younger poet is legitimated through the simple fact of the association, rather than the qualities of the interactions, and the association can therefore contribute to the younger poet’s establishment. Maintenance After having made a name for himself, the poet enters the next facet of his career, that of maintenance. In some ways, this can be more emotionally taxing than trying to break through in the first place. While the field is often collectively effusive about its new entrants and grand successes, those in mid-career who are neither “rock star” nor debutante find themselves working just as hard to maintain their status as they worked to gain it in the first place. The second book is just “another book” – necessary for maintaining one’s position, but not inherently valued as an accomplishment, since the poet’s ability to write and publish a book has already been established. Efforts that feel like they should result in forward momentum often work only to hold one’s place – or may have positive effects that are not immediately apparent. This can be particularly frustrating if others seem to be advancing in their careers for reasons other than the quality of their poetry. As one poet lamented: “Sometimes I feel like taking my poetry ball and just going home, but then I worry that I would be the kid that no one notices leaving the field.” It is within the facet of maintenance that the tensions inherent in maintaining commitment to art for art’s sake become most clear. How can one sustain hope for building success if the values espoused do not seem to be the values awarded? How to maintain the necessary disinterest and lack of economic gain necessary to be seen as authentic while still working to maintain one’s position and increase one’s status? How to work for both art’s sake, and the sake of your own art? The answer is enfolded in Bourdieu’s observation of the literary field: “The only legitimate accumulation . . . consists in making a name for oneself, a name that is known and recognized, the capital of consecration – implying a power to consecrate objects . . . or people . . . and hence of giving them value, and of making profits from this operation” (1996: 148). That is, after having made a name, the next logical step is to use the power gained through that accomplishment – to engage in consecrating others and to become a gatekeeper oneself. 14 The most obvious examples of this are the many poets who take positions as poetry editors at literary journals or presses (often without pay), or who curate reading series, volunteer to organize literary festivals, write poetry reviews for newspapers, run their own chapbook presses, take teaching positions, or even run their own independent poetry workshops. But even if a poet

Practicing poetry 49 is unable or unwilling to take on such a responsibility, she can still harness her own power to consecrate others via informal mentorship (recall its similarities to institutionalized gatekeeping practices) and through networking with finesse. The artfulness of the networking is crucial – otherwise it can violate the ideals of the field by appearing to be self-promoting. And my interviews and observations support Wilson’s finding that “poets deprecate any overt statement of the way to ‘get ahead’ in poetry, beyond that of hard work and faithfulness to one’s talent. A poet who consciously plots his career in terms of worldly goals, e.g. a certain income, a certain reputation, is generally scorned” (Wilson 1990: 171). Certainly most of my respondents have cited “shameless self-promotion” as a faux pas for poets – even one writer who realizes that he gets accused of it. This poet expressed his frustration at not being able to activate a network on his behalf in saying: “I know it [self-promotion] is supposed to be bad, but it’s not like we have agents or anything. What else am I supposed to do?” What this poet is missing is the fine difference between personal networking and fostering a network. Networking with finesse involves harnessing the power one has gained through establishing a name to introduce other poets to each other, to editors, and to publishers. Using one’s status to foster connections for other people has similar benefits to gatekeeping. In being the one who makes introductions, a network is created that is reliant on the catalyst for the connection. While benefit can therefore accrue to the poet who fostered the network, it works as an act of generosity as well, and that generosity obscures the ways that it achieves some of the same goals as “shameless self-promotion.” In summary, for a poet to successfully maintain the name she has established for herself, she must find a way to acknowledge and harness the power accrued through establishment without violating the values of the field. “You don’t do it [poetry] for return,” commented one poet, “You just do it. But it’s easy to get caught up in ‘what am I going to get published, who am I going to get published with.’ You know, using the same sort of networking, business skills to approach your work as if it’s a product on the market . . . it’s easy to lose the way” (emphasis mine). The misrecognitions that originally helped strengthen the illusio of the field become clear. For this reason, the facet of maintenance can be one of disillusionment, resentment, and frustration. In order to maintain one’s position, one’s practice must reflect the values of the field, even while capitalizing on their violation. Projection The facet of projection is not restricted to the latter part of a poet’s career. Indeed, the use of the term “projection” points to the recognition that the latter part of a poet’s career is difficult to pinpoint. As Menger notes (1999: 561):

50 Ailsa Craig One can get the feeling that there is no end to the learning process and to the assessment of one’s talent and that no situation is really crucial when one has to decide how far to go ahead in such a career. This could explain why many artists maintain for so long the hope that they will eventually become famous, even after death. The practices of projection are therefore woven into those of earlier stages, since practices of maintenance and establishment can also serve its ends – though only time will tell if they have succeeded. Nevertheless, poets do engage in practice that attempts to project the name they have made for themselves into the future. This is done blindly, of course, since the author function of a particular name will necessarily change with the passage of time. Fields are not static social spaces; the position accorded a particular name will therefore shift in relation to the changes in context – since the ongoing re-creation of the field ensures that, like stepping into a particular place in a river, it can never be done twice. The name of Wordsworth does not signify to poets today what it did to his contemporaries; and Wordsworth the man could never have foreseen what his name would survive to be.15 Just as Becker argues for the fundamental indeterminacy of art works, there is a fundamental indeterminacy to artists as well, since the work is re-created through reception each time it is read or viewed (Becker et al. 2005). Perhaps one of the earliest (and ongoing) practices of projection16 is the common tendency of poets to save everything poetry-related: their journals and rough notes, hand-edited drafts, notes jotted on subway transfers, flyers from events they have attended, chapbooks, broadsheets, or poetry postcards they have received, letters to and from other poets, and files of email exchanges. As soon as an entrant to the field begins to claim the identity of poet, these scraps of living are often saved for posterity. Ironically, poets refer to these carefully hoarded scraps and mementos as “ephemera” – a word which by definition means short-lived. “Do you really need to keep it all?” I asked one poet, who had several boxes he claims don’t even get unpacked between moves. “I like to keep it,” he replied, then smirked and said, “I’d like to keep some future graduate students very, very busy.” He then laughed at himself for both presuming and hoping that anyone might be interested. Projection is also involved in the choices and goals that poets have regarding publishers; different publishers make varying gestures toward the possibility of posthumous recognition and renown. Some poets prefer to aim for large, established publishing houses, in part because of the machine of publicity they may use to support the book, but also because a larger publishing house can afford to keep a book in print or do larger print runs. Larger presses are also more likely to have their books purchased by libraries as a matter of course, facilitating their work’s archival preservation. Small and specialized presses offer different incentives, since they often create books that are beautiful, collectible objects. And while you “can’t judge a book by its cover,” much of the discussion among poets at book

Practicing poetry 51 launches is about the quality of the paper used, the design of the cover, and the feel of the book in one’s hands. Indeed, one poet interviewed received a note from a friend who had read his manuscript for him before publication. His friend wrote that it was “incredibly mature writing. It deserves lovely paper and a lot of attention.” The practice of sharing work with others also includes aspects of projection, since being thanked in others’ publications, or having a book or poem dedicated to the friend and reader, allows for the possibility of leaving behind an extra trace of recognition – if one of the two attains posthumous renown, the other may be able to slip through the door along with them. Similarly, acting as a mentor or teacher to other poets increases the number of poets with whom one may be associated – and the more associations one has, particularly if they are institutionalized through academic programs or print acknowledgment, the more chances one has of later recognition.

Conclusion While the development of institutions that mimic aspects of professionalization may help to maintain or bolster the status of the occupation of “poet,” defining poets as professionals does not result in any greater clarity if our goal is to know what it means to be a living poet.17 Nor does it clarify how mundane practice interacts with ideals and values of genius, exception, and apotheosis in the trajectory of poets’ careers. The lack of economic capital available for the work of poetry and its orientation toward the possibilities of posthumous success mean that it is clearer to use professions literature as a lens for observation rather than as a mold for categorization. Though there is a kinship between poets and professions, poets are more an illusion of profession than a profession proper. Far from being a static accomplishment, being a poet is a continual commitment and achievement based in social interactions. In fields of poetry production, cultural, symbolic, and social capital trump economic success as poets compete for legitimacy, recognition, and ongoing reputation. The work of the poet includes not only writing poetry but also contributing to the field of poetry as a whole by participating in mundane practices that re-create the field as a dynamic space of formative tension and struggles. The question that now presents itself is this: What does it mean if poets are competing for the ability to contribute to the field and its values? While certainly that fits the definition of fighting for legitimacy, it is also more than that, since legitimacy is predominantly an interest in one’s personal status. While legitimation and legitimacy are often linked to gatekeeping activities, authenticity is seen within poetry fields as an always-already category that some fill and others do not – while at the same time being an ideal to which poets can aspire. While some gatekeepers may claim to be able to recognize authenticity and therefore harness the auratic power of the authentic (Benjamin 1988) to bolster their own reputations, others make no such claim

52 Ailsa Craig and make market-based decisions. Authenticity is a particularly salient principle for contemporary poets, and the emphasis on authenticity is understandable for a career so invested in purity of practice (art for art’s sake) and narratives of self-discovery that naturalize, essentialize, and mythologize poets’ trajectories. Interestingly, this aspiration works similarly to the principle of predestination elaborated by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace” (1992: 111). A “real” poet, someone whose authenticity will be proved through his or her ongoing posthumous success (a form of eternal life, no?), has a calm confidence in their work, and is unlikely to behave in ways that appear (however futilely) to be trying to affect the ongoing reception of their work. This is why self-promotion is antithetical to authenticity, as is relentless schmoozing – the ideal is that authentic poetry should be able to speak for itself, and requires no promotion. To understand poets’ struggle for legitimacy, it is helpful to recall Simmel’s characterization of competition, and the ways in which competition differs from conflict. While conflict is the struggle for existing resources that results in only one of the parties winning access to the resource in question, competition is an exercise in creation (not allocation) of resources, since all parties compete for something that the other does not already have. Because both parties aim for the same goal (here, the maintenance and renewal of the field of poetry) all participants benefit when the goal is attained. As Simmel puts it, competition “offers subjective motives as the means of producing objective values” (1964: 60). Another way to conceptualize this is to see the competitions and struggles of fields of poetry production as engaged in creating collective cultural capital – that is, cultural capital that benefits all involved, regardless of their status or rank within the field, because it reinforces the strength of the field itself. This is similar to Taylor’s characterization of shared goods. Taylor writes that: “A good is shared when part of what makes it a good is precisely that it is shared, i.e., sought after and cherished in common” (1983: 6). Indeed, “becoming a poet” can be understood as a trajectory toward contributing to collective cultural capital, to the “shared good” of poetry. While poetry may be “a hermetic genre” whose audience is populated by fellow practitioners (Sapiro 2003: 448), this hermetic quality is best understood not as a failure of the field but rather as part of poetry’s aim of appreciative communion, which allows one to extend outside oneself, even while pursuing personal success.

Notes 1 Observations and data for this chapter were gathered through ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with poets from New York City and Toronto, Canada. A total of forty interviews were conducted, twenty in each city.

Practicing poetry 53

2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10

Interviews lasted between three and five hours, depending on the loquacity of the poet being interviewed. Observations took place at both formal and informal gatherings of poets: at poetry readings or launches and parties in poets’ homes; at literary festivals, and while poets shared coffee with friends. In addition to attending a variety of events and venues, I tried also to see the poets I interviewed “in action” – at their own reading or book launch, at an event they were hosting, or through attending an event in their company. Respondents were selected for the interview using a snowball method whereby each respondent was asked to suggest contacts for further interviews. Initial contacts were well connected in their own poetry community: editors, reading series organizers, and teachers of poetry. All those interviewed have published their poetry, and therefore identify themselves and can be identified by others as poets. The fact that all the poets are published does not mean, however, that they can all be considered established, and more publications do not necessarily translate into a poet being better established or respected. At the time of interview, some respondents had only one or two publications and were struggling to create and publish a larger body of work (4/40), some had individual publications in journals or chapbooks and were trying to complete and/or place a manuscript (10/40), some had published a book or two (17/40), and some had published three or more books (9/40). While the constellations of institutions and the history of poetry fields in New York and Toronto differ, potentially altering poets’ expectations or the specific content of each facet of their trajectories, poets in both places are united by a shared occupational subculture, and therefore both New York and Toronto poets’ careers can be understood through application of the four-faceted model suggested in this chapter. Bowling 2002: 82. Wilson 1990: 147. All of these observations and theorizations are supported from the research on which this chapter is drawn. In a later piece Freidson argues explicitly that artists cannot be professionals since “the issue of professionalization . . . is one of providing reasonably secure work careers for average practitioners who are free to control their own work within the limits laid down by their organized profession” (1994). Being deemed a snob is one of the gentler criticisms that opponents or critics of spoken word may face. They are also often called elitist, racist, classist, antipolitical, or conservative. Unfortunately, a full exploration of the dynamics of this tension is outside the purview of this study. While a performance can be recorded, the immediacy of live performance – where the audience is in the same space as the performer – cannot be reproduced. A live performance has important effects on the experience of poetry. Stebbins’s work also emphasizes the relationships between professionals, amateurs, and their publics (1992). All of the respondents for this study who started their careers as adults did so through involvement in some sort of workshop or academic experience. What started as an experiment or curiosity provided them with positive reinforcement and encouragement that led them deeper into the field. Applying for funding early in one’s career is far more likely to happen in Toronto than in New York, simply due to the nature of the funding available. The National Endowment for the Arts provides prestigious and lucrative awards to poets and writers who have already proved themselves, whereas Canadian funding sources have awards earmarked for “emerging” writers and funding that is judged blindly and requires samples of work, but not a CV of accomplishments. This is not to say that the NEA does not support emerging writers

54 Ailsa Craig

11

12 13 14

15

16 17

– it just does so indirectly, through funding programs whose aim is to extend the reach of the arts, or publications that make a point of including less-established writers. Being accepted into a creative writing program at either the undergraduate or the graduate level can, however, be a legitimating factor and step towards establishment, since enrolment is often limited and requires an extensive application process. The undergraduate program at York University in Toronto, for example, requires applicants to apply for the introductory year-long course with a portfolio (this course can only be taken in the second year of study). Completing that course does not, however, guarantee students a spot in the program. Upon completing that full-year course, students must submit a more extensive portfolio than was required for the introductory course and the head of the department makes decisions on who will be part of the program at that point. This intensive entry process means that students who want to major in creative writing will not know with certainty until their penultimate year of study what their undergraduate major will be. Attaining the status of author function is fairly commonplace, however, while “surviving the test of time” is not. The poet’s name has been changed. Becker et al. also note the status inherent in acting as an arbiter: “The licence shall be claimed on the ground that only those in the occupation are competent to do the work, or, what is more crucial, to judge when the work is well done” (1961: 6). Emphasis mine. This does not mean he did not hope or intend to project himself into the future. Indeed, Susan Eilenberg writes of how Wordsworth used writing as a form of “poetic life insurance” in her discussion of Wordsworth’s poetic legacy and views about his immortality (1992: 207–208). I owe thanks to Jennifer Lokash for leading me to this reference. For an in-depth analysis of the processes affecting artists’ recognition and renown see Lang and Lang (1988). A partial list of institutions that express this urge toward professionalization includes the League of Canadian Poets, The Writer’s Union of Canada, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and MFA programs themselves.

Works cited Abbott, Andrew D. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anheier, Helmut K., Jurgen Gerhards, and Frank P. Romo. 1995. “Forms of Capital and Social Structure in Cultural Fields: Examining Bourdieu’s Social Topography,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (4): 859–903. Becker, Howard S. 1953. “Becoming a Marihuana User” American Journal of Sociology 59 (3): 235–242. Becker, Howard S., and James Carper. 1956. “The Elements of Identification with an Occupation,” American Sociological Review 21 (3): 341–348. Becker, Howard S., Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm L. Strauss. 1961. Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1956. “Careers, Personality, and Adult Socialization,” American Journal of Sociology 62 (3): 253–263.

Practicing poetry 55 Becker, Howard S., Rob Faulkner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds.), 2005. Art from Start to Finish: When Is an Art Work Done? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1988. Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. Reprint. New York: Schocken. Original edition, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art And Literature, edited and with an introduction by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bowling, Tim. 2002. Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation. Roberts Creek, B.C.: Nightwood Editions. Chambliss, Daniel F. 1989. “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” Sociological Theory 7 (1): 70–86. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1993. The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Eilenberg, Susan. 1992. Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Freidson, Eliot. 1990. “Labors of Love in Theory and Practice.” Pp. 149–161 in The Nature of Work, Sociological Perspectives, edited by K. Erikson and S. P. Vallas. New Haven: Yale University Press. Freidson, Eliot. 1994. “Why Art Cannot Be a Profession,” originally published as “Pourquoi l’art ne peut pas etre une profession,” in L’art de la recherche, Essais en l’honneur de Raymonde Moulin, edited by Pierre-Michel Menger and JeanClaude Passeron. Paris: La Documentation Française, formerly available at http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~eliotf/Why Art Cannot be a Profes.html. Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. 1992. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. Lang, Gladys E., and Kurt Lang. 1988. “Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1): 79–109. Lehman, David. 1998. The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday. Menger, Pierre-Michel. 1999. “Artistic Labor Markets and Careers,” Annual Review of Sociology 25: 541–574. Orr, David. 2004. “You, Too, Could Write a Poem,” New York Times, November 21: 7. Sapiro, Gisele. 2003. “The Literary Field Between the State and the Market,” Poetics 31 (5–6): 441–464. Simmel, Georg. 1964. Conflict. 1st Free Press pbk. ed. New York: Free Press. Simpson, Eileen B. 1982. Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Stebbins, Robert A. 1992. Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1983. Social Theory as Practice. Delhi, Toronto: Oxford University Press.

56 Ailsa Craig Weber, Max. 1992. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London, New York: Routledge. West, James L. W. 1988. American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wilson, Robert N. 1990. The American Poet: A Role Investigation. New York: Garland.

3

Hot glass The calorific imagination of practice in glassblowing1 Erin O’Connor

Imagination and reverie are often thought to be repose from practice, that everyday corporeal engagement with the world. In a similar vein, symbols have been regarded as floating above practices, as storehouse of meaning, expressive, but not constitutive of practice. Imagination, however, does not float above practice. It is deeply rooted in practice – in the relations of embodiment that structure our everyday social worlds, simultaneously salient to the generation and persistence of those practices – it is the organ of reciprocity of material and practice. Through understanding imagination as a generative force of practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine; the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice, is itself constitutive, not expressive, of culture – the lungs of culture. Drawing from two years of in situ ethnographic fieldwork in a New York City glassblowing studio, as a student and teaching assistant, and from an apprenticeship with a glass artist, I will explore the imaginative modes of glassblowing, from my own experience and that of others, elucidating the relations of imagination and practice across varying stages of proficiency: the dialectic of formal image and practice, one of light and technique; the recession of meaningful practice and practical imagination in fascination, one of heat and embodiment; and the emergent reciprocity of imagination and practice. I will examine this reciprocity, first and foremost, in the embodiment of glassblowing tools, and, secondly, in the intimacy thereby constituted with the material, a relation of heat and incorporation – a journey from the light to the heat. In this venture, we will see how embodied imagination, tied to practice, allows for the ascension of an “art,” be that glassblowing, poetics, physics, or politics – a practice refined by the subtleties

58 Erin O’Connor of its field. Without this embodied, material imagination, practice lacks depth, like a shadow, or souvenir removed from original meaning.

The seduction of glass I had already been an admirer of glass for some time, finding myself reminiscing about my grandmother’s crystal figurine collection – the frogs, the clowns, the swans – holding them to the window light, admiring their many facets, repositioning them at the center of a mirror-coaster. My childlike fascination similarly riveted me before a Bergdorf Goodman holiday window on Fifth Avenue in 2002 – a winter reverie of sheer sparkling splendor: countless strands of crystal beads chaotically strung above mounds of bluetinged glass shards, catching the light of a grand chandelier; crystal chalices, bowls, and carafes adorned a deep mahogany serving table, themselves wrapped in strands of cut glass cascading to the floor – a mirror reflected the luxurious delight, these remnants of decadence. I loved glass – loved to drink from it, look at it, hold it, press it to my cheek – to see through it, to the optics of the stem below, to the person opposite me – to see what it brought to the window light. Many beginning students of glassblowing had exposure to, and were enthralled by, not only the objects of glass, cool and formal, but the practice itself in some manner. They cited these experiences as motivation for enrolling in the course: Matt, a student in his late thirties, explained that he was given the beginner’s glassblowing weekend workshop as a birthday present: “We collect glass window ornaments and so my wife got me this class for my birthday. We’ve also been to Murano.”2 Similarly, Kathie had enrolled in the workshop after seeing Dale Chihuly3 blow glass at a garden exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, while Ruthie, a dedicated collector of paperweights, including those of renowned Paul Stankard,4 wanted to make some of her own. (Field notes, April 23, 2005) In another case, a man, also in his late thirties, had wanted to learn glassblowing since he first saw it at a “crafts village” when he was nine years old (Field notes, June 6, 2005). Though the specifics of their stories differ, it is not uncommon that at least some beginners, including myself, enter the glassblowing studio having been seduced by glass in some form, whether the objects of consumption or collection, or the choreography of the bodily art itself. It is often those cool and formal images of glass that the beginner envisions as the object of her practice. To a great extent, the novice’s knowledge of glass in one of light – cool hard forms, refracting, reflecting, and capturing the light. Blowing glass, however, is a practice informed not by cool reflective light but by engaging heat. However, it is the imagination of

Hot glass 59 light that the novice first brings to her practice of glassblowing – with it she envisions both the chimera and the caricature.

Images of glass: the chimera In a beginning glassblowing class in February 2004, my instructor, Rob, 5 asked us to start bringing a notebook to class in which to take notes during the demonstration. He added that he would also like us to bring sketches of objects that we would like to make, which he would demonstrate for the class. A few weeks later, when Rob asked if anyone had brought a sketch, I showed him mine: “This is actually relatively simple. The only thing that might be different is getting that off the center like you have sketched,” he said, looking at the sketch with a puzzled expression, and continued, “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?” “A pen holder/desk thing,” I responded. It sounded so boring. “A pen holder/desk thing?” Rob asked, jokingly skeptical. “Yeah, a friend of mine just got a teaching position, so I want to make him a pen holder,” I explained. I watched with curiosity as he made the piece and wondered, as it increasingly didn’t look like what I had intended, how he was going to finish it . . . He finished – it wasn’t anything remotely close to what I had envisioned. “Is that it?” he asked. I looked at him, half-smiling. “That face says ‘no,’” he continued, answering himself. “You don’t want to save it?” “Well, it’s ok, it just looks like a miniature Christmas tree stand,” I said. “A miniature Christmas tree stand, she says, folks! Christmas tree stand,” he exclaimed. His assistant’s gaze punished me as an ungrateful child. (Field notes, March 18, 2004) I had seen an array of pen stands in my life, although generally of the veneered wood variety, and had a vague idea that a pen holder was connected to prestige and success. These rather embarrassing impressions were fodder to the sketch (Figure 3.1) – essentially a reproduction of an image I already possessed. Though I knew that openings in the piece could be formed from the bubble, which is always on-center, I had not brought this knowledge to bear on the sketch, placing the pen well off-center. I sketched without thinking of the techniques I had learned in my fledgling four months of glassblowing, nor how the glass itself might be expressed in a form known through wood veneer. I had not thought to take the time to translate the form into glass terms. When asked to “envision” an object, I lacked the ability to “see,” to “envision” with the glass, an act necessarily rooted in the corporeal memory of the interaction with the material in practice itself. I could only imagine from my hitherto established practical sense of glass – the cool hard reflective form. Moreover, I imagined only a general hard form, given that the fabrication of a penholder from wood veneer was equally alien to me.

60 Erin O’Connor

Figure 3.1 Sketch of penholder for a friend, Ernesto

My imagination for forms lacked any material depth gained through practice – the penholder was a chimera insofar as it had nothing to do with either the practice or the material of practice. However, even the sketches brought by beginning students, who have thought through their objects in “glass terms,” do not seem to “get at” what captures the imagination of the proficient glassblower. During a course in the fall of 2005, in which I was a teaching assistant, a second-time student, Gretchen, handed her sketch to Adam the instructor.6 He responded: “Ah . . . a pitcher.” My ears, as did the other teaching assistants’, heard the resonating drone of monotony in his voice, and we looked at each other with a grin. “Great, yup, we can do this,” he continued, the drone undetected by the students. He looked at the sketch again, “It’s actually like the Kool-Aid man,” he offered. We all laughed. He chalked the form on the cement floor, complete with eyes and smile. (Field notes, November 10, 2005) While a pitcher is a completely legitimate form, blown across all levels of proficiency, its rendering, such as where the handle is placed, how the lip is flared open, or the proportions she has given to the fuller lower body versus the girded pouring neck – that is, how she has imagined the pitcher – falls short of capturing the depth and potential of the material. The subtleties of the form did not get at the complexities of the material. What is the source of the glassblowing imagination such that subtleties of form and complexities of material are wedded?

Hot glass 61

Touching the glass: towards the warmth Warmth characterizes the first contact of the novice with the glass – warmth in the eyes from the luminosity of molten glass, orange and soft with heat – warmth upon the skin from the flames of the roaring glory holes and furnaces – warmth deep behind the nose, odors of burning wood and newspaper, sweat – and of course warmth in her own limbs, the graceful movements and gestures stirring her, without explicitly asking, to motion. The novice is poised towards her immanent engagement with the glass, open, already experiencing the material. The warmth itself invites the dream of shaping, an undulating dialectic of resistance and reception. This anticipated corporeal dialectic turns the novice towards “consciousness of inner heat which always takes precedence over a purely visual knowledge of light” and perhaps the novice, like Novalis,7 senses that “[l]ight plays upon and laughs over the surface of things, but only heat penetrates” (Bachelard 1964: 40). The immersion in warmth, simply by virtue of being in the studio, alights the novice’s imagination from her body. In the actual encounter with the heat, in her first gather of glass, this invitation to engage the warmth is quickly overtaken by practical demands of the heat, yet corporeally incorporated and thus yet a figurative component in her imagination. While the novice may have aspirations for penholders, window ornaments, vases and intricate paperweights, the practice, even if encouraged by the anticipatory sensations of warmth, cannot yet realize those images. Rather, the novice’s encounter with the heat awakens schemata with which to manage the situation. The adaptation, which structures this management, disposes the novice’s body such that she begins to know and understand the material. Through learning and incorporating these dispositions, and thus coming to the material, the novice is able to begin to understand the heat. To gather the glass, one must (1) warm the end of a gathering rod, a steel pipe approximately three feet long and up to two inches in diameter, (2) take the warmed pipe to the furnace, where the molten glass is kept, (3) open the small front door of the furnace and dip the warmed tip of the pipe into the glass while rotating, and (4) withdraw the pipe from the glass while still rotating with the “gathered” orb of glass on the end. Following Deb’s8 demonstration of gathering from the furnace, we said, “Ok, everyone grab a punty.” The students had only been in the studio for about 30 minutes. Deb and I tried to coax them out from their timidity as they stood before the furnace’s scorching heat, blinded by its glare, only pensively moving towards extending the punty into the furnace. We adjusted their hands, their position before the furnace, and tried to protect them from the heat, as they dipped the tip of the pipe into the glass, peering for the effect through the small opening in the furnace door. (Field notes, February 19, 2005)

62 Erin O’Connor The results of the gathers varied widely: some hardly nudged their pipes through the opening, gathering little or no glass, while others gathered a foot and a half up the pipe. The deftness of the gather, however, was irrelevant to the purpose of the exercise: namely, exposing the student to the experience of that invariable first step of glassblowing, the gather and everything that goes into it – the advance of the glass, the blinding glare, the singeing heat on the hands, wrists, forearms, cheeks, and its viscous grip on the pipe. The exercise effectively required her to adopt a disposition, a schema with which to handle the situation. Characterized by a consciousness of the heat, even overwhelmed by the heat, her management of the situation is not yet imaginative practice, but utilitarian, using or adapting the means available to accomplish a certain end. For example, gathering involves the sensation of heat and the motion of retrieval, common to experiences such as working a campfire or fishing respectively. Past experiences, the individual’s own history of practice, translate the experience of first reaching towards a vat of molten glass so that a schema with which to manage the task of gathering, keeping adequate proximity from the heat and “retrieving” the glass without catastrophe, is engendered. This is a corporeal translation of new experiences through adaptation. Thus, in practice, the glassblowing habitus, that system of “structured, structuring dispositions,” begins to take shape (Bourdieu 1990: 52): “[W]e are disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed and endangered in the world . . . that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form” (Bourdieu 2000: 141). Through learning the dispositions necessary to get to know the glass, the novice’s body is immersed in this adaptive process of translation. The meaning with which she reads the practice is imported, as it is not yet in the practice’s own terms. Anchored in the body, perception is able to envision that which is corporeally incorporated. Thus the images of glass noted above, the penholders, window ornaments, vases and intricate paperweights, could not be “seen” even while sketching or describing their forms. With untrained bodies, we lacked the dispositions and the consequent habitus with which to “see” these images, given that “sight” is anticipation engendered by the corporeal incorporation of the practice: Social psychology is mistaken when it locates the dialectic of incorporation at the level of representations . . . This is firstly because of all schemes of perception and appreciation in which a group deposits its fundamental structures, and the schemes of expression through which it provides them with the beginnings of objectification and therefore of reinforcement, intervene between the individual and his/her body. (Bourdieu 1990: 72–73) Gathering is the first step of the incorporation of the dispositions of the practice and that which instigates the development of corporeal sight.

Hot glass 63 Once the novice has gathered, she begins to attend to the glass with hand tools. With this, the horizon of her corporeal sight becomes more expansive. To feel through tools is to extend ourselves into and embody those tools.9 Embodiment, or extension of our corporeal bodies through things, permeates our everyday experience – the grade of the pavement through our bicycle’s tires, the shaking limb of a tree while swinging, the lake beneath a sailboat’s hull – our lived body is much more than our own flesh and blood; our body reaches out and inhabits a phenomenological domain. In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi discusses this process through which instruments recede from consciousness and become extensions of the body: “[T]ools . . . can never lie in the field of . . . operations; they remain necessarily on our side of it, forming part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them” (Polanyi 1962: 59). Through attending, the novice begins work with and against the heat of the glass, shaping while it’s hot, heating when it becomes cold. Thus, the first collaboration with the heat, beyond managing it, takes place in the course of shaping. The use of the hand tools in shaping the glass provides an opportunity for the individual to consciously explore, direct, and guide her knowledge of the material – here, she becomes aware of material idiosyncrasies, a spectrum informed by heat, and thus it is in shaping that she begins to return to the warmth that enticed her upon her arrival in the studio. The first instance of shaping is scoring lines in the gather with a tong-like bladed tool, called the “jacks,” a technique called “jacking.” Deb demonstrated how to make a line with the jacks in the glass, a shape referred to as a “caterpillar”: rotating the gather on the punty along the arms of the workbench, you slowly bring the tips of the jack blades, while still rotating the punty, onto the glass and gently squeeze, scoring a line around the glass. While this sounds relatively simple (and appears as such in the sketch, Figure 3.2), it is quite difficult, given that the novice lacks the corporeal anticipation for the material idiosyncrasies encountered: The student lingered with the jacks above the glass, looking for a way to come onto the piece, which I helped him to keep rotating, much like one looks for the right moment to jump into the already skipping ropes of double-dutch. Part of the problem was that his hand wasn’t right: “Put your hand on the outside of the jacks, hold them straight up and down to the glass, that’s right, now just lower and . . .” Before I could get the word “gently” out, I saw the jacks lynch the rounded glass and immediately heard the clunking that comes from the jacks riding over cold squared glass. (Field notes, February 19, 2005)

64 Erin O’Connor

Figure 3.2 Steps towards and of jacking

Figure 3.3 Instructor, Bill, jacking a caterpillar proficiently

Hot glass 65 Removed from the affronting furnace, sitting at the workbench, guided by a very tangible image of a caterpillar, the novice begins to read, explore, and linger in reflection upon the glass. Though the exercise of shaping is about “scoring jack lines” and, more broadly, using the jacks to shape the glass, and not about “making caterpillars,” the novice often measures the relative success or failure of the jack lines in terms of the resemblance of the produced shape to a caterpillar. A pedagogical device, the caricatured image of the caterpillar, a row of balls, guides the novice’s exploration of the material and instigates a reflective practice. That is, the novice seeks to “see” the caterpillar. Embodying the jacks, she extends herself through them to the glass under hand, towards this caricature, reheating the small gather many times, trying to jack in more than one line.10 Striving to achieve the caterpillar, she begins to understand the importance of heat and the limitations of cold glass. Dikla attempted to put a jack line into the glass following a heat but corkscrewed it. The jack line needed to be tightened up following another heat. “Ok, let’s do that one more time, tighten that jack line up a bit,” I said to her. But she remained seated, continuing to hold the jacks on the glass, rotating the piece a little forward, a little backward, the jack blades following the corkscrew, staring at the ever-chilling piece. “Heat, Dikla, heat,” I said. (Field notes, May 16, 2005) Within the blades of her jacks, she began to make judgments in relation to this caricature. “It doesn’t really look like a caterpillar,” she would say, “Can I heat it up and try again?” Though she subjected the glass to her gaze, she could not yet interrogate the glass, as did the painter for Merleau-Ponty in asking the mountain how it makes “us see the visible” through “[l]ight, lighting, shadows, reflections, color” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 166). While Merleau-Ponty’s painter, implicated in the visible, knows the import of light in the constitution of the visible mountain, the novice, aiming towards the visible caricature, attuned to the heat only in terms of achieving the visible, imagines heat as light in the cold and hardened caterpillar. Though exploring heat in shaping, she is not yet able to bring heat to her interrogation. In the initial stages of gathering and shaping the glass, the heat, for the novice, must be overcome and tamed into light, into hardened form. What she imagines is thus still tethered to a cold and static form. It is not yet properly informed: the imagination of the novice glassblower is not yet hot. Caught in the relation of caricature to practice, the novice only hesitantly acts – form is not a powerful generator of bodily action – allowing the glass to cool, to take form. Often she simply stares at it. Detached from the dynamism of glass and the heat, both the image and the shaping hands remain stiff, timid and pursed – unexpressive of the force of glassblowing, the heat, that swelling and softness. Thus, she yields only crass forms.

66 Erin O’Connor

Losing touch: going for the heat Lacking the corporeal competence to bring the force of heat to her practice – the structured and structuring dispositions – but simultaneously having a sense of the significance of heat, the novice may have “the desire for a warm, soft, enveloping, protective substance, by the need of a matter that surrounds the entire being and permeates it” (Bachelard 1971: 63). Though she may not be able to engage the heat meaningfully, she is definitely not unaware of it. Blowing glass is hot – beads of sweat roll off the forehead, hair becomes wet, rivets on jeans singe the skin atop the pelvic bone, and moistness sheathes the entire body. An exposed inner arm, unaccustomed to the heat of the piece, becomes bruise-ish red. An unfortunate brush against a tool, fresh off the hot glass, can burn, leaving a scar that begins to fade only after a year. Attracted to and surrounded by this heat, she may succumb amidst practice to visual reverie, contemplation of the heat. Unlike one sitting at the hearth, dreaming into fire, the glassblower’s visual reverie is accompanied by an embodiment of the heat – the movement of the hot glass at the end of her tool. Such was the case the first time I tried to blow a goblet. I had tried, for the first time, to attach the stem of the goblet. Never having “taken a stem” before, my attempt to do so was marked not with the ease of incorporated practice but rather with the fumbling body, the bare punty, the blowpipe and the glass. Each was distinct and seemingly unrelated: My body was both numb and abuzz in the agitation of the unknown, hands shaking, heart racing. I drew the punty away from the bubble with the diamond shears so that the bit elongated into a semblance of a stem. They continued, “It’s going cold! Cut it! Don’t wait to cut it!” Not seeing the cold of which they spoke, but knowing that I had to act immediately, I hurriedly took the shears with my right hand, clumsily positioned them on my fingertips for leverage and clamped down onto the glass: quartz-like veins of opacity broke through its clarity, as I exerted as much brute pressure as I could muster; the glass moaning under the bandying shears like paper-thin ice of a frosted sidewalk puddle underfoot on a February morning. (Field notes, April 8, 2004) Seeking relief from the anxiety of the arrhythmic cadence, I took the piece to the glory hole to heat. Immensely relieved, my body fell into the familiar mode, my fingers automatically twirling the pipe to a long-established rhythm, my eyes looking nowhere into the glory hole, slowly becoming caught up in the flickering texture of heat – its white, orange and grey hues running around the furnace’s walls, framing the rotating glass – I became mesmerized and I day-dreamed:

Hot glass 67 During the process of reheating the bit three times in order to “shorten” it, I had amazing visions at the glory hole. Not amazing visions, but I constantly see phallic or sexual images in the forms the glass takes. The glass started to move, the heat of the glory hole awakening its fluidity, its rounded end making gentle revolutions. I could not act on it; it was too charming, too intimate: I wanted to follow it, to see where it was going, where it could take me. I just stared at these still timid revolutions, pleased that it answered within a moment my own gestures. I kept the bubble, the goblet’s bowl, and the bit, the goblet’s stem, rotating. My body faded away – into the rotating blowpipe, my eyes becoming increasingly captivated by the movements of the softening glass. My bubble became testicles, flaming orange, and the bit, the stem, on the end became a searching penis, swirling around as it softened with the heat. Though attached to my pipe it seemed to swim outwards, bounded within the coarse white-peach-tangerine walls of the glory hole – the breathing red embers below, the roar of the bathing gas flame – was it nice in there? Why did I seem to be cutting through the lake? Moving ever outwards within the brilliant fiery red of the glory hole, the bit shortened and the penis reformed to a sperm, swimming towards me, the short tail struggling to propel the head up my blowpipe. I withdrew the blowpipe slightly, leaving only the bit under the flame: it sauntered and swayed round and round, directing the piece towards me. The sauntering amused me – I didn’t mind. I wanted to keep the glass in the glory hole: I was relieved to become a spectator, to become captivated. The stem recklessly overheated, sauntered and swayed round and round – an enraged white sperm swimming towards me. (Field notes, April 8, 2004) At the time, this visual fantasia seemed brilliant, inspiring like a muse, but when I inquired of the proficient glassblowers whether it was part of their practice, they spoke against such reverie: “You have to keep your focus on the glass. When you lose it, you lose the piece. I can’t think about anything but what I’m supposed to be doing” (Paul Roberts, glassblower, April 13,

Figures 3.4 and 3.5 Glass vessels in the glory hole

68 Erin O’Connor 2004). This reverie at the glory hole, the place where I could let the glass saunter and sway, where I could risk being a bit reckless, allowed me to experience that which I could not sustain in the more intimate contact of shaping of the glass with the hand tools – heat. Paul, able to work the hot glass, offered practical and reasonable advice – the safe way of making the piece. This was “formal” advice, short-term, the path to be taken not to “lose the piece.” However, it did not touch on the more long-term necessity of understanding heat. Kanik Chung11 touched on this necessity in coming to understand glass: “Intimacy is direct experience with the medium. It’s not steps, it’s not making a cup. It’s dribbling on the floor, getting things too hot, getting things not hot enough – it’s understanding the medium” (February 20, 2005). Similarly, while discussing approaches to glassblowing, the glass artist with whom I apprenticed, Josiah McElheny,12 explained to me that a good punty is just a bit of glass of the end of the punty rod, balled up, with a hot tip – that that punty would work for any piece; on the other hand, techniques to shape a punty that go against the basic idea of a small gather with a hot tip are limited (Field notes, March 7, 2006). The properties of glass, of hot glass, heat, need to be understood. At the glory hole, I had abandoned that oneiric relation to work and allowed the eye to gain ascendancy: I was “seduce[d] . . . in the direction of forms and colors, of varieties and metamorphoses, of the probable shapes of future surfaces . . . desert[ing] depth, intimacy with substance, volume” (Bachelard 1971: 11). I had lost the dynamic engagement with the material and allowed it to become an utterly decontextualized, detemporalized imaginative meandering.13 But, this imaginative meandering was a “reverie of will,” which though irrelevant to the proficiency of the practice at that moment, allowed for a glimpse of the force of the practice, the heat. While the reverie at the glory hole may have been born of sublimation – “Indeed, it is not only in art that the Libido is sublimated. It is the source of all the works of homo faber” (Bachelard 1964: 30) – into it must be incorporated techne, which both Dikla and I, eschewing our Promethean inclinations, had forsaken. It is in the sense, of both techne and material reverie that Heidegger’s cabinetmaker attends to the wood: The learning [of a cabinetmaker’s apprentice] is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood – to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. (Heidegger 1954: 14)

Hot glass 69 In reverie, one discovers the force of the material, but it is this force in techne that is meaningful for practice. As the formal images had slipped away in the first encounter(s) of the novice with the glass, so too did the reverie, the indulgence of heat at the glory hole, quickly faded upon getting back to the task at hand. Thus, though I eagerly worked toward the goblet following this occasion of visual reverie, sincerely evoking my skills to the best of my ability, confident that I could carry what had been a difficult piece into something great and significant. I centered the stem, smoothed the bowl, attached a foot with eagerness and finally put the piece away in the annealer to cool. When riding the Manhattan-bound 3 train home, I was enflamed by the idea of a goblet, pondering its technical difficulty, considering that perhaps goblets were the only pieces of glass worth blowing, and enthusiastically sketched goblets fit for Venetians in my notebook. The actual piece, however, bore neither a remnant of my imaginative meandering nor a resemblance to the goblet I had seen taking shape under hand. It hardly looked like a wine glass. Yes, it had the same components as a wine glass: foot, stem, and balloon; but it was more of a gesture towards a wine glass. My goblet, my instructor joked, had turned “globlet”: it was lopsided and stout with a bowl like an inverted pyramid – the curvature of which

Figure 3.6 Subway sketches of goblets after blowing a goblet for the first time, April 2004. (Under my pen, they seemed, at the time, fit for Venetians)

70 Erin O’Connor

Figure 3.7 The “globlet”

could never accommodate my hope to gracefully aerate a kept Barolo – a stem as curved as a piece of ginger, and a foot that resembled a homestyle silver dollar American flapjack. Though I had evoked my most sincere and well-executed technique towards a vision so tangible that I could see the Barolo swirling in the goblet under hand, that vision was doomed to failure, given that it was not coherent – split between visual reverie and faith in technique alone to achieve the form envisioned. However, reverie at the glory hole – a reverie of heat, of penetrating to the interior, which neither eye nor hand can access – opened that dialectic of warmth that the novice had sensed when entering the studio and in her first instance of shaping the glass: “Imagination needs a dialectical animism” (Bachelard 1971: 68). Subjecting it to an aesthetic gaze, I did not employ the initiative of a worker, knowledgeable of heat and its relation to the movement of glass, rooted in a dialectical animism. “The eye – that inspector – prevents us from working” (Bachelard 1971: 82). In blowing the goblet, there was no reciprocity between the work and the material, given that my imagination was informed by material depth as visual reverie, or by the light of form through technique towards the caricature. Material imagination, which intimacy with the heat fosters, forging a dialogical relation between work and material, a frame of reciprocity, had not yet emerged: “Imagination that is material and dynamic enables us to experience a provoked adversity” (Bachelard 1971: 68). The novice, unlike Heidegger’s cabinetmaker, is not yet able to do this. To the anima – the swelling, undulating glass which commanded my eye and dreams, the daydream – I needed to bring animus, the girding discretion of definite action: Matter, to which one speaks according to the rules when he is working it, swells under the hand of the workman. This anima accepts the

Hot glass 71 flatteries of the animus which makes it emerge from its torpor. The hands dream . . . A reverie of intimacy – of an intimacy which is always human – opens up for the man who enters into the mysteries of matter. (Bachelard 1971: 72)14 In the visual reverie, I had experienced the movement which heat gives the glass, albeit in sexualized “forms.” To make this intimacy with the heat meaningful for practice, the dialectic of warmth, an undulation of resistance and reception, needed to be engaged, worked, guided through the tools and the accompanying corporeal dispositions. It is at this juncture, wherein the worker develops an oneiric relation with the material, that the touch of the hand becomes the caress. And in the caress, material imagination takes flight.

Towards the caress: returning to the glass The glassblower, in the course of shaping with the hand tools, begins to respond through the tool to the material. The glass says to the jacks, “Come on gently, lest I foil your intentions” – and therefore, both negate in part the instrumentality, the grabbing, which defined the novice’s first contact with the glass in the gather and beckons the dreamer back to the task at hand. It is here that the depth of the material imagination opens, that imagination fueled by the force of the material, by the heat and incorporated habituated technique. Learning to listen and respond to the material develops in tandem with the glassblowing habitus. While I had been jacking in necklines since my first day of glassblowing, it was in a Venetian glassblowing class that I began to understand some of the subtleties of using the jacks. I had used the jacks repeatedly to accomplish two tasks: (1) jacking in the neckline and (2), at a more advanced level, holding the jacks horizontally along the bubble, called “riding the bubble with the jacks” while blowing it out. I was “ready to learn,” had developed a “practical sense” for glassblowing, a corpus of dispositions from which I could make decisions and take action in the field.15 As a progressing beginner, the jacks had become an extension of my hand and in this sense, an object of subsidiary awareness, through which I attended to the object of focal awareness, the glass: This lapse into unconsciousness is accompanied by a newly acquired consciousness of the experiences in question, on the operational plane. It is misleading, therefore, to describe this as the mere result of repetition; it is a structural change achieved by a repeated mental effort aiming at the instrumentalization of certain things and actions in the service of some purpose. (Polanyi 1962: 61–62)

72 Erin O’Connor I was able to attend to the distal term, the object of focus, through the proximal term, the tool that has been incorporated, with some ease of incorporated skill (Polanyi 1967: 10). Though I was able to attend to the glass through the jacks to the extent that the jacks were no longer a conscious term of my action, I lacked the understanding of how the tool is held in the hand and how it is moved along the glass rotating underneath: Adam explained this step to me in a really clear way – he said he thought of it as “catching the curve,” as in “catching the wave,” so that you caught the curve of the bubble depending on the direction you were going in. When rolling the bubble forward and jacking, you ride the front side of the bubble by pushing back, and vice versa; when rolling backward, you lift the jacks off of the piece for a moment and then come on with the jacks pushing forward. He took hold of my hand with the jacks and guided it through the process of which he spoke . . . I had been riding the bubble with the jacks parallel to, or on top of, the bubble, and Adam said that this wasn’t the most effective way to handle the glass – wasn’t the most efficient – didn’t really shape the glass. (Field notes, February 4, 2005) In Figure 3.8, the glassblower is likely rotating the glass towards him, riding the front of the bubble at the bubble’s set angle with the jacks by tilting his wrist out and downwards, so that he pulls the glass towards him as he rotates. These subtle wrist movements both taper and cool the bottom of the bubble. The glass that is not being tapered and cooled remains hot and will expand when someone blows through the pipe, creating the “shoulders” of the piece. Subtle bodily adjustments must occur while riding the bubble with the jacks to accommodate the heat and the shape of the glass. To shape well the maker must listen to the material, must let the material guide the practice. The body, through the tool, must be in dialogue with the glass, such that the glass informs the practice. As such, the novice shapes with heat. She begins to work towards her practice not according to form, but rather according to the formative properties of the material. The novice begins to think, to imagine, not in terms of the light of glass forms, but in terms of hot glass. To this, however, I had to add my own program of visual rigor through which I could constantly evaluate the formative properties of heat: assisting beginning glassblowers. I became a teaching assistant in the winter of 2005, after becoming attuned to the complexities of the practice during months in the Venetian class. At this point I was able to actively watch, making judgments and suggestions. From May through July 2005, I assisted two to four nights a week, three hours each night for both a beginner’s glassblowing class and an intermediate glassblowing class. In September, I continued my work as a teaching assistant, two nights a week, three hours a night for the full twelve-week semester and continue even now one night a week. At

Hot glass 73

Figure 3.8 Kanik riding the bubble with the jacks

each of these classes, I assist the instructor in his or her demonstration and then assist the students as they practice – it is three hours of evaluation, of constantly fixing the students’ pieces, or helping them to think through how to make the piece that was demonstrated – a process of deforming the image: “Imagination is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images” (Bachelard 1971: 19). While the novice clings to the “form” – wanting to make the vase, the bowl, the cup, or whatever object it may be, the instructors have to teach not formation, but deformation – how to see the piece as various heats and shaping. In this vein, Adam recommended that his advanced beginning students not focus too much upon reproducing the steps to achieve the object, but try to understand what each heat and each use of the tool accomplishes: What I’m teaching you guys, the heats and how to use the tools – you should be able to use these for anything. You know, we’re making a plate tonight, but you can make anything out of what I’m showing you. It’s how you arrange the steps. (Field notes, November 10, 2005) Through breaking the form down into particularities and then refiguring those particularities towards new and different wholes, in terms of the heat, I was able to bring the animus to the anima.

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Imagining with glass Through instructively watching, having experienced the material depth towards which my incorporated techniques tended, subtleties came to the fore. That October, I was able to bring them to my practice, albeit humbly, to command them of myself. Images were no longer theoretical, but practical possibilities, the content of which was not an imitation of some form previously perceived, but an image put forth based on, even relatively determined by, matterly engagement, matterly intimacy: “Take away your dreams and you stultify the worker. Leave out the oneiric forces of work and you diminish, you annihilate the artisan. Each labor has its oneirism, each material worked on contributes its inner reveries” (Bachelard 1971: 80). I was able to at least glimpse this oneirism. The litany of what became intimate possibilities: Drawing back out of the furnace when gathering so the glass is off the end of the pipe; angling the block down as I roll the gather outwards, bringing it up as I roll the gather towards me and then cupping the end of the gather in the block, rounding down, so as to round out the end of the gather; seeing the evenness of the heat in the glass; patiently waiting for the glass to cool to blow out a sturdy starter bubble; marvering with great breadth and calm to cool the sides so that the shoulders would blow out; jacking to and fro as I rolled the pipe on the bench, cooling the bottom enough so that the shoulders blew out well; a tight jack line; tapering my heats so that the glass would drop out from the right points; getting in and out of the bench with at least some felt grace, swinging the pipe with glass overhead and directly into the glory hole; heating up the dropped blown foot so that it didn’t pull out into a flat oval . . . (Field notes, September 30, 2005) I did not experience these subtleties and then reflect upon my new ability to blow glass with some greater degree of intention. I felt the power to do so and then set about doing it: The imagination will see only if it has “visions”and will have visions only if reveries educate it before experiences do, and if experiences follow as token of reveries. As d’Annunzio has said: “The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time”. (Bachelard 1983: 16) Six months before I was able to effectively experience and guide the heat while riding the bubble, I had searched out that heat in the visual reverie at the glory hole. Some time later, I was able to start envisioning, imagining

Hot glass 75 through and with the glass – I knew how heat would carry it, how my body would relate to the heat. I wanted the heat, heated the glass for the heat, needed the heat, because having the heat meant that I could blow glass – the heat in practice was my envisioned piece in form. The first “artistic vision” I had – and I specifically felt it to be the first artistic vision, somehow different from any other “plan” I had had, prior to blowing the piece – was of a simple vase with blown out shoulders and a flared lip. While ever-refined technique and sensitivity to bodily engagement had opened a dialogical relation with the glass, my reveries had taught me to dream. With some competence I was finally able to “envision,” to “imagine.” Making this piece was accompanied by sheer pleasure and an unmistakable sense of empowerment. While the final piece is not a perfect resemblance of the sketch, I was nonetheless pleased – the way I had imagined the piece had been different: “The way we imagine is often more instructive than what we imagine” (Bachelard 1964: 28). I had imagined from within, rather than from without. At all times of day, at any place, I would sketch pieces to blow and for the first time, looking at Glass magazine made sense – I perused the articles with a discriminating eye, looking at the work of the artists featured, analyzing it, and mentally noting whatever aspects I might try to experiment with or incorporate into my own work. This changed how I began to think through the glassblowing process. To imagine something like glassblowing, that dialectic of warmth, one has to imagine it muscularly – to imagine how the material resists, relents. Though Figure 3.11 is composed of static images, arranged in terms of steps, techniques and tool positions, their meaning is the bodily comportment in

Figure 3.9 Sketch for glass vase with lip

Figure 3.10 Vase with lip

76 Erin O’Connor

Figure 3.11 Sketch for footed low bowl

Figure 3.12 Footed low bowl

relation to the heat which they demand, beckon, call for. It is here, at the inner heat, that the glassblower imagines and works – in relation to the heat is the work, the imagining, albeit its end in the final form.16 Thus, D’Annunzio’s glassblower laments when thinking of how the blown pieces, still bathed in heat, are destined for some chilly bourgeois dinner table.17 Thus, in my still nascent apprenticeship with Josiah, it was the heat of which I wrote and spoke: I have never seen anyone work this hot. There seems to be some imperceptible moment when the piece actually becomes the form – until then, that orange luminous glow is never lost, is steadily maintained. (Field notes, February 21, 2006) Moreover, the sketch that Josiah attached with the magnet to the heat shield near the glory hole was a one-line drawn form on graph paper – no steps, no alternatives, no notes, just a simple one-line form. His imagination is much deeper than my own. Imagination “enfolds” the glassblower and the glass (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 139). The journey towards the material imagination, rooted in the formative properties of glassblowing, is one from the light to the heat. Imagination has both informed and been shaped by practice – in fact, has facilitated the reciprocity of material and practice. We have seen two distinct modes of imagination: formal and material. In the former, the practitioner reproduces an image, which is grounded in neither an understanding of technique (rules and regulations or schemata) nor a developed sensibility for the material.

Hot glass 77 This imaginative mode, while creating a plethora of theoretical, envisioned, or visual possibilities, is without the tools for realization – the image remains formal, and unrealized. In material imagination, the practitioner is able to bring forth an image from knowledge of both technique and a developed sensibility for the formative properties of the material, in the case of glass, heat. Material imagination reinvigorates, expresses these engagements: “[T]here are – as I shall show – images of matter, direct images of matter. Vision names them, but the hand knows them. A dynamic joy touches them, kneads them, makes them lighter. One dreams these images of matter substantially, intimately, rejecting forms – perishable forms – and vain images, and the becoming of surfaces. They have weight, they are a heart” (Bachelard 1971: 11). Yes, they are girded by the possibilities of matter, but the imagination is allowed to take flight through the deformation of form.

Conclusion This transition, however, is wrought with ambiguity. There is excitement in the initial sensation of entering a dialogical engagement with the material, which, though a ground upon which material imagination can take flight, creates the possibility of being fascinated, like Empedocles18 before throwing himself into Mount Etna, with the molten material itself. In this vein, I remember a conversation at an East Village wine bar in July 2005 with my good blowpartner, Susie, in which I waxed poetic about drawing the glass out into a form, of envisioning the whole under hand: “When you’re riding the bubble with the jacks to blow out the shoulders, can’t you just see the whole piece before your eyes, right there under your hands?” Susie’s face broke into a wide smile, “No,” she began with a bit of a chuckle, “I just see hot glass and think about cooling the bottom with the jacks so that the shoulders blow out.” “Imagine that?” I laughed, recognizing the practical wisdom of her statement, “You see, that’s why you’re the better glassblower.” While we both looked to the glass, Susie did so in a meaningful way. She imagined within the glass, not at or upon it. There is reciprocity between material imagination and practice – within the material is contained the means through which we imagine. “Contemplated nature aids contemplation, [in] that it already contains some means of contemplation” (Bachelard 1971: 77). While bodies and bodily practices have been documented in cultural analyses, the body as such has been poised as a canvas upon which social forces could be read. We have seen here, however, that the body in practice is engagement: “Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia,’ which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 140–141); “It may be that the ‘symbolic function’ or

78 Erin O’Connor the ‘representative function’ underlies our movements, but it is not a final term for analysis. It too rests on certain groundwork” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 124). The phenomenal body is this groundwork. Understanding its embeddedness in and modes of relatedness to material helps us to better understand practice and the life-giving force of practice to culture. Moreover, understanding the relations of the phenomenal body, as structured, not only by the field of practice but also by the formative properties of the material it engages, demands an understanding of how those formative properties are known and how they generate different modes of practice. While the heat in glassblowing can be known in visual reverie, we have seen that it becomes formative to practice when the glassblower begins to imagine, or envisions her practice in terms of heat (and by default, cold). Imagination thus constituted, material imagination, becomes constitutive of practice as an organ of reciprocity of material and practice. The way, not the what of imagination lends to subtle distinctions in practice. To understand practice as the theatre of expression of what we imagine ourselves to be falls short of recognizing our embeddedness in a material. Culture is embedded and shaped by a material world. It is embodied practice. In situ ethnographic research, a practice itself of embodiment, opens up the possibility for understanding how the material world “penetrates” the actor. Here, we have not only practice at the center of our analysis, but have emphasized the material dimension of practice, the dialogical relation of the actor with the material world and the imaginative modes through which he comes into relation with the material. The actor has united “the poetics of reverie with the prosaism of life” (Bachelard 1971: 58). With deep imagination, there is deep practice, and so in glassblowing, one “art” – an “art” of culture – arises.

Notes 1 I would like to thank everyone at New York Glass for their continued support, particularly Deborah Adler, Adam Holzinger, Bill Couig, James McLeod, and Laurie Coutu-Korowitz. Special thanks to Kanik Chung and Susie Peck for their willingness to talk through the imaginative process, as well as for their steadfast care. I would also like to thank Josiah McElheny and Anders Rystedt. Working and talking with them has provided numerous insights into the art. In addition, thanks to Craig Calhoun, Richard Sennett, and Terry Williams for their encouragement, enthusiasm, and constructive comments. I am especially indebted to the living memory of my great-grandfather, Fred Papsdorf (1887–1978), American modern primitive painter – his simple story and passion for his craft continue to inspire me. 2 Murano is a small island off of the coast of Venice, Italy, renowned for its glassblowing. In 1291, the Venetian Republic ordered glassmakers to move their foundries to Murano owing to the fire danger they represented to Venice, a city of wooden buildings. The art of glassblowing became highly coveted, particularly with the perfection of mirror-making. By the fourteenth century, glassblowers and their families, courted by the French monarchy and the aristocracies of Europe, were forbidden to leave the island at the risk of assassination. Murano

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continues to be an active glass center and is revered as the “home” of glassblowing. Dale Chihuly is attributed with giving birth to the American studio glass movement. In 1967 he received a Masters of Science in Glassblowing from the University of Wisconsin. In 1968 he received a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, Chihuly was the first American glassblower to work in the prestigious Venini Fabrica on the island of Murano. Along with several other glass artists, Chihuly founded Pilchuck Glass School in 1971 in Stanwood, Washington. It remains the “mecca” for many young glassblowers and is known as the “home” of American glassblowing. He currently works out of his studio, Manifesto, in Seattle, Washington. Paul Stankard has specialized for more than thirty years in the art of making glass paperweights. Stankard flameworks miniature wild flowers of vibrant and distinct colors with extraordinary accuracy and delicacy, which are then encased in clear glass orbs. He is the most renowned American paperweight artist, his paperweights selling for up to $10,000. Robert Panepinto was a beginning and intermediate glassblowing instructor at New York Glass until January 2005. With a B.F.A. in painting from Pratt University, he continues to work as a glassblowing assistant, while focusing on painting. Adam Holtzinger is an upcoming glass artist, his works featured in the 2006 SOFA exhibition. Graduating with a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2003, he teaches beginning to advanced glassblowing, produces his own art, and works in production for a New York design house. Novalis (1772–1801) was the writing pseudonym of Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg, a German lyric poet. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) regarded Novalis as a poet of substances, of depth, a poet who touches the untouchable – a primitive sensual substance – rather than seeing the invisible. He is a poet who disdains forms: “Consequently, for one whose dreams are marked by warmth, the imagination is purely a material imagination. It is of matter that he dreams, its warmth that he needs” (Bachelard 1971: 63–64). Deborah Faye Adler is a glass artist and beginning glassblowing instructor at New York Glass. She graduated with a B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts in 2000 and has worked in a production studio and as an assistant to a glass artist in Connecticut. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) famously discusses this shift of an object in hand to an extension of the phenomenal body in regard to the blind man’s walking stick: “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it . . . To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 143). It is often the case that the beginner can jack only one or two jack lines in the glass. In order not to discourage the students, it is sometimes suggested that they make a “snowman,” requiring only two lines, rather than a “caterpillar,” which requires at least three. Kanik Chung is a sculptor and accomplished glassblower. Earning his M.F.A. at Ohio State University in 1999, he currently teaches glassblowing at beginning and advanced levels, blows production glass for a New York designer, and dedicates his remaining time to both glass and non-glass sculpture.

80 Erin O’Connor 12 Josiah McElheny (born 1966) is a noted American glass artist. Graduating from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989, he has been a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995) and the 15th Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass. His work has been exhibited at many national and international galleries and museums, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela), and the Whitney Biennial (2000). His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is currently on display. 13 Bachelard referred reverie in the depths of matter as feminine, as anima, versus the masculine animus: “Here we receive the teachings of the natural calm and an entreaty to become conscious of the calm of our own nature, of the substantial calm of our anima. The anima, the principle of our repose, is that nature within us which is sufficient unto itself; it is the tranquil feminine” (Bachelard 1971: 69–70). 14 The anima is the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies. The animus is the personification of all masculine psychological tendencies. 15 In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu writes: “Practical sense is a quasi-bodily involvement in the world which presupposes no representation either of the body or of the world, still less of their relationship. It is an immanence in the world through which the world imposes its imminence, things to be done or said, which directly govern speech and action. It orients ‘choices’ which, though not deliberate, are no less systematic, and which, without being ordered and organized in relation to an end, are none the less charged with a kind of retrospective finality. A particularly clear example of practical sense as a proleptic adjustment to the demands of a field is what is called in the language of sport, a ‘feel for the game.’ . . . Produced by experience of the game, and therefore of the objective structures within which it is played out, the ‘feel for the game’ is what gives the game a subjective sense – a meaning and a raison d’être, but also a direction, an orientation, an impending outcome, for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake” (Bourdieu 1990: 66). 16 “This need to penetrate, to go to the interior of things, to the interior of beings, is one of attraction of the intuition of inner heat. Where the eye cannot go, where the hand does not enter, there heat insinuates itself” (Bachelard 1964: 40). 17 “[W]e should no longer be surprised that works dealing with fire should be so easily sexualized. D’Annunzio portrays Stelio who, in the glass works, is contemplating, in the annealing oven, the extension of the smelting oven, the shining vases, still slaves of the fire, still under its power . . . Later, the beautiful frail creatures would abandon their father, would detach themselves from him forever; they would grow cold, become cold gems, would lead their new life in the world, enter the service of pleasure-seeking men, encounter dangers, follow the variations in light, receive the cut flower or the intoxicating drink” (quoted in Bachelard 1964: 56). 18 Empedocles (490–430 BCE) was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher. He maintained that matter was composed of the four elements: water, air, fire, and earth. He threw himself into the volcano, Mount Etna, so that it would be thought that he had vaporized into an immortal god. Bachelard writes of the Empedoclean lure of the glassblower’s furnace.

Works cited Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press. ——. 1971. The Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hot glass 81 ——. 1983. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation. ——. 1988. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications. ——. 1990. Fragments of A Poetics of Fire. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications. ——. 1998. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. D’Annunzio, Gabrielle. 1995. The Flame. Trans. Susan Bassnett. New York: Marsilio Publishers. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1954. What Is Called Thinking. Trans. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. ——. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Trans. James Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ——. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Polanyi, Michael. 1962. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1967. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City & New York: Anchor Books.

4

State power as field work Culture and practice in the French Survey of Historic Landmarks1 Alexandra Kowalski

After capitalism and organizations (Fligstein 1990, DiMaggio and Powell 1991), after class and social movements (Somers 1997, Goodwin and Jasper 2003), the state has undergone its own cultural turn in the social sciences (Steinmetz 1999). Positivist brands of sociology had traditionally sought to operationalize the state concept by reducing this rather amorphous entity to a bounded organization or set of organizations with objective contours, explicit functions, and defined responsibilities (to government or bureaucracy). The culturalist approach redefined it as a cultural construct, that is, as an object of discourses and beliefs that is constituted, as a reality, by discourses and beliefs. The goal of this conceptual operation was not to make the state a wholly subjective construct with no basis or consequence in the material world, but, on the contrary, to enable an empirical exploration of the objective manifestations and effects (effects of power in particular) of this construct on politics and social life. The culturalist approach attempts to show how governmental action is embedded in cultural systems that define and legitimate the state’s role in ideological and dependent ways. This chapter comes as a contribution to the culturalist agenda, although it may be a paradoxical one since it focuses on a governmental agency. Its object is the state as a “state effect” – that is, as a powerful cultural construct, one that defines the parameters of legitimacy and thereby confers legitimacy (Mitchell 1999, Bourdieu 1994). Rather than looking for the general norms defining governmental action from above (at the international level) (Meyer 1999) or from outside (by partly autonomous classes or forms of expertise) (Mitchell 1999, Rose and Miller 1992), I seek to explore the forms of this construct through an empirical study of governmental practice. The point is double. On the one hand, it is rather simply methodological. I would like to suggest that government agencies constitute an important empirical source to understand what the “state effect” is and how it operates practically – that is, on a ground where both the conception and the implementation of policies are enacted. On the other hand, the point is substantive. The objective effects of the state as a cultural construct are not only, I argue, forms of legitimacy graspable at a broad conceptual level or even at the inter-

State power as field work 83 mediary level of legal arrangements (policy), legal dispositions (laws), or “institutional” dynamics. The objective effects of the state are also constituted by concrete actions performed on the ground by social agents (civil servants, officials, administrators, etc.). The real “state” is thus also embedded from below, so to speak, in forms of concrete interactions that are subject to change over time. This “bottom-up” embeddedness can be defined as an embodiment which has not received much attention in the social sciences (Haney 1996) beyond the emerging subdiscipline of the anthropology of the state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). When the General Survey of Historic Landmarks (Inventaire Général, or Inventory) was created as a new agency of the French state, it was in part the product of a broader political culture, the aggregated result of a confluence of several ideologies – some literary, some political, some journalistic: ideologies about the nation, the state, and the relation between them; ideologies exuded by the war that had been officially won; ideologies emerging from the radical transformations of the landscape due to dramatic economic development over almost three decades; ideologies brought to the surface by the narcissistic trauma of decolonization (Ross 1996, Lebovics 1999). In the years that preceded its creation, between 1960 and 1964, the Inventory was defended by its proponents as a national venture. The mission of the new public body, it was argued, was to make up for an alleged French backwardness in the field of historic preservation (Lantelme 1998, Chastel 1989). France was compared with its European neighbors, both of the East and the West, from England to Hungary and Poland, who “already” had implemented such inventories, some of them more than fifty years earlier: the nation lagged “behind,” and it was unworthy of its own past. German scholarship, in particular, was offered as a model to emulate: its armies of well-trained art historians had been studying, and thereby appropriating, the religious treasures hidden in the Alsatian countryside since the turn of the century (Chastel 1989). Over the course of the 1970s, the United States and its large private institutions (especially the Getty Trust toward the end of the decade) would become the nation’s reference point in matters of patrimonial surveys – a paradoxical model that the French public Inventory would seek to emulate while fiercely rejecting American collaboration through fear of its influence. Defending the French Inventory meant not only defending national pride but also defending a public institution, one in charge of a collective form of property. The “nation discourse” (Calhoun 1996) in which the Inventory project was wrapped was also, as often is the case in France, a “state discourse” – that is, a discourse about the state, its autonomy, its power; a discourse that made the state in the process of legitimating it. “A public administration is not a management, but the instrument of a nation’s fate,” Malraux once said.2 The Inventory, like the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of which it was part, can be considered as one of the “state effects” discussed by Timothy Mitchell (1999). But this concept covers two realities that are distinct empirically

84 Alexandra Kowalski and need to be distinguished analytically. The Inventory is, on the one hand, a figure of speech: it is a metaphor both for the public property that is to be surveyed and surveilled and for the nation that is to be defended. The Inventory is also an “effect” of power as a concrete organizational dispositif that operationalizes, at its own level and in its own range of action, the presence of “the state” on French territory. Over two decades, between 1964 and 1984, the Inventory became a bureaucratic agency with a permanent staff of surveyors; a branch in every region; hundreds of ongoing programs, publications, and local exhibitions; and hundreds of thousands of files documenting historic buildings and objects. The unlikely, infinite, superhuman catalogue that Malraux imagined in 1960, in line with his dark and heroic fantasy about “man’s fate,” about the “nation’s fate” and about the “imaginary museum,” was embedded in a culture of the state and of the nation that was broader than both Malraux and the Inventory. The making of the Inventory has by now taken place on the grounds of twenty thousand towns and villages, accounting for an estimated 25 percent of the national territory (Inventaire Général, 2004).3 The Inventory is grounded in a physical experience of the territory in a very special sense. Central to its mission as a “corporate identity,” and central to the work of a large part of its staff, is the collection of empirical data in the towns and villages of France. If the reality of the Inventory is institutional in a complex sense which involves ties to the Ministry of Culture, to the University, and to local organizations and municipalities, the job of inventorying and the outcome of this work (publications and databases) is concretely predicated on sustained physical contact with roads and streets, with buildings, with objects – which also entails contact with the people who live on these streets, in these buildings, and with these objects. This chapter is an investigation of the “state effect” produced by these surveyors’ field work. By “produced” I mean, first of all, “shown” in a way that can be explored through a reading of their practices as a text. What does the practice of field work say of the state’s position toward the nation’s people and monuments, and the forms of resistance offered by the latter? What does the Inventory’s culture say of the modalities of state power over population and territory? Post-Foucauldian scholarship has mainly captured the state’s “gaze” in the abstract terms of an institutionalist approach from which agents are absent, or in which their action is reduced to a sort of bureaucratic vocation made of rationalizing obsessions and grand planning schemes (Scott 1998, Mitchell 1988).4 What do the concrete practices of viewing say about the concrete workings of surveillance that neither organizational nor institutional approaches really account for? By “state effect produced” I also mean “state effect affected.” What is the effect of the survey as a discourse or construct on “actually existing” social life? In an attempt to shed light on these questions, I will indicate the ways in which the surveys vary over time, showing how practices simultaneously reflect and affect institutional change.

State power as field work 85 Although some elements of ethnographic writing may be found in the following paragraphs, this is more a stylistic choice than a report of my direct experience of field work, which on the whole was relatively limited. I reconstrued survey practices through a variety of sources, including a series of 39 interviews with surveyors or former surveyors. Observation included three series of participation in field work over two- or three-day periods, in three different regions (Lorraine, Alsace, and Poitou), several guided visits in areas studied by surveyors (Poitou, Alsace, Brittany, Paris, and Midi-Pyrénées), and a year of data collection and weekly socialization in the services. The data used here include written documentation on survey methods, visual documentation of survey records, and catalogues of exhibits and publications. Assessing the congruence and the divergence between real practices and official guidelines was part of the method of this qualitative analysis.

The “field” as empirical ground What is the specificity of the Inventory? C’est le terrain. What is it that they prefer about their job? C’est le terrain. (Bien que ce soit fatigant.) What is the difference between you and a surveyor of the Bureau of Historic Monuments? Le terrain. Between then and now? Je ne fais plus beaucoup de terrain. Le terrain, “the field,” is the ground on which survey work is played out. It is the measure of the Inventory’s difference from other patrimonial organizations, and the measure of change in the Inventory’s function and position over time. It is the pole of experience around which imaginations and memories have crystallized over the years, giving the Inventaire Général its particular institutional identity, its culture de service. Unlike the Recenseurdocumentaliste of the Bureau of Historic Monuments who goes into the field at the request of an owner or local official and studies a mansion, or a room in a mansion, or a tapestry in one of the rooms of a mansion, the Inventory surveyor studies the tapestry, the rooms, the house and the neighboring houses: le terrain is an extent of space rather than a single object in it. Unlike the tourist who also visits places looking around for remarkable objects, the surveyor is a professional with practical training in the field and “an eye” for context: The cultural tourism approach to heritage is this narrow-minded, unbearable frame, the frame defined by the GPS and by the GIS, it is where the same answers are always given to the same questions, it is an accumulation of things that are repeated over and over again. It is the idea of a cultural practice where one day, it is believed, we’ll know everything about everything, and it is the idea of a closed knowledge. It is the groups of fifteen schmucks with sandwiches in their bags who

86 Alexandra Kowalski parade in a line, one after another, under the windows of your village house, listening to the ready-made speech they are served, nose in the air, mouth open, and who then move on to the next house or to the next church, all in a line. That is when an area is transformed into a vast amusement park. [The difference between Inventory work and this] is all the difference that there is between visiting a botanical garden where you see all the plants, one after another, reading the signs on which names are written in Latin, and going on a stroll with a friend who will explain the plants for you, and show you the way into that world, a vast world, an open one, exactly the opposite of a museum. (Marcel)5 Unlike the “armchair archaeologists” mentioned by one of my respondents, and unlike the art historians many of them admire and respect as their intellectual mentors, the surveyors pride themselves on their privileged relationship with the material sources of art-historical knowledge. But approaching architecture “in the field” is not only an objective part of these agents’ practice, the object of their training and what defines their specific skill. It is also, like maybe any “practical knowledge” as such, the source and the focus of a mystique, of verbal rituals, and of a belief that there is a goodness in it that makes it valuable in and of itself, among other evaluations both positive and negative – it is the source and the object of a collective imagining. The meaning of le terrain cannot be understood without reference to the experience of working in the field – let us say to the savoir-faire of the field, since the French language offers here an idiomatic notion for this mystique of practice. Conversely, the experience of le terrain includes the myths that came out of the collective life forms in the field. The following paragraphs discuss the meaning of le terrain for its practitioners, with respect to both ideal and material conditions. But separating matter and “ideas” in this way is only to show the entanglement of myth and experience within an “imaginary” of the field that enacts concrete forms of power on the ground. The imagined community of surveyors is not the nation. Unless they are from Paris or occupy managerial positions, few of them have much good to say about the recommendations and programs concocted for them nationally. Few of them have anything to say about the national founding figures of the Inventory either – the writer André Malraux, the historian of art André Chastel, or statesmen such as Julien Cain or André Chamson. When they do, they speak mostly about Malraux (as did Marcel, quoted above, as well as Jean and Georges, two surveyors mentioned in the following paragraphs). But it is not De Gaulle’s Malraux, the minister, the statesman. The character they recall is not even the writer of Man’s Fate or the philosopher of art. They have in mind the adventurer who mounted unlikely expeditions to the Middle East in search for the city of the Queen of Sheba, and to the jungles of Vietnam in search for ancient Annamese

State power as field work 87 temples. They remember the robber of antiquities – but they remember him as an outlaw who, while he smuggled ritual statues, also supported the political independence of Indochina. Malraux set the tone of this romantic attachment when he called the Inventory an “adventure of the spirit.” The smuggler and homme de terrain was also an autodidact who ferociously hated academics. He was a challenger of intellectual boundaries who scandalized historians of art with his Musée Imaginaire, the Museum without Walls. Historians saw in it only an ungrounded, ahistorical history of art – a threatening parody of their discipline.6 In 1961, when André Chastel, professor of art history at the Sorbonne, submitted the Inventory project to Malraux, the latter did not accept it for the sake of his discipline, but because he saw in it a mirror image of himself as an unconventional archaeologist, and a reflection of his tragic vision of “man’s” artistic consciousness. Malraux saw in the general Inventory a neverending task, a limitless catalogue of all traces of human creativity, at once desperate and eternal. It would be eternal like creativity itself, and desperate like “man.” Malraux “created” the Inventory institutionally and symbolically, and the surveyors who mention him “return the favor,” to use Voltaire’s irreverent mot d’esprit: as men did with God, they make him in their own image, that of a man who smuggles objects and knowledge out of “the field” – a field, as we will see, that is wide open for discoveries and imagination. Reference to the “adventure of the spirit” is commonplace at the Inventory and is used routinely in oral presentations and brochures, showing that the important part of the formula resides, from the point of view of surveyors, in its reference to the work they perform, to which Malraux’s name lends legitimacy. Interestingly, the three men who elaborated on the metaphor during interviews I conducted were all recommended (or mis-recommended) to me as “particular cases” to approach with caution. All three were “outcasts” with excellent professional credentials. They were doing good work but in the spirit of academic research rather than of a survey, and/or they were in conflict with their hierarchy over research programs, and/or they wore “two hats,” one finishing a doctoral degree and another working as an expert for international organizations. All three developed the Malrucian theme in a defensive and dissenting way, opposing the original aventure de l’esprit to recent trends they fiercely and eloquently rejected: the bureaucratization of the Inventory, the routinization of procedures through the rule of the bordereau d’inventaire (the standard survey form) and the invasion of computer technologies, the loss of local ties, the loss of practical implications, the loss of intellectual breadth, etc. I will relate these discourses to the conditions of field work more systematically below. For now it is enough to say that for these subjects (outliers, again, in a population that usually does not so directly challenge the system) the aventure de l’esprit is a narrative device accounting for a global structural social change experienced at the practical level.

88 Alexandra Kowalski The point where the narrative makes sense, potential contradictions included, is where the expressive device (the romanticization of Malraux’s notion of aventure) meets the particular stories of frustrated individuals at odds with the existing institutional order. The point where the metaphor makes sense, sociologically and methodologically, is where it connects a particular story, no matter how atypical and how hybrid the location of the teller, with one given institutional frame. This point is, generally speaking, what anthropologists call practice, and sociologists social action, or habitus. In this case, the practical knot to which the aventure figure of speech points is the practice of field work: field work is the plane where the psychological strain experienced by these three respondents meets the Inventory as an institution embedded in governmental organization, ministerial directives, laws and bureaucratic cultures. Rather than a “point,” actually, le terrain is a ground: a ground where actors’ practical investigation meets the sociological investigation I am reporting here.

The field as context The method and the myth of the étude de terrain find their historical and sociological sources in the early surveying campaigns (campagnes d’Inventaire) that took place between 1964 and the mid-1970s in the first regions in which the Inventory was implemented. I focused in particular on data from early operations, in Alsace and Brittany (1964), Lorraine (1966), and Poitou-Charentes (1967). The setup of these campaigns was conditioned by the limited financial and political means granted by the government – in particular the Ministry of the Economy and Finance – to the Ministry of Culture and to the Inventory during the first twenty years of its existence.7 Only two permanent positions were created in each region: one for a Secrétaire Régional and one for an assistant. Both were administrative positions. The workforce for the survey work itself was provided by teams of ten to twenty students enrolled in graduate programs (Licence) in history, art history, and architecture at local universities. They were hired for all or part of the summer months and were paid by the hour. Out of 103 Conservateurs du Patrimoine working at the Inventory in 2001, a majority (76) took part in the summer campaigns of the first ten years. They represent approximately 30 percent of the research staff. In addition to these temporary workers, the government was initially counting on the participation of local volunteers. This segment of the labor force, it was thought, would be extracted from local networks of associations and learned societies, which are dense in certain regions, through an ingenious system of commissions of notables with high status and political visibility to ensure the broadest mobilization of the “live forces of the nation.” With one exception in the Lorraine region, the levée en masse of an army of citizens did not happen. Illusory expectations were partly built on an obsolete organizational model inspired from the nineteenth century, a

State power as field work 89 time when learned societies were very actively involved in semi-professional forms of historical research locally (Gerson 2003, Chaline 1998). These organizations declined after World War I. The illusion of a citizen-made Inventory was also partly built on a misunderstanding which Malraux’s administrators strategically entertained for short-term political reasons: their priority was not to give a realistic picture of the human resources needed for a national inventory, which, they agreed with Malraux, was quite beautifully unrealistic, but to obtain from the Ministry of the Economy and Finance the funds that would allow the launch of the first operations in Brittany and Alsace, thus creating a “point of no return.”8 Students were recruited in January or February. They were trained and sometimes organized in work teams during the Easter vacation (between the end of March and April). Work started at the beginning of June and proceeded until the end of August. Field work was collective work. Teams were made up of one or several writers who recorded the information on a plain sheet of paper. Issues over the standardization of information were solved progressively; the first forms did not appear until the mid-1970s. The object was described, measured, and dated when possible. An architect drew plans of buildings. A photographer took pictures of the buildings, objects and decorative details. Photos were developed that very evening in the photographic truck – the main piece of modern technology on which the staff prided itself (“Everyone knew that a service without driving material is not a real service,” says Secrétaire Général Roger Delarozière). We worked like dogs, it was strenuous. All day long standing in the mud and sitting in corners on the ground, climbing up ladders, looking for interesting details, keeping an eye out for the photographer to call him when there was something, discussing dates and construction techniques with colleagues, fighting over minute points, about the description of statues and other things. We were often still talking late into the night after dinner . . . we prepared our own grub (tambouille), with the fire and all. It was amazing. We were up and running [sur le pied de guerre] early in the morning, worked until sundown, we were doing it. (Jean-Pierre) The camp-like organization of field work made the Inventory into a sort of “total institution” for the three summer months. Students, often with their supervisor, the Secrétaire Régional, worked, ate, and slept in a common location, sometimes even in the same room. Most often, funds were not available to pay for a hotel, a house rental or guest rooms, so the teams would plant their tents in the municipal camping ground. In some cases they were housed in the classrooms of local schools which stood empty during the summer vacation. In Poitou students stayed for two summers in empty military barracks graciously lent by the Ministry of Armies. The connection

90 Alexandra Kowalski to the military was a legacy of the social networks built up by Malraux through the Resistance, during the war, and by the Inventory’s Secrétaire Général Roger Delarozière back when he was a colonial administrator in Africa. The army graciously provided other goods and services, including office buildings, plane rides for aerial photographic campaigns, photographs and photographic material from the local gendarmerie.9 Several other stately institutions met on the field of the Inventory and collaborated at no cost, in informal but sustained ways, lending personnel and material: the national service of Archives (Archives de France) and the national press (Imprimerie N