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 Nationale) from the Ministry of the Interior; and the Ministry of Education. In spite of divergent experiences, all commonly use the collective “we” when telling about these antique field campaigns. A fantasy grew up with the group and its members that tie them together across the years, beyond social and geographic origins, a myth with both scientific credit and a warlike connotation: le terrain. The campaigns stopped in 1976, when surveyors’ positions became permanent and their title upgraded to that of chercheur. Graduate degrees in art history were just being created, and these were additional jobs students could apply for. Regional services could in return rely on a regular, professional or professionalizing workforce, a goal the administration had long pursued. Today the Inventory continues to rely quite extensively on precarious forms of employment, by temporary contracts that are renewed throughout the year. Surveyors do field work virtually all year, although they tend to keep archival and other indoor activities for the coldest months. Intense investigation of the field resumes in April and ends in mid-October. Researchers are rarely alone in the field but teams have dwindled to dyadic dimensions. This is partly for scientific reasons (two pairs of eyes are better than one), and partly for safety reasons. “Le terrain, it’s dangerous” – that is, of course, as dangerous as it can be to climb a ladder, crawl on a fallen beam, enter a collapsing cellar, deal with lunatic dogs or talk to suspicious or disgruntled residents. The few surveyors who do field work by themselves in rural areas are old, tired, about to retire or actually retired. They are people who have been set aside because they hold onto their old ways and there is nothing to be done about it. The new generation of Conservateurs finds it useless to lecture them anymore about the new, faster methods that to them signify “professionalization.” Marinette, for example, was turning sixty in 2001. She still did field work according to the methods of the old inventaire fondamental. Marinette was a micro-research institute all by herself, with her own research program, her own extensive knowledge of poitevines grain barns, and her own quantitative analyses of the relationship between the number of holes in the wall of a barn and the wealth of its owner. She did not fill in any forms on the spot but waited until her return to the office, in which she spent only a couple of days a week. The photographers, who used to be major players and a fundamental symbolic resource for the Inventory, have been marginalized and instru-

State power as field work 91 mentalized. Now, like graphic artists, they are given the locations and the descriptions of selected objects only after the survey is done. A photograph and sometimes a drawing or map are put in the “green files.” Some are used for the publications. Researchers rarely accompany them during their visits anymore, unless it is justified by the rarity (or some other “inherent” quality) of a piece. The once part-time “agents of the Inventory” were all promoted twice: to the grade of “researchers” in 1976, and to the prestigious title of “curators” (conservateurs du patrimoine) in 1990. What used to look like a “mission” became bureaucratized; walls were built around the “museum without walls.” What used to be referred to as an opération d’inventaire (the survey campaigns) and defined the Inventory as a service has now become faire de l’inventaire (doing survey work) and represents only one of many other types of activities. Many of these activities are bureaucratic and do not involve field work. They include archiving, writing, attending training workshops, going to meetings and conferences, and training departmental employees. The standardization of methods of research and archiving is time- and energy-consuming: office work takes today three times as long as time spent in the field. Field work, the on-site study of material culture, is still the defining part of the researchers’ work and identity. But faire de l’inventaire, in the old sense of combing any area in search of any trace of social and creative forms, has become a minor part of their work, even when there are funds available.10 The memory of the summer campaigns evokes no noticeable nostalgia among of researchers hired after 1976. It generates indifferent or irritated forms of contempt among the youngest, especially those hired after 1990, who earned their “curator” title through the demanding competition exam of the select Ecole Nationale du Patrimoine,11 rather than through internal promotion as did their elders. The basic requirements of field work have not changed much, however: covering ground while identifying and studying, with rigor, as many items as possible.

The field as practice Once the first “mapping” of the area has been conducted by car to locate isolated farms and groups of farms (as well as, sometimes, the preliminary archival and library research that gives an idea of what previous observers and local historians had remarked and sometimes studied), the surveyor proceeds on foot, at a slow pace. I went into the field in three different regions with Jeanne and Armance (employed by the same regional bureau since 1965), with Marinette (since 1967), and with Anne, the head of the regional bureau (an archivist who joined the Inventory ten years ago because she preferred to work outdoors). My visits to the field lasted two to three days. I had socialized with these women beforehand, while consulting documents in the office, and stayed in

92 Alexandra Kowalski touch with them throughout the year I spent in France. I did not do field work myself. My role was that of a privileged observer, trying not to interrupt work, yet benefiting from patient and detailed explanations. Explanations were not so much about the “job” itself with its set of formal requirements (one color for the forms on which objects were simply recorded, another color for the remarkable items that deserved to be “studied”) as they were about the place we were going through, the objects in the place, and the skills of observation required to analyze and classify them. These experiences of field work were for me what they seemed to be to the people we met (and met again, and again, because the villages were small): a long, tedious guided tour bordering on compulsive behavior. For my guides, they were a special day of work because they had a public to cater to. Apart from Anne, whose Inventory has become in the past few years a national laboratory where new forms of state decentralization were being experimented, and who was obviously tired of curious and clueless visitors like me, they welcomed my presence and were quite happy to explain what they were doing while they were doing it. In theory (that is, according to founding texts and official recommendations) the Inventory had no defined object at its inception. Rather, its object was everything that falls into the categories of the fine arts, the decorative arts, popular arts and crafts, architecture (religious, vernacular and industrial, including decorative and functional parts), furniture, and instruments (agricultural, industrial, musical). In practice, the first “fundamental” surveys reflected a rather traditional art-historical approach to provincial “monuments”: they focused on architecture and, within it, on religious architecture, as well as on decorative details – anything that could be assimilated to grande architecture and the fine arts.12 The young surveyors’ provincial gaze looked for small monuments within the small monuments of the provinces. However, wary of the accusation of façadisme (a conventional bourgeois taste for decorative façades and details “pleasant” to the eye), the academic avant-garde that was in command of the Inventory’s “scientific methodology” in Paris straightened the shot at a distance through the methodological guidebooks they put out. These were informed by frequent visits to the field. From the early 1970s on, the gaze became more penetrating. Without losing sight of the statues of saints, altarpieces and other capitals, the eye started questioning the function, social or structural, of all buildings, rooms and stones as well. By the end of the decade, the functional approach had made rural houses attractive and intriguing to all regional teams. Intrusion in religious and semi-public spaces (such as châteaux and manors) had long been practiced. But intrusion in ordinary domestic spaces had become a new skill, an intellectual as well as a practical challenge which surveyors became experts at taking up. Elements that were key to the distribution of rooms became the target of the surveyors’ gaze, as they allowed surveyors to interpret the function and layout of buildings. In towns, accessing courtyards became

State power as field work 93 a priority. In rural areas, it was all about locating the staircase in the farmhouse, and then actually getting to see it. The structural turn of the Inventory did not only open its categorical agenda towards the “vernacular,” it also opened the doors of private homes to the state’s gaze, both virtually and physically. Surveyors developed superior skills deciphering the inside of a farmhouse or a house from the outside: the kitchen betrayed by the sink’s larger stone built into the external wall, the staircase by the position of the kitchen and the chimney, the living room, the possible corridors and the bedrooms by the staircase, walls and windows. These reading skills were put to good use as rhetorical devices that forced the door open both literally and metaphorically: Surveyor: Owner: S: O: S:

You have a beautiful sink, Madam. Well. (How do you know?) I can see. From there? I am with the Inventaire Général, Malraux’s Inventory. Could I take a look at your kitchen?

Another tactic: “You must have an exceptional staircase. It is a spiral one, right?” etc. “I have my tricks,” says Marinette with pride. “They never fail.” While driving me through the rural landscape in her white van and telling me about her tricks, Marinette points to milestones where I see only grass, and to cemeteries where I have not even identified cypresses. Human presence and industry turned the landscape into a web of familiar edifices invisible to my foreign eye. Marinette’s “tricks” are the skills of an old generation of above-ground archaeologists whose job was to spot the stones, upturn them and see what lay underneath. What was behind the façade of ancient houses, once the door had been opened, ended up satisfying the requirements of a general survey: old pieces of rustic furniture, ceramic dishes, rare porcelain dishes with a bit of luck. To a large extent, the “generality” of the Inventory was sacrificed over time to the professionalization of its staff. Poitou is the only region where pieces of privately owned furniture are still recorded. The standardization of methods, as well as the strong and sometimes violent pressure coming from above to cover more ground in less time, turned the general Inventory into an Inventory of historic buildings. Today, surveyors say they do not have the time to enter houses. But they still know how to, and they still do when circumstances help: when the building is “interesting” (either a unique case or representative of a type, in any event “readable”), and when the resident is home, and when the surveyors are not too exhausted by their day of walking. In any event, the reading skills acquired at the Inventory, the focus on functions, the topographic principle, the will to decipher space with aesthetic and historical categories, both at the scale of a building and at the scale of a pays, all these elements remain the best part of their practical capital. They know it, too, and this knowledge is readily converted into

94 Alexandra Kowalski rhetorical capital when they have to promote the quality of their “service” on the decentralized market of local development. The pays just mentioned is not France, but the local “land” (Heimat, as Germans call it). The units of analysis of surveyors’ studies are no longer defined by national programs aiming, without mediation, for an extensive and indiscriminate coverage of all types of “artistic treasures.” They are increasingly defined, on the one hand by national programs bounded by specific themes of research (industrial heritage, rural architecture, urban architecture, or cast iron techniques), and on the other hand by locally funded studies of particular areas, sites or monuments. While the empirical component of the field principle remains, and while the databases that today constitute the catalogue are still being filled, the categorical and geographic boundaries of the gaze are now defined from outside. Control is exercised either by the administrative hierarchy that brings funding from above (the state) and from below (regions, departments, and municipalities), or by a scientific hierarchy (the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and the university) that brings surveyor-researchers cognitive guidance and social prestige. The practice of field work confronts surveyors with several types of obstacles requiring distinct treatments. One is the series of movable objects they observe and record: details of buildings, pieces of furniture, paintings, sculptures, and so on. Another is the immovable objects they also record: buildings, a major focal point for the gaze. The third and last of these obstacles, only briefly mentioned so far, is “people”: the inhabitants of the territories surveyors explore. The next section examines the interactions between surveyors and these three poles of resistance as instances of power relationships confronting the embodied state in relation to its territory and population.

The field as a field of struggle Movable objects Objects need to be found and discovered. We saw how reading through the walls and opening the doors of properties, homes, and cupboards had become part of the skills of surveyors in the times of the “general” (or “fundamental”) survey. We saw how the practical skills that give physical access, and the cognitive skill that gives virtual transparency to the thick matter of the walls, are complementary and embedded. Field work, as the terms “campaign” and “operation” suggest, is a work of conquest over the material environment which endeavors to open it up to inquiry. All narratives of field work in religious edifices include the problem of “the key.” Finding the priest or the person in charge of the church to ask for the key is a preoccupation of surveyors from the moment they start working on a village.

State power as field work 95 When you entered a church and, opening the cupboards, you fell on statues or paintings that had been left there, and you said: “oh but that is . . .” Little by little the eye gets trained [l’oeil se fait] and you could discover interesting things. I remember the first campaigns I did in Roussillon . . . we were just overwhelmed by the number of Catalan altarpieces we found, that was a fantastic discovery. Those pieces were known by local historians but for us it was a shock, these altarpieces. We knew classical Italian painting, nineteenth-century painting, but we didn’t know the painting of painters from Roussillon and Catalogne. (Gallia) Discovery is a victory over one’s ignorance. It is also a victory over matter, achieved through the dirty pleasure of uncovering altars under piles of wood, or silverware under a layer of rust. Madeleine, a specialist of decorative arts who admits to being bored by her theoretical work in Paris, speaks with nostalgia of the old days in the field in the 1960s: I visited the regions quite often. I participated in the “field campaigns,” as we called them, in Ile de Ré, in Alsace, Brittany, Languedoc. We were doing churches, farmhouses, crosses, stuff that smells bad, sacristies, old dirty cotton rags, making your hands feel like metal at the end of the day because they smelled so bad . . . especially because when you need to identify an object and see whether it is silver or copper, you need to warm it up in your hands, then rub your fingers on it and smell the fingers, because copper smells while silver doesn’t. In the same way that she looks for the key to the church door, Madeleine finds, figuratively, the “key” to the object from a micro-archaeology of layers of dirt which, stripped away, reveal its texture and composition. Her victory is a historian’s victory over temporal layers masking the object. Unlike traditional documentary discoveries, however, this one allows the researcher to wear the hide of her conquest. As Madeleine indicates through her emphatic tone, the victory is also a personal one, especially when one is a Parisian raised in the sanitized atmosphere of a bourgeois apartment. Similarly, the photographic treatment of objects in the files of the fundamental inventory skins the context from the objects: they are either presented on a blanket or some other neutral background, or outlined in white paint when the object is attached to a wall or a pedestal. This mode of presentation monumentalized “small heritage” (le petit patrimoine). It is still used today in the electronic databases to present fine pieces of religious art (ciboria, crosses, etc.). Generally speaking, however, the “short survey” that has become the norm today radically changed the approach to objects and to decorative parts of buildings. As a rule, objects are not recorded unless they are physically tied to architectural structures – unless they are a function

96 Alexandra Kowalski of the architectural context that explains their presence in the field. The current focus on buildings and on context is partly a product of the structural turn identified above. The gaze tries to capture the relations between units in space, as much as the units themselves, a cognitive change that can also be observed in the survey of buildings. Immovable objects The architectural and structural turn of the mid-1970s made the gaze more penetrating. It also made it more encompassing by making the past and present functions of buildings the central object of investigation. “Individuals” are not only studied for themselves if they are “interesting,” they are also studied as Ns in a “family” of objects (farm houses, barns, residence, apartment building, factory) and in a functional “group” (such as a farm, a village, a hamlet, a housing project, a “new city”) and in an organic whole that developed and changed across time (the village, the neighborhood or the city). “Denaturation” (dénaturation) has been a central discriminating criterion in the theory and practice of the architectural survey since its origins. It is a “rational” principle of selection by which denatured “individuals” are labeled as deviant and excluded. “Denaturation” connotes loss of authenticity, but its meaning is more complex than any clichéd “unmasking” of “socially construed” nostalgia would suggest. This meaning changed over the years, too, leaving us with a surplus of explaining to do. The Livret d’Architecture,13 which introduced the term in 1974, defined dénaturation as the loss of original materials, shape and function of a building due to intentional or natural transformations. The 1974 gaze thus looked for the “original.” According to researchers currently involved in field work and most articulate about theoretical issues (Anne again, Annabelle, Jean, and Frédérique) “denatured” today means “unreadable.” In other words, transformations belong to the record when they can be accounted for and/or dated.14 This is another manifestation of the transformation of the gaze from a “monumental” approach that isolates remarkable “individuals” (in Inventory jargon, unica) to a relational approach that seeks to bridge space and time between single occurrences. The relational (or functional, or structural) approach uses occurrences to “weave” them into an account of architectural (and, ultimately, social) “fabric” (le tissu architectural). The urban turn at the Inventory in the mid-1980s partly explains this change (three of the researchers mentioned above work on urban areas in Rennes and Paris): cities calls for units of analysis that are larger than the building. These units of analysis – the lot, the neighborhood, or the city, depending on the scale of operations of urban development at any given time – form what surveyors call the “urban fabric” (tissu urbain), long an unbeatable obstacle for the gaze due to its density and historical complexity. New electronic technologies contributed to overcoming this obstacle, allowing today the

State power as field work 97 possibility of handling more complex taxonomies, coupling databases and maps, and reducing the cost of photographic documentation. People (les gens) The relationship between surveyors and people is complex and is not limited to the “field” part of the Inventory. However, the field puts forward some crucial aspects of state power in the domain of collective memory. Reaching out to people is for surveyors a secondary by-product of the survey job. Raising awareness comes as a function of their knowledge of the field: they lecture to people who ask questions (and also to those who don’t), they organize exhibits in villages, give conferences, and sometimes train external staff. These aspects of the job remained constant across the decades. Outside of these controlled events, but also sometimes during, “people” represented more of an obstacle on the way to inanimate objects than the kind of quiescent and attentive public imagined by ideologues to justify the Inventory’s civic “mission.” Malraux declared in front of the National Assembly in 1963: “Its name is the Inventaire Monumental: it concerns monuments. However, it also concerns the statues of Saint Michel and the Virgin Mary I mentioned earlier [reference to popular arts in Brittany]. When all the villages of France will possess their own Inventory booklet, with photos of their Saint Michels and their Virgin Marys in it, we will have generated in these villages a feeling of collective ownership that will make each of them the very guardian [of its heritage]” (November 9, 1963 meeting, in Lantelme 1998). Addressing an educated Parisian public in 1989, Chastel remembered the pioneering years of the Inventory in similarly paternalistic terms: “We had, at one and the same time, to define and refine the method, while also starting the operations. Meaning, actually going and staying in the field, after obtaining the agreement, and sometimes the company, of the municipal council, in front of children and hoi polloi (les gamins et les braves gens), dumbfounded that one could be interested by their houses, their cavalry, their fountains, which they never thought to be so interesting. Now, we’ll know, they said” (Chastel 1989: 90). The lived experiences on which Chastel bases his generic narrative took place some time between 1964 and 1966, at the occasion of one of his few visits to the base of the “troops” of Brittany, as an observer. We may compare this condescending and emotional account with a more distanced anecdote from the field. Emmanuelle remembers her work in Brittany in the 1970s: “I was with Denise in the field, in the attic of a house, looking at some mortise and tenon joint, or some other part of the carpentry. Suddenly a little old lady shows up with her wimple [the traditional Breton headgear which older women were still commonly wearing until the end of the 1970s] and says: ‘What’re you doing?’ So we explain. ‘And that’s your job?’ ‘Uhhh . . . ye . . .’ ‘Aha . . . but until what age are you going to

98 Alexandra Kowalski do that?” We giggled, we giggled, but we thought: she is so right [this is not a job for life].” In Emmanuelle’s acerbic and sometimes cynical stories of field work in the old days, hoi polloi were not “commoners” who let themselves be taught tales of history out of ignorance. They gazed back, curious about Inventory surveyors primarily because their “job” seemed to involve strange gymnastics on the roof of their family home and in the bell tower of their church. Researchers from Alsace explained that people were sometimes successfully convinced that the painted cupboard they had relegated to the attic had some value on the emerging market of rustic antiques. The cupboard was decrepit and too colorful for an age in which Formica represented domestic progress, so they had to be told they should not bargain it if an antique dealer proposed to buy it. Even when the surveyors understood and listened, though, these laypeople cost precious time. Sometimes surveyors found doors closed and had to come back. Sometimes they wasted an afternoon listening to the farmer’s life story “to be polite.” Guilt and an afternoon of work was the price to pay for the right to look through his dirty laundry. And probably many more times than they were willing to admit they felt sorry and guilty for the stark misery they found in the smelly shacks with a dirt floor, which illustrated so brutally the final days of the French peasantry in the age of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. Georges started in the most rural and depopulated region of continental France, the Centre region. We were taking clean pictures and looking at things . . . but there were people there, that we were passing just like that, as if we could ignore them, for them these things were all they had, living in the crassest poverty, without running water or electricity, their hands, their nails were pitch black, so black with dirt you couldn’t imagine, they had nothing, and we could have walked over their bodies to take a picture. We removed the dirt for the picture. That’s how it was. We didn’t talk about that, nobody talks about that, I am sure no one told you that. It is nowhere in our files for sure. (Georges) The underlying truth of Georges’s sincere grief is that the 1970s Inventory of “vernacular architecture” was part of the burial ceremony of a past as it lay dying, which it hypocritically pretended to preserve in abstract visual and textual forms, for the pleasure of a spiritual adventure and the beauty of art, and while feeding from it. The guilt may also have been felt on behalf of the other part of the middle class, the dominant one, consumers of old stones as leisure goods, for whom countryside romanticism meant cheaply bought second homes and weekends among the crickets. For Georges, as for Madeleine and her piece of copper (though in a darker way), the field did

State power as field work 99 not just mean a glorious combat against matter. It was a young educated kid’s burden carried at some human cost. The érudit local (local historian) was another human in the surveyors’ field of action. Always a notable, he was often a priest, sometimes a retired doctor, or a retired mayor, or a teacher, very rarely a woman. A vestige of the nineteenth-century class of provincial literati, the local historian was more threatening because his knowledge of the pays was far superior to that of the young recruits who admittedly “knew nothing,” and his collaboration was as crucial as it was precarious. The érudit local is always mentioned with an ironic smile, and in the singular form: as if it was impossible that two lords of their sort could share sovereignty over the same unit of land, or as if the person had to be reduced each time to an all-too-familiar type, both feared and resented. One was one too many in any case. Far from the official imagery of the quiescent provincial, collaboration with the érudit was arduous and competition was direct and confrontational. His documents were coveted by surveyors and he sometimes jealously defended his treasures. His knowledge was especially necessary at the beginning of an investigation. One researcher reports meeting “an individual who pretended to have done the inventory of Brittany” and who stubbornly refused to give access to his photographs and documents (Alban). The Secrétaire Général of the Inventory was called to the rescue. He was known to have been trained in a “field” himself – the African outback (brousse) where goods and meanings are negotiated with locals through talks (palabre). The Secrétaire Général had been the Inventory’s effective liaison with local notables so far, but that time his efforts were in vain. Isabelle, who joined the Inventory at the turn of the 1980s, recounts with pride her “victory” (she uses the v-word) the day she correctly identified a disused sink in a hollow stone for which the local historian had only shown the contempt deserved by natural objects. Until the early 1970s surveyors also had to deal with volunteers. In her ever-sharp tongue, Emmanuelle calls them “a plague,” these “old schmucks who think everything is owed to them because they don’t cost a penny.” As with local historians, the problem of volunteers appropriating documents and photographs for their personal use was a common concern, which added to the difficulty of obtaining reliable documentation from amateurs. It is not uncommon at the Inventory to hear of “thousands of pictures,” sometimes discarded, sometimes still stored in a file cabinet somewhere, with which there is “nothing to be done” because they were inadequately labeled. Lastly, the proud owners of châteaux and mansions stood in the surveyors’ way, preventing them from accessing valuable property. The residents were prompt to amalgamate the Inventory with the Bureau of Historic Buildings, and they avoided opening their doors for fear of the financial and other obligations entailed by the ownership of recorded historic property. The system of local commissions was instrumental in circulating the news across networks of notables that the Inventory was not contrary to their interests. In the field, it was crucial to be announced before showing up, and using

100 Alexandra Kowalski Malraux’s name was always helpful to remind people of the Inventory’s pedigree. Today, most of these characters have vanished from the parameters of survey work. With the exception of the Lorraine region, volunteers are either a bad memory or part of the mythology of the Inventory’s civic involvement. The érudit is still mentioned but seems less threatening. S/he is more of an amateur figure, more often a woman, with an affiliation to some local preservationist association doing research as a hobby. Relations with preservationists often result in publications, conferences, and exchange of information. They can be in fact quite cordial, and surveyors in Paris and Toulouse find them refreshing in these times of change, when the bureaucratic requirements of survey work have emptied the job of most of its intellectual interest. Marcel, for example, includes these exchanges in his definition of aventure de l’esprit. As for the hoi polloi, they are now used to seeing strangers poke around – even in remote villages foreigners who are curious about stones are known as tourists. Les gens are also generally more aware of the symbolic value of patrimoine. In addition, changes in survey methods have physically removed ordinary people from the field of the survey: the imperative of productivity limits investigation to skimming the surface of the built landscape, and surveyors often assume that they have enough experience of surfaces to deduce the interior from them without entering private spaces.

Conclusion: field work as state power In which specific sense, then, does the practice of field work embody state power on the ground of the national territory – that is, not only represent it in a symbolic sense but also enact it in concrete ways? The mythology, the theory, and the practical skills of field work intersect, overlap, and sustain each other to form what may be called the “culture” of survey work. Culture assumes here a practical meaning which makes it irreducible to its cognitive-intellectual or ideological dimension. In fact, it cannot be reduced to its “skilled” dimension either. The culture of field work encompasses and refers to a relatively coherent web of meanings manifested on the three closely dependent yet distinct empirical planes of physical interaction, cognition and symbolic production. It is these aspects of survey work and their practical relationship that have changed over time, defining two distinct sets of professional practices at each end of the period between 1964 and the present. In each of these sets, it is the specific articulation of interaction, cognition, and symbolic production that defines distinct forms of power.15 In the original survey of the first decade of the Inventory’s existence, the gaze of surveyors was analytical and monographic, singling out monuments and art works which it described as unique entities. It was also cumulative and totalizing, aiming to exhaustively “cover” the national territory. The

State power as field work 101 survey’s gaze was therefore also penetrating, reaching into the depth of private spheres, beyond and above the bodies of the people encountered. Surveyors were committed to convert them to historical consciousness, to defeat local knowledge and challenge private symbolic ownership. They symbolically appropriated, on behalf of the public body they represented, the material vestiges of history. By contrast with the early missionary, object-oriented inventory, current survey practices reflect a synthetic approach that is space- and contextoriented. The gaze does not cover the nation but the portion of territory on which it operates and is now partly funded: the local level of municipalities, departments, and regions. As a consequence of the development of the “heritage” (patrimoine) industry, few citizens remain to be converted. The bodies of citizens have ceased to be an obstacle as such. They are now either co-opted or simply routinely bypassed by a policy-oriented approach that focuses on the surface of buildings and produces maps used in projects of land and urban planning. These two sets of practices represent distinct cultures of the nation-state and cause two different “state effects.” The French state used to represent itself through its national Inventory as the guardian and the curator of art and memory. No longer viable as a gratuitous “adventure of the spirit” today, the survey sells itself to local governments as a service and as a policy tool tailored to local needs – such as the rehabilitation of old city centers in Lyon, Rennes, or Paris, the identification of rural heritage in Lorraine, or the promotion of regional identity in Alsace. The state’s gaze at work in the inventory is thus not just a technical or cognitive ability to survey buildings and objects, reducing them to abstract schemes. The survey of historical buildings and art is a practical instrument of surveillance insuring the accumulation and traceability of objects across space. The reduction of relative disorder, both human and non-human, by the reason of state categories and methods through survey work always happens through concrete confrontations with a changing field of obstacles. This agonistic relationship defines state power as a practical ethic that always has to negotiate its concrete conditions of possibility on the ground of social interaction.

Notes 1 The doctoral research on which this chapter is based was conducted in 2001. Funding for this research was generously provided by the French Ministry of Culture (Département d’Etudes et de Prospectives and Direction du Patrimoine). My research also benefited from extensive logistical assistance from the Comité d’Histoire du Ministère de la Culture which gave me access to a precious collection of twelve recorded interviews with agents and former agents of the Inventory, conducted in 1999, on the subject of the local commissions and committees of the Inventaire Général. I wish to thank Michel Melot, who was heading the Inventaire at the time of this research, and Professors Jean-Louis

102 Alexandra Kowalski

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

Fabiani and Craig Calhoun for their kind and tireless support in the process, as well as all the chercheurs, too numerous to be named here, who so generously shared their time and experience with me – the stuff this text is made of. Public speech, Bangui, August 12, 1960 (cited by Rauch 1998, pp. 64–65; translation is mine). Since its inception, the results of the survey have been made public by various means. The exhaustive record is compiled and archived in paper files that, since 1974, are also conserved on microforms both in Paris and in the region where the data was collected. The paper files and their microform version are accessible to the public, without restriction in principle, in documentation centers that were opened in 1985. Before 1985, the main findings of the survey were displayed through local exhibitions organized after an area had been “covered,” often in collaboration with local organizations and/or municipalities. Since 1967, a summary version of the survey has been published in book form, in formats that have varied over time, from the original, austere, catalogue-like multi-volume series to the multiple thematic collections that have more commercial appeal. Since the mid-1990s the files have been transferred to electronic databases that can now be consulted on the website of the Ministry of Culture. The direct, linear “impact” of this mass of information on the public is difficult to evaluate precisely. History and data suggest that the Inventory is, in fact, as much a product of cultural change as it is a factor of such change. For example, the public reported by the Inventory’s regional documentation centers is mostly made up of specialists (students in history or art history in particular) or individuals (amateur historians, owners of historic property) who were already interested in issues of art and history before they reached out to the Inventory. The cultural power of the state explored in this chapter is not defined as an ideological effect but as a practical and dialogical relationship with problematic entities (people and things). The question of the diffusion of the Inventory’s findings and of its impact on the public, therefore, remains beyond the scope of this contribution for both empirical and theoretical reasons. A critical assessment of Scott’s study and of its links with neoliberal ideology was provided by Steven Lukes (2005). All translations are mine. First names in parentheses refer to interviews that I conducted myself or that were conducted by the Comité d’Histoire du Ministère de la Culture. I decided to systematically resort to pseudonyms considering that position-takings in a professional field often express personal opinions and value judgments about the respondent’s own position and that of his or her colleagues. For the same reason, I do not indicate the geographic location of respondents unless it adds useful information to the given context. When a location follows a name, it refers to the location of the respondent at the time of the events that are discussed, not at the time of the interview. This opinion was echoed in art critic Georges Duthuit’s 1956 book, Le Musée Inimaginable. Under Malraux the Ministry of Cultural Affairs received less than 0.5 percent of the total state’s budget, which was approximately the share of the ministry’s budget allocated to the Inventory. According to Roger Delarozière, head administrator (Secrétaire Général) of the Inventory between 1964 and 1971. The gendarmerie is a local police force in charge of the routine enforcement of public order and is dependent on this Ministry, while the Police Nationale depends on the Ministry of Interior. As in Lorraine, where the state, the region, the departments and the towns provide financial support to “opérations d’inventaire.”

State power as field work 103 11 Since 2001, Institut National du Patrimoine. 12 Brittany was an exception. The Secrétaire régional was an historian of art interested in vernacular architecture. 13 Methodological guide to field work marking the beginning of the “architectural turn” at the Inventory, also known as Livret Vert (Green Booklet). 14 According to the 2001 methodological guide known as the Red Booklet which officially replaced the 1974 Green Booklet, “one should avoid naming transformations ‘denaturations’” (Principes, méthode et conduite de l’Inventaire Général, p. 15). 15 By contrast with the definition of culture as a “toolkit” (Swidler 1986) or as a “repertoire” (Lamont 1992) or (in a daring sociological formula) as “a collection of stuff” (DiMaggio 1997), the view presented here (1) implicitly stresses the “kit” part of the toolkit – which, after fifteen years of conceptual musings to grasp what culture “is,” has the merit to be a clear constructivist answer to the only constructivist question: what do we need a culture concept for? And (2) distinguishes between conceptual, verbal and practical cultural orders – which is required by the case at hand.

Works cited Bourdieu, P. 1994. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12 (1): 1–18. Calhoun, C. 1996. Nationalism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Chaline, J. P. 1998. Sociabilité et érudition: Les Sociétés savantes en France. Paris: Editions du CTHS. Chastel, A. 1984. “La Notion de patrimoine” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. P. Nora. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1996 [1989]. “L’Invention de l’Inventaire” in André Malraux ministre: Les Affaires Culturelles au temps d’André Malraux, ed. A. Girard and G. Gentil. Paris: La Documentation française. DiMaggio, P. J. 1997. “Culture and Cognition,” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–288. DiMaggio, P. J., and W. W. Powell. 1991. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fligstein, N. 1990. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gerson, S. 2003. The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goodwin, J., and J. Jasper (eds.). 2003. Rethinking Social Movements. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Haney, L. 1996. “Homeboys, Babies, Men in Suits: The State and the Reproduction of Male Dominance,” American Sociological Review 61 (5): 759–778. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat (eds.). 2001. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Inventaire Général 2004. Présentation. Paris: Ministère de la Culture. Online. Available (accessed February 28, 2006). Lamont, M. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

104 Alexandra Kowalski Lantelme, M. (ed.). 1998. La Grande Pitié des Monuments de France: Débats parlementaires 1960–1968. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Lebovics, H. 1999. Mona Lisa’s Escort : André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lukes, S. 2005. Paper presentation, Conference for the Study of Political Thought, Columbia University, New York. Malraux, A. 1996. La Politique la culture: Discours articles entretiens 1925–1975. Paris: Gallimard. Meyer, J. 1999. “The Changing Cultural Content of the Nation-State” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, T. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Mitchell, T. 1999. “Society, Economy, and the State Effect” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rauch, M.-A. 1998. Le Bonheur d’entreprendre: Les Administrateurs de la France d’Outre-Mer et la création du ministère des affaires culturelles. Paris: La Documentation Française. Rose, N., and P. Miller. 1992. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43: 173–205. Ross, K. 1996. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scott, J. C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Somers, M. 1997 “Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory” in Reworking Class, ed. John R. Hall. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Steinmetz, G. (ed.). 1999. State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Swidler, A. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51: 273–286.

5

New and improved nations Branding national identity Melissa Aronczyk

When Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs hired an advertising agency in 2002 to create a new face – logo, slogan, and symbol – for its national persona, observers wondered about the agency’s choice of a red-and-white toy kite as Poland’s metonymic mark of identification. Why a kite? After all, the country already has a red-and-white flag as a stock symbol of national identity. And the flag has been around for centuries: history texts note that a red flag decorated with a white eagle accompanied King Władysław Jagiełło during the Battle of Grunwald in 1410.1 But according to an interview with branding expert Wally Olins, “flags have nationalist, military or political connotations.” The kite is “postpolitical.” It represents “a break from the past,” he added. “It is joyful, modern” (Boxer 2002). The shift from political to “postpolitical” representations of national identity appears to signal a change in the way we think about the idea of nation. It suggests that it is now possible to form allegiances with regard not to shared traditions and rituals, kinship and ethnicity, language or geographic proximity, but to the profit-based marketing strategies of private enterprise. The interpenetration of corporate and state interests in creating and conveying national identity through a specific branding and marketing process is a growing trend, one that has been adopted in countries with emerging market economies and with established capitalist economies alike. If we were to judge solely from the number of countries that have adopted this technique, it would appear to be effective. Nations whose governments have engaged the services of advertising or branding firms in the last five years to create and promote a national image include Latvia, Romania, Finland, New Zealand, the states in the former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia), India, Estonia, Turkey, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rwanda, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Britain.2 Though the idea of branding is an accepted, or at least tolerated, feature of modern consumer culture, the idea that nations can be produced, branded, and consumed in commodity form is somewhat less palatable. National identity, a concept that is notoriously elusive and difficult to define, can at least be defined by what it is not: a conference of meaning, uniqueness, and

106 Melissa Aronczyk

Figure 5.1 Banner of King Władysław Jagiełło (1351–1434), circa 1410

Figure 5.2 National flag of Poland constituted by Polish Parliament, circa 1919

Figure 5.3 Polska kite logo created by DDB Corporate Profiles, circa 2002. Courtesy Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland

New and improved nations 107 legitimacy by the marketing techniques of corporations. National identity is not like yogurt; it is not a concoction that can be packaged and displayed among identical items in a grocery aisle, differentiated essentially through a process of conscious design and artificial flavoring. We are aware that culture in our time has become thoroughly commodified (Harvey 2001) but whether a nation, with its history, population, systems of practice and belief, material and symbolic structures, and geographic coordinates can be also constructed and conveyed by current branding processes is a more contestable point. Here I want to explore this theme, and to suggest a possibly surprising conclusion: that it is possible to view nation branding not as a new or necessarily nefarious process, but rather as a logical extension of a particular way that national (or other territorially bounded) identity has long been construed and communicated in time and space. Let me explain what I mean by “logical extension.” I mean to refer to two historical trajectories. One charts a way of thinking about community and the terms of belonging to a community that sets up an opposition between nation as ancient and nation as invention. The second trajectory charts a short history of mass communication in the United States that actually trails off in two directions, both of which inform current strains of thought in mass communication theory. My view is that the site of critical thought at which these trajectories intersect suggests that the phenomenon of nation branding can be understood historically and as part of previously existing social and cultural practices. Note that by “logical” I do not mean necessary or desired or beneficial. I simply mean to show that there is continuity in this way of thinking and that this phenomenon may be seen as representing a current stage of this pattern of thought. My intention in this chapter is not to account for the full range of ideas of communication over time which may have led to the concept of branding, nor the full range of ideas of community in space which may have led to thinking about national identity. Rather I am interested in examining a particular way in which the ideas of community and communication have come together to create and convey a shared existence. The goal is to establish a dialectical setting for the topic that widens the scope of argument about its perceived role in contemporary society. Certainly, there are vast implications for cultural specificity and nationhood in the context of such conditions. These remain to be examined later in the chapter.

Nation as brand To begin, we must gain purchase on the concept of a nation brand. What is nation branding, and what claims do its proponents make about the relationship between a nation brand and national identity? Spain is considered the “success story” of nation branding (Gilmore 2002), and most countries now contemplating the process look to Spain as proof that it works. In the late 1970s, the democratization and decentralization of

108 Melissa Aronczyk the country’s institutions were part of Spain’s aim to raise its population’s standard of living and create new ties to the rest of Europe following the demise of the Franco regime. Aside from the major changes in political structure, the next twenty-five years saw revolutions in the areas of cultural production (the Bilbao museum, the films of Almodovár, the fashion of Agatha Ruiz de la Prada), architecture (Santiago Calatrava’s Telefónica communications tower, the Velodrome by Esteve Bonell and Francesc Rius, the Agbar skyscraper), economy (the revitalization of cities through increased spending by the public and private sectors on infrastructure and institutional and tourist advertising; the privatization and transnationalization of Spanish multinational companies such as telecommunications group Telefónica, oil company Repsol, and Unión Fenosa) and international attractions (the Barcelona Olympics, the 1982 Soccer World Cup, the 1992 Seville International Expo) (Olins 2004: 162, Gilmore 2002: 282). Accompanying these changes was a national promotional program, initiated in the early 1980s, which stamped virtually all of the country’s innovations with a colorful logo (Figure 5.4). The logo and the impact it came to have on the national imagination are widely considered to have been instrumental in the “repositioning” of the country. Once an impoverished and isolated nation emerging from dictatorship, the country now put forward an image of an effective democracy and a cultural and cosmopolitan destination. Indeed, the logo symbolizes Spain’s entry into modernity (Olins 2004: 162). In particular, Spain’s economic development has been widely celebrated. In 2004 the Economist noted that Spaniards “have seen their economy grow faster than the European average for nearly ten years.” As of May 2005, Spain was the second most popular tourism destination in the world, a position it has held since at least 1990. Its market share of international tourism arrivals (the percentage of international tourists visiting Spain) has hovered near 11 percent in Europe

Figure 5.4 Spanish Tourism Institute “Sol de Miró” logo. Courtesy Dirección General de Turespaña

New and improved nations 109 and 7 percent globally (Ivars 2004, World Tourism Organization 2005). The Tourism Impact Index, which “measures the direct economic effects of the international tourism industry in the economy,” more than doubled in Spain between 1990 and 2004 (World Bank 2004).3 Of course, the very idea of “repositioning” is loaded with irony when referring to a place. Is it even possible to redraw the coordinates of a place – if not in geographic terms, then in ideological ones? Recent writing around the topic of branding and identity has been divided over its significance in the context of wider political and sociological trends. Some highlight this relationship as symptomatic of the waning power of the state to impose and maintain a uniform sense of identity (Billig 1995, Woudhuysen 2004, Klein 2000, Van Ham 2001) in democratic societies. According to these analyses, the legitimacy of government and other public institutions as purveyors and protectors of the cultural specificity of nationhood declines as ongoing processes of globalization, which operate according to the economic logic of capital flows, produce and reinforce cultural homogeneity. Nationally imagined identity is thus compromised by producer-consumer patterns of identification, which override political and administrative boundaries in favor of a “free market of identities” (Billig 1995: 133). In this context, corporate “branding,” a process of assigning unique identification by consciously highlighting certain meanings and myths while ignoring others, is increasingly justified by governments as a means of promoting national identity while encouraging the economic benefits necessary to compete in a globalized world: tourism, trade, investment, and job creation. The criticism of this phenomenon is obvious enough: by selling themselves, these countries are selling out, as their governments hand over their exercise of authority in the jurisdiction of culture in exchange for a position on the newly drawn map of mass politics, transnational institutions and global economies. Other commentators, most noticeably those involved in the marketing consultancies and public relations firms themselves, identify the phenomenon of branding a nation as nothing more than a manifestation of the ways cultural affiliation and social cohesion have always been formed and practiced. Their argument goes something like this: Branding is coterminous with the shaping and reshaping of identities in symbolic ways, ways used by nations throughout history. The term merely reflects the most efficient strategy in the current capitalist context, in which “consistency” and “coherence” are key factors in the formation and maintenance of identity. In other words, corporate techniques of valuation to differentiate products in competitive realms have proven effective; is it not then appropriate to apply these methods to nations, which are currently striving to articulate their unique identities in a widening sphere of global knowledge and competition? One of the most vocal proponents of this point of view is branding consultant Wally Olins. In an opinion piece in the Journal of Brand Management he describes the “violent” reaction he encounters when discussing branding as an effective means of communicating national identity. He cites the

110 Melissa Aronczyk criticism leveled by the Sorbonne academic Michel Girard, who insists that a country carries “specific dignity” and cannot be branded like a product. Olins’s reply encompasses his view: The France of the Revolution was a completely different entity from the France of the Bourbons. Not only was the traditional nobility exiled and dispersed, the royal family executed, a republic proclaimed, religion excoriated, and an entire social and cultural system turned on its head but every little detail changed too. The tricolour replaced the fleur de lys, the Marseillaise became the new anthem, the traditional weights and measures were replaced by the metric system, a new calendar was introduced, God was replaced by the Supreme Being and the whole lot was exported through military triumphs all over Europe. In other words the entire French package was changed. You may not like the term, you may prefer to talk about a new or reinvented nation or state, but if revolutionary France was not a new brand I do not know what is. (Olins 2002: 242) Since the days of the French Revolution, Olins goes on to argue, the branding and rebranding of France has continued apace, to match the shifts in leaders, republics, and political regimes. “Each time the reality has been modulated the symbolism has changed with it. And each time France has presented a new version of itself both internally and to the outside world” (2002: 243). From this point of view, nation branding does not itself attempt to correct or mitigate a nation’s reality; rather, it acts as the “symbolism,” the “package,” or the representation of a new social and political reality. Olins concludes that the disjuncture between his own view and that of Girard or other critics is brought about by semantics (it is merely the term “branding” that raises ire), snobbery (“nations should not seem to be associated with any activities in which commerce is engaged”), and ignorance (academics deny that businesses, like nations, also create loyalties, and that they rely on “very similar techniques to those of nation-builders” to do so). In sum, Olins argues that if the term has commercial origins, the practice does not (2002: 241–248). Here I intend to examine the claims made by Olins and other proponents of nation branding, to investigate the ways in which the phenomenon can be understood as part of a longer historical trajectory. Olins suggests that “branding has moved so far beyond its commercial origins that its impact is virtually immeasurable in social and cultural terms” (2004: 14). If we are to accept this proposition, we need to investigate the nature of these social and cultural terms, to derive some working conclusions about the impact of branding on the practices and beliefs of a given community.

New and improved nations 111

Gastronomy, geology, or banality? The title of Anthony Smith’s 1995 article, “Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations,” brackets a way of looking at the history of ideas concerning the origins of national identity. Are nations and nationalism primordial or provisional? Universal state of ancient origin or self-conscious creation and re-creation? Defining nationalism along this spectrum seems to depend on what we see as inherent and inevitable in human nature and what we see as brought into being by various social and cultural formations; it is in a way the age-old debate of nature versus nurture. Herder, for example, saw community formation as a “basic human need.” Isaiah Berlin paraphrases Herder’s view: “To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that for food or drink or security or procreation” (Berlin 2001: 12). Some theorists of nationalism see it as a natural and universal phenomenon. Gellner, for example, offers the position of certain theorists who see nationalism as always having existed, though at times in a dormant state. In this view, “the ‘nations’ are there, in the very nature of things, only waiting to be ‘awakened’ (a favorite nationalist expression and image) from their regrettable slumber, by the nationalist ‘awakener’” (1983: 48). Smith describes the position that sees the nation as “historic deposit,” where the idea of nation is formed by layers of knowledge embedded in the strata of earlier social formations (1995: 12). This view claims that the nation of Israel today, for example, is invested with the historical meanings of Israel from previous eras. In its current incarnation, Israel is still and will always be beholden to its ethnic heritage (Smith 1995: 12).4 Though the idea that nations can be “perennial” like this has been largely discounted by academics, according to Smith, Israel is one of the important examples of how this form of belief can contribute to the battles waged over nationhood in the twenty-first century. At the other end of the nature–nurture spectrum are the theorists who see the nation as a product of invention, imagination, and ongoing reconstruction. Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation as an “imagined political community” is well known: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (1991: 5–7). We can also look to Craig Calhoun’s observation that nationalism never exists apart from the discourse that constitutes it. Nationalism as discourse is “the production of a cultural understanding and rhetoric which leads people throughout the world to think and frame their aspirations in terms of the idea of nation and national identity, and the production of particular versions of nationalist thought and language in particular settings and traditions” (1997: 6). Seeing the nation as a product of such “social engineering” (Smith 1995: 3) opens up the possibility that

112 Melissa Aronczyk even the rituals and symbols of tradition so vital to a nation’s sense of history and community can be manufactured. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) documents a series of symbolic and formalized rituals that we tend to think of as drawn up from a distant past but that are in fact invented much more pragmatically – and much more recently. Hobsbawm notes that the thirty-year period before World War I saw the invention of several traditions, such as public ceremonies, monuments, and holidays. These new “traditions” symbolized the emergent political and social realities. In this period of intense social change, “social groups, environments and social contexts called for new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations.” As Hobsbawm points out, “there is probably no time and place with which historians are concerned which has not seen the ‘invention’ of tradition in this sense” (1983: 4). What we start to observe is that no matter in which camp we locate ourselves, whether we prefer the theory of nation as a product of social engineering or as historic deposit, each rests on four architectural pillars of praxis: rhetoric, image, symbol, and ritual. But if both camps rest on the same foundational pillars, this causes the axis of debate to shift: rather than trying to locate nationalism along the spectrum of ideas from ancient to invented, we might better understand the debate if we frame nationalism as a strategy for nation-building that can present itself as either ancient or invented to advance certain ends: systems of belief, political goals of determination or legitimacy, or economic incentives. This allows us to reframe the discussion at hand. Rather than asking, “What is national identity?” we might instead ask, “What does it mean to claim to have a national identity?” (Billig 1995: 61) That is, rather than interrogating the idea of national identity as something that is either “always already there” or pure invention, we need to ask, what does it mean to see oneself as having a national identity, as being proud to be American or British or Canadian? This is the question sociologist Michael Billig poses, and it allows us to introduce a third term into the debate over the nature of national identity. The title of his book, Banal Nationalism (1995), refers to a “collection of ideological habits (including habits of practice and belief) which reproduce established nations as nations . . . Daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged,’ in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition” (Billig 1995: 6). What banal nationalism suggests is that nationalist activity does not occur in a heightened moment of attention. It is not an outpouring of feeling which is summoned in times of need or passion. In Billig’s view, nationalism is reproduced and reinforced daily in established Western nations, in ways that function primarily because they do not capture our attention. Banal nationalism is not a flag vigorously waved in a spirit of national pride; it is the flag hanging on the front of a post office building (1995: 8). Thinking along the

New and improved nations 113 lines of banal nationalism allows us to imagine how rhetoric, symbol, image and ritual display the nation in seemingly innocuous ways. The earlier discussion of Spain illustrated this. Its cultural production in the realms of art and architecture, film and fashion, sporting and other international events provides daily, visible, yet ordinary manifestations of a nation’s enterprise, neatly summed up by Spain’s colorful logo. The creation and implantation of symbols and images allow us to form standards of taste, in order to critique, distinguish, and differentiate one culture from another. When these symbols and images are constructed by authoritative forces, they assist in the formation and recognition of the self as a member of a particular culture. And when these symbols and images are constructed by branding and marketing firms, with their adeptness at creating consistency and coherence, backed by financial clout and their practiced art of persuasion and pervasiveness, their potential is indisputable. Consider the following argument from a short document prepared by the chairman of the international branding firm Interbrand: Principles of branding apply in equal measure to countries as they do to corporations . . . Creating a branding program for a country demands an integration policy that most countries do not possess – the ability to act and speak in a coordinated and repetitive way about themes that are the most motivating and differentiating a country can make. Which countries bother really to understand and act on this? The identification of key issues is an emotionally charged debate as who can really decide whether tradition or radicalism is the more motivating? (Brymer 2003) According to this text, nation branding has two constitutive features: an “identification of key issues,” or an assembly of particular rituals, images, and symbols that situate the nation somewhere along the spectrum from “traditional” (ancient) to “radical” (invented); and an “integration policy,”a uniform discourse that communicates this composite structure in a cohesive and efficient way. Of course, neither of these features is unique to nation branding; the discourses and practices of legitimacy have long been assembled and communicated by authoritative forces. The question that arises here is the nature of such authority. What does it mean to have the authoritative forces of national identity located in private enterprise? If allegiance to the flag presumes an acknowledgment of government as the locus of authority, does the nation brand suggest a shift in allegiance to the authority of private enterprise and expertise in the maintenance of the nation? Or is this, too, part of a more profound historical pattern? This brings us to the second trajectory we intend to examine.

114 Melissa Aronczyk

Communication as expertise and communication as culture At this point I wish to tie the ideas of nation we have been examining to a second trajectory of thought that will allow us to see nation branding as a logical extension of earlier ideas and practices. If the nation can be seen as a collection of different rhetorics, images, symbols, and rituals operating at different moments in time and in a variety of spaces, we need to look at how branding, as a form of mass communication, functions to maintain and perpetuate the nation through time and across space. I will summarize here a version of the story of mass communication’s evolution in the United States that draws heavily on the ideas of James Carey. Carey’s story relates two independent currents of thought, one derived from liberal theory in the United States, and one from German counter-utilitarian theory, which have been instrumental in forming current ideas of mass communication. According to Carey, mass communication in American society was not a cohesive concept in the nineteenth century (1996: 27). The liberal-utilitarian theory that dominated this period saw mass communication (at that time essentially newspapers) primarily in terms of its ability to procure freedom of expression, especially the freedom of public opinion, against the political and institutional forces that might undermine it. As Carey explains, “When the entire public was conceived as a rational body engaged in discussion through printed media, the press was directly involved in the formation, maintenance, and expression of liberal society” (1996: 27). The early twentieth-century offspring of this idea is represented by Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book Public Opinion is considered by Carey to be “the originating book in the modern history of communication research” (1996: 28). The book was written following Lippmann’s experience working for U.S. President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. During this time Lippmann wrote the first draft of the “Fourteen Points” peace program and accompanied President Wilson to Versailles to participate in the peace negotiations. Beyond his disappointment at the outcome of the negotiations, the scene he observed there upset him immensely. For Lippmann, the “pathetically limited education” of the assembled officials, combined with the perceived threat of the peace process to their established ways of life, led to pandemonium at the conference. Rumour and gossip spread like wildfire, and Lippmann felt that the issues at hand became irrevocably distorted. Lippmann concluded that intelligent and informed public opinion was not a feasible project. The only way to ensure democracy, in his view, was to assemble a small team of experts, whose intellect and mastery of events would ensure democracy for the general public. He observed: The burden of carrying on the work of the world, of inventing, creating, executing, of attempting justice, formulating laws and moral codes, of dealing with the technique and the substance, lies not upon public opinion and not upon government but on those who are responsibly

New and improved nations 115 concerned as agents in the affair. Where problems arise, the ideal is a settlement by the particular interests involved. They alone know what the trouble really is. (Lippmann 1925) For Lippmann (and later, Harold Lasswell and Edward Bernays, whose work on propaganda would give new meaning to the idea of mass communication), communication was about disseminating ideas to the public, not engaging them in dialogue. Moreover, the “inventing, creating, executing” of the “technique and the substance” of political life should be relegated to the domain of private, specialized interests (quoted in Carey 1996: 29). The experts in Lippmann’s day were scientists, whose claims to neutrality and objectivity seemed to form the rational calculi of knowledge on which society ought to draw. Yet these views also form the foundations on which the contemporary industries of advertising and public relations are built. Indeed, in our day, the role of the expert appears to be filled by the chief executives and decision-makers in the corporate sphere, where the “identification of key issues” and the devising of “integration policies” provide the means to ensure the legitimacy and rationality of communication. Let us look again at remarks on the subject of nation branding by Interbrand’s chairman: The business of country branding is deeply serious, starting with the example of the Romans, it’s always been with us. Those who employ professional skills with a determination to measure, evaluate and communicate can achieve outstanding economic results. With over twenty-five years of brand consulting behind us, Interbrand would go so far as to say that a well-engineered program has the potential to transform fortune and create a lasting value for the country. It cannot, as a consequence, be the property of one administration and it must as a consequence have the ability to outstrip political issues to focus on significant and compelling aspects of differentiation. (Brymer 2003) For these experts, the political realm is problematic. Its inherent messiness – diverse and competing interests, struggles over policy and regulation, not to mention the short time spans that government representatives are allowed to remain in office – interferes with the cohesive, coherent images that experts attempt to convey. The perception here is that image differentiation will beget social and political determination; if only those pesky politicians would get out of the way, and leave the “work of the world” to the experts, their mastery will establish the legitimacy of the discourses and practices offered up to the political stage. At around the same time as Lippmann’s early writing appeared, another current of thought was developing in the United States to address the new social and intellectual problem of mass communication (Carey 1996: 30).

116 Melissa Aronczyk The Chicago School of Social Thought was represented by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, along with a number of theorists who shared the same intellectual leanings (Charles Cooley and Robert Park, among others). In a way this group represents the antithesis of Lippmann’s views. The views of the Chicago School, heavily influenced by the German academic traditions of Hegel, were preoccupied with the central concerns of power, legitimacy, and social cohesion. Thus the problem of mass communication was interpreted by the Chicago School not as the need to ensure freedom of communication but rather the need to examine how social cohesion, control, and power were balanced through communication. As Carey puts it, “They turned from the liberal question – What are the conditions of freedom – to the inverse question – How is it that the social order is integrated through communication?” (1996: 31).5 But the conditions in which the Chicago School examined this question were vastly different from those in which the German tradition had previously functioned. The shift from German to American soil, in Carey’s view, is at the root of the ideas they fostered in mass communication. The formation of new communities and associations on the American frontier led to new ways of thinking about the nature of social cohesion, shared tradition, and institutional formation. In the absence of previous tradition, kinship, language, or ethnicity, the population of nineteenth-century America had to develop a way to establish a shared reality. Whereas European populations could draw on generations of community structures, in the New World the absence of common language, ethnicity, and background meant these associations did not yet exist. Communication came to be seen as a way of forming community. This view lets us see communication not only as integral to culture but as culture, in Carey’s terms.6 It reminds us of the ways in which identity is practiced in and by communication, as a symbolic and ongoing process of reality-making. Understanding how communication can be substituted for tradition in the creation and maintenance of a collective social imaginary helps us to imagine another way in which nation branding can be situated as a logical extension of these practices.

Identity and innovation: creative destruction What we start to realize here is that to see nation branding as new is to fall prey to the logic that informs much of modern-day production: that the methods and ideas of our age are continually new and improved, on an endless march of progress toward greater efficiency, power, and capacity. At the beginning of this chapter, Olins was quoted as saying that the choice of a kite as Poland’s new logo instead of the national flag was valuable insofar as it represented “a break from the past.” Both of these patterns of thought – the progressive march and the break from the past – are part of what David Harvey calls the “myths of modernity” (Harvey 2003: 1). In Paris: The Capital of Modernity, Harvey demonstrates how Baron George-

New and improved nations 117 Eugène Haussman, the civic planner commissioned by Napoleon III in the mid nineteenth century to implement vast reforms on the city of Paris, helped to perpetuate this myth: [Haussman] needed to build a myth of a radical break around himself and the Emperor – a myth that has survived to the present day – because he needed to show that what went before was irrelevant; that neither he nor Louis Napoleon was in any way beholden to the thinking or the practices of the immediate past. (Harvey 2003: 10) Modernity, Harvey says, is a constant process of “creative destruction” (2003: 1), where old ideologies and infrastructures are torn down and new ones instituted in their place. The term creative destruction is usually credited to Schumpeter. His landmark text on economy and society, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, describes capitalism as a kind of virus, moving from commodity to commodity and technology to technology in an “industrial mutation,” revolutionizing from within in a constant quest for new bodies of competition. This process was integral to the “history of revolutions” of the modern age: So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. (Schumpeter 1942: 82–85) For Schumpeter the “creative destroyer par excellence” was the entrepreneur, whose desire for constant innovation in social and technological realms were instrumental to progress (Harvey 1990: 17). The idea of creative destruction is actually borrowed from Nietzsche, who used it to portray the dual nature of the human essence: “Whoever must be a creator always annihilates” (Nietzsche 1968).7 Understanding the term creative destruction as infused with the ideas of Nietzsche and Schumpeter allows us to understand its dual meaning: creative destruction can refer both to markets and to myths; and in both physical and aesthetic realms. We can view the creation and

118 Melissa Aronczyk promotion of a new image of nation as its own form of creative destruction, in which old myths and memories are swept away and new ones instituted in their place. The aura created is even, at times, more valuable than the physical reconstruction. This is another way of conceiving nation branding as more than a recent corporate invention. In branding lingo, the work of undoing and rebuilding an image of a product is sometimes called “deconstruction” and “reconstruction.”8 The entrepreneurs, always looking for new spaces and strategies, expand their markets and methods. Globalization is this process of expansion writ large. Value can be affixed to a locality through the deconstruction and reconstruction of the locality’s aura through branding techniques. If nation branding can be seen as the creation of value (or value-added, in corporate terms) by private “creative destroyers,” we need to understand how this value gets extracted for the benefit of these enterprising types. We can observe this practice through the category of monopoly rent, a term borrowed from the language of political economy by Harvey to demonstrate its significance in cultural and social contexts, or, in Harvey’s words, to “generate rich interpretations of the many practical and personal dilemmas arising in the nexus between capitalist globalization, local political-economic developments and the evolution of cultural meanings and aesthetic values” (2001: 394–395).9 Monopoly rent, in a social and cultural context, is the modeling of difference, authenticity, and uniqueness of a “tradable item” in the interest of acquiring surplus value and profit. Those who control this resource can extract “rent” from those desiring to use it for its “unique,” “authentic” and “non-replicable” qualities. The owner of a unique work of art, for example, can charge considerable amounts for the privilege of viewing it; or exact a high price when selling or trading it. Monopoly rent can apply equally to a geographically defined space, not by directly trading it, of course, but by “trading upon” it through marketing practices (Harvey 2001: 395). This is the raison d’être of place-based branding, a process which constantly seeks methods to make a particular region appear more attractive than that of its neighbors. Each place brand boasts more luxurious hotels, better food, more pristine natural settings, whiter sand on its beaches, and so on. But as Harvey points out, the category of monopoly rent contains a vital contradiction.10 Although uniqueness and particularity are crucial to the rate of monopoly rent, the commodity cannot be so unique as to be outside the realm of tradability. In other words, in order to function as a commodity, the item must have a price, which presents its value as exchangeable rather than as truly authentic or unique. To maintain these terms of exchange, the number of categories in which to display uniqueness is restricted to accommodate the perceived desires of those wishing to visit or invest. As Harvey says, “the more easily marketable such items become, the less unique and special they appear” (2001: 396). Here is a simple example to demonstrate this phenomenon. Below are the introductory texts from the tourism websites of five locations throughout the world. Each of the websites

New and improved nations 119 chosen is endorsed by the government-sponsored tourism board of the locality. For the purposes of comparison I have removed the geographic names but left the rest of the text intact. As we will see, the texts suggest there is little difference from one place to the next, though they are located at diverse spots on the world map and have vastly different histories, cultures and social environments: You can find more or less everything in (LOCALITY): alpine mountains, wide beaches, clean lakes, deep forests, world-class historic monuments, and friendly people. The climate is temperate, and the people warm and hospitable. (LOCALITY)’s cities with a thousand-year history invite their visitors to encounters with culture, and (LOCALITY)’s villages and small-time towns offer the opportunity to get away from the bustle of modern life. And all this comes with a backdrop of breathtaking natural landscapes, because (LOCALITY)’s greatest attraction is nature. Wild, untouched, more diverse than in most countries either in (CONTINENT) or the world and, what’s more, easily accessible. (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Tourism 2006) (LOCALITY)’s beauty is intertwined with a colourful history, rich culture and the renowned friendliness of its people. From the wild and rugged beauty of the (MOUNTAINS) and the majesty of the (NATURAL LANDSCAPE) to the magnificent (LAKES), one of the most unspoilt landscapes in (CONTINENT), the six counties: (COUNTY), (COUNTY), (COUNTY), (COUNTY), (COUNTY) and (COUNTY) are just waiting to be discovered and offer a wide range of activities, from horse riding and golf to fishing the unspoilt waters in beautiful places. Golfers can get into the swing on the windswept dunes of world championship courses at (VILLAGE) and (VILLAGE), and enjoy the unparalleled challenge of lesser known links courses at (VILLAGE) and (VILLAGE). Indeed for such a small place, (LOCALITY) is bursting with things to see and do. (Tourism Ireland 2005) Whether you are an art and history buff, an archaeology nut or a nature lover, enjoy browsing through markets or going diving, the different regions of (LOCALITY) offer endless possibilities all year round. Each area has its own personality, history, landscape and even cuisine, and with so much on offer to visitors it is not surprising that one trip to (LOCALITY) is never enough. Surrounded by four different seas, (LOCALITY) is a beach paradise with over 8000 km of sunny strips of sand. It also has an abundance of plant and wildlife species that can be enjoyed while camping or trekking in the many national parks which are dotted around the country. (Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2006)

120 Melissa Aronczyk The closest seaside resort area to (CONTINENT), (LOCALITY) has a sun that shines almost all year round; its great and historic museums, its natural sites of great beauty, its natural parks and the reserves; its large rich fauna and flora, the warm welcome of its population resulting in the constant increase in the number of tourists each year interested with the discovery of the internal richness of the country, the encounter with the inhabitants, customs and habits of the local population and a real contact with the diverse cultures. (Senegal Tourism Bureau 2006) Experience why (LOCALITY) is one of the most special places on earth. Immerse yourself in our culture. It’s as vibrant as our art, as unique as each sunset and as diverse as our people. Truly a nation “out of many, one people” (LOCALITY) is a multifaceted mosaic of international customs and traditions. (Jamaica Tourism Board 2005) It is all too easy to imagine that these texts were written by the same hand. It is also abundantly clear what is perceived as attractive to the visitor: natural settings, cuisine, the friendliness of inhabitants. The key term in these texts, it should be noted, is diversity – the irony being that as each place markets its own brand of uniqueness and diversity according to the same criteria, there is less and less of it to be found. Branding applies the logic of best practices in business – efficiency, consistency, and coherence – to keep competition operating on a restricted scale. It symbolically flattens the social, cultural and physical topography that makes a place inherently unique, then reshapes it until it fits into preordained market categories. Here the expression “creative destruction” attains its full meaning.

Branding and the national imaginary Up to this point, I have attempted to situate nation branding as a logical extension of earlier practices and discourses that constitute national identity. Here I want to introduce a second register to my hypothesis. Although in many ways nation branding can be seen as a logical extension of older forms and practices of nationhood, the phenomenon is qualitatively different from other conceptions of nation in some important ways. It would be spurious to suggest that nation branding has somehow replaced or superceded other forms of loyalty to the nation. But I think it is possible to say that it constitutes a barometer of some of the challenges facing the nation-state and the collective sense of identity in the contemporary era. For some, an unmistakable shift has taken place. International relations scholar Peter Van Ham argues that the use of branding techniques to create and promote national identity represents a “shift in political paradigms, a

New and improved nations 121 move from the modern world of geopolitics and power to the postmodern world of images and influence” (2001). Not only are concerns over image and reputation taking pride of place in a state’s administrative agenda, he asserts, but nation branding is a tool that, well used, can defuse the antagonisms of nationalist agendas: [The] preference for style over substance is increasingly shaping Europe’s political landscape, affecting even NATO and the European Union (EU). Although no doubt unsettling to conservative thinkers, this is actually a positive development, since state branding is gradually supplanting nationalism. The brand state’s use of its history, geography, and ethnic motifs to construct its own distinct image is a benign campaign that lacks the deep-rooted and often antagonistic sense of national identity and uniqueness that can accompany nationalism. By marginalizing nationalist chauvinism, the brand state is contributing greatly to the further pacification of Europe. (Van Ham 2001) For Van Ham, national loyalty can be replaced by brand loyalty, since branding is merely a modern, peaceful incarnation of more incendiary forms of nationalism. What to make of this proposition? Can we observe a transformation in allegiance from the Polish flag, with its “nationalist, military and political connotations,” to the Polska kite, with its “joyful, modern” evocation of commerce and leisure? Or is the new logo merely an innocuous encouragement to outsiders, a package that conveys wealth and prosperity to foreign eyes, but that does not affect its internal contents? To address this question, we need to consider the distinction between the discourses and practices that constitute the nation and national identity internally, among its citizens, and the discourses and practices that present the nation in an international context. These are not mutually exclusive categories. Both are basic to the development and maintenance of national allegiances; but they are not, and indeed by definition cannot be, the same. Though the substance of local and regional actions and engagements is critical to maintaining a sense of national identity, nation-state boundaries operate in part to organize communities on the scale and scope required for transnational interactions and global markets. It is in this sense that Calhoun says that the idea of nation is inherently international (1997: 93). Nationalists, decision-makers and other arbiters of national identity are thus faced with an ongoing dilemma: they cannot ignore without consequence internal differences at the local level; but they must prepare an external discourse that presents a united front in order to engage with other nations. And this external discourse has consequences for internal activities. Referring to the late twentieth-century reconceptualization of China in a world system of nation-states, Calhoun writes: “To use the international rhetoric of nationalism to claim local self-determination was not only

122 Melissa Aronczyk to commit oneself to representing local distinctiveness in internationally recognizable terms. It was also to make the local nation a token of a global type, to construct it as equivalent to other nations” (1997: 94). How to reconcile these two integral components? Local distinctiveness is one thing; but local distinctiveness in an international context is quite another. When local difference is set up as a “token of a global type,” it is largely, and fundamentally, determined by economic interests. Though the end result may be to foster exchange in political or institutional infrastructure, public or consular diplomacy, or human rights and understandings, equivalency becomes a question of substantively determining equal offerings in trade, foreign affairs and investment. Goals of interaction are interpreted through economic exchange. Here the category of monopoly rent slides more clearly into view. “All rent,” Harvey reminds us, “is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of any portion of the globe” (2001: 397). Market processes in a capitalist economy operate according to the terms of this monopoly. A contradiction arises when the uniqueness, authenticity, and difference of a tradable item is modeled for the purpose of capital gain, because these differences are channeled through restricted zones to allow private producers to maintain their monopoly. When national identity is conceived in economic terms, as it is in an international context, it contains the same contradiction.11 The struggles, contention, and conflict that characterize national distinctiveness are risky to the international discourse; they must be contained if channels to trade, tourism, and diplomacy are to remain open. Let us return to the case of Spain to grasp the complexities of this issue. Spain’s Miró logo is considered emblematic of the Spanish nation. But we are not surprised to learn that the unity conveyed by this symbol is in many ways disconnected from the country’s political and social realities. For centuries, Spain has been characterized by both its distinct linguistic and cultural identities and the struggles waged to maintain them.12 Today the federal boundaries of the Spanish nation-state contain seventeen “autonomous communities,” each with its own rules and desires of selfgovernance. Spain’s sense of itself is as a series of nations within a nation, and its pluralism is a source of ongoing debate (“Second Transition” 2004). Ironically, the brand symbol itself is representative of this complexity. Certainly, using the figure of Miró as a metonym for Spain’s distinctiveness as a nation is fitting, as no other country can claim Miró as its own. But while Miró might say “Spanish passion” and “artistry” and “liberty” to the rest of the world, his biography reveals fundamental tensions with his homeland. The region of Catalonia claims him as its own, calling him the “Catalán genius”; to use him to symbolize the whole of Spain might be seen as problematic in this regard. It is potentially even more problematic when we consider that the artist was deeply ambivalent about his roots: in his early career, Miró’s work was unappreciated in Barcelona. He spent much of his artistic life in Paris and the United States. Today, most of his artistic production is housed in museums and galleries outside Spain, a reminder

New and improved nations 123 – at least to those who live there – that he was not always such a congenial ambassador (“Artist Miró” 1993, Rowell 1986). Clearly, there is a fundamental difference between internally generated and externally communicated conceptions of nation and national identity. These dual conceptions are not contained within a nation brand and logo. When the nation is conceived as a unit of economic exchange, a nation brand functions as a handy symbol of external, economic viability. But if we want to conceive of the nation as an ethno-historical project, as a palimpsest of discoveries and interpretations of the past, as a site of ongoing contention and struggle, as a receptacle of heritage, or as a multiplicity of identities – all of which make up a nation’s distinctive culture – then conceiving nationalism in terms of a brand identity is a lopsided and necessarily partial project. Branding is not a new “package” that can represent the changed social and political realities of a nation. Neither can it be appraised as a shift in political paradigms from geostrategic articulations of power to the more ephemeral influences of image management. Rather the phenomenon must be seen as an intervention into the social and cultural fabric that constitutes the nation, one which challenges our “social imaginary” (Taylor 2002). In Taylor’s terms, the social imaginary is “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (2002: 106). This is more than a theoretical conception. It has to do with the way we navigate through the world, and the way our experience structures our common understanding of how the world works and how we want it to work: “It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of one another, the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life” (2002: 106). As Taylor points out, the modern conception of Western society and the polity has been since the seventeenth century fundamentally economic, in both the metaphorical and the pragmatic senses of the term. Metaphorically, because the modern era has been characterized by a sense of equality, exchange, and mutual benefit, a view that countered the premodern, hierarchically structured social order; and pragmatically, because prosperity and economic wealth in modern societies has become a central and collective concern. From the outset of this new moral order, “governing elites gradually became aware that increased production and favorable exchange were key elements of political and military power” (2002: 103).13 This modern view of society as a network of mutual benefit and exchange is now so deeply engrained in our social imaginary, Taylor notes, that we have trouble imagining society in any other way. Seen in this light, nation branding may reflect a certain political and social reality of our time – not necessarily the best or most desired reality, but one in which economic power is valued above other forms. Certainly this appears to be the case in the international context. If the eagle on Poland’s fifteenthcentury flag commanded a sort of subjectivity to the hierarchy of the military or monarchic order, the modern-day kite in the Polska logo appears to signal

124 Melissa Aronczyk our existence in a community of equals, with a prosperous economy and a democratic nation achieved through the principles of mutual exchange and benefit. The difference, perhaps, lies in the products of such exchange. If flags set up nations as equivalents in war and diplomacy, brands and logos set up nations as equivalents in commerce and leisure.14 Yet this is not the crux of the issue. The larger debate needs to center not on what the nation brand reveals about a nation but on what it obscures. What are the consequences when “real” differences – historical practices, cultural memories, conflict and disparity among classes, ethnicities and forms of belief – are subsumed by the conscious differentiation of the place brand? At the outset of this chapter I suggested that there had been a shift in our time from political to postpolitical representations of identity. It might be more accurate to describe a twinning of political and postpolitical representations to create a totalizing picture of a nation and what it stands for. Can we deny that Spain’s Miró logo is at least as familiar a national symbol as the country’s flag, if not more so? Which symbolic forms might become most legitimate remains to be seen. For the moment, we must consider what it means to conceive of branding as an effective means of creating and communicating national identity. First, we need to shake off the hasty assumption that branding is inherently superficial, tawdry, or just plain bad, especially if we are to understand its role in the production of social relations and the changing practices and beliefs of a culture. Second, we need to abandon the idea that it represents a waning of the longstanding antagonisms of nationalist sentiment. It is false to imagine that nation branding is responsible for eroding the relevance of politics, erasing our systems of memory, or collapsing history into ruins. The proof of this, if there can be such a thing in this context, is that at a time when the current phase of capitalism leans precipitously toward globalization and the reduction of spatial and temporal barriers, and when branding represents the apex of efficient and coherent communication, nationalism and nations are assuming greater roles than ever before. Anderson is categorical: “The ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (1991: 3). Though our traditions may be invented, our memories selective, and our identities formed and reformed by forces and relations we cannot predict, our desire to maintain, communicate, and perpetuate the nation across time and space marks our existence in a form we seem unable to forget.

Notes 1 See, for example, the FOTW website which provides an extensive history of flags in several countries. According to this source, the redand-white banner in fact existed as early as the twelfth century, but King Jagiełło was the first to brandish it as a flag. 2 This is a very partial list. For further information on the branding of the countries

New and improved nations 125

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10

11 12

13 14

mentioned, see Ad Council 2002, de Vicente 2004, Branding Romania 2004, Fraser et al. 2003, Lindsay 2000, Ivars 2004, Preston 1999, Hall 2002. See Harvey 2001 for a discussion of this perspective as it relates to urban entrepreneurialism, where collaborations between corporate and state entities give rise to the development of city infrastructures and bids for Olympic Games, sports teams, and arts and cultural incentives as part of an effort to attract visitors and investment. I am greatly indebted to the discussion in this text for the argument I am making here. See this text for a considerably expanded and much more comprehensive version of this debate. Jeff Pooley puts it in a slightly different way: “The so-called ‘problem of order’ has preoccupied much thinking about society, especially the nascent European sociology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The point has been to answer what Talcott Parsons later dubbed the ‘Hobbesian question’: Why isn’t society a ‘war of all against all’? How is a stable social order maintained, and why do we come together to cooperate in the first place? . . . Western Marxists latched onto the Hobbesian question too, but turned it on its head: How are the working classes integrated into societies that remain fundamentally exploitative? How . . . does capitalism reproduce itself over and over? In place of other social theorists’ fixation on ‘the problem of order,’ these Marxists took up the ‘problem of consent’ ” (Pooley 2001). See Carey 1989. See Reinert and Reinert’s discussion (2006) of the relationship of Nietzsche to Schumpeter, and to Werner Sombart. See, for example, Lodge 2002. In many ways monopoly rent resembles the idea of aura advanced by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” I have chosen to use the category of monopoly rent here because it strikes me as better suited to the particular features of geographic space and the economic determinism of those who control it in branding processes. Perhaps we can conceive of monopoly rent as a kind of geographically specific aura. Harvey in fact identifies two major contradictions in his category of monopoly rent. The second contradiction is related to the first: the significance of uniqueness can be measured not only in terms of marketability but also in issues of legitimacy and relevance in the politics of national identity. If monopoly rents rise in proportion to the degree of uniqueness and non-replicability of the nation being branded, then the promotion of a place as culturally distinct opens up the potential for political and social claims of distinction as well. I discuss this second contradiction in “Place as Brand: Lessons from Two Canadian Cities,” European Science Foundation Conference Proceedings, Linköping University E-Press, 2007. Again, see Harvey 2001, who makes this argument in terms of urban entrepreneurialism, in particular regarding the case of Barcelona and its accumulation of collective symbolic capital at the expense of collective memory. And of course, these struggles are not relegated to history textbooks. On 23 March 2006, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, or “Basque Homeland and Freedom”), finally declared a permanent cease-fire, after carrying out terrorist acts within Spain for nearly forty years, killing over eight hundred people in its stated desire to achieve self-determination for the Basque region (McLean 2006). See also Hirschman 1977 (whom Taylor cites) and Colley 1992, among others, who offer excellent expositions of this argument. I am greatly indebted to Craig Calhoun for his contribution on this topic; the insight here is his, not mine.

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Works cited Ad Council. 2002. Matters of Choice – Advertising in the Public Interest: The Advertising Council 1942–2002. Online. Available (accessed March 2005). Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso. “Artist Miró, Once Rejected by His Hometown, Is Now Its Favorite Son and Marketing Draw,” Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 1993. “Bad Echoes from the Past: Spain and Catalonia.” Economist, January 14, 2006: 40. 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. Berlin, Isaiah. 2001. “The Counter-Enlightenment.” Pp. 1–24 in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications. Boxer, Sarah. 2002. “A New Poland, No Joke,” New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2002: 26–28. Branding Romania. Online. Available (accessed March 2005). The Branding Success of Destination Spain. PowerPoint. Available (accessed March 2005). Brymer, Charles. 2003. “Branding a Country.” Interbrand Group White Paper. Unpublished. Calhoun, Craig. 1997. Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carey, James. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. ——. 1996. “The Chicago School and Mass Communication Research.” Pp. 21–38 in American Communication Research: The Remembered History, ed. Everette E. Dennis and Ellen Wartella. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. “Cool Britannia,” Economist, March 14, 1998: 20. De Vicente, Jorge. 2004. “State Branding in the 21st Century.” Master’s thesis, The Fletcher School, Tufts University. Deutsch, Karl W. 1953. Nationalism and Social Communication. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Fraser, Spencer, Michael Hall, Jeremy Hildreth, and Mia Sorgi. 2003. “A Brand for the Nation of Latvia.” Report, Saïd Business School, Oxford University. Unpublished. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilmore, Fiona. 2002. “A Country – Can It Be Repositioned? Spain – The Success Story of Country Branding,” Journal of Brand Management 9 (4–5): 281–293. Hall, Derek. 2002. “Brand Development, Tourism, and National Identity: The Reimaging of Former Yugoslavia,” Journal of Brand Management 9 (4–5): 323–334. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell.

New and improved nations 127 ——. 2001. “The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture.” Pp. 394–411 in Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. ——. 2003. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York and London: Routledge. Hirschman, Albert. 1977. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ivars Baidal, Josep A. 2004. “Tourism Planning in Spain: Evolution and Perspectives.” Annals of Tourism Research 31 (2): 313–333. Jamaica Tourism Board. 2005. Online. Available (accessed March 2005). Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited. Lindsay, Marsha. 2000. “The Brand Called Wisconsin.” Economic Summit White Paper prepared by Lindsay, Stone and Briggs Co. Unpublished. Lippmann, Walter. 1925. The Phantom Public, New York: Macmillan. —— 1960. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. Orig. pub. 1922. Lodge, Creenagh. 2002. “Success and Failure: the Brand Stories of Two Countries,” Journal of Brand Management 9 (4–5): 372–384. McLean, Renwick. “Basque Fighters Set a Cease-Fire After 4 Decades,” New York Times, March 23, 2006: A1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. London: Penguin Books. Olins, Wally. 2002. “Branding the Nation – the Historical Context,” Journal of Brand Management 9 (4–5): 241–248. ——. 2004. On Brand. New York: Thames and Hudson. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Tourism. Online. Available (accessed April 2006). Pooley, Jeffrey. 2001. “Return of the Re-repressed: Critical Media Studies in an Age of Exhaustion.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University. Preston, Peter. 1999. “Selling Britain Abroad Is Important, but We’ve Got to Buy It First,” The Guardian, November 15: 22. Reinert, Hugo, and Erik S. Reinert. 2006. “Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter.” Pp. 55–86 in Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–2000: Economy and Society, ed. Jürgen Backhaus and Wolfgang Drechsler. The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, Vol. 3. Berlin: Springer. Republic of Turkey – Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Online. Available (accessed April 2006). Rowell, Margit. 1986. Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1975. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Orig. pub. 1942. “The Second Transition: A Survey of Spain.” Economist, June 26, 2004: 3–16. Senegal Tourist Bureau (Senegalese Ministry of Tourism and Aerial Transport) New

128 Melissa Aronczyk York Office. 2006. Online. Available (accessed April 2006). Smith, Anthony D. 1995. “Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations,” Nations and Nationalism 1 (1): 3–23. Taylor, Charles. 2002. “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (1): 91–124. Tourism Ireland. 2005. Online. Available (accessed March 2005). Van Ham, Peter. 2001. “The Rise of the Brand State: The Postmodern Politics of Image and Reputation,” Foreign Affairs 80 (5): 2+. World Bank. 2004. World Development Indicators: Tourism Impact Index. Online. Available (accessed March 2006). World Tourism Organization. 2005. Annex: Tourism Market Trends. Madrid: World Tourism Organization. Woudhuysen, James. 2004. “Brands: Don’t Buy the Hype,” Spiked, August 25, 2004. Online. Available (accessed March 2005).

6

Facts in the city How London accountants simplify decisions Matthew Gill

Decisions are never made in the light of the perfect knowledge assumed by classical microeconomics, for obvious reasons. The human brain could not cope with omniscience, even if conditions in the world could ever be made favorable to it. Simplification is therefore not always over-simplification, and it can be a mistake to criticize it as such. Nonetheless, any simplification embodies some decisions in advance of making further decisions possible; it facilitates the recognition of some options and perspectives at the expense of others. Although the above is true of any sphere of social life, it is particularly salient to financial decisions made in the City of London. Those decisions can be highly consequential, with huge implications for jobs, pensions, and the wider economy. They can also be complex and abstract, and as a result can require extensive simplification to make them possible. That simplification is achieved through the discourse of accountancy, a discourse widely perceived to offer the definitive simplified perspective on financial matters. Yet although there is a pragmatic need for simplification in accounting, the more extensive that simplification becomes the more important it is to evaluate the way in which it is achieved. This chapter will argue that, despite appearing to be technically definitive, accountants’ strategies of simplification depend heavily on pragmatic and normative considerations. Failure to fully acknowledge these considerations, however, leaves accountancy without an adequate language in which to debate their impact. As a result, accountants lack a resource which is vital to ensuring that their accounting decisions are well founded. After illustrating how this problem is manifested in practice, I will conclude by discussing why accountancy’s existing concepts of truth and fairness do not offer a ready solution to it. My analysis is based on interviews with twenty London accountants between June 2003 and October 2004.1 I asked my interviewees to decide how to account for a hypothetical commercial scenario, and then challenged them to explain their reasoning and defend it against possible alternatives. Before discussing those conversations in detail, however, I want to introduce the key category of simplification in accounting discourse.

130 Matthew Gill

The accounting fact It has not always been possible to think of accounting facts in abstraction from any normative perspective. The earliest known champion of double-entry bookkeeping, Luca Pacioli, positioned it within the field of medieval rhetoric (Aho 1985: 23). It gradually became a powerful way for merchants to try to demonstrate the moral legitimacy of their activities in a Christian context (Poovey 1998: xvi, 32). For every debit, there was also a credit, and this double entry demonstrated that the merchant’s dealings were balanced, rather than excessive or extortionate. Beyond this, “the conventions of double-entry writing simply excluded allusions to what no rules of writing could control: shipwrecks, storms at sea, and the wild fluctuations in currency rates that characterised the early modern economy” (Poovey 1998: 36). In these ways, accounting served to enhance a merchant’s reputation, and therefore his creditworthiness (Carruthers and Espeland 1991: 51). Modern accounting soon outgrew its dependence on formal rhetoric and religion. It spread due to the mobility, interconnectedness, and education of merchants (Carruthers and Espeland 1991: 52). By the late sixteenth century, with mathematics still carrying pejorative associations with necromancy, double-entry bookkeeping was helping to confer legitimacy on numbers, rather than vice versa. It offered a systematic and apparently neutral way of configuring information, seemingly immune from interpretative challenge. Over subsequent centuries, together with descriptive statistics more broadly, it became increasingly useful to government and to entrepreneurs (McKendrick 1970; Poovey 1998: xii, 54, 316–317). The ascendancy of the accounting fact was the result not of some breakthrough in epistemology, then, but of an intersection of religious, commercial, and political interests, which allowed facts to proliferate in spheres where they would previously have seemed out of place. Modern accounting’s origins are rhetorical, and it will become evident below that it remains a product of that heritage. Conceived rhetorically, facts can be defined as “objects of precise, limited agreement” (Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteca 1969: 68–69), and values, derivatively, as statements which are not factual. This is not to assume anything substantive about what should be considered a fact. Instead, I will explore how the category of fact is used by accountants, and in particular how the scope and authority of facts in accountancy enable values to be defined as such and consequently excluded from accountants’ frame of reference.

Champion Chicken The rest of this chapter will consist of a close analysis of interviewees’ decision-making with respect to the aforementioned hypothetical commercial scenario. The scenario presents a fictional company – Champion Chicken – which is discussing an accounting problem with its auditors. The problem

Facts in the city 131 is relatively straightforward in technical terms, and interviewees might well have come across something similar themselves. The relevant accounting standards are covered relatively early in accountants’ professional training. Nonetheless, the problem is what an accountant might call “judgmental”: something more than a competent application of the accounting standards is needed in order to resolve it. The text of the Champion Chicken scenario is reprinted below: Paul is an assistant manager in the audit division of Staines & Slough, a UK accounting practice. His most important client is Champion Chicken, a London-based supplier of ready-cooked rotisserie chickens to British supermarkets (turnover £200m, profit before tax £0.2m).2 Champion Chicken has recently experienced financial difficulties. An economic downturn has meant that consumers have economized by buying uncooked or frozen chicken instead of ready-cooked products. Champion is forecast to breach its bank covenants next year, and has begun to negotiate new credit terms. Champion Chicken’s bankers, London Money, are insisting that it cut costs, and to enable it to do so they have financed the construction of a new centralized roasting facility on a brown field site near Birmingham. The facility became fully operational shortly before the year end, after a series of teething troubles. The most serious of these involved setting the correct temperature for the ovens. Difficulties in doing this initially resulted in chicken worth £0.4m being overcooked and therefore unusable. Angela, the management accountant responsible for the new roasting facility, had submitted a budget to Steve, the finance director in London, for the cost of the project. Apart from the £0.4m worth of overcooked chicken, costs have been in line with Angela’s budget. She does not want to add the cost of the chicken to the asset value of the facility, as this would appear to be an overspend on her part. Similarly, she does not view the item as an operating expense, because it distorts the normal cost of roasting, which she is keen to demonstrate is lower at the new facility than before. She has reported the cost to Steve as an exceptional item. Steve has informed his contacts in London that Champion has rationalized its operations and is well placed to achieve revenue and earnings growth next year. A £0.4m expense against profit would undermine his credibility and jeopardize his negotiations with London Money. He wants to capitalize the overcooked chicken along with the rest of the commissioning costs of the new roasting facility. The audit partner, Geoff, is a new partner at Staines & Slough, and won the audit of Champion Chicken from a competitor two years ago. This was seen as a major coup at the time, and he is keen to maintain a strong client relationship. He has carried out several special projects for Champion recently, including helping them prepare information to

132 Matthew Gill support negotiations with London Money. Paul works on a few of Geoff’s clients, and has a good reputation in the office. He hopes to be made a manager in a few months’ time. Paul has come across the overcooked chicken as a capital item while reviewing the audit of fixed assets. Champion Chicken’s business is capital intensive, with fixed assets totalling over £300m, and no mention of the overcooked chicken is made in the draft accounts. The accounts are due to be published in three days’ time, so Paul is very busy finalizing the audit.

Three accounting options Before looking at what interviewees made of this scenario, I will discuss the three accounting options suggested in it, indicating briefly what the accounting standards have to say about each one and what the consequences of each would be for Champion Chicken’s accounts. A suspension of disbelief is needed during this exposition, while I lay the groundwork necessary to develop the critical perspectives of subsequent sections. The relevant parts of Champion Chicken’s financial statements are its balance sheet and its profit and loss account (P&L). The balance sheet lists the assets and liabilities of the company at the end of its accounting year. The P&L summarizes its performance during that year, beginning with revenue (or turnover) and subtracting various expenses to leave the retained profit for the year, which reflects the increase in the company’s assets on its balance sheet. Sample profit and loss accounts and balance sheets for Champion Chicken are given in Tables 6.1 and 6.2, illustrating the effects of the possible accounting treatments. The large, bold numbers are those referred to in the scenario or directly affected by a particular treatment. I have added other numbers, not specified in the scenario, in order to complete the illustration. Capitalizing the overcooked chicken, or from Paul’s point of view making no change to the financial statements as he finds them (option A), would result in the chicken being treated as an asset on the balance sheet. It would not feature as an expense in the P&L, therefore, and would not reduce the year’s profit before tax figure of £0.2m. Clearly, overcooked chicken is not an asset in its own right, so the debate turns on whether its cost can be considered part of the cost of establishing the new roasting facility. Financial Reporting Standard (FRS) 15 states that “[t]he costs associated with a start-up or commissioning period should be included in the cost of the tangible fixed asset only where the asset is available for use but incapable of operating at normal levels without such a start-up or commissioning period” (paragraph 14).3 Interviewees therefore discussed the precise nature of the teething troubles that gave rise to the overcooked chicken. If the amount were capitalized, it would be depreciated over the “useful economic life” (FRS 15, paragraph 2) of the roasting facility, meaning that its cost would be

Facts in the city 133 transferred from the balance sheet to the P&L gradually over, say, fifteen years. If the chicken were not capitalized, it would have to be treated as an expense. Two questions would remain, however: firstly, whether the chicken was an exceptional item or not (option B or C), and, secondly, if it was, how it should be disclosed in the P&L (option B1 or B2). FRS 3 defines exceptional items as “[m]aterial items which derive from events or transactions that fall within the ordinary activities of the reporting entity and which . . . need to be disclosed by virtue of their size or incidence if the financial statements are to give a true and fair view” (paragraph 5). Exceptional items should be included in a P&L above operating profit (above the line), unless they fall under one of three categories of costs which should appear below it. The only one of these categories that might include Champion’s overcooked chicken is “costs of a fundamental reorganisation or restructuring having a material effect on the nature and focus of the reporting entity’s operations” (paragraph 20b). Operating profit is often taken as a measure of the trading performance of a company, because it excludes the costs of financing, taxation, etc. that do not directly reflect trading. Therefore, if Champion’s overcooked chicken was exceptional and could be disclosed below the line, then the company would appear to be performing better (option B1 in Table 6.1, where a reader can more clearly see that, were it not for the exceptional item, Champion would be profitable). However most interviewees did not think that the company’s restructuring constituted a change in the nature or focus of Champion’s operations, because it was still in the rotisserie chicken business. Whatever the conclusion on this question, though, it is at the lower line of profit before tax that the overcooked chicken would cause Champion to report a loss. This is unavoidable if the item appears anywhere in the P&L, as a straightforward operating expense or as any form of exceptional item. If the overcooked chicken was not disclosed below the line, it would need to go above the line, and the question as to whether it was exceptional or not would then concern whether to draw attention to it on a line of its own (option B2) rather than including it in the same line as the cost of successfully processed chicken (option C), and whether to provide some narrative explanation for it. From the point of view of a company trying to argue that the overcooked chicken should be excluded from an analysis of its underlying performance, the more prominent the disclosure the better, but from an auditor’s point of view such prominence should be allowed only if the accounts would not otherwise give a “true and fair view.” If the overcooked chicken is neither capitalized nor treated as exceptional, it must be treated as an ordinary trading cost, or expense (option C). Since expensing an item has the maximum negative impact on a company’s reported performance, it is, according to the prudence principle enshrined in Statement of Standard Accounting Practice (SSAP) 2, the default option when no decision has been made to do anything else.4

(19.8) (0.2) – (0.2) – (0.2)

Interest Payable Profit Before Tax

Taxation Profit After Tax

Dividends Payable Retained Profit

– 0.2

Dividends Payable Retained Profit

Note: Numbers in brackets are negative numbers.

– 0.2

Taxation Profit After Tax

(19.8) 0.2

(0.4) 19.6

Exceptional Item Profit Before Interest

Interest Payable Profit Before Tax

Operating Expenses Operating Profit

(19.8) (0.2) – (0.2) – (0.2)

Interest Payable Profit Before Tax Taxation Profit After Tax Dividends Payable Retained Profit

(80.0) 19.6

Operating Expenses Operating Profit

(80.0) 20.0

Operating Expenses Operating Profit

(80.0) 20.0

Operating Expenses Operating Profit

Gross Profit

100.0

100.0

Gross Profit

(19.8) (0.2) – (0.2) – (0.2)

Taxation Profit After Tax Dividends Payable Retained Profit

(80.0) 19.6

99.6

£m 200.0 (100.4)

Interest Payable Profit Before Tax

Turnover Cost of Sales

Gross Profit

£m 200.0 (100.0)

(Item Expensed as Ordinary)

(Item Expensed as Exceptional above the line) £m £m Turnover 200.0 Cost of Sales Ordinary (100.0) Exceptional Item (0.4) (100.4) Gross Profit 99.6

(Item Expensed as Exceptional below the line) £m Turnover 200.0 Cost of Sales (100.0)

(Item Capitalized)

Turnover Cost of Sales

Option C

Option B2

Option B1

Option A

Table 6.1 Champion Chicken, Year Ended 31 December 2003. Profit and Loss Account

£m

0.2

£m

179.6

180.0

1.0

179.6

(150.0)

329.6

30.0

299.6

178.6

(0.2)

178.8

(40.0)

70.0

£m

179.0

Retained profit for the year

Brought forward

Brought forward

Retained profit for the year

Profit and Loss Account

Profit and Loss Account

Share Capital

1.0

Long Term Liabilities (Bank Loan)

Total Assets Less Current Liabilities

Net Current Assets

Current Liabilities

Current Assets

Fixed Assets

Share Capital

180.0

(150.0)

330.0

30.0

300.0

Capital and Reserves

178.8

(40.0)

70.0

£m

Option B1, B2 or C (Item Expensed)

Capital and Reserves

Long Term Liabilities (Bank Loan)

Total Assets Less Current Liabilities

Net Current Assets

Current Liabilities

Current Assets

Fixed Assets

Option A (Item Capitalized)

Table 6.2 Champion Chicken, Year Ended 31 December 2003. Balance Sheet

136 Matthew Gill

Capitalization Capitalization was generally the first option interviewees considered, as it represented the status quo in Champion Chicken’s accounts. Ryan5 thought capitalization was acceptable so long as the situation was fully explained in words, although those words could be favorably written: he suggested that Champion “sell it up a bit” with the “reasonably open disclosure” that the cost of the roasting facility simply “includes half a million pounds of stock used to ensure that the best quality stuff comes out.” Most interviewees, however, rejected the capitalization option. It seemed absurd to be depreciating a highly perishable, useless item over the life of the roasting facility. Daljit, for example, just couldn’t believe that such a large value of chicken being overcooked might have been deliberate, even as a test run. Interviewees generally thought that the overcooking was most likely to have been a mistake. Alistair found this self-evident: “Mistakes happen in business all the time.” Liam was more sceptical, though, and wondered whether the chicken had really been overcooked, or whether theft or fraud would be a better explanation of the cost. In any case, he thought there was something fundamentally wrong with “the control process of the business to have allowed this to happen.” If even a much smaller amount had been budgeted for a commissioning period than the eventual cost, Liam would have been more sympathetic to management’s explanations. Most other interviewees also thought intention was important and used Champion’s budgets as evidence of intention at the planning stage. Sebastian dissented, however, saying that management’s intention was irrelevant to whether the overcooked chicken represented “inefficiencies” or not. The common thread through all of these reactions is that my interviewees assume that Champion Chicken’s management think in a similar way to themselves. Management might be incompetent, they might make huge mistakes, or they might be corrupt, but nonetheless if they applied their minds to a business problem they would resolve it in the same way as would a given interviewee. The assumption is not unreasonable. Champion Chicken is, after all, in business to make a profit by roasting chickens, and since profit is itself a convention there are conventions concerning how it can be made. Nonetheless, the particular discourse surrounding these conventions simplifies in such a way that human agents seem interchangeable and transparent. When pressed on the capitalization issue, Alistair simplifies it with reference to an “analogy”: If you built an apartment block and used some concrete in it, the concrete, unlike the chicken in this case, could not be extracted from the asset, and would therefore be part of it. Alistair’s strategy is to make the issue as simple as possible so that the solution would be obvious to “even your normal layman. You don’t have to be an accountant.” He can then appeal to common sense, and take a straightforward line throughout the interview which doesn’t require too much effort to maintain. Sebastian also simplifies, but by exaggeration rather than analogy: “If the

Facts in the city 137 whole place you know, had fallen apart and you had to rebuild it again from scratch, you couldn’t capitalize it twice.” Joe sees his first impressions of the scenario as significant: “My honest judgment when I’d read it through the one time . . . was that, in my head I made a judgment you’d have to write it off against profit and therefore anything else is by default, wrong.” Although Joe mentions judgment, he does so in such a way as to render it opaque. His impressions are merely asserted, therefore, but legitimized by reference to his honesty. Furthermore, he states his conclusion from “my very uneducated level,” which both denotes deference to the audit partner in the scenario (Geoff), and mitigates his responsibility for interpreting the accounting standards. Even if his conclusion turns out not to concur with Geoff’s, Joe can still justify his thoughts by reference to an almost instinctive reaction which is somehow unmediated or authentic, and therefore reliable. Tom tries to give some quasi-scientific legitimacy to his gut reactions by calling them “a sleep easy test,” but Sebastian actually does refer to “instinct.” Many interviewees also used the audit risk management jargon of gaining sufficient comfort over numbers. Terms such as “comfort” and “instinct” achieve the effect of simplification not by reducing complexity which could be subjected to argumentation if only there were more time, but instead by demanding credence to feelings that other practitioners can recognize. Because such feelings are difficult to articulate, they are also difficult to contest, and therefore tend to go uncontested. A disposition to assess accounting facts against whether one feels a certain way towards them is therefore likely to work against unconventional ways of seeing things.

Profit If Champion’s overcooked chicken is not capitalized, it must go through the P&L, and therefore must impact upon retained profit. The only debatable question is then how it does so, and which of the other profit measures are affected. Profit is the ultimate accounting simplification. Because so much evaluation of a company’s past and future and of its management is embodied in that single concept, profit is perhaps the point at which the attempt to portray a company in terms of accounting facts comes under most pressure. As the balancing item between income and expenditure, it is sensitive to all of the assumptions made when preparing a P&L account. Gary identifies profitability as the key “fact” in the Champion Chicken scenario because the need to improve profitability caused the restructuring, and consequently the overcooked chicken, in the first place. He thinks that capitalization would be the wrong option, but reflects the sensitivity of profit by squirming at length before stating a position that would adversely affect it. He would have “serious concerns” and be “sceptical” about the treatment, it is something he would “bring up” with the client, but without being too specific: “It definitely

138 Matthew Gill has to be disclosed somehow.” He says that “you’d be very hard pressed to justify holding it as part of an asset,” and that even if there were “some small clause . . . which you could possibly bend” in the standards, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable” capitalizing the amount. Only after all this indirectness does he feel confident enough to state that the chicken is “basically a cost that . . . would have to be written off.” Adrian, like several other interviewees, blamed unsophisticated users of accounts for making profit so sensitive: “I mean there isn’t one number that summarizes one company’s position I suppose but people often behave as if there is . . . even if that is a bit silly.” An item in the P&L might seem more important than the same item on the balance sheet, because on the balance sheet it would make little difference to a company’s total assets, whereas in the P&L it could turn a profit into a loss. Adrian countered, however, that a small profit or a small loss should say something similar about the performance of the company. Several interviewees, particularly those familiar with companies in difficulty, wondered whether Champion Chicken would remain a “going concern” if it breached its bank covenants. If not, the items on its balance sheet would need to be valued on a break-up basis, i.e. according to the price which could be gained by selling them off quickly to pay debts rather than according to the contribution they could generate through Champion’s ongoing operations. At the margin of financial viability, therefore, the profit figure might have implications for every other valuation in the accounts. For Tom, the risk to the company makes the accounting decision all the more important: “I mean, this is all very, very dodgy ’cause at the end of the day, all of these things do tend to come out in the wash around these things, when these companies go down the pan.” His string of clichés strikes a conspiratorial tone, as he tries to secure what is clearly a brittle position. Some interviewees also took Champion’s low profitability to indicate the general incompetence of its management. An alternative explanation is given in the scenario (which relates falling profitability to market conditions), but nonetheless blaming management seemed plausible to interviewees when coupled with viewing the overcooked chicken as an error on their part. Joe doubted that the error itself was very significant. He worked it out to represent about two days’ worth of chickens, and concluded that “the number is huge but the mistake is not huge and therefore it would be difficult I think to justify it as an exceptional item.” However, if the mistake was not huge, neither was it forgivable. “I keep coming back to this but that’s what they do, they roast chickens, and they made a mistake roasting chickens.” For Joe the nature, as well as the size, of the problem makes it unexceptional. Sebastian suggests that “a lot of exceptional items that appear in accounts could probably be, if you really wanted to, traced to management incompetence,” and agrees that an appropriate punishment is to treat them as ordinary operating costs.

Facts in the city 139 Just as we saw that Ryan demanded a formal disclosure under the capitalization option but then suggested how its impact might be softened, Daljit, whilst remaining strict about the numbers in the accounts, also offers damage limitation advice to Champion’s management: You’ve got to manage the expectations of the bank and demonstrate to them, by way of . . . sufficient disclosure in the accounts, that this is a one-off cost. And you know, you could say, “and during the year, four hundred thousand of stock was written off due to initial,” I don’t know quite how you’d say it without making it sound horrendous, but “initial production runs and blah blah blah.” The importance of getting the profit number right is counterbalanced by a willingness to use the surrounding words to promote a desired interpretation of that number. The overcooked chicken can be glossed as a one-off whether or not it is categorized as exceptional. The subtle distinction between these terms apparently rests on the exceptional being a more exclusive category, which a company’s management have to earn or to deserve. Although Daljit, like Joe and Sebastian, demands the authority to judge exceptionality in the numbers, he is happy as business advisor to recommend that the events to which those numbers relate be reinterpreted in words on the same page. Daljit demands a particular factual simplification, but is prepared to reintroduce complexity alongside it in order to mitigate its inherent evaluative implications.

Crystallizing fact So far, I have discussed some of the strategies interviewees used to decide between discrete accounting options. Here, I want to look more generally at how they crystallized the relevant facts out of the scenario in order to make that style of decision-making possible, or, in other words, how they simplified events such that they could be presented as a finite collection of facts at all. Despite my interviewees’ pragmatism, Liam’s sentiment is common to most of them: “In a pure sense, it would be nice to imagine that auditing did not have so many grey areas.” Technical idealists might be cast as soft and unworldly, but not as wrong-headed. Joe, when asked what the facts were, retorted: “From whose perspective?” However, when I asked him whether that would influence his answer, he immediately responded in generic terms. This suggests that the adoption of different perspectives is perhaps tactical, but is not integral to the view of knowledge Joe and his colleagues have. They believe, apparently, in the objective facts of the matter. Profit challenges this attitude by being so difficult to agree on. Gary uses common jargon when he talks of “recognizing” profit, rather than simply calculating it. Profit can be earned, but recognition implies that social

140 Matthew Gill validation is integral to its having been earned. In this light, interviewees’ technical framing of Champion Chicken’s dilemma appears fragile. I tested its limits by asking Daljit whether anyone at Champion could persuade him that the overcooked chicken represented a pilot of the roasting facility: They could persuade me if they had, it’s not so much they could persuade me, it’s if they demonstrated certain additional information, I would agree that it was a pilot. But what they’re not really doing is changing my view, what they’re doing is, we’re almost trying to find the truth as opposed to, we’re trying to find a factual thing as opposed to my interpretation of it. Because in order for it to be capitalized, it had to satisfy certain criteria. If they can demonstrate those criteria, it’s fine. Belief in the irreducibility of facts is bolstered here by the prestige of the accounting discourse. Daljit’s inflexibility aims to maintain his independence as an auditor. Its effect, though, is not to eliminate persuasion but to demand a style in which that persuasion must occur in order to be effective. Either it must challenge existing facts, present new facts, or perhaps argue for a different way of applying the criteria according to which facts are validated. It cannot question the idea of a fact, or the criteria themselves. Nonetheless to demonstrate information, or, as Simon put it, to produce evidence, is not the same as to find it, or to make it available. It is a more immanent normative involvement in a practice of creating facts. It is only on the face of it, therefore, that facts are sought with quasiscientific objectivity. Liam, for instance, thought of a fact as something that could be tested. Yet he couldn’t carry out his test except by reference to other facts: “Do the facts that have been presented to this point stack up? Is there some kind of mismatch? Is there an instinct that something is there which is not being revealed?” In other words, can we interrelate the facts as we would expect to be able to? If not, the accounting discourse is strong enough to conclude not that there is a deficiency in understanding, but that we may not be dealing with a “well-run company.” Like Daljit, Liam seems to demand an explanatory story within a defined genre. His pretensions to objectivity simply make the genre rigid and pedagogical. A corollary of such an approach is that accounting entries come to be treated as materialized entities rather than as representations. Alistair, for instance, objectifies the cost of the overcooked chicken as “dead and buried” because it is not “going to deliver some form of future income stream.” Rather than attribute agency to himself or his colleagues, Liam similarly attributes it to accounting items, commenting that the capitalized chicken would either “come to the attention” of an accountant or not. Like the Marxian commodity fetishized by an alienated worker, the accounting item is active here, but the accountant is passive. Yet his passivity implies that Liam is not responsible for finding things, so it could just represent a strategic equivocation on his part. He only made a statement about how things

Facts in the city 141 appeared to him, rather than committing himself to an absolute claim about how they were. He simplified the world into facts, but abdicated from the responsibility that his simplification might imply. In situations where there is acknowledged dispute between possible candidates for factuality, accountants draw on a raft of evaluative concepts. For example, when I asked Alistair what the facts of the Champion Chicken scenario were, he responded: I think it’s about accounting judgments. It’s about people taking different views on certain issues because if you were to look at accounting standards that are prescribed . . . then you know there’s some prescriptions within them that would apply to that particular scenario in terms of interpretation. But it’s not necessarily prescriptive in every single way and there’s a degree of open interpretation of which some of the characters in this particular scenario decide to interpret in their own way. So what do you think would be the right outcome from this? Well in terms of what the answer is? I would see nothing wrong with treating that . . . as an exceptional item. Alistair then went on to defend his conclusion in very black and white terms. He apparently does think there is an answer, even though a process of contestation is necessary to reach it. One could attempt a taxonomy of his various evaluative terms. In this quotation alone, Alistair refers to judgments, views, issues, prescriptions, interpretations, decisions, answers, treatments, and wrongness. But a taxonomy would risk glossing over the contradiction, for instance, between Alistair seeing some interpretations as being open, and others as being prescribed. Alistair’s thinking, fundamentally, is pragmatic: he wants to create an answer, but he wants it to be defensible by more than just assertion, and so he uses all kinds of near-synonyms to describe a process of fact construction acceptable to his peers. In case his defence fails, of course, he hedges: an opponent would find it much harder to argue against the claim that he could “see nothing wrong” with his conclusion, than against what I pushed him to say, namely that it was right. Alistair is also resisting the potentially moralistic connotations of my use of “right” here. Joe did so more explicitly in response to the same question, which took him aback: “The right, I mean I don’t know what right means, but the proper outcome is that they account for their mistake and it’s fairly clear and visible in their accounts.” In other words, if the accounting is clear and proper, then readers can draw their own moral conclusions. The attempt to evacuate evaluation from accounting conceived as a technical process may be what makes it possible for an accountant to answer a question with “I don’t know what right means” in such a way as to make the question sound inappropriate. The clarity Joe sought to further was ultimately not technical, however. For him, “the accounting question is potentially a sideshow” compared to

142 Matthew Gill “whether the evidence becomes clear or not,” by which he means evidence of a deeper operational reality which underlies accounting technicalities. “We’re saying that the real issue is, forget finance, we’re saying the real issue is an operating screw up.” Interviewees like Joe followed this attitude through by styling themselves as non-technical: “Don’t ask me an accounting question for goodness’ sake.” Where does the common-sense operational perspective’s status derive from? Is it just a set of generally accepted prejudices that are immune from dispute? An oversimplified ethic of competence, which accountancy sustains through presentational punishments and rewards? Or pure pragmatism? The answer is unclear, yet the perspective allows Joe to be outspoken concerning what happened at Champion Chicken at the same time as being agnostic as to how the event should be accounted for. Liam explains the relation of accounts to reality as follows: An auditor should actually understand how the business is working and how it’s running and have a firm sort of intuitive grasp upon how it is that the company is actually performing, because the portrayal of a company’s financial well-being or otherwise in a set of accounts is rather more like a painting than like a photograph, in the sense that it does represent the matters but on certain items, there are different treatments which may be chosen and there are conventions on many of them. To “understand” is all the more important here because accounts are not photographic, but are conventional representations. Yet “a firm sort of intuitive grasp” seems anything but firm. Liam is arguing that his understanding pre-exists language, but accounting itself is, after all, predicated on the assumption that a discursive representation can influence how stakeholders understand a company. Liam’s invocation of choice and convention exposes the weakness of his position. A choice in this context is an accounting decision with no basis. Convention here is merely a factor in a choice, and so provides only a spurious basis. If accountants struggle to use their public discourse to formulate bases for decisions between possible facts, it seems that this leads them to rely in their non-public discourse on an operational perspective that they still cannot articulate.

Circumstantial influences In this penultimate section, I will look at the impact of the circumstances surrounding their accounting decision on how interviewees simplified the Champion Chicken scenario. It is already clear, given accountants’ concern to persuade each other that their decisions are appropriate, that a major test of accounting practice is peer review. Joe, though keen that the underlying communication of Champion’s situation is accurate, nonetheless says that “if the accounting treatment is solid . . . well okay they’re always going to

Facts in the city 143 choose the capitalization option because you know even if you write a note it’s prettier than having losses.” Solidity doesn’t mean objectivity, but being defensible to fellow accountants. Liam argues commensurately that if the overcooked chicken had been separately identified by Champion’s management in their draft accounts, Paul (the auditor) would have had a greater responsibility to approach Geoff (the audit partner) about it. Three conclusions follow. Firstly, an auditor’s view of the facts is to a significant extent framed by the way in which a client initially categorizes and groups the balances in its draft accounts. Secondly, the description of a number, for instance as “burnt chicken” rather than “running-in costs,” is integral to its meaning. The view that you can say what you like in words as long as the numbers are right therefore appears to be tactical: facts are not merely numerical. Thirdly, the likelihood of Paul being criticized is not clearly distinguished from the extent of his requirement to act. He is apparently expected only to be motivated instrumentally. Motivation was the primary evidence some interviewees used to crystallize facts with respect to the Champion Chicken scenario. Joe cited the Finance Director’s motivations in order to rule out his accounting proposal: “Given that motive . . . it would seem to me to be dishonest to capitalize it.” Dishonesty, for Joe, is not fully prevented by accounting standards: he is concerned that Champion may try to exploit flexibility within the standards to hide its mistake from London Money. Joe reaches this conclusion by construing Champion as “a business in financial trouble looking at getting itself into more financial trouble and within that context there are people who ultimately – I suppose incentivized is the wrong word – but have a reason to hide that fact.” Incentivized is the wrong word because it would imply blame, as though there were someone doing the incentivizing. Reason is a substitute term which makes different assumptions about origins; a reason derives either from the situation or from the protagonists themselves. It hardly matters which, because, if protagonists as conceived by accountancy reason in a predictable way, they could all be expected to interpret a commercial situation similarly. The assumption of homogeneity denies protagonists ethical autonomy: they all appear as crude and short-sighted pursuers of individualized selfinterest. Joe does not say that his clients’ motives might impair their objectivity, but that their motives are so transparent and corrupt that no further evidence is needed beyond those motives to confirm that the truth must be the opposite of what they suggest. Joe may be trying to balance the overall portrayal of events, assuming that if management are biased in one direction then the accounts should be biased in the other. When summarizing his reasoning he said under his breath that he wanted to treat the chicken as an expense “more than anything to spite him [the Finance Director], but that’s beside the point.” Joe’s moral crusade, though, reinforces a vicious circle: he condemns and redresses bias which he only observes because he assumes it is inevitable.

144 Matthew Gill These conclusions must be treated with caution because the wording of the scenario itself juxtaposes Champion employees’ motives with their accounting proposals, perhaps suggesting the kinds of approach Joe took. However, when we discussed examples of his own work later in his interview, Joe outlined a generic approach to determining accounting entries which was as much psychological as technical, and explicitly relied on protagonists’ motivations. More broadly, several interviewees dealt with Champion Chicken as if such problems were a game. Daljit talked as if he were playing chess: “That’s how I would probably start to move.” Alistair seemed to enjoy trying to devise strategies by which Champion could effectively negotiate with London Money, suggesting for instance that they calculate adjusted ratios to demonstrate better performance. Adrian tried to define what would constitute an inappropriate relationship between auditor and client in the Champion Chicken scenario: By crooked I don’t mean doing something illegal I suppose, I mean someone who’d read this and sit down with a client and try to think up some way of producing some meaningful evidence that they could do what they wanted to do and stick it on the file and so on so that if it ever came out they could say well look we thought about it, we’ve documented it, we did this, we thought it was a reasonable thing. That would not be a professional approach and I don’t think many accountants I’ve worked with would approach it in that way and whether they would ultimately buckle under or not I don’t think they would sit down at the outset and try to do what the client wanted. Auditors are paid by those they regulate. Client relationships are important, but so is independence, and they must satisfy both requirements. None would be so crass as to take the “crooked” approach Adrian describes, but the question is how far this is simply a matter of form. If they “ultimately buckle under,” as he puts it, then their professionalism is little more than an elaborate risk management etiquette. Simon talks not of buckling under but of respecting the client’s industry knowledge and being open to the “evidence they can produce to back up their argument.” This is part common sense, but also part euphemism, because the production of evidence is not an impartial process. Although Sebastian would not say that the risk of being sued ought to influence which accounting treatment an auditor might accept, he did believe that it ought to influence the amount of attention paid to determining that treatment. Champion Chicken, given its possible going concern issues, would demand significant attention. Liam criticized Champion’s auditors for not finding the overcooked chicken sooner, but nonetheless wanted to explain their not doing so in terms of accepted auditing risk management: was it “economic” to test in sufficient detail to pick up this item? The question relativizes and proceduralizes the failure. It was a probabilistic error, based on “statistical likelihood” derived from “a pragmatic stance.”

Facts in the city 145 The interviewee who most clearly delimited his sphere of responsibility was Tom, whose “primary thought” about the scenario was that “I’m in a very fortunate position, never actually having to make a decision on this sort of thing, ’cause all I would do is attempt to get all this information down in a portable format and then it would be up to like the senior managers and partners.” He might make suggestions but “would sort of bow to their greater knowledge and experience basically.” When he said that he would still be happy to defer to their experience if a superior had signed off on a treatment he was sure was wrong, respect for experience seemed a much less real concern than being off the hook. But the situation is not quite as simple as Tom abdicating professional responsibility. He inhabits an institutional structure that expects him to act within strict parameters. He is both a professional and an employee, and for him his status as an employee is the more significant. The implications of this for professional ethics are profound, and Tom’s comments illustrate something paradoxical about the accountants I interviewed. They are highly adept at constructing and manipulating facts, yet they do so in a way over which they at least perceive that they have very little control. For all their art, they do not see themselves as creative, but as servants of a rationale which is beyond them.

Conclusion: a true and fair view? My interviewees all agreed that the complexities of a scenario could be unproblematically simplified down to a few clearly defined accounting options. Most believed that there was a right answer, or at least that ideally there should be a right answer. However, as I have shown, they decided among the options by referring to their gut reaction, the alleged intentions and motivations of protagonists, and the likelihood of their decision being criticized, for example. There is a disparity, therefore, between the apparent clarity of an accounting decision once made, and the opacity of the decision-making process itself. Interviewees tried to bridge this disparity by using an intricate vocabulary of judgments, views, issues, interpretations, answers, and treatments to gloss a highly argumentative process as if it were technical. Yet that intricate vocabulary is not technical, but rhetorical. In practice, interviewees used it to persuade hypothetical peers that their conclusions were credible, legitimate, possible, acceptable, or conventional much more than they used it to claim that they were correct. British accounting standards don’t formally aim for correctness. However, their explicit objective to ensure that accounts are “true and fair” has come to be defined as ensuring that they “provide information that is relevant and reliable; are sufficiently informative of matters that affect their use, comprehension and interpretation by those for whom they are intended; and reflect the law and appropriate accounting standards” (Technical Core 2: Auditing and Financial Reporting 1998: 2.3). Such a definition obscures the normative

146 Matthew Gill assumptions implied by fairness in accounting, because they are subsumed into a series of superficially factual criteria. But is a fact still just a fact, when it embodies particular notions of fairness? What does fairness actually mean when the word is treated in this way? These are questions which accounting’s practitioners are not linguistically equipped to answer. Their profession’s apparently factual basis, reinforced by its increasingly rules-based technical standards, obscures the ways in which accounting decisions must be thought through in practice. Truth and fairness are not merely technical, but appeal to a shared normative perspective, or professional ethos, and it is this perspective or ethos which my interviewees’ technical public discourse leaves them struggling to articulate at a collective level. This conclusion raises broader questions about the relations between accountants’ presentation of information, their perspective on commercial situations, and the ethical orientation through which they approach their work. What does professionalism mean in an environment which is glossed as technical? How does a concern for presentation and self-presentation affect transparency and truthfulness? What vocabulary might accountants use to articulate ethical issues? What role is there for emotional engagement in accountancy? These questions will inform my ongoing research into facts, values, and ethics in accounting language, but for the time being it is already clear that a technocratic conception of what accountants do is unsatisfactory even to them. Mary Poovey situates this dissatisfaction more broadly, suggesting that the modern fact, of which she finds the accounting fact to be exemplary, is itself evolving towards “the postmodernist conviction that the systems of knowledge humans create constitute the only source of meaning” (Poovey 1998: 327). This is perhaps the logical conclusion of abstracting fact from value. Having accepted this abstraction, it is hard not to notice the consequent superficiality of the facts that remain, and to take that as reason to find knowledge itself less convincing. Accountants, publicly at least, cannot take the relativist’s way out and question the veracity of their language. Financial decisions need to be made, and so the information supporting those decisions needs to be simplified. Nonetheless, my interviewees and those like them do perhaps find a sense of disbelief increasingly difficult to suspend with respect to their representations of commercial life. How could they buck the trend and make those representations more compelling? The question is important and practical, but it cannot be answered without reimagining the accounting fact.

Notes 1

For the purposes of this chapter, sameness is more interesting than difference, so, instead of trying to sample the range of accountants working in London, I interviewed a few of the profession’s most archetypal representatives. In doing so, I assumed that accountants’ language is highly standardized. If this were not the case, not only would a small sample of interviewees be insufficient to draw

Facts in the city 147

2 3

4 5

worthwhile conclusions, but studying accounting language itself would not make sense. My assumption was borne out in the interviews. Qualified accountants have all been through an intensive three-year training period comprising both work experience and study for examinations. In a profession whose role is to discursively represent commercial information in a standardized and comparable way, and whose accounting standards are scrupulous in establishing terminology, it was to be expected that the consequent regularities of thought and behaviour would be manifested linguistically. My interview sample consisted of twenty qualified accountants working in the big four accountancy practices in London, five being taken from each firm (KPMG, Ernst and Young, Deloitte, and PricewaterhouseCoopers). My interviewees were male and aged thirty-five or below. I used the snowball technique to identify them, beginning with personal acquaintances and asking interviewees for follow-on contacts. Having decided to interview chartered accountants, and having made distinctions between them according to gender, age, employer, and location, my sampling decisions were always in favor of the majority. For instance, in the United Kingdom, there are more male than female chartered accountants, the big four firms are the biggest employers of them (and employ more people under thirty-five than over), and London has a higher concentration than any other city. London is, of course, also a major international financial center. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), with whom all but one of my interviewees qualified, is both the largest and most prestigious of the institutes serving the profession in the UK. Nonetheless, accountants fitting all of these criteria at once are a minority group, and it is primarily their archetypal status which makes them interesting. The archetype’s significance became clear to me during the four years I worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers. To interview this group is to interview the symbolic representatives of accountancy against whom others benchmark themselves in terms of status, competence and behaviour. The archetypal accountant is not an average accountant, or a representative accountant, or a normatively ideal accountant, but does to some extent embody the essential characteristics of an accountant. As this chapter concerns UK accounting, amounts are denominated in pounds sterling. FRSs can be found in the ICAEW’s Accounting Standards and Guidance for Members (Accounting Standards Board 2001). They applied to all UK company accounts at the time this research was conducted (with exemption criteria for smaller companies), although at the time of writing UK listed companies are now required to use International Financial Reporting Standards. SSAPs are UK accounting standards issued before the FRSs (see note 3), and can be found in the same volume. All names have been changed.

Works cited Accounting Standards Board. 2001. Accounting Standards and Guidance for Members. London: ICAEW. Aho, J. A. 1985. “Rhetoric and the Invention of Double Entry Bookkeeping,” Rhetorica 3 (1) (Winter): 21–43. Carruthers, B. G., and W. N. Espeland. 1991. “Accounting for Rationality: DoubleEntry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality,” American Journal of Sociology 97 (1) (July): 31–69.

148 Matthew Gill McKendrick, N. 1970. “Josiah Wedgwood and Cost Accounting in the Industrial Revolution,” The Economic History Review n.s. 23 (1) (April): 45–67. Perelman, C., and L. Obrechts-Tyteca. 1969 [1958]. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver. Notre Dame, IN, and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Poovey, M. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press. Technical Core 2: Auditing and Financial Reporting (1998). [n.p.]: AFP.

7

Managing doubt Professional wrestling jargon and the making of “smart fans” Marion Wrenn Bodies have been bruised. Careers ended in an instant. Yes, this is entertainment, but the hazards are real. No matter who you are or what you do, please do not try this at home. – World Wrestling Entertainment disclaimer What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. – Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling” Verbum sapientibus sat est. – Proverb

The dialogic relationship between wrestling audiences and performers is rich terrain for sociological inquiry. As seemingly marginal as professional wrestling appears, it remains decidedly part of modern life: more than a reaction to the conditions of contemporary culture or a subversion of them, pro wrestling is embedded in and manifests the values and contradictions of consumer culture. The strategies and practices of the “lowly” wrestling fan (Sehmby 2002) shed light on what is generally understood as a postmodern sensibility of ironic nihilism; a penchant for “authentic inauthenticity” is key to the logic, spirit, and practices of American consumer culture.1 Far from being a mere manifestation of the so-called postmodern media environment, this historically constructed spectator position has a much longer trajectory: the practices, sensibilities, and discourses associated with late twentiethcentury postmodern consumer culture find their roots in the late nineteenth century, and the ongoing popularity of professional wrestling illustrates this continuity. This chapter offers an historical analysis of shifts in the industry argot used in professional wrestling, an insider language that has only recently come to be shared on a mass scale by performers, producers, and fans alike. Of particular interest is jargon that determines the way audiences understand and engage in the pleasures of watching pro wrestling, a language through which we can trace the spectator positions conceived of by the pro wrestling industry over the last century. The history of pro wrestling – and its lingo regarding categories of audience engagement – reveals a continuity between

150 Marion Wrenn modernism and postmodernism, nineteenth- and twenty-first-century leisure culture; it is through this continuity that we can detect what amounts to a longstanding vernacular theorization of spectator knowledge and pleasure. Much has been written about the “savvy” postmodern spectator. S/he is a pointing, clicking, joy-sticking bricoleur, playing in the clutter of consumer culture across a range of media, aware of the “authentic inauthenticity” of it all.2 This spectator position – and its attendant sensibilities – is often understood as a relatively new phenomenon, a manifestation of the culture of late capitalism. But such presentist presumptions miss crucial connections among entertainment forms, strategies of audience engagement, and spectator positions that span the twentieth century. For example, in his typology of modern celebrity-watching audiences, Gamson (1994) describes those fans who relish knowledge of the celebrity system and crave evidence of its techniques of production: “Theirs is an engaged disbelief, and the revelation of technique feeds rather than damages their interest. Call these postmodernists or the antibelievers” (his emphasis, 147). Calling such a position or strategy of engagement postmodern misrecognizes the history of this gaze for, as this chapter argues, such “engaged disbelief” can also be found among pro wrestling fans. To illustrate this point I will begin by tracing a brief history of the professional wrestling industry in the United States, discuss how this history affects the use of industry jargon, then demonstrate how such jargon describes the historical construction of a range of spectator positions, positions that offer us a more specific sense of the dialogic relationship between cultural producers and consumers.

Industry history (a confederacy of punches) In this section I offer an overview of pro wrestling industry history to show how performers and promoters conceive of a range of possible fan positions and strategies, evidence for which can be found in the industry’s evolving jargon. In fact, the genealogy of the concept of “sports entertainment,” a term by which pro wrestling has come to be commonly called, is embedded in pro wrestling industry history, and the popular use of this term is at the heart of my argument. Professional wrestling is best described as part-choreographed, partimprovised athletics in which performers are co-conjurers creating the illusion of real violence and real mayhem (Webley 1986, Freedman 1983, Feigenbaum 2000).3 Professional wrestling is an obvious descendant of Greco-Roman wrestling, though there are some distinct features. More theatrical spectacle than pure competition, pro wrestling’s history goes beyond older forms of grappling.4 Fan lore holds that pro wrestling can trace its roots to “collar and elbow” or “all in” grappling, forms of public brawling which arrived in the U.S. via Irish and English immigrants in the mid nineteenth century. Such matches soon moved from alleys, squares, and taverns to carnival fairgrounds, where they attracted large paying crowds.

Managing doubt 151 Wrestling scholars and historians locate pro wrestling’s roots in a similar era but a slightly different milieu: American carnival culture, particularly the carnival circuits, circuses and fairgrounds of the late 1800s (Mazer 1998, Morton and O’Brien 1985, Sehmby 2002). Carnival strongmen would challenge local comers in matches promoted by carnival owners. These strongmen were called “hookers” or “shooters” or “shoot wrestlers” because they could deploy painful submission holds and inflict real damage on their opponents and thus legitimately win their matches. When promoters began to organize matches between professional strongmen, the spectacle of professional wrestling as an institutionalized entertainment form was born. In an important sense, the history of pro wrestling parallels the history of twentieth-century mass media. Notably, professional wrestling was one of the first televised “sports” (appearing on broadcasts as early as the 1940s), and experienced a golden age in the 1950s, featuring wrestlers such as Gorgeous George, arguably one of the first television stars. Yet despite the existence of several national promotions, pro wrestling remained a largely fringe or marginal entertainment form. By the 1980s, however, the secondgeneration wrestling promoter Vince McMahon Jr. had begun laying the groundwork to bring pro wrestling to mainstream audiences. He eventually dominated the industry with his federation, World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation).5 A pay-per-view visionary, McMahon saw the potential of cable and private access television for the industry and secured a number of lucrative contracts for his federation. In the mid-1980s, professional wrestling became an extraordinarily popular mainstream entertainment form in the United States; its programming included live events, network broadcasts of televised matches, and cable payper-views. The media mogul Ted Turner’s wrestling federation, World Championship Wrestling (WCW), was broadcasting on the TBS and TNT networks. The WWE appeared on the USA Network (now known as Spike TV). Both the WCW and the WWE also had monthly pay-per-view shows. The reach of pro wrestling extended well beyond its formal matches: there were books, magazines, and Saturday morning cartoons based on pro wrestling, as well as an extensive market for T-shirts, toys, lunchboxes, and other forms of merchandising. It is important to note three important aspects of this period of growing popularity in the last few decades of the twentieth century: (1) from the mid1980s through the 1990s, pro wrestling became considerably more violent or “extreme”; (2) extreme-style wrestling was nonetheless considered “sports entertainment,” more spectacle than sport despite its claims to authenticity; and (3) this blurring of sports and entertainment led to the spread and development of wrestling’s insider jargon. During this era, as pro wrestling increased its stakes, it became excessively violent, excessively crude, and adopted a shock aesthetic (à la Howard Stern) called “WWE Attitude.” The “WWE Attitude” era occurred simultaneously with a number of industry factors: the WWE was competing for ratings (and

152 Marion Wrenn fiscal survival) with the fledgling WCW. The WCW beat the WWE in ratings wars for 86 consecutive weeks and Turner was eager to buy McMahon’s WWE. Industry insiders claim that the tide turned and the WWE began to outpace the WCW with the ascension of the wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Performing as a working-class, bar-brawling, monster-truck-driving hothead, Stone Cold’s charisma resonated with American fans. Austin’s performance blurred the boundaries between hero and villain, sustaining elements of both at once. Austin’s character was heroic in his villainy; a spectacular fin de siècle anti-hero, he was raucously good and bad simultaneously.6 More than merely a feature of a postmodern aesthetic in mass entertainment (or the fickle nature of pro wrestling fans), the popularity of Stone Cold Steve Austin signaled an important shift in industry practices toward “extreme” or “hard core” wrestling.7 While the WCW and the WWF were battling it out for audience share, ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling) was on the horizon. ECW fans sought and found so-called “real wrestling” – bloody matches, wounded performers, men hitting women, lesbian narratives, a mock crucifixion, lighter-fluid-and-flaming-table matches. Bamboo rod canings and barbed-wire matches were commonplace at the Philadelphia-based federation. Fans report attending matches where they brought in weapons – everything from frying pans and BBQ tongs to hockey sticks – for wrestlers to use to beat each other. What is more, ECW foregrounded industry machinations in their broadcasts: behind-the-scenes contract disputes with other federations were fair game for on-screen story lines at ECW. For example, when then-struggling Austin was fired from the WCW he found work at ECW, where he blasted WCW management on camera for the shoddy way he had been treated. Compelled by Austin’s performance and his growing popularity among wrestling fans, McMahon recruited Austin from the ECW. At the WWE Austin’s performance was as much inspired acting as it was a nod to ECW aesthetics. He brought the ECW’s auto-grotesquerie, its bash-a-beer-can-toyour-own-forehead style, to mainstream audiences. And WWE fans loved it. Impressed by the way the ECW had attracted and satisfied a specific demographic of hard-core wrestling fans, McMahon began to appropriate the ECW’s style as well as its wrestlers, launching and intensifying his federation’s “Attitude” era with hardcore matches, extreme-style wrestling, and, in what may be understood as an even more risqué move, breaking with a century-long tradition of denying wrestling’s status as choreographed entertainment. Even as pro wrestling was becoming more “real” the WWE announced that it was all merely entertainment – “sports entertainment.” Prior to the mid-1980s, pro wrestling observed an industry-wide policy of disavowing wrestling’s fakery; its choreography was a public secret, but a secret nonetheless. To be clear, most fans understood professional wrestling as choreographed athletics despite the industry’s practice of claiming its authenticity. As Jenkins notes, wrestling “links nonfictional forms with

Managing doubt 153 fictional content” (2005: 39), and, despite its “broad theatricality,” one of pro wrestling’s dominant aesthetics has been a kind of “pseudorealism”: The programs’ formats mimic the structure and visual style of nonfiction television, of sports coverage, news broadcasts, and talk shows. The fiction is, of course, that all this fighting is authentic, spontaneous, unscripted. The WWF narrative preserves this illusion at all costs. There is no stepping outside the fiction, no acknowledgment of the production process or the act of authorship. (Jenkins 2005: 51) Jenkins’s description of pro wrestling’s “pseudorealism” captures the industry’s practice of claiming the legitimacy of its matches. But “pseudorealism” seems to emphasize the formal features of the matches and televised programs as aesthetic objects; it does not quite help us understand the way the industry imagines its fans’ strategies of engagement per se. For example, when the WWE announced that it produced sports entertainment, that its performers were characters engaged in “angles” (story lines) and “works” (predetermined matches), the federation betrayed its code of denial, rechristened the century-old entertainment form, and, arguably “stepp[ed] outside the fiction” by “acknowledg[ing] the production process,” as Jenkins puts it. This re-christening forms the core problematic of this chapter, for, while “sports entertainment” has become part of the common lexicon, it is a fairly new term, coined by the WWE.8 A seemingly innocent/neutral moniker, the term belies major shifts in the industry regarding the way the industry describes its product. “Sports entertainment” indicates the continuity and complexity of the way the industry conceives of its fans’ pleasures and practices. Under the reign of Vince McMahon, Jr., the WWE sanctioned sharing its insider language of scripts, characters, and story lines with its audience. By calling his shows “sports entertainment” McMahon invited all of his patrons to watch the game as expert critics of the spectacle and its orchestration. The WWE’s performers let their audiences in on the industry’s supposed secrets. Experts agree that what the McMahons did to raise pro wrestling to the next level was take an unapologetic, amped-up view of their product that discounted as irrelevant the legitimacy of the competitions itself [sic] . . . There was still debate back then [circa 1982] over whether what the athletes were doing was real or – for lack of a better term – fake. (Richmond 2004: S6) Senior executives within the WWE corporation claim that the McMahons “pioneered the idea that the value of the event as entertainment wasn’t

154 Marion Wrenn dependent on outcome” (Richmond 2004: S6). The value was in the performers’ physical prowess and the spectacular nature of the matches – pro wrestling was more Cirque de Soleil than squared circle. According to Basil De Vito, WWE Senior TV advisor, the McMahons “reasoned that these were athletes who could do spectacular things. It was great choreographed entertainment, not fake – a terminology that I rankle at” (quoted in Richmond 2004: S12). Kevin Dunn, Senior Vice President of TV Production, echoes this sensibility, adding that the WWE “admitted to what we are because we’re proud of who we are. We’re no different than any other dramatic series on television. When we do our product right, it’s just like doing a movie. No one sits there charging that the movie is fake” (quoted in Richmond 2004: S12). On one level, this gesture toward transparency coincides with the so-called postmodern zeitgeist: instead of disavowing wrestling’s staged aspects, it allowed performers to engage fans and audiences with an explicit, winking, ironic quality. Stripped to its most basic definition, irony refers to the thing that is said and not said at once; what is intended and what is actually said are in tension always. Since its beginnings pro wrestling’s performers hailed its audiences thus, declaiming the authenticity of their competitions even as they engaged in excessively dramatic hyperbolic performances of rage, pain, and defeat. But the late twentieth-century break in the industry-wide codes of performance amounts to the WWE’s anti-marketing marketing campaign, as if the industry were saying “we know you know it’s fake, and we know you know we know. We’re in on it together.”

Breaking kayfabe The term “sports entertainment” signaled the “unapologetic, amped-up view” of professional wrestling espoused by the WWE, but it also broke an industry taboo – kayfabe. Much of the jargon of professional wrestling is argot, terminology designed to conceal meaning from an outsider. The need to hide behind argot is so intense that a synthetic language has been created to protect the business and lock out intruders: an intentionally distorted language called Carnie, lifted from the circus or carnival (Kerrick 1980: 144).9 Carnie is a particular kind of carnival slang, one which “results from the rule-governed anamorphosis of standard English words, yielding what is – at least to the uninitiated ear – an unintelligible patois” (Russell and Murray 2004: 401). “Kayfabe” derives from this tradition. According to one of hundreds of online wrestling glossaries, “the word is often said by one in the business to indicate everyone around him should stop talking openly because someone not privy to the inner-workings of the business just entered the room . . . the term was yelled to signal trouble.”10 As a verb “kayfabe” can be used as an imperative; as a noun it describes a code of behavior; as an adjective it describes someone who is aware of the inner workings of the industry. Kayfabe helped mark the backstage and onstage boundaries

Managing doubt 155 of the spectacle of professional wrestling. By calling pro wrestling “sports entertainment,” the WWE broke kayfabe on a mass scale. Though much of the scholarship on professional wrestling locates the entertainment form in the context of theatrical spectacle rather than athletic competition,11 it is interesting to note that the strategy implied by kayfabe finds a predecessor not in Diederot but in the history of legitimate sports: the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British boxing. Members of the British boxing subculture, known as the Fancy, were “flash” – a synonym for the boxing subculture’s language, which was an amalgamation of technical sporting terms, cockney and underworld slang.12 Used as a noun, the word “flash” referred to a specific kind of language designed to conceal meaning from those outside the discourse community; the adjective form – to be flash – meant to be clued in to the inner workings or hidden meanings of the world of boxing. According to Dyer, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury British boxing fans engaged in flash for several reasons: “The Fancy often needed to be discreet: competitive boxing matches, unlike sparring or exhibition, were illegal, and the organizers had to conceal their plans from the magistrates.” Flash also allowed the Fancy to keep their betting secrets and strategies to themselves. Finally, “the Fancy’s dialect was fashioned to hide meanings from outsiders, and even if a man did not need to hide his meaning, by using flash language he spoke as if he did,” thus creating an air of privileged wisdom (Dyer 2001: 6).13 While the legitimacy of competition clearly distinguishes boxing from pro wrestling, their respective cultures of production share an important feature: privileged argots, forming similar discourse communities that distinguish insiders from outsiders.14 Flash allowed members of the subculture to communicate with each other in public places without detection; it was an insiders’ code. Flash referred both to the language itself and to linguistic competence – to be flash meant to be in the know. John Badcock’s 1823 Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton and the Varieties of Life defines “flash” as “the language of persons whose transactions demand concealment, yet require that they should mix with those from whom it should be concealed.”15 This definition of “flash” is nearly synonymous with pro wrestling’s “kayfabe,” where wrestlers were charged with the responsibility of concealing the industry’s operations from its fans. Carnival slang, specifically Carnie, and especially kayfabe, can thus be seen as a kind of flash. But here’s the twist: to be “full flash” means to be totally initiated into the demimonde, fully knowledgeable and literate in the language and references of the discourse belonging to the Fancy, whether you’re a boxer, a bettor or both. On one level, pro wrestling industry argot marks a similar subcultural boundary, delineating insiders from outsiders. Kayfabe originally signaled the difference between spectator and performer, industry and fan.16 But as fans became more aware of and delighted by wrestling’s contrivances, they found pleasure in the sense of insider knowledge afforded

156 Marion Wrenn by the jargon. It indicated a kind of cultural capital. Like the boxing Fancy, the otherwise marginal practices of the wrestling fan (and those of the wrestlers themselves) become a privileged knowledge through the use of the industry’s argot.

Smarts, marks, and smarks The rhetoric of concealment found in the industry’s jargon has received scholarly attention over the years (Kerrick 1980; Schwartz 2003). What has received less attention is the rich and complex way the jargon reveals the industry’s conception of possible spectator positions and pleasures. For instance, pro wrestling has a name for fans who know that wrestling is “fake” yet nonetheless relish the spectacle, fans who are expert in the skills it takes to make wrestling look like real violence. Such spectators are traditionally called “smarts” or “smart fans.” The term refers to those fans who seek insider knowledge despite the industry’s code of denial regarding wrestling’s contrivances, its disavowal of fakery, and its assurances of authenticity. Smart fans are aware of and subvert the industry’s insider/ outsider boundary and seek a position of expertise regarding the content of the matches and the arc of narratives; they want to know how the game itself is played, how the spectacle is constructed. They seek to transgress the backstage/onstage binary established by the industry, to accrue insider information about the industry, and might turn to “dirt sheets” or “dirt rags,” newspapers and magazines offering fans insider information on backstage struggles and intrigues.17 The term “smart fan” is used by industry insiders and fans alike; having internalized the field’s insider/outsider categories, fans call themselves smarts, often with an air of privileged wisdom, or as a defensive posture claiming a prophylactic hipness, a shrugging “yeah, so?” to non-fans who would condemn pro wrestling as merely fake. But to understand the smart fan, as conceived by the pro wrestling industry, its opposite, “the mark,” must also be defined. The industry has long capitalized on the fact that its audience was also made up of marks, naive spectators who trust in the authenticity of the matches and lack the same kind of industry knowledge or competence sought and exchanged by “smarts.” Derived from wrestling’s carnival roots – and still used in today’s carnival circuit – the term “mark” is believed to refer to the practice of putting chalk marks on the chairs or backs of a show’s potential targets. As a contemporary carnival worker puts it, the term “comes from the old times. It’s when the gypsies used to spot marks and peek their pokes at the gate. They’d peek their pokes and see if they’ve got stew, then chalk their backs.”18 When patrons would open their wallets to buy a ticket to enter the carnival, the worker at the gate would glance into the patron’s wallet, get a sense of how much cash the carnival-goer brought, and if the “stew” was “thick” the patron would be “marked.”19

Managing doubt 157 Pro wrestling’s historical emphasis on denying its stage-managed characteristics pulls it away from legitimate sport and aligns it with the carnival milieu. In some respects, the connections between pro wrestling and the carnival circuit appear self-evident. As Schwartz (2003) notes, pro wrestling retains not only Carnie jargon but also carnival presentation. Schwartz, like other scholars, attends to pro wrestling’s sideshow qualities and carnivalbarker hype: massive, steroidal bodies in the ring, freakish feats of physical prowess. But if we focus instead on connections between the carnival circuit and pro wrestling’s strategies for imagining and managing its patrons’ engagement with the spectacle – as evidenced in the industry argot – interesting (and unacknowledged) patterns emerge. Carnival workers who run skill games tend to see all customers as “marks,” someone who can be manipulated, someone with cash. Christine, an ex-carnival game operator (with a face like a Madame Alexander doll atop an imposing 5-foot 11-inch, 200-pound frame) got her start on Coney Island and eventually found herself working the carnival circuits nationwide as an independent contractor.20 Her description of her relationship with her customers at the midway skill games she operated is revealing: You have to control your mark at every single moment. Let ’em win a couple of rounds, think they’re good at it, but never let them over a certain point. So yeah, there are two important rules: First – always control your mark. Control your game, know who’s spending what and play them right. Second – take the money and shut up. Even when you can’t believe how much they’re forking over and you know the odds and how the game works, don’t let your hand shake. Just take it and shut up. You are selling the mark an idea – that’s all you’re selling. It’s all an illusion. You are selling a dream. You know, off-season most Carnie folk sell cars [or] insurance. I did. Her game is rigged. She knows the odds. In the complex dance between the operator and the patron, she leads, and (if she keeps her hands from shaking) her mark might never know it, being so caught up in the pleasures of play and the promise or threat of the outcome. The boundaries are clear: patrons are outsiders. Within contemporary carnival lingo, there is no equivalent to the word or category “smart” as found in pro wrestling. Implicitly, all carnival game operators are smart; anyone with money from which they can be parted is a mark. Within pro wrestling the definition of “mark” is slightly different from that in the contemporary carnival circuit. On one level, the term is used by pro wrestling’s performers, ring announcers, and other commentators to refer to the trusting sensibility of fans who wholeheartedly believe in the legitimacy of the performances. It refers to a blinkered, childlike willingness to believe. Whereas in the carnival circuit the term mark refers primarily to a patron’s economic capital, in pro wrestling the term shifts to refer first

158 Marion Wrenn to a patron’s lack of knowledge, competence, or expertise (cultural capital), and then by extension to his or her capacity to spend money in order to remain engaged in the game (economic capital); or, as the industry puts it, to “keep [their] asses in the seats.” Seen this way, anyone watching pro wrestling, regardless of their awareness of the form’s choreography, is arguably a mark. But unlike the de-differentiating jargon of the carnival circuit, pro wrestling argot traditionally differentiates among its fans. Pro wrestling fans have long been deemed, addressed, hailed, or self-identified as either marks or smarts (and sometimes both). This binary is as simplistic as it is important, echoing and complicating larger configurations and theories of audience reception and behavior found in the fields of cultural and communication studies. The now-discredited mass society theorists tended to reduce all audience members, regardless of their social differences (race, class, gender, education, economic or life experiences, etc.) to “viewers,” or, worse, cultural dupes, pawns of a conspiratorial culture industry. “Massmediologists,” write Bourdieu and Passeron, “[forge] massive, obscure concepts that annihilate difference” (Neveu 2005: 199). They critique early theories of mass culture which describe passive consumers under the sway of mass-produced entertainment forms.21 Such theories tend to misrecognize a social agent’s possible worldview and convictions, particularly those actors within consumer culture who savor mass-produced entertainment forms. If we allow for the possibility of a range of strategies (of understanding and play), the boundary between the dominant and the dominated seems to blur. Later scholars were more sensitive to the diversity of reception strategies, trusting and demonstrating that social agents neither consume nor interpret nor experience cultural objects in precisely the same manner, nor are they categorically dominated by mass-mediated texts. Departing from the transmission model of communication, scholars aligned with what James Carey describes as a “ritual model” of communication, where senders and receivers are engaged in a more active exchange. British cultural studies similarly replaced the idea of imposition with the idea of interaction, focusing less on media effects and more on uses and gratification. David Morley used Hall’s encoding/decoding model to study the decoding and sense-making strategies of British television audiences and helped usher in a large body of research on reception strategies, the result of which includes the generally accepted idea that viewers are engaged in a far more active process of meaning-making and identity construction than previous theories of mass audiences allowed. Triangulating pro wrestling, the carnival circuit, and mass media theory illustrates the rhizomatic appearance of “marks” and “smarts.” The sense-making strategies and pleasures of audiences and consumers during the second half of the twentieth century has received substantial scholarly attention, but relatively little has been written about the encoding

Managing doubt 159 strategies of the culture industry (perhaps because scholars run the risk of reproducing the suspicious contempt for popular culture manifested by some mass society theorists). By focusing on the professional wrestling industry’s internal discourse regarding fan positions, I also run the risk of sketching the industry as malevolent and the fans as cultural dupes.22 But the industry argot itself resists such flattening; the strategies of engagement described therein are far more varied and complex than that. To be clear, the dynamic between performers and audiences suggests a potentially unsubtle narrative of the relationship between producers and consumers: performers set out to dupe audiences, audiences try to detect the fraud. While the discourse of marks and smarts appears to massify audiences by reducing the range of reception strategies to a limited binary, it nonetheless admits a range of possible strategies that indicate a more nuanced relationship between producers, texts, and consumers. Pro wrestling industry discourse suggests an understanding of audiences that has been circulating in the culture of production of pro wrestling since its advent: a century-old discourse of fan positions, one which accounts for the boundary play and dialogic nature of the relationship between producer and consumer. Pro wrestling industry jargon offers a typology of spectator positions which amounts to a vernacular theory of the way its patrons understand, negotiate, and take pleasure in this entertainment form. While the academy feared and theorized “cultural dupes,” the industry addressed “smarts.” Thus the “world of wrestling,” famously assessed by Barthes (1957), is possessed of a loaded jargon: the discourse of kayfabe, sports entertainment, marks and smarts creates a world in which being a competent insider is the ideal, where knowledge of the techniques of the spectacle is a kind of privileged wisdom. The way the industry conceives of its fans’ pleasures and strategies of engagement echoes the pleasures and anxieties associated with belief and doubt. In the mark position, one is engaged in sincere belief; such fans suspend their disbelief or doubt (or perhaps, in the instance of small children, approach the spectacle sans doubt or disbelief entirely). In the smart position, fans suspend belief or credulity and remain in a skeptical frame of mind as they detect the techniques used to create the illusion of authentic fighting. But things are more complex than these distinct categories of belief and doubt imply. For instance, there is a kind of belief circulating among smart fans, a belief in the game as worth playing, despite their knowledge of its contrivance, or, more accurately, because of their knowledge of its techniques. The smart fan engages in modes of belief and doubt simultaneously, a dual process characterized by different degrees of certainty and uncertainty, which reinforces the fan’s position as competent or knowledgeable spectator deeply invested in the game. The relationship between belief and doubt within the pro wrestling industry provides an illustrative example of the illusio activated by consumer culture. Put another way, “The game makes up the illusio, the investment in the game by the informed player, who

160 Marion Wrenn possessing a sense of the game because made by the game, plays the game, and thereby makes it exist” (Bourdieu 1992: 290). For Bourdieu, the investment in the game is the illusio, and the relationship between the player and the game is mutually constitutive. Even as the player is created by the game on one hand, the player’s faith in the game as worth playing helps make the game, and is thus also a kind of world-making. As cultural producers, professional wrestlers and promoters are of course sensitive to their fans’ pleasures. As a result, the industry’s fan taxonomy has evolved over time. For example, the industry sensed its fans’ capacity – and desire – to toggle between the status of smart fan and mark. At the end of the twentieth century, the industry coined a new term for such spectators: “smarks.” Fusing smart and mark, the term refers to the way spectators, even those armed with insider knowledge about the logic and practice of sports entertainment, delight in the spectacle of choreographed athletics and the soap opera narratives deployed by the form. Smark – a term coined by performers – names the contradiction of being a smart fan who nonetheless relishes the game and the potential to be duped, someone awed by and engaged in viewing professional wrestling despite their knowledge of its construction.23 The term has recently appeared on numerous wrestling sites, and has been ascribed to industry professionals who use it to describe all wrestling fans, capturing their fans’ sense of being at once confidently in the know and blissfully believing. Even though the wrestlers will now admit to engaging in sports entertainment, and know that most fans are aware of the form’s choreography, the implicit message is: “you might be smart, but we’re still gonna trick you.” This call meets with the implicit fan response, “Yes, we’re smart, but we still like to be tricked.” Today’s smart fans describe a desire to “mark out,” to give themselves over to the pleasures of being engaged and immersed in a choreographed match. “Marking out” is part of pro wrestling fan habitus; it is a conscious (and unconscious) strategy of engagement, activated by matches, performers, and performances that make audiences “pop.” Wrestlers and fans refer to extreme audience reactions as “pops.” Crowds tend to “oooooo” or “aaaaaahhhh” when a wrestler either (1) does something clearly in character; (2) does something surprisingly out of character; (3) executes moves so well as to convey the potential of violence; or (4) executes moves in such a way as to actually appear violent, out of the wrestler’s control. It is in that confused moment of belief and disbelief – of knowledge and doubt at once – where audiences find themselves deeply engaged, struggling to decipher the “shoot” from the “work.” Not surprisingly, such moments tend to be excessively violent. The fascination with pro-wrestling violence seems to emerge from an industrially sanctioned voyeuristic gaze (as if the industry enticed viewers by saying prowrestling is choreographed so it’s OK to watch, no one will get hurt); this fascination is stoked by the ways in which “hard-core” matches challenge the permissibility of active looking (and yelling and shouting): pro wrestling

Managing doubt 161 is fake, but that’s blood, a metal chair, thumbtacks in this wrestler’s arm flesh, a tooth up his nose.24 What happens to smart fans in moments like these? The formal techniques of pseudorealism foster their belief (and doubt) in the spectacle, but the bodies in the ring are covered in very real blood. In these moments when the boundary between what is staged and what is real is so intensely blurred, the status of smart fan is threatened, rendered paradoxical, and maintained – smart fans remain engaged in the game. The industry’s mixed messages frame the spectacle of choreographed entertainment in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity, certainty and uncertainty, belief and doubt. Knowledge of the production process does not defuse the pleasurable anxieties of doubt and belief. The smart fan gets caught up in uncertainty – and finds pleasure there. Uncertainty born of insider competence supports fans’ ability to give themselves over to the game itself. What is being played out in moments of “pop” is the enmeshed relationship between competence and faith, uncertainty and illusio; the chiastic link between faith and doubt results in a kind of engaged uncertainty, the bliss of being smart and marking out. These are the modes of pleasure Barthes describes when he distinguishes between the enjoyment of plaisir (the pleasure of an enjoyed right, of coming together, of being “smart”) and the bliss of jouissance (the pleasure in the threat of things coming apart) (1977).25 For the wrestling fan, these pleasures hinge on an engagement with the spectacle and the degree to which the fan can give him- or herself over to the game. Referring back to Jenkins (2005) above, this capacity relies on the pseudorealism of professional wrestling. Bourdieu distinguishes between the “belief effect” of well-crafted literary fiction and the “reality effect” – the realism with which writers re-create the worlds they imagine. In literature, the reality effect helps foster the belief effect. Put another way, the belief effect “rests on the accord between the presuppositions (or, more precisely, the schema of construction) that the narrator and the reader . . . engage in the production and reception of the work. Because they are held in common, they serve to reconstruct the world of common sense” (1992: 334). To borrow and extend Jenkins’s description of pseudorealism, I would argue that in professional wrestling the belief effect pivots on a pseudoreality effect. On one hand, authentic violence provokes the smart fan to “mark out” and enjoy the rules of the game by trusting that things are, ultimately, choreographed, and no one is really getting hurt. On the other hand, the more violent-seeming the spectacle is, the more easily the smart fan can “mark out” and feel pleasurably confused (is someone getting hurt?). The smart fan is caught in the midst of the bliss between competence and doubt. This dialectic of authenticity and choreography renders the smart position both unstable and enduring. The promise of being an insider is transformed into a permanent process of becoming an insider – always on the edge, the verge, simultaneously erasing and reinforcing the border between insider and outsider, smart and mark.

162 Marion Wrenn The smart fan’s experience of certainty and uncertainty has a direct impact on the wrestlers themselves. If the pleasures of watching pro wrestling can be understood as the permanent process of becoming an insider, then we might also consider the actual practice of becoming a pro wrestler as illustrative of this process. For example, Sharon Mazer’s (1998) study of pro wrestling practitioners and hopefuls in a training gym in Queens, NY, illustrates a paradox within the industry: to become a pro wrestler is to become an expert and yet remain always in the realm of uncertainty. 26 Narratives of confused producers abound, from Mazer’s study to Paul Jay’s documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1999).27 Further evidence of misrecognition and boundary confusion can be found in the industry’s tendency to charge specific wrestlers (“hookers” or “shooters”) with policing other wrestlers who would thwart the predetermined outcomes of matches, as well as in pro wrestling jargon that describes those wrestlers who lose sight of the industry’s bottom line. To clarify, audiences are not the only “marks” in the industry. Performers themselves can be marks, especially when they are over-invested in the status of the character(s) they play. As one online wrestling glossary puts it, a mark is 2. A fan of or participant in the wrestling industry who believes in whole or in part that any aspect of the wrestling industry is more important than making money (i.e. a wrestler could be referred to as a mark by a promoter or other wrestlers for being preoccupied with fan-perception – such as holding a title belt – [instead of] being concerned with being paid what he’s worth).28 (italics mine) Fans might be believing spectators under the sway of the spectacle, but so too might performers. When fans or performers comment that “Jerry Lawler’s a mark for Hogan” or “Bret was a mark for Vince” the word mark is used to signify positions in the field; the phrase indicates a wrestler is pretending to be a gullible patsy or, on the other hand, is in fact being legitimately deceived. Once the WWE broke kayfabe, wrestlers could be marks within the story arcs crafted by the industry as well as inadvertently find themselves in the mark position behind the scenes (where career tensions emerge between wrestlers and promoters or among wrestlers themselves). Recent popular pro wrestling biographies and autobiographies not only make fans privy to backstage and insider information; they also contain consistent tales of the wrestlers themselves being tricked. Part of the initiation into the culture of production in professional wrestling is a sustained time period during which initiates are led to believe that their work is not to throw and take “fake” punches but rather to sustain very real physical abuse. Hogan (2003) tells of broken leg bones, pulling his car to the side of the road to throw up from the anxiety he suffered in anticipation of grueling matches with Andre the Giant, and being “hurt,” “confused,” and “betrayed” when

Managing doubt 163 finally told that instead of legitimately hurting competitors and being hurt in return he was merely “working with the guy, dancing with him” (43). Professional wrestlers work inside a culture of production that renders being “smart” a rite of initiation, an unstable state of being, and a site of some anxiety. By revealing the process of becoming a skillful performer, such autobiographical narratives re-mystify the de-mystified spectacle of “sports entertainment.” Granted, these tales appear in WWE-produced books (and thus serve to stoke the larger mystique of the industry); still, they reveal fascinating modalities of confusion and uncertainty within the field. What is important to note about such autobiographies is the way the move from “mark” to “smart” is built into the popular narrative of a wrestler’s career. The WWE recently capitalized on this re-mystification through de-mystification in the WWE/MTV reality series Tough Enough. An extreme example of “breaking kayfabe,” the show was built around a handful of wrestling hopefuls who competed for a spot in the WWE through a rigorous training process, which included learning the business of pro wrestling, its physical requirements, and its argot. In many of the episodes, they learned to take and deliver “bumps.” Like most athletes, wrestlers in training must learn to suffer and persevere under great physical stress. But theirs is a peculiar training process. While promising WWE hopefuls are sent to WWE-sponsored camps and circuits (the equivalent of the minor leagues), those just starting out attend special gyms and training schools.29 Successful retired wrestlers often found such schools and programs. The Canadian Stu Hart, for example, an Olympic wrestler turned professional, trained numerous pro wrestlers and specialized in “shoot holds.”30 As mentioned earlier, “shoot holds” and the “shoot wrestlers” who deploy them are often used by the industry to ensure that wrestlers play by the rules of the predetermined match. “Shooters” are there to thwart an upstart from trying to “win” a match he has been scheduled to lose. Clarifying the jargon, Kerrick writes, “An extremely tough or aggressive wrestler is a shooter, and a match whose outcome is unknown beforehand is a shoot . . . [I]n a shoot the toughest or luckiest wrestler will win the match. It is not part of the program. It is a gunfight in the streets, so to speak” (1980: 144). Thus the distinction between a “shoot” – (where “you’re really trying to hurt somebody”) and a “work” (a predetermined match) is crucial to the inner workings of the industry (Hogan 2003: 43). Smart fans try to decipher which match, blow, outcome, or narrative arc is a work, which a shoot. As the term “shoot” suggests, the lingering possibility that a “gun fight” might erupt exists. Smart fans know it. And the WWE capitalizes on this knowledge by scripting battles between supposedly warring federations, fictions rendering the authentic tensions of labor inside the professional wrestling industry fodder for the pseudoreality of the spectacle. What is more, use of the oxymoronic term “work shoot” by performers and audiences alike implies the pervasive blurring and reinforcement of boundaries

164 Marion Wrenn in the industry: a real-life squabble might be fuel for an in-ring or on-screen feud. According to one fan, the term “work shoot acknowledges that it’s fake, but that every now and then there’s stuff that’ll be real, and that’s exciting.”31 In one of the few studies of wrestling jargon Kerrick notes that “all wrestlers are called workers.” Kerrick argues that work “is probably the single most important term in the jargon.” It has multiple meanings and can be used as various parts of speech (and shows the obvious influence of business – rather than athletic competition – on the industry). Importantly, “the term does not connote athletic ability or strength, but instead the ability to perform well, to look good” (1980: 143). Being a good worker, then, means the performer has the ability to sway an audience, to make the audience believe in the performance, to keep the audience engaged. The more authentic the violence seems, the more credible the performance, the more easily smart fans can “mark out.” There seems to be a correlation between the popularity of extreme-style wrestling and the WWE’s “kayfabian” turn – as if the more fans were deemed “smart” the more likely the matches would be excessively violent. Regardless of the era, at the core of professional wrestling labor is the body and its capacity to suffer and perform suffering. The industry’s jargon reveals a history of “working strong.” “Strong style wrestling” refers to those moves and matches that stress realistic action, particularly in aerial maneuvers (especially popular in Japanese professional wrestling). To satisfy their audiences, pro wrestling performers are similarly caught up in creating authentic-seeming violence, a violence that sometimes results in real harm, or “heat.”32 Pro wrestling has a long tradition of wrestlers using razors in matches to self-inflict bloody forehead wounds. Or consider, for instance, the legendary Martin “Farmer” Burns and his famed 18-inch neck. Burns played carnival circuits in the early twentieth century where he would hang himself by a noose and whistle “Yankee Doodle” to enthusiastic crowds.33 Clearly, the jargon of playing strong reveals an aspect of the performer’s labor that obscures the clarity between what is authentic and what is staged. “Playing strong,” and connected industry terminology, emerged as a way to describe performances and performers working on the boundary between the authentic and the staged, performers who use their bodies (and crowd reaction) as an index of that authenticity, of their audience’s pleasures in (dis)believing. Pro wrestling industry jargon is an index – and an archive – of the way a discourse community describes a range of possible positions in the dialogic relationship among cultural producers and consumers.

Conclusion: the operational aesthetic As this study of pro wrestling’s argot shows, audience pleasures hinge on what Bourdieu would call the illusio (1992; 1997), in this case the sustained balance between belief and doubt that allows fans and performers to remain

Managing doubt 165 engaged in the game. The experience of such engaged uncertainty is defined by the simultaneity of this belief and doubt, the sustained process of always already being a smark, a subject toggling between a desire to understand the artifice of the spectacle and the bliss of being confused (clasping a hand to the eyes and peeking out at the match between the fingers). The range of strategies and tactics available to wrestlers (the regulated improvisation of the matches, for example) as well as the range of strategies available to fans (booing, chanting, poster-waving, website-surfing, becoming “smart” and “marking out”): these make up the world of pro wrestling’s habitus. Within this range of strategies, the core belief that the game is worth playing, and the simultaneous suspension of belief – and doubt – required to remain engaged in the game are modes of illusio. Not only does professional wrestling offer an illustrative example of the imbrication of these two concepts; but by tracking habitus and illusio within pro wrestling we can see the historical production of a particular kind of gaze – one which at first appears to be entrenched in a postmodern ironic sensibility, but in fact is part of a longer history of consumer practices within leisure culture stemming from the late nineteenth century. Pro wrestling’s argot once ostensibly marked a clear boundary between industry insiders and outsiders, mystifying the business of the industry to outsiders, describing the kind of work insiders/laborers do and the kinds of reactions they seek. When the WWE dispensed with the practice of maintaining kayfabe and began to share its argot with industry outsiders, it played with that boundary. Though breaking kayfabe occurred in the thick of the postmodern 1980s and 1990s, the concept itself – and thus the implication that some fans might be “smart” and aware of wrestling’s contrivances – dates back to pro wrestling’s carnival roots. Breaking kayfabe in the world of pro wrestling was at once radical and retrograde. The tradition of engaging fans in the pleasures of expertise and uncertainty, the delight in detecting fraud, can be traced to the mid nineteenth century, and particularly to P. T. Barnum. Industry lore holds that Barnum was the first American wrestling promoter. Whether this lore is truth or fiction, the aesthetics of circus promotion and Barnum’s masterful use of hype have had a decided influence on pro wrestling (Kerrick 1980: 144).34 Barnum knew there was money to be made in the confusion enjoined by certain entertainment forms. The historian Neil Harris argues that Barnum saw how his audiences enjoyed being humbugged and would pay to be tricked; he also noticed that they would pay a second time to find out how the hoax was perpetrated upon them.35 Harris describes this desire as an “operational aesthetic” among turn-of-the-century audiences; they delighted in knowing how things operated. Harris’s historical analysis of Barnum’s humbugging suggests that nineteenth-century Americans took “delight in learning,” which “explains why the experience of deceit was enjoyable after the hoax had been penetrated, or at least during the period of doubt and suspicion.” Barnum understood that the opportunity to debate

166 Marion Wrenn the issue of falsity, to discover how deception had been practiced, was even more exciting than the discovery of the fraud itself. The manipulation of a prank, after all, was as interesting a technique in its own right as the presentation of genuine curiosities (77). While the operational aesthetic demystified the humbug, it did not empty the humbug of potential pleasure. Knowledge of the production process brought competence and delight – or, rather, delight in competence. Further, the operational aesthetic’s pleasurable strategies of demystification allowed nineteenth-century spectators to engage in self-transformation, in this case from outsider to insider, from “sucker” to expert.36 The delight in being tricked and the pleasures of understanding how the trick worked on them – arguably a move from dupe to insider/expert – suggests a decidedly modern sensibility among nineteenth-century audiences. Like Barnum’s circus promotions and museums, McMahon’s WWE has always, in one way or another, invited suspicion: prior to the shift the industry denied their machinations (keeping kayfabe), and thus invited suspicion; after the shift, they admit their strategies, break kayfabe, and thus make us all expert critics, faithful skeptics, skeptical believers. Whereas the term “pseudorealism” (which Jenkins deftly uses to describe pro wrestling’s formal features) stops short of naming strategies of audience engagement per se, the “operational aesthetic” suggests the tactics of a curious, skeptical, active audience. The WWE has tapped into an “operational aesthetic,” and the evidence is in the proliferation of fan websites, online glossaries, blogs, and chatrooms where smart fans debate the veracity of story lines, matches, injuries, etc., all the while using pro wrestling’s argot. By breaking kayfabe, and providing its spectators with access to the industry’s insider language, the WWE has made the operational aesthetic part of its marketing plan. To be sure, the nineteenth century lurks in twenty-first-century sports entertainment. Perhaps we’ve always been “smart.”

Notes 1 See especially Grossberg (1992) on ironic nihilism and Hannigan (1998) on simulated experience and the culture of consumption. 2 To account for the postmodern sensibility he saw emerging in the 1980s, Lawrence Grossberg (1992) coined the term “authentic inauthenticity” to characterize the dominant features of postmodern entertainment forms, particularly within rock music. 3 While the outcomes of matches are predetermined, the choreography of individual matches is only loosely planned. Pro wrestlers rely on their training to improvise the moments between pre-planned finishing moves. 4 The history of boxing and the history of pro wrestling are entwined with grappling. Clearly the choreography and predetermined outcomes of pro wrestling matches oppose the legitimate competition of the “sweet science” of boxing (despite the obvious parallels in terms of the fight venues and bodily labor of boxers and wrestlers. Pro wrestling breaks off as a distinct form in the late nineteenth century.

Managing doubt 167 5 Owing to a court battle with the World Wildlife Foundation, the World Wrestling Federation had to change its name and acronym when it became a publicly traded company in 2001. 6 Such boundary blurring and the disintegration of clear categories seemed indicative of the so-called postmodern milieu, and media critics and the mainstream press read them as such. See, for example, Plagens (1999), which misrecognizes the industrial logics of pro wrestling, imagining an infinite regress of the hyperreal and authentic inauthenticity. 7 As any wrestling fan would know, I could as easily make the case for the turn toward extreme-style wrestling by pointing to the career of Mick Foley. As Cactus Jack or Mankind, Foley had a notoriously high pain threshold. 8 NJ Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed professional wrestling’s entertainment status into law. See B. Pulley, “Trenton deregulates wrestling as (gasp!) nonsport,” New York Times, March 17, 1997: B1. See also SportSex (Miller 2001: 45). 9 See also Russell and Murray (2004). 10 Pro WrestlingTorch Yearbooks, ’92–’95; Wade Keller; accessed at . Some hold that the command “be fake” is converted into “kayfabe.” 11 Much like Barthes’s foundational essay, “The World of Wrestling,” wrestling scholarship takes pro wrestling’s placement in the dramatic arts as a launching point, situating pro wrestling as spectacle or ritual drama (Barthes 1957, Workman 1977), melodrama (Jenkins 2005, Levi 1999), “media-constructed ritual” (Migliore 1993), “cultural con” (Sehmby 2002) and, of course, “sports entertainment” (Feigenbaum 2000). 12 See Dyer (2001: 4) for a reference to John Ford’s history of Regency pugilism, from which Dyer gets this definition of flash. 13 As Dyer’s insightful reading of Byron’s Don Juan shows, flash was a language of discursive communities devoted to crime, to sports, and also to sodomy. 14 To consider pro wrestling a derivative of theatrical spectacle and differentiate it from legitimate boxing matches, as most scholars do, is to miss the linguistic link between the two forms of spectacle. The strategies of flash – its logics of concealment and pleasures of insider expertise – can be found in pro wrestling. But the dialogical relationship between performers and spectators found in professional wrestling (where fans actively engage in deciphering the performers’ motives and practices) contradicts the clear insider/outsider boundary of the nineteenth-century boxing Fancy. The boundary marked by the argot of the Fancy subculture contained cultural producers and consumers; “kayfabe” marks a boundary within the wrestling subculture between its producers and consumers. 15 Babcock, aka Bee, page 79, quoted in Dyer (2001: 8). 16 While there is no explicit criminal behavior within pro wrestling, the industry is engaged in a kind of “cultural con” (Sehmby 2002). Sehmby argues that professional wrestling “reappropriate(s) its own status through seeing entertainment as a form of deception”; the form “raises a historically simple con into a powerful form of popular art, where being fake yet still appearing realistic is the ultimate goal” (8). The spectator is aware of the con, delighting in detecting the way it is deployed. 17 Notably the term “smart fan” also came to refer to those fans who accessed information about wrestling through new communication technologies like the Web in the 1990s. Fans found not only fan-run sites but websites run by industry giants like the WWE itself. 18 Christine, personal interview. December 15, 2003. 19 To be sure, a mark is not necessarily a sucker. Further, perhaps “peeking pokes” finds its modern counterpart in demographic research in the televisual age.

168 Marion Wrenn 20 Christine had worked as a cocktail waitress in a gaming hall, watching the “guys on the games” make far more money than she, and decided to add to her income by taking the opportunity to make 10 percent off any patron who played because of her powers of persuasion. To “duke in a mark” means to convince a potential customer to play, and Christine was good at it. She found she “had the snap” (meaning she has a knack for getting customers to play her games and keep playing, spending maximum cash). 21 Contributing to this image of a dominated, passive audience, Adorno and Horkheimer theorized a vulnerable viewer when they argued that filmgoing audiences in the first part of the century were reduced to uncritical distraction, complicit in their own exploitation under capitalism, as a result of the massproduced industrial art of the Hollywood studio system and similarly reduced to passive listening due to “pre-digested,” standardized songs within popular music. Such pessimism was peculiarly European. U.S. scholars were much more skeptical of the idea of all-powerful media. See, for example, Gitlin 1978. Being aware of this debate, I hope to avoid setting up mass media theorists as rhetorical straw men. 22 See Harold Garfinkel (1967). 23 There’s an apocryphal story about a WWE wrestler (Brian Pillman) showing up at an EWC match and shouting at the audience something along the lines of “You Smarts think you know everything! You don’t know nuthin’! You’re nuthin’ but marks! You’re just smarks!” 24 This is a reference to an infamous cage match between Mick Foley and the Undertaker. See the film Beyond the Mat (Barry W. Blaustein, dir., 2000). 25 Barthes’s Image-Music-Text (1977) is arguably as important a means to understand pro wrestling as his oft-cited explicit analysis in “The World of Wrestling” (1957). 26 See specifically Mazer’s (1998) account of a wrestler at Gleason’s gym who admits to not being sure when he’s “working” or when he is “shooting.” 27 The film chronicles Hart’s infamous confrontation with Vince McMahon where McMahon assured the departing superstar that he would win his final title match; instead, McMahon changed his mind at the last minute. Hart was deceived, and reacted on camera by spitting on the ringside McMahon. Offstage, the two came to blows. In the days following, a black-eyed McMahon appeared on several wrestling shows to declare that “the only person Bret Hart screwed was Bret Hart.” 28 See . 29 See Mazer 1998 for reference to Gleason’s gym in Queens; see also South Jersey’s School of Pain. 30 An interesting side note: Stu Hart had 12 sons and daughters, all of whom either married or became pro wrestlers. 31 Interview with Harry Bryson, January 2001. 32 “Heat” is a term regularly used in promotional ads for wrestling programs: “Nitro: We’ve Got Heat.” 33 The act’s status as a work or a shoot is open to debate. Nonetheless, Burns is the forerunner of performers such as wrestler Mick Foley (aka Captain Jack, aka Mankind), famous for matches where he has lost teeth, parts of his ears, etc. 34 The popular press has similarly likened Vince McMahon, Jr. to Barnum, and this superficial comparison is actually quite productive for the purposes of this chapter. See People Magazine, Newsweek, Fortune, and the New York Times circa 1999. 35 Barnum “never analyzed in detail the reasons for his success and the popularity of his vast practical jokes, but he understood in practice how they worked. He

Managing doubt 169 determined, then, to give as many details as possible of his operations” (Harris 1973: 88). 36 While it is commonly attributed to Barnum, there is no evidence that he used the phrase “A sucker is born every minute.”

Works cited Badcock, J. 1823. Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton and the Varieties of Life. London: Printed for T. Hughes. Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, R. 1957. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers (2001). New York: Hill and Wang. ——. 1975. The Pleasures of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. ——. 1977. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Beyond the Mat. 2000. Film. Barry W. Blaustein, Director/Producer. Universal Pictures. Bourdieu, P. 1992. The Rules of Art. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 1997. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. DeGaris, L. 2005. “The Logic of Professional Wrestling.” Pp. 192–212 in Steel Chair to the Head, ed. N. Sammond. London: Duke University Press. Dyer, G. 2001. “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan,” PMLA 116 (3) (May): 562–578. Feigenbaum, A. 2000. “Professional Wrestling, Sports Entertainment, and the Liminal Experience of American Culture.” PhD Dissertation. University of Florida, Gainesville. Freedman, J. 1983. “Will the Sheik Use His Blinding Fireball? The Ideology of Professional Wrestling.” Pp. 67–69 in The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. F. E. Manning. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press. Gamson, J. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Gitlin, T. 1978. “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm,” Theory and Society 6: 205–253. Grossberg, L. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge. Gutowski, J. A. 1972. “The Art of Professional Wrestling: Folk Expression in Mass Culture,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 17 (2): 41–50. Hannigan, J. 1998. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. New York: Routledge. Harris, N. 1973. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. New York: Little, Brown. Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows. 1999. Film. Paul Jay, Director. National Film Board of Canada. Hogan, H. H. (with Michael Jan Friedman). 2003. Hollywood Hulk Hogan. New York: Pocket Books. Jenkins, H. III. 2005. “‘Never Trust a Snake’: WWF Wrestling as Masculine

170 Marion Wrenn Melodrama.” Reprint. Pp. 33–65 in Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, ed. N. Sammond. London: Duke University Press. Keller, W. Pro Wrestling Torch Yearbooks, ’92–’95. Online. Available (accessed 26 March 2005). Kerrick, G. E. 1980. “The Jargon of Professional Wrestling,” American Speech 55: 142–145. Levi, H. 1999. “On Mexican Pro Wrestling: Sport as Melodrama.” Pp. 173–190 in SportCult, ed. R. Martin and T. Miller. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lubken, D. 2005. “Reconsidering the Straw Man.” Conference paper delivered at the National Communications Association Conference, Boston. Unpublished. Mazer, S. 1998. Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Migliore, S. 1993. “Professional Wrestling: Moral Commentary through Ritual Metaphor,” Journal of Ritual Studies 7: 65–84. Miller, T. 2001. SportSex. Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. Morton, G. W. and G. M. O’Brien. 1985. Wrestling to Rasslin’: Ancient Sport to American Spectacle. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Neveu, E. 2005. “Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School, and Cultural Studies: On Some Misunderstandings.” Pp. 195–213 in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, ed. R. Benson and E. Neveu. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Plagens, P. 1999. “Pinning Reality to the Mat,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 46 (Sept. 24): B9–10. Pulley, B. 1997. “Trenton Deregulates Wrestling As (Gasp!) Nonsport,” New York Times, March 17: B1. Richmond, R. 2004. “Titans of TV” Hollywood Reporter 382, 9–15 March: S6, S12. Rickard, J. 1999. “The Spectacle of Excess: The Emergence of Modern Professional Wrestling in the US,” Journal of Popular Culture 33 (1): 128–129. Russell, C., and T. Murray. 2004. “The Life and Death of Carnie,” American Speech 79 (4): 400–416. Sammond, N. 2005. Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. Durham: Duke University Press. Schwartz, D. 2003. “Carnival Entertainment: The Carnival Origins of Professional Wrestling and Casino Gambling,” Popular Culture Review 14 (2): 5–14. Sehmby, D. S. 2002. “Wrestling and Popular Culture,” CCLWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.1. Online. Available (accessed 28 February 2006). Webley, I. 1986. “Professional Wrestling: The World of Roland Barthes Revisited,” Semiotica 58: 59–81. Workman, M. E. 1977. “Dramaturgical Aspects of Professional Wrestling,” Folklore Forum 10: 14–20.

8

Beauty at the gallery Sentimental education and operatic community in contemporary Buenos Aires1 Claudio E. Benzecry Il buon dramma per musica é quello che non ha buon senso – Vincenzo Bellini It ain’t over till the fat lady sings – Popular saying

At the end of the first half of the twentieth century an axiom began to travel through musical and intellectual circles around the world: the opera is in crisis. The cries ranged from the extreme – such as the contemporary composer and conductor Pierre Boulez’s remark, “We must blow up all opera houses!” – to more moderate positions. The cause resided in two processes. On the one hand, the dramma per musica had lost its ability to function as a place for elites to meet and display themselves. On the other hand, there emerged at this time a pre-eminence of operatic reproduction – CDs, videos, television, movies, even theatrical performances – over production. These factors, plus the tendencies of contemporary music towards structural autonomy – as described by the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno in Quasi una fantasia and Philosophy of Modern Music – along with the growing and omnipresent competition by the cultural industry, which can offer multimedia heirs apparent to the “total work of art,”2 are still among us and leave us trapped within a peculiar effect. Let’s imagine that the film industry stops producing new films, that our screens no longer feature sugary romance fables from Isabelline times, pretentious epic dramas about the life of the average U.S. soldier or ironic police movies in which the main character exchanges gratuitous acts of violence with his co-stars. Let’s imagine that this week we don’t have four or five releases with a different cast and director, but only the scene-by-scene remakes of movies made not five but thirty or forty years ago, or even from the beginning of film. Nowadays, opera is in this situation. The repertory has stopped its growth; it has become an unfashionable art. Those causes and these consequences should have put an end to a medium that highlighted a

172 Claudio E. Benzecry taste for novelty until the first decades of the twentieth century and that participated and pursued an agenda of formal reformation. Eppur si muove. Despite the death certificate neatly signed by critics, intellectuals, and vanguards, audiences keep filling “paradises,” galleries and standing rooms only; they keep ecstatically contemplating the white deaths that afflict Violetta and Mimi; listen with naivety and horror to Iago’s Credo; accept fat old women dressed as fragile and helpless creatures. We all know that filmmaking has adopted some of the innovations presented by narratives and formats as diverse as those catered by verismo or by the Wagnerian tetralogy. As Adorno has said, opera is movies before movies (1992: 20). Film has established itself as an art and entertainment form while using the cinematic and naturalistic formulas of operatic realism, its taste for everyday drama, to dignify the quotidian life, its sugar-coated passions, and its contained excesses. It has understood the corporeal and institutional mechanisms that guaranteed the silent, non-participant3 enjoyment of the audience, the disposition in divided seats, the naturalism of the actors, the disappearance of the music source from the eyes of the spectator. We also know that cinematographic realism has conspired against the traditional modes in which opera has been represented, mining the suspension of belief that was the foundation of audience expectations, making the presence of fat sopranos or “artificial” styles of acting unacceptable. I am aware of the criticism that accuses opera of the same ills and wrongs that affect the modern cultural industry (Adorno, 1985, 1994): fetishism – not only of the production relationship but of the voice and other operatic procedures – and reification, not just of the performer but of the elements and conditions of production that cause a good performance. In this discussion lies the principal point of this inquiry: How does an audience receive, represent and experience opera years and years after its historical primacy, when it has lost both its popular and distinguishing character at the same time? How does beauty compel them to participate in this social game? And related to this: How does the audience constitute itself as a community and what role does beauty play in cementing this community?

Entering the opera house through the backstage door One of the funniest paradoxes of Buenos Aires’s opera house is that its public face in the cultural imaginary is not the main entrance but the secondary one for artists and in-house workers. The Colón’s main entrance is in front of a small square near the Court House, several elite schools, and what used to be the Stock Exchange. Yet, despite its close association to the symbols of power, the best known entrance is the one at its backside. In the 1950s the small street that led to the backstage door was torn down and merged with four other streets in the construction of that which with modernizing frenzy was called the widest avenue in the world. So maybe a good way to

Beauty at the gallery 173

Figure 8.1 The Teatro Colón as seen from its back entrance. Photo by the author

enter the house and think through some of its more common representations and practices is by the backstage door and the side entrances where those who make the house from below (as workers) and the audience enter the theatre. Being a musician’s son, one of my first memories of the art is not related to public acclaim, the generous applause of the audience, or a breathtaking performance. One of my first memories is hanging around the little kitchen backstage at the Colón Opera House, listening to a tango on the radio while looking at the pictures of all the famous (then unknown to me) singers of the world. My idea of fun at the time was not related to seeing my father conduct the Ballet or the Philharmonic Orchestra, watching the dancers flying around the stage, or admiring the quality of the soloist or the musicians. My idea of fun at the opera house consisted basically in greeting the performers, resting in my father’s dressing room or talking to Luis, the kitchen guy. However, for most of the other members of the audience the musical world was filled with magic and authority. It was difficult for me to understand why people I had known for years still referred to my father as “Maestro,” why many people approached him or my mother after a performance to talk about how mature his interpretation of Brahms was or to remind the soloist that they saw his or her debut as concertmaster of the National Youth Orchestra. I was used to clapping after performances,

174 Claudio E. Benzecry because I knew when I had to, but it was difficult if not impossible to understand why people went crazy at the end of an aria, a soloist’s concerto finale or an acrobatic solo by a ballet dancer. I had met most of the soloists and musicians and always remembered them better for their soccer anecdotes than their public performance. Those who approached the musicians to praise their performance as high culture rarely dressed the part. While their comments made them appear to be high cultural mandarins, their frayed jackets and worn shoes gave me a different impression. That’s why years later I was surprised when I started reading about the relationship between status, class, and cultural consumption. I never understood the charged words that hung around concepts like status, social hierarchy, or cultural capital. Moreover, the disjuncture between my understanding of the performers as regular everyday people and the devotion and charisma the audiences invested in them usually contradicted most of the dictums of the theories of high culture consumption as high modernist appreciation of the art but also the theories of cultural hierarchy. However, this representation is a powerful legacy from the early history of the theatre when most of its audience was constituted by either the in-town relatives of the wealthy landowner families or the nascent urban bourgeoisie. This self-representation has made the Opera House the house of the few and select; in focusing on these groups, the rest of the population of the theatre has slipped into oblivion, even in the texts where its existence is acknowledged. This classic text from the late 1970s by the Argentinean writer Manuel Mujica Lainez shows us this representation at work: We say to Colón – María Zuñiga added, with the definitive emphasis of somebody who ends a debate . . . and this time she highlighted we. The teenager went mute. We – he thought – we, would mean the Gonzalvez and the Zuñigas? And there must be others. Those who don’t say “to the Colón” (as it should be) but “to Colón” (as we are told to say it) – do we say it like this in order to distinguish ourselves? Is it a code? Do we talk in code? And Salvador promised from that moment on to keep an eye on who said “to Colón”: this would help him classify them. In the meantime he was ashamed of not having been initiated in this particularity of his own clan, of his own people, of us. He gazed around and wondered if the surrounding people would be included within we. (Mujica Lainez 1979: 65)4 More important, this representation – a wise way for us to ask who are “the others” to this “we” – goes together with the idea of this group enjoying a monopoly of the understanding of the operatic experience, in a way that involves not only the right way to appreciate the staged works, the inherent meaning of beauty, but a way to move in and out of the house that makes

Beauty at the gallery 175 them special enough to secure a privileged place in the status tournament (Appadurai 1987) and a deserved dominant place in sociodicy.5 The idea of the Colón as the place of residence of this wide definition of beauty attached to social status and the home of the universal, eternal, and superior power of nineteenth-century European culture is inscribed in several accounts of its history. Pollini (2002) writes: “The Colón has been, is and will be the place of beauty, of the ephemeral eternal, of the sublime, of the unrepeatable.”6 Yet this idea is not only inscribed in books but embodied in the words of those who attend and work at the opera house, whether they enter the front or the backstage door. One of the volunteer librarians of the Opera House discussed with me the current status of literacy among the young people who attended the opera library looking for information: “This is monstrous, really a land of barbarians. And it will get worse. Not their fault, the fault resides in the teachers. They don’t know how to distinguish a ballet from an opera. And they send them over here, as if we are going to give them the answers! You have to know something to get the answers. And they don’t know anything about the House.” Another time, while lunching in front of the second most important opera house in La Plata, a couple of old middle-class operagoers gave me a similar definition while discussing why it wasn’t smart to send school boys and girls to see the latest contemporary opera performance: Can you believe taking people to see that instead of an opera?! Why not take them to see Traviata? So they can see something beautiful. Which memories will the kid bring home? Do you know Traviata? Do you know the beginning of the first act when they start with the toast . . . that’s beautiful, isn’t it? A boy, a girl, sees that and takes a memory with him. The problem is that many people don’t know the Colón. They don’t know what is underneath it, what it is good for. High school kids think it’s a monument, like the Obelisk. It’s not the same to listen as to see and listen. But people don’t know about this and refuse to come. Out of ignorance, because I’m sure that if we took somebody with us tonight to watch this (La Bohème) they won’t ever want to leave. This is like that. It either gets you or it doesn’t. As we can infer from these testimonies, one of the most interesting aspects of the distinction between the “others” and the “we” is that many of these others try to think of themselves as included in the more exclusive group of the opera house. In this operation, however, the community of privilege gets translated into a privilege-deserving, yet privilege-deprived community of culture appreciation. In that sense my interest is to show that access to a high cultural good – as opera is usually defined in most sociological surveys – is perceived as a gained social right and that high-culture consumption works as a means for middle-class ascription associated with the moralizing character of the

176 Claudio E. Benzecry beauty consumed in the opera house and the codes of interpretation and behavior it produces. To demonstrate this, the first empirical question I will try to answer is: How is the opera audience constructed as a social world? I used the tools of descriptive ethnography to “map” the ways in which people exhibit or display their appreciation of and participation in the life of the opera audience. In doing so I looked at how they define and evaluate the opera at play, and what they distinguish as important, worthy of attention. I eavesdropped on intermission conversations and had conversations at intermission with opera regulars as a device for apprehending these issues. I was also interested (especially after taking a closer look at the disciplinary characteristics of the upper floors of the House) in bodily behaviors: Do people stay in the same part of the theatre? Do they speak during the music? Are they a “respectable audience” (Sennett 1977) that can restrain its feelings through silence? Do they keep an upright posture or do they keep challenging the space? Do they shout loudly after a well-known aria? Do the audiences at the minor opera houses7 behave in the same way? Is there a spatial division of behavior at the minor opera houses between galleries and balcony? Many authors (Johnson 1995, Ahlquist 1997, Levine 1988, Gerhard 1998) have demonstrated the historical relationship between the development of a silent audience and the disciplinary character of the theatre in the construction of “respectable” conduct among middle-class men and women. What kinds of metaphors and vocabulary do audience members use to analyze the singers? Is it evaluative and reflexive or more immediate? Is it visual, intellectual, or corporeal? Do they have a charismatic and immediate relationship with the singers? What are the more common adjectives used to describe their personality and dexterity? Does it represent a “taste of reflection” or a “taste of the senses” (Bourdieu 1984)? As some authors have argued, the difference between high culture and popular culture lies in the discursive mediation of the first where the critics work as “gatekeepers” at the door of the “art world” (Shrum 1996, Becker 1982). Assuming a negotiation in which what is exchanged for status is the right to a personal opinion, I focused on the role that opera criticism plays in their evaluation. Do operagoers read the newspaper’s reviews? Do they pay attention to the radio commentators or the specialized classes, conferences, and lectures?

Audience as community One approach to examining the moral education opera audiences undergo is to look at those who are either just starting in the opera community or attending the Colón Opera House as part of a new subscription series; then compare them to how the opera house audience mostly behaves on its regular and more traditional nights. In order to understand this process of cultural production and reproduction I will show some of its mechanisms and the contents that are instilled by means of the formal and informal institutions that compose the opera as a social world. First, I will look at the

Beauty at the gallery 177 novices; then at those who attend opera classes, to illuminate the special role gatekeeping has in reproducing ideas of beauty and enjoyment and the community of operagoers itself; finally I will observe and discuss the practices of those in the gallery who have intensively and extensively attended performances at the House. The novices There are some formal institutions through which one is initiated into the world of opera: the smaller opera houses, the specialized free press, the public access radio shows, the music appreciation class and the small recitals. These last two take place at some off-Colón locations or at the smaller, free venues of the Opera House. Most of the people who approach these institutions are at one of two extremes of the operatic moral career: those who are “afraid” (in their own words) to attend the Colón, because they think they wouldn’t know or understand what is happening onstage since they are dispossessed of knowledge and are also concerned by the patina of the opera, not to mention its high prices (a misconception since standing tickets cost about five pesos [two dollars]); and those who are actually opera buffs and as such have a life invested in the participation in this social world (“I try to organize my daily planner around the opera season. As soon as somebody invites me to something I have to figure out when or whether I have to be in La Plata or at the Theatre or at the Avenida. Same thing with vacations. I try to take them during the off-season”). Avid operagoers tend to recognize each other. In fact when I started doing the research I got two comments most of the time: “We are actually always the same. We come here, we take a bus trip to La Plata, to the Avenida, to Avellaneda, to see Juventus, sometimes to a recital. We are ‘opera people.’ ” “I haven’t seen you before. Are you an ‘opera people’ person? We all know each other and I don’t remember you.” They have not only accumulated a stock of operatic knowledge about who among the minor figures of the off-Colón opera market would be perfect for a specific secondary role in Carmen, but have also collected a who’s who list for the audience-side of the opera world. A noticeable trait of these places is their highly pedagogic character, usually structured around the figure of a “maestro” or “professor” who is in charge of “introducing” and “explaining” what you are about to hear. Unlike what is taken for granted at opera houses around the world, at these places audiences are not afraid of behaving like “a public” and chat about the music at the same time that it is happening. People – especially on the top floors of the Avenida which are seldom sold out – also tend to move and circulate in a way not imagined by the highly disciplinarian character of the opera houses.8 Further, they tend to clap at moments when they are not supposed to. Interestingly enough, while they behave as “unruly bodies” compared to the etiquette inscribed in bourgeois opera and in the silent romantic listening disposition (I will shortly return to this category more

178 Claudio E. Benzecry extensively), they reproduce some of the features that belong to that way of understanding opera. Beauty is achieved through harmony and melody. It was significant that during a performance of Bomarzo – an opera from the late 1960s by the Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera that is considered the pinnacle of Latin American high modernism – not only did the new subscribers stay much longer than the more partisan and traditional audience, but they also clapped loudly at two moments: when the venerable singer Ricardo Yost sang the Sorcerer scene and when a kid sang a fifteenth-century madrigal at the beginning and at the end. In fact one of the older audience members told me: “You know why they clapped? They liked the boy ’cause they like melody, harmony, something that they don’t know, but they can understand and maybe, maybe – look what I’m saying! – enjoy.” This coincides with the rest of the appreciation of the opera house. But what are the differences in beauty appreciation between a trained and an unsocialized audience? Beauty is something that you can recognize. Beauty is sheer effort. Beauty is something you know and you consider especially melodic and harmonious. While I know these are not your classic discrete sociological categories, this is what comes out of observing the audience’s practices at the intermediate venues. If the performance is Verdi’s “Celeste Aida” and it is awful, it doesn’t matter, by the end you already know you have to applaud. You also have to clap after the scenes with the toast (“Brindisi”) and Violetta’s solo “Sempre libera” in La Traviata, Tosca’s “Recondita Armonia,” the “Si, mi chiamano Mimi” aria in La Bohème, Nabucco’s “Va pensiero,” and “Una furtiva lagrima,” an aria in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore. These are the basics of an operatic beginning. Afterwards you can add some German repertory, especially the “love duet” from Tristan und Isolde. As one of the works you recognize you are expected to respond to it. Since you still don’t have the subtleties of knowledge to distinguish between a mediocre performance (such as those by most of the off-Colón singers compared to those on the main stage) or a really bad one (as are some of the interpretations in the Buenos Aires opera circuit) you tend to respond with great enthusiasm to that which you can already recognize. This happened in the living room at the house of former singer Adelaida Negri (grandly called “Casa de la Opera”) when one of the singers sang “Celeste,” missed most of the high notes, cracked his voice whenever he tried to put more volume to it and yet couldn’t even get to the end of it because of the applause. Another great example is the more than warm reception given to the last-minute replacement Rodolfo in a performance of La Bohème at La Plata’s Opera House (Argentina’s second in importance) who cracked every high note, was absolutely stiff on stage owing to the lack of rehearsals but when he sang “Che gelida manina” people wouldn’t stop humming to the melody and started clapping before he could stop. A stage director who shared the thirty-mile trip to the opera house with me to watch the performance called it the “Bohème effect”: even though she knew what was going to happen on

Beauty at the gallery 179 stage and that the interpretation was very bad she couldn’t help feeling like crying and she couldn’t restrain herself from humming the melody – both during and afterwards – or from clapping. This situation also serves to exemplify the second category: sheer effort, especially if translated into voice volume, no matter how out of tune, is treated as beautiful and deserving of recognition. This seems to happen not only with opera but also with symphonic music. For instance, consider the free concerts at the Law School Main Hall, which houses the main youth orchestras in the city – a venue and a musical institution at roughly the same structural place in the orchestral music field as those discussed above in the operatic one. The end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or any other spectacularly loud work guaranteed a clapping return for the programming investment as much as a shouting Pagliacci novice singing “Vesti la Giuba” in front of a novice audience. Yet differences can also be observed at the new subscription series at the Colón. For instance, during the several performances of Bomarzo most of the subscribers from the traditional nights9 left after the end of the first act amidst expressions of boredom and complaints: “This is not opera, there is no harmony.” “This style has aged, it’s dated. It doesn’t suit voices. It doesn’t need good voices, even Yost [the old singer mentioned earlier] can sing it!” “I’m leaving. One act was enough. Was too much! One act of this. Bye, see ya later. For Flying Dutchman [the next opera of the season].” Unlike the older subscribers, the new ones are unsure of how they need to react, convinced that “they are there to learn,” are really hesitant to boo or to leave the performance despite not being satisfied. As one of the ushers discussed with me after the fourth night of a contemporary staging by painter Guillermo Kuitca of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, “I knew they were not going to boo him tonight. It’s the new audience. The one from Tuesday is more traditional. They shouted at him! Today nothing is happening.” This is very different from Ricardo’s (one of the old operagoers) reaction on a previous night when after seeing the painter on stage he started shouting: “What a thief! And I’m sure he’s not only bowing but getting a load of money. You have to have some nerve! This is shameful . . .” When I asked a new subscriber later that night if she liked it or if she had shouted anything she told me, “I kind of liked it. There wasn’t much shouting or booing. I guess the maniacs and the connoisseurs didn’t come tonight. I wouldn’t pay to boo.” The woman’s words hit a key point. The idea held by most people approaching opera as novices – that they wouldn’t be quick to judge in such a harsh way – was connected to their lacking the specific knowledge about voices and style that comes with habituation. However, some of them try to take a crash course, as I’ll show in the following section.

180 Claudio E. Benzecry The maestro On a Wednesday night in July 2005 I entered a small room in the basement of a Buenos Aires private university. The room was usually used as a lecture hall and the seats repeat the disposition of a pedagogical institution. Most of the people were already seated and separated from one another, gazing at the front where a blackboard, a television with VCR, and a desk were set up. There were some fifty people in the room, most of them in their fifties; only eight or nine are younger than thirty. They were all eagerly waiting for the “professor” to come. The class, one of the many given during that week in Buenos Aires, is not an adult education seminar but a public talk on how to properly appreciate La Fanciulla del West (“The Girl of the Golden West,” an opera by Puccini). This university is not the only institution with a schedule of conferences that follow the operatic season. The Colón Opera house itself has a free lecture cycle given by its in-residence critics and so does the Italian Circle. Some eight hundred people pay up to 25 pesos (the equivalent of a seat on the top floor of the opera house) to see a musical critic and popularizer discuss the current Colón season on a giant screen at the Avenida Theatre. Most of the lectures at the university have between thirty and seventy students, depending on the opera and the critic who is going to be talking. Many of those who attend are preparing to go to the opera house during the week, trying to pick up some forgotten story line, some clever or sassy anecdote or just hoping to enjoy a free screening of an opera on video. The professor enters. He’s the feared critic of one of Buenos Aires’s historic yet declining newspapers. He’s about 6-foot-3 and wears grease in his combed hair; he is dressed in a light gray suit, carrying an attaché case. He smiles gently when he enters. A woman sighs a little; some others recognize him now that they see him. He also recognizes some people from a previous lecture. He comes with a colleague, another critic, an ex-singer who has recently developed a free newsletter that covers with praise most of the musical season in Buenos Aires, focusing on opera. Before the video starts rolling he is talking, giving some background (“The opera was performed in 1911, ’15, ’20, ’30, ’51, ’79, and ’86”), while the in-house assistant looks for the scenes the Professor gave him to use as examples. “This work wasn’t composed by commission” – a fifty-something person sitting next to me wearing a red jersey writes down. The Professor keeps talking: If you had to define Puccini the basic words to understand him would be lyricism, symphonism, harmonic beauty . . . OK, fast forward until the leitmotif . . . See, that’s the leitmotif of the opera, it’s in this aria at the beginning but also at the end and in one of the middle scenes. Isn’t it a splendid phrase? . . . I hope you understand this is a unique scene . . . Now it travels through the Puccinian language, so dynamic. It has passion, emotion, heart.

Beauty at the gallery 181 The man points to a couple of other scenes. He repeats one of the key passages and for an hour and a half gives a talk in which adjectives abound and in which the description of the argument takes turns with some references to the context of creation, the careers of the singers in the video and the luck of the diverse versions of the opera performed at other times in the Colón. This scene summarizes and gives us a good idea of what goes on in these classes. A figure who performs an authoritative role explains bits of a work by reference to certain categories that conform to the romantic musical experience: harmony, melody and accompaniment, intense emotion, the essence of music beyond words. It offers a definition of beauty as the harmony of composition and the production of inwardness as the necessary condition to enjoy the harmony individually and in silence. At the same time, it makes a continuous reference to the persona of the main singers as recognizable names of extraordinary character, gifted people who should also be admired as the embodiment of beauty, maybe as much as the music that produces such emotion because of its “passion and heart.” Not much can be really said of the music since, for this disposition, language and music are two different meaningful systems apprehensible only through metaphor and the concentrated effort of the listener. Because he cannot say much about music, other than providing the information that gives the listeners the tools to “decipher” the composer’s intention – another key element of Romantic listening – he talked about all that surrounds its production: dates, casts, personal anecdotes of the life of the composer and of the lives of the well-known singers. Then he also gossiped a bit about the new production of the opera, which he learned from watching the dress rehearsal. As we can see, the enthusiasm and knowledge of the professor, despite the special character granted to him among the members of the community, doesn’t seem so esoteric on first reading. It is only a more intensive and extensive gradation of the knowledge any amateur could have. It doesn’t involve special skills, like reading scores or playing an instrument, or serious studies that certify professorial status, like musicology or a thorough understanding of diverse musical theories. It means putting together, in the most diverse manner, dates, casts, soloists, and works. However, it does imply a specific kind of knowledge that derives from experience, the understanding by comparison of what is a good performance, the classification of the voices not only in their registers (soprano, for instance) but also in their style (ligera, lirica, dramatica, de coloratura, etc.) and peculiarities (whether deeper is better in the lower areas, whether it cracks at the highest part of its range, whether the voice has range or not, etc.). As I said before, this kind of knowledge can be acquired by anyone who is interested in investing themselves in the opera world. However, as witnessed when talking with the critics and while attending many performances as part of my field work, it is a work of habituation that occupies most of an operagoer’s non-working time.

182 Claudio E. Benzecry Actually, most of the “professors” or “maestros” can’t read music and are not trained musicians or musicologists or even historians. They are lawyers, accountants, and physicians who fell in love with the bel canto and achieved a higher rank inside the operatic community to the point where they started exercising that power as a paid activity in newspapers, radio shows, public lectures, or sometimes in free newsletters. Such newsletters guarantee them not only the recognition of the community, signaled by the name “maestro” or “professor” in front of their last names, but also free circulation among all the institutions that compose the opera social world. It ensures that their names will be known. As one of the former press secretaries of the Colón told me, one of the worst problems with checking attendance is the number of free passes people get because of this. Many consider that the “theatre belongs to them,” since they have been in it for so long, and, according to this logic, are already “a part of it.” In order to certify this belonging they usually invoke some obscure musical newsletter or radio show they once wrote for. Moreover, he told me, even when he tried to banish some of them from the house, their knowledge of the institution allowed them to point to diverse agents (the hall chief, the ushers, the guardians) who recognized them and let them in for free. As we can see, the maestros play a dual role. On the one hand, they are the supreme beings of the amateur community (and as I’ll show later that can even get translated into staging plays). On the other hand, they are in charge of didactically guaranteeing that the new audiences get both the proper interpretation of the intentions of the music10 and the proper behavior that is attached to it. To explain how they do so I’d like to consider Goffman’s (1959, 1961) focus on the dramaturgical perspective, which is concerned with the analysis of the impression management techniques of the several teams of the institution in their interrelationship (1959: 239–241). I examine the maestro’s presentation of him- or herself as a restoration of the Romantic and authorityoriented figure of the liberal professor. This set of practices gives the actors the chance to present themselves and their activity in public interactions and serves to influence any other participant in the interaction (in this case, both the musician and the audience). A performance like this seeks a reinvention or restoration of a past or a cultural model that is recognized – by the observer – as the source of the performance.11 The performance of the maestro is more oriented toward the dilettante musical critic model from the past than to his actual socioeconomic conditions of existence. The maestro presents all the elements that have characterized the musical critic as a mixture between romantic dilettante and impresario (Rosselli 1984): authority, magnetism, self-education, distance. As I showed before, the profiles of most “professors” fit this mold; what is more important, despite what at first could appear as a division between the new and the old guard of critics (the former having specialized in musicology or musical composition) almost half of the new musical critics,

Beauty at the gallery 183 especially those dedicated to opera, are still in this mold. The career pattern is still the same as before the professionalization of music criticism and still involves instances of apprenticeship. What is performed here is not only the role of the liberal professional who became a critic but a social trajectory that involves personal and moral betterment tied to upward mobility in a way that reproduces the strategies of lower-middle-class people from their twenties to their fifties but that seems lost nowadays in Argentina, a country where most of the sociological literature focuses on downward mobility.12 Almost as a corollary to this section we can say that one of the key indicators of having “made it” in the community, that is, becoming authorized to discuss beauty and the proper way to receive and decipher it, is to become a name with capital letters, to become recognized by either first or last name without confusion as to whom people are talking about. This status is reached in particular by those who have a dual role in this world and move from journalist to impresario, shaping the operatic season with their decisions and the fates of those who devote their free time to the pursuit of an operatic life. While this may sound exaggerated, there are at least two opera companies – albeit second tier among the off-Colón companies – that have been put together by journalist-impresarios, who later turned themselves into directors of some kind, either staging, directing, or even conducting some performances. Most of the audience at these off-venues is composed of a combination of new enthusiasts still scared of the Colón, and die-hard fans. The latter come not from the pit or from the boxes but from the cheaper sections of the Colón, which have turned out a good number of “maestros” or music critics: the gallery. The gallery listener When thinking about the galley listener we must come to terms with French literary critic Roland Barthes’s book Le Plaisir du texte and with its place in operatic analyses.13 In it, opera loses its formal and analytic character and recovers its excessive and theatrical shape. He alludes to the juxtaposed and melodramatic physical exchange between the singers and the audience, which explodes in a climax during a certain bar of a certain aria. For him, the theatrical power of opera lies in this excess. The second epigraph of this chapter dealt with the proverbial “fat lady,” the famous woman who embodies opera in the popular imaginary. As Sam Abel (1996) proposes, the physical power of opera, its impact, finds itself comfortably in this anachronic image of femininity, in this “Barbie on anabolic steroids.” While the iconography comes from the cartoonization of the Wagnerian Valkyrie – with her generous breasts, her ridiculous helmet, her blonde braids, her all-encompassing immensity – its generalization as an icon for opera exceeds her, even though it finds its fundament in her: the evocation of the immensity

184 Claudio E. Benzecry on which the operatic effect is built, the grandiosity of the opera houses, the greatness of the names of the divos and divas that signify opera in the popular discourse, the size of opera as a genre, the excessive consumption of all the previous artistic forms – acting, music, singing, painting, and sculpture at the service of staging – as well as the excessive presence of elements and extras on stage. But the scenic excess makes a certain sense in opera; it appears as a mere extension of the shameful presence of physical and emotive factors as constitutive of the relationship between the work and the audience. That’s probably why il dramma per musica is still popular: because it excites each and every aspect of low taste in its quest for the great spectacle, its sensual disposition, its predisposition toward exoticism, grandiloquent action, and passionate eroticism.14 Opera seems to demand the most absolute fidelity in its listeners or to cause the most powerful hatred and distaste. Most of the gallery listeners can be described as having a specific kind of knowledge. Just like popular-class individuals for Hoggart (1957) or boxers for Wacquant (2003), most opera lovers embody a particular knowledge articulated from and by a common space that cements the relationships (the opera house) around the bodies and the music and around the uses of the voice onstage and at the performing house. This particular knowledge, hard to articulate in a complete discursive form, is composed of minimal gestures and presumptions, quickly interpreted and recognized by the names of historical singers and famous arias that help to classify and understand the scale of that which happens on stage, to illustrate the undeclared presuppositions. Just like sports fans, it is common to find memorabilia collectors among operagoers, actual connoisseurs who form imaginary mosaics with autographed concert programs, the exact name for the precise cast, and the day Flagstadt, Björling, or Callas debuted. Pleasure and nostalgia are keywords to make this principle of judgment explicit. Pleasure, as I said, gets activated by a complete network of interpretative skills and knowledge; nostalgia is linked to a pastoral past, represented by epic live versions, or by their recording, and presented as a criticism to the professionalization of music. “They used to sing as if their lives depended on it. Now they just sing like their careers depend on it” is a phrase often overheard while inhabiting this community, a community that finds a home in nostalgia, a secure and comfortable place – the basement of all musical discussions – where they used to know what was good and what sounded good. This is a place that, despite having undergone several transformations (mainly the change from a world of production to one of technological reproduction), they would like to revisit, sometimes “just for old times’ sake.” This kind of feeling, necessary for the reproduction of such community, is seldom acquired from a formalized and secondary knowledge that lacks the corporeal lesson of the operatic scene and the conjunction of intellectual and emotional experience. Thus, the importance of amateur knowledge, complementing experience with sheer data about the history of the community itself and its re-enactment in every performance.

Beauty at the gallery 185 Several excellent historical studies have been written about the experience of music listening. Starting from Johnson (1995) and his work about the birth of silence and the representational and non-representational modes of listening, to Antoine Hennion (1993, 2000) and his theory that the amateur is the result of a passionate apparatus, passing through Ahlquist (1997) and the modeling and moralizing character of music in the U.S. during the early nineteenth century. Most of these works can be summarized by two ideas by Adorno in his essays “Motifs” and “Commodity Music Analyzed” from Quasi una Fantasia. On the one hand, Adorno invites us to rethink the cognitive frames required to listen, extending “immanent listening as far as possible, while at the same time approaching music radically from the outside. To think of twelve-note technique at the same time as remembering that childhood experience of Madame Butterfly on the gramophone”; on the other hand, he advances the idea that “most people listen emotionally: everything is heard in terms of the categories of late Romanticism and of the commodities derived from it, which are already tailored to emotional listening. Their listening is the more abstract the more emotional it is: music really enables them to have a good cry.”15 This link between music and the emotional character of consumption usually ascribed to popular culture appears very clear in a statement by my gallery neighbor at the 1999 Buenos Aires performance of one of Verdi’s most often performed operas, La Traviata: “La Traviata is the Boca-River of opera.” (The Boca-River is the most important and representative rivalry in Argentina’s soccer history, so important it is called “El clásico” [The Classic].) In Argentina a soccer metaphor works to underline and highlight the massive or popular character of the genre. In Verdi’s case, critics tend to reproduce this placement in the realms of the popular as they just accept the last two works by the composer16 (Otello and Falstaff ) as part of the operatic canon. Further, some of them insist upon calling his early work “frivolous,” “vulgar,” “full of effects,” and “grandiloquent.”17 Beauty lies in the body, even if the body is not beautiful. If opera could be reduced to two minimal components we’d have to point to the presence of a fetishized voice and to a body that incarnates the audience’s attention. The anatomic characteristics of the singers are not of importance. What matters is their remote presence, far away onstage; imposing, dressed in a repertory of characters and colors that might as well belong to the World Wrestling Foundation (or its Argentinean version, Titanes en el ring).18 Comedian Jerry Seinfeld defines better than anyone this scopophilic drive: “I had some friends drag me to an opera recently, you know how they’ve got those little opera glasses, you know, do you really need binoculars, I mean how big do these people have to get before you can spot ’em. These opera kids they’re going two-fifty, two-eighty, three-twenty five, they’re wearing big white woolly vests, the women have like the breastplates, the bullet hats with the horn coming out. If you can’t pick these people out, forget opera, think about optometry, maybe that’s more your thing.”

186 Claudio E. Benzecry

Figure 8.2 The Opera House as seen from the gallery. Photo Fabián Mosenson

At the same time as we build up the relationship of the eye–body pair, we can identify a second pair: the sacred–profane opposition articulated by the distinction between intimacy and distance. If we think of the connoisseurs of Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, or Strauss, for whom singers are nothing but an appendix or a medium for their magical relationship with music (for better or worse they are priests who invite the initiated to share the wonderful and intimate sacred ritual that happens through voice) as examples of a sacred engagement to music, the profane version is the spectacular worship of the singer by him- or herself, losing the mediated relationship with music.19 If among the second group we can usually name the lovers of Maria Callas, as operagoers in love with a voice with mythical characteristics that guarantees by itself a mystical and lyrical ecstasy, the performance of Verdi’s Otello by Argentinean tenor José Cura at the Colón Opera House in 1999 invites us to recover the corporeal dimension of the operatic spectacle, its special relationship with a “profane” gaze.20 In technical terms – that is, in terms of the quality and the volume of his voice – it can’t be said that Cura is a great singer. However, we can say without a doubt that he is a great performer; moreover, that he is a great actor. He sings naked while he rolls down the stairs disposed by Beni Montressor’s staging and all of a sudden, hysterical screams precede the euphoric applause that accompanies the aria finale. If a first and careless reading could exhaust the interpretation of what happened, subsuming it under the mark of technical difficulty – that is, a man passionately sings notes that inflate his chest while lying on his back – a second look allows us to assimilate the audience’s high-pitched screams,

Beauty at the gallery 187 similar to the ones rock stars receive but opera singers are supposedly foreign to: the desire for a profane body that is not a medium for music but adored by itself. Otherwise, if not because of the powerful and distanced physical presence of the performers, how can we explain the devotion and applause by a connoisseur audience to artists often catalogued as mediocre by the music critics? Why do we get so upset when we see the performers’ faces without makeup during an interview or when we focus binoculars on them during the curtain call and see their sweating and ruined bodies? Why is it so disturbing to look at the Beijing’s Forbidden City Turandot performance on video where the face of the main character differs so blatantly in its closeups from the distant love she establishes when we are far away from the stage? It is obvious that recognizing these “low” features – associated with the body and desire – invite us to think about the similarities between opera and popular culture and to examine the arbitrariness of the distinction between high and popular culture. Placing a cultural product or artifact at one or the other end of the cultural boundary does not mean the establishment of a permanent definition drawn by the institutions in charge of tracing meaning and its hierarchical places but a classifying battle that happens through the whole social structure.21

Conclusion For the operatic audience of Buenos Aires’s Colón Opera House, beauty is a field of struggle and a bundle of relationships in which new operagoers submit to a moral and sentimental education through certain formal and informal institutions (the ticket line, the bus trip, the intermission chats, the critics, the radio and newspaper reviews, the music appreciation class). This education involves both the substantial definition of beauty at the opera and the delimitation of the boundaries of the community of connoisseurs. It also involves a conceptual understanding of what is beautiful about the operatic experience or rather the tautological self-explanation that beauty is beautiful. This already presupposes a series of related categories and adjectives; an understanding of the moral character of beauty. This practiced idea of the beautiful involves a conception of the self bounded to a class definition akin to that of the early twentieth-century bourgeoisie and as a consequence an array of codes that frame bodily behaviors while participating in the enjoyment of the experience. Buenos Aires’s gallery listeners traverse a complex process of initiation that includes many formal and informal sources and sometimes many contradictory messages. In this process beauty produces practices; practices which participate in the reproduction of a set of ideas and discourses called beauty. An obsolete practice gets performed because of inertia in the symbolic configuration that produces behaviors and attitudes. The opera house works as an enclosed world that doesn’t take much notice of the changing

188 Claudio E. Benzecry pattern of status display and conspicuous consumption in the general society. The understanding of operatic beauty, and the codes of behavior that come with the proper modes of deciphering it, has as a consequence a series of practices (spatial, behavioral, and categorical). This coupling of practices and categories of appreciation is the result of the encounter of the following elements: A romantic disposition (as we saw at the opera class, inculcated by most formal music-producing and music-reproducing institutions) plus “popular” or “unruly” bodies and responses to “bodily” characters (as we discussed in the last section) plus the pedagogical character that transforms the moral uplift produced by opera not because of what happens dramatically on stage but by the inward feeling produced by music combined with the acquisition of an amateur knowledge that, nevertheless, is good enough to make the spectator feel superior and make him or her know that certain qualities are “needed” in order to enjoy opera. This practice of beauty is based on an alliance between enthusiasm and experience during the listening process. It constitutes musical experience as an experience anchored in certain categories: the aesthetic as a signifying system based on singularity (“Puccini is like Mozart. It doesn’t matter how badly you suck, you can’t go wrong. You really have to do a lot of work to ruin Tosca”), music as a passionate activity (“This is my fantasy space, where I dream. I’m a psychologist but I couldn’t care less about reading texts about opera. I need a place to let myself go, to dream, to let my mind wander”), or opera as mediated by the body of the singers and articulated by the fetishized divo and diva (“She’s divine! Beautiful people always look great onstage. Remember her in La Italiana, she had those long gloves. They were divine. She looked like Marilyn”) that appears in everyday operatic talk by the abuse of the article “la” or “el” next to the singer’s last name as if we should refer to every minor off-Colón soprano as speaking of Callas or Freni (“la Mirabelli was great, don’t you think?”). I have tried to break with the idea of high cultural goods being consumed with distance and sobriety, with opera as a practice only for the highly educated or the urban elites. However, breaking with the idea of spectators as receptacles does not mean postulating the “natural” subversion of the “original” uses of the cultural products by the practitioners-consumers (De Certeau 1984). The uses of opera are, as I’ve discussed, the result of a heterogeneous mix of elements cemented by a shared idea of beauty. To understand how the series of appropriations and re-appropriations are performed, we need to locate the practitioners in a relationship network, in which the individual is the locus of inscription of often incoherent and contradictory relationships that interact as multiple determinations over the subject.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on seven months of field work during three operatic seasons and focuses heavily on the lives and practices of the galleristas at the opera house

Beauty at the gallery 189

2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16

and on the institution of the semi-professional musical critics as gatekeepers of the community. The German composer Richard Wagner called opera Gesamtkunstwerk or Total Work of Art. For him, operatic performance was a synthesis of all other arts, as it united music, drama, visual arts, and stagecraft on an unprecedented scale. See Johnson (1995), Sennett (1977), Ahlquist (1997), and Levine (1988). Translation mine. Pierre Bourdieu (1999) and Grignon and Passeron (1991) use the term “sociodicy” to define the societal narrative in which places in social structure are explainable with reference to justice and presented as deserved. In this ideological explanation of social stratification, those in better positions are simply better. They adapt the term from Max Weber’s theodicy. For an overview of memoirs and amateur historiography that reproduce this trope see Echevarría (1979), Sanguinetti (2002), and Walmman (1978). Other houses such as the Avenida – historically associated more with the Spaniard community and the zarzuela repertory), which now houses two opera companies, Buenos Aires Lyrica and Juventus Lyrica. For instance, there are different entrances and stairs for different floors and ticket prices, and it is impossible to access certain parts of the theatre, such as the balconies. If you go to the gallery, there is the enforcing character of the bars and rails on the top floors of the house, and a gendered division between the standingroom-only floors. For a general discussion of the relationship between space and discipline see Foucault (1979). There are five different subscription series at the Colón Opera House: Gran Abono (Great Subscription), Abono Nocturno Tradicional (Traditional Night Subscription), Abono Vespertino (Early Afternoon), Abono Nocturno Nuevo (New Night), and Abono Extraordinario (Extraordinary). Operas are usually premiered either at the Gran Abono night – where for the boxes and the orchestra seating men have to still wear black tie – or at the Abono Nocturno Tradicional. These two subscription series have been around since almost the beginning of the opera house and the people subscribed to them have attended for a long time or transferred their tickets to people in their family. On the other hand, more recent subscribers attend the Abono Extraordinario and the Abono Nocturno Nuevo series. To the point that when I surveyed some patrons at a free concert about what would be the best adjectives to describe opera, two of them answered: “Music can’t be reduced to words. They belong to two different worlds of thought and to another non-verbal register than words,” and “I don’t know the works. I just feel the music.” According to Auyero (2000: 144) and his reading of Schechner (1985) the performance is “always restored behavior.” Performance means “never for the first time”; rather, it means “for the second to the nth times.” “It is always a twice-behaved behavior.” For examples see Barbeito and Lo Vuolo (1992), Villarreal (1996), and Minujin and Kessler (1995). Michel Poizat (1992) has taken a Barthes-like understanding of opera while exploring the psychoanalytic characteristic of its enjoyment. See Edward Said (1978, 1991). For a discussion of the problems that Adorno’s “grand” legacy poses to the sociology of music see De Nora (2000, 2003). For a general assessment of his contribution to the sociology of the arts see Wolff (1983) and Zolberg (1990). See the comment by the official musicologist of the Colón Opera House written in the hand program of Otello’s performances: “Otello. Cuando Verdi llegó a la cumbre” by Pola Suárez Ortubey. For an overview see Kerman (1988).

190 Claudio E. Benzecry 17 In these presentations his work is usually dichotomized against the work of Wagner (see Lindenberger 1984, 1998; Nietzsche 1967, 1976; Adorno 1981), as the battle between north and south, harmony versus melody, composer-centered opera against performer-based opera, intellectual or popular, progressive or regressive. The antithesis is clearly ordered in its development – beyond our own evaluation of Wagner and Verdi scores – as the struggle between high and popular culture. However, as a genre opera itself confronted the same problems and fought the same “wars” about its place in the artistic realm. In the manifestos written by the opera reformers as a conscious operation plan – like Gluck or Wagner (Sutcliffe 2001) – opera was uplifted to the mountain positions of the beaux arts. On the other hand it appeared as mass entertainment or at the low boundaries of taste when fulfilling the promise of its popularity. Because of this planned frame, Italian opera has had few chances to belong to the high spheres of the super-sensible as its relationship with popular culture and with the organizational procedures that gave birth to the mass cultural industry is constantly remembered. The basic premise that completely sustains this series of oppositions is art considered as an elevated and disciplined activity; this also explains the disciplining character of the gatekeepers and the building, who maintain a certain distance from the everyday pleasures pursued by ordinary people in their quotidian life. 18 David Levin (1994) and Sam Abel (1996) have highlighted the closeness among the codes and signifying hierarchies between wrestling and opera based on Barthes’s article included in Mythologies. 19 Max Weber (1978, 2000) offers a similar interpretation in his writings on religion. 20 José Cura was a protégé of Plácido Domingo. He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1999 sharing a cast with his mentor, in the double bill Cavalleria/Pagliacci. 21 A similar problem is present at Paul Di Maggio’s (1982, 1992) work. For him the distinction is something that pre-exists its institutional delimitation (divided by cultural patrons for high culture and cultural industry for popular culture). Culture is represented in an identical mode for all the agents of a society, no matter whether they are elite, petty bourgeois, or workers. For a critical understanding of this please refer to Mukerji and Schudson (1992), specifically the introduction written by the editors. Also, in its aim of defining art as that which the art worlds practice, most “production of culture” attempts usually reduce meaning to its conditions and mechanisms of production without ever inquiring about what is art and what is distinctive of art and music as a practice. Is this to inscribe value in an object or a practice – as Clifford Geertz (1983) thinks? Is it the representation in experience of an emotion with a sound – as Antoine Hennion (1993) would want it? The sociology of culture that conceptualizes art tends to ignore these definitions and chooses, instead, to accuse singularity from a collective standpoint (production mechanisms instead of individualism, cooperation instead of isolated genius, patrons and merchants instead of art’s universality, the context’s radicalized historicism instead of the work’s universalism). As Heinich (2003) says, none of them thinks about art as a world whose meaning is built around the idea of singularity. When this is recognized, the work of the interpretative sociologist is to complement the institutional network with the self-understanding of the practitioners themselves (emotion, genius, divas, universality) instead of claiming art’s lies by making explicit its social “reality.” It’s not about finding a deeper level of reality but about building an explanatory model that incorporates the agent’s experience without reducing it to participation in a collective deception.

Beauty at the gallery 191

Works cited Abel, Sam. 1996. Opera in the Flesh. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music. New York: Seabury Press. ——. 1981. In Search of Wagner. New York: Seabury Press. ——. 1985. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” Pp. 270–299 in The Essential Frankfurt Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Continuum. ——. 1992. Quasi una Fantasia. London and New York: Verso. ——. 1994. “Bourgeois Opera.” Pp. 25–44 in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. D. Levin. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ahlquist, Karen. 1997. Democracy at the Opera. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1987. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auyero, Javier. 2000. Poor People’s Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Barbeito, Alberto, and Rubén Lo Vuolo. 1992. La modernización excluyente. Buenos Aires: Unicef-Losada. Barthes, Roland. 1980. Mitologías. México and Madrid: Siglo XXI. ——. 1982. El placer del texto. México and Madrid: Siglo XXI. Fourth rev. ed. Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. 1999. The Weight of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. New York and London: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2003. After Adorno. New York and London: Cambridge University Press. DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1, 2): 33–50, 303–322. ——. 1992. “Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theatre, Opera and Dance, 1900–1940” in Cultivating Differences, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournieur. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Echevarría, Néstor. 1979. El arte lírico en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Imprima. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Art as a Cultural System” in Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Gerhard, Anselm. 1998. The Urbanization of Opera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. ——. 1961. Asylum: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books. Grignon, Claude, and Jean Claude Passeron. 1991. Lo culto y lo popular. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Heinich, Natalie. 2003. La sociología del arte. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Hennion, Antoine. 1993. La Passion musicale. Paris: Metaille. Hennion, Antoine, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Emilie Gomart. 2000. Figures de l’amateur. Paris: La Documentation Française.

192 Claudio E. Benzecry Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto & Windus. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1988. Opera as Drama. Rev ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Levin, David. 1994. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–18 in Opera through Other Eyes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levine, Lawrence. 1988. Highbrow and Lowbrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lindenberger, Herbert. 1984. Opera. The Extravagant Art. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ——. 1998. Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Minujin, Alberto, and Gabriel Kessler. 1995. Cuesta Abajo. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Mujica Lainez, Manuel. 1979. El Gran Teatro, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson (eds.). 1992. Rethinking Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. “Nietzsche contra Wagner” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. ——. 1976. “The Case of Wagner” in The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Random House. Poizat, Michel, 1992. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pollini, Margarita. 2002. Palco, Cazuela y Paraíso. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Rosselli, John. 1984. The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi. New York: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. ——. 1991. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred Knopf. Sanguinetti, Horacio. 2002. Opera y sociedad en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Gaglianone. Schechner, Richard, 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sennett, Richard. 1977. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf. Shrum, Wesley. 1996. Fringe and Fortune: The Role of Critics in High and Popular Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sutcliffe, Tom. 2001. The Faber Book of Opera. New York and London: Faber and Faber. Villarreal, Juan. 1996. La exclusión social. Buenos Aires: FLACSO-Norma. Wacquant, Loic. 2003. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Walmman, Margarita. 1978. Balcones del cielo. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2000. The Religion of India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Wolff, Janet. 1983. The Social Production of Art. New York: New York University Press. Zolberg, Vera. 1990. Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. New York and London: Cambridge University Press.

9

The erotic life of electric hair clippers A social history Alton Phillips

We might think that the question of how one does one’s gender is a merely cultural question, or an indulgence on the part of those who insist on exercising bourgeois freedom in excessive dimensions. To say, however, that gender is performative is not simply to insist on a right to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested. – Judith Butler, Undoing Gender The principle of action . . . lies in the complicity between two states of the social, between history in bodies and history in things. – Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations

Leo J. Wahl first began experimenting with electromagnetic motors in 1911 as a junior at Sterling High School in northwest Illinois. While an engineering student at the University of Illinois, he designed a vibrating medical massager later manufactured by his uncle, J. Frank Wahl. Leo spent much of his free time peddling these massagers to local barbers. On these excursions, he began to envision ways electromagnetic motors could make barbers’ day-to-day work more efficient. After his uncle was called into service during the Mexican Revolution, Leo took over the manufacturing business and began to work on designs for an electric hair clipper. On October 14, 1919, Leo applied for patents on his electromagnetic hair clipper. Previous electric models of hair clippers had been connected to the motor through a flexible shaft. His design was the first to include the drive motor in the hand shaft. This design change had a significant impact on the substantive properties of the object: adding weight and heat, heightening the sensation of vibration, and easing mobility with clipper in hand. This new Wahl Model 66 allowed barbers to do the same cutting as with scissors and a comb, but in about half the time. It was less cumbersome and easier to use than previous designs and nearly half the price. By 1920, thousands of Wahl hair clippers had been manufactured and sold to barbers across the United States (Wahl 2005). Unsatisfied with the initial success, Wahl continued to work directly with barbers to improve the efficiency and convenience of

194 Alton Phillips

Figure 9.1 Leo J. Wahl’s Electric Hair Clipper, Patent Application Drawings, 1919

his electric hair clippers. The ultimate success of the electric hair clipper, however, was not simply the product of a single man’s genius. Indeed, “nothing stands alone – to understand any one thing you have to learn how it fits into larger arrays of physical objects, social sentiments and ways of being” (Molotch 2003: 1). The analysis in this chapter proceeds on two levels. First, it looks at the ways in which electric hair clippers function within a larger context of practices of cultural reproduction. Specifically, it examines the roles clippers play in routines of care, presentation of the self, and gender construction (Foucault 1988, Goffman 1959, Mort 1996); that is, the role of clippers in the reproduction of history in bodies. Second, it examines the ways in which these relations structure the ongoing relationship between clippers’ form and function (Molotch 2003); that is, the ways in which history is embedded in the object itself. It is the intersections of these two histories – history in bodies, or habitus, and history in things, or fields – that form the basis of Bourdieu’s theory of action. Bourdieu posits action as structured in the conjunction of habitus and the field, and innovation occurs in the (highly circumscribed) disjunction. Habitus is the internalization of the social structure in the body, inculcated through one’s experience with structured and structuring structures over time. “The body is in the social world but the social world is in the body (in the form of hexis and eidos)” (Bourdieu 2000: 152). Here, Bourdieu moves beyond Durkheim (1914), who conceptualizes the social structure as exclusively present within the mind in the form of eidos, to include social structure in the flesh in the form of hexis. It is through habitus that Bourdieu orients the body to the larger world. Spatially, habitus is reproduced by a field, the space of the game, which can be mapped “with more or less distortion” onto physical space (2000: 134). Capital, both economic and cultural, structures the field and the positions within it. The social space of the field is “defined by the mutual exclusion, or distinction, of the positions which constitute it” (1997: 134). While the body is connected to physical space by contact, the agent is related to the field by illusio – “the sense of investment in the game

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 195 and the outcome, interest in the game, commitment to the presuppositions – doxa – of the game” (1997: 66). While habitus determines a repertoire for action, it does not determine action itself. “Dispositions do not lead in a determinate way to a determinate action; they are revealed and fulfilled only in appropriate circumstances and in the relationship with a situation” (2000: 149). Habitus leaves space for the agent to act in various situations, which are themselves structured and structuring, by drawing off of and improvising from past experience while also noting the regularity of particular actions in particular contexts. Action is structured in the intersection of the habitus and field. In the disjunction, there is greater space for (creative) innovative action; however, Bourdieu believes such schisms are rare. In these moments, action is still structured by past experiences. Cognitive scientists claim that “innovation” is often achieved by the “blending” of existing concepts (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). Similarly, David Halperin (1997) argues that queer subjectivities, in particular, are marked by a propensity toward the use of techniques of parody, appropriation, and resignification to create new meanings. Bourdieu and Judith Butler both draw from J. L. Austin’s “performativity” (Austin 1962, Bourdieu 2001, Butler 1990) in their discussions of gender. Performatives are performances that have forces of social institutionalization behind them, which performances do not necessarily have (Butler 1997). Butler (1993) argues that gender is produced by iterations of performatives, none of which is an exact copy of the last. This iterative gap, between the production and reproduction of gender, is inclusive of the space for improvisation within the disjunction of habitus and the field. Further, it is these iterative cycles of action that reproduce the “illusory” correspondence between sex and gender. This is Butler’s critique of biofoundationalism. Or as Bourdieu (1997) argues, habitus creates a coherence that “naturalizes” the arbitrary correspondences between the biological and the social, or between sex and gender. That is, there is no necessary relationship between the biological and the social, but the mutually reinforcing relations contained in habitus make it appear as if there is. This framework provides a way to understand both how gender changes (slowly) over time, and how “new” genders and gender identities are produced. Decades of anthropological research have explored the role that hair and its attendant practices can play in the construction of the self, and the production of ethical subjects. The cutting of the hair can mark the passage from one stage of life to another; it can symbolize one’s closeness to society, or one’s affinity to a particular group or sect (Leach 1958, Hallpike 1969, Synnott 1987). Hair also has a longstanding relationship with the production of gender. In St. Paul’s speech to the Corinthians, he says: “If a man have long hair, it is shame unto him. But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her” (I Corinthians 11:4). In the ruins of Roman Gaul, however, long hair was a sign of aristocratic status. Removing the long hair of a king removed

196 Alton Phillips his claim to the throne, and faced with the choice Queen Clotild said she would rather see her grandsons die than have their hair cut (Coates 1999). During the seventeenth century, Puritan magistrates in the colonies returned to biblical ascriptions against long-haired men, condemning white men for wearing their hair long. In the 1800s, missionaries also forced the young Native American men at their boarding schools to cut off their braids; refusal to do so was seen as a refusal of assimilation into white culture. While the meaning of the length of men’s hair has oscillated over time, the relationship between the length of men’s and women’s hair during any particular period follows a more regular pattern. Richard Corson (1995) argues that, at almost every point in Western history, women’s hairstyles have been longer than those of men. Generally, short hair on women has been conceived as deviant, punitive, and indicative of a denial of (“proper”) female sexuality. Krafft-Ebing (1908: 333) warned that lesbianism “may nearly always be suspected in females wearing their hair short.” Throughout history, hair was repeatedly deployed as a sign of sexual difference and ethical status within culture; thus its attendant practices became highstakes techniques, or performatives, in self presentation, and the production and reproduction of gender. To the extent that tonsorial practices engage the biological, it is an example of how habitus creates a coherence that “naturalizes” the arbitrary correspondences between the biological and the social. The exposure of arbitrariness of this doxic formulation can create cultural anxiety and panic. Inversely, it can also generate erotic charge. This investigation into electric hair clippers and tonsorial practices fills a gap in the existing sociological literature, which neglects in general to problematize “male” bodies to the degree it problematizes “female” bodies, and which neglects men’s tonsorial practice almost entirely. While there is much writing in the sociological literature about women’s hair and beauty salons (Heckert 2003, Heckert et al. 2003, Weitz 2001, Candelario 2000, Soulliere 1997, Gimlin 1996, Basow 1991), men’s hair and the spaces designed to attend it have gone largely undiscussed. A small number of studies have looked at African-American barbershops, as spaces either of sociability or of deviance (Alexander 2003, Wright and Calhoun 2001, Williams 1993). The practices of hair cutting, however, receive little to no attention. Further, while many theoretical models describe how gender is reproduced over time (cf. West and Zimmerman 1987), this investigation provides an example of the ways in which gender changes over time, and the ways in which “new” genders are produced. Past action produces and structures a repertoire for future action embedded in assemblages of bodies and objects organized in space that produce “culture” and “gender” in patterned ways. These actions feed back into these assemblages and, in the gap between production and reproduction, can alter the associated bodies, objects, and spaces in subtle ways. Such alterations occur in highly circumscribed moments, which are not a product of

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 197 pure creativity, or a desubjectified will to power (Foucault 1977), yet are one of the “spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is reproduced and contested” (Butler 2004). The social history of the electric hair clipper traces a path through these assemblages in three periods. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the innovation of the electric hair clipper arose from existing barbering tools, a political and economic climate that facilitated the electrification of commercial goods, and a cultural climate of female emancipation that radically increased demand for public haircutting services and fueled rapid sectorial growth. During the mid-century, we see the solidification of the clipper’s role in the production of a mainstream American masculinity, as well as a series of formal changes to the object itself, reflecting its location in new and changing milieus. In the century’s closing decades, we see members of queer communities appropriate and resignify clippers’ past associations with mainstream masculinity in their construction of new forms of masculine identities.

The “birth” of the electric hair clipper While the Rock River running along the northwest border of Illinois failed to become a major navigational route as once hoped, it was able to provide the community growing along its banks with electric power. With transportation facilitated by rail lines laid in 1856, Sterling’s business and industry soon began to grow. The “industrial bedrock” of the city was laid with the founding of Northwestern Steel & Wire in 1879 and Lawrence Brothers Hardware in 1876. At the turn of the century, the nearby University of Illinois, which Wahl attended, was a site of substantial research in the rapidly developing field of electrical engineering. During this time, a number of new electrical appliances began to reach the market, including the first electric iron, the Hotpoint, introduced in 1893, and the first electric vacuum cleaner, introduced by Hoover in 1908. In 1917, under government stewardship, the electrical power industry adopted standardized designs for electrical plugs, spurring significant growth in the electrical appliance industry. The spread of electricity across the country, facilitated by the Rural Electric Administration in the 1930s and 1940s, charted the growth of markets for electrical appliances, including the electric hair clipper. While at one time barbers could do business with an old armchair and a simple set of hand tools, by the turn of the century they had at their disposal a wide array of furnishings and accessories. In 1861, the barber supply company Kraut and Dohnal of Cincinnati, Ohio, released the first specialized barber supply catalog. Barbering tools were also featured in the catalogs of the Archer Company, Berninghaus Supply, and Sears Roebuck. Never before had so many varieties of specialized chairs, scissors, and razors been available. Catalogs let barbers across the country buy new products through the mail, and thus allowed producers and distributors to vastly expand their clientele. One particular barbering tool peddled in these catalogs was key to

198 Alton Phillips the development of electric hair clippers; it was called, simply, a “hair clipper.” In some models, the two handles were separated by spring-steel strips or barrel springs and attached to a pair of serrated metal plates. Later models housed a coil spring in the cutting head. In the 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog, five models were available for family or barber’s use ranging in price from $1 to $3.75 a pair. Each pair cut hair to a single length from one-thirty-second to five-fifteenth of an inch. Manual clippers were especially useful in cutting the closely cropped hairstyles popular on men in the U.S. around the time of World War I. Ostensibly, the short hair was a precaution against lice in the trenches, but the style was also popular amongst men who did not serve in the military. Corson (1995) speculates that it was a practical consideration, allowing more time between trips to

Figure 9.2 Manual Hair Clippers, 1897 Sears & Roebuck Catalog

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 199 the barber. With the advent of electromagnetic motors, these tools were ripe for automation. During World War I, many women moved into the public sphere because of labor shortages, and, with the advent of the “bob” hairstyle in the late 1910s, the cutting of women’s hair also began to move into the public sphere. While the barbershop was long the site of public male haircutting, before the early twentieth century the cutting of female hair was almost exclusively confined to the private sphere. When the first women’s salon opened in the 1600s, it sparked a moral furor and was soon closed. In the late 1800s, a small number of salons catering to upper-class women opened, but they focused on the “dressing” of hair, not cutting. Short hair on women challenged dominant constructions of both masculinity and femininity, and the bob was entangled in cultural challenges to patriarchal hegemony. Although they stood to gain financially from the patronage of women in their shops, many barbers at first publicly opposed the cutting of women’s hair as unfeminine. Fearing their presence would threaten the male culture fostered in these spaces, many refused to serve women. Eventually, most barbers relented, marking a significant shift in the construction of public space in which hair was cut. Toward the end of the 1920s, it was estimated that as many as two thousand women a day were cutting their hair short; it was the first time in history that women cut their hair short en masse (Corson 1995). This renewed focus on women’s hair also caused men to be more conscious about attending to their own hair, further feeding the growth of the industry (Trusty 1958). Specialization would eventually lead to the creation of beauty salons which catered to a female clientele. The move of women’s haircutting into the public sphere, however, led to massive growth in the industry and drove considerable innovation. Indeed, the number of public spaces for haircutting grew nearly fourfold over ten years (Stevenson 2001). During this early period, clippers arose from classic barbershops and practices of masculine (and transgressive feminine) self-presentation. The innovation of clippers is inextricably linked with the closely cropped hairstyles popular amongst the male clientele in these barbershops, and barbers’ need to cut hair into these styles evenly and efficiently. Further, the formal qualities of the objects themselves reflected the milieus from which they were innovated, and the relations in which they were embedded. Early models of electric hair clippers had a rigid, blocky industrial design, significant weight, and exposed screws. Wahl’s early clippers were manufactured with steel blades and parts. From the innovations in electrical engineering made in the area, to the local steel industry, to the prevailing industrial aesthetic and Wahl’s conversations with local barbers, the form of early electric hair clippers was shaped by the place from which it came.

200 Alton Phillips

The electric hair clipper and the enforcement and contestation of mid-century masculinity Barbershops in the postwar, Fordist period were known by the sounds of electric clippers as much as by the fougère scent of Lucky Tiger hair tonic. While a brief period in the 1920s had seen women enter male barbershops in large numbers, the gendered segregation of haircutting was soon reestablished with the popularization of beauty salons catering to women. Barbershops largely returned to being spaces of male sociability. As in much of the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century, barbershops were also segregated by race. While African American barbershops were a vital space for both labor and leisure in the black community, they were largely ignored by the established hair care industry until the 1970s (Willett 2000). Many African Americans did wield clippers to shear the heads of white men, though the inverse relationship was almost unheard of. In the late 1950s, Essex Finney, a black student at Virginia Tech, could not openly get his hair cut at either of the barbershops near campus despite the fact that both shops were staffed and owned by black men. “The policy was that no black person could go in the barbershop and get a haircut.” Instead, he had to meet the barbers secretly after hours (Finney undated). This racial segregation was also mimicked in the beauty salons of the time (Willett 2000). While many remember the experience of the classic American barbershop as an active space of community, where conversation was more important than the haircut (Staten 2001), others have less positive memories. The relationship between barber and client is not one purely of client selfdetermination, but a relationship organized and mediated by contemporary culture. Barbershops can thus function as spaces in which one can become aware of the construction of the “fictive” self through style, beauty, and performance (Stevenson 2001). Barbershops are sometimes remembered as a space of domination where the barber’s “interpretation” of a client’s request is devastatingly misunderstood, often in the form of a shorter-thandesired cut. They are also remembered as spaces where the imposition of someone else’s will, often a father’s, was enacted over another’s body and self-presentation. These acts, however, often accumulate meaning beyond the simply aesthetic, and come to be seen as acts to quell a rebellious spirit or make a boy into a “real man,” as in Tobias Wolff’s memoir of coming of age in the 1950s, This Boy’s Life. The book was later remade into the 1993 film by the same name, staring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. During the 1950s, clippers were used to cut the majority of men’s hairstyles. In 1956, Life magazine reported on the growing popularity of the flattop hairstyle, a cut fashioned with clippers (Corson 1995). A 1957 survey of men’s hairstyles in the New York Times Magazine reported a strong preference for short, simple crew cuts based on the military G.I. style (Mitgang 1957). Even many longer styles (which would still be considered short by today’s standards), such as the “Madison Avenue,” named for the

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 201

Figure 9.3 “Official Hair Styles for Men and Boys”

location emblematic of the professional class that popularized it, involved the back and sides of the head being sheared with clippers. The names of many of these haircuts reflected the tool used to cut them as well as other contemporary masculine tropes. The “buzz” of the clipper, the vibrations of its steel plates, became emblematic of the object itself, with popular crew cut styles becoming known as buzz cuts. Revealingly, the extremely short variation of the buzz cut was known as a “butch.” Cars also figured prominently in the naming of men’s haircuts, from “fenders” to the Camaro or El Camino (also known as a mullet), or closely shaved sides of the head known as “whitewalls.” In addition to use in barbershops, manufacturers saw an opening for the use of electric hair clippers in the home. Positioned in the market as a “thrifty” alternative to trips to the barbershop, the packaging and manuals included with these products consistently featured an image of an older woman cutting a younger boy’s hair. (This trope continues to be reproduced in clippers marketed for home use today.) While the industrial setting of Sterling was reflected in the blocky, sturdy industrial design of early hair clippers, the design of models made for the consumer market was decidedly different. They tended to be produced in a selection of softer colors, and had a shorter shaft to be delicately held in a woman’s hand, as indicated by images in advertisements. They were also often sold with patterned carrying cases. During the mid-century period, the plastic casings and all other parts of Wahl Clippers were “proudly” manufactured in plants in Sterling, Illinois as part of a strategy of vertical integration typical of the Fordist period. With the installation of plastic molding presses, the professional models used in barbershops transitioned from metal to plastic casings, while still reflecting the blocky, sturdy industrial design of earlier models. Plastics allowed for increased versatility in the design properties of the casings. The shafts

Figure 9.4 “Thrifty Families Now Use Home Haircutting Kits”

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 203 continued to be contoured, but some models also began to reflect the integration of automotive metaphors into the tonsorial realm by featuring “streamlined” curves popular in car design at the time. Sketches done by Leo Wahl in 1955 also show a desire to incorporate “Cadillac-like tail fins” into the design of clippers (Wahl 2005). Clippers produced in this period continued to have exposed screws, indicative of the assembly line procedure through which they were manufactured. Additionally, while earlier models cut hair only to a single short length and needed to be used with combs to create the popular buzz cut styles, the introduction of plastic and metal guard attachments allowed barbers to buzz hair to the particular lengths required for these popular cuts more efficiently without the need for a separate comb. With short crew cuts as the mainstream hairstyle, some youth rebelled against convention, opting for longer “Elvis” hairstyles with sculptural ducktails and long sideburns (Marling 1994). The Ducktail, also known as the D.A. or “Duck’s Ass,” was “popular with budding juvenile delinquents who gathered around the motorcycle stand each morning at my high school . . . It was a gorgeous style that must have taken hours to cut and more hours to reshape each morning” (Staten 2001: 65). The style was invented in 1939 by a South Philadelphia barber named Joey Cirello, but did not become popular until the James Dean generation in the 1950s. During that time, some of the boys from the television show American Bandstand, which was shot in South Philadelphia, began to frequent the shop. Cirello told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “When the music managers started bringing their kids into the shop, we knew we were onto something” (Staten 2001: 66). As Elvis’s headlining Army haircut emphasized, however, with the draft in effect, most young men coming of age in the U.S. at the time would come into contact with the clippers at least once, even if they avoided them in the local barbershop. For many of these young men, the inevitable shearing associated with military service incited such trauma that an article in the New York Times encouraged them to get a “post-Elvis” transitional style with “normal” sideburns to lessen the pain (Mitgang 1957). This rite of passage was memorialized in a number of films, including Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), set in the late 1960s, which depicts the shearing of a number of recruits with electric hair clippers during the Vietnam War. During this period, then, electric hair clippers were used not only to cut the “official hair styles for men and boys” but to mark the initiation ritual for the military duty served by most young American men. The clipper’s association with the production of masculinity was solidified as most young men underwent the clipping of their hair as they were groomed for military service. Both the political structures that created the high probabilities that young men in the U.S. would undergo an initiation haircut in the military, and the economic structures which made it more likely for men to get their hair cut in a barbershop (or at home) with electric hair clippers structured the habitus of a generation to associate the production of

204 Alton Phillips

Figure 9.5 Elvis’s Army haircut. Photo Associated Press

a masculine self-presentation with clippers. Further, the resistance to mainstream masculine aesthetics with longer styles not cut with clippers reifies the centrality of clippers in the production of mid-century American masculinity. The structure of the field shaped the habitus of a generation of men to associate clippers with masculine self-presentation, and getting a buzz cut with “becoming a man.” This relationship is also embedded in the object itself. Clippers can be thought of as secondary agents, or indexes of the agency of those wielding them to construct mainstream masculinity (Gell 1998). This does not violate the Cartesian distinction between animate people and inanimate objects; discussing an object as a secondary agent is not to imbue it with human intentionality. An object is active only insofar as it elicits particular sense memory responses. “An object with new or subversive sensory qualities will send social relations off down a new path, not through any intention on the part of the object, but through its effects on the sets of social relations attached to various forms of sensory activity” (Gosden 2001). Thus the association between getting buzzed and “becoming a man” becomes embedded in the object itself, in that the object awakens particular sense memories in those who come into contact with it.

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 205

The electric hair clipper and the appropriation and resignification of mid-century masculinity Herb Pierce, a barber in Saint Matthews, Kentucky, recalls the moment that would change barbering forever: February 7, 1964 – the day the Beatles flew into New York City for their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Barber Wil Scarboro concurs: “The Beatles hurt me more than the hippies.” According to Pierce, the impact wasn’t immediate: “A lot of kids, their parents wouldn’t let them wear their hair long at first. But it took off in a big way in ’68. From then to ’74 it was hard.” The early 1970s were also difficult for Wahl Clipper. In addition to facing a protracted labor strike, demand for hair clippers dropped sharply, with sales of both professional and consumer models “plunging” in 1970 and 1971 (Wahl 2005). Pierce says the state of Kentucky lost about two thousand barbers, and many barbershops that did stay open became styling salons (Staten 2001: 53–54). The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reports that between 1972 and 1977 the number of barbershops across the U.S. declined by 25 percent, and has continued to decline since 1979. Undoubtedly influenced in part by the popularity of the Beatles style and the long hair of hippie style, most American men’s hair gradually grew longer between 1965 and 1970, thwarting the norms of close-cropped male hairstyles. Just as short hair on women in the 1920s sparked a moral panic, a furor erupted over men’s long hairstyles in the 1960s. Billboards in the Midwest read, “Beautify America, Get a Haircut” (see Figure 9.6). Violent acts were carried out on “patriotic” grounds, to enforce the “proper” correspondence between a “man” and his hair. On May 7, 1970, a fifteenyear-old boy was admitted to a hospital in California after being literally scalped by two men who claimed his long hair was un-American (Corson 1995). Such responses to the violation of sex/gender doxa emphasize the degree to which the connection between short hair and masculinity had been naturalized, and evidence the anxiety produced by its transgression. Public school authorities moved to discourage, if not ban outright, longer hair on male students in many locations. In the 1950s and early 1960s, high schools had exercised a largely unquestioned, and often unspoken, control over students’ self-presentation, including bans on jeans and mandates for tucked-in shirts in addition to regulations on hairstyles. These regulations commonly stipulated that hair could not cover eyebrows, ears or collars, and dictated the proper length and width of sideburns. The contestations over school regulation of hair were embedded in larger social struggles over the rights and autonomy of high school students. In the 1969 Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District case, the United States Supreme Court “ambiguously affirmed” that high school students were citizens. This case became central in future debates, allowing courts to rule both for and against regulations on students’ hair (Graham 2004). Between 1965 and 1975, over one hundred cases that included challenges

206 Alton Phillips

Figure 9.6 “Beautify America – Get a Haircut.” Photo Robert Altman

to regulations over student hairstyles were submitted to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals; nine reached the Supreme Court. In the end, the result was split. The third, fifth, sixth, ninth and tenth circuits upheld the rights of schools to regulate student hairstyles, while the first, second, fourth, seventh and eighth circuits ruled for the students. The Supreme Court refused to hear all nine cases that appealed to it, leaving the matter ultimately unsettled. In the testimony, administrators described long-haired young men as dirty and disorderly, and often objected that they would be mistaken for girls and thus get into places where they did not belong. Despite the mixed results, what is clear is that students emerged after 1975 having greater rights over their self-presentation in many school districts around the nation (Graham 2004). Further, with the end of the draft in 1973 and the conversion to an allvolunteer army in the United States, the likelihood that young men would be compelled to undergo the initiation haircut and be subjected to military haircut regulations decreased significantly. By the mid-1970s, despite some resistance, there was a growing acceptance of a plurality of styles for men’s hair (Corson 1995). Within this acceptance of plurality, however, lingered a strain of traditional American masculinity that continued to see barbershops and short buzz cuts as emblematic of an “authentic” masculine identity. For the remainder of the century, however, barbershops would never again be the primary spaces in which men had their hair cut, nor would the short styles produced by clippers be the dominant aesthetic in the construction of mainstream American masculine identities.

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 207 Further facilitating these changes was a significant change in the spatial organization of men’s haircutting: the growth of low-cost, high turnover unisex salon franchises. These operations were a source of significant competition for many barbershops. In these low-cost unisex salons, with their sterile, minimalist interiors, the efficiency of clippers became even more of a commodity. Underlying this spatial transition is a change in barbering and cosmetology licensing in many states. Beginning in the 1980s, states such as New Jersey eliminated barber-only licensing in favor of general cosmetology licensing. This means that the people cutting men’s hair are increasingly trained in a broader set of techniques than with barber-only licensing, such as perming and hair dyeing. The recession of state-sponsored tonsorial regulation, specifically the contestation and partial repeal of the tacit control operating in public schools, evidences a shift in the structure of social regulation from the modern to the late modern period that Bauman (2000) describes as a shift from panopticism to synopticism. Foucault (1975) describes panopticism as a mode of social regulation through which the specter of observation of the many by the few subjectifies the will to power and produces docile bodies. Mathiesen (1997) proposes that the panoptic mode of subjectification is also characterized by an inverse process he calls “synopticism.” He characterizes these techniques, through which the many are able to observe the few, as largely manifest by the mass media. While Mathiesen explicitly argues that panopticism and synopticism arose during the same period and that they function in tandem, Bauman (2000) reads him as suggesting that the transition from modernity to late modernity is characterized by a shift from panopticism towards synopticism. We see the increasing import of synopticism in the intensification of hair images and discourses, often based in commercial fashion cycles, circulating through the media, which play an increasing role in structuring gender presentation. However, it is important to question the extent to which this synopticism functions as a panopticism of a higher order. After the 1970s, with a growing acceptance of a plurality of styles on men, the variety of hairstyles also multiplied, from the shaved heads of workingclass skinheads to the dyed mohawks and unique styles of new wave and punk rock, to the gender-bending and androgynous looks of Annie Lennox and David Bowie. While hairstyles were and continue to be symbols of gender identity and a rebellious adolescent spirit, men’s hairstyles have increasingly become caught up in the cycles of commercial fashion trends. A survey of articles on men’s hair published in popular newspapers and magazines through the 1980s and 1990s shows both the rapidity of these cycles and the continued use of celebrities in their popularization. A 1985 article in People magazine reads: Men are becoming less uptight about their appearance and have begun to grow their hair long again for the first time since the activist days of

208 Alton Phillips the 1960s. Either because of the long hair sported by Christopher Lambert in the movie Greystoke, or the ponytails worn by male models in last season’s Italian fashion shows, the styles have been adopted by men who don’t want to be bothered with frequent haircuts and wish to project individuality rather than a group manifesto . . . Women are attracted to the current style, and long hair no longer is seen as a statement about the sexual life-style of its wearers. (54–55) This sentiment was also reflected in a January 1986 article in New York magazine and a March 1986 article in Harper’s Bazaar. Five years later, a July 1990 article in the New York Times Magazine read: Crew cuts are back in fashion, according to salon owner Todd Albright. The popularity of the low-upkeep style, seen on children as well as adult men, has been alternately attributed to stressful times, a desire to camouflage baldness, and the influence of media stars ranging from Oliver North to Tom Cruise. (24) The sentiment was again reflected in an interview with Oribe, “America’s hottest hairstylist,” in a July 1991 article in Gentlemen’s Quarterly. More recently, this pattern was reflected in the popularization of actor Ashton Kutcher’s seventies-style shag haircut and David Beckham-inspired “fauxhawk” styles. Amongst these new styles and the nostalgia for barbershops of years past, the clipper’s position within performative assemblages for the production of mid-century masculinity has not been lost on members of communities attempting to lay claim to or to subvert dominant conceptions of masculinity. “Andy’s Passing Tips,” a website for gender-transitioning individuals, highlights the intersection of two communities’ appropriation of clippers, recommending female-to-male transgendered individuals “[g]o for a very conservative, short-back-n’-sides cut, but avoid getting an all-over crew-cut . . . as these are often sported by the butch lesbians who you are trying to distinguish yourself from.” For many of those looking to create new forms of masculinity, or construct masculinity in new ways, habitus would present clippers as a potential tool for such projects. As urban gay communities grew in the 1970s, men in these areas began to appropriate cultural signifiers of masculinity as part of the construction of a gay identity and community, including the popularization of hard, muscle-bound bodies, mustaches, and short, cropped haircuts. In contrast, much of the representation of male homosexuality during the twentieth century up until this point was characterized by an effeminacy, such as the gay cowboy in Stan Laurel’s 1923 comedy short The Soilers, Dr. Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Wint and Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Albin in La Cage aux Folles (1978) (Russo 1987). Mae

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 209 West, one of few people during her time to acknowledge homosexuals, reported in a 1969 Life interview that, while her play The Drag was running in 1926, she would tell police not to beat up homosexuals because “a homosexual is a female soul in a male body. ‘Your hitting a woman, I says’” (sic) (Russo 1987). This belief, which might be seen today as sexist or homophobic, is rooted in the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and other proto-“gay” rights activists. Ulrichs described himself as an “Urning” to indicate his desire of other men, and explained, in his 1864 Research on the Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love, that this love was rooted in a female psyche being confined to a male body. This idea was extended further in the work of sexual rights activist Havelock Ellis, particularly his 1897 Sexual Inversion, and has been engaged with, in some form, by gay communities and activists through much of the twentieth century. For many of the members of these growing urban gay communities in the 1970s and 1980s who desired to create a “gay” non-feminine selfpresentation as a strategy of either resistance or survival, the historical relationship between clippers, buzz cuts and the production of masculinity would be prefigured in their habitus by earlier experiences in mid-century barbershops. The parodic appropriation by members of “gay” communities of classic tropes associated with mid-century American masculinity transgresses both the effeminacy that was associated with homosexuality in the cultural imagination of the time and the implicit heterosexuality of this mid-century masculinity. It is a similar kind of transgression that generated cultural anxiety and panic around women’s bobs in the 1920s and men’s long hair in the 1970s. Here, the anxiety produced by this transgression is channeled into erotic desire between members of the community. It is this transference that is the basis of queer techniques of parodic-erotic reappropriation. This new hyper-masculine aesthetic became a common trope within gay communities throughout the final decades of the twentieth century. For example, it is self-consciously adopted by the character Michael in Armistead Maupin’s novel Tales of the City, which stories life in 1970s San Francisco. It also arises in the fetishizing of “rough trade” and is represented in the stylized drawings of Tom of Finland, which feature exaggerated muscled bodies and cropped haircuts. Michelangelo Signorile (1997) describes buzz cuts as emblematic of a hyper-masculine “clone” gay identity adopted by many of those who populated urban gay communities and frequented the gay circuit party scene in the late 1980s and 1990s. In particular corners of these communities, “clipper parties” – where one could get a buzz cut along with a beer – began to be held in gay bars and at other gay events, such as the annual International Mister Leather competition, also the site of the annual Black and Blue circuit party. The website buzzedhard.com is another example of a segment of the gay community that has taken the reappropriation of clippers’ role in the production of masculinity to a particularly explicit extreme. Buzzedhard.com

210 Alton Phillips is an online community to which members contribute their own stories and photography, often intermingling buzz cuts and buzz-cutting with sexual activity. Members of the community also meet offline for “clipper parties” organized through the site. The men in this community describe the short buzz cuts that they give each other as “real men’s haircuts.” Photos and discussions of longer, more stylized cuts are degraded as feminine. Clippers are used as a fetish object in erotic play, with members expressing a particular affinity for retro hair clippers, specifically a Wahl Classic 76. The use of clippers in erotic play highlights both the parodic-erotic in the transgression of gender boundaries and clippers’ mechanical similarities to vibrators, both of which use an electromagnetic motor in a long shaft to produce vibrations. One series of images typifies the community’s particular use of clippers. The first image depicts a sign on the wall that indicates it is a “United States Marine Corps Barber Shop.” Tonics, creams and other paraphernalia crowd a countertop at the bottom of the image. In the multiple reflections of the mirrors we see an older man using clippers to shear the head of the younger man seated in the barber chair. Photographs of haircuts and haircutting cover the walls. What becomes clear as the series progresses, and elements of bondage and sexual activity enter into the scenario, is that this is probably not in fact a Marine Corps barbershop, but a parodic representation of such a space. It is, in fact, an addition built onto the home of the older man, in the manner of a sado-masochistic “dungeon.” The multiple mirrors on the wall, as well as the wallpaper of media images, invite contemplation of the ways in which tonsorial practice can function as techniques of the self. We see the structured relationship between clippers and masculinity deployed in a new environment, “blended” with homosexual sexual practices to construct a new form of masculine identity. This moment exposes some of the reasons why hair cutting can be so erotically charged. Hair is distinct in that it is one of the few parts of the body we regularly cut, shape, and style; these practices are also highly tactile. Further, as we have seen, hair has historically been intimately entangled in processes of gender selfconstruction and identification, which aggregate in a strong connection between the body as a material, corporeal object and the body as a social object. These images evidence an aggregation of masculine tropes. The barbershop, specifically a military barbershop, which recalls a regime of statesponsored haircutting, is reappropriated as a space of queer sexuality. The social relationship between barber and client is taken to its exaggerated extreme, with the client bound to the chair, accentuating the extent to which getting a haircut is not simply an act of self-determination. Finally, the electric hair clipper, a key object in the construction of mid-century American masculinity, is deployed to shape a traditional masculine corporeal aesthetic. By appropriating these existing tropes in the context of homosexual sexual practices, the men depicted are constructing a masculine gay identity. That

The erotic life of electric hair clippers 211 is, in these images, the body in the chair is being made into a man; being made into a man whilst sucking cock.

Conclusion Over the course of the twentieth century, we see a number of design changes in the production of electric hair clippers influenced by the social milieus in which they are used: The original industrial design; the import of streamlining popular in car design during the 1950s; the smaller, lighter-colored home models, suggestive of the oft-reproduced trope of a woman cutting a young boy’s hair. Further, the barbershops from which clippers were innovated are spaces in which one can become aware of the construction of the self through tonsorial practice (Stevenson 2001). Thus to the extent that practices of self-care function as techniques of the self, encouraging reflection on processes of self-construction, the organization of regimes of care over time illustrates Bauman’s argument that late modernity is characterized by a shift towards a synoptic society (2000). It is in this shift in visual culture, with the growth of the mass media, that we have seen an intensification of media penetration into regimes of self-care and an acceleration of aesthetic cycles. These changes in modes of visual representation, and thus the organization of modes of social regulation, have radically transformed the circulation of aesthetics. The rapid dissemination of aesthetic forms accelerate the pace at which styles cycle in and out of fashion, and increasingly provide for new forms of panoptic regulation to be exercised through the synoptic apparatus. With increasing consolidation of the media industry, synopticism presents the organizational inverse of panopticism – many watching the few, versus the few watching the many – but the extent to which this inversion also inverts the power relationship is unclear. Said differently, there is an extent to which synopticism may be thought of not as the inverse of panopticism but rather as panopticism of a higher order. Over the course of the last century, the clipper and its absence have marked two moments of the policing of gender boundaries – the “hair issue” of the 1920s and the “hair wars” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1920s, the cold steel of the clipper’s blades against women’s napes became emblematic of a larger cultural challenge to the “acceptable” role of women in society. Decades later, it was used to shear the hair of young men into the “official” haircuts of American masculinity; and when, in the late 1960s, it was abandoned and hairstyles grew longer, it ignited so-called “patriotic” violence to enforce the doxic correspondence between sex/gender and the body. Between these two moments, from crafting the standard men’s buzz cut to marking the military induction ritual, clippers played an important role in shaping the hair, masculinity and habitus of America’s men. This association was structured, in part, by a state-sponsored regime of conscription marked by clippered initiation haircuts, and a regulation of young men’s hair in public schools that went largely unchallenged until the late 1960s.

212 Alton Phillips The relationship between clippers and masculinity was not lost on the various communities challenging hegemony and the enforcement of strict binary correlation between sex/gender and the body. In claiming and subverting masculinity (or negating traditional femininity), many queer people adopted the clipper and the styles it produces as part of their appropriation and resignification of masculine bodily signifiers. During these processes, the clipper also became a fetish object involved in erotic play, in part due to its relation to masculinity directly, but also owing to its substantive similarities to vibrators and other sex toys. In this case, the performative is dislodged from its traditional institutionalization, appropriated and re-signified by queers in transgressive constructions of non-heterosexual masculinity. It is not a total decontextualization of the assemblage; rather it is a subtle twist or turn. This subtlety is due in part to the extent to which habitus structures the associations individuals have towards performatives, and the structures behind them. While change occurs slowly, it is important to recognize the degree to which these processes function to create increased flexibility and ambiguity in masculine self-presentation, as it is that increased flexibility and ambiguity that is the goal of queer political strategies of parody, appropriation, and re-signification in the first place.

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214 Alton Phillips Soulliere, Danielle M. 1997. “How Hairstyling Gets Done in the Hair Salon,” Michigan Sociological Review 11: 41–63. Staten, V. 2001. Do Bald Men Get Half-Price Haircuts? New York: Simon & Schuster. Stevenson, Karen. 2001. “Hairy Business: Organizing the Gendered Self.” Pp. 137–52 in Contested Bodies, ed. Ruth Holliday and John Hassard. London: Routledge. Synnott, Anthony. 1987. “Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair,” British Journal of Sociology 38 (3): 381–413. Trusty, L. Sherman. 1958. The Art and Science of Barbering. Los Angeles: Wolfer Press. Ulrichs, K. 1994 [1864]. The Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love: The Pioneering Work on Male Homosexuality. Trans. M. Lombardi-Nash. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Wahl, Jack. 2005. Wahl: History of Wahl Clipper Corp. Sterling, IL: John F. Wahl. Weitz, Rose. 2001. “Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation,” Gender & Society 15 (5): 667–686. West, C., and D. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1 (2): 125–151. Willett, Julie. 2000. Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop. New York: New York University Press. Williams, Louis. 1993. “‘Dennis’: The Relationship Between a Black Barbershop and the Community That Supports It,” Human Mosaic 27: 29–33. Wright, E. and T. Calhoun. 2001. “From the Common Thug to the Local Businessman: An Exploration into an Urban African American Barbershop,” Deviant Behavior 22 (3): 267–288.

10 Practicing authorship The case of Brecht’s plays Monika Krause

Bertolt Brecht collaborated with partners and friends throughout his life. Almost all his plays – including The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Galileo, and Mother Courage – are the product of a close cooperation between Brecht and a set of his colleagues. They shared in collecting material, translating sources, putting text into verse and editing and re-editing after rehearsals. Among forms of literary partnerships, the Brecht circle is an extreme case of sustained collective production. Public recognition, however, has been focused on the individual Brecht, and “Brecht” has come to denote an author like many others. What explains this discrepancy between the process of producing these plays and public recognition? How have these texts become associated with one individual? In my analysis, I draw on letters by Brecht and his collaborators, memoirs, biographical research and the reception of Brecht’s life and work. 1 Most prominent among his co-authors are the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann, the actress Grete Steffin, and the Danish journalist Ruth Berlau. It is tempting to focus on Brecht’s personality in trying to understand what is specific about the Brecht circle. Brecht is often said to be exceptionally charismatic and thus able to attract collaborators. He is sometimes portrayed as exceptionally ruthless in exploiting those around him. Sexist ideology is also suggested as a factor: Many of Brecht’s collaborators were women and some of them were his partners as well as his collaborators. The difficulties women faced in the literary field at that time need to be considered if we want to understand why that form of workshop emerged at that particular time. Brecht’s personality, however, is not enough to understand the elision of the contribution of his collaborators. Neither is gendered ideology alone – if understood as a set of free-floating meanings. Rather, it is the institution of authorship as a real abstraction from the practices of production which obliterates the role of the collaborators and hurts the women of the circle. The institutions of publishing, literary scholarship, biography, and journalism all have stakes in producing “Brecht” as the sole author of the work. Receiving Brecht as an “author” equivalent to other authors helps solve their particular practical problems of coordination

216 Monika Krause and strategies of reproduction. In this process everythng work-related is labeled as Brecht and the women become part of his private life, invisible as writers. I begin by reviewing work on authorship and collaboration, then analyze the collaborative practices that produced Brecht’s plays.

Approaches to authorship What does it mean to talk about “an author”? Or, as Foucault (1977) urged us to consider, how is an author produced? After the poststructuralist critiques of the 1960s and 1970s, we can no longer take the naive view that there is a simple relationship between the proper name, the person, the work, and its meaning. The author is a historically specific phenomenon and it is a specifically modern phenomenon. Much has been said about the elective affinity of the concept of the author with modern, Western individualism; feminists in particular have criticized the masculinist connotations of the concept (Moi 1985).2 Authorship can be traced to the late eighteenth century. Across genres, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark a transition from art produced in direct relationships of patronage to art produced more directly for an expanding public (Elias 1994, Bourdieu 1996). The legal form of authorship responds to the needs of a group of writers who sought to make a living by writing under these conditions (Vogel 1973, Woodmansee 1984). These shifts coincided with a shift in writers’ self-understandings and in readers’ expectations. Yet the author is not produced once and for all. For it to continue to exist, it needs to be reproduced again and again, in every generation, but also on a daily basis. Rather than analyze authorship only as a structural or legal reality, I analyze it from the bottom up as it is reproduced. From a producer’s perspective the contradictions of authorship can become visible. The case of Brecht’s plays allows us to look at the institution of authorship at its most unstable and potentially at its most violent.

Collaboration and authorship Students of literature have been interested in the idea of collaboration for some time. Traditionally, the aim of scholars studying collaboration was to understand exactly who wrote what and to correct attributions accordingly. Some scholars treated collaborations as a pollution of pure writing and tried to cleanse an author’s work from inauthentic materials. Others set out to establish collaborators as authors in their own right. This strategy has yielded some insights into the previously unacknowledged contribution of collaborators. Some of this work has been limited, however, by a tendency to take the category of authorship for granted: the aim has often been to establish the true authors of the texts in question, making authorship the starting point rather than the target of the investigation.

Practicing authorship 217 In the wake of structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of authorship, collaboration became interesting as a potential challenge to the ideology of individual authorship. A strand of recent work celebrates collaboration as a form of resistance against hegemonic conceptions of subjectivity and scholars have begun to reflect on the transgressive potential of collaboration in their own practices of writing and teaching (Peck and Mink 1998, Ede and Lunsford 1990, Leonard et al. 1994). Scholars have also begun to empirically analyze collaborative practices across literary history.3 On a general level, Becker (1982) and other sociologists have long maintained that the production of art is a collective process. For the more specific case of writing together literary scholars have examined various forms of co-writing and asked why and how writers collaborate, what its meanings are for the participants and how it affects the texts in question. Scholars have recovered the forgotten forms of collaboration before “authorship” became institutionalized (Masten 1994). Jack Stillinger (1991) and others have collected evidence that various forms of co-writing have been quite common throughout literary history, even at the height of the cult of the solitary genius in Romanticism. Stillinger also revealed the different forms multiple authorship can take: “[T]he young Keats being refined, polished and restrained by well-intentioned friends and publishers; the middle-aged Mill being spruced up by his wife for attractive autobiographical presentation; Coleridge constructing his philosophy with lengthy extracts taken over verbatim without acknowledgment from the Germans; Eliot seizing on the revisions and excisions of his mentor” (Stillinger 1991: 182). Given these findings, the question arises: If art is a collective process and if co-writing more specifically is such a common phenomenon, why do we continue to think of art work in terms of individual authors? Why does collaboration have to be discovered and rediscovered by scholars and other critics? How are these collective processes obliterated?

The making of epic drama From the beginning of his career, Brecht worked very closely with others. One of his first collaborators was Lion Feuchtwanger, who helped him revise The Life of Edward II of England (Brecht 1966). In 1924, when the play Man Equals Man was produced, Brecht was living in Berlin in an apartment that his girlfriend, the actress Helene Weigel, had rented for him. Elisabeth Hauptmann would visit in the morning, bringing some of her own translations of Kipling. They would edit and write together. At lunchtime, Brecht would go out to eat with Weigel and their son, Stefan, while Hauptmann would continue writing. Hauptmann came to Berlin when she was in her early twenties to study, to write and to escape the confines of her role as a private teacher in the country. She met Brecht at a party and soon became his secretary and closest collaborator. Hauptmann contributed to almost all of Brecht’s works

218 Monika Krause between 1925 and 1933, most notably the plays, including Man Equals Man, The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and Saint Joan of the Stockyards. Grete Steffin, a working-class actress and writer, worked with Brecht among others on Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Ruth Berlau, a Danish journalist and actress, would later work on The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Over the years, his collaborators would also include the writers Emil Hesse-Burri, Hermann Borchardt, and Hella Wuolijoki, the composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, and the directors Bernhard Reich and Slatan Dudow, to name but a few. These works are today known as Brecht’s and as his dramatic oeuvre they are key to what we understand Brecht to be about. There have recently been challenges to this attribution, led most provocatively by John Fuegi. Fuegi has incurred the wrath of Brecht’s heirs and devotees by setting out to debunk the genius Brecht. Fuegi’s and others’ recent research seeks to measure the respective input of Brecht and his co-workers and thus establish true authorship (Fuegi 2002, Horst 1992, Hanssen 1995). In so doing, these scholars take for granted the concept of authorship and overlook the truly collaborative nature of producing these works. The collaborators all came from the same milieu, which provided shared orientations and artistic ambitions. The inner circle shared an ideological position and a vision of a larger political contribution. The “third cause” came to be the label for the cause of the workers’ movement and these artists saw themselves as contributing to that movement within the realm of art. Weigel introduced Brecht to communism, Hauptmann joined the Communist Party in 1929 and Steffin had been active in the labor movement since her teenage years. To Hauptmann, Brecht, and Steffin sheer productivity was a value in and of itself, regardless of the concrete publishing arrangement. They disciplined each other to increase the output of the workshop. They were used to working on a variety of projects at the same time and the process of collecting ideas and using and reusing them was a collective one. Many of the Brecht– Hauptmann plays – and some of their poems – were based on translations of foreign sources; sometimes, as in the case of the Chinese poems, on translations of translations. Hauptmann translated Kipling and got Brecht interested in Japanese No theatre. Translation is by its very nature collaborative – it is collaboration with the writer of the original. But in their routines, Brecht and Hauptmann made the back-and-forth process of writing and editing integral to their work. Hauptmann would provide a first draft of a translation, Brecht would edit it, they would discuss the piece, edit it again, and Hauptmann would finally prepare it for publication. The plays and some of the short stories draw on diverse sources such as newspaper clipping and popular songs. Hauptmann contributed sources based on her knowledge of English and interest in American popular culture. After Brecht’s death, Hauptmann recalled: “The ideas for a play came easy [to Brecht] – 10 to 20 pages – but then to work it

Practicing authorship 219 through dramaturgically – that was hard” (quoted in Hanssen 1995: 19).4 Episodes and fables had to be turned into dialogue, the material needed to be structured, songs and choir passages had to be written. Man Equals Man existed as a rough draft when Hauptmann joined Brecht. She found a solution to a central problem of the plot: how to motivate the main character’s getting involved with three soldiers (Hanssen 1995: 21–22). Hauptmann suggested they could tempt him with a proposed deal regarding an elephant. Consequently Brecht had her hired by Kiepenheuer to help him with this play. Hauptmann worked with Brecht at his family’s home in Augsburg and at hers in Westphalia (Hanssen 1995: 23). She contributed translations of Kipling (Lyon 1975). The Threepenny Opera, the biggest success of the circle, is based on Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s eighteenth-century play The Beggar’s Opera. She suggested the project to Brecht, who suggested it to Ernst Aufricht, the manager of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Hauptmann also contributed passages from Happy End. It was Weill’s music that made the play so memorable to many. On Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht wrote: “The play is based on the play Happy End by Elisabeth Hauptmann in collaboration with Borchardt, Burri and Hauptmann” (quoted in Hanssen 1995: 50).The theme of a young girl trying to do good first appears in Hauptmann’s story “Bessie Soundso” about the Salvation Army. There are strong parallels between Happy End and Saint Joan, and the latter contains songs from the former (Hanssen 1995: 58). Knopf writes, “One can conclude from the material that Emil Hesse-Burri and Elisabeth Hauptmann did most of the initial work, including the writing and they provided the structure of the fable; Brecht’s work consisted mostly in checking the proposals, editing the texts and expanding them” (Knopf 1986: 107). Mittenzwei suggests that Brecht, Hauptmann, and Burri would meet regularly in Brecht’s apartment and work on the play together, while Hans Borchardt, Bernhard Reich, and Walter Benjamin consulted on the project (Mittenzwei 1987: 329). Commentators have noted that the female characters in Brecht plays became deeper once Hauptmann started working for him (Fuegi 2002). The dialogue in the play is enhanced by the different voices of the collaborators and the co-writing underscores the pastiche element of epic drama (Kebir 2002). The plays were also written with a view to their performance. Happy End was initially conceived around operetta singer Fritzi Massary – Brecht originally called it the “Massary Project.” Work on a play continued during rehearsals, including the actors in the production process. As Hauptmann notes in her diary, “B[recht] is in the middle of rehearsals for Baal . . . casting is finalized . . . Afterwards worked on Baal” (quoted in Hanssen 1995: 28). The Threepenny Opera was not finished until days before it premiered and Happy End premiered as a draft. Collaborators shared editorial authority. In 1946 Eric Bentley worked closely with Brecht in Berlin and it was Hauptmann who supervised his work translating the dramas of the workshop. In his memoirs he recalled how Hauptmann wrote texts published

220 Monika Krause as Brecht’s that were never presented to Brecht for approval. “Brecht’s lines were sometimes corrected by Frau Hauptmann and it was fine with him. ‘Yes, yes,’ he would tell me, ‘let that stand’” (Bentley 1991: 25).

A workshop in context Workshops have a long history – the painters’ workshops of the Renaissance are perhaps the best-known example. A workshop led by a man staffed by his lovers is a more historically specific phenomenon – but it is not unique to the Brecht case. What made this workshop possible at this point in time? It is tempting to attribute it to Brecht’s exceptional charisma. In many accounts, it is Brecht’s personal ability to make people work for him that explains the workshop. Others say Brecht needed more help than other writers. Still others emphasize the actors’ intentions to break with bourgeois forms of living. There are other factors to consider, however. The womanizing genius does not emerge as a type before the end of the nineteenth century when women gradually gained formal equality. The formal liberation of women since the turn of the century was not matched by positive equality, especially within the arts. Publishing with a male author marked a transitional phase of women’s incorporation into the field. The women in Brecht’s circle were part of the generation of “new women” who gained visibility after World War I. After centuries of systematic exclusion from the public sphere, women had benefited from a series of legal reforms: As of 1909 women could attend universities in Germany; in 1918 the Republican revolution gave them the vote. During and after the war they moved into the cities to work, replacing soldiers and men who had died in the war. It was under these conditions that Marie-Luise Fleisser moved from a girls’ school in provincial Ingoldstadt to Munich to take up literary studies. During her first year she left the Catholic girls’ dorm to live in her own apartment and joined the Bohemians in Munich and the circle around Lion Feuchtwanger. Though Elisabeth Hauptmann was forbidden by her wealthy parents to attend university, she was able to defy her parents’ will, partly because she could move to Berlin with a reasonable hope of obtaining one of the secretarial positions opening up for women there. Hauptmann worked as a secretary and translator before she joined Brecht’s team in late 1924. She had started writing well before that and she continued to write on her own, even if her work with Brecht often left her little time for her own work. “Worked only a little because I was at Brecht’s. Translated Kipling. Some beautiful things,” she notes in her diary on 13 March 1926 (quoted in Kebir 1997: 44). Several of her stories were pub-lished in Uhu magazine and the Berliner Börsenkurier newspaper during the 1920s. With another author, Emil Hesse-Burri, Hauptmann wrote for radio productions. The young worker Grete Steffin met Weigel and Brecht in a communist theatre group. The contact to the Brechts afforded her a chance to pursue her literary ambitions.

Practicing authorship 221 Hauptmann, Steffin, and Berlau found both meaning and resources in their work with Brecht. Paying publication opportunities were scarce. Even when Brecht was already well established, his pieces were not always easy to sell. Hauptmann’s diaries attest to the difficulties she encountered in her role as Brecht’s agent. The number of target journals was small, and sometimes neither the Uhu nor the Vossche Zeitung nor Scherl’s Magazine wanted a piece. When the National Socialists took power in Germany, many of these sources of income dried up; like other writers Hauptmann, Brecht, and Steffin went into exile and wrote for the drawer. Women’s writing had traditionally been accorded low value and associated with specific forms such as letters and the novel. In poetry and drama women were extremely under-represented. For a playwright to be noticed plays need to be produced; and having a play produced requires access to directors and stages. Drama was public in its content, and Brecht reflected literary conventions when he said, “It has not been possible for me to find a vision strong enough in the relationship of a man to a woman that would be able to sustain an entire play” (quoted in Fuegi 2002: 172). Within drama, women were associated with the low-status genres such as children’s theatre and romantic comedies. The literary field continued to erect barriers against female writers in the 1920s. Between 1918 and 1933, 68 plays by women premiered at one of the 218 main German theatres listed in Willett’s Theatre in the Weimar Republic. Out of 476 first-time productions that Willett lists as noteworthy, only six are by female authors.5 It is clear that both Hauptmann and Steffin agreed to publish their own work under Brecht’s name. When Hauptmann was asked for her reasons, she said: “His name would carry more weight.” Steffin said, “It made more money.” Because he was well-known, Brecht was often offered projects and handed them on to his associates. When writer Martin Anderson Nexo asked Brecht to translate his autobiography from Danish into German, Grete Steffin accepted the job. Publishing under the name of a well-known man was not an uncommon strategy at that time. We know for example that Zelda Fitzgerald published short stories under her husband’s name because it would earn more money. Like Fitzgerald, as a well-known author Brecht had contractual obligations to deliver certain types of new writing regularly to his publishing houses. The writing of female associates could be published easily this way and could help fulfill these obligations.

Authorship as a real abstraction In his book Brecht and Company, John Fuegi portrays Brecht as someone who has no respect for his co-workers, friends, or lovers and who seeks to exploit them at every opportunity. This is at best an incomplete account and distorts systematically by attributing complex social outcomes to individual

222 Monika Krause desire or intent. It is the institution of authorship itself, which systematically abstracts the work from the practices of its production and obliterates the collaborative nature of the work – and therewith his partners’ contribution. The formal designation of authorship in the legal sense is only one anchor of this abstraction from the context of production. The “author” as an established and familiar “thing” also provides a coordinating function and solves many other people’s practical needs. The real abstraction from practice is amplified by the social organization of the publishing industry, of the press, and of literary scholarship. Each of these institutions has its own stakes in making “Brecht” an author like other authors. In this process, actors’ meanings are appropriated and come to confront them as external forces. In the case of Brecht, in private there seems to have been little disagreement between parties about who wrote what. We have already discussed some of the shared meanings and decisions among the collaborators. Brecht also often acknowledged the contributions of his collaborators. As Brecht wrote in a private dedication of the manuscript Man Equals Man to Hauptmann: “It was a troublesome play and even compiling the manuscript out of 20 pounds of paper was heavy work. It took me two days, half a bottle of Cognac, four bottles of seltzer, eight to ten cigars and all my patience and it was the only thing I did by myself” (quoted in Häntzschel 2002a: 162). To Steffin, he wrote about the Threepenny Novel after celebratory reviews following joint writing and editing: “Generally, you seem to have written a masterpiece, old muck. They especially celebrate your pure language. No kidding: it is good, to have the most demanding reader at home” (quoted in Häntzschel 2002a: 218). From early on, the plays written by Hauptmann, Brecht, and co. were primarily received as Brecht’s and the recognition was associated with his person alone. Brecht had celebrated some early successes in Munich as a protégé of Lion Feuchtwanger along with his then-collaborator stagedesigner Caspar Neher. He had made his name as a prospect and this proved to have an avalanche effect. Critics began to take a stand for or against him; they reviewed “Brecht” and consistently personalized their attention, creating an individual behind the text. The battle between Brecht and the leading critic of the time, Alfred Kerr, took on a dynamic of its own (Wyss 1977). In the public’s perception, everything work-related became labeled as “Brecht” and the women became invisible as writers. Bavarian writer Marie-Luise Fleisser’s play Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt), the most celebrated production of a female-authored play in the Weimar Republic, demonstrates this tendency to the extreme. Fleisser worked on this play in Munich when Brecht was in Berlin and there is little evidence of any contact between the two at that time. Despite this, in a generally enthusiastic review of the play, Kerr playfully repeated the line, “if Fleisser exists.” “Fleisser,” Kerr wrote, “is a gifted naturalist – if she exists . . . and if she is not a pseudonym for Brecht” (Häntzschel 2002a: 75). The collaborative work becomes at best an afterthought – as when the

Practicing authorship 223 contribution of one of the women to Brecht’s work is emphasized – against the existing icon Brecht. Professional readers infer the positions of an individual from the work and expect a certain consistency. Where it is lacking they produce that consistency, as that of an artist but also often as that of the person Brecht (Barthes 1977). The convention in journalism to use personal birthdays and other anniversaries to catch readers’ attention further personalizes authorship. General readers are also expected to be receptive to the individualization of the author. Single authorship solves a coordination problem for them as well: It reproduces the way they are taught to think of themselves. A variety of practices have drawn on the value of the brand, have reproduced it and have enhanced it by their investments. Its value grows and with that the work is more and more removed from the context of its production. Literary scholars establish their careers by becoming authorities on one of the canonical authors. Evoking a big name confers status. The most careful interpretative work is often done on the basis of a single text, treating each play in its own right. Yet, in the case of Brecht, the most influential works of interpretation focus on “Brecht’s” work as a whole. The plays are grouped with a variety of other texts as Brecht’s work – including the poems and his letters, yet excluding the work of his collaborators published under their own names. For the various institutions of reception and their interests of valuation, comparability is important. Labeling Brecht the author of the workshop’s products makes Brecht comparable to other authors; comparing “Brecht” to other authors obliterates the specificities of production for the case of Brecht. Brecht and Piscator came to stand for two different projects that competed closely within the theater scene in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic. The logic of that competition encouraged an equivalency of both names – a game in which Brecht actively participated. Later these comparisons became the basis of dissertations and books. Scholars have compared “Brecht” in book-length treaties to Lessing, Heine, Büchner, Shaw, and Adamov among others. As early as the 1920s Hauptmann was looking to establish a car sponsorship deal for Brecht. She sought to find out what he would have to do to get a free car. Her attempts failed. His name has since been used for various other institutions, some of them closely concerned with his person or the texts associated with him such as the International Brecht Society, or the Brecht Jahrbuch. Memoirs of Brecht have become a genre in themselves. His expartners Paula Banholzer and Ruth Berlau have published books on their lives with Brecht, as have his apprentice directors Manfred Wekwerth and Werner Hecht and the British-American critic Eric Bentley (Banholzer, Poldner, and Eser 1981, Berlau and Bunge 1985, Bentley 1991, Hecht 1978, Wekwerth 1976). Others draw more broadly on the associations of the name such as the Brecht-Forum, a cultural center in New York City and the Brecht School, a public high school in his hometown of Augsburg. The song “ICE Bertolt Brecht” by the punk band Goldene Zitronen satirizes these

224 Monika Krause appropriations – its title suggesting a high-speed train in West Germany named after the supposedly revolutionary artist.

Differential alienation The author is beyond the control of any individual – including Brecht himself. Authorship confronts him as something external as well and the abstraction of meanings does a certain amount of violence to his experience. Foucault was to protest the violence involved in the expectation of consistency when he replied to an interviewer: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order” (Foucault 1977: 17). For Brecht the person, however, authorship also brings considerable power. It is a power he also often used on behalf of his team, for example when he organized the move to exile and when he was able to set up shop in the G.D.R. with considerable privileges after the Second World War. Yet he can command the most authentic use of his name and can draw on other people’s investments when doing so. The collaborators are alienated from themselves and each other, from their texts and the material and symbolic recognition for those texts. Authorship comes to stand between them and between Brecht and them. Hauptmann sometimes received credit as a translator – she received 12.5 percent of proceeds from The Threepenny Opera. Her name appears as a co-author on several of the plays – partly because Brecht had excluded co-authored plays from his contract with Ullstein. Most of the time, though, once a piece was published under Brecht’s name – even as the result of a consensual strategy – the royalties would automatically go to Brecht’s account. Brecht could afford to wait and see; the default worked in his favor. The contributors had to ask for their share if only to help pay their living expenses. Hauptmann in particular acquired a reputation for her constant negotiating and “petty nagging.” After Brecht left Kiepenheuer in 1925, she lost her salary as his secretary and was dependent on income from her writings. In a letter to Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill references Hauptmann’s nickname, “Tantiemensadie” (“Royaltiessadie”) and reports that dramaturges would shout “hide the plays, Hauptmann is coming to edit!” (Häntzschel 2002a: 164). Separated from the group in exile, Hauptmann wrote to Brecht, asking for compensation for her work on the play Roundheads and Pointed Heads, somewhat embarrassed and belittling her own contribution: “Even though I was not important in the further course of writing except for one basic idea – the horses – which I am truly ashamed to write about, I would like to claim my share of the earnings like in The Threepenny Opera.” Shortly before his death, Brecht did assign the rights of The Threepenny Opera to Elisabeth Hauptmann, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle to Ruth Berlau but his wife Helene Weigel successfully challenged the validity of the will and secured most of the proceeds for herself and her children (Hayman 1983, Völker 1976).

Practicing authorship 225 After Brecht’s death, the “work” came to confront those who survived him in an even more reified manner. Hauptmann, who played a leading role in publishing Brecht’s collected works, was heavily criticized for not justifying her editorial decisions in great detail. This contrasts strongly with the independent role she had played in writing and editing these texts in the first place. But Brecht “the person” could no longer counteract Brecht “the author” and the various interests that had been attached to it.

The invention of Brecht’s private life As everything work-related is labeled Brecht, the work is taken out of the context of its production and re-attached to Brecht as an individualized person. The context of his life in turn is separated from the work and construed as private. This individual is the starting point for biographers and others who are in the business of mining letters and anecdotes for revealing details. Brecht’s relationships to his collaborators and especially the women have been read as primarily personal and sexual relationships. Brecht’s biographer Klaus Völker is often quoted remarking that Brecht “changed his women like a shirt.” The poet Robert Gernhardt has professed that one would like to know “womit und wodurch und weshalb ihm die Frauen derart” – “how and with what and why women fell for him this way” – expressing the hope “to learn from the classics” (Gernhardt 1996: 261). Even though the letters between Brecht and his female co-workers speak as often about joint projects, publication possibilities, and contracts as they speak about love, the interpretations of the lives of the women stress their private troubles as lovers of the unreliable genius. Not just his letters but also his work is mined for direct evidence of his cruelty towards them. Of the surviving letters by these women, the most longing and desperate are typically cited and re-cited. All women associated with Brecht are retrospectively attributed a secret desire to make him marry them – even in cases where evidence for a romantic relationship is very thin. Marie-Luise Fleisser – like Brecht a protégé of Lion Feuchtwanger – is counted again and again among Brecht’s lovers. Even though there is little contemporary evidence for such a relationship, Brecht’s biographers are ready to interpret her life throughout the 1920s accordingly. Hayman claims that Fleisser was so disappointed to hear about Brecht’s marriage that she immediately got engaged to another poet (Hayman 1983). Fuegi (2002) reports that she attempted suicide after Brecht’s marriage, a claim for which there is no evidence.6 It is unclear whether Hauptmann and Brecht were ever lovers, yet commentators typically repeat that she tried to commit suicide in 1929, when she learned that Brecht and Weigel had married. The predominant image of the Brecht circle is today one of a genius and a harem of lovers rather than of a workshop for writing. To correct this portrayal is not to say there was nothing sexual about these relationships

226 Monika Krause – in many cases there was. Yet even the sexual and emotional aspects of these relationships are poorly understood when isolated from the practices of the participants and their social context. These misrepresentations are, however, not easy to counter in a lasting way – they are a consequence of the gendered logic of authorship.

Conclusion The defining works of Brechtian epic theater – such as The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, and the Lehrstücke, among others – are collective productions; yet these texts have been subsumed into the life work of one person and “Brecht” has come to stand in for an author like many others. Even against considerable active and passive resistance from subjects’ own attempts to create meaning and a narrative and their writing practices, individual authorship is reproduced. The institutions of publishing, literary scholarship, biography, and journalism all have stakes in producing Brecht as an author like other authors to solve their particular problems of coordination and strategies of reproduction. For the collaborators this contributed to their alienation. Their work came to confront them as something external and their recognition by others was mediated through the construction of “Brecht,” the author. Is this alienation inevitable? How could authorship be more in tune with actual writing practices? Authorship is institutionally firmly entrenched and, in order to formulate and identify oppositional projects, it is not enough to simply deconstruct authorship or try to undo it by unconventional writing or reading practices. It is worth investigating more closely in these terms how the relationship between practices and authorship has changed historically and in particular in the last decades. Has authorship become more democratic? Here, I can only hint at some of the developments worth considering. The gender inequalities in the literary field that have made possible the Brechtian workshop seem to have lessened. Women today find it easier to publish on their own and access to stages may be more open to female playwrights. The prominence of Sarah Kane, Carol Churchill, and Elisabeth Jellinek bear witness to the new possibilities that have opened up for female playwrights. Have the technological innovations of the last decades – most notably the internet – lessened the separation of authorship from writing practices for men and women? The internet has made available broader opportunities for publishing. Blogging has often been hailed as a vehicle of the democratization of authorship. Some non-traditional authors such as the breast cancer patients studied by Orgad (2005) have used the internet to share their experience and create public narratives. Certain experiments notwithstanding, however, the impact on the literary scene of web-only publishing has been less dramatic than in other genres such as journalism, and the impact on the performing arts has been minimal.7 We also know that attention to websites

Practicing authorship 227 is highly concentrated and it is important to distinguish between the opportunity to publish and the opportunity to reach broader audiences and have an impact in the world. Other developments may also have heightened rather than alleviated the tensions between writing practices and effective authorship: increasing concentration in the publishing industry and cuts in public funding for the performing arts may have made authorship less democratic. Producers concentrate their budget for promotion to very few candidates. This might bring the alienation of unprecedented fame to the very few, and the alienation of obscurity or niche success to the many.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

A series of recent biographies have made new material on the women around Brecht (specifically Weigel, Berlau, and Hauptmann) available to the Germanreading public. See Häntzschel (2002a), Horst (1992), Kebir (1997, 2000, 2002), Stern (2000), Hanssen (1995), Hauck (forthcoming). Letters and diaries are published as Brecht and Hecht (1973), Brecht et al. (1990), Brecht et al. (1992), Fleisser and Rühle (2001), Steffin and Hauck (1999). On the problem of Mitarbeit see also Willett (1983) and Wiedenmann (1988). Some feminists have expressed concerns about the political consequences of such abstract critiques and have sought to recover the concept in the name of a concern with “agency,” and in particular feminine or other previously marginalized “agencies” (Christian 1988, Miller 1986). On collaborations see among others Laird (1994–95; 2000) Köstenbaum (1989) Stillinger (1991), London (1999), Woodmansee and Jaszi (1994), Hahn (1991), Horst (1992), Pethica (1988), Mudge (1989). Translations from sources in German are mine. Compiled from Willett (1988), Stürzer (1993). The legend of an affair between Fleisser and Brecht was reinforced by Fleisser’s short story Avant-garde, in which a provincial female writer gets drawn into and destroyed by the urban Bohème around a famous male poet. Häntzschel (2002b) argues that for Fleisser the story of being Brecht’s victim presented in Avant-garde was an opportune explanation for her disappearance from the literary scene in the 1930s. But see McGann (2001).

Works cited Banholzer, Paula, Axel Poldner, and Willibald Eser. 1981. So viel wie eine Liebe: der unbekannte Brecht: Erinnerungen und Gespräche. Munich: Universitas. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Becker, Howard Saul. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bentley, Eric. 1991. The Brecht Memoirs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Berlau, Ruth, and Hans Bunge. 1985. Brechts Lai-Tu: Erinnerungen und Notate. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1966. Edward II: A Chronicle Play. New York: Grove Press.

228 Monika Krause Brecht, Bertolt, and Werner Hecht. 1973. Arbeitsjournal. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brecht, Bertolt, Marianne Zoff, Hanne Hiob, and Günter Gläser. 1990. Briefe an Marianne Zoff und Hanne Hiob. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brecht, Bertolt, Paula Banholzer, Helmut Gier, and Jürgen Hillesheim. 1992. Liebste Bi: Briefe an Paula Banholzer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Christian, Barbara. 1988. “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14 (Spring): 67–69. Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. 1990. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Elias, Norbert. 1994. Sociology of a Genius. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fleisser, Marieluise, and Günther Rühle. 2001. Briefwechsel 1925–1974. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fuegi, John. 2002. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. New York: Grove Press. Gernhardt, Robert. 1996. Gedichte: 1954–1994. Zurich: Haffmans Verlag. Hahn, Barbara. 1991. Unter falschem Namen: von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hanssen, Paula. 1995. Elisabeth Hauptmann: Brecht’s Silent Collaborator. New York: Peter Lang. Häntzschel, Hiltrud. 2002a. Brechts Frauen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. ——. 2002b. Schlagschatten Vergangenheit. Marie-Luise Fleissers Bemühungen um Rückkehr in die literarische Öffentlichkeit. In Cämmerer et al. Erfahrungen nach dem Krieg. Autorinnen im Literaturbetrieb 1945–1950. Frankfurt. Hauck, Stefan. Forthcoming. Die im Schatten sieht man nicht. Grete Steffin – Leben und Werk. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hayman, Ronald. 1983. Brecht: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. Hecht, Werner. 1978. Brecht. Vielseitige Betrachtung. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Kunst und Gesellschaft. Hecht, Werner, and Helene Weigel. 2000. Helene Weigel: eine grosse Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Horst, Astrid. 1992. Prima inter pares: Elisabeth Hauptmann, die Mitarbeiterin Bertolt Brechts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kebir, Sabine. 1997. Ich fragte nicht nach meinem Anteil: Elisabeth Hauptmanns Arbeit mit Bertolt Brecht. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ——. 2000. Abstieg in den Ruhm: Helene Weigel: eine Biographie. Berlin: AufbauVerlag. ——. 2002. Ein akzeptabler Mann?: Brecht und die Frauen. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag. Knopf, Jan. 1986. Brecht-Handbuch Theater: eine Ästhetik der Widersprüche. Stuttgart: Metzler. Köstenbaum, Wayne. 1989. Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. New York: Routledge. Laird, Holly. 2000. Women Co-authors. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ——. ed. 1994–95. “Forum: On Collaborations, Parts 1 and 2,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13 and 14: 231–240, 7–18.

Practicing authorship 229 Leonard, James S., Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis and Jeanette Harris (eds.). 1994. Author-ity and textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. West Cornwall, CT: Locus Hill Press. London, Bette. 1999. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lyon, James. 1975. Bertolt Brecht and Rudyard Kipling. A Marxist’s Imperialist Mentor. The Hague: Mouton. McGann, Jerome. 2001. Radiant Textuality: Literature Since the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave/St Martins. Masten, Jeffrey. 1994. “Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Miller, Nancy. 1986. “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mittenzwei, Werner. 1987. Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht oder der Umgang mit den Welträtseln. 2 vols. Berlin: Aufbau. Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Mudge, Bradford. 1989. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Orgad, Shani. 2005. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang. Peck, Elisabeth, and Joanna Stephens Mink. 1998. Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy, Albany: SUNY Press. Pethica, James. 1988. “‘Our Kathleen’: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the Writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan,” Yeats Annual 6: 3–31. Steffin, Margarete, and Stefan Hauck. 1999. Briefe an berühmte Männer: Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Stern, Carola. 2000. Männer lieben anders: Helene Weigel und Bertolt Brecht. Berlin: Rowohlt. Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press. Stürzer, Anne. 1993. Dramatikerinnen und Zeitstücke. Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Theatergeschichte von der Weimarer Republik zur Nachkriegszeit. Stuttgart: Metzler. Vogel, Martin. 1973. “Der literarische Markt und die Entstehung des Verlags- und Urheberrechts bis zum Jahr 1800.” Pp. 117–136 in Rhetorik, Ästhetik, Ideologie: Aspekte einer kritischen Kulturwissenschaft. Völker, Klaus. 1976. Bertolt Brecht: eine Biographie. Munich: Hanser. Wekwerth, Manfred. 1976. Brecht? Berichte, Erfahrung, Polemik. Munich: Hanser. Wiedenmann, Ursula. 1988. “Frauen im Schatten. Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitautorin. Das Beispiel der literarischen Produktion Bertold Brechts” in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Munich: Beck. Willett, John. 1983. “Bacon ohne Shakespeare? – The Problem of Mitarbeit,” Brecht Yearbook 12: 121–137. ——. 1988. The Theatre of the Weimar Republic. New York: Homes and Meier.

230 Monika Krause Woodmansee, Martha. 1984. “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the Author,” Eighteenth Century Studies 17: 425. Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi. 1994. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wyss, Monika (ed.). 1977. Brecht in der Kritik: Rezensionen aller BrechtUraufführungen. Munich: Kindler.

Index

Abbott, Andrew D. 36, 39, 43 Abel, Sam 183, 190n18 accountants 129–48 accounting facts 130, 137, 139–42, 143, 146 action 5, 8, 88, 193, 194–5 Adler, Deborah Faye 79n8 adolescence 44 Adorno, Theodor W. 168n21, 171, 172, 185 ‘adventure of the spirit’ (aventure de l’esprit) 87, 100, 101 aesthetics 211 African Americans 196, 200 Ahlquist, Karen 185 alienation 224, 226, 227 American Sociological Association 4 American studies 3, 9 Anderson, Benedict 111, 124 Andre the Giant 162 anima / animus 70–1, 73, 80n13 anthropology: cultural 3; of the state 83 architecture 86, 92, 96, 98 Arendt, Hannah 14 Aristotle 7, 8 Aronczyk, Melissa 105–28 art 35, 190n21; authorship 216; career maintenance 48; as collective process 217 artifacts 5, 6, 10, 26; see also objects audiences: British cultural studies 3; opera 172, 174, 175, 176–87; postmodern 150; reception strategies 158; wrestling 159, 160, 164, 165, 166; see also spectator positions Austin, J. L. 195 Austin, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve 152 Australia 3 authenticity: ‘authentic inauthenticity’

149, 150, 166n2; denaturation 96; Kaliningrad bric-à-brac 29, 30, 31; poetry 51–2; wrestling 149, 151, 154, 161, 164 author function 46–7, 48, 50 authority 113 authorship 36, 215, 216–17, 221–4, 226, 227 autonomy 143 Auyero, Javier 189n11 Bachelard, Gaston 61, 66, 68, 70–1, 73–5, 77, 79n7, 80n13 Badcock, John 155 Bagehot, Walter 7 balance sheet 132, 135, 138 banal nationalism 112–13 Banholzer, Paula 223 barbershops 196, 197–201, 203, 206–7, 208, 210, 211 Barnum, P. T. 165–6, 168–9n35 Barthes, Roland 149, 159, 161, 168n25, 183 Bauman, Zygmunt 207, 211 The Beatles 205 beauty 174, 175–6, 178, 181, 185, 187–8 Becker, Howard S. 4, 9, 38, 44–5, 50, 54n14, 217 Beckham, David 208 beer bottles 18–19 ‘belief effect’ 161 Benjamin, Walter 14, 15–16, 30, 32n3, 33n6, 125n9, 219 Bentley, Eric 219–20, 223 Benzecry, Claudio 171–92 Berlau, Ruth 215, 218, 221, 223, 224 Berlin, Isaiah 111 Bernays, Edward 115

232 Index Billig, Michael 112 ‘Birmingham School’ 2–3 body 77–8; habitus 194–5; opera 185, 187 Borchardt, Hermann 218, 219 Boulez, Pierre 171 Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 7–8, 9, 45; action 193, 194, 195; ‘belief effect’ 161; critique of mass society theory 158; dispositions 62; illusio 159–60, 164, 194–5; literary field 42, 48; practical sense 80n15; ‘sociodicy’ 189n5 Bowie, David 207 boxing 155, 167n14 branding 105, 107–10, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120–4 Brecht, Berthold 215–27 bric-à-brac 15, 16, 17–27 British cultural studies 2–3, 158 Brodsky, Josef 32 Brymer, Charles 113, 115 buildings 92–3, 94, 96–7 bureaucratization 87, 91 Burke, Kenneth 8 Burns, Martin ‘Farmer’ 164 Butler, Judith 193, 195, 196–7 Cain, Julien 86 Calhoun, Craig 1–12, 111, 121–2 Callas, Maria 186, 188 capitalism 109, 124; ‘creative destruction’ 117; Russian-style 29; spectator position 150 capitalization 131, 132–3, 136–7, 142–3 career trajectories of poets 43–51; career entry 43, 44–6; establishment 43, 46–8; maintenance 43, 44, 48–9; projection 43–4, 49–51 Carey, James 114, 116, 158 Carnie 154, 155, 157 carnivals 151, 156–7 Carper, James 38 celebrities 150 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 2–3 Certeau, Michel de 8 Chambliss, Daniel F. 38 Chamson, André 86 Chastel, André 86, 87, 97 Chicago School 4, 116 Chihuly, Dale 58, 79n3 China 121

Chung, Kanik 68, 79n11 Churchill, Carol 226 Cirello, Joey 203 class: opera 174, 175–6, 187; stratification 27 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 217 collaborative authorship 215, 216–17, 218 collecting 30 collective cultural capital 36, 52 Colón Opera House 172–7, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187 commoditization 20, 22, 23 communications studies 3, 158 communism 218 community 107, 111 competition: poetry 36, 39–40, 52 constructivism 103n15 consumer culture 149, 159 consumption: emotional character of 185; high culture 174, 175–6; Kaliningrad bric-à-brac 19, 21, 26, 29–30 ‘conventional value’ 16 Cooley, Charles 116 Corson, Richard 196, 198–9 Craig, Ailsa 35–56 ‘creative destruction’ 117–18, 120 Cruise, Tom 208 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 38 cultural anthropology 3 cultural capital: collective 36, 52; fields 194; poetry 35, 41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 52; wrestling jargon 156, 158 cultural codes 20, 27 ‘cultural intimacy’ 32 cultural reproduction 5; assemblages 196; Benjamin 16; electric hair clippers 194; opera 176 cultural studies 1, 2–3, 9, 10; audience interaction 158; meaning 6 cultural tourism 85–6 ‘cultural turn’ 5, 6, 9 culturalism 9, 82 culture: ‘Birmingham School’ 2–3; Bourdieu 8; commodification of 107; communication as 116; of field work 100; high 9, 174, 175–6, 187, 188, 190n21; imagination 57; meaning 6; metonymic reconstruction of 31; mnemonic 15; as performance 8; popular 2, 159, 176, 187, 190n21; as practice 5, 6–7, 10, 78; sociology

Index 233 of 1–2, 4, 6, 10; as a ‘toolkit’ 11n8, 103n15 Cura, José 186–7, 190n20 D’Annunzio, Gabrielle 74, 76, 80n17 De Vito, Basil 154 Dean, James 203 Delarozière, Roger 89, 90 denaturation 96 Derrida, Jacques 2, 9 Dewey, John 116 Di Maggio, Paul 190n21 digging 13–14, 15–16, 21–7 discursive representations 142 dispositions 62, 195 double-entry bookkeeping 130 Douglas, Mary 9 drama 8, 221 dramaturgical perspective 8, 182 Ducktail (D.A.) haircut 203 Dudow, Slatan 218 Dunn, Kevin 154 Durkheim, Émile 1, 2, 194 Dyer, G. 155 economic development 108–9 Eilenberg, Susan 54n15 Eisler, Hanns 218 Eliot, T. S. 217 Ellis, Havelock 209 Empedocles 77, 80n17 encoding/decoding model 158 ‘engaged disbelief’ 150, 159, 164–5 English literature classes 45–6 eroticism: electric hair clippers 210, 212; opera 184 ethical issues 143, 145, 146 ethnographic research 1, 6; embodied practice 78; French General Survey of Historic Landmarks 85; poetry 52n1 Europeanness 31 exclusion 41–2 Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) 152 facts: accounting 130, 137, 139–42, 143, 146; social 1 fairness 145–6 Fanon, Frantz 9 feminism 216 fetishism 140, 172 Feuchtwanger, Lion 217, 220, 222, 225

field work: buildings 96–7; methods and workforce 88–91; movable objects 94–6; people 97–100; practice 91–4; as state power 100–1 fields 7–8, 42, 50, 51, 194 film 171, 172 Financial Reporting Standards (FRS) 132, 133 Finney, Essex 200 Fitzgerald, Zelda 221 ‘flash’ 155, 167n14 Fleisser, Marie-Luise 220, 222, 225, 227n6 Foley, Mick (Cactus Jack/Mankind) 167n7, 168n24, 168n33 Foucault, Michel 9, 46, 47, 207, 216, 224 Freidson, Eliot 37, 53n5 French General Survey of Historic Landmarks 83–101; buildings 96–7; field work as practice 91–4; field work as state power 100–1; methods and workforce 88–91; movable objects 94–6; people 97–100 French Revolution 110 Fuegi, John 218, 221, 225 Full Metal Jacket 203 functionalism 9 gallery listeners 183–7 Gamson, J. 150 ‘gatekeepers’: opera 176; poets 47, 48, 49, 51; sociology of culture 4 gay communities 197, 208–11, 212; see also lesbians gaze: glassblowing 65, 70; of the state 84, 93; surveyors 92, 94, 96, 100–1; wrestling 165 Geertz, Clifford 3, 9, 57, 190n21 Gellner, Ernest 111 gender 193, 195, 196, 211 Gernhardt, Robert 225 Gill, Matthew 129–48 Ginastera, Alberto 178 Girard, Michel 110 Gitlin, Todd 3, 168n21 glass 58–9 glassblowing 57–81 globalization 109, 118, 124 Gluckman, Max 8 Goffman, Erving 8, 9, 182 Gorgeous George 151 Gosden, C. 204

234 Index Gramsci, Antonio 2 Grignon, Claude 189n5 Grossberg, Lawrence 166n2 Habermas, Jürgen 8 habitus 7, 88, 194–5, 196, 212; gay identity 209; glassblowing 62, 71; men’s hairstyles 203–4, 208, 211; wrestling 160, 165 hair clippers 193–214; early use and development 193–4, 197–9; gay communities 208–11; mid-century masculinity 200–4 Hall, Stuart 2–3, 9, 158 Halperin, David 195 Hansa 15 Häntzschel, Hiltrud 227n6 Harris, Neil 165 Hart, Bret 168n27 Hart, Stu 163, 168n30 Harvey, David 116–17, 118, 122, 125n10 Hauptmann, Elisabeth 215, 217–20, 221, 222, 223, 224–5 Haussman, Baron George-Eugène 116–17 Hayman, Ronald 225 Heaney, Seamus 13–14, 15, 32n2 heat 61–2, 65–6, 68, 71, 74–5, 76 Hecht, Werner 223 Hegel, G. W. F. 116 Heidegger, Martin 68 Heinich, Natalie 190n21 Hennion, Antoine 185, 190n21 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 111 heritage 85, 101 Hesse-Burri, Emil 218, 219, 220 high culture 9, 174, 175–6, 187, 188, 190n21 Hobsbawm, Eric 112 Hogan, H. H. 162–3 Hoggart, Richard 2, 184 Holtzinger, Adam 79n6 Horkheimer, Max 168n21 identity: categories of 16; gay 208, 209, 210–11; Kaliningraders 27, 31; masculine 197, 206, 210; poets 44, 47; see also national identity ideologies 83 illusio 42, 49, 159–60, 161, 164, 165, 194–5 image 112, 113, 121

imagination 57–8, 60, 70, 71, 73, 74–7, 78 imagined community 111 instinct 137 institutionalist approach 84 ‘intentional value’ 16 internet 226–7 intersubjectivity 12n10 invention of tradition 112 Ireland 119 irony 154 Israel 111 Jamaica 120 Jaspers, Karl 14 Jay, Paul 162 Jellinek, Elisabeth 226 Jenkins, H. III. 152–3, 161, 166 Johnson, James H. 185 Jones, LeRoi 5 Kaliningrad 14–32 Kane, Sarah 226 Kant, Immanuel 8, 14, 15, 17 Katz, Elihu 3 kayfabe 154–6, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167n14 Keats, John 217 Kerr, Alfred 222 Kerrick, G. E. 163, 164 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 31, 32 Knopf, Jan 219 knowledge 5, 8; French General Survey of Historic Landmarks 93–4, 97, 99; monopolies on 20, 22; opera 177, 179, 181, 184, 188; practical 86; systems of 146; tacit 27 Königsberg (Kaliningrad) 14–32 Kowalski, Alexandra 82–104 Krafft-Ebing, R. 196 Krause, Monika 215–30 Kubrick, Stanley 203 Kuhn, Thomas 6 Kutcher, Ashton 208 labor 16, 26 ‘labors of love’ 37 Lambert, Christopher 208 language: accountants’ vocabulary 129, 145, 146; British boxing subculture 155; ‘linguistic turn’ 5; wrestling jargon 149, 154, 158, 159, 163–4, 165, 166

Index 235 Lasswell, Harold 115 Lazarsfeld, Paul 3 legitimacy: accounting decisions 137; Chicago School 116; poetry 35, 38, 42, 44, 46, 51, 52; ‘social imaginary’ 123; state 82 Lehman, David 35 leisure 29–30, 150, 165 Lennox, Annie 207 lesbians 196, 208; see also queer communities Levin, David 190n18 light 58–9, 61, 65 ‘linguistic turn’ 5 Lippmann, Walter 114–15 literary field 42, 48, 221 literary production 35 local historians (érudit local) 99, 100 logos 105, 106, 108, 122, 123–4

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 65, 77–8, 79n9 Mill, John Stuart 217 Miró, Joan 122–3 Mitchell, Timothy 83 Mittenzwei, Werner 219 mnemonic culture 15 modernism 149–50, 178 modernity: ‘myths of’ 116–17; synopticism 207, 211 monopoly rent 118, 122, 125n9, 125n10 Morley, David 158 Morse, Margaret 28 Moscow 20 Mujica Lainez, Manuel 174 Murray, T. 154 music critics 182–3 ‘myths of modernity’ 116–17

maestros 180–3 Malraux, André 83–4, 86–8, 89, 90, 97, 99–100 management incompetence 138 ‘marking out’ 160, 161, 164 ‘marks’ 156, 157–8, 159, 162 Marx, Karl 8 Marxism 2, 9, 125n5 masculinity 197, 199, 200–4, 205, 206, 208–10, 211–12 mass communication 107, 114–16 mass culture 2–3 mass society theory 158, 159, 168n21 material imagination 57–8, 70, 71, 76–7, 78 Mathiesen, T. 207 Maupin, Armistead 209 Mazer, Sharon 162 McElheny, Josiah 68, 76, 80n12 McMahon, Vince Jr. 151, 152, 153, 166, 168n27, 168n34 Mead, George Herbert 116 meaning 5–6, 16; Kaliningrad bric-à-brac 30, 31; systems of knowledge 146 media 2–3, 114, 151, 207, 211 memory: collective 97; Königsberg 22; objects of 31 Mendelssohn, Moses 15 Menger, Pierre-Michel 49–50 men’s hair 195–6, 198–9, 200–1, 203–4, 205–11

nation 105–28; branding 107–10, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120–4; ‘creative destruction’ 118; discourse of the 83; formation 111; ongoing reconstruction 111–12 National Endowment for the Arts 53n10 national identity 105–7, 109–10, 111, 112, 120–4 nationalism 111, 112–13, 121, 123, 124 nature-nurture debate 111 Negri, Adelaida 178 Nexo, Martin Anderson 221 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 117 North, Oliver 208 nostalgia: barbershops 208; French General Survey of Historic Landmarks 91, 95, 96; opera 184 Novalis 61, 79n7 novice operagoers 177–9 NYLON project 5, 11 objectivism 1 objectivity 5, 6, 115, 140, 143 objects: electric hair clippers 204; French General Survey of Historic Landmarks 94–6; Kaliningrad bric-à-brac 15, 16, 17–27; see also artifacts O’Connor, Erin 57–81 Olins, Wally 105, 109–10, 116 ontological exchange 21, 27–9

236 Index opera 171–92; gallery listeners 183–7; maestros 180–3; novices 177–9 Orr, David 44 Pacioli, Luca 130 Panepinto, Robert 79n5 panopticism 207, 211 Park, Robert 3, 116 Parsons, Talcott 10, 125n5 Passeron, Jean-Claude 158, 189n5 performance 8, 10; opera maestros 182; spoken-word poetry 41; wrestling 153, 154 performativity 8, 195 phenomenal body 78 Phillips, Alton 193–214 Pierce, Herb 205 Pillman, Brian 168n23 Piscator, Erwin 223 pleasure 161, 166, 184 poetry 35–56; career entry 43, 44–6; establishment of career 43, 46–8; maintenance of career 43, 44, 48–9; profession concept 36–8; projection of career 43–4, 49–51; slam poetry competitions 39–40; snobbery 39, 41, 42; spoken-word 39, 40–1, 42; women’s under-representation 221 Poland 32n4, 105, 106, 116, 119, 121, 123–4 Polanyi, Michael 63, 71 political economy 1 politics 115 Pollini, Margarita 175 Pooley, Jeff 125n5 Poovey, Mary 130, 146 Popadin, Alexandr 29–30 popular culture 2, 159, 176, 187, 190n21 positivism 3, 82 postmodernism 146, 149–50, 154 poststructuralism 2, 3, 216 power 6, 8, 94, 116 practice 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 88; authorship as abstraction from 222; digging for bric-à-brac in Kaliningrad 26; French General Survey of Historic Landmarks field work 85–6, 91–4; glassblowing 58–9, 60, 62, 72, 78; imagination relationship 57, 77; mundane 39, 51; objects of 31; opera 188; phenomenal body 78; poetry 36, 39, 43, 49, 50

Presley, Elvis 203, 204 privatization 4, 108 production of culture 190n21 the profane 186 professional ethics 145 professions 36–7, 38, 39, 43, 51 profit 133, 136, 137–40 profit and loss account (P&L) 132, 133, 134, 137–8 propaganda 115 protostructuralism 2 pseudorealism 152–3, 161, 166 publication of poetry 46, 47 publishers 50 Puccini, Giacomo 180, 188 queer communities 197, 208–11, 212; see also lesbians racial segregation 200 Ranger, Terence 112 ‘reality effect’ 161 reception strategies 158 reflexivity 15 Reich, Bernhard 218, 219 reification 172 reverie 57, 66, 67–8, 69–71, 78, 80n13 rhetoric 8, 112, 113, 130 Richmond, R. 153–4 risk management 137, 144 ritual 8, 112, 113 Russell, C. 154 the sacred 186 Sapiro, Gisele 35–6 Schudson, Michael 3 Schumpeter, Joseph 117 Schwartz, D. 157 secrecy 22–3, 27 Sehmby, D. S. 167n16 Seinfeld, Jerry 185 self: construction of the 29, 210, 211; subjective project of the 31 Senegal 120 Sennett, Richard 1–12 sexism 215 Sezneva, Olga 13–34 shared goods 52 ‘shooters’ 162, 163 Signorile, Michelangelo 209 Simmel, Georg 52 simplification 129, 136–7, 139, 141 Simpson, Eileen B. 35

Index 237 slam poetry 39–40 ‘small heritage’ 95 ‘smarks’ 160, 165 ‘smarts’ 156, 158, 159, 161–3, 164, 165 Smith, Anthony 111 snobbery 39, 41, 42 social action 5, 8, 88 social capital 27, 42, 51 social cohesion 109, 112, 116 social dramas 8 social facts 1 social fields 7–8 ‘social imaginary’ 123 social networks: Kaliningrad diggers 23–6, 27; Malraux 90; poets 49 social organization 5, 8 social relations 1, 30, 112, 124 social structure 187, 189n5, 194 socialization 26 ‘sociodicy’ 189n5 sociology 3, 9; of culture 1–2, 4, 6, 10; NYLON project 4–5; positivist 82; practice 7 solidarity 16 souvenirs 31 Spain 107–9, 113, 122–3, 124 spectator positions 149, 150, 156, 159; see also audiences spoken-word poetry 39, 40–1, 42 ‘sports entertainment’ 150, 151, 152, 153–4, 159, 163 Stankard, Paul 58, 79n4 state 82–4, 94; collective memory 97; decline of influence over national identity 109; field work as state power 100–1; gaze 84, 93 ‘state effects’ 82, 83–4, 101 Statement of Standard Accounting Practice (SSAP) 133 status 174, 175, 183 Stebbins, Robert A. 36, 38, 43 Steffin, Grete 215, 218, 220, 221, 222 Stern, Howard 151 Stewart, Susan 30, 31 Stillinger, Jack 217 Strauss, Anselm L. 45 structuralism 8, 216 student hairstyles 205–6 subjectivity 5, 16, 28, 217 sublimation 68 Swidler, Ann 11n8 symbolic capital 41, 42, 43, 51

symbols 57, 112, 113 synopticism 207, 211 talent 38 Taylor, Charles 52, 123 le terrain 85, 86, 88, 90 Teutons 15 textual interpretation 1, 10 theatre 10 Thesen, Sharon 35 Thompson, E. P. 7, 9 Toennies, Ferdinand 3 tourism 85–6, 108–9, 118–20 trickery 165–6 truth 145–6 Turkey 119 Turner, Ted 151, 152 Turner, Victor 8 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 209 uncertainty 159, 161, 165 the Undertaker 168n24 United States: electric hair clippers 197–211; mass communication 107, 114–16; patrimonial surveys 83; sociology and cultural studies 2, 3, 4 urban areas 96 value 19–20, 22, 28; ‘conventional’ 16; ‘intentional’ 16; souvenirs 31; symbolic 19, 35 Van Ham, Peter 120–1 Verdi, Giuseppe 185, 186, 190n17 violence 151–2, 160–1, 164 Völker, Klaus 225 Voltaire 87 Wacquant, Loïc 184 Wagner, Richard 179, 189n2, 190n17 Wahl, Leo J. 193–4, 197, 199, 203 Weber, Max 52, 189n5, 190n19 Weigel, Helene 217, 218, 220, 224, 225 Weill, Kurt 218, 219, 224 Wekwerth, Manfred 223 West, James L. W. 36–7 West, Mae 208–9 Willett, John 221 Williams, Raymond 2, 9 Wilson, Robert N. 35, 37, 47, 49 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7 Wolff, Tobias 200 women: Brecht’s co-authors 215,

238 Index 220–1, 225; hairstyles 195, 196, 199, 211; playwrights 226; underrepresentation in literary field 221 Wordsworth, William 50, 54n15 World Championship Wrestling (WCW) 151–2 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) 149, 151–4, 155, 162–4, 165, 166 Wrenn, Marion 149–70

wrestling 149–70; breaking kayfabe 154–6; extreme versions 151–2, 164; origins of 150–1; ‘smarts’ and ‘marks’ 156–64; as ‘sports entertainment’ 151, 152–4 Wuolijoki, Hella 218 Wuthnow, Robert 6, 11–12n9 Zhuangzi 7