Reading the Social in American Studies 3030935507, 9783030935504

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Reading the Social in American Studies Edited by Astrid Franke Stefanie Mueller Katja Sarkowsky

Reading the Social in American Studies

Astrid Franke  •  Stefanie Mueller Katja Sarkowsky Editors

Reading the Social in American Studies

Editors Astrid Franke American Studies Universität Tübingen Tübingen, Germany Katja Sarkowsky Amerikanistik, Universität Augsburg Augsburg, Germany

Stefanie Mueller Institute of English and American Studies Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-93550-4    ISBN 978-3-030-93551-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Reading the Social: An Introduction  1 Astrid Franke, Stefanie Mueller, and Katja Sarkowsky Part I Theories and Concepts: Past and Present  11 2 Recognition, Literature, and Social Dependence: An Inquiry into the Work of Bourdieu und Elias 13 Winfried Fluck 3 “Habit” and the Concept of Character in American Literary Realism and Pragmatist Thought: The Example of William Dean Howells and the James Brothers 55 Heinz Ickstadt 4 Pushing the ‘Envelope of Circumstances’: Reading the Social with Henry James and Pierre Bourdieu 79 Peter Schneck 5 Systemic Racism: Reading Ralph Ellison with Bourdieu’s Theory of Power105 Christa Buschendorf

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Part II Life Writing and the Production of Knowledge 131 6 “On the Margins of One Group and Three Countries”: Exile, Belonging, and the Sociological Imagination in Reinhard Bendix’s From Berlin to Berkeley133 Katja Sarkowsky 7 J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility153 Milena Feldmann and Markus Rieger-Ladich 8 Literariness and the Double Bind of Stigma177 Lisa Spieker Part III Literary Texts and Beyond 203 9 Civilization and Its Discontents: Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club with Norbert Elias205 Dietmar Schloss 10 Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias233 Johannes Voelz 11 Reading the Social in Photography: Emotional Practices, Power Relations, and Iconography259 Astrid Franke Index285

Notes on Contributors

Christa  Buschendorf  is Professor Emerita at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. Her books include The High Priest of Pessimism: Zur Rezeption Schopenhauers in den USA (Winter, 2008) and a number of co-authored works, among them Black Prophetic Fire with Cornel West. She has taught and researched a figurational approach to American literature, in particular to African American Literature, and recently edited the volume Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias (transcript, 2018). Milena  Feldmann is enrolled in the master program “Education: Culture – Politics – Society” at the Universität Tübingen and works as a student assistant at the Department of Philosophy of Education. She is interested in educational theories in an international context, aesthetic education and social practices and power dynamics, especially in the field of ageing. She is the co-author of “Contested Remembrance: The ‘Old’ Federal Republic and ‘New’ Right Politics in Germany” (2021, with Markus Rieger-Ladich and Flora Petrik). Winfried Fluck  is Professor Emeritus of American Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin and Co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. Among his many book publications are Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (Winter, 2009), Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans (Suhrkamp, 1997), and Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus, 1865–1900 (Fink, 1992). vii

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Astrid  Franke  is Professor for American Literature and Culture at the Universität Tübingen, Germany. She is the author of Keys to Controversies: Stereotypes in Modern American Novels (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Winter, 2010) as well as articles on popular culture, poetry and injustice, and the contemporary American novel. She is a principal investigator in the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center Threatened Orders with a project on the resilience of the racial order in the US. Heinz Ickstadt  is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the John F. Kennedy-Institute at the Free University Berlin. His publications include a history of the American novel in the twentieth century and essays on late nineteenth-century American literature and culture, the fiction and poetry of American modernism and postmodernism, and the history and theory of American Studies. Some of these were collected in Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Age to Postmodernity (Winter, 2001). He has also edited and co-edited several books on American literature and culture, among them a bilingual anthology of American poetry. He was president of the German Association of American Studies from 1990 to 1993 and president of the European Association of American Studies from 1996 to 2000. Stefanie Mueller  is an adjunct professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and holds a PhD in American Studies from Goethe-University. She is the author of The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Winter, 2013), which combines narratological analysis with the tools of figurational and relational sociology, and of The Corporation in the NineteenthCentury American Imagination, a study of the business corporation in law and literature (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming). She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge, and the University of California, Irvine. Her current research examines US citizenship in lyric poetry and law, questions of scale and genre in environmental fiction and film, as well as twenty-first century corporate culture. Markus Rieger-Ladich  holds the chair for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, Universität Tübingen. He is a member of the DFG Research Training Group “Doing Transitions,” and is ­particularly interested in working on educational theory informed by theories of power. Therefore, he is engaged in poststructuralist, practice-­theoretical,

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and cultural studies’ approaches. He is currently researching auto-­ sociobiographical texts in which educational and social climbers reconstruct their own lives. He has co-authored Enabling Violations: Social Class and Sexual Identity in Didier Eribon’s ‘Returning to Reims’ (2020, with Kai Wortmann), and is the author of Bildungstheorien zur Einführung, 2nd edition (Junius, 2020). Katja  Sarkowsky holds the chair of Amerikanistik at Universität Augsburg. She has widely published in the fields of life writing, Indigenous literatures, and literary citizenship studies. Her publications include the monographs Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature (Palgrave, 2018) and AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (Winter, 2007). She is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal for Canadian Studies [Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien]. Dietmar  Schloss  is professor of English and American Studies at the Universität Heidelberg. His research interests include American intellectual history from the colonial period to the present, the contemporary US novel, and cosmopolitanism in the Early Republic. He is the author of The Virtuous Republic: Political Ideology and Literature in the Founding Period [Die tugendhafte Republik: Politische Ideologie und Literatur in der amerikanischen Gründerzeit] (Winter, 2003) and editor of Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture (Winter, 2009) and The American Presidency: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Winter, 2012). Peter Schneck  is chair of American Literature and Culture at Universität Osnabrück, Germany. He is the author of Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture (De Gruyter, 2011) and a member of the editorial board of Cognition and Poetics (Oxford University Press book series). He is the co-founder and co-­ director of the research cluster “Cognition and Poetics,” and director of the Osnabrueck Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law (OSI). He has been a fellow at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Irvine, Nottingham University, and the University of Torino, Italy. Lisa Spieker  holds a PhD in American Studies from Tuebingen University, Germany. She has a background not only in American Studies but also in political science and sociology and has taught at Tuebingen and Yale

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University. She currently works as an educator in Dortmund, Germany with a focus on pedagogy of citizenship, diversity, and hate speech. Her monograph analyzes the memoirs of people with mental illnesses and how they represent themselves by drawing upon popular narratives, references to psychiatric literature as well as traditions in life writing. As an independent researcher and lecturer, she specializes in Queer Theory and intersectional feminism. She is the author of Writing Madness, Writing Normalcy: Stigma and Self in Memoirs of Mental Illness (McFarland, 2021). Johannes Voelz  is Heisenberg-Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018) and Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (UP New England, 2010), and has edited and co-edited several essay collections and special issues, among them a themed issue of the journal Telos, titled Security and Liberalism (2015). In 2016, the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded him a Heisenberg-Professorship.

CHAPTER 1

Reading the Social: An Introduction Astrid Franke, Stefanie Mueller, and Katja Sarkowsky

This collection explores a very specific approach to bringing together sociology and literary scholarship in the field of American Studies, understood as comprising literary and cultural studies. Rather than analyzing the social dimension of literature with the means of sociology, the contributions to this collection combine literary and sociological modes of perceiving social relations and their dynamics. Sociology, in particular the fields of ethnomethodology and relational sociology, provides concepts and methods to describe human interactions that prove to be useful to literary analysis— and to explicate literature’s “tacit knowledge” (Polyani 1966) about social inequalities, questions of status, or constraints of individual and collective

A. Franke American Studies, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Mueller Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] K. Sarkowsky (*) Amerikanistik, Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_1

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agency. Conversely, literature takes a close-up look at personal interactions and their psychological underpinnings, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of, for example, (symbolic) violence, the fashioning of the self, or subtle differences and changes in manners. Literature pays attention not only to the subjective but also to the aesthetic dimension of human sociability and interaction that sociology largely neglects.1 With this approach, the volume adds to a vibrant field of research that has so far mostly aimed at embedding literature in society and conceptualizing it as a social institution. In this vein, Americanists have analyzed the social production of literary value (e.g., John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 1993), reading habits and tastes (e.g., Gordon Hutner, What America Reads: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960, 2005, or Hugh McIntosh, Guilty Pleasures. Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2018), social and material networks as they come to bear on book history (e.g., Theodore Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, 2009, or Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 2020), the institutions of literary studies (e.g., Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, 2004), and the educational frameworks of literary production (e.g., Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, 2009, or Joseph Csicsila’s edited volume Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies, 2016). The approaches taken by scholars in the fields of African American Studies, Intersectionality Studies, and Queer or Gender Studies, and, of course, Marxist approaches, predate this more recent surge of interest in the linkage between literature and sociology, but their focus on the impact of social and sociological categories on literary texts and their reception builds on related assumptions about literature’s potential to reveal and negotiate social categories and stratification. These assumptions have a long history. US-American sociological studies of the early twentieth century, such as those by William Isaac Thomas and Jane Addams, converge with immigrant literature by writers such as Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska in the depiction of urban spaces and processes of assimilation, and literary texts such as Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements can be read as critical commentaries on social reform agendas 1  The editors would like to express their gratitude to Aileen Priester and Elias Sbordone for their diligent copyediting and reliable support.

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or theories of democracy such as John Dewey’s. In the literary realist fictions of William Dean Howells and Henry James, we find critical explorations into the concepts of character and habit at the same time that these became key terms in the work of American Pragmatist philosophers William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. A more recent European example of an explicit integration of sociological and literary analysis can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s study Masculine Domination (2001): reading a scene from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Bourdieu fuses literary and sociological reading techniques and thus manages to grasp forms of symbolic violence that would have remained opaque from within the confines of empirical research. Moreover, in his analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Bourdieu explains, “that the literary work can sometimes say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions […]” (1996, 32). In a similar vein, David J. Alworth approaches Don Delillo’s White Noise as a “microethnographic treatment, however satirical, of social relations in American suburbia during the final decade of the Cold War” (2010, 307) and suggests that “[n]ot only does synthesizing [literature’s and sociological theory’s] respective approaches [to social phenomena] promise to provide more nuanced and sophisticated understandings […] than either could provide individually; it could also suggest a new model of humanistic and social-­ scientific collaboration directed toward emergent problems in and of the social” (308). As these examples illustrate, specific approaches, stressing power relations between people and groups and highlighting the entanglement of  the psyche and the social, are particularly open to use literature as a hermeneutical tool (cf. Bourdieu 2000; Elias 2008; Goffman 1963). After all, fiction provides us with “transparent minds” (Cohn 1978) more than any other kind of writing; narrative conventions and complex techniques enable us to observe the workings of the mind of a character in challenging situations that we are sometimes meant to understand better than the characters themselves. Vice versa, these sociological concepts and theories—particularly those by Bourdieu and Elias—can be useful for literary scholars in making comprehensible the kind of world-making or “worlding” (cf. Cheah 2016) that literary texts perform in reference to extratextual realities, and their social dynamics and interactions. And yet, reading literature and art for “revealing” social and even sociological knowledge is easily attacked for willfully overlooking aesthetic form. Moreover, and bluntly put, it may turn out to be repetitive and

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predictable when the interpretations keep finding what the social theory predicted (cf. Felski 2015). These are important objections, and the first section of this volume—“Theories and Concepts: Past and Present”— devotes some space to critical reflections along those lines. Winfried Fluck in particular suspects that, at its worst, a sociological approach might let literary studies disappear. At the same time, his work on “recognition,” drawn from political philosophy, is given a sociological twist by understanding it in terms of dependency and power. As Heinz Ickstadt’s exploration of the concepts of “habit” and “character” in the work of William Dean Howells and William and Henry James, Peter Schneck’s discussion of the implicitness and explicitness of the social in Pierre Bourdieu and Henry James, Christa Buschendorf’s analysis of “symbolic violence,” “split habitus,” and “illusio” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Astrid Franke’s reading of a photograph demonstrate, the exchange between literature, psychology, and sociology benefits from attention to the aesthetic aspects of a text. In this vein, Schneck’s exploration of the multilayered notion of the implicit in both Henry James and Pierre Bourdieu alerts the reader to the complexity of reading as well as writing the social and thereby critically challenges any reductive understanding of literature as either revealing or concealing social power relations. Likewise, in its close attention to form, Buschendorf’s contribution in particular directly counters the charge summarized above, namely that a “sociological” reading might downplay or even entirely ignore literary aesthetics. The chapters in the second section, “Life Writing and the Production of Knowledge,” explore the affordances of the autobiographical genre and show how different forms of life writing can offer insights into the perspectives of agents, their narrative self-construction, and hence understanding of specific social fields. Autobiographies, or life writing more generally, have for quite some time now been regarded by scholars as relational texts, not as the individualistic or even solipsistic genre as which it had long been criticized (Eakin 1999; Smith and Watson 2010). Approaching these texts relationally, these readings demonstrate that the texts seek to strategically overcome a still-dominant convention of the autobiographical genre, the primacy of the individual over the group. Instead of telling a story of the “heroic individual” as Rieger-Ladich and Feldmann observe in their discussion of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), these texts revisit the lives of their subjects as part of what Norbert Elias has called figurations, that is, as part of a social collective. In this way, the texts do not simply seek to understand the individual life as part of a

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sociocultural moment. They specifically stress and reflect upon the ways in which a marginalized position enables their subjects to assume more distance to the fields in which they are involved. Looking “from the margins” and “with two pairs of eyes” (Wong 1945, 165) takes on multiple meanings in the context of the memoirs discussed in this section, as they involve forms of mobility that lead to intimate knowledge of more than one social world and its codes. If the dual perspective—of both observer and observed—is already constitutive of the autobiographical genre, many of the authors discussed in the section look at their own lives in sociological terms. If this is not surprising in the case of sociologists such as Reinhard Bendix (discussed by Katja Sarkowsky), the examples of J.D. Vance’s memoir of social mobility or Marya Hornbacher’s pathography (discussed by Lisa Spieker) also illustrate Robert K. Merton’s important observation that “not all sociological autobiography is written by credentialed sociologists” (1988, 21). Sociological knowledge, this section illustrates, is both drawn upon as well as produced in the life writing under discussion, and the texts’ specific narratives of self are crucial to understand this dual function of knowledge production. The third section, “Literary Texts and Beyond,” pushes the terms “reading,” “literature,” and “text” further by including the analysis not only of literary texts but also of visual and performative material, such as a photograph and the political phenomenon of polarization. It begins with yet another form of literary interpretation that builds upon sociological theory: Dietmar Schloss uses insights from the sociology of sports to interpret Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) as a “seismograph” for antidemocratic, destructive, and violent social processes meant to counter the affective numbness of especially white males in late capitalism. His text provides a spring board for readings that go beyond the literary text: Johannes Voelz’s reading of populism seems to continue Schloss’s discussion not only because their diagnosis of antidemocratic tendencies (among white males in particular) overlaps but also because Voelz approaches populism with an eye to its aesthetic aspects: its performances, representations, the rhythm, and choreography of rallies and the affects aroused by them. With this text, the volume has come full circle as Voelz is not reading aesthetic forms for their social but a social phenomenon for its aesthetic aspects. In both cases, the goal is ultimately to enhance aesthetic experience as well as social understanding. Astrid Franke’s text may be regarded as another attempt to achieve this balance, if with a different focus. It uses a particular aesthetic expression of gendered anger in an

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analysis of an iconic photograph from the Civil Rights Movement, Will Counts’s shot of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, which is read and interpreted as a “text.” In her reading, the text emerges not only as something to be decoded but also as a manifestation of social practices that should be reconstructed before the photograph can be fully understood. While the practices of autobiographical writing in the second section were already reflexive practices, meant to produce explicit social knowledge to help individuals understand their lives, the “emotional practices” (cf. Scheer 2012), habits, and routines of two young southern teenagers and a photographer are not likely to be fully conscious. They arise from and reaffirm implicit or tacit knowledge of complex power relations which are literally embodied and thus visible in facial features, postures, and gestures. As in Buschendorf’s analysis of Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Feldmann  and  Rieger-Ladich’s discussion of Hillbilly Elegy, reading for the social here also produces insights into how the experiences and internalizations of marginalization or even oppression by previous generations live on in the present. Of course, the chapters in this collection also speak to one another across these sections and thereby also suggest topics for future research. One term that seems helpful across different readings, even though it is not always explicitly mentioned, is the “split, cleft, or divided habitus” (cf. Bourdieu 1998, 100), as shown particularly in the readings by Buschendorf and Feldmann and Rieger-Ladich. Resulting particularly from educational mobility and social ascent, as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu, the dual perspective of observer and observed in different social settings can also arise from geographical mobility and forms of marginalization. A split habitus is wont to recognize the unspoken rules in social practices that those socialized into it may follow and believe in without knowing they do so; such a person—sociologist, author, or protagonist and any combination of the three—and their stories may be read with an eye to the extent to which they “buy into” the rules of the dominant game. Here, another term a number of articles evoke is the illusio—the commitment to participate and compete in a social field and a belief in its “stakes.” This Bourdieuan term, less known than “habitus” or “capital,” can be used to comment on an important aspect of Ellison’s Invisible Man, Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and (to some extent) Bendix’s From Berlin to Berkeley, namely the very American belief in the power of the individual to make his (usually) destiny—as captured by the self-made man—and the importance of merit, rather than parentage and privilege, in his making. Sociologically

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speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a self-made man, but the belief that individual hard work can overcome all obstacles is still very much present in Hillbilly Elegy, whereas, whatever Ellison personally believed, he created a protagonist who is able to emancipate himself from that “American ideology” (Lipset 1990, 24), the importance of individual merit. In addition, a number of chapters stress the role of affect and emotion in the material that they investigate. In the analyses by Buschendorf and Feldmann/Rieger-Ladich, for example, it becomes apparent to what degree emotions, such as shame and embarrassment, are shaped by and therefore also express the collective history as well as individual experience of a social position. Close readings of the texts—one fictional, the other autobiographical—allow Buschendorf and Feldmann/Rieger-Ladich to gain a more nuanced understanding of the social mechanisms of oppression that the texts portray. In this regard, Buschendorf shows, for example, that, while Ellison’s protagonist has long come to an intellectual awareness of his oppressed position in US society, his body still reacts to the so-called soft mechanisms of what Bourdieu has termed “symbolic power.” Emotions therefore add a historical and hence collective dimension to the protagonist’s individual story. In a similar vein, reading emotions and their social as well as aesthetic import is also central to Franke’s analysis, in which the gendered dimensions not only of the public display but also of the aestheticization of emotions (in this case, anger) become apparent. In this regard, Franke’s text speaks to Johannes Voelz’s interpretation of the function of resentment and indignation in public performances of populism. Indeed, Franke’s analysis also draws our attention to the role of gender in Voelz’s as well as in Schloss’s analysis of “affective and expressive repertoires” (Voelz) in late-capitalist societies since both texts—albeit to varying degrees—explore, as Schloss points out, a “crisis of masculinity” in US society. In line with this volume’s agenda, it can be plausibly claimed that the different materials analyzed in the contributions not only draw on sociological categories and knowledge, but that they also generate knowledge and may even reflect on such processes. Accordingly, some of the chapters—Ickstadt’s, Feldmann and Rieger-Ladich’s, and Schneck’s in particular—reject the idea that this kind of “literary knowledge” is inferior to “sociological” knowledge and its categories. Taking up Pierre Bourdieu’s famous, if somewhat paradoxical, statement that literature can only say what it does by not saying it directly, Ickstadt maintains that it is precisely

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by eschewing abstraction for particularity—by presenting life in all its messiness—that literature can offer us deep insights into our social lives; this applies not only to fiction but even more so to autobiographical writing, as the second section of this volume amply illustrates. In this context, ways of coping with different forms of marginalization and conflicting positionalities—such as the dual perspective of observer and observed or the split habitus—function to produce both sociological and literary knowledge. By shifting our attention to the mechanisms of the social as uncovered by literature, we aim to complement the current debate in American studies on the links between literature and sociology. Indeed, we maintain that there is an implicit sociological gaze in literature, and dedicate this collection to the task of specifying what literature may contribute to a critical analysis of social relations.

References Alworth, David J. 2010. Supermarket Sociology. New Literary History 41/2: 301–327. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. Masculine Domination. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Csicsila, Joseph. 2016. Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Elias, Norbert. 2008. Further Aspects of Established-Outsider Relations: The Maycomb Model. In The Established and the Outsiders: The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, ed. Cas Wouters, vol. 4, 209–231. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

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Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutner, Gordon. 2005. What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1990. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. London: Routledge. Liu, Alan. 2004. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McIntosh, Hugh. 2018. Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Merton, Robert K. 1988. Some Thoughts on the Concept of Sociological Autobiography. In Sociological Lives, ed. Matilda White Riley, 17–21. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Polyani, Michael. 2009 [1966]. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Scheer, Monique. 2012. Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understand Emotion. History and Theory 51/2: 193–202. Senchyne, Jonathan. 2020. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Striphas, Theodore. 2009. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Wong, Jade Snow. 1945. Fifth Chinese Daughter. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

PART I

Theories and Concepts: Past and Present

CHAPTER 2

Recognition, Literature, and Social Dependence: An Inquiry into the Work of Bourdieu und Elias Winfried Fluck

I Can the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias be of interest for discussions of the role of recognition in social processes and, more specifically, in the reception of art?1 The question gains in relevance when we take our point of departure from two starting assumptions: (1) Recognition is a basic human need; without recognition by others we would not know who we are and could not develop any sense of self and self-worth; (2) Recognition is a social act; in looking for recognition and a sense of individual worth, we become dependent on others. Humans are social beings, 1  This chapter is dedicated to Christa Buschendorf who brought Norbert Elias to American studies.

W. Fluck (*) John F. Kennedy Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_2

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and the need for recognition is a central reason for our dependence on others. Recognition is thus a mixed blessing: it holds the promise of individual acknowledgment, but only at the price of a growth in social dependence. The fact that the search for recognition makes us dependent on others is the founding premise of intersubjective theories of recognition. But interpersonal relations are not the only possible source of recognition. The struggle for recognition also takes place in society and is thus also socially determined. It is subject to social conditions and cultural recognition regimes. We can only gain recognition on the conditions set by the social world. The question of how these social determinants can be defined is an important part of the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. Can these two points of reference—recognition and the social theories of Bourdieu and Elias—be brought together in a meaningful and analytically productive way? For a literary theory of recognition, this question must lead to an obvious follow-up question: Can the theories of Bourdieu and Elias be helpful in clarifying the relation between literature and recognition? This will be my topic in the concluding section of this chapter. To put my discussion of Bourdieu and Elias into a larger context, it can be helpful to see what role society plays in the currently dominant theories of recognition, the politics of recognition, usually associated with Charles Taylor, intersubjective theories of recognition, usually associated with the work of Axel Honneth, and, from a radically different point of view, poststructuralist theories that can think of recognition only as an imposition that traps the subject in a culturally imposed identity position, as Judith Butler argues, for example, in her essay “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Butler’s account is based on a Foucauldian view of modern society as a society of disciplinary regimes and all-pervasive structural constraints, so that power effects are at work everywhere, including in processes of recognition—which raises the question of the role power plays in theories of Bourdieu and Elias. In contrast, Taylor’s politics of recognition is based on a view of liberal society that has to be nudged into taking its liberal principles of equality seriously—which raises the question of what role group identity plays in Bourdieu’s and Elias’ work. Honneth’s society may be described as social democratic in its political orientation; his concerns are not primarily issues of gender, ethnic, or racial equality, but the basic needs for a decent life, such as family relations, work, education, legal rights, and social solidarity—which raises the question of the role social hierarchies play in the two

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social theories discussed here. George Herbert Mead could be added, because he has provided the theoretical basis for theories of human interaction in which taking the attitude of the other is the key. Mead also acknowledges that life does not merely consist of interpersonal relations, and thus introduces a social dimension which he calls the “generalized other.” This is originally a term to describe the social side of the self, but in order to provide an idea what this social side is, the concept is extended to refer to society’s general norms, as they are internalized by the self. Mead’s characterization is a very general one, and the terms used by him and his interpreters vary accordingly, ranging from superego, the social whole, collective identity, and community to attitudes of the others or community attitudes. Honneth takes the easy way out when he speaks of “conventional norms.” This is a surprisingly undifferentiated view of society. Mead leaves out history, politics, and ideology.2 One explanation may be that he thinks of this large, undifferentiated social whole in terms of American democracy which he conceptualizes as a community (very much like his colleague John Dewey), instead of focusing on separate classes or racial groups. Mead’s democracy must be interested in an open exchange between its members, and such exchanges—more generally: forms of communicative interaction—can be seen as a recognition of the other as a member of the democratic community.3 His is a confident progressivist vision of American democracy in which successfully achieved processes of interaction based on mutual recognition provide the basis for cooperation. Other views of the relation between recognition and democracy are possible. In my own work, I have approached the problem from an altogether different perspective, provided by Alexis de Tocqueville’s book on Democracy in America (Fluck 2013). For Tocqueville, the historical significance of the arrival of democracy in America lies in the fact that democracy abolishes the institution of a society of rank, with which Tocqueville was familiar from his native France. This changes the role and function of recognition in a fundamental way. In a society of rank 2  Cf. Wagner, “Alienation, ideological blindness, and distortion do not seem to exist” (1993, 325, m.t.). Mead does not address the question of sources of historical or social misperceptions. 3  Cf. Axel Honneth: “If it is the case that one becomes a socially accepted member of one’s community by learning to appropriate the social norms of the ‘generalized other,’ then it makes sense to use the concept of ‘recognition’ for this intersubjective relationship” (1995, 78).

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(Ständegesellschaft), recognition is firmly institutionalized. The degree of recognition a person can expect and the limits of it are strongly determined by a person’s rank. To belong to a higher rank provides an almost automatic recognition of one’s social superiority, just as, on the other hand, belonging to a lower rank signals social inferiority. Democracy eliminates these ranks and with them the recognition regime that is produced by societies of rank. Thus, Tocqueville can begin his study with the by now classical statement: “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions” (1969, 9). Equality of conditions does not mean equal recognition, however, as it does in pragmatism’s narrative of democracy. On the contrary, Tocqueville draws very different conclusions from the establishment of equality. Since individuals can no longer rely on institutionalized forms of recognition, it now becomes their own responsibility to make sure that their true worth is being recognized. In a perceptive vision, Tocqueville anticipated the consequences that have indeed become the reality of American life: They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quickly and cleave away through the dense throng which surrounds and presses them. (Tocqueville 1969, 537)

Democratic cooperation is displaced here by a universal competition that is intensified by democracy. This competition is not merely one for material gains but also for recognition. Possible sources of recognition multiply and so do the different fields in which one can gain recognition. Each field, to anticipate Bourdieu, can be said to develop a recognition regime of its own, so that identity formation becomes a complex negotiation between different sources of recognition: one may be recognized in private life, but not in professional life, at home but not abroad, through group membership but not individually. For Mead, the model of society is a democracy in which we no longer have any significant status distinctions. What Tocqueville contributes is that he undermines a (well-intentioned but rather naïve) idealization of democracy in America. Yet both envision democracy only in broad terms. What Bourdieu and Elias add, each in his own way, is to fill out this empty frame by reinserting the reality of

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different status orders. Society may no longer be a society of rank, but it is still shaped by status.

II Tocqueville did not pursue this aspect in any detail. His democracy remains a wide and open field of action, with individuals going in many different directions and trying out various things, but the field itself is not really differentiated.4 This is different in the case of Pierre Bourdieu. The society of rank may have been abolished, but it has left a legacy—at least in France—which can be called the status society.5 A search for recognition is the driving force behind these status-seeking activities. This is already a topic in his early empirical studies, as Bourdieu has pointed out himself: in my earliest analyses of honour … you find all the problems that I am still tackling today: the idea that struggles for recognition are a fundamental dimension of social life and that what is at stake in them is an accumulation of a particular form of capital, honour in the sense of reputation and prestige, and that there is, therefore, a specific logic behind the accumulation of symbolic capital. (Quoted in Jenkins 1992, 129)

Tocqueville’s democracy is characterized by a great instability of status in which one’s standing in society can change quickly and frequently. Some surge ahead, others fall back, but tomorrow things can already be different again. Bourdieu’s status society is almost the opposite: it is firmly set in stable, almost immoveable structures. Status is not only a category of recognition but also a subtle, highly effective boundary line for maintaining one’s social position. One of the gratifications of recognition in Bourdieu’s status society lies in the possibilities of feeling superior by excluding others.6 Recognition’s social function can thus provide a legitimation of social 4  One rarely highlighted but remarkably far-sighted exception is his chapter 20 in Vol. II on “How an Aristocracy May Be Created by Industry”: “Hence, just while the mass of the nation is turning toward democracy, that particular class which is engaged in industry becomes more aristocratic” (1969, 556). 5  As Max Weber has defined status, the term refers to the social position of a social actor: “Whereas the genuine place of classes is within the economic order, the place of status groups is with the social order, that is, within the sphere of the distribution of honor” (1993, 135). 6  In a study of the relations between an established group and outsiders in a suburb of Leicester, Norbert Elias and John Scotson have also described how status hierarchies can be sources of exclusion and stigmatization, so that status can be a site of institutionalized preju-

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hierarchies and social dominance. Not everybody who participates in society’s processes of social interaction can thus participate equally in the rewards of recognition. In Bourdieu’s status society, recognition is gained by “distinction” (= the title of Bourdieu’s major book) and the function of distinction is to establish and stabilize the dominant social order.7 Distinction can be gained in different ways and by different means. This makes the case of the “cultural” class (intellectuals, artists, and academics) especially interesting. In his introduction to Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson provides a succinct summary of Bourdieu’s argument: The cultural (literary, artistic, etc.) field exists in a subordinate or dominated position within the field of power, whose principle of legitimacy is based on possession of economic or political capital. It is situated within the field of power because of its possession of a higher degree of symbolic forms of capital (e.g. academic capital, cultural capital) but in a dominated position, because of its relatively low degree of economic capital (when compared with the dominant fractions of the dominant classes). It is for this reason that Bourdieu refers to intellectuals as pertaining to the dominated fraction of the dominant class. (Johnson 1993, 15)8

As Bourdieu himself has put it: The literary and artistic fields attract a particularly strong proportion of individuals who possess all the properties of the dominant class minus one: dice. Christa Buschendorf has drawn on Elias’ Maycomb Model for an interpretation of Jesse Hill Ford’s novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones. See her essay on “Narrated Power Relations” (2011). 7  The French original was published in 1979 under the title La distinction: Critique social du jugement. The German translation came out in 1982 and had the title Die feinen Unterschiede: Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. 8  The introduction of the concept of the field is another important aspect of differentiation in Bourdieu’s system. The search for distinction takes place on several levels and in several areas: in society as a whole, but also within particular fields, such as, for example, the economic field, the political field, the educational field, and the literary field. This is the specific social context in which the individual acts. These fields have “relative autonomy,” that is, a relative freedom from the political field. Or, as Bourdieu describes its relative autonomy in an essay on Flaubert, each field has “its specific laws of functioning within the field of power” (1993, 163). Each field has its own status order, and actors in the field must know the respective rules of the game. Nevertheless, each field is also characterized by status orders which are the determining factor in the struggle for recognition. The freedom is relative indeed.

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money. They are, if I may say, parents pauvres or ‘poor relatives’ of the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats already ruined or in decline, members of stigmatized minorities like Jews or foreigners. (1993, 165)

Bourdieu’s distinction is possible because of one major difference between societies of rank and Bourdieu’s status society. In societies of rank, status is granted by parental lineage and title. Bourdieu adds a symbolic dimension. Symbols are not merely a form of communication; they can also become a source of power when they signal symbolic capital. Status is gained by symbolic capital (i.e. prestige), and one of the ways in which symbolic capital can be gained is by acquiring cultural capital (taste), a way of establishing social distinction through “widely shared, high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods and credentials)” (Lamont and Lareau 1988, 156) that are used for social and cultural distinction and membership in high-status groups. Thus, cultural capital does not necessarily indicate a privileged insight into an aesthetic object’s intrinsic value (there exists no such thing in Bourdieu), but merely an awareness and skilful application of the codes and conventions of a particular status group. Terms like “taste,” “art,” and “aesthetics” do not describe a well-founded aesthetic judgment; they function as status markers “that make the social privileges and deficiencies which are accidents of birth seem natural and right” (Wilson 1988, 51).9 In his empirical-sociological studies—that form the core material of Distinction—Bourdieu has found characteristic patterns of cultural activities that are astonishingly standardized and predictable. People prefer classical music because they know that, within their status group, classical music has more cultural capital than pop music. Why are people submitting themselves to this recognition regime? This is a key question in all social theories of recognition. For Tocqueville, the answer is easy. In the final analysis, what drives people in the search for recognition is an insatiable desire to assert themselves and to gain the upper hand. Any type of culture may be useful in this endeavor; this may be one of the reasons why the US soon developed a sensationalist, unabashed popular culture. As Tocqueville points out in a chapter entitled “In What Spirit the Americans

9  Significantly, the subtitle of Bourdieu’s magnum opus Distinction is, in an obvious allusion to Kant, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. The unmistakable message is: Aesthetic judgment is not what it claims to be.

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Cultivate the Arts,” one of the major trends of culture in a democracy like the American one is to try to achieve “equality” by cheap imitations. In Bourdieu’s status society, on the other hand, the issue is more complicated. Bourdieu’s explanation as to why people go along is that each status group has formed a particular habitus, a set of socially determined dispositions, tastes, and cultural preferences into which members of this group have been socialized and that has therefore become “second nature” to them.10 The habitus concept is an ingenious way of finding a middle ground between economic determinism and individual agency. The individual is “regulated” but without overt calls for obedience; it can therefore live in the illusion to act on its own free will, but does so within the limits set by deeply ingrained behavioral codes: “Bourdieu takes as his subject precisely those attitudes, dispositions, and ways of perceiving reality that are taken for granted by members of a social class or society” (Di Maggio 1979, 1461). One might say that the habitus—and thus the search for recognition—has been internalized, although the category is not a psychological one in this case. Habitus is a semiconscious, embodied disposition, and precisely because of that it can be so effective. It is interesting to note that Bourdieu’s work plays no role in recognition debates. In a way, this is surprising since, after all, he offers a sociological analysis of the social conditions under which people can hope to gain social recognition, namely by acquiring symbolic or cultural capital. Why does Bourdieu play hardly any role in recognition debates, then? One reason is that, although Bourdieu may be said to open up a new perspective on social determinants of recognition, his argument can be of no interest for the currently dominant theories of “recognition,” because he does not use the term as a category of moral critique and social change, but of sociological analysis. That is to say, he does not use it as a positive term. One of the complications in working with the concept of recognition is that, in English, it can have two different meanings (for which we have two different words in German). The term “recognition” can mean not only to take note of the presence of a person (Wiedererkennen in the sense 10  Cf. Johnson: “The habitus is the result of a long process in inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes ‘a second sense’ or a second nature” (Johnson 1993, 5). As Bourdieu claims, this process determines cultural preferences: Educational institutions “tend to inculcate (…) a cultural disposition as a durable and generalized attitude which implies recognition of the value of works of art and ability to appropriate them by means of generic categories” (1990, 208).

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of acknowledging one’s presence) but can also mean positive acknowledgment of a person’s worth (Anerkennung in the sense of Achtung). “Recognition” in the sense of Achtung is a positive term of empowerment; it can make up for a long period of neglect, a significant oversight or disregard. In the Hegelian tradition, it is crucial for the formation of self-consciousness. Yet Bourdieu uses the term, if not as an altogether negative term, then with a cold cynical look at human status competition. This also means that, since his recognition is not the same as Achtung, its use does not have to be restricted to groups that are still in need of recognition. There is not one group that already has recognition and another one that does not have it yet but should get it. Rather, the struggle of recognition takes place on all levels and in all groups. And since everybody does it, it is the way it works and why it provides gratification that is of interest for Bourdieu, not recognition’s moral promise. Status seeking is an inevitable part of the social order for him, no matter where we live and no matter whether we like it or not. Not only rich people are engaged in it, but intellectuals, too, have developed their own strategies.11 The search for recognition is thus reconceptualized, from being a promising way to battle injustices caused by exclusion or misrecognition, to the description of a key fact of social life that may have taken on specific forms in France and other forms in the US, but in both cases for the same purpose, with the same motivations, and for the same reason.12

11  In fact, there is now an influential approach, marketplace criticism, in literary studies, which attempts to demystify aesthetic innovations as merely another clever way of gaining cultural capital. See my analysis in “Shadow Aesthetics” (2015, 37–40). 12  In a more recent essay, “Autonomie und Anerkennung,” Honneth acknowledges that a discussion of recognition in positive terms has dominated German theories of recognition (2018). But this focus may now be challenged by a change in emphasis, because traditional sources of social acknowledgment are losing ground while pathological forms are on the rise. In his superb recent study Anerkennung: Eine europäische Ideengeschichte, Honneth compares the different concepts of recognition in French, British, and German philosophical traditions and concedes that the predominantly critical view in French philosophy, ranging from Rousseau to Althusser, has to be taken seriously as a challenge to a German tradition still anchored in Hegel and German idealism (Honneth 2017). Although Honneth has written on Bourdieu on other occasions, he does not consider him in this context.

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III This is different in the case of Norbert Elias and his theory of the civilizing process, although there are also some aspects Bourdieu and Elias have in common. Both theories are directed against a humanist tradition in which human agency and the subject’s self-consciousness stand at the center. In fact, Elias’ starting point comes close to intersubjective theories of recognition. Repeatedly, he has criticized the idea of what he calls homo clausus, an “independent, autonomous being” (1981, XLVII).13 For Elias, human beings are inherently social, always already members of a social figuration like family, group, or larger association. But what interests Elias about these figurations is not their forms of interaction or their encounters with an other, but the impact of social interdependence. It is the major achievement of Elias that he has reconceptualized the story of the civilizing process—no longer as a Hegelian story of the growth of human consciousness and freedom, but as the unintended structural effect of growing social interdependency. As Goudsblom points out, for Elias the ongoing differentiation of the civilizing process also has the function of preserving and increasing social hierarchies (Goudsblom 1984, 97). In contrast to Bοurdieu, however, these hierarchies are not the result of a process of social reproduction perpetuating itself with few changes, but the result of a long-term transformation of interpersonal relations and cultural attitudes from external constraints to internalized self-restraint. Social hierarchies are in constant transformation, albeit slowly, because they respond to a changing reality in which humans have become ever more interdependent, that is, dependent on one another. In early feudalism, impulsive forms of aggression were needed to defend claims for power. Once social relations multiply, however, and lead to growing interdependency, such behavior would be counterproductive. What is needed now is an ability to control one’s affects. Self-regulation is the best possible way of adapting to new social conditions by being able to handle a growing number of social encounters. This self-regulation works most reliably when it is internalized. Internalization provides regularity and predictability of response in which one’s behavior is not simply responding to threats of punishment but to an inner-directed psychic structure. Bourdieu’s individuals could in theory reject their class habitus 13  In this chapter, all translations of Elias are my own. English translations of Elias’ works were not accessible at the Freie Universität Berlin in Corona times.

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(although they would be foolish to do so). Elias’ individuals cannot help but make social norms part of their psychological make-up, because this is their best bet to function effectively. There is really no other choice, the courtier cannot become an affect-driven knight again. The clock cannot (and should not) be turned back. Thus, when we ask why people are submitting themselves to the dominant recognition regime, Bourdieu’s answer is that, because of their habitus, they have no self-awareness that they are doing so. As far as I can see, Elias’ answer relies on the psychological costs of the civilizing process. Growing interdependence leads to growing competition, and growing competition leads to growing anxieties about a loss of social position. The struggle for recognition is a struggle driven by the fear to lose the status one has already gained: “Fear of a loss of social distinction, of inherited or inheritable prestige, have decisively shaped dominant behaviour patterns” (1981, 449). This fear is not restricted to an upper class. The middle class, too, experiences a high degree of social pressure, produced by the “fear of a loss of property and social standing, a fear of social humiliation, or of a severe disadvantage in society’s competitive struggles—something parents and educators pass on to children already at an early age” (1981, 450). As in the case of Bourdieu, the struggle for recognition is the driving force that transforms social structures into personal behavior. But there is a problem. Elias describes a historical process characterized by an increasing state monopoly of power, growing interdependency, and, in consequence, a need for ever greater affect control. However, in the twentieth century this process seems to have come to a halt. In fact, it appears to have been reversed. Many codes, for example those for regulating sexuality, have become less restrained and more liberal; on the whole, manners have become more permissive and informal.14 Cas Wouters speaks of an informalization process that challenges a narrative of growing self-­ restraint (Wouters 1977).15 He does so, however, not with the aim of 14  One may call this the transition from “economic individualism” to “expressive individualism,” terms coined by Robert Bellah in his study Habits of the Heart. The movement is away from a culture of self-regulation to a culture of heightened self-expression. One consequence is that traditional forms of cultural influence have been reversed. In Elias’ world, it is the upper class that develops habits that are then taken up by the lower social orders (topbottom model). But in the new age of expressive individualism, marginalized groups can be more influential, because their culture is more expressive than upper-class culture. 15  Cf. also Wouters’ English version of the argument in his essay “On Status Competition and Emotion Management: The Study of Emotions as a New Field” (1992). See also his

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replacing Elias’ theory of the civilizing process, but to describe a new form it has taken. Ironically, the liberation from strict behavioral codes does not simply mean more freedom; it puts the individual under even greater strain to successfully coordinate a growing number of options, so that even more self-regulation is needed. As a result of this informalization process, the need for self-regulation has thus increased, not decreased (Wouters 1999). A similar argument could be made, as I have done, by drawing on Daniel Bell’s theory of the cultural contradictions of capitalism (Fluck 2011). As Bell points out, in capitalism demands on the individual go in two very different, seemingly contradictory directions: professionally, an ever greater self-discipline is required; in private life, the consumption-­ driven ideal is that of a fun-filled expressive lifestyle (Bell 1978). It is as if economic and expressive individualism have to be balanced within one person. In contrast to Bell, however, one could argue that these two lifestyle scripts are not conflicting either-or options. They are part of an increasing range of choices that can only be successfully coordinated, if the individual enhances its powers of self-regulation.16 Self-restraint becomes self-management, which no longer needs internalization. In Elias’ story of a civilizing process that proceeds from uncontrolled impulse behavior to self-restraint, the latter is still a sign of development, whereas in mere self-­ management this “maturity” promise is lost and self-restraint has become only another technology of self-control. Several studies have described this development as driven by new social conditions created by neoliberalism.17 book Informalisierung. 16  This development seems to apply even to French society. Andreas Reckwitz has drawn attention to the fact that another publication of a French sociologist, Bernhard Lahire’s La Culture de l’individu, published in 2004, already presents quite a different picture of French society from the one Bourdieu presented in the 1970s. Instead of the predictable cultural choices made on the basis of Bourdieu’s relatively stable and coherent habitus structures, cultural preferences have now become much more mixed and unpredictable, combining, for example, high and popular culture at will (Reckwitz 2008, 126). On a different, psychoanalytic level, Axel Honneth has drawn attention to how the ego ideal has changed under the influence of object relations theory: “The maturity of a person no longer resides in her ability to control her own impulses and drives; rather, it is now seen in the ability to open up to the many sides of her person” (2003a, b, 160, m.t.). 17  See, for example, Gabriele Michalitsch, Die neoliberale Domestizierung des Subjekts. Von den Leidenschaften zum Kalkül; Sighart Neckel, Flucht nach vorn. Die Erfolgskultur der Marktgesellschaft; Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform.

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If descriptions of the neoliberal subject have anything in common, it is an emphasis on the flexibility that is now required by the individual. This raises the interesting question wherein the functionality of the informalization process lies. After all, it has been regarded as one of the great strengths of Elias’ theory that it is able to describe each new stage in the civilizing process in terms of a functional necessity. In what way can informalization be considered functional, then? One of the main questions that is currently at stake in discussions about the “neoliberal subject” is whether the new flexibility should be seen as merely another internalized structure, tailor-made for the needs of neoliberalism and globalization, or as a new stage in self-development in which more options in all spheres of life are opening up. This emancipation narrative tells a story of the leveling of social hierarchies and a liberation of dimensions of the self—above all sexuality and the body—that remained hidden or repressed in the self-restraint regime. It is no accident, on the other hand, that one of the major arguments of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish-period is that this apparent liberation is an illusion designed to incorporate the body even more effectively into a new disciplinary order. Unfortunately, neither Elias nor Bourdieu set their own narrative in any relation to the opposite possibility of interpreting this phenomenon. The informalization narrative changes the social conditions of recognition and makes the story more complicated. In Elias’ civilizing process, self-restraint is needed to be able to gain recognition within one’s status group. In the informalization narrative, it is almost the other way around: in contrast to self-management, self-restraint is now “old-fashioned,” especially where it is still strongly internalized. However, in a world shaped by informalization it is no longer clear what the best source is for gaining recognition. In this, the informalization narrative moves in the direction of Tocqueville’s democracy of “liberated” individuals driven by desire and universal competition.18 Although his is the oldest and least systematic

18  Cf. Tocqueville: “An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. (…) A man who has set his heart on nothing but the good things of this world is always in a hurry, for he has only a limited time in which to find them, get them and enjoy them. Remembrance of the shortness of life continually goads him on. Apart from the goods he has, he thinks of a thousand others which death will prevent him from tasting if he does not hurry. This

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theory of the ones discussed here, it may come closest to today’s reality.19 In both cases, Tocqueville’s democracy and Wouters’ informalization narrative, we have a wide open field for the pursuit of recognition options coming at the price of greater uncertainty, possibilities of disappointment and risks of failure.20 Like Tocqueville, Bourdieu also claims that social life consists of a constant struggle for position in the social order. But the conclusions they draw are different. For Tocqueville, the ongoing struggle for recognition explains a performance-oriented society with great mobility in which self-­ salesmanship and other forms of impression management produce a status order of great instability. For Bourdieu, the ongoing struggle for recognition is a struggle to defend a firmly entrenched status order that is highly effective in reproducing itself. On the one hand, the struggle for recognition destabilizes the status order; on the other, its main function is to keep it stable, for only then can one’s status be protected.

thought fills him with distress, fear, and regret and keeps his mind continually in agitation, so that he is always changing his plans and his abode” (Tocqueville 1969, 536–537). 19  The permeability of symbolic boundaries that Tocqueville already observes (and Wouters confirms) raises the question whether American society has not developed other forms of exclusion. Inevitably, this must bring up the role of race, a racial recognition regime, castelike, that has proven to be almost immoveable. Tocqueville noted the problem himself and added a chapter at the end of Vol. II of Democracy in America, entitled “Some Considerations Concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States.” It offers a bleak, devastating analysis of the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans in American society. About the treatment of Native Americans, Tocqueville writes: “The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity” (1969, 339). 20  Cf. Wouters’ comparison between English and American society at the end of the nineteenth century: “Throughout most of this period, English status competition and social mobility was highly regulated by a unified good society with a formalized regime of manners with strong functions of boundary-maintenance and gate-keeping, providing protection from strangers and intruders. In contrast, the USA had many competing good societies and a very open status competition” (2011, 263). At another point, Wouters speaks of the “open competition and uncertainty of status” (272) in American society.

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IV Bourdieu’s theory cannot be understood without taking the development of critical theory in the wake of the Paris May into consideration. Although he always kept a certain distance,21 he nevertheless shared some basic assumptions with the movement. Its critical theory has been shaped by one major challenge: to find an answer to the question why the “revolutionary subject,” the working class, has shown no inclination to join the revolution. In orthodox Marxism, the explanation why workers in Western democracies had developed no revolutionary class consciousness can be summarized by the word “ideology,” still defined as “false consciousness.” The challenge for the Left therefore was to find ways to revive the worker’s revolutionary consciousness. Yet, workers remained indifferent, often hostile. There had to be another explanation. The question was “how does a social system in which a substantial section of the population are obviously disadvantaged and exploited survive without its rulers having to depend on physical coercion for the maintenance of order?” (Jenkins 1992, 119). Trying to find an explanation led to Barthes’ redefinition of ideology, Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Foucault’s idea of disciplinary regimes, and other approaches. One of these other approaches was Pierre Bourdieu’s, at times a colleague and friend of Foucault. What all of these approaches had in common as a starting assumption is that the capitalist system had found effective ways to conceal its true nature. Thus, “Bourdieu takes as the fundamental problem of sociology the means by which systems of domination persist and reproduce themselves without conscious recognition by a society’s member” (Di Maggio 1979, 1461). This argument is part of a theoretical shift from political to cultural radicalism. In the interpretive framework of political radicalism, including orthodox Marxism, there are progressive and reactionary forces in society, and the challenge is to provide support for the one and resist the other. For this political struggle, there are still institutions like progressive political parties, or the labor unions, or the student protest movements, or simply the institution of art that hold a promise of resistance. In cultural 21  Cf. Bourdieu: “I feel that many characteristics shared by the ‘structuralist’ generation of Althusser, Foucault, etc.—in which I do not include myself, firstly because I was younger and secondly because I was repelled by its faddish aspects—derive from their effort to distinguish themselves from existentialism and all that it entailed in their eyes: that insipid ‘humanism’ that was prevalent, the preference for ‘lived experience’ and that form of political moralism which still survives in the pages of Esprit” (Honneth et al. 1986, 36).

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radicalism, such hopes are rejected as liberal self-delusions, because for this newer type of radicalism the actual source of power does no longer lie in particular institutions but in culture and its processes of subject formation. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu provides an exemplary definition of his theory of power and links it with the term “recognition”: What I put under the term of ‘recognition,’ then, is the set of fundamental, prereflexive assumptions that social agents engage by the mere fact of taking the world for granted, of accepting the world as it is, and of finding it natural because ‘their mind is constructed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very structures of the world. (168)

Bourdieu stands somewhere in-between political and cultural radicalism. His theory aims to explain that “invisible” force which prevents people from realizing their own situation. But in contrast to other cultural radicals, as, for example, Althusser or Foucault, the manifestation of this force, the habitus, is not an entirely closed system. Bourdieu does not want to be an orthodox Marxist, but he also does not want to be a structuralist Marxist in order not to close the door completely on the possibility of change. As Lamont and Lareau put it, Bourdieu’s theory of power is “structural, yet it left room for human agency” (1988, 154). What he wants to avoid is that actors are degraded as “mere bearers of a structure” (Honneth et al. 1986, 44). As Bourdieu describes it, one of his motivations in departing from structuralism was “to bring real-life actors” back into the analysis, “I do mean ‘actors’ and not ‘subjects’” (1986, 41). But the only “active, creative dimension” (ibid.) on which Bourdieu focuses is the enactment of a habitus that is socially predetermined.22 One of the major points of criticism leveled at the concept of recognition is that it disregards questions of power. Bourdieu does not disregard 22  The question of the possibility of change is therefore difficult in Bourdieu. On the one hand, the concept of habitus is supposed to be a “weak” structure that leaves some room for agency; on the other hand, Bourdieu has identified no source or possible resistance other than (the) sociological self-reflection (of Bourdieu): “The true freedom that sociology offers is to give us a small chance of knowing what game we play and of minimizing the ways in which we are manipulated by the forces of the field in which we evolve” (1992, 198). As Dunn puts it: Sociology “will encourage resistance to the kinds of manipulation that desire makes possible, and this is precisely the kind of resistance that he recommends in the face of aesthetic temptation” (Dunn 1998, 93).

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power, and he even formulates his theory of “invisible power” in a way that makes it possible to link it with questions of recognition. One of his essays on the question is entitled “On Symbolic Power.” Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power is designed to move away from “the interactionist error which consists in reducing relations of power to relations of communication” (1991, 167). To avoid this Habermasian error, it is not sufficient to note that the relations of communication are always, inseparably, power relations (…) It is as structured and structuring instruments of ­communication and knowledge that ‘symbolic systems’ fulfil their political function, as instruments which help to ensure that one class dominates another (symbolic violence). (167)

A key element in upholding this dominance is status, and, as we have seen, culture plays a crucial role in providing legitimation for status distinctions. Culture is, in other words, an invisible form of domination. However, if symbols are the instruments of power, hopes for change are not entirely out of the question. Theoretically, habits—even when they are reconceptualized as an embodied habitus—can be changed. The concept of symbolic power is therefore tailor-made for Bourdieu’s position in-­ between: on the one hand, the source of the power is invisible in the sense that it only manifests itself in symbols that people do not automatically associate with power; but on the other hand, symbols and the habitus are not as deeply ingrained as are fully internalized psychic structures. But since Bourdieu cannot give any reason why individuals should be motivated to strive for change, since reenacting their habitus is in their own best interest, his theory of power remains a theory of social reproduction. Calhoun can thus argue that “Bourdieu’s theory is at its best, therefore, as a theory of reproduction, and at its weakest as a theory of transformation. In this it shows its structuralist (perhaps even functionalist) roots” (2006, 334). It is interesting at this point to compare Bourdieu to Elias who is by no means shying away from the question of power. On the contrary, in one way his view of power is even more fundamental than Bourdieu’s, because Elias sees it as an element built into all forms of human interaction.23 For 23  Bourdieu would disagree. He was well aware of Elias’ work and criticized it for its lack of an adequate analysis of power, equating him, ironically in view of Elias’ criticism of Max

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Elias, “power is not a charm that one person possesses and another does not; it is built into human relations—all human relations” (Elias 1970, 77). Wherever we find human interdependence—on which we depend to survive—we also find power relations.24 Reciprocity is always uneven. Power relations are constantly renegotiated in shifting power balances, and the narrative sequence of a literary text or film, I would add, can be read like a record of this negotiation. By introducing the concept of figuration, emphasis is shifted “to the ever-changing balances of power within complex and interweaving sets of interdependencies” (Layder 1986, 371). This is a different kind of power than Bourdieu’s which keeps people from realizing that they are dominated. In Elias, in contrast, the external constraint that becomes self-restraint is an inevitable part of Vergesellschaftung, that is, of human association. It may put a considerable constraint on human freedom but, to a certain extent, this is a functional necessity to survive. The normative basis of Bourdieu’s critique of status society is a radical sense of freedom. As Dunn puts it: If increasing the realm of human freedom is one of the goals of Bourdieu’s sociology, freedom itself also provides the norm by which he judges the justice of social practice. Thus, he sees the necessity imposed by various forms of social determination as a manifest evil. (Dunn 1998, 89)

If change were possible, its goal would have to be to set humans free from this determination. The implication is that, at least conceptually, there must be something like a true core of the individual that can be imagined as separate from the habitus: “Bourdieu does imply the existence of a self with needs that somehow exceed the social conditioning that creates the habitus” (Dunn 1998, 94). Dunn has therefore characterized the tacit premise that underlies Bourdieu’s theory of power as “the freedom to Weber, with the latter: “But I must at least mention what my work on the emergence of the state has led me to discover that, just like Weber before him, Elias always fails to ask who benefits and who suffers from the monopoly of the state over legitimate violence, and to raise the question (addressed in La noblesse d’Etat) of the domination wielded through the state” (1992, 92–93). 24  In “Norbert Elias über sich selbst,” Elias criticizes Max Weber for having contributed little to an analysis of power. The problems of power, he insists, are “problems of relations and interdependencies. No matter whether one looks at the relation of infants and parents, workers and employers, the governing and the governed, smaller and larger states, what we find are always unstable power balances that might change” (1995, 121).

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preserve autonomy by resisting manipulation” (1998, 93). The potentially autonomous core of the individual might be liberated from the iron grip of the habitus, when the sociological analysis of this “invisible” force leads to self-reflection and self-awareness, so that the spell of the invisible force can be broken. For Elias, on the other hand, such an assumption of an autonomous core of individuality is unthinkable. He is much closer to Mead than Bourdieu in this respect; in fact, he has argued that the opposition between individual and society is entirely untenable, because one generates the other. Bourdieu has also claimed that this opposition is untenable: The most obvious example of such absurd oppositions is that between individual and society. The concept of habitus, as an incorporated and individuated dimension, is also an attempt to overcome that. (Honneth et al. 1986, 48)

However, the habitus is an “invisible” form of social determination of the individual. The relation here is not individual versus society but individual versus bourgeois society, that is, a certain historical type of society that has had a deforming effect.

V In Taylor’s politics of recognition, the term “recognition” is used to fill a gap in the liberal narrative of equality. In his intersubjective theory of recognition, Honneth does not want to limit this correction to questions of group identity and extends it to a conception of “ethical life.” Recognition, for him, is a topic that belongs to a moral philosophy that focuses on “the moral progress of societies” (2003a, b, 217).25 It is Honneth’s project to define “the social prerequisites for achieving individual autonomy” (212). This changes in the work of Bourdieu; in fact, it is almost turned on its head, since the struggle for recognition is now one of the driving engines for the establishment of a status order and, thereby, of an (almost) invisible system of domination that keeps the individual from achieving autonomy. For Elias, trying to gain honor is a driving force not only in the civilizing process but also in the attempt to establish social dominance. In the theories of Taylor and Honneth, recognition is still a social value, 25  The concluding chapter of Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition is entitled “A Formal Conception of Ethical Life.”

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perhaps even a moral one. Recognition may not be more important than redistribution, but it entails an acknowledgment of others that may be the precondition for eliminating social or even economic inequalities. In the works of Bourdieu and Elias, recognition is reduced to an instrumental function designed to establish a superior status. Does it still make sense to call the result recognition? What sense does it make to use the term “recognition” for a cultural behavior in search of distinction that supports the dominant status order? Can the acquisition of symbolic capital, perhaps even by intrigue, manipulation or simply by impression management be worthy of the term “recognition”? It is true that such a use unhitches the term “recognition” from its positive normative meaning, but it also opens up a different perspective on the struggle for recognition. It moves the concept out of moral theory into social analysis, that is, into a world that is not shaped by successfully achieved forms of cooperation but in which universal competition reigns supreme—not only in capitalism but as a defining characteristic of human relations more generally. Reducing the term to the meaning of Anerkennung in the sense of a positive acknowledgment fails to account for the many different ways in which the struggle for recognition shapes cultural and social life. There are three aspects of the struggle for recognition that complicate an equation of recognition with positive acknowledgment. To start with, societies are not divided into groups that do not yet have recognition and should get it, and other groups that already have it. Each group, whatever its status in society as a whole, also has its own internal recognition regime.26 (In fact, one may claim that this is one of the major topics of literature and that literary texts often deal with such inner group struggles.) As Jenkins points out, Bourdieu’s “own evidence suggests that working-class people seem no less concerned to make distinctions than 26  See Bourdieu: “Both the symbolic representations, as well as the accumulation of economic goods, then assume a function in the competition for status between the kinship groups which constitute a tribe. The discrepancies and inconsistencies manifested in the symbolic classifications of natives have their common origin in the fact that competing kinship groups within the tribal society attempt to differently interpret the intersubjectively binding symbol-systems according to the current constellation of interests in order to improve their own standing in the hierarchy. A group, for example, which succeeded through a skillful handling of kinship classifications in claiming an esteemed ancestor as its own, could thereby crucially raise the value of its own standing in the tribal community” (quoted in Honneth 1986, 56).

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anyone else” (1992, 148). That also includes minorities. As I have argued in a different context: Even if my cultural difference is fully acknowledged, I may still lack sufficient recognition as a subject. Groups constituted by cultural difference may present a united front to the outside world, but internally they are also characterized by status order and struggles over status, that is, for a full recognition as a subject. (Fluck 2016, 125)

If we want to preserve the analytical potential of the term “recognition,” we also have to take into consideration that recognition can be—in fact, often will be—a nonreciprocal form of interaction or simply a form of misrecognition. Honneth has recently traced the predominance of a critical concept of recognition in French thought. For poststructuralists, misrecognition explains the persistence of domination. This is also Bourdieu’s position: “The persistence of these arrangements, says Bourdieu, itself depends on the systematic misrecognition of their oppressive nature by both dominators and dominated” (Di Maggio 1979, 1462). The dominated go along with their being dominated, because misrecognition has created a self-perception that makes them disavow what is happening. Misrecognition positions a person in a state of self-delusion. If one concedes that recognition can also be misrecognition, but does not want to accept that recognition is always and by definition misrecognition, as poststructuralists claim, one will have to provide arguments why this is not the case.27 Finally, there is an inbuilt “selfish” dimension in trying to gain recognition. “A generalized desire (whether conscious or unconscious) for a better position is,” Dunn claims, “the habitus’s most durable disposition” (1998, 92). To obtain a better position and to gain a sense of superiority is one of the major driving forces of recognition, and it can often only be realized at the cost of others. Domination, exclusion, and the consolidation of inequality are results of it. Even Mead concedes that “one does get the sense of one’s self by a certain feeling of superiority to others” and that this is “fundamental in the development of the self” (285). Mead still assumes that this is a somewhat immature phase of human development

27   I have tried to make that argument by redefining identity as narrative identity (Fluck 2013).

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which will be overcome in time by a feeling of superiority that is well deserved: One does get the sense of one’s self by a certain feeling of superiority to others, and that this is fundamental in the development of the self was recognized by Wundt. It is an attitude which passes over, under what we consider higher conditions, into the just recognition of the capacity in his own fields. (…) The development of the expert who is superior in the performance of his functions is of a quite different character from the superiority of the bully who simply realizes himself in his ability to subordinate somebody to himself. (285)

Yet such an either-or contrast fails to capture the infinite variety of daily encounters and interactions in which claims for superiority can be made. The struggle for recognition is an endlessly repeated everyday event, manifesting itself in ongoing struggles over superiority that are taking place on all social levels of society, in micro-configurations as well as macro-­ constellations, changing at each historical stage and with each class, “many of them of a very trivial character, but of great importance to us” (Mead 1934, 205). In a chapter in which he discusses “superiorities,” Mead himself mentions forms like gossip and laughter at one point, but also the gratifications of group identity or nationalism: “The sense of superiority is magnified when it belongs to a self that identifies with the group. It is aggravated in our patriotism” (207).28 Seen from this perspective, the driving force in the struggle for recognition is not necessarily a search for distinction. That is only one of its conspicuous manifestations. What is much more common is a struggle over feelings of superiority and inferiority that takes place continuously, even where people interact with the best of cooperative intentions. It is a struggle that can never arrive at a happy ending. In fact, one may claim that struggles for recognition are struggles to define superiority and inferiority. This, in effect, is the more interesting part of the relation between recognition and literature. Stories about how dominance can be exerted in interpersonal relations are much more interesting and instructive than Cinderella stories or tales of male adventures. One may even claim that the true achievement of writers like Jane Austen or Henry James (and many others) is that they have found ways to 28  See also the study of the established-outsider relation by Elias and Scotson and the role of “praise-gossip” and “blame-gossip.”

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combine the two recognition narratives. And it is an important part of this achievement that they successfully affirm the Hegelian claim that recognition is always a form of interdependence in which it is not only the slave that is dependent on the master, but that it is part of their mutual dependence that the master is also dependent on recognition by the slave. Changing constellations in the relation between superiority and inferiority are an elementary part of human interaction.

VI If the struggle for recognition creates a relationship of dependence, we have to get a clearer sense of what this dependence consists of and how it has been conceptualized in social theory. This has been the starting question of this chapter. The work of Bourdieu and Elias has been discussed to clarify how the relationship between recognition and social dependence can be conceptualized. Both Bourdieu and Elias make use of recognition in their arguments, because it is a driving force in human competition. In both cases, people are not aware (or at least, not sufficiently aware) of the power effect of recognition, because it works indirectly, and in both cases these indirect forms have the function to make power “invisible.” In other words: people are not aware of their dependence, because it is exerted by invisible structural effects that determine the individual’s possibilities of response.29 This stands in a striking contrast to Mead where the “I” has an unpredictable, potentially “creative” freedom of response. For Mead, the normal situation “is one which involves a reaction of the individual in a situation which is socially determined, but to which he brings his own responses as an ‘I’” (211). “Such a novel replay to the social situation (…) constitutes the ‘I’ as over against the ‘me’” (197). Because the individual has to take the attitude of the other in order to be able to interact, its response “will contain a novel element. The ‘I’ gives the sense of freedom of initiative” (177).30 Because Mead’s self retains a dimension of 29  As Bourdieu has put it, power only works through “structured and structuring instruments” (1991, 167). Dunn points out one of the consequences: “Bourdieu insists that all forms of culture are shaped by social practices that few individuals understand and that none control” (Dunn 1998, 90). 30  Mead likes to take baseball as a model for the unpredictability of response he has in mind: “Now, it is the presence of those organized sets of attitudes that constitutes that ‘me’ to which he as an ‘I’ is responding. But what that response will be he does not know and

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spontaneity that is not yet structured, drawing on a repertoire of psychic energies, its social dependence has its limits, whereas it is almost unlimited in Bourdieu and Elias. Mead can still use a word like “freedom” of action, whereas there is no freedom left in Bourdieu and very little in Elias’ civilizing process, in both cases only as a latent norm of critique. Are Bourdieu and Elias, each in his own way, structuralists, then? The major difference to other structuralists is that in their case the structure that is the carrier of the power effect has a clearly defined source and a clearly defined functional necessity. It is not structure per se that is the source of the power effect but the function it has in particular historical and social contexts, such as the status order of bourgeois society or the civilizing process that has created a need for growing self-regulation. Thus, instead of structuralism, it seems more fitting to speak of a form of functionalism for which the identification of structural effects is crucial in order to validate their theories about social dependence. These theories are very different from each other, and thus Bourdieu and Elias are both functionalists only in a methodological sense. Ideologically, they are miles apart. In the case of Bourdieu, the function of the structural effect of the habitus is to consolidate power; in the case of Elias, the structural effect of interdependency generates increasing self-regulation that advances the civilizing process. In each case, social processes are shaped not by social actors. It is structure that does the trick. To be sure, this is not Parsons’ functionalism of the kind that Elias criticizes at the beginning of his book on The Civilizing Process. Instead, it comes closer to systems theory with which it shares a basic starting assumption: the common ground for both is to posit that social developments unfold in a process of ever increasing functional differentiation. What is different is how Elias interprets this process. Despite his repeated protestation that he does not want to tell a story of progress in the manner of a Hegelian philosophy of history (which the term “civilizing process” could suggest), his civilizing process, although “blind,” nevertheless has a direction and a telos. In fact, one can identify two narratives that I would like to call Elias1 and Elias2. Elias’ story of the civilizing process is one of a development from childish impulse behavior to a hard-won

nobody else knows. Perhaps he will make a brilliant play or an error. The response to that situation as it appears in his immediate experience is uncertain, and it is that which constitutes the ‘I.’” (1934, 175).

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(=internalized) maturity gained by self-restraint.31 It is a story that sees historical development in terms of stages of human development. This story created the problem of informalization, because informalization would have meant to fall back into immaturity. As we have seen, this led to a reformulation of the story to that of a functional democratization, defined by Elias as a development of “diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties” (1981, 342–351) between classes, that—in the long run—leads to “the lessening of power gradients and social inequalities” (Wouters 2020, 299).32 Ironically enough, this narrative gets support from an unexpected source. In his analysis of the unstable status order of American democracy, Tocqueville also claims that the result will be a growing equality. In both cases, democratization is not dependent on the political system called democracy; it is the result of a long-drawn process of (often unintended) dehierarchization. The story Tocqueville tells in his introduction to Democracy in America is one of a slow but steady advancement of equality, starting in the Middle Ages. The forces that drive this process are by no means restricted to familiar enlightenment actors. It is not a gradual unfolding of reason, nor an ingrained longing for freedom, as the democratic narrative usually has it, that leads to a struggle for equality, but, paradoxically, often the very mechanisms of maintaining power: “In France,” Tocqueville writes for example, “the kings proved the most active and consistent of levelers”

31  Cf. Grubner wo draws attention to the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo on Elias’ The Civilizing Process. Both “describe early world views as emotionalized, self-centered and child-like and the process of civilization as maturation” (2017, 159, m.t.). See also Elias in Vol. I of The Civilizing Process when he talks about aggression: “Because emotions are expressed in a way that we only observe in children today, we may call these expressions and practices ‘childish’” (277). 32  This chapter of Elias’ The Civilizing Process seems to have become by now the key chapter for understanding Elias, because it already introduces the idea of a “functional democratization” (without using the term, however). The central line of defending Elias now seems to have shifted from addressing the apparent contradiction between formalization and informalization as part of a pendulum swing in the civilizing process to functional and dysfunctional democratization. See Wouters, “Have Civilising Processes Changed Direction? Informalisation, Functional Democratisation, and Globalisation” (2020). See also Stephen Mennell, who writes in his Elias-inspired study The American Civilizing Process: “A major thesis of this book is that the long-term historical experience of the USA is the opposite of functional democratization: it has seen increasing inequality, in some respects internally, but more certainly in its power position vis-à-vis its neighbours” (2007, 17).

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(1969, 10). Even adversaries of democracy cannot but contribute to its advancement: As soon as citizens began to hold land otherwise than by feudal tenure, and the newly discovered possibilities of personal property could also lead to influence and power, every invention in the arts and every improvement in trade and industry created fresh elements tending toward equality among men. Henceforward every new invention, every new need occasioned thereby, and every new desire craving satisfaction were steps towards a general leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the dominion of fashion, all the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart, seemed to work together to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor. (1969, 10–11)

Seen this way, there is indeed, as Tocqueville argues, “hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality” (1969, 11). Tocqueville’s actors are far removed from heroic freedom-fighting motivations. They are driven, pure and simple, by “the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart,” things like a taste for luxury, or the domain of fashion, or even, most shockingly, a love for war. What drives them, in other words, are ever new desires craving satisfaction, and this explains why the process is irreversible and unstoppable, because as soon as one desire is satisfied, another one will take its place: Everywhere the diverse happenings in the lives of peoples have turned to democracy’s profit; all men’s efforts have aided it, both those who intended this and those who had no such intention, those who fought for democracy and those who were the declared enemies thereof; all have been driven pell-­ mell along the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will and some unconsciously, blind, instruments in the hands of God. (Tocqueville 1969, 11–12)

Therefore, Tocqueville concludes, “the gradual progress of equality is something fated. (…) every event and every man helps it along” (12). It is, in other words, an elementary human narcissism that drives the process of dehierarchization. In contrast, Elias tells a Freud-inspired story of human development from a yet-unregulated narcissism to self-control.33 33  See the superb analysis by Bernadette Grubner, “Kultureller Narzißmus: Zur Frage ursprünglicher Selbstbezogenheit in den Kulturtheorien Sigmund Freuds und Norbert

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This Elias (Elias1) had to be reinterpreted by Wouters to fit the narrative of functional differentiation and democratization (Elias2). Dehierarchization is one of the major narratives about history that have been developed to describe the rise of modernity. In Elias2, emphasis on ongoing functional differentiation as the source of democratization, can be seen, as I have claimed, as a form of systems theory, but Elias has taken the prospect of an optimistic outcome from Elias134 and immunized himself against all skeptical objections by pointing out that what he talks about is a blind long-term trend, so that trends that others have identified, such as instances of “dysfunctional democratisation,” cannot undermine his claim. We are here, it seems to me, at the core of the explanation why Elias’ work has found relatively little resonance in the American academy, and has never become part of the leading critical theory pantheon. It is more or less the same reason that has also hampered the reception of systems theory in the American humanities more generally. For critical theory, Elias’ two narratives are, to put it bluntly, simply not critical enough, and thus not a useful form of social criticism. For Elias, what the system does to the individual is empowering, despite an often-­ uncomfortable need for adaptation; for critical theory, what the system does to the individual is to constrain and subject it. Its favorite philosophy of history narrative (which it prefers to call genealogy) is the Weberian narrative of rationalization that has gone through several stages of radicalization. In Weber, we still have a coexistence of Zweckrationalität and Wertrationalität, in Horkheimer/Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, instrumental rationality is now dominant and has also begun to invade the few remaining realms of noninstrumentality, with aesthetic negation as a last resort of resistance. Finally, in Paris May cultural radicalism, there is no longer any realm that still stands outside the grasp of instrumental rationality. It is not hard to discover in poststructuralism’s focus on classification, surveillance, and disciplinary power up-to-date reformulations of the narrative of instrumental rationalization. In the final analysis, the major difference between Bourdieu and Elias can be seen in the fact that their social theories are embedded in very different narratives about what drives history. (Another way of putting this Elias” (2017). 34  In his study The American Civilizing Process, Stephen Mennell calls Elias basically an optimist. This view is based on his personal encounters with Elias but also on a close reading of his work.

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would be to say that their theories rest on different philosophies of history.)35 For Elias2, what happens in history is that power differences are gradually diminished by functional differentiation, and for Bourdieu, this is an illusion; power has merely taken on new, even more cunning forms. History is the source of ever new forms of domination. For Bourdieu, the main manifestation of this invisible domination is symbolic power. With his theory of power, he offers yet another version of a relentlessly advancing instrumental rationality; in his case, the struggles for symbolic and cultural capital are the entry gates because they submit all human activities to an economic logic of interest calculation. The fact that Bourdieu seems especially motivated to prove that the claim of aesthetic disinterestedness is merely a pursuit of self-interest in disguise is a typical move in radicalized versions of the instrumental rationality narrative. It is aiming to show that power has by now invaded even those last realms that still seemed to be exempt from it. The only difference to these radical versions is Bourdieu’s occasional in-between-ness which keeps him from the sweeping claims about history that we find in Foucault’s genealogy. This may explain why Bourdieu never really became part of the poststructuralist pantheon in its heyday, but it can also explain why he has aged better than most of the then fashionable exponents of cultural radicalism. For the purpose of our argument, it is notable that both theories depend on the concept of recognition as a driving force in social development. But because of the very different explanatory frames, this force also drives society in very different directions. In Elias2, it is a driving force of dehierarchization that can be effective, because status competition is internalized. Bourdieu does no longer need any psychological motivation, because recognition as a driving force has become embodied in the habitus and can thus function as a kind of habitual impulse. The common ground in both cases is that recognition is part of a historical process that works through its structures and that recognition therefore functions as a 35  In an age of the (apparent) demise of grand narratives, this might appear to be a somewhat daring claim. It rests on the belief that even with the best of intentions interpreters, whether explicitly or implicitly, willingly or unwillingly, cannot avoid seeing their interpretive objects in a larger context from which they derive meaning and significance. Postmodernists and poststructuralists have called for the demise of grand narratives only in order to make room for their own grand narratives. Genealogy is such a new grand narrative, because it claims to know what really went on in history, namely that, in the words of Foucault, it has been an “endlessly repeated play of dominations” in which humanity “proceeds from domination to domination” (1984, 85).

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structural effect. But apart from the fact that both see structures as the driving force in history, there is no common ground on which they could meet. For Elisians, instrumental rationalization is probably simply another variant of functional democratization, whereas for cultural radicalism and Bourdieu functional democratization is merely another, even more cunning form of domination and, hence, merely another liberal self-delusion.

VII In the final analysis, Bourdieu and Elias offer variants of two narratives that have dominated interpretations of Western history and society, that of functional differentiation and that of rationalization, here in the radicalized form of a domination of instrumental rationality in all spheres of life. Their versions of these narratives are highly original, but they nevertheless remain within the basic explanatory frames established by these narratives. And if one knows the narrative, one also knows what role literature and recognition will play in these theories. If the point is to reveal the all-­ pervasive reach of instrumental rationality, literature and art are of interest primarily to prove that no phenomenon, no matter how “disinterested” it may claim to be, stands outside the iron cage of rationality. Consequently, the recognition it may provide can only be misrecognition. For Bourdieu, “individuals need social recognition to have any kind of identity at all, yet they can purchase such recognition only by surrendering to the structures of symbolic power that will imprison them” (Dunn 1998, 95). If the claim is, on the other hand, that the historical process is a civilizing process and, as such, one of functional differentiation, two possibilities open up. If the historical process is conceptualized along the lines of a Freudian development from narcissistic impulse behavior to an increasingly mature self-control (Elias1), then literature will only be a form of Ersatzhandlung. There are very few references to literature in Elias’ work,36 but if the following reference is any measure, this is what his view of literature seems to have been. About the transition of warrior existence to court society, Elias writes:

36  In the introduction to The Civilizing Process Elias talks about the role of self-experience in the constitution of the homo clausus and mentions that literature, for example Virginia Woolf, provides examples in a “less reflected form” (than Max Weber). (1981, LV)

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Life becomes less dangerous, but there is also a loss in the intensity of affect, at least, as far as a direct affect enactment in action is concerned. What is lacking in everyday life, is compensated by dreams, books and images. Thus, nobility, in its transition to court society, begins to read romances of knighthood, just as the middle-class exposes itself to the experience of violence and passionate love by watching movies. (1981, 330)37

If we apply this to the question of recognition, one might say: literature provides substitute recognition, while the transformation of external constraints into a successfully achieved form of self-restraint paves the way for real recognition. A mature person does not need literature for compensation. Recognition, too, remains a secondary phenomenon. Since recognition is not a concept used in any systematic way, it is never entirely clear what impact interdependence has on the struggle for recognition. Sometimes the result seems to be an increasing differentiation that requires more integration and a more cooperative spirit,38 and sometimes it seems to be an intensified status competition and enhanced status anxiety. On the other hand, if the civilizing process is reconceptualized as a process of functional differentiation (Elias2), then the picture changes. Literature is no longer related to a psychic structure, if only in a compensatory fashion, but constitutes a system of its own with its own inner logic and history. Neither autopoiesis nor emergence are possible in Elias’ world. One would have to write another history on this basis, along the lines of Niklas Luhmann’s Die Ausdifferenzierung des Kunstsystems, and this is obviously an altogether different project that would add nothing to Elias’ argument. However, if functional differentiation is conceptualized as functional democratization, then the interesting question would be whether literature has had anything to contribute to this process, if only in an indirect and perhaps even unintended fashion.

37  Cf. in contrast the more perceptive view of George Herbert Mead, who sees in fictional texts other possibilities of ourselves: “The possibilities in our nature, those sorts of energy which William James took so much pleasure in indicating, are possibilities of the self that lie beyond our own immediate presentation. We do not know just what they are. They are in a certain sense the most fascinating contents that we can contemplate, so far as we can get hold of them. We get a great deal of our enjoyment of romance, of moving pictures, of art, in setting free, at least in imagination, capacities which belong to ourselves, or which we want to belong to ourselves” (1934, 204). 38  See Wouters’ characterization of interdependence: “all have increasingly exerted pressure upon each other to take more of each into account more often” (1992, 231).

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There is by now a sizeable body of work in literary studies that sees literature as an important and influential medium in the development of self-restraint, just as, on the other hand, literature, starting with romanticism has been a medium for articulating claims of the individual, thereby functioning as one of the driving forces in the process of informalization. That opens up the prospect of tracing the gradual growth and changing functions of self-restraint as a significant stage of functional democratization through literature. The works of Jane Austen and Henry James provide rich examples, as does the genre of the novel of manners more generally, which offers a cultural history of changing attitudes toward selfrestraint and self-control.39 In an essay on the cultural history of manners in the US, I have traced the ways in which certain genre-specific literary strategies (Wirkungsstrukturen) can best be explained as forms designed to make readers experience the need for self-restraint as an effect of the reading experience.40 However, in these cases the need for self-­restraint is not simply a consequence of growing interdependence. It is an attitude produced by cultural developments in religion, changing moral and social norms, as well as changing individual self-perceptions. In a superb essay on changing disciplinary regimes in nineteenth-century American culture, Richard Broadhead describes a new gender-specific disciplinary regime in American domestic literature of the mid-nineteenth century that he calls disciplinary intimacy, in which recognition is gained at the price of increased dependency.41 39  On Jane Austen see, among others, the essay by D.W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Janes Austen.” James and especially Austen played a major role in the criticism of Lionel Trilling, including his major work of cultural criticism, Sincerity and Authenticity in which the transition from self-restraint to authenticity is told as a story of decline and Austen’s Mansfield Park is praised as a novel that is in support of self-restraint and its moral superiority. Cf. my essay “Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature” (2014). 40  Cf. “Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion’: American Manners and Modernity.” The quote is taken from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and indicates that, at least in American society, informalization set in much earlier than the twentieth century. From that perspective, the major stages in the cultural history of American manners are first the dominance of a gentry code of manners, then a first democratization and transformation into gender-specific codes like the cult of masculinity and the cult of domesticity, both of them models of enhanced self-control, but also self-empowerment, and then yet another stage of democratization in the twentieth century in the shift to expressive individualism (1988, 295). 41  See Brodhead’s description of this new disciplinary intimacy, “its aim, through the cultivation of closeness, to center the child emotionally on the loving parent; then, climactically,

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These examples can serve as a reminder that the internalization of self-­ restraint took place as a drama and a struggle, because it is also always a history of self-denial and self-suppression, of dependence and liberation, of claims of superiority and inferiority.42 Such dramas are a central topic of literary texts in which the individual has to come to terms with conflicting impulses of the self. For Bourdieu, the best literature can do is something sociology can do better; in my view, literature offers something sociology cannot provide, namely an experience of the individual’s struggle with conflicting impulses and social demands. Literature continually articulates and stimulates the individual’s desire and thereby opens up a conflict between the reality principle and the reader’s desire, which are often inverted in their hierarchy in fiction in order to tempt and engage the reader. Affect has to be controlled by self-restraint, but in the process self-­ restraint provokes new desires for the expression of affective and imaginary impulses. In fact, one may claim that this struggle between a drive toward expanding individual self-expression and the social need for restraint (that takes on different forms in each stage of the historical process and in each segment of society) is the actual “civilizing process”— which would also solve the apparent contradiction of a rather sudden turn to informalization.43 It could provide an explanation why functional differentiation can have a particular direction and how it could lead to functional democratization. A drive toward dehierarchization and its plan to use this centering to implant the parent known outwardly only as love as an inwardly regulating moral consciousness” (1993, 20). 42  As Grubner points out, “Elias mentions the cost of the civilizing process only as an aside. The gains dominate the picture he paints almost completely” (2017, 163, m.t.). 43  In my essay “Containment or Emergence? A Theory of American Literature,” I have used the case of the historical novel (that gave literature an altogether new and elevated status in Western societies), to describe this basic conflict: “The historical novel has to draw on elements of the romance in order to make itself dramatically interesting and to provide a space for scenarios of heroic self-enhancement. But it also has to discipline and ultimately control these elements of the romance in order to meet their potential challenge to a social hierarchy which the historical novel set out to defend and to exempt from the suspicion of undue privileges of power and possession” (Fluck 2000, 71). “In terms of its theory of effect, the main point about the historical romance is thus not the liberation of an imaginary core of ‘wild,’ savage self-assertion but its connection with a countermove of control, resulting in a constant tension between wish-fulfillment and restraint, the articulation of a desire for imaginary self-empowerment and its socialization. The reader is lured by the excitement of heroic deeds; at the same time, he or she is also reminded of the need for self-discipline and the legitimacy of social hierarchy” (72). I think that this is a model for understanding the function of fiction more generally.

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individualization has always been a central part of Western intellectual and cultural history, a history that is altogether missing in Elias, most likely because it would complicate the thesis of a dominant structural effect. In this respect, the history of ideas or of literature may have to offer a lot for Elysians by reminding them and us that growing interdependence is itself taking place in a larger context, a historical one but also an interpretive one. In contrast to Elias, literature and art play a central role in Bourdieu’s work as key elements of cultural capital. His sociology of culture is driven by the ambition to set the record straight on the function of art and culture and to tell us what actors in the field do not see or do not want to see. The much acclaimed “disinterestedness” of art is merely a clever strategy to conceal another interest, namely the usefulness of the claim of “disinterestness” for consolidating existent class hierarchies.44 Bourdieu’s project of aesthetic demystification is an argument in support of his theory of power: it is designed to prove that there is no sphere, not even that of “disinterestedness,” standing outside of power relations. Power is not perceived as such, because it is exerted indirectly on a symbolic level, and an analysis of the function of art in bourgeois society can show how this works. Bourdieu has two main problems with literature and art. One is that they are not what they pretend to be. If society is governed by one purpose—to organize and conceal class domination—and if the habitus has, above all, one function—to strengthen this dominance through status seeking—then art can only have one function, namely the support and legitimation of social hierarchies. It has no intrinsic value; it is merely a cultural convention to secure one’s place in the social status order.45 Like magic, it can be effective as long as people believe in it: “The work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art” (1993, 35). Aesthetic judgments thus have no real substance: “Like changes in the lengths of 44  Thus, Bourdieu can say about the problem of justifying the normative standards of such a critique: “I tend to pose the question regarding reason or norms, in a radically historical way. My initial question would be: in whose interests is universalism? Or, what are the social conditions in which certain actors come to be interested in it?” (Honneth et al. 1986, 48). 45  Cf. Dunn, who claims that Bourdieu “has attempted to show that both the producers and the consumers of art are driven by an unremitting struggle for social distinction, a struggle he finds all the more scandalous, because it is masked by doctrines of aesthetic disinterest” (Dunn 1998, 88). As Wilson points out, this stands in striking contrast to Adorno’s view of modern art and the social function it has in Frankfurt School critical theory.

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women’s skirts or in the width of lapels on men’s jackets, differences in aesthetic value serve only to confer social distinctions; they have no positive content in and of themselves” (Dunn 1998, 88). The perception and evaluation of art is determined by the rules of the economy in which capital dominates. In the literary field itself, artists, too, are struggling for position and status. Hence, from Bourdieu’s point of view it is actually pointless to analyze these artifacts as aesthetic objects.46 The idea of aesthetic value has been created by bourgeois society to find a way to gain distinction and justify status. A sweeping, all-around rejection of art as an empty status symbol might not have been intellectually ambitious enough for Bourdieu, however, especially since one French writer, Gustave Flaubert, mattered very much to him.47 For Bourdieu, Flaubert stands out because he provides a perceptive self-analysis of the situation of the writer, so that Bourdieu can ask, in the title of an essay on Flaubert, “Is the Structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-Analysis?” Flaubert is different, because of “his ability to reflect critically on the social conditions that have shaped him” (Dunn 1998, 103). Unfortunately, literature’s fictionality undermines this potential: “The charm of literature lies to a great extent in the fact that, unlike science, according to Searle, it deals with serious matters without asking to be taken completely seriously” (1998, 159). Because literature does not insist on being taken seriously, it requires the help of sociology.48 Literature is condemned to invoke an illusion even as it exposes the 46  However, literature is not entirely useless. Sociologists, Bourdieu says, “can find in literary works research clues and orientation that the censorship specific to the scientific field tend to forbid to them or to hide from them” (1992, 206). 47  Cf. Bourdieu: “I believe that this fascinating and mysterious work condenses all those enigmas that literature can put to those who wish to interpret it” (1993, 145). 48  Cf. Bourdieu: “The sociological reading, which abruptly unveils the structure that the literary text unveils while still veiling it, runs uncomfortably counter to the literary approach. (…) The sociological reading breaks the spell by breaking the tacit complicity that binds author and reader together in the same relationship of negation with regard to the reality indicated in the text. Such a reading although it reveals a truth that the text says, but in such a way as not to say it, does not reveal the text’s own truth; and it would be completely erroneous if it claimed to give the entire truth contained in a text which owes its specificity precisely to the fact that is does not what it says in a way a scientific text would say it. It is doubtless the form, the literary form in which literary objectification takes place, which enables the most deeply buried and the most safely hidden truth to emerge: indeed, the form constitutes the veil that allows author and reader to hide from themselves (as well as from others) this repressed truth (in this case, the structure of the field of power and the model of social ageing)” (1993, 158–159).

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fictionality of that illusion. That includes “self-reflexive” literature, as Dunn points out: “Interestingly enough, Bourdieu insists that even art that openly proclaims its own fictionality and exposes the game from which it derives is still complicit in the process of esthetic mystification” (1998, 107). Even where art possesses a self-reflexive dimension and, as a quasi-­social analysis, manages to transcend its own status as merely a strategy of status-seeking, it can only do this in a mode of fictionality, and that means, it is, in the final analysis, not to be taken seriously. Since Flaubert is the one author who comes closest to going beyond literature’s function as merely a status-seeking pursuit, this negative verdict can be, it seems, extended to all of literature. Even the best literature keeps “the smooth running of all social mechanisms” (Bourdieu 1993, 159) intact. Do we still have to talk, then, about the literary forms of works like Moby-Dick or about the reasons why they are experienced as compelling or powerful by readers? Melville may have experienced status anxieties as an author and therefore may have tried to elevate the novel to a new level of aesthetic innovation in order to gain professional distinction, but in the pursuit of that goal he wrote a number of very different novels and tales which are not yet sufficiently explained by seeing them as strategies in the pursuit of cultural capital. Similarly, it may be convincing to claim that, sociologically speaking, American modernism, including the art novels by Henry James, was the product of “beleaguered gentry” writers (McGurl 2001, 18), but it does not yet explain the different forms produced in response to this status anxiety. Not every beleaguered gentry member that tried to use art for the purpose of gaining cultural capital and social distinction succeeded. Could that have something to do with the different literary texts they produced? There is an aspect of Bourdieu’s work that may be more promising for the purpose of linking literature and recognition. While Bourdieu sometimes can be self-righteously schematic, at other points he seems to have asked himself why certain cultural works could gain cultural capital at all. Is there something in the works themselves that may explain cultural preferences? Why Moby-Dick and not Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The issue comes up in his discussion of the culture of the dominant class which, at a closer look, does not draw on only one type of material to gain cultural capital. There is actually a split. Since the two fractions of the dominant class are different in status, they also have different cultural preferences. For example, the dominant class often prefers decorative culture that signals

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importance, whereas the intelligentsia prefers a much more ascetic culture of difficulty and negation. Do these choices have a logic? In an interesting argument that unfortunately is not fully developed in his work, Bourdieu suggests that the choice of cultural preferences may have something to do with the specific class position of the group within the status order. The interesting point is that the meaning of the cultural preferences of the intellectual class does not necessarily lie on the level of content (so that intellectuals would prefer certain stories); it can also lie in views and feelings produced by that class position, that is, in homologies of dispositions or affects between the text and those produced by the recipient’s social position. The relation is set up by way of analogy—the feeling of powerlessness produced by the intellectuals’s class position as a dominated class within the dominant class can be rediscovered in the disillusionment of a Meursault, although on the overt level the two are not linked in any explicit or obvious way. If developed more consistently, Bourdieu’s argument would have the potential to go beyond the greatest analytical problem of his work, the assumption that most cultural objects are merely “empty” status symbols.

VIII In recent American literary studies, Bourdieu has had an amazing revival in the form of “marketplace criticism.” This may be explained in part because of the present-day situation of literary studies and the humanities at American universities where disenchantment on an institutional as well as an intellectual level has become the order of the day. But one may also claim that Bourdieu’s prominent role has something to do with the fact that he draws attention to some pertinent truths: work in disciplines like literary studies and art history, in fact, in the sciences more generally, is not merely motivated by an uncompromising search for knowledge, but also by a desire to distinguish oneself in a crowded field of competition—a phenomenon that is especially notable in American literary studies and its fixation on “fresh new original insights” that has produced an academic culture of exaggerated interpretive claims and a strong incentive to out-­ radicalize all others. Bourdieu also has a valid point in claiming that value judgments or concepts of art are often built on an unexamined fashionable

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consensus and could not survive without the symbolic power of institutionalization.49 However, a problem remains. For Bourdieu, the production and consumption of art is governed by the purpose to gain distinction. Can it also be produced and consumed for other reasons, such as epistemological inquiries, a search for knowledge, aesthetic experience, psychological needs, or a hunger for recognition that cannot be satisfied by the habitus? One of the most damaging consequences of Bourdieu’s monofunctionalism is that he is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of a coexistence of motivations. In fact, one may argue that literary studies have always had an awareness of the double-sidedness of motives in the profession where the pursuit of knowledge is, at the same time, also a pursuit of professional distinction. One may even argue that one cannot have the one without the other. In the end, the puzzling question that remains is why Bourdieu is not willing or able to concede some kind of coexistence. After all, there may be legitimate reasons for valuing something beyond its strategic usefulness. An enlightenment intellectual might have taken part in the culture of the salon because he could encounter invigorating ideas, but at the same time he could also enjoy the status he gained by doing so. Similarly, one may be deeply engaged emotionally in the music of Beethoven but also appreciate the status that comes along with it. If one does not want to give up the humanities altogether, this would actually seem to be the reasonable view to take, but it would water down Bourdieu’s Paris May radicalism considerably and take away its provocative edge. In other words, it could not have the same function of forceful distinction that a more radical claim can have. Applying Bourdieu’s perspective to his own work, one might claim that he acts out in his own theory what he claims others are 49  Cf. Bourdieu: “Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such, in particular teachers (but also families, etc.)” (1993, 37). To be sure, this is a very timely reminder.

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doing in order to gain status in the radical field. In the pursuit of this goal, he has produced important arguments. But his radical separation of a sociological perspective from intellectual and literary history would in its final consequence lead to an abolition of the field of literary studies. In this respect, the fact that his work has gained such prominence at the present time may be a bad omen. As we have seen, the work of Elias will not be able to come to the rescue.

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CHAPTER 3

“Habit” and the Concept of Character in American Literary Realism and Pragmatist Thought: The Example of William Dean Howells and the James Brothers Heinz Ickstadt

I The interrelatedness of the rise of American literary realism and the development of American social thought—of concepts of society and concepts of fiction—has been part of my academic preoccupations for more than thirty years.1 I have been fascinated by the fact that the realist novel in America and American social thought unfolded in parallel, if distinctly different, ways—the one projecting and dramatizing the particular case, the other abstracting from it in the effort to create a systematic frame into which the concrete and particular might then be placed. Talking about 1  See 77–95 in Ickstadt 1983, or 97–113 in Ickstadt 2001. On the parallel rise of realism and sociology in France, England, and Germany, see Lepennies 1985.

H. Ickstadt (*) John F. Kennedy-Institute, Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_3

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Human Nature and Conduct, John Dewey stated this difference quite succinctly: This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing psychologist [or sociologist, one may add]. The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new situations. The scientific systematizer treats each act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory. (Dewey 1983, 156)

Although this is primarily an argument against his traditionalist enemies in academia, Dewey would no doubt maintain his distinction between the modes of systemizing thought and world-building fictionalization. The realist produces fiction that offers itself to sociological analysis; in contrast, the sociologist produces social fiction as theory or fact-based argument. Both invent society in different modes of representation. The game of fiction is not played according to sociological rules—it enacts its own rules and its own practices of “habit,” perhaps with reference, or in analogy, to theory (be it sociological or psychological), perhaps interacting with it on a parallel course, thus creating its own playing field. One might even argue that Dewey, echoing Zola’s concept of the experimental novel, takes fiction to be a means of exploring, experimentally and autonomously, the social field. Would a sociological approach to the literary text imply a violation of its aesthetic autonomy? Not at all, Pierre Bourdieu insists in his discussion of Gustave Flaubert’s Education Sentimental since the novel itself “supplies all the tools necessary for its own sociological analysis.”2 Since fiction and sociology are considered homologous inquiries into the structures and habits of society, there actually would be no need to use the key of sociological discourse to unlock what is socially enacted in the novel. And yet Bourdieu argues that the work’s social knowledge is a hidden text, or, rather, a deeper text, hidden in its specifically literary discourse, its formal organization:

2  Bourdieu then continues: “the analysis of the book ought to allow us to take advantage of the properties of literary discourse, such as its capacity to reveal while veiling, or to produce a de-realizing ‘reality effect’, in order to introduce us gently, with Flaubert the socioanalyst of Flaubert, to a socioanalysis of Flaubert and of literature” (Bourdieu 1995, 3–4).

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What indeed is this discourse which speaks of the social and psychological world as if it did not speak of it, which cannot speak of this world except on condition that it only speaks of it as if it did not speak of it, that is, in a form which performs, for the author and the reader, a denegation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) of what it expresses? And should we not ask ourselves if work on form is not what makes possible the partial anamnesis of deep and repressed structures, if, in a word, the writer most preoccupied with formal research – such as Flaubert and so many others after him – is not actually driven to act as a medium of those structures (social or psychological), which then achieve objectification, passing through him and his work on inductive words, ‘conductive bodies’ but also more or less opaque screens? (Bourdieu 1995, 3–4)

This is intriguing, if also somewhat mystifying. Although Bourdieu pleads for the (relative) autonomy of the literary text/discourse, he yet insists on the deeper truth, hidden underneath the veiled truth of fiction, that is accessible to sociological inquiry—thus reestablishing a hierarchy in which science dominates the aesthetic as providing deeper, “truer,” knowledge. Fascinating as this is, I shall not go down that path of textual analysis. Instead of trying to tear the veil of aesthetic form in order to reveal the sociological unconscious of the text, I shall follow the more conventional assumption that in realist novels “habit” and “character” are concretely acted out in movements, gestures, patterns of behavior as aspects of an individual experience embedded in a web of social concepts and relations. In their different enactments of “habit,” these texts often touch on, or interact with, contemporary theories of conduct since both modes—that of fiction and of sociological theory and/or study—conceive of the individual self as socially and relationally constituted. In the novels of William Dean Howells, character is always tested in experience and the importance of “habit” acknowledged, although it is dealt with only indirectly. If habits are a problem (since they are under the constant pressure of cultural change), they are yet also a resource. Which may be the reason that there is no Proust-like problematization, even denunciation, of “habit” in American realism. Thinking about “habit” and moral conduct belongs to a long and venerable tradition of philosophical, psychological, and sociological speculation from Aristotle to Bourdieu.3 I shall concentrate on the period between 1880 and 1920, however, when the fields of literary, philosophical and  See, for instance, Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013.

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scientific discourse still hung together—even though they were well on their way of becoming separate disciplines. Keeping in mind that Howells as well as Henry James wanted to become the “American Balzac”—not only for reasons of “fame and fortune” but also because they wanted to emulate Balzac’s detailed exploration of social structure and social being— I shall deal in particular with the interplay between realism and a socially conscious pragmatism. Both realism and pragmatism echo each other in their enactment of, and reflections on, human behavior—in its individual and collective expression, its limits, and its possibilities.

II But what are “habits” and in what way are they connected to “character”? Both William James and, two decades later, John Dewey conceived all living creatures primarily as consisting of “bundles of habits.” Both anchor these habits in the materiality of the body, in the nervous system, in the lower, instinctual, “chaotic,” regions of consciousness. Habits may thus be unconscious and automatic; yet they can also be acquired and consciously cultivated. Accordingly, the semantic range of what can be considered “habit” is wide: There are habits of moving, laughing, thinking, speaking, or writing—habits that we are so used to that we have become completely unaware of them; whereas to others, they are the very mark of our personal being. Habits can have a stabilizing effect—it is their equilibrium that constitutes “character.” And habits are guardians against the consciousness of Death and Time, as Aristotle argues and as Proust deeply regrets in his discourse on “habit” at the end of his À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Habits are “an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response”—a style or manner of behaving that is also reflected in one’s way of thinking and acting. “There is the habit of cultivating attention,” writes William James, for whom “habit” is at the foundation of any thought on “character” and conduct. However, there is, especially in his late work, also a need for the more flexible habit of thinking beyond habit, of getting into the habit of thinking “unhabitually.”4 If, on the individual level, habit forms “character,” on the collective level it builds and maintains social order and is therefore a means of social control. “Habit,” William James famously argued, “is […] the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious agent. It alone is what keeps us all 4

 See the chapter on “Habit” in James 1925.

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within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor” (James 1925, 63). In fact, habits can become so routinized, so confining, that a shock of accident or crisis is needed to break them down, and new stability can be found by the creation of new ones. Habits may become stifling in their automatism and repetitiveness. However, they can also serve as useful tools in the education of ourselves and others. “The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy,” William James argues: The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. (James 1925, 65)5

Therefore, habits can be useful when they become building stones in the construction of character: “So with the man,” thus argues James once again, who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him […] when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. (James 1925, 67–68)

In Human Nature and Conduct, John Dewey would argue along similar lines: Character is the interpenetration of habits. Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character could exist. There would be simply a bundle, and an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. […] Of course interpenetration is never total. It is most marked in what we call strong characters. Integration is an achievement rather than a datum. 5  Indecision and passivity may prevent “character” to be formed since character is built by seizing “every concrete opportunity to act.” “Character” may show itself in distinct individual habits but it is enacted by principle and will. “There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (James 1925, 66). James’s negative example is Rousseau but, secretly, he may have had his brother Henry in mind; and of course, he would have scorned “the weltering sea of sensibility” in Marcel Proust.

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A weak, unstable, vacillating character is one in which different habits alternate with one another rather than embody one another. The strength, ­solidity of a habit is […] due to reinforcement by the force of other habits which it absorbs into itself. (1983, 30)

Character is thus effort, struggle, work—the result of “slowly cumulating strokes of choice […], by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff,” William James writes at the end of the “Stream of Thought” chapter in his Psychology. “Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos [of lower instinctual habits]!” (W. James 1995, 204). “We cannot change habit directly,” thus Dewey argues again, “that notion is magic. But we can change it indirectly by modifying conditions, by an intelligent selecting and weighting of the objects which engage attention and which influence the fulfillment of desires” (Dewey 1983, 18). James’s as well as Dewey’s philosophical scenarios of moral action—the “interpenetration of habits,” the unceasing struggle to acquire new or better fitting habits in the adjustment to, and the shaping of, a changing environment—very often resemble the basic plot lines of a realist novel. Indeed, William James’s vision of the sick or morbid soul, his haunting figure of a man “in whom nothing is habitual but indecision,” as much as his contempt for “the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed,”6 have their echo in several decadent artist or 6  The figure of such a person functions as a counterpoint in James’s moral discourse of building character out of “inexpressive chaos.” In his chapter on “The Sick Soul” in Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes—in the disguise of a letter from a fellow “sufferer” written to him in French—about an experience he once himself had when he saw a psychiatric patient in whom he recognized a potential image of himself: “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches […] with his knees drawn up against his chin […] He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. […] That shape am I, I felt, potentially” (James 1961, 138). In his William James: The Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006), Robert D. Richardson notes on p.543 that this was indeed James’s experience at a low point of his life when he felt paralyzed from the conflicting desires between an artistic awareness of the sensuous richness of life and the dry knowledge of the scientist. James later eliminated the episode from his diary. (I thank Herwig Friedl for this information.) The experience made him “sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since”, and it made him decide to take his life into his own hands: “I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power […] I will posit life […] in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the

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corrupt scoundrel figures in Howells’s novels as well as—although modified and with reduced moral(ist) emphasis—in those of Henry James. (One may think of Gilbert Osmond’s coldly reflective selfishness in The Portrait of a Lady.) It may nevertheless come as a surprise that William James would end his study of the “mind from within,” his chapter on the fluidity of thought and the associative range of language on the borderline of articulation, with metaphors of self-building and the sculpting of character. One may wonder whether he implies that it takes a strong and structured self to engage in the reinstatement of “the vague to its proper place in our mental life” and that one would need to be morally centered to be able to explore mental, psychological, and linguistic marginal states. This tension, even split, between what one might call a Victorian commitment to an ideal of character and a modernist inquiry into the processes of cognition is noticeable everywhere in the late William James.7 On the one hand, it prevents him from becoming a moralist; on the other, it also keeps him from indulging in radical skepticism or the moral relativism he may have sometimes felt his sensitive brother was dangerously close to. Although Henry James, as far as I know, never commented on his brother’s Principles of Psychology and made his famous statement of having unconsciously practiced pragmatism all his life with reference to one of William’s later works (Pragmatism, 1907),8 he had probably read sections of it. His late novels—The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, especially— show his fascination with the “stream of thought,” the fluidity of consciousness, the feelings of transition and of there being no end to relations, the elusive radiance of its associative vagueness. In contrast, William Dean Howells, who never called himself a pragmatist, had read it and reviewed The Principles of Psychology in 1891. Ignoring almost completely what world. Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.” He called this the will to believe; believe in himself, believe/trust in the world, in the creative sustenance of faith (James 1997b, 87). 7  Ross Posnock states the tension in James’s thinking quite succinctly: “James’s life and work are a monument to the self as a perpetual work of labor, a structure of repression. But this is not to deny that the repression is dialectical, issuing in a philosophy of pragmatism that celebrates repression’s opposite: the fact of vulnerability in a world of contingency, uncertainty, risk, change” (1991, 40). 8  “I simply sank down, under it. […] I was lost in wonder of the extent to which all my life I have […] unconsciously pragmatised,” writes Henry to his brother (see H.  James 1995b, 347).

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William James had written about the instability of self, the streaming of thought, the evanescent halo of words, Howells concentrates on the chapters on “Habit” and on “Will” from which he extracts as a lesson to be learned that “we are creatures of our own making” and that “the will of the strong man, the man who has got the habit of preferring sense to nonsense and ‘virtue’ to ‘vice,’ is a freed will, which one might very well spend all one’s energies in achieving.” Obviously, Howells recognizes in William James most of all the moral teacher of right conduct who sternly admonishes his audience that “more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller the import of common duties and of common goods” (Howells 1993, 176). In these mutual interpretations, each reads the other according to his own different needs and purposes. But it should also be clear that all three—Howells as well as each of the James brothers—are involved in a project one might call with William an “unstiffening” of established ideas, of existing forms (be they narrative or philosophical); of concepts of conduct and of character; of social, religious, and cultural order. In this project, which cautiously opens the notion of the “civilized” toward “the dark underlying premises of consciousness”—without, however, entering them in the Freudian manner—and where form, as William James phrased it, is worked out of the stuff of experience like a sculptor “works on his block of stone,” Henry James and William Dean Howells occupy opposite, yet related positions. They are related in that they attempt to save a notion of social order by making it more flexible. (An order, based on common sense and decency in Howells’s case, on “manners” as a system of good behavior in the case of James.) Yet they distinctly differ as to the different degree of flexibility they each allow.9 While Howells confined himself more conventionally to the moral premise of his social vision, he was yet determined to explore, within the conceptual limits he had imposed on it, a world of his own making grounded in an ethics of behavior.10 This would explain his affinity to the moralist side of William James as well as, inversely, Williams’s appreciation of Howells’s fiction—the “veracity” and “goodness” of it—which he valued higher than the density of his brother’s late novels. In contrast, Henry James emphasized in his late work, an  See Ickstadt (2016). On American realism’s civilizing project also see Fluck (1992) and Fluck (2009, 179–198). 10  In defending his concept of realism against the naturalism of Frank Norris, for whom realist novels were little more than “teacup tragedies,” Howells assumes a stern moralistic tone when he speaks of the need to tame “the savage world which underlies as well as environs civilization” (See Howells 1972, 60). 9

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aesthetics of behavior that, although steeped in ethical implications, was yet filtered and refined through his artistic sensibility and a “poor habit” of reflection that is not only Strether’s. As he argued in “The Question of Our Speech” for an audience of young women, he assumed to be the future guardians of American culture: mere “habit” had to be transformed into a higher “second nature”—manners lifted to the form of art.11

III What Murray G. Murphy writes in his preface to Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct could, with some modification, also be applied to the educational project of the realist novel as put into fictional practice by Howells and Henry James: “Viewed in the tradition of American social thought, Dewey stands clearly in the tradition of consensualism,” Murphy argues. Not only did he believe that the application of free creative intelligence to the problems of the world could lead to solutions which would produce both agreement within the community and a satisfactory adjustment for all its members, but he further believed that man was so fully a social being – so intimately and inextricably tied to the life of the group – that social commitment was a natural fact about human beings which underlay much of their symbolic life.12 (Dewey 1983, xxii)

11  In his 1905 commencement speech at Bryn Mawr College, James urged his audience of young upper-class ladies to acquire “an acute consciousness, absolutely,” a self-awareness that would be “the narrow portal” to a beautiful unconsciousness when “our knowledge has passed into our conduct and our life; has become a second nature.” Once through that narrow portal of self-imposed discipline, they would see “the blue horizon across the valley, the wide fair country in which our effort will have settled to the most exquisite of instincts, in which you will taste all the savor of gathered fruit” (James 1999, 52). In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey offers a similar argument in a less elevated tone: “that the real opposition is not between reason and habit but between routine, unintelligent habit, and intelligent habit or art” (Dewey 1983, 55). 12  However, this may seem doubtful in the case of Henry James. Considered from early on to be a writer for an elite audience limited in number, he was nevertheless always aware of the communal aspect of his writing—no matter how small that community might in fact be. In several Prefaces to the New York Edition, he emphasizes the communal, even utopian dimension of his fictions. They are part of a “campaign on behalf of something better […] that blessedly […] might be,” as he wrote in his Preface to “The Lesson of the Master” (James 1934, 222).

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The venture of this civilizing project in times of great social and cultural change (primarily a project of moral melioration that was to bring about an “ethical republic here below,” as William James phrased it13) is based on the assumption that we are indeed “creatures of our own making”— against the grim possibility that our character and its fate might be (pre) determined by God, History, Social Class, or the Laws of Nature after all. In Howells, this tension within the very concept of “character” as created either by individual choice or as inevitably determined by “fate” is acted out symbolically with several exemplary protagonists: with Bartley Hubbard (in A Modern Instance), Jeff Durgin (in The Landlord at Lion’s Head, 1897), or the religious impostor Dilks (in The Leatherwood God, 1916)—all of them monsters of economic and social selfishness who are unable to fundamentally change; or whose fate is determined by irrevocable decisions that move them further out of the circle of civilized society. Sometimes, as in Howells’s late The Leatherwood God (1916), a veritable exorcism is needed, a ritual expulsion of perceived social evil, in order to reconstitute a community that had been led astray by a false prophet and lost its guiding common sense. (To some extent, such a ritual is also enacted in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl.14) These elements, undermining established social order, are the living examples of culture’s possible defeat by “savage nature”—be it by the “savage” enemy within, or the “savage” forces without: instinctual drives and habits, socially or genetically predetermined dispositions; the lower classes and their uncouth desires, or the instinctual life of “uncivilized” racial groups. Howells’s realism—which is always played out before a setting of latent possibility and improvement—has to be seen against this contrapuntal awareness of a naturalist/Social Darwinist (or even an older Calvinist) determinism that it wants to moderate or “unstiffen.” This applies especially to Howells’s first major novel, A Modern Instance, published in 1882.15 It is a curiously conflicted study of “character” in a time of radical cultural change. At one point, the main protagonist, Bartley Hubbard, feels that what happens to him is “the climax of a long series of 13  “Whether a God exist or no God exist […] we form at any rate an ethical republic here below” (Bird 1997, 264). 14  In an admittedly one-sided interpretation, one could argue that the symmetry of a complex marital arrangement is reestablished by the exclusion of its disturbing element— Charlotte Stant, Maggie Verver’s deceiving, yet less hermeneutically gifted antagonist—in a ritual of mutual deception and a subtle reading of social signs. 15  I subsequently quote from The New American Library (Signet Classic) edition of 1964.

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injuries of which he [Hubbard] was the victim at the hands of a hypercritical omnipotence” (Howells 1964, 117). Is this God’s all-seeing and all-­ judging omniscience? Or the power that a godlike narrator has over his protagonists? Or is it the doing of those quasi-divine paternal figures who pass judgment on Hubbard from early on: that he is a “scamp,” has the “making of a scoundrel” (Howells 1964, 91)?16 In any case, the narrator’s dice seem loaded against Hubbard from the beginning: “his chin, deep-­ cut below his mouth, failed to come strenuously forward” (Howells 1964, 8), a sign of a weakness of will that is echoed in his “winning manner which comes from the habit of easily pleasing.” Although Hubbard’s “true” nature is brought out (or confirmed, or determined) by a series of questionable choices (his opting for journalism and not law—and for popular journalism at that), it is his inherent lack of character that in the end determines his destiny: his desire to please, his drinking habit, his flirtatious response to the charming presence of women as well as his inclination to gamble. He is thus one of those “weak, unstable, vacillating” characters, Dewey would write about some forty years later, “in which different habits alternate with one another rather than embody one another.” Hubbard himself is dimly aware of his deficiencies. A curious feeling possessed him; sickness of himself as of someone else; a longing, consciously helpless, to be something different; a sense of captivity to habits and thoughts and hopes that entered in himself and served him alone. (Howells 1964, 98)

He feels contingencies in him “and sees certain habits, traits, tendencies, which he would like to change for the sake of his peace and mind hereafter” (Howells 1964, 306) but he cannot integrate his possible other selves. When, after an ugly quarrel with his wife Marcia, he decides—or rather, feels compelled—to go back to her (because “the mute, obscure forces of habit, which are doubtless the strongest forces in human nature, were 16  In A Modern Instance, Howells controls his narrative predominantly via an omniscient narrator who wavers between conveying his judgment of the characters (and the new social tendencies they represent) to his readers, and of leaving it to them. He mostly does the first, thus seemingly taking sides with the paternal figures of the previous cultural order and its upper-class representatives. In later novels, he frequently foregoes omniscience, makes more flexible use of point-of-view techniques, thus allowing for a shifting of perspectives and, occasionally, for free indirect discourse.

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dragging him back” [Howells 1964, 323]), he discovers that he cannot: Fate has intervened, his money has been stolen, the final path down to moral degradation and to death is from now on unavoidable: “nothing remained for him but the ruin he had chosen.”17 As Atherton, the Boston aristocrat—who is “untempted” in his prosperity—sums up his judgment of the Hubbards: “In some sort, they chose misery for themselves – we make our hell in this life and the next – or it was chosen for them by undisciplined wills that they inherited. In the long run their fate must be a just one” (Howells 1964, 387). This convoluted logic of moral cause for social failure raises questions the novel cannot, or does not want, to answer. The narrator apparently oscillates between different frames of interpretation: There is Hubbard’s failure of conduct, to be sure, the long string of wrong choices made; but there is also the genetic chip he has on his shoulder, suggested phrenologically by the weakness of his chin. There are also his social disadvantages: as orphan he grew up without the frame of parental discipline that might have kept his selfishness in check. In addition, there is, in this “modern instance,” the general decline of religious and parental authority. It is replaced by a new fluidity of customs and convictions, a loosening of moral and social standards that Atherton rages against: The natural goodness doesn’t count […]. The Hubbards were full of natural goodness […]. No, it’s the implanted goodness that saves – the seed of righteousness treasured from generation to generation, and carefully watched and tended by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have dropped it. (Howells 1964, 387)

But if Atherton’s is an example of character as it should be, it is, in its abstractly idealistic, hysterically self-righteous rigidity of principle, as dubious in its strength as Hubbard’s is in its weakness. All these flawed or failing characters are particular instances of a modern world in flux for which the title, “A Modern Instance,” is the common denominator. Habit appears to determine character here and the character’s choice of actions is responsible for the course of his own fate. There is little creative, 17  Hubbard’s misfortune anticipates Hurstwood’s bad luck in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), when he could not return the money he had stolen from the safe of his bank because its door accidentally closed on him. In both cases, accidents befall the weak-willed character who cannot be master of his fate. Except that in the case of Dreiser the moral law that still rules Howells’s world has been replaced by a natural law in which events happen accidentally and yet inevitably.

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or as Dewey might say, “progressive,” adjustment to changed circumstances, only a progressive maladjustment to changing conditions and the diminishing of moral (and social) status it entails. In subsequent fictions, Howells moves toward a more flexible idealist/realist position—a general middle ground with middle-class figures (businessmen, clergymen, doctors, and lawyers), rooted in stable but not rigid habits—habits that can be modified in a moment of moral crisis when put to the test by circumstance and the scrutiny of common sense. An Imperative Duty (1892)18—a short and fascinating, if neglected, novel he wrote after a series of ambitious economic and utopian fictions in the late 1880s and early 1890s—is Howells’s only narrative involvement with racial matters, with white prejudice and its stereotypes. The protagonist is an American physician who, after five years in Italy, returns to Boston, his native city, which he now sees with the eyes of a foreigner. He is homesick for Italy, and what reminds him of its grace and warmth is Boston’s black population that has increased by immigration from the South during his years of absence. They appear to him “the only people left who have any heart for life here” (Howells 1962, 153). One evening, he is called to treat the sickness of a lady whom, together with her pretty, Italian-looking niece, he had met before in Florence. Mrs. Meredith and Dr. Olney talk about race and the doctor expresses his hopes for social equality and eventual integration, but also his disapproval of miscegenation and intermarriage. During his second visit on the next day, Mrs. Meredith asks his advice in a delicate matter: her niece, Rhoda, is on the verge of accepting the hand of a clergyman from Ohio, but doesn’t know that she is “black,” according to prevalent racial definitions, an octoroon. Should she be told or not? Should the clergyman know or not? Wouldn’t her niece’s prospects be ruined if he would? Olney argues against the specter of “heredity” and advises Mrs. Meredith not to tell and let things take their course. But Mrs. Meredith’s Protestant conscience makes her believe that it is her “imperative duty” to tell her niece what she “really” is. For Rhoda, the revelation of her “blackness” is devastating. Up to now, she had idealized Boston’s Negro population in recognition of their temperamental affinity, to some degree even their similarity of looks, but always in the safe knowledge of her racial difference and the confidence granted by her upbringing as a “white lady.” Her aunt’s confession makes this confidence collapse and all her idealizing images turn into mere  I quote from the New College and University Press 1962 edition.

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stereotypes of black savagery and ugliness. Walking through Boston’s Negro ghetto—an exotic delight before the revelation of her secret—now becomes for her a descent into an inner hell of racial aversion and self-­ hatred: a self-inflicted violence that echoes the covert and overt social violence around her.19 She is saved from ultimate despondency by Dr. Olney, who makes it his own “imperative duty” (and a matter of love) to walk Rhoda, via empathy and common sense, through the aberrations of racial prejudice (his own “racial instinct” and its stereotyping included). He is therefore set to take down the mask of the “tragic mulatto” that Rhoda has assumed. Since he does this as an alien in his own country, it is easier for him to overcome the ingrained habits of racial prejudice—those projections of white fears and desires on blacks that Rhoda has so self-destructively internalized. Eventually, Howells’s assumption that human nature “is the same under all masks and disguises that modern conditions have put upon it” (see Howells 1899)—which constitutes the basis of all his writings—forces him to make Olney argue, in a remarkable logical volte, that racial difference does not really exist. What does exist, however, is class prejudice disguised as racial prejudice: the rejection of hard work that, for Howells, is a fundamental social value, metonymically represented by those who once suffered (and continue to suffer from its inheritance) the burden of the degradation of work in slavery. Whereas Hubbard’s choice of profession corresponds to his deficiency of character, Olney’s character is formed by his humanist disposition as much as by habits that may have influenced his choice of profession: his ability to listen, to careful evaluate and draw conclusions. On the basis of these positive habits, he can work his way through the limits of his own social and racial perception as much as he is able to help Rhoda to overcome her white stereotypes of blackness. Olney thus builds on his habits as William James’s sculptor works on his piece of stone in an effort of patient dedication and of love. His patiently shaping character (his own as well as Rhoda’s) out of the resistant materiality of instinctual habits and a hostile environment may well illustrate realism’s project of individual and collective melioration but also be conceived as enacting contemporary 19  Howells uses mostly an omniscient narrator even in this novel but occasionally uses the free indirect discourse that his friend Henry James had developed a few years earlier in The Portrait of a Lady. He makes use of it especially for Rhoda’s self-tormenting excursion into the Boston ghetto.

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social thought (William James’s, for instance, or as running parallel to that of Charles Horton Cooley’s and George Herbert Mead’s, for that matter). In order to extend my argument, I shall briefly look at Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1995a, yet like Howells’s A Modern Instance, published in 1882), specifically at the famous discussion between Madame Merle, experienced in all ways, and the future victim of her deception, Isabel Archer. They argue about the virtue of social “forms” and fine “habits,” be they costumes or customs. Madame Merle, American, yet almost-European, believes that they are essential for self-protection as well as for self-expression, however indirect the latter would have to be. Whereas Isabel, freshly arrived from New  York, and at that point still inspired by Emersonian ideas of self-reliance, argues for the virtues of a free, “un-habited” (“naked” in the eyes of Madame Merle) self. In the course of the novel, Isabel learns to choose habits and duties—the protective shield of “manners”—to save herself from the contingencies of a free “new” life offered to her in different ways by female friends or devoted male admirers. After a series of wrong decisions (the worst of which having been her marriage to Gilbert Osmond), she is transformed, through stages of increasing awareness, from “naked” self into the emblematic “Lady” of the title—a process that culminates in her accepting her cultural role and with it the consequences of the choice she once made.20 However, I would like to discuss more extensively a much later novel of the 1890s, What Maisy Knew (1896/1897) where James—after a brief and unsuccessful engagement with the theater—develops a new narrative technique by following “the divine principle of the Scenario.” In this short novel, James takes the unprotected innocence of a youthful heroine even farther back to the vulnerability of childhood—at the same time that he seems to anticipate the pragmatist resiliency of the more mature and more consciously self-creating protagonists of his late fiction (such as Maggie Verver of The Golden Bowl [1904]). In this earlier novel of the mid-1990s, James chooses a little girl, Maisie, as “center of consciousness” who is 20  The novel has been analyzed so often and in so many different directions that my own interpretation seems perhaps too arbitrarily conservative. The title suggests Isabel’s exemplary status if compared to several women figures in the novel—Madame Merle, former lover of Isabel’s corrupt and cruel husband, but also Henrietta, the journalist and emancipated professional woman. In view of James’s late essays, to become a “Lady” with all its implied attitudes and duties would be a positive, socially redemptive aim. One could of course turn this interpretation around and see Isabel as victim of a long tradition of feminine self-denial and of an obsolete ethos of manners.

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bounced, like “a shuttle-cock,” between an ever-changing symmetry of threes and fours consisting of parents and their lovers, who subsequently become for her another set of parents in a Bourdieu-like game or dance (in which the observer of a field of action is at the same time in it and part of it)—a complex choreography of shifting marital and extramarital relationships. This fictional social field, in which all players use Maisie to protect their highly dubious social respectability or as a cover for establishing a new set of profitable cohabitation, is one of general corruption, a collapse of private and collective mores from which only the child remains exempt. She reacts to the habits of those who constitute her constantly changing environment of persons and of places by creating habits of her own, thus actively adjusting to each new social situation. (As when she enacts, playfully, with her French doll Lisette, the strange conduct of her elders and practices, with Lisette as alter ego, new strategies and habits of behavior [James 1985, 55]). Maisie might be a good example for what William James called the “plasticity” of habit by which he means the “possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we might call a new set of habits” (James 1925, 61). For Maisie, such malleability is the condition of her growing self- and world-­ awareness since it allows her innocence to absorb and “convert” whatever she observes (and thinks she understands) into self-determined agency. Maisie’s “small consciousness” thus expands with her growing “sense of freedom to make out things for herself.” She is, to the end, object of the game of others—a selfish game of love and of jealousy, of money and of sexuality—but she increasingly participates in it as an active player, intuitively grasping its rules without understanding them and yet able to shift the balance and symmetry of the relations—until she sets herself free at last by stepping out of it. From “dim discernment” at the beginning, her knowledge slowly unfolds in several stages of awareness. There is, first, her “long habit” of keen but often clueless observation. Then, by interacting with the other players, she gains power to feel her way through, and to discriminate between, their actions. Later, while in France, she becomes capable of aesthetic and sensuous appreciation, and, finally, acquires what her governess Mrs. Wix calls (and what possibly is) “a moral sense” (which takes her back to London in the company of Mrs. Wix.) “Oh, I know,” Maisie keeps insisting till the very end. Although what Maisie really knows, or

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merely thinks she knows, or only pretends to know, or eventually comes to know in a game where knowledge is inextricably mixed with pretension, deception, and self-deception in which some kind of “truth” eventually evolves, the reader can never be certain of.

IV How much the interplay of “character” and “habit” is indeed tied to the concept of realism, I became aware of once again when I (re)discovered Samuel Beckett’s essay on Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, published in 1931, nine years after Proust’s death and only four years after the last volume of this foundational work of modern literature had come out.21 If Howells and Henry James emphasize the sustaining potency of habit (despite its liability of fast becoming rigid and restrictive), Proust— or, to be more precise, “Marcel,” the novel’s self-centered I-narrator— conceives of habit as nothing more than a lifelong prison that makes true perception impossible. “Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit,” Beckett writes in his long essay on Proust. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world is being a projection of the individual’s consciousness […], the past must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up-to-date. (Beckett 1931, 7–8)

Habits “hide our true impressions from us by burying them under the mass of nomenclatures and practical aims which we erroneously call life,” Marcel reflects in the last section of Le Temps Retrouvé (Proust 1934, 1975). Voluntary memory is thus tied to this protective shell of habit that hides from us the constant presence and possibility of Death and the relentless passing of Time. Habit is therefore no more than a palliative that makes living easier. It helps us “get a grip on things,” but spiritually it counts for nothing. We can truly remember only “what has been registered by our extreme inattention and stored in that ultimate and inaccessible dungeon of our being to which Habit does not possess the key” (Beckett 1931, 18). If habit is thus connected to the boredom of living, the breaking of habit 21  A few years before he wrote his essay on Proust, Beckett had met Joyce in Paris, worked with him and wrote about his work, thus thoroughly absorbing the mind frame and the literary techniques of modernism. I shall subsequently quote from the English version of Proust’s novel, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.

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is related to the excruciating but life-enhancing pain of Being. Time— “that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation” (Beckett 1931, 1)—and the tormenting dualism of desire are, it seems, the condition of Marcel’s sudden and revelatory flashes of remembrance: the taste of the Madeleine steeped in a cup of tea he once had when still a child in his grandmother’s house; the sound of a spoon against a plate that brings to mind the sound he heard of a mechanic’s hammer hitting the iron wheel of a train on one of his past travels; the unevenness of the cobble stones when descending from his carriage to the courtyard of the Princesse de Guermantes, which recalls to immediate sensuous presence an analogous moment of experience in Venice—all these accidental illuminations open for him paths into a past that had long been buried under a surface of accumulated mental rubble: those always fresh and permanently present moments of a long-ago, yet never past, experience—redeemed in time, beyond time’s evanescence. These accidental and unexpected memories, moments of ecstatic recognition that come through “a relaxation of the subject’s habit of thought” (Beckett 1931, 54), are “an immediate, total and delicious deflagration,” thus states Beckett quoting Proust. “In its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness is revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and will reveal— the real,” “the essence of things,” which is hidden “in the depths of our selves, where what has really existed lies unknown to us” (Beckett 1931, 20). To evoke and represent these hidden essences beyond and against the ravages of time is the true function of art. In contrast, Will, Memory, and Habit are aspects of a false reality of mere appearances and thus allies in the creation of the “grotesque fallacy of realistic art.” “Consequently,” Marcel argues, “that literature which is satisfied to describe objects, to give merely a miserable listing of lines and surfaces, is the very one which, while styling itself ‘realist,’ is the farthest removed from reality.” In contrast, his art deals with deeper, underlying truths—subjectively experienced and involuntarily remembered, truths that are entirely of the mind. “I realized that only superficial observation attaches all importance to the object, when the mind is everything” (Proust 1934, 1005 and 1025).22 “Proust,” thus states again Beckett, “is  Proust seems very close to Henry James here, although James keeps fiction strictly separate from essay and autobiography, as Proust apparently does not. In his late novels, especially in The Ambassadors (1903), James enacts the priority of mind/consciousness in remembered and reflected scenes of sensuous experience. But he deals with consciousness most abundantly—since without the restraints of narrative—in his essay of 1910, “Is There a Life After Death?” where he immerses himself in the “inward life” and sinks into “the fountain of being. Into that fountain, to depths immeasurably, our spirits dip – to the effect 22

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that pure subject. He is almost exempt from the impurity of will. He deplores his lack of will until he understands that will, being utilitarian, a servant of intelligence and habit, is not a condition of the artistic experience” (Beckett 1931, 69). This image of the artist may have been anticipated in Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” in the metaphor of the writer’s imagination as “a kind of huge spider web […] suspended in the chamber of consciousness.”23 It is the opposite of William James’s (and also implicitly Howells’s) image of the creative self as a sculptor actively working his form out of the formless stuff of experience.24 Proust’s self-reflecting subject, “exempt from will,” seems in fact related to the passive figure that haunted and continuously fascinated William James: this “miserable human being” of habitual indecision, this “morbid” alter ego he so desperately tried not to be. It was precisely this notion of the sensitive mind as a mere receptacle of aesthetic impressions that William James and his realist coworkers in the field of American culture wanted to avoid in favor of what they considered the usefulness and meliorating social function of their work as artists or

of feeling itself, qua imagination and aspiration, all scented with universal sources” (Matthiessen 1948, 602–614). 23  See James 1984, 44–65. In that connection it may be interesting to note that Gilles Deleuze, in his essay on Proust’s novel, uses the metaphor of spider and spider web to describe not only the narrator but the structure of the novel: “The Search is not constructed like a cathedral or like a gown, but like a web. The spider-Narrator, whose web is the Search being spun, being woven by each thread stirred by one sign or another: the web and the spider, the web and the body are one and the same machine” (Deleuze 2000, 182). 24  That “formless stuff of experience” William James sometimes sees as the material basis (the “bundle of instincts”) out of which the higher form of mental existence is sculpted; but it increasingly becomes intriguing to him as an evanescent and preconscious field, as a mental borderland he calls “pure experience.” It still amounts “only” to an extension of the mind’s center toward the mind’s margins—and is not a replacement of the center by the margins— but it allows him to recognize the subjective truth of the experience of mystics and the psychotically disturbed. In his texts on “Radical Empiricism,” William James places himself on the borderline of epistemological inquiry, Janus-faced, between poetry and philosophy, between his fascination with the prelinguistic and irrational areas of consciousness and the persistent need to put them under the control of reason and habit. He thus always looks toward the margins and the center, intending to “work” out a substantive form, although at the same time conceiving form as evanescent since gained from, yet also always immersed in, the fluid stuff of experience. See Joan Richardson’s and Herwig Friedl’s contributions (and my response to them) in Rohr and Strube (2012, 27–76); also Herwig Friedl’s masterful discussion of pragmatism and its impact on American (and European) thought in Friedl 2019.

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proponents of social thought.25 Of course, as soon as William James sets the social dimension of his exploration of the thought process in brackets, that borderland of evanescent truth (“like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field”26) he tried to convey in his concrete yet fluid language of transition becomes ever more fascinating for him. Although the discourse of conduct and the discourse of cognition seem to be drifting gradually apart the more nineteenth-century thinking is dissolved in the experience of the modern, they do not cease to interact completely. This is certainly true of John Dewey’s democratic pragmatism that never relinquishes questions of the aesthetic and the cognitive. It may even be true of such introverted manifestations of literary modernism as Proust’s novel. Perhaps William James and Marcel Proust are not that far apart after all, if we keep in mind that the self-reflecting and inward-­ looking “Marcel” is not identical with his creator Proust. That, in La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the sickliness and the always-tortured sensibility of Marcel constitutes the very condition of Proust’s extraordinary work. Proust’s novel ends with Marcel’s decision to begin writing his book; and the more than 2000 pages it takes to get to that end—the record of a process of unfolding mental life that spans a personal lifetime as well as the lifetime of a long and painful period of social and cultural transition—amply demonstrate that this radically self-absorbed and mind-­ committed author (who drives Henry James’s habit of reflection to extremes) must nevertheless be a greatly self-disciplined “character” who firmly controls artistically whatever cognitive field on the margins of consciousness he has discovered.27

 “The artist is active,” Beckett remarks on Marcel’s idea of artistic activity, “but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy [of mind or consciousness]” (Beckett 1931, 48). 26  As he phrased it with great visual precision in James (1987, 1181). 27  Although William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) was written more under the influence of Joyce than of Proust, it is nevertheless connected to Proust’s monumental work in its enactment of different forms of subjectivity. In doing so, it questions any notion of a collectively binding order (be it religious, mental, or social). In its fourth and last part, such order has shrunk to the habits and rituals of the religious black community (represented in Dilsey who survives and sustains her decadent white family), or is reduced to that of the mentally retarded Benjy, through whose chaotic consciousness the first part of the novel had been told. His disjointed and totally associative monologue represents human consciousness at its least rationally controlled or ordered level. At the end of the book, Benjy experiences the reversal of his drive around the village square as a devastating collapse of his life’s limited yet familiar (and thus secure) order. He yells and cries until Luther, his black guardian, reestablishes the habitual pattern when he drives the carriage once again in the manner and direction Benjy is used to. 25

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Nevertheless, it is the slow erosion of the Victorian concept of “character” and the habits it is built on, together with the various new paths taken to represent whatever essential reality is found “beyond” or “beneath,” that mark the end of nineteenth-century realism and the beginning of a mind-propelling (if also dangerous and disconcerting) blurring of boundaries in all areas of this new modern culture, as it expresses itself in literature, philosophy, and all the arts.

References Beckett, Samuel. 1931. Proust. New York: Grove. Bird, Graham H. 1997. Moral Philosophy and the Development of Morality. In The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam, 260–281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. S. Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2000. Proust & Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Dewey, John. 1983. The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 14, 1899–1924: Human Nature and Conduct, 1922. In Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dreiser, Theodore. 1900. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. Faulkner, William. 1929. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House. Fluck, Winfried. 1992. Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus, 1865–1900. München: Fink. ———. 2009. Fiction and Fictionality in American Realism. In Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter. Friedl, Herwig. 2019. Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Howells, William Dean. 1897. The Landlord at Lion’s Head. New  York: Harper/Brothers. ———. 1899. Concerning a Council of Perfection. Literature 1: 290. ———. 1916. The Leatherwood God. New York: Century Co. ———. 1962. The Shadow of a Dream and An Imperative Duty, ed. Edwin Cady. Albany: New College and University Press. ———. 1964. A Modern Instance. New York: Signet Classics. ———. 1972. A Case in Point. In American Thought and Writing in the 1890s, ed. Donald Pizer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1993. In Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Ronald Gottesman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Ickstadt, Heinz. 1983. Concepts of Society and the Practice of Fiction: Symbolic Responses to the Experience of Change in Late-Nineteenth-Century America. In Impressions of a Gilded Age: The American Fin de Siècle, ed. Marc Chénetier and Rob Kroes, 77–95. Amsterdam: VU University Press. ———. 2001. Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity, ed. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter. ———. 2016. Helping My People know themselves’: Novels of William Dean Howells from the Turn of the Century. In Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction, ed. Susanne Rohr et al. Heidelberg: Winter. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications. James, Henry. 1903. The Ambassadors. New York/London: Harper & Brothers. ———. 1904. The Golden Bowl. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1905. The Question of Our Speech: The Lesson of Balzac; Two Lectures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1925. Talk to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt. James, Henry. 1934. The Lesson of the Master. In The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. New York: Scribners. James, William. 1961. Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Books. James, Henry. 1984. Henry James: Essays on Literature, American & English Writers. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1985. What Maisie Knew. London: Penguin Classics. James, William. 1987. A World of Pure Experience. In Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1995. The Stream of Thought. In William James: Selected Writings, ed. G.H. Bird, 170–204. London: Everyman. James, Henry. 1995a. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Norton Critical Edition. ———. 1995b. The Correspondence of William James Volume 3, William and Henry: 1897–1910, ed. Ignas K.  Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M.  Berkeley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. James, William. 1997a. Habit. In Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand, 60–68. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997b. The Will to Believe. In Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand, 69–92. New York: Vintage Books. __________. 1999. Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre Walker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lepennies, Wolf. 1985. Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft. München: Hanser.

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Matthiessen, F.O., ed. 1948. The James Family. New York: Knopf. Posnock, Ross. 1991. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Proust, Marcel. 1934. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House. ———. 1975. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Paris: Gallimard. Richardson, Robert D. 2006. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Rohr, Susanne, and Miriam Strube, eds. 2012. Revisiting Pragmatism: William James in the New Millennium. Heidelberg: Winter. Sparrow, Tom, and Adam Hutchinson, eds. 2013. A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu. New York: Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 4

Pushing the ‘Envelope of Circumstances’: Reading the Social with Henry James and Pierre Bourdieu Peter Schneck

Sociology is an esoteric science. […] One must thus draw up a theory of this non-theoretical, partial, somewhat down-to-earth relationship with the social world that is the relation of ordinary experience. And one must also establish a theory of the theoretical relationship, a theory of all the implications. Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 21, 53) The province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, it is all experience. The power to guess the unseen from the seen […] may almost to be said to constitute experience. Henry James (1984, 59, 52–53)

P. Schneck (*) Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Universität Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_4

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I One of the reasons why the following remarks may appear shamelessly speculative is that they are the result of revisiting a conceptual and theoretical terrain which some time ago (a long time ago, to be honest) had been of rather considerable interest for me and whose ‘allure,’ in a manner of speaking, has never left me even though I have indeed strayed off quite a bit in the meantime.1 This points both at a certain objective distance—in terms of the continuity of research—and a certain form of subjective attachment—in terms of unresolved questions and investments which have kept the interest in the matter alive without, however, resulting in more than a merely occasional acknowledgement. To revisit such a terrain thus was and is not without risks; even while there is reason to trust a certain familiarity established over the course of long immersive readings of both James and Bourdieu, it is also reasonable, even necessary, to revise while revisiting. Indeed, I am rather grateful for the opportunity to pursue both with the complexities involved when attempting to ‘read the social’ with James and Bourdieu. Thus, the following discussion is an attempt to carve out in some detail a few distinct similarities or points of convergence between James’s and Bourdieu’s understanding of what it means to ‘read the social.’ This attempt, of course, has to cut both ways, as it were, since what is at stake in the ‘reading’ both James and Bourdieu are concerned with is not just the concrete social practice of ‘reading,’ that is, interpreting one’s social surrounding and situation as the basis for individual action. It also concerns the question of how these practices of ‘reading’ are interpreted from the perspective of the sociologist or the literary writer, respectively. What I hope to show is that despite their obvious differences, there is a similar, and I think quite symptomatic, investment in both Bourdieu’s and James’s readings of the social to understand and to highlight the crucial significance of the implicit dimension of social meaning which any competent reading has to be aware of, precisely, because of the particular power it contains. Joining James and Bourdieu together in such careless manner, of course, cannot do justice to the particular, that is, the distinctive nature of their respective complexities—and even though there are certainly quite a number of good reasons which would support a comparison between 1

 See Schneck 1999 and Schneck 2019.

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James’s and Bourdieu’s notion of the social, or better notions, since as I said, the complexities matter a lot, in the following discussion I will have to concentrate on a very small set of hopefully plausible options. Nevertheless, I think, and will subsequently argue, that this selection addresses rather essential interests in both cases and in similar ways—and the term ‘interest’ itself will hopefully turn out to be a most essential one, as I aim to demonstrate in the following. In this respect, it might be helpful to look at an already-established ‘primary’ connection between Bourdieu’s sociological mode of reading and James’s critical reading of literature—above all, because it was Bourdieu himself who, in his most emphatic demonstration of a sociological reading of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, approvingly referred to James’s criticism of Flaubert’s novel, lamenting about the almost suffocating compactness and control exerted by the author’s tight composition. Comparing Flaubert’s position vis-à-vis his fictional social world as ‘divine creator,’ Bourdieu argues (with some help from literary critics): In fact, as if in some Leibnizian universe, everything is given in actu, from the outset, to the Godlike creator-spectator. […] In such a universe there is no room for chance […] Henry James, for whom the novel read ‘like an epic without air,’ rightly noted that everything in it ‘hangs together.’ (Bourdieu 1993, 151)

The sociologist’s approval of the novelist-cum-critic’s assessment is worth mentioning not just because it reveals that Bourdieu indeed happened to come across James’s criticism and found it worth quoting, but much more so for the specific reason Bourdieu quoted James (if only obliquely).2 The rather inconspicuous passage prepares for an important argument central to Bourdieu’s discussion about the specific way in which Flaubert’s reading (or rather construction) of the social conceals the author’s own 2  The James quote is wrapped in several layers of critical discourse, taken from French sources, in an extremely compact way. Bourdieu is not quoting directly from James, but is intrigued enough to use James’s comments verbatim, even though nestled within the French source (Victor Brombert) criticizing another French reading of Flaubert (Jean Bruneau). It is more than a bit irritating that Bourdieu’s readings of Flaubert (so central for the sociological debate of literature and literary authorship) have largely escaped more intense scrutiny and discussion in regard to their use of literary criticism. Thus, it remains difficult to assess the degree to which Bourdieu was actually familiar with James’s ongoing and intense struggle with Flaubert’s work from 1874 to 1916—especially in regard to the latter’s “scientific” approach to the “deterministic” dimensions of the social. See Seed 1979.

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position within the ‘field of power’ imagined and fictionalized in his novel. For Bourdieu, this concealment or ‘veiling’ marks the major difference between literary sociology and sociology as a scientific reading of the social. While granting that Flaubert’s view of the social space in the novel could be called “a sociological view of things,” Bourdieu claims that the major difference to a sociological analysis proper is marked by its “specifically literary form.” As Bourdieu concludes: The sociological reading, which abruptly unveils the structure that the literary text unveils while veiling it, runs uncomfortably counter to the literary approach […]. The sociologist should try […] to grasp the difference between literary expression and scientific expression […] for the sociologist lays bare a truth that the literary text will reveal only in veiled terms, that it will say only in such a manner as to leave it unsaid, that is, by means of Verneinung, as Freud uses the term. […] This way of withholding things which is characteristic of the literary view of life is the thing which, above and beyond the aesthetic function it fulfils, enables an author to reveal truths that would otherwise be unbearable. (1990, 158; my emphases)

This is a rather curious passage, especially in the larger context of Bourdieu’s argument, since at closer inspection it appears to be quite contradictory. To begin with, what ‘reading’ does Bourdieu actually refer to— his sociological reading of Flaubert’s literary social world or, much more fundamentally (as suggested by the second remark), any scientific reading of the social world versus a literary representation—a veiling—of that same world? Moreover, it appears that the major difference between the literary and the scientific view of the social world is a difference in method but not in substance since both ‘unveil’ or reveal the ‘real’ structure of the social, only that sociology does so ‘abruptly’ whereas literature proceeds in a more indirect manner, as it were. Bourdieu’s reference to Freud (a rare incident that draws attention) seems to suggest that the indirectness of the literary form is inevitable and hardly, if ever, the result of a conscious choice of the author. Yet, negation or disavowal in this particular Freudian sense is not the same as saying something “in such a way as to leave it unsaid.”3 What must appear even more contradictory is that Bourdieu 3  For Freud, Verneinung (negation) and Verleugnung (disavowal) are two different but also closely connected psychic defense mechanisms (Abwehrvorgang); the latter refers to the reality of a traumatizing experience, and the former refers to the subject’s denial of its own statements about latent wishes and desires. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out in their seminal

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seems to neglect the strategic implications of literary form, meaning that the form of a literary representation of the social world itself is a matter of choice. From this perspective, Flaubert’s particular way of ‘unveiling’ the social by ‘veiling’ it contains at least a degree of deliberation, of artistic choice and the conscious application of a ‘method.’ Of course, to insist that the sociologist should be aware of the particularities of literary form is good advice, but that form is not simply to be taken as the inevitable result of the forced misrecognition of the author’s own position vis-à-vis the social reality described. To bring that point home, one may ask whether Bourdieu had actually understood what James was criticizing when he quoted him. What James found objectionable was Flaubert’s explicit and at the same time fatalistic revelation of a social structure in which characters fall prey to their various illusions of agency without being able to learn through their experience and develop more competent (and ethically grounded) responses to and within their social environment. For James, that effect (that ‘reading’ of the social) was clearly a result of a compositional choice which could (or even should) have been different. In other words, for James, Flaubert’s ‘unveiling’ of the social was a bit too obvious and maybe also too ‘abrupt’ and left no room for considering other options, forming more flexible modes of social interaction and response in order to allow a reading of the social not along the lines of an explicit denouement and disillusion but rather along the lines of (self-)reflective experience and the gradual evolvement of social competence. On the basis of this contrastive reading of this primary connection between James and Bourdieu, I would like to suggest that what James found lacking in Flaubert, and what Bourdieu took to be Flaubert’s ‘sociological view,’ is not a form of denial or negation but the contested ways in which realist literature (and sociology for that matter) attempts to make explicit what is (and must remain) socially implicit. This attempt may be described as a ‘veiled unveiling’ or an ‘unveiling while veiling’; no matter, the main point is that the ‘sociology’ of realist literature is heavily invested Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (1967), for French readers the way in which Freud uses ‘negation’ suggests both meanings—which in their assessment should be seen as a source for the suggestive wealth of Freud’s discussion of the defense mechanisms in general. In both cases, and in this way, Bourdieu’s reference seems a bit misleading, and the act of denial is separate from what is being denied and happens when the subject is confronted with a reality (disavowal) or a prior speech act (negation). In Bourdieu’s reading of Flaubert, the literary representation of the social amounts to both an affirmation and a negation of the latent structures of the social in the very same act or form.

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in the socially implicit which it tries to make explicit through ‘literary forms.’ What is contested, though—and this is what James addressed in his criticism of Flaubert—is the specific way in which literature itself could and should act as a medium or instrument of revealing the implicit structures of social life. I think that it is this contested question which even more connects James’s and Bourdieu’s readings of the social since they both reflect on the specific power of the relation between the implicit and the explicit. My last and final introductory consideration thus concerns the question of the possibility of an ‘implicit sociology of literature’ and the way in which it allows or even demands specific ways of ‘reading the social’—a possibility which in turn contains numerous and complex implications. For there are at least three rather contrasting ways in which to read it, all of which turn out to be equally interesting and stimulating to pursue. Is this about the sociological dimension of literature or the sociological analysis of literature as a social practice—and what does the qualifier ‘implicit’ stand for to begin with? Is the sociology in question purely literary—and if so, in what way? Or, following an even more outlandish thought, is this about a sociology of the implicit only to be found in literature? Maybe literature could be looked at and described as the most privileged medium of inquiry and revelation of the socially implicit—bringing out, as it were, in ever so indirect but precise ways what remains hidden in plain sight in the most explicit observations of sociology. Given all these tantalizing options, in the following I have opted for a collision course, that is, I want to tackle the question head-on and discuss the concept or notion of the ‘implicit’ in both James’s and Bourdieu’s understanding of the social in contrast and in comparison. This comparative procedure is aimed to bring out in more clarity the specific role both Bourdieu and James assign to the implicit in their distinct perspective on the social. There are two major ways then in which I understand the notion of an ‘implicit sociology of literature’ and they are somewhat informed by a literary bias: 1. The particular sociology of literature is characterized essentially by its being implicit—in the sense of ‘unspoken,’ ‘tacit,’ or even ‘oblique’ and ambiguous rather than ‘outspoken’ or ‘straightforward.’ 2. The sociology of literature as a ‘literary sociology’ must be implicit, in the sense that it cannot be explicit, or it would cease to be litera-

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ture. A literary sociology not only proceeds by implication, it also cannot escape its implications. The difference between 1. and 2. may appear almost too slight to keep the definitions separate, but I would insist that the first refers rather to a specific form of expression and description which demands a particular activity—a reading, obviously, but one that specifically aims at decoding the implicit sociology of literature. It would not be enough for literature to be somehow ‘about’ the social in one way or another: as a tacit or oblique form of sociology one needs to know how to read its relation to the social in order to read it as a sociology. This is rather obvious, for example, in the case of ‘satire,’ a form of literature which is often explicitly (I use the term with caution) about the social, but it certainly does not ask to be read as a direct and explicit representation of the social. This may appear almost too banal to remark upon among literary scholars, but it is important to keep in mind that the implicit sociology of literature in the first of my two senses needs competent readers who know how to decipher the particular ‘slanted’ form in which a literary text may offer its sociology. In contrast, the second sense in which I understand the implicit sociology of literature actually points at my central hypothesis in the discussion of both Bourdieu’s and James’s use of the difference between the implicit and the explicit. Hence, the second meaning addresses the strategic dimension of being implicit—which obviously also includes the option of being explicit (otherwise it would cease to be a strategy). My hypothesis will be that a literary sociology may be read as an explicit description of the social or at least as explicitly about the social by an act of competent reading according to definition 1; however, there will always be something that must remain implicit and thus escape the sociological reading or interpretation of the literary text. In a certain way, the literary must be blind to its own sociology—to the point of denying or disavowing its very own implication in the particular representations of the social it envisions or projects. Of course, this first cursory attempt at defining does not in any way exhaust all the possible meanings of the attribute ‘implicit’—especially in regard to its curious double nature as being both ‘vague’ but also ‘categorical’—as in the term ‘implicit trust.’ The term itself thus is excessively ‘tricky’ and points at a specific social power dynamic connected to the control of what I would like to call the implicit/explicit option in terms of specific strategies within the context of competing symbolic and linguistic

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practices. That is, the option of choosing between being implicit or being explicit is a salient and profitable strategic choice only for those social agents and in those situations where one can be explicit without being too explicit and where one can afford to be implicit in one’s communication without becoming irrelevant or incomprehensible. This understanding reveals yet another important aspect or dimension of the sociology of the implicit which I take to be a fundamental element in both Bourdieu’s and James’s notion of linguistic and symbolic power and the distribution of, and competition over, symbolic capital.4 If we take as one of the central hypotheses about the social shared by James and Bourdieu, it may be that for both the sphere of the social (a sphere not only of practical action but also of observation) is much more shaped by what is implicit (and thus can only be observed if it is already known) than by what is explicit (and thus affords knowledge readily through observation).5 From the perspective of the participant observer, however, 4  Using Bourdieu’s specific terminology here does not mean to subsume James’s ‘vague’ understanding of symbolic capital and power to the more adequate sociological theory and specific concepts of the sociologist. It certainly should not suggest that James indeed lacked the same understanding of the specific practices and their logic simply because he did never develop a terminology as succinct as Bourdieu’s. Most importantly, it should not support the most egregious of misunderstandings of the real difference between the sociological observation of the social and the literary observation of the social. This difference is not the difference between a more rigorous and systematic versus a more aesthetically inclined and affected mode of observation. On the contrary, the difference resides only in the effect of the distinct ways in which these potentially rather similar modes of observations are translated into forms of representation which demand rather distinct modes of reading the social. I would even surmise that James’s ceaseless commenting and reflecting on his practices of observation and representation over the course of his career as a writer somehow produced a systematic approach to the social, precisely, on the basis of his awareness of the fundamental economic structure of symbolic exchange. This interest in the ‘economy of art’ and life has attracted numerous studies from different angles. What is still missing is a more rigorous discussion of James’s ‘sociology’ in the light of Bourdieu’s categories. It is no wonder that Bourdieu’s own attempts to read the ‘sociology of literature’ from the perspective of his own system was based on a reading of Flaubert—even though he managed to smuggle in a comment on Flaubert by James!—which among many other things again reveals the thoroughly ‘francocentric’ dimensions of Bourdieu’s theory. But then, James’s theories about literature and literary criticism are also heavily influenced by the French context, that is, the literary and critical production of his time. 5  Again, ‘observation’ must be understood in its dual implication as an act of (sustained) attention and as a form of ‘observant’ behaviour, an attempt to adapt one’s immediate social experience to something not immediately given to observation but something nevertheless expected to be of significance, in fact, something expected to be ‘observed.’

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someone who is not immediately involved or invested in the strategic choice between the implicit and the explicit, recording or representing the social situation observed in order to reveal the particular power strategies inherent in the implicit/explicit option presents a challenge. The act of registering and describing social experience also entails a tendency to codify a form of social behaviour from the outside, presenting the observed social practices as something that is completely prescribed by rules and may be predicted and abstracted with the help of these rules. For Bourdieu, this means that what we consider to be social reality is to a great extent representation or the product of representation. And the sociologist’s language plays this game all the time, and with a particular intensity, derived from its scientific authority. In the case of the social world, speaking with authority is as good as doing: if for instance I say with authority that social classes exist, I contribute greatly to making them exist. […] Thus, the sociologist’s words contribute to creating the social world. The sociologists of the future (but it’s already true of us) will discover more and more in the reality they study the sedimented products of their predecessors. (1990, 53–54)

One could argue that this kind of performative authority is the very core of the authority vested in literary authorship—as it seems that in the fictional world of James’s novel and tales, for instance, all of the social is created by words as a matter of principle. Yet, in a way rather similar to Bourdieu’s appeal for a reflexive sociology, James also subjects this novelistic principle of the creation of the social as a fiction to a form of rigorous reflection on the conditions of these acts of creation. This reflection can be found in his meta-novelistic commentary—his diaries but also his prefaces, where he extensively discusses the strategic convergence of dramaturgic interests and formal strategies. Most importantly, however, the (self-) reflection of the performative power struggle at the centre of the social reality he depicts is staged again and again in the retroactive re-reading of the social in the consciousness of his main characters. Reflection is paramount in James; if at all, the social world is never directly available, never immediately given, always (already) prefabricated, predetermined, staged, and performed. This, of course, is also a strong point of identification for his readers who find themselves very much in the same position as the central characters in their common plight to find the most adequate and profitable way to ‘read the social.’ The most important aspect in this

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matter—and also an aspect which severely complicates the reader’s identification—is that James hardly ever assumes his authority as the central agency of creation in an explicit manner. In fact, both the representation of immediate experience and the representation of its retrospective reflection in James’s fictions of the social are far from straightforward and usually refrain from ‘spelling it all out.’ In other words, James’s realism may be said to be much more ‘implicit’ than ‘explicit.’ The catch is, however, that James marks the very reluctance to be explicit as the most obvious (and possibly also suspicious) sign of the implicit and its strategic potential. Especially in the later novels, from The Ambassadors to The Golden Bowl, the strategic power vested in the controlled use of implicit encodings or the controlled ‘unveiling by veiling,’ as Bourdieu has it, is worked into the narrative and the development of the main characters both as the challenge of the actual and as the discovery of a latent potential for action as well as for the expansion of consciousness and experience. This implicit power—more precisely, the power of being implicit by choice—in its most dramatic and performative mode also marks the most decisive moments of discovery—the discovery of implications that cannot or must not be made explicit, because the ‘truths’ they contain would be, indeed, ‘unbearable.’ The emphatic insistence on James’s part on being implicit rather than explicit has been noted and discussed as a form of ‘tact’ and as an ethics of representation, and I will have occasion to discuss this rather important perspective in the second part of my argument. At this point, it might be more effective to develop a more rigorous understanding of the strategic use or function of the implicit/explicit option as conceived by the authority of the sociologist. My first line of inquiry thus will be about the way in which the implicit and the explicit may be regarded from the perspective of Bourdieu’s sociology.

II For anyone remotely familiar with Bourdieu’s writings, his particular interest in what I have called (a bit vaguely) the implicit/explicit option or ‘strategy’ and the significant role which he assigns to this option are rather obvious. It is a central and continuous interest that runs through almost all of his texts and points at the significant function this pairing has for his theory of the social—the logic of practice and the forms of power that shape it. It is obviously central for his discussion of language and symbolic power, which points to the fact that implicit speech or communication

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plays an eminent role in exercising power through linguistic means. This could lead to the conclusion that the implicit/explicit distinction is only operative (as a strategy) in language, or, at least, that it exclusively marks a characteristic feature of forms of expression and communication. However, it would be a mistake to assign the implicit/explicit divide to the realm of expression (or non-expression) alone, for it not only works through what is said versus what is left unsaid, what is alluded to, hinted at, or merely insinuated in contrast to what is made explicit through an act of expression or communication linguistic or other. The distinction between what is implicit and what is explicit (which could better be described as a range of degrees of implicitness vs explicitness) is also one which must be realized by the receiving end, not only on the side of expression but also on the side of reception. In fact, as one could argue in reference to one specific discussion of the implicit/explicit divide by Bourdieu, namely his article on “Codification,” this distinction is a most basic one, already active in what Bourdieu calls the “informational models” which guide “ordinary modes of behavior” and thus are the most essential elements of the “logic of practice” (1990, 78). The short article is exceptional in the way in which it brings together and critically reflects on not only certain concerns but also constraints in regard to a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the social on the one hand and the forms of observation, documentation, recording, and codification on the other, which especially disciplines like ethnology and sociology may use or even must use in order to make the implicit logic of social practices explicit. The critical reflection of one’s own procedures of explication and formalization—as a reflexive sociology, indeed—is an integral element of what Bourdieu here (and elsewhere) calls “a science of practice”: […] an adequate science of practice must take into account and analyse […] the mechanisms at its basis (codification, canonization, etc.). And this comes down – if you take the enterprise to its conclusion – to posing in all its generality the problem of the social conditions of possibility of the very action of codification and theorization, and of the social effects of this theoretical activity, of which the work of the social researcher in the social sciences itself represents a particular form. (1990, 86)

I have to admit that in my early encounters with Bourdieu and James, this specific article presented a kind of foundational text which made it

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possible, and immensely plausible as well, to draw connections between the activity of the social researcher and the literary realist as they in similar ways approach the challenging task to make the implicit logic of the social visible and therefore legible and understandable. In making all these wonderful connections, however, I was prompted less by Bourdieu’s concluding appeal for a reflection on method but much more by his preceding description of how and why he developed central notions of his sociology like the habitus, the sense pratique, or the virtue or mastery of form. What I found—and still find—particularly striking are Bourdieu’s remarks on the difficulty but also the necessity to maintain two conceptions of the social at once, namely that social practices are as much generated and governed by norms or explicit rules (meaning rules which could be explicitly stated) as they are by a much more vague and therefore much more elusive “generative spontaneity” which “asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with ever-renewed situations” and which “obeys a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world” (1990, 78). In short, social practices or “modes of behaviour” are created by the “habitus,” as Bourdieu states, a “system of dispositions to a certain practice” which can be understood basically as a result of the adaptive development of individual modes (or options) of behaviour in response to the demands of a certain field of practice, an indeterminate “feel for the game”: to explain what people do you have to suppose that they obey a certain ‘feel for the game’, as they say in sport, and that, to understand their practices, you have to reconstruct the capital of informational models that enables them to produce sensible and regular thoughts and practices without any intention of behaving meaningfully and without consciously obeying rules explicitly posed as such. (1990, 76)

From my point of view, this particular emphasis on the indeterminate, vague, and improvised character of most of our social behaviour, combined with the obvious awareness for the particular constraints of individual disposition and the formation of habit, strongly resonates with the peculiar Jamesian notion of the ‘envelope of [social] circumstances,’ that is, a complex network of relations and dependencies which ultimately defines both the potential and the limits of our strategic options as social actors.

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The basic resonance between the Bourdieuian and the Jamesian approach to the social appeared (and still appears) to me especially strong in regard to the most basic register or dimension of social practice, that is, the practice of perception or, better, perception as a social practice. In this respect, Bourdieu’s remarks are particularly revealing—and also challenging in regard to necessary revisions—since his notion about the essential function of perception as a social practice can only be assessed adequately in relation to the crucial (strategic) divide between the implicit and the explicit. Since the article on “Codification” deals with a crucial problem of making the social ‘attainable’ as a text or, in other words, of translating the implicit logic of modes of behaviour into a discursive form which would make it explicit, it presumes—and thereby institutes—a basic distinction between modes of behaviour that are oblique to themselves and modes of description that objectify the formal aspects of these modes but by doing so obscure the degree of improvisation and vagueness—but also the potential for transgression and revision—implied by the modes of behaviour described. The crucial distinction between the implicit and explicit—as a practical differentiation—is already operative at the most basic and fundamental level of the subject’s interaction with the social world, that is, on the level of perception, the level where material constraints (the physical facts) and social constraints (the social facts) have to be observed in both senses of the word. It is worth quoting the respective passage again, even though it might be said to present one of the most familiar description of the ‘informational models’ made available by the individual’s habitus: In most ordinary behaviour, we are guided by practical models, that is ‘principles imposing order on action’ (principium important ordinem ad actum), or informational models. These are principles of classification, principles of hierarchization, principles of division which are also principles of vision, in a word, everything which enables each one of us to distinguish between things which other people confuse, to operate, that is, a diacrisis, a judgement which separates. Perception is basically diacritical; it distinguishes ‘figure’ from ‘background’, what is important from what is not, what is central from what is secondary, what is a matter of current concern and what is not. (1990, 79)

Bourdieu’s reference to the fundamental principles of perception defined by Gestalt-Psychology is meant to underline that the principles of

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judgement are always already adapted to, or better in line with, the physio-­ psychological disposition; indeed, it is here where the dispositions of the habitus become embodied, find their bodily anchor, and are performed through the body. It is also obvious that the essentially diacritical perceptual attitude towards the environment is what effects the first or basic implicit/explicit distinction. Yet it is important to look at the conclusion of the passage, where the implicit/explicit distinction is emphasized again, only in a different way: These principles of judgement, of analysis, perception and understanding are almost always implicit, and thus the classifications they work with are coherent, but only up to a certain point. […] if you take logical control too far, you see contradictions springing up at every step. (1990, 79)

What generates the particular degree of implicitness or explicitness in a given moment of social practice is another form of implicitness, which is not the effect of a diacritical perception, but rather an effect of naturalized structures of habits which perception as a practice is unaware of. Obviously, there is a close, intimate connection between the generation of a structured field of perception based on the opposition (in degrees, as I said) between what is explicit and what is not explicit on the one hand and the implicit structures and principles (the informational models) which are not part of the structured field but remain hidden (invisible) in the very act of their realization or performance. In Dieter Hoffman-Axthelms‘apt phrase: “[D]as Wahrnehmen […] verschwindet, wie im Körperprozeß das Atmen, als Selbstverständliches in den Handlungen” (perception dissolves, as does breathing, as something granted in its physical excecution) (1987, 13). What I am interested in here is the relation between the two dimensions of the implicit, especially since Bourdieu seems to suggest that the process which generates one from the other may produce contradictory results—the experience of unexpected constraints or confusion. This means that there is always a potential tension between the implicit structure of the habitus and its realization in practical situations. Obviously then, not all situations can be solved in practice by simply following the implicit structures of the habitus, and there may occur moments when the implicit dimension—the unseen or imperceptible logic of the informational model performed or enacted—becomes perceptible precisely by the contradictions it produces. More to the point, the two dimensions of implicitness which characterize the realization of practical models in

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ordinary modes of behaviour are mutually dependent and, at the same time, potentially conflicting. As long as imposing order on action by enacting ingrained routines will produce the desired results, the logic or structure of the generating principles will remain unnoticed, and the implicit/ explicit divide of the field of perception and action will appear to be natural, true, appropriate, and adequate—that is, it will feel ‘just right’ since it matches the expectations of our dispositions. This particular use of the notion of ‘implicit structures’ (an order which is not made explicit, but nevertheless informs action, becomes visible through action) presents only a small point in Bourdieu’s overall argument, but the dimension of the ‘implicit’ or better the two dimensions of the implicit must be kept in mind because they also inform the processes of objectification and formalization which are implied by codification. Bourdieu’s remarks are directed against what he calls ‘legalism,’ that is, “the tendency by ethnologists to describe the social world in the language of rules and to behave as if social practices were explained merely by stating the explicit rule in accordance with which they are allegedly produced” (1990, 76; my emphasis). In contrast, Bourdieu insists that “[the] tendency to act in a regular manner […] is not based on an explicit rule or law,” which also “means that the modes of behaviour created by the habitus do not have the fine regularity of the modes of behaviour deduced from a legislative principle: the habitus goes hand in glove with vagueness and indeterminacy” (1990, 77; my emphases). This vagueness and indeterminacy of regular behaviour must present a formidable obstacle for the description of the social world which sociology aims at—for several reasons. The major problem presented by the notion of the implicit concerns its transformation into the explicit, in two related ways. Most obviously (and this is the dominant understanding), the transformation results in a loss—which is not only a loss of depth but also a loss of character. The first effect of codification thus is the objectification of the implicit, as Bourdieu states in regard to the work of the ethnologist: To ask what objectification is means asking about the ethnologist’s very work, which in the fashion of the first legislators, codifies, by the mere fact of reporting, things which existed only in the incorporated state […]. (1990, 79)

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However, the transport from incorporated practice to reporting and writing about that practice is also fraught with an epistemological problem:6 One has to refrain from seeking in the productions of the habitus more logic than they actually contain: the logic of practice lies in being logical to the point at which being logical would cease being practical. […] Codification maybe antinomic to the application of the code. (1990, 79)

In other words, the re-projection of the objectified unto the implicit, even in the act of interpretation, will produce a misinterpretation of the implicit. Therefore, as Bourdieu insists: [a]ll codifying activity must thus be accompanied by a theory of the effect of the codification, for fear of unconsciously substituting the objectified logic of the code for the codified logic of the practical models and the partial logic of practice they generate. (1990, 79)

If we take the literary description or ‘recording’ of the social as a distinct form of objectification, that is, as a practice of codification in its own terms, Bourdieu’s claim must also apply to a “Sociology of Literature,” however implicit or explicit it appears to be. This sociology—and obviously this includes both the literary ‘codification’ of social practice and its ‘application’ through interpretation (‘reading’ the social)—also must be accompanied by a theory of the effect of this particular mode of codification. The haunting question is, of course, what kind of theory we would need: A theory of literature or a sociological theory or even a mixture of the two? I do not have a ready-made solution for this problem, but in the final part of my discussion I will try to accrue a few arguments for some provisional answers. I will do so by abruptly switching my perspective from the implicit in sociology to the explicit in literature, that is, from Bourdieu to James.

6  This is the problem which Loïc Wacquant pointed to when he talked about the objectifying gaze of the esprit geometric versus the embodied grasp of the esprit finesse (in the opening lecture of the conference to which this discussion was originally contributed).

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III Not many moves may appear more counterintuitive than presenting Henry James as a prime example for an ‘explicit’ sociology of literature, since for most readers and critics, myself included, James’s novels and stories appear to be so radically and excessively devoted to subtlety that they become explicitly implicit. One may only refer in this respect to William James’s famous reaction after reading into his brother’s latest production: ‘Why, for heaven sake, don’t you spit it out for once’—or words to that effect—and there are still many readers today who would share the frustration.7 William James’s frustration is telling in more than one way: Even though he was no sociologist, his deep interest in the conditions of human and social behaviour—from the formation of habits, the question of the will to the psychological underpinnings of thought and language— would have made him susceptible to complex and careful modes of describing social reality, but obviously he felt that Henry was holding back deliberately and that the strategy of indirection was just a strategy, an artistic choice or manner of speaking.8 What is interesting is that William’s reading habits—that is, his expectations about the forms representing the social—obviously inform his assessment by shifting the implicit/explicit divide. Since there is nothing explicit in the novel, the divide or difference can only be played out on the level of form, as something explicit about its style. Thus, when looking at the stylistic unfolding of Henry James’s strategies of indirection, the breaks and silences in the dialogues, the unanswered questions to others and to oneself, and the mental restagings of actions in retrospective meditations, often hypothetically by surrogates or participant observers—in all these instances, the very act of ‘withholding’ may turn into an explicit sign, marking or tracing an unseen structure which lies beneath the character’s actions and their verbal and mental attempts to negotiate and master this structure. What is important to note is that this effort on the plane of action and character reflection is mirrored by the efforts of James’s readers because it not only marks one major strategy of the social interactions described in the novel, it clearly and quite consciously is also modulated and used by James as a central compositional strategy. To put it bluntly, indirection as a social manner of 7 8

 For this discussion, see Hocks 1974, and Armstrong 1983.  See also Ickstadt (in this volume).

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interaction preferred (and perfected) by a specific class of actors is turned into style in the literary representation of these interactions. Reading James entails a particular mode of wilful compliance to the rules of the social world depicted, joining, as it were, the efforts of the characters to ‘master’ the implicit. Thus, James states in his preface to The Golden Bowl, “What perhaps stands out for me is the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action,” only to conclude, in the same sentence, that he could also call “this mode of treatment […] the very straightest and closest possible” (James 1937b, v). What must appear paradoxical at first sight actually characterizes a conception of social reality as a field of action which exists in two, importantly connected ways. It is a field of action, because it is determined by the actions of all characters. But it is a field of action only in relation to the character’s interpretations of these actions as referring and complying to the same rules and structures of power—or, more precisely, referring to the same ‘interests’ invested in the field. This may sound very much like Bourdieu’s notion of the field, which actually turns on the Jamesian notion of interest. Explaining his ‘oblique view’ further in The Golden Bowl preface, James describes how he would ‘habitually’ give over the narrating perspective to characters in his novels who were not at the centre of the action represented and thus not directly involved as actors, but who were even more actively trying to interpret the action of the main characters as the plot unfolds. Reading the social with James thus always entails or amounts to reading ‘readings’ of the social, that is, reading the interpretations of participant observers as a sort of running commentary from a perspective that is free from the “muffling majesty of ‘authorship,’” as James remarks, and at the same time mediates between the ‘raw’ aspects of immediate social experience and the interpretation of that same experience from another angle, yet within the same field. What is important is that this ‘oblique view’ of participant observation is not without interests or investments of its own—even the observation and interpretation of the social is a social practice in itself and an act of purposeful investment. What James seems to insist upon is that these acts in and for themselves can be presented also as forms of aesthetic involvement and assessment—this specific notion can be detected already in earlier texts, as, for instance, in Daisy Miller, which is as much about Daisy as it is about Winterbourne’s (and our own) attempt to ‘read’ her. Critics have discussed this method of indirection, silence, and implicitness as a form of protection, an ethics of reading and interpretation which emphasizes tact, a reluctance to judge in order to reduce harm or damage

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to the characters—but also to the reader’s assessment of the characters. These readings are convincing and plausible, but they also tend to miss an important point about ‘tact’ and its specific, that is, strategic, function and value.9 For, if read in their historical and biographical context of creation/ production, we may find that James’s ‘tact’ is less a personal reluctance of judgement vis-à-vis his characters and much more (and maybe more significantly) a meaningful emphasis on the strategic value of the ­implicit/ explicit option. Again, this is not a paradox or even a conflict between character and strategy and between ethics and social practice because they unfold in the same sphere of action. More poignantly, what James seems to imply (in his ‘veiled unveiling’) is that ethical behaviour or ‘tact’ is not just a matter of personal choice but also depends on the power and the effects it may exert in the social sphere as a field of action. In fact, this may be the most central concern of James’s fictions of the implicit: in what way the personal and subjective ethics of individual actors can be invested (through actions) in the competitive environment of the social field. For both the devotees and admirers, then, style is function in James, which directly bears on the reception and the comprehension of content; appreciation of form and insight into meaning are closely linked. Reading the social with James means to indulge in the implicit, a wealth of suggestive detail which exudes significance, a web of potential meanings that have to be worked out from experience by experience. The meaning of the social in James is thus only open to a form of competent intuition since it is never explicated as such, and for many ‘experienced’ readers, such moments of highlighted intuition are as crucial for the characters as they are cherished by the readers as exemplary demonstrations of James’s mastery of dramatizing the implicit. I suppose every Jamesian has her or his favourite example in mind, and mine can be most likely recognized in the following: Just beyond the threshold of the drawing-room she stopped short, the reason for her doing so being that she had received an impression. The impression had, in strictness, nothing unprecedented; but she felt it as something new, and the soundlessness of her step gave her time to take in the scene before she interrupted it. Madame Merle was there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was there talking to her […]. Isabel had often seen that before, 9

 See, for instance, Brudney 1990 and Scofield 2003.

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certainly; but what she had not seen, or at least not noticed, was that their colloquy had for a moment converted itself into a sort of familiar silence, from which she instantly perceived that her entrance would startle them. […] There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light … it was all over by the time she had fairly seen it. (1984, 407–408; my emphasis)

Without going into specifics, the formal strategy here can serve as a fairly generic example of James’s particular ‘codification’ of social practice or reality, that is, a typical demonstration of his ‘implicit sociology.’ The close affinities between this fictive scene and a similar description, which James used in “The Art of Fiction,” strongly suggest that James saw no difference between the processes active in social cognition and those which the writer of literary fiction had to rely on to represent these processes. By confronting the reader with the processes rather than with their potential results or outcomes, James also channels the attention of his audience invested in the process of reading in order to heighten their awareness of the implicit—as the ‘not yet’ explicit. In fact, on the basis of examples like these, as well as numerous remarks in his notebooks, letters, and the prefaces to the New  York edition of his collected works, it is obvious that James was not simply addressing but clearly demanding a disposition for the implicit—what I would call an ‘experienced’ intuition. As he famously declared: “the power to guess the unseen from the seen […] may almost be said to constitute experience” (1984, 52–53). This understanding is completely covered by the first definition of an implicit sociology of literature which in James’s case could be even radicalized as a ‘sociology of the implicit’ as it were. James’s sociology, especially if one wants to interpret it in Bourdeuian terms, obviously needs dedicated readers who are acutely sensitive to the implicit and on whom ‘nothing is lost,’—and when they are so disposed, they will get a sense of the hidden logic of social power struggles and how it affects and informs the behaviour of his characters in all possible detail. But as I stated at the outset, the sociology of literature (and most arguably so in the case of James) may also be said to be implicit in a way that will not become explicit by simply reading the novel as a representation of social practices of power but only by extending the field of our reading to include the novel itself as a practice. In what way then can the emphatic obsession with the implicit dimension of social reality be read as a strategy

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which does not simply aim at the objectification of the subjective dimension to reveal hidden social structures but also as a strategic investment in the revision of established modes of reading the social in literature. After all, if there is a sociology in James’s novels that we can read in Bourdieuian terms, this sociology is still very much a rather explicitly Jamesian sociology of literature. To make this implicit sociology more explicit, I will conclude with another example, one which will also allow me to return to other concepts or notions which are central for both Bourdieu and James, especially ‘interest’ and ‘value.’ James published his last novel—The Outcry—in 1911, and even though it was well received during his time, it is almost completely forgotten now and certainly does not belong to the standard Jamesian canon. There are of course reasons for this neglect, the most obvious may be that it presents a glaring anomaly in terms of style and narrative finesse in comparison to the later novels, like The Wings of the Dove, but also in comparison to other novels from the ‘major phase’ as The Portrait of a Lady. Thus, it does in no way offer itself to a mode of sensible reading that is disposed towards the implicit; it is, in fact rather explicit, even in its title. I do not aim to save the novel from the neglect it has suffered, yet the lasting disinterest of scholars and readers alike must be seen as quite symptomatic. Surprisingly, there is a lot of ‘sociology’ invested in The Outcry, and it is actually rather revealing if read in comparison to other works deemed to be more significant in this respect. The Outcry therefore is not a complete anomaly, since it is concerned with some of James’s central themes and issues. Most of all, it is concerned with the social value and the recognition of art as symbolic capital and thus with interest and investment. The Outcry is based on actual events which were of great public interest in England between 1907 and 1909, when an English private collection of immensely valuable paintings was sold to foreign investors, among them James Pierpont Morgan, who had become the director of the Metropolitan Museum in 1904. The English resented this sell-out in particular, but it only presented a more spectacular transaction within a larger dynamic where American economic power led to a massive loss of symbolic goods, especially paintings, from English private owners. The increasing public resistance and the ‘outcry’ of 1907 eventually led to the foundation of the National Arts Collection Fund a few years later which could save the artworks for the public by turning them into cultural property. The details are rather fascinating, but James is less interested in the actual case than in

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the larger crisis of symbolic and cultural capital which he essentially presents as the struggle between three different practices of art appreciation and the various interests which drive these practices. The novel lends itself easily to an analysis with the help of Bourdieu’s concepts, but I will only try to sketch out how James’s rather explicit sociology in this strange work may help to connect the two dimensions of the implicit in regard to his own interest in social cognition. One major strategy used by James to situate his characters according to their potentials within the struggle for symbolic power and capital is literary portraiture, and it is certainly no coincident that the two paintings at the centre of the struggle are also portraits. All characters have their own interests to pursue—and it is not altogether clear whose interests are the most laudable, or the most deplorable ones. Without exception, all disputes about the paintings are marked as ‘business’ negotiations, so that all conversations, even while they are not explicitly about the paintings, seem to partake in the overall logic of transaction, exchange, and the maximization of profit. The paintings are both the object and the medium of the struggle because they signify the different realization of the particular capital they want to accrue. They stand for social prestige, tradition, and patriotism, as well as for pure art and disinterested connoisseurship, but also for exchange value, investment, and symbolic expression and stabilization of economic power. In numerous dialogues and conversations (the novel had been originally conceived as a play), James carefully characterizes most interests as an inherent feature of class position and class discourse. What is most conspicuous in contrast to what we have come to accept as the typical Jamesian style or method is the glaring absence of a centre of consciousness or an interior perspective which would invite the reader to share the process of experience. In fact, one could argue that this novel is not about experience—at least not on the subjective level as the confrontation of individual sensibility with the normative codes of social practice. In contrast to the densely composed works surrounding it, The Outcry is rather explicitly about the conflict of schemes of classification, more precisely the conflict of ‘experience as a method’—as John Dewey would have it.10 As James carefully makes explicit, the crisis of the symbolic order and the drain of symbolic capital from England to America are due to the failure of established schemes of appreciation of art (the perception and  See Dewey 1976, 117.

10

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assessment of the symbolic value of art) on the part of the English ruling classes, which are the original owners of the paintings. The failure is threefold: Firstly, there is an obvious disregard of the paintings as a form of symbolic capital, a denial of their function as a form or signal of social distinction. Secondly, there is the tendency to perceive the paintings merely in one of their possible dimensions of value, namely their status as economic capital presented by them. And finally, there is a failure to acknowledge the significance of art as a form of collective capital, to perceive the value of the paintings from the perspective of the public good. This is a crucial failure since, for James, the social function of art can only be realized through a form of appropriation which is a form of both apprehension and appreciation. As Bourdieu puts it: “The work of art considered as a symbolic good (and not as an economic asset, which it also may be) only exists as such for a person who has the means to appropriate it, or in other words, to decipher it” (1993, 220). In the novel, the paintings are eventually saved from neglect and degradation to mere economic capital and made accessible for public access (and appropriation/appreciation) by transferring ownership to a museum. All of this is only possible through the work of a professional art critic (who comes from nowhere, and has neither monetary nor class interests but understands paintings and gets the girl) whose fine sensibility detects the real value of the artworks by revising their authorial attribution—thus placing them as ‘original’ artworks within the larger canon of established collective symbolic capital. James was reacting to a real public ‘outcry’ in 1909 surrounding a cherished Holbein painting on loan to the National Gallery. The owner of the Holbein had accepted an offer for the picture to sell it abroad, which could only be averted if the National Gallery could match the sum offered. This seemed to be impossible without raising a considerable amount through a public campaign—and it was only a last-­ minute offer by an ‘unknown lady’ which finally saved the painting for the National Gallery.11 As mentioned above, in his play and the subsequent novel, James uses this event to cast a light on the underlying conflicts between different discourses of value and ownership in which attribution as a major technique of re-evaluation and reappropriation also could

 See Litt 2001, and Tintner 1980, 1981.

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changes the forms of perception and codification in both aesthetic and economic practices of appreciation.12 James’s argument about the need to develop public discourses of appreciation based on the acute and sensible perception of implicit qualities (and values) in The Outcry is motivated by his own interests in establishing a readership as sensible as the art critic in his novel, and thus here his argument is made in the most explicit manner—which may exactly be the reason why The Outcry is so hard to classify as a typical ‘Jamesian’ novel. It inverses the economy of the implicit which we usually find in the other novels and stories; while it explicitly endorses a fine sensibility for the overlooked detail and its potentially crucial social significance and value, it does not demand it from its readers—thus, in The Outcry there is no interest and no investment in the ‘oblique view’ which would ‘pay off,’ as it were. The inversion is a telling one, I think, because it also demonstrates how the dynamic of the implicit/explicit division informs our reading of the sociological dimension in relation to the aesthetic dimension. For it is not that the sociological reading of James’s works has made their aesthetic apprehension and appreciation irrelevant, far from it. It is only because of the specific aesthetic reading they demand and because of the fact that this specific form of reading for the implicit has turned into an accepted and established form of reading and appropriating literature—an institutionalized practice—that it may be also accepted as a useful and appropriate codification of the social world. This then is another crucial aspect of its character as an ‘implicit’ sociology, which is that one can read James’s fictions as implicit codifications of the social world not because we have come to finally accept them as a sociology but because they have explicitly been accepted as works of art.

References Armstrong, Paul B. 1983. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bendix, Regina F. 2015. Eigentum, Kultur(erbe) und Wert. In Kultur als Eigentum: Instrumente, Querschnitte und Fallstudien, ed. Stefan Groth, Regina F.  Bendix, and Achim Spiller, 177–196. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. 12  These discursive mechanisms have been described as “Inwertsetzungsdiskurse,” see Bendix 2015.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New  York: Columbia University Press. Brudney, Daniel. 1990. Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral Philosophy. Critical Inquiry 16 (2): 397–437. Dewey, John. 1976. ‘Consciousness’ and Experience (1899). In John Dewey: The Middle Works, ed. JoAnn Boydston, 113–130. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hocks, Richard A. 1974. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hoffman-Axthelms, Dieter. 1987. Sinnesarbeit. Nachdenken über Wahrnehmung. Frankfurt: Campus. James, Henry. 1937a. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Scribner. ———. 1937b. The Golden Bowl. New York: Scribner. ———. 1984. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. New York: Library of America. Laplanche, Jean, and J.B.  Pontalis. 1967. Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Litt, Toby. 2001. Introduction. In Henry James. The Outcry, vii–xxviii. London: Penguin. Schneck, Peter. 1999. Bilder der Erfahrung: Kulturelle Wahrnehmung im amerikanischen Realismus. Frankfurt: Campus. ———. 2019. Henry James and the Creative Process: The Stewpot of the Imagination. In Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal, ed. Suzanne Nalbantian and Paul M.  Matthews, 239–257. New York: Oxford University Press. Scofield, Martin. 2003. Implied Stories: Implication, Moral Panic and “The Turn of the Screw”. Journal of the Short Story in English 40: 97–107. Seed, D. 1979. Henry James’s Reading of Flaubert. Comparative Literature Studies 16 (4): 307–317. Tintner, Adeline. 1980. James’s King Lear: The Outcry and the Art Drain. AB Bookman’s Weekly 65 (5): 798–828. ———. 1981. Henry James’s The Outcry and the Art Drain of 1908–09. Apollo 113 (228): 110–112.

CHAPTER 5

Systemic Racism: Reading Ralph Ellison with Bourdieu’s Theory of Power Christa Buschendorf

The following reading of Ralph Ellison’s masterwork Invisible Man (1952) is based on two interconnected hypotheses. First, I would claim, Ellison’s reception has been overshadowed by discussions about his political

This chapter goes back to a lecture I gave in July 2019 at the international symposium “(Re-) Reading Ralph Ellison” organized by Luvena Kopp, Stephan Kuhl, and Nicole Lindenberg. I am very grateful for the opportunity to present my thoughts to a wonderfully vibrant and knowledgeable group of Ellison scholars. I greatly benefited from their valuable feedback and from the animating discussions during the conference. I am especially grateful to the class of highly gifted graduate students of the MALS program of Dartmouth College whom I was fortunate and honored to teach as Harris Distinguished Professor in the summer term of 2019. Their intellectual commitment and inquisitiveness have greatly stimulated my thinking about Ellison’s Invisible Man. Special thanks to my most generous and inspiring host Donald Pease.

C. Buschendorf (*) Goethe-Universität, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_5

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standpoint. He is frequently judged as a freedom fighter manqué rather than an author of literary texts. Having moved from a decidedly leftist stance in the 1930s to a liberal position by 1945,1 Ellison—accused of unpolitical existentialism, crude nationalism, or even of being an Uncle Tom—has been a great disappointment to progressive Black intellectuals.2 Unlike, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright, Ellison lost interest in the African struggles for freedom; and, more importantly, he more often than not even kept a safe distance from the civil rights movement. Arnold Rampersad’s biography emphasizes Ellison’s political shift in the 1940s. There is, however, a remarkable undercurrent in the biographer’s portrait: he repeatedly mentions Ellison’s fits of anger, a rage that seems to erupt in reaction to disrespect shown toward himself as a Black man. Evidently, Ellison was highly sensitive to gestures of disregard that result in the kind of social invisibility he represents in his novel. When in 1973 he was asked, “How do you feel about the criticism you sometimes get from black students who feel you haven’t been militant enough?” Ellison answered, “I say you be your kind of militant and I’ll be my kind of militant” (Rampersad 2007, 490). In the following, I will take him by his word, and look for signs of militancy—not in his life—but in Invisible Man. Given the passion with which the ongoing debates about Ellison’s personal political views are conducted, the following caveat may be appropriate. This chapter does not offer yet another opinion on Ellison’s political trajectory or, for that matter, his partisan intentions in writing Invisible Man. Rather, it investigates what the text itself reveals about the sociopsychological living conditions of Black people in the United States in pre–civil rights movement times. My second hypothesis regards my approach. I claim that reading Ellison’s novel Invisible Man by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts discloses a kind of militancy that can easily be overlooked. At the core of Bourdieu’s theory of power is the following fundamental question: Why is it, the sociologist wonders, 1  See Barbara Foley, who, on the basis of “the multiple drafts, outlines, and notes for the novel, as well as Ellison’s early journalism and fiction,” reads Invisible Man “as a conflicted and contradictory text bearing multiple traces of his struggle to repress and then abolish the ghost of his leftist consciousness and conscience” (2010, 6–7). As Foley claims, it is “these unpublished texts which contain the clearest evidence that Ellison not only took his Marxism seriously but also continued to think like a Marxist well past 1943” (2010, 17). 2  For examples of such outspoken critique, especially in the early 1970s, see Bradley 2010, 57–61.

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that the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, and that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural. (2001, 1)

The interrelated concepts Bourdieu developed in his oeuvre focus on analyzing the conditions and structures of domination that result in unequal distributions of power as well as various other fundamental resources that, in turn, can explain the durability of established hierarchies. I will single out the concept of “symbolic violence” as particularly relevant to Ellison’s text. In contrast to physical violence, which is recognized as such by perpetrator and victim alike, symbolic violence, or “gentle violence” (Bourdieu 2001, 1), often remains hidden, because it usually confirms the social hierarchy the agents take for granted. As an inconspicuous practice within an accepted order of the world, symbolic violence, “exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition” (2001, 2), becomes a particularly efficient instrument of domination. At least this is true as long as not only the committer but also the target of symbolic violence naturalizes and thus misrecognizes the existing power relations. Due to this misrecognition of power,3 it becomes more difficult, if not at times impossible, for the victim to engage in conscious resistance. Invisible Man, I maintain, presents a broad range of examples of the exertion of symbolic violence and a great variety of reactions to it.

I In his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, Ellison questions the portrayal of Blacks in African American literature. He wonders “why most protagonists of Afro-American fiction […] were without intellectual depth. Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, […] but yet seldom able to articulate the issues which tortured 3  See Bourdieu’s definition: “Any symbolic domination presupposes on the part of those who are subjected to it a form of complicity which is neither a passive submission to an external constraint nor a free adherence to values” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 168, n. 122). Cf. also the following passage: “This submission is in no way a ‘voluntary servitude’ and this complicity is not granted by a conscious, deliberate act; it is itself the effect of a power, which is durably inscribed in the bodies of the dominated, in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions” (Bourdieu 2000, 171).

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them” (1995, xix). By contrast, Ellison decided, he had “to create a narrator who could think as well as act” (xxi). It is indeed an eloquent protagonist, who in the prologue starts out by reflecting his social position in American society. As the heterodiegetic narrator muses, the invisibility, which defines him, derives from “a peculiar disposition” of the “inner eyes” (3; emphasis in original) of those who disregard him. He recalls that in a fit of rage he recently attacked and almost killed a white man after having accidently bumped into him at night, whereupon the latter had kept insulting and cursing him. Even in direct confrontation, the white man does not give up his disposition of denying the Black man social recognition. The invisible man (henceforth “IM” as acting, “narrator” as reflecting protagonist) stops his physical assault, when it occurs to him that the white man is completely incapable of regarding him as someone who legitimately resents disregard, but will instead insist on conceiving him as a criminal. The narrator finds himself then in a social relation of domination whose logic, in Bourdieu’s words, is “exerted in the name of a symbolic principle […], a distinctive property, whether emblem or stigma, the symbolically most powerful of which is that perfectly arbitrary and non-predictive bodily property, skin colour” (2001, 2). The narrator confesses that his awareness of being invisible produces changing moods: “Most of the time,” he states, “I am not so overtly violent.” Rather, “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones” (5). Resistance against domination may alternate with submission to it. There is an alternative to applying physical violence in resisting the powerful, which the narrator has come to favor. In analogy to the “soft power” (Bourdieu 2001, 32) of the dominant, he in turn has implemented a subversive kind of resistance once he started living underground: he is draining off massive amounts of electricity from the corporation “Monopolated Light & Power” (5). Thus, he counteracts his social invisibility by an “act of sabotage” (7) that provides him with the light he claims is necessary to confirm his very reality as well as to manifest the state of ‘enlightenment’ he has achieved as a result of his learning process: “The truth is the light and light is the truth” (7). The outcome of his education takes the form of a paradox: “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (7). While the narrator has gained insight into the predicament of being principally treated with disrespect by white fellow citizens, the name of the corporation, understood

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metonymically, indicates that the dominant in society continue to claim the monopoly of distributing both light and power; namely, they define what is true and who is in control. The dire message of the prologue then is that notwithstanding the narrator’s crucial insight into his invisibility, which on an individual level saves him from leading a life in death, society will yet keep him in the position of the dominated. Ellison’s novel, whose “end is in the beginning” (6), has frequently been associated with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a work with which it shares the notion of a narrator who writes from not only a position of marginalization but also a fundamental compositional device.4 Both nameless narrators begin by speaking about their present situation and state of mind as having grown out of experiences in the past, which in a reversal of time sequence they narrate afterward; and of both works it is true that “[C]oming at the end of the book, it sends us back to the beginning” (Pevear 1994, xviii). Though writing his memoir, Dostoevsky’s protagonist is not “a professional man of letters […], but one whom circumstances have led or forced to take up the pen” (Pevear 1994, vii), which also applies to Ellison’s narrator, who, in the course of events, undergoes a metamorphosis from “ranter to writer” (Ellison 2003, 111).5 This is important to understand, because it should prevent us from

4  Ellison himself confirmed the connection: “I associated him [IM], ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and with that I began to structure the movement of my plot, while he began to merge with my more specialized concerns with fictional form” (1995, xix; emphasis in original). For further aspects of the influence of Dostoevsky on Ellison, see Frank (1999). 5  Not surprisingly, Invisible Man has been associated with Richard Wright’s Man Who Lived Underground; yet Ellison would insist on the decisive relevance of Dostoevsky’s narrator in the shaping of his protagonist; in a letter to Stanley Hyman (1957), he writes: “As for my narrator, he comes out of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, not Wright’s Man Who Lived Underground, who is incapable of simple thought much less of philosophical articulation” (Ellison 2019, 487; emphasis in original). In a later letter to Hyman (1970), Ellison persists: “My narrator, like Dostoevsky’s, is a thinker, and this is true despite the fact that my character does not think too clearly or too well. Nevertheless, my protagonist does possess a conscious philosophical dimension and is, since he lives by ideas, an intellectual” (2019, 680). Debating literary influence in his essay “The World and the Jug,” Ellison famously distinguishes between “relatives” and “ancestors” claiming that “while one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ‘ancestors.’ Wright was in this sense, a ‘relative’ […] Dostoevsky and Faulkner[,] were ‘ancestors’” (2003, 185).

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identifying the professional writers Dostoevsky and Ellison with their narrators, a confusion of which many readers and critics have been culpable.6 Up to this point, the narrator has reflected upon a social dynamic that he finally has come to understand clearly, that he knows to be severely harmful to Blacks, and that, to his frustration, he finds himself unable to change. In the following part of the prologue, the narrator’s rational contemplation—stressed by visual imagery—shifts to a visceral experience based on the sense of hearing. At the same time, there is a shift from the present to the past. One night, prompted by the effects of a reefer and Louis Armstrong’s blues, he “not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths” (9). Passing into a cave, he is transposed into the historical past and finds himself in the hell of slavery, first witnessing an auction scene, then hearing a sermon on the “Blackness of Blackness,” and, finally, encountering a moaning slave woman. She mourns the death of her master, whom she had come to love dearly, because he had given her several sons, “and because I loved my sons I learned to love their father though I hated him too” (10). “He promised to set us free but he never could bring hisself to do it. Still I loved him” (11). But because she loves freedom even more than her master, she is able to resolve this ambivalence of feeling in a subversive act: “I loved him and give him the poison and he withered away like a frost-bit apple. Them boys woulda tore him to pieces with they homemade knives” (11). Apart from the irony that lies in the suggestion that her sly method of killing the master is morally preferable to the brutal physical violence her sons would have used and despite the fact that she was not caught, the murder has by no means set her free. Regardless her act of resistance, the slave is still firmly bound to the master by the strong contrary emotions of hate and love. Obviously, the episode evokes collective Black history, and thus the slave’s ambivalence reveals one of the systemic consequences of slavery that turns the slave mother into an object of “symbolic violence, a gentle violence, imperceptible and 6  As Pevear notes, “readers [got] the impression that they have to do here with a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s own ideological position, and much commentary has been written on the book in that light.” But whereas “Dostoevsky certainly put a lot of himself into the situations and emotions of his narrator; what distinguishes his book from the narrator’s is an extra dimension of laughter. Laughter creates the distance that allows for recognition, without which the book might be a tract, a case history, a cry of despair, anything you like, but not a work of art” (1994, ix). This characterization also fits Ellison’s novel, on whose “dimension of laughter” see below. In addition, Ellison stresses the distance between himself and IM by repeatedly pointing out the latter’s naïveté.

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invisible even to its victims” (Bourdieu 2001, 1). The precondition, under which this kind of “gentle violence” is effective, is that the dominated have from early on experienced and embodied the structures of domination. Sharing the schemes of vision and division of the dominant, the dominated will “often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed” (2001, 38). Moreover, it is a “form of power that is exerted on bodies directly and as if by magic” (38). This magical power “take[s] the form of bodily emotions – shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt – or passions and sentiments – love, admiration, respect.” “These emotions,” Bourdieu explains, are all the more powerful when they are betrayed in visible manifestations such as blushing, stuttering, clumsiness, trembling, anger or impotent rage, so many ways of submitting, even despite oneself […] to the dominant judgement, sometimes in internal conflict and division of self, of experiencing the insidious complicity that a body slipping from the control of consciousness and will maintains with the censures inherent in the social structures. (38–39; emphasis in original)

With the visionary example of the slave woman juxtaposed to the narrator’s present reality, Ellison points to the relevance of the shared history of slavery for the producing of “schemes of perception, thought and action” (Bourdieu 1990, 54) that shape what Bourdieu calls habitus: “The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product” (56; emphasis in original). What Bourdieu formulates theoretically, Ellison illustrates in fiction, in this case by creating similarities between the subjective experience of the narrator and the slave mother. They both suffer from swinging moods and from ambivalent feelings toward the dominant, and both exhibit “bodily emotions” (38; emphasis in original) typical of the dominated. To the sociologist’s general theoretical question, why “the established order, with its relations of domination […] ultimately perpetuates itself so easily” (2001, 1), Ellison, in this fictional episode, gives a concrete answer by pointing out that the roots of Black-­ and-­white power relations, which originate in slavery, reach into the present by having shaped the dispositions of slaves and shaping their descendants. Moreover, Ellison demonstrates that the collective experience is passed on in the major African American cultural practice: music. While expressing the continuous suffering of Black people, the

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blues—Ellison asserts—simultaneously represent an essential means of coping creatively with that same suffering. As the prologue reveals, a major result of IM’s education is that he has come to an understanding of the mechanisms of exerting and enduring symbolic power. However, as important as this knowledge is, it does not save him from experiencing the effects of the ongoing domination.7 On the contrary, the white stranger’s insults trigger severe bodily emotions: the narrator senses “outrage” (4); he is “in a frenzy” (4), so that he feels indeed his “body slipping from the control of consciousness and will” (Bourdieu 2001, 39) and, as a consequence, reacts to the soft power with physical violence. It is only because he has in the past become aware of his principally inferior social position that he is capable at all of pausing and regaining control over his emotion of “impotent rage” (Bourdieu 2001, 38) before he might have killed his opponent. Or is it really control, when he “ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself” (5)? Juxtaposed to “raw anger,” laughter—even “an extravagance of laughter,” as Ellison called it in his famous eponymous essay (2003, 617–662)—is a strategy of distancing and, ultimately, of survival. In view of the infamous practice of lynching, “the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy” and “given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection” (1995, xv), Ellison asked himself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter? And could it be that there was subtle triumph in such laughter that I had missed, but one which still was more affirmative than raw anger? A secret, hard-earned wisdom that might, perhaps, offer a more effective strategy through which a floundering Afro-American novelist could convey his vision? (1995, xv– xvi; emphasis in the original)

The differences between the prologue’s enlightened man and the young student, whom the narrator in hindsight calls “naïve” (15), are considerable. The first and very important episode in the narrative proper renders the seminal message of the protagonist’s grandfather, who, accusing himself of meekness on his deathbed, urges his “alarmed” offspring to “to keep up the good fight” (16). The type of fighting, he recommends, 7  “It is quite illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the weapons of consciousness and will” (Bourdieu 2000, 180).

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does not consist in open battle, but in subversive behavior: “I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction” (16). By exaggerating expected gestures of deference, the dominated should turn acts of subservience into acts of insubordination. Yet, to IM, the “old Man’s words were like a curse” (17), because they puzzle and irritate him with regard to his own habitual conduct. At that early point of his development, IM is the model Black student proud to deliver the graduation oration, “in which I showed that humility was the secret, indeed the very essence of progress.” But at the same time, as the following caveat proves, the message of his grandfather has already sufficiently taken root: “(Not that I believed this – how could I, remembering my grandfather? – I only believed that it worked)” (17). The first three major scenes of the novel, the nightly encounter with the white man in New  York in the fictional present of the late 1940s, the imaginary conversation with a Southern slave, and the memory of the grandfather’s speech in the narrator’s youth in Jim Crow South, address a central question of the novel: What possibilities of resistance exist for the dominated in a world of uneven power relations? These three incidents prepare us, as it were, for the immediately following scene, one of the most striking and significant episodes of Invisible Man: the smoker.

II The “most lily-white men of the town” (16) have gathered in the ballroom of the best hotel for an evening of entertainment. Declaring it a “smoker” ensures that the men, uninhibited by the presence of their wives or daughters, can drop the mask of respectability and indulge in the most vulgar types of amusement. Dressed in tuxedos, as it befits their social status, they turn into animal-like creatures while giving in to those pleasures, “wolfing down the buffet foods” (17). All four presentations of the after-dinner show, the display of the nude dancer, the battle royal, the money grabbing on the electrified carpet, and the speech of the narrator come down to the white men’s primitive pleasure in the act of domination, and all four perfectly illustrate the effects of symbolic violence on the dominated. Not only is the blonde nude herself turned into a completely objectified body chased after and tossed up in the air, to which she reacts with “terror and disgust” (20), but her “stark naked” body also functions to evoke both lust and terror in the young Black men who are forbidden to look at her and simultaneously are told by others to gaze at her and, if

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obeying the latter order, are forced to break the strongest taboo during segregation, a double-bind situation, which the white men watch with a satisfaction that suggests sadistic pleasure.8 Due to having embodied the social structures of Jim Crow and “tacitly accepting the limits imposed” (Bourdieu 2001, 38), the young Black men express this acceptance by “bodily emotions – shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt” (38), or, in IM’s words: “I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor” (19); and he “felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear” (19). These bodily emotions produce a variety of “visible manifestations” (Bourdieu 2001, 38): as IM confesses, he “almost wets [his] pants” (19). “My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked” (19). “Some of the boys […] trembled” (19), “one boy faint[s] (20), and even after the dancer had escaped from the room, some “were still crying and in hysteria” (21). The second game, the battle royal, not only forces the Black youth to fight each other relentlessly, but, in contrast to the first game, they are now blindfolded so that they move in the small space assigned to them like utterly helpless figures. Again, the narrator feels fear and terror as his body is covered with sweat increasingly mixed with blood, but, above all, he feels humiliated: “I had no dignity” (22). The third game, based on the young men’s poverty and the subsequent eagerness with which they grab for the coins and the fake gold, is designed to exacerbate their helplessness and thus their humiliation. Hit again and again by electric strikes, they lose control over their bodies altogether and perform the most grotesque— and to the white men—hilariously funny movements. Over so much gratifying amusement, the men have to be reminded of what the master of ceremonies calls “an important part of the program” (29), IM’s speech. Seemingly inattentive, showing their disdain by laughing and talking, the men immediately notice, when the speaker dares to cross “the magical 8  Parallel to his political reorientation, Ellison turns to studies of myth and ritual that allow him to reinterpret the Black experience anthropologically as “rites of initiation.” In a lecture at West Point “On Rites and Power” (1969), for example, he comments on the “battle royal” as follows: “It was a rite which could be used to project certain racial divisions into the society and reinforce the idea of white racial superiority. On the other hand, […] as one who was reading a lot about myth and the function of myth and ritual in literature, it was necessary that I see the ‘battle royal’ situation as something more than a group of white man having sadistic fun with a group of Negro boys. Indeed, I would have to see it for what it was beyond the question of the racial identities of the actors involved: a ritual through which important social values were projected and enforced” (2003, 533).

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frontier between the dominant and the dominated” (Bourdieu 2001, 38) by substituting the words “social responsibility” with “social equality” (31). As the episode of the “smoker” suggests, the “big shots” (17) of the Southern town, that is, white men who have accumulated economic, cultural, and social capital in various combinations, have the power to dictate the rules of social games. They habitually keep those they consider inferior in their place by various strategies of degradation. They underline the latter’s alleged inferiority both by insulting them—for example, by name-­ calling (“shines,” 18; “nigger,” 21; “coon,” 21)—and by rendering them physically helpless; they also consistently evoke fear and terror in them and then show their contempt by laughing at their mortification. In the case of the protagonist, who tries to move upward by means of education, they choose to ignore that within his group he stands out owing to the cultural capital he has gained at school. To the contrary, they devaluate it by making jokes thereby undermining the display of his accomplishments. Yet, despite the white men’s openly expressed contempt, the narrator delivers his speech “with […] fervor” (30). At that time, his investment in the social games, or what Bourdieu calls illusio, is unshaken.9 Or, in the words of the narrator who comments on his younger self: “What a belief in the rightness of things!” (30).10 The two instances of intuitive rebellion—at one point, the protagonist holds on to the leg of a chair and tries to topple a white man onto the electrified carpet, and then, as mentioned before, he utters the forbidden word “equality”—do not contradict his submission; rather, drawing on Bourdieu, it could be said that the involuntarily expressed “anger or impotent rage” can be explained as a way of “submitting, even despite oneself […] to the dominant judgement, sometimes in internal conflict and division of self” (2001, 38–39). Consequently, IM, who in “those pre-invisible days visualized [himself] as a potential Booker T. Washington” (18), proves to be undisturbed by the utterly degrading experiences of the evening and is “overjoyed” to receive the gift of “a scholarship to the state college for Negroes” (32). The chapter ends, however, with the reappearance of the grandfather in a 9  “We have an investment in the game, illusio (from ludus, the game): players are taken in by the game, they oppose one another […] only to the extent that they concur in their belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes, they grant these a recognition that escapes questioning” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 98; emphasis in original). 10  Cf. Bourdieu: “Belief is thus an inherent part of belonging to a field” (1990, 67).

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nightmare, in which he prophesies his grandson’s future by making him open a document in “an official envelope stamped with the state seal,” which contains the message: “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (33), foreshadowing President Bledsoe’s perfidious letter of recommendation. Yet, it will take the grandson many years (symbolized in his dream by the numerous envelopes he has to open before he can read the devastating message of the last one), and many more experiences of physical and symbolic abuse, before he manages to break free from his complicity in his domination and rid himself from the illusio, the conviction that it is worthwhile to invest in the social game. The first chapter presents a devastating picture of the Jim Crow South in the late 1920s. The white men, acting out the sense of their preeminent social position, unabashedly exert power in the form of symbolic violence over the Black youth who, in turn, have accepted the dominant’s vision of themselves as inferior human beings. They have become complicit in their own domination in the Bourdieusian meaning of complicity, as their bodily manifested emotions reveal. The taboo word “social equality” is evoked by the protagonist by “mistake” (31), a Freudian slip, as it were. Sociologically, we may interpret it as an unwillingly uttered protest, a gesture of anger triggered by abuse. The dominant react to this provocation unambiguously: “We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times” (31). What is conveyed by the power structure inherent in the performances of the smoker episode is confirmed by the grandfather’s dream message that racism is not just a matter of some individuals’ prejudices, but that it operates authorized by the government so that Blacks, while they are encouraged to believe in the official myth of progress, are systemically prevented from reaching their goals, not to speak of achieving equality.

III In addition to the ubiquitous mechanism of symbolic violence, the institutions devoted to the education of the dominated contribute significantly to keep the Black students’ expectations within the limits defined by the dominant—as the novel illustrates so well. The “state college for Negroes” teaches the students above all “to accept and love and accept even when [they] did not love” (112) their world. The essential site of teaching is the chapel, where the protagonist goes “silently, past the rows of puritanical benches straight and torturous, finding that to which I am assigned and

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bending my body to its agony” (110).11 While his body is bent into submission, simultaneously his mind is mauled by Reverend Homer A. Barbee’s sentimental, false-ringing sermon about the noble ideals of the founder into believing that what happened during the excursion with the trustee Mr. Norton was his own fault: “old Barbee had made me both feel my guilt and accept it. For although I had not intended it, any act that endangered the continuity of the dream was an act of treason” (134). As the reader, but not the protagonist, realizes, the treason he thinks he has committed, namely disloyalty against the institution, stands in contradiction to the kind of treason of which his grandfather has warned him, namely to betray his fellow Blacks. While in this case the discrepancy between the protagonist’s naïve belief and the reality is obvious, Ellison sometimes makes sure that we understand the limitations of his fictional character and thus has the narrator explicitly comment on his younger self’s memory, for example when in the chapel scene he questions a statement by the latter, explaining with great insight the principle of what Bourdieu terms amor fati, namely “love of the dominant and his domination” (2001, 80): I seem to hear already the voices mechanically raised in the songs the visitors loved. (Loved? Demanded. Sung? An ultimatum accepted […], an allegiance recited for the peace it imparted and for that perhaps loved. Loved as the defeated come to love the symbols of their conquerors. A gesture of acceptance, of terms laid down and reluctantly approved.) (111)

Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the college, very successfully practices the grandfather’s tactics; his power derives from his perfect skill of manipulating whites by seemingly subservient behavior. However, he does not manipulate with the intention to “keep up the good fight,” but he misuses his position and the institution exclusively for his personal advantage. By continuously enhancing his power, he accumulates economic capital and status symbols: he is “the possessor of not one, but two Cadillacs” (101; emphasis in original). Considered a leader, he is, in fact, a traitor.

11  “The vocabulary of domination is full of bodily metaphors: ‘bowing’, ‘lying down’, ‘showing flexibility’, ‘bending’, ‘getting into bed with’, etc. Sexual metaphors also, of course. Words only express the political gymnastics of domination as well as they do because they are, along with the body itself, the support of deeply buried assemblages in which a social order is inscribed in the long term” (Bourdieu 2008, 134).

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IV While there is a stark contrast between riding Jim Crow in the bus that takes IM from the South to New York and the thronged New York subway, in which the frightened protagonist unintentionally rubs shoulder— and other body parts—with the white woman standing next to him, the degree to which Blacks are exposed to racist behavior changes in manner, but not in essence in the North. White Northerners may be more courteous at times, they nevertheless refuse to see him: “I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me […]. It was confusing” (168). And while IM suspects that the invisibility he experiences in the streets of the city may have more to do with the indifference of New Yorkers toward strangers than toward himself as a Black man, he will nevertheless soon encounter a broad spectrum of both physical and symbolic violence. Each chapter offers new variations of domination. There are the brutal tactics of exclusion by the members of the factory union and the ruthless exploitation in the form of medical experiments by the doctors in the clinic, examples that refer to the long history of abusive white-Black relations in the realms of labor organization and public health; there are also several attempts to dehumanize IM by reducing him to a mere stereotype, be it the request at a party to sing a spiritual song under the assumption that “all colored people sing” (312; emphasis in original), or be it the notion that he could serve the Brotherhood better if he were “a little blacker” (303). Yet in contrast to the clear-cut racism IM had commonly encountered in the South, the situations he finds himself in the North tend to be more ambivalent. At the party of the Brotherhood, for example, where he is confronted with those stereotypical expectations, Brother Jack reacts visibly annoyed and refutes what he calls “unconscious racial chauvinism” (312), and when the drunken guest keeps insisting on “the rights of the colored brother to sing,” he even throws him out (312). But it is not Brother Jack’s refutation of racism that upends the embarrassment the incident has caused among the guests. Rather, feeling that not the racist but he himself is made responsible for the awkward atmosphere, it is IM who by falling back upon crude minstrel show stereotypes brings the crowd to join him in hysterical laughter. Thus, he resolves the tangible tensions by drawing upon mechanisms of the comic. While this can be interpreted as an act of subversive resistance, it comes at the high price of affirming white supremacist racist notions about Blacks. Compared to the rough type of symbolic violence Southern whites exerted during the battle

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royal episode, the symbolic violence wielded by the Northern party guests is much more subtle. The fact that it is not less efficient is revealed by IM’s succumbing to an irrepressible impulse of helping whites in overcoming their embarrassment, by which intervention he factually restores white domination. The degree of the protagonist’s complicity in his domination, which Ellison emphasizes in this scene of his introduction to the members of the Brotherhood, changes only gradually over time. It diminishes to the extent to which he is able to rid himself from the illusio, the conviction that it is worthwhile to invest in the social game. At first, IM is captured by the political program of the Brotherhood, whose authoritarian structure, indicated rhetorically by Ellison, escapes him: “I was dominated by the all-­ embracing idea of Brotherhood […]. We recognized no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science” (382). While identifying with the organization, IM simultaneously puts his stakes in the game of the field and tries to rise within the party. When he is disciplined by the Brotherhood for allegedly having betrayed its ideals and ordered downtown to be a speaker on behalf of the Woman question, he briefly contemplates to quit, but then argues: “No, despite my anger and disgust, my ambitions were too great to surrender so easily” (407). With regard to types of resistance, there is a gradual shift from resentment triggered and successfully suppressed, to anger lingering on, to the overt expression of rage leading to demonstrations and culminating in riots. IM’s growing distance vis-à-vis the Brotherhood is mirrored in the changing attitude and actions of other Black activists. There is Tod Clifton’s disappointment with the Brotherhood that leads him to the tragically futile act of subversive provocation that costs him his life. Juxtaposed to him is Ras the Destroyer, a caricature of Black nationalism, whose bellicose wrath (evoked intentionally by the Brotherhood) ends in a Harlem riot. In contrast, IM’s increasing detachment culminates in escaping into a coal cellar, finding “a home – or a hole in the ground” (6), where, “in a state of hibernation” (6), he writes his ‘notes from underground.’ In staging the fighter against the writer, Ellison confirms the role of the artist as an activist in his own right, a conviction he also uttered in the famous controversy with Irving Howe about the mission of the African American writer, namely that “the work of art is important in itself, that it is a social action in itself” (2003, 183).

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V While writers are by no means in need of sociological theories for developing a subtle and precise vision of the injustices caused by power imbalances in society,12 the sociologist Bourdieu drew on the writer Virginia Woolf, specifically her representation of gender power relations in her novel To the Lighthouse, to explain and illustrate his concept of symbolic violence, because, as he put it, “the literary work can sometimes say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions […]. But,” he adds, “it says it only in a mode such that it does not truly say it” (1996, 32; cf. Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 80).13 The essential ambiguousness of fictional texts depends of course on literary devices, in the case of Ellison, apart from his ample use of myths and symbols, on his employment of a broad range of techniques of the comic and other forms of humor. In order to carve out the mechanisms of symbolic violence, the novel’s aesthetics of the comic must be briefly considered. As Bourdieu points out, comedy, like sociology, reveals the wellsprings of power by “unmask[ing] the hidden machinery that makes possible the production of the symbolic effects of imposition and intimidation” (2008, 135); it does so in the form of parody or caricature. In the episode of the smoker, for example, the “big shots,” while terrorizing the young Blacks, are simultaneously unmasked. A “certain merchant,” for example, who follows the movements of the dancing blonde “hungrily, his lips loose and drooling” […] with his arms upheld, his posture clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind” (20). In this scene, the unmasking turns one of the dominant into a comic figure, 12  In fact, Ellison himself was very much opposed to the discipline of sociology; he considered the social sciences incapable of analyzing Black life adequately; for example, he complains that “our knowledge of it [American Negro experience] has been distorted through the overemphasis of the sociological approach” (2003, 75). As he mentions in the introduction to Shadow and Act, his rejection originated in an act of symbolic violence exerted in the form of sociological doxa, namely “the humiliation of being taught in a class in sociology at a Negro college (from Park and Burgess, the leading textbook in the field) that Negroes represented the ‘lady of the races’” (2003, 57). 13  See Mueller, for a discussion of Bourdieu’s contribution to the field of literary sociology in The Rules of Art as methodologically opposed to his reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in his study Masculine Domination (Mueller 2013, 12–16). “Based on his concept of symbolic power,” Mueller explains, “he interprets Woolf’s style as one that specifically enables us to see the discrepancy between the male and female vision of the world and most importantly of the lucidity of the oppressed” (2013, 15).

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an act of degradation that suggests the illegitimacy of the authority of the dominant. “Once uncovered as arbitrary, symbolic violence becomes comical and loses its power” (Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 82). But in this early scene of the novel, the degrading of the powerful, while obvious to the reader, does not affect the dominated. In fact, we likewise laugh at the naïve protagonist, when he stubbornly holds on to his delusion that “only these men could judge truly my ability” (25). In contrast, neither the protagonist nor the reader joins in “the booming laughter” of the dominant, when one of the young Blacks landed upon the charged rug and “literally dance[d] upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor” (27). What applies to the humor in Ellison’s story “Cadillac Flambé” holds true of Invisible Man as well: “Ellison’s comic devices not only bring to light the farcical nature of domination but also present individual suffering thereby creating tragicomedy” (Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 90). As Glenda Carpio puts it in her seminal study of African American humor, in tragicomedy “laughter is dissociated from gaiety and is, instead, a form of mourning” (Carpio 2008, 7; quoted by Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 90). In the course of the novel, IM—facing ever more variations of symbolic violence—gradually transforms his habitus.14 He becomes increasingly capable of seeing the ludicrous aspects of demonstrations of power, and, as a consequence, is able to consciously resist it. In a quarrel with the Brotherhood over discipline, the protagonist looks at Brother Jack “as if for the first time, seeing a little bantam rooster of a man” (476), and, after the meeting, “felt as though I’d been watching a bad comedy” (478). To the degree that IM is capable of revealing “the wellsprings of authority,” discovering that “the world seen in this way—i.e. as it is—is pretty comical” (Bourdieu 2008, 135, 136),15 he approaches the state of enlightenment the narrator of the prologue claims for himself. 14  “While Bourdieu argues that ‘there is an inertia (or hysteresis) of habitus which has a spontaneous tendency (based in biology) to perpetuate structures corresponding to their conditions of production,’ (2000, 160; emphasis in original) he also underlines that habitus can ‘be practically transformed’ and even ‘controlled through awakening consciousness and socio-analysis’ (Bourdieu  1994, 116; emphasis in original)” (Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 79). 15  As Bourdieu points out in this interview with Didier Éribon, (published in Libération, 19 October 1982) any claim of authority depends on its general acceptance: “After all, what is a pope, a president or a general secretary, if not someone who takes himself for pope or general secretary – or more exactly, takes himself for the church, the state, the party or the nation? The only thing distinguishing him from a stage character or a megalomaniac is that he is generally taken seriously” (Bourdieu 2008, 136).

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In the complex process of revising the manuscript, Ellison reacted to the political sea-change of the post–Second World War era by erasing several characters and episodes in Invisible Man that expressed sympathies with communism, working-class figures, or activities of unions. For example, he obliterated positive aspects of the work of the Brotherhood, further emphasized the authoritarian nature of the organization, and demonized Brother Jack. As a result, Foley maintains, “anticommunism displaces the novel’s critique of the social and historical origins of invisibility” (284). Simultaneously to depoliticizing the novel, Ellison strengthened philosophical notions of universalism and existentialism. Not only did he make considerable changes to the text, but he also tried—successfully so—to direct the interpretation of the novel by offering interpretative comments himself.16 Yet the most significant of his textual interventions occurs within the novel itself in the form of the epilogue that he added very late in the composition process, in which the narrator reinterprets the grandfather’s message and professes a new attitude toward his invisibility.17 It is above all the epilogue with its conciliatory notions of “affirm[ing] the principle on which the country was built” (574), that “the world is one of infinite possibilities” (576),18 in which “even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (581), that won Ellison the high acclaim of the white literary field. Moreover, by purging the radical left from his text throughout and, more generally, by emphasizing humanist rather than political ideas, Ellison undoubtedly forfeited the political radicalness 16  For example, in the interview “The Art of Fiction” (1955), Ellison contradicts the statement of the interviewers that “you begin with a provocative situation of the American Negro’s status in society” by reinterpreting the novel’s central metaphor of “invisibility” as a psychological struggle taking place within the protagonist: “The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white society. It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity” (2003, 221). 17  “Originally, however, there was no epilogue at all” (Foley 2010, 336). Foley documents in detail the “process by which he radically transformed the ending of his novel” (336), not the least by changing the meaning of the central metaphor of invisibility: “Invisibility, the narrator now announces, is not the exclusive province of those who have endured the humiliation  – and worse  – of the racial rituals governing American life; it is a universal human condition” (346). 18  However, it is important to note that in “The World and the Jug” (1963) Ellison repudiates Irving Howe’s critique that “Ellison also offends by having the narrator of Invisible Man speak of his life (Howe either missing the irony or assuming that I did) as one of ‘infinite possibilities’ while living in a hole in the ground” (2003, 157; emphasis in original).

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both of the novel’s first draft and of his own past. However, how could Ellison possibly delete his sharp-sighted observations on American racism without giving up the novel altogether?19 Ellison’s extraordinary success as a writer, which, in Bourdieu’s terms, was the result of a substantial accumulation of incorporated and institutional cultural capital as well as social capital that eventually he was even able to transfer into considerable economic capital, never prevented him from bursting into those notorious fits of impotent rage triggered by experiencing symbolic violence. Whenever “he got it into his head that people resented him” and “his underlying rage erupted” (Rampersad 2007, 536–537), he found himself, in Bourdieu’s terminology, in “internal conflict and division of self” feeling “the insidious complicity that a body slipping from the control of consciousness and will maintains with the censures inherent in the social structures” (Bourdieu 2001, 38–39).20 As much as IM differs from his author, who called his hero “a fool” (2003, 532), there is no doubt that Ellison created a protagonist who shares with his author what Bourdieu in his Sketch for Self-Analysis called a split or “cleft habitus” (2007, 100; emphasis in original). Referring to his own career, Bourdieu defined it as “a very strong discrepancy between high academic consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions. This kind of ‘coincidence of contraries’ no doubt helped to institute, in a lasting way, an ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission” (2007, 100).21 While Bourdieu’s habitus was 19  This article does not discuss the material side of structural racism that the novel displays in great detail. For example, Ellison points to the multiple effects of poverty in the Black population, from the insufficient care for traumatized veterans and horrific poverty among sharecroppers in the South to evictions and malnutrition as signs of poverty in Harlem. Nor does he neglect the physical violence that derives from systemic racism, for example police brutality and lynching (the latter in a nightmare, 2003, 569–570). 20  Cf. Bourdieu’s reflection on the potential incoherence of habitus: “Habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation nor necessarily coherent. It has degrees of integration […]. Thus it can be observed that to contradictory positions, which tend to exert structural ‘double binds’ on their occupants, there often correspond destabilized habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering” (2000, 161). 21  Cf. Stephan Kuhl, who develops Bourdieu’s concept of “cleft habitus” by adding what he terms “oppositional habitus” that he ascribes to Richard Wright. Due to his mother’s “possession of a relatively high degree of cultural capital” (2018, 64), Wright “had socially inherited an intellectual disposition, but the limitations that opposed his acquisition and realization of this disposition were also inscribed into his habitus” (65). Yet both forms of

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t­ransformed by moving into a “consecrated” field, the “tension between contraries, never resolved into a harmonious synthesis” (107). Consequently, individuals with a cleft habitus are likely to be more insecure and thus more prone to feel the effect of symbolic violence, notwithstanding their principal awareness of the mechanisms of symbolic domination. Moreover, even in the case that as writers they come to observe and display those mechanisms of power, they are not exempt from repeatedly suffering the painful impact of symbolic violence.22 However, it is the very agonizing experience of being “invisible” to the dominant that produces the “special perspicacity of the dominated” (Bourdieu 2001, 31), which, in turn, is responsible for the particularly lucid descriptions of symbolic domination.

VI What then is the relation of the epilogue both to the prologue and to the main narrative? Does the message of “affirm[ing] the principle on which the country was built” (574) overwrite the foregoing extended demonstration of oppressive (symbolic) violence? Is there an indissoluble contradiction between the lengthy description of structural inequality in the story of IM and his decision to return to society with the argument that “there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play?” (581). As to the prologue, there is a significant parallel regarding the experience of ambivalence between the slave mother’s contradictory feelings of love and hate toward her master and the confession of the narrator in the epilogue that, although “a desperate man” (580), he has come to understand that one should approach life “as much through habitus, Kuhl states, “describe […] the phenomenon that the upward social movement that both, Wright and Bourdieu, underwent usually entails internal tensions, contradictions, insecurities, and anxieties” (65 n.3). See also Kuhl (2021), for a Bourdieusian comparative analysis of Wright’s and Ellison’s positions in the field of African American literature 22  “The passions of the dominated habitus […] are not of the kind that can be suspended by a simple effort of will, founded on a liberatory awakening of consciousness. If it is quite illusory to believe that symbolic violence can be overcome with the weapons of consciousness and will alone, this is because the effect and conditions of its efficacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions” (Bourdieu 2001, 39). As a consequence, “the relation of complicity that the victims of symbolic domination grant to the dominant can only be broken through a radical transformation of the social conditions of production of the dispositions that lead the dominated to take the point of view of the dominant on the dominant and on themselves” (41–42).

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love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and defend and I hate and love” (580). It is important to note that the narrator’s inner tension derives from the process of writing: Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but […] I’ve failed. The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is now […] I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. (579)

Yet what the narrator considers a failure, namely that writing about his anger resulted in toning it down, the text reveals to be a successful creative process. The “ranter turned writer,” who “give[s] pattern to the chaos” (580), gains distance from his suffering by transforming raw feelings into prose, and this process of sublimation allows him to acknowledge the contradictoriness within himself and the nation.23 In the epilogue, Ellison gives voice to some basic aspects of his theory of art, which was profoundly shaped by Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic action.24 The formative role Burke’s theory played in Ellison’s reorientation in the 1940s can hardly be overestimated. Burke’s theoretical framework provided Ellison not only with “the symbolic resources he needed for the creation of his own art form” (Pease 2003, 74), but by way of interpreting Burke’s explanation of the scapegoat mechanism Ellison “resituated himself within a social order that was grounded in the critique rather than the repetition of scapegoat rituals” (74). In Burke’s theory, then, Ellison discovered the possibility to free himself from what he now considered the shortcomings of Marxism with regard to both its flawed aesthetic theory and its inadequate explanation of American racism. Ellison’s shift in perspective grants IM the chance of starting anew by ending hibernation. The rebirth that happens when the narrator at the end of the epilogue is “shaking off the old skin” (581) suggests that leaving behind the underground, a space, where he “could try to think things out” (571), offers the prospect of reunifying mind and body. Earlier, 23  Cf. “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945), where Ellison emphasizes the form-giving aspect of art as follows: “Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed into a chart.” And he quotes one of his favorite authors, Malraux, on “the organized significance of art,” which “alone enables man to conquer chaos” (1995, 133). 24  For a differentiated and subtle analysis of the highly complex communication between Burke and Ellison, see Donald Pease’s pivotal study.

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awakening from the horrifying nightmare, in which he is lynched by his major oppressors, IM registers that “in spite of the dream, I was whole” (571). At the end of the epilogue, the narrator is not only physically intact, but is about to regain the wholesome unity of thinking and acting. Emphasizing reunion, he shows the very disposition for conciliation that Bourdieu recognizes in a cleft habitus, which is, he claims, “the product of a ‘conciliation of contraries’ which then inclines one to the ‘conciliation of contraries’” (103). But despite such an inclination of overcoming the contrariness inherent in the split habitus, “the tensions and contradictions” will resurface in the shape of the opposing attitudes of “rebellion and submission” (Bourdieu 2007, 100). Likewise, the “ranter turned writer” will not be safe from occasional eruptions of ranting passion. After all, as the narrator reminds us, “[T]he end was in the beginning” (571); or, as Ellison puts it in the “Introduction,” “I realized that the words of the Prologue contained the germ of the ending as well as that of the beginning” (xxiii). What the epilogue envisions, a new beginning for the narrator and, by implication, for the nation, remains a mere promise. The last “conciliation of contraries” that the narrator attempts is the most daring, and it “frightens” him: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581)—suggesting that he, the Black man, deep down can speak for a “you” that includes the white reader. If confirmed, it would no longer be “prophecy, but description” (577) that “[O]ur fate is to become one, and yet many–” (577). While it may be thought-provoking, the question remains unanswered; and if, indeed, the end is in the beginning, we are, by a logic of circularity, referred back to the prologue’s first sentence. Undoubtedly, the protagonist is still an invisible man. Yet, after having witnessed and probably empathetically shared IM’s distressing experiences of physical and symbolic domination, we will be better prepared to perceive the radicality of the metaphor of invisibility and understand it as a strong statement about systemic racism in the United States. To sum up, reading Invisible Man with the conceptual tools of Bourdieu’s relational sociology allows us to step, as it were, in Ellison’s back. As has been documented in abundant detail, Ellison adjusted to the changing political climate of his time, and in the 1940s and early 1950s, while writing the novel, turned into a Cold War liberal. His reading and thinking changed accordingly and, as discussed above, clearly had an impact on the composition of Invisible Man. However, what we may come to understand with Bourdieu, is that—notwithstanding Ellison’s intellectual shift to conservatism—his habitus could not possibly undergo a

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similar swift change. As a set of dispositions, anchored not only in the mind but in bodily emotions, Ellison’s split habitus is firmly grounded in his longtime and painful experience of growing up as a Black man under Jim Crowism, that is, under the regimen of structural racism and white supremacy, even while simultaneously he would be rising to be considered one of the great writers of American literature. According to Bourdieu, it is the habitus of the suppressed that is capable of yielding an extraordinary lucidity of observation, and it is this lucidity that Ellison manifests in his fiction. What Ellison in fact perceived with great subtlety and accuracy and then transposed into an aesthetically sophisticated narrative were insights drawn not from theory but from lived experience. Yet if we, in turn, read the novel by drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of power, its methodical perspective sharpens our view to the brutality and the systemic nature of racism depicted in Invisible Man. But why are Bourdieu’s concepts particularly suitable to recognize structures of domination? Whereas psychological theories dealing with racism tend to concentrate individualistically on the consequences of stereotyping, and sociological action theories are based on intentional acting of individual agents, “Bourdieu’s theoretical approach proceeds from a thoroughgoing relationalism which grasps both objective and subjective reality in the form of mutually interpenetrating systems of relations” (Wacquant 1993, 236).25 It is for this methodological reason that the application of Bourdieu’s major conceptual tools of relational sociology to the novel and its author (symbolic violence, habitus, cleft or split habitus, complicity of the dominated, field, illusio, doxa, economic, cultural, and social capital, amor fati) contributes to disclosing the extent to which the novel—beyond displaying individual suffering—exposes systemic racism. As a consequence, reading Invisible Man with Bourdieu highlights what has often been neglected, the novel’s detailed rendering of inconspicuous instruments of oppression. Furthermore, it permits to underline what has frequently been overshadowed by the epilogue’s rhetoric of American individualism and democracy, namely that the novel from the 25  According to Loïc Wacquant, it is Bourdieu’s relationalism that is at the core of “the structural causes of the recurrent misinterpretations that his writings have encountered in the course of their transfer across the Atlantic” (1993, 236): “Thus the first move of American scholars is often to try to read Bourdieu’s sociology into the dualistic alternatives – micro/ macro, agency/structure, interpretive/positivist, structuralist/individualist, normative/ rational, function/conflict, and so forth  – that structure their national disciplinary space” (1993, 241).

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prologue to the last chapter presents highly perceptive and forceful depictions of symbolic violence that, in turn, demonstrate the result of structural racism deeply ingrained in society as well as its psychosocial effects on the dominant and the dominated. But why then does the epilogue exert so much hermeneutical power over the rest of the novel? Apart from the obvious fact that rhetorically the last word carries most weight and will therefore easily outvote the narrator’s former interjection that the “end was in the beginning” (571), the epilogue has the immense attraction of being a conversion story. And what is more, the narrator converts to the most sacred American creed, the belief in individualism.26 To its adherents, the epilogue with the narrator’s message of individual responsibility represents a satisfactory perspective, if not a convincing solution to a long-standing American problem.27 To its critics, in contrast, the narrator’s turn represents a renunciation of “keeping up the good fight” against an injustice, whose roots are seen in structural inequality. For different reasons, both groups will tend to disregard or downplay the argument the main part of the novel makes so strikingly. If the novel is still highly relevant today, it is not because it went beyond describing the structures of Jim Crow, but instead because it insists on revealing with as much precision as artistic imagination the mechanisms of systemic racism that far from being past are a poignant phenomenon of the present. Therein consists the militancy of the novel, no matter what Ellison may have understood by being “my kind of militant.”

26  Cf. the comment by the sociologist William Julius Wilson on the widespread inclination of Americans to hold individuals responsible for their poverty: “It is an unavoidable fact that Americans tend to deemphasize the structural origins and social significance of poverty and welfare. In other words, the popular view is that people are poor or on welfare because of their own personal shortcomings. Perhaps this tendency is rooted in our tradition of ‘rugged individualism’” (Wilson 2009, 43). 27  As Ellison states, he employed Burke’s understanding of Greek tragedy’s tripartite structure as a “conceptual frame” for his novel: “The three parts represent the narrator’s movement from, using Kenneth Burke’s terms, purpose to passion to perception.” As the term “perception” suggests, “the maximum insight on the hero’s part isn’t reached until the final section” (2003, 218–219). In this case, the hero’s “maximum insight” gains sanctity through his conversion. And yet, accepting it means reversing the metaphor of invisibility; rather than alluding to the oppressed, it now refers to the human condition in general (cf. Foley, 346).

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References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. Masculine domination. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2007. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Trans. Richard Nice. London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. Revealing the well-springs of power. In Political interventions: Social science and political action, eds. Frank Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo, 133–136. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.  D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bradley, Adam. 2010. Ralph Ellison in progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting…. New Haven: Yale University Press. Buschendorf, Christa, and Astrid Franke. 2014. The Implied Sociology and Politics of Literary Texts: Using the Tools of Relational Sociology in American Studies. In American Studies Today: New Research Agendas, ed. Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf, 75–104. Heidelberg: Winter. Carpio, Glenda R. 2008. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1994. Notes from Underground. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage. Ellison, Ralph. 1995 [1952]. Invisible man. New York: Vintage International. ———. 2003. In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F.  Callahan. New York: Modern Library. ———. 2019. In The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan and Marc C. Connor. New York: Random House. Foley, Barbara. 2010. Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’. Durham: Duke University Press. Frank, Joseph. 1999. Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘Ancestor’: Dostoevski. In Modern Critical Interpretations of ‘Invisible Man’, ed. Harold Bloom, 45–60. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Kuhl, Stephan. 2018. Intellectual Disposition and Bodily Knowledge: Richard Wright’s Literary Practice. In Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias, ed. Christa Buschendorf, 55–75. Bielefeld: transcript.

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———. 2021. The Wright School. In Ralph Ellison in Context, ed. Paul Devlin. New York: Cambridge University Press. Müller, Stefanie. 2013. The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Heidelberg: Winter. Pease, Donald E. 2003. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: The nonsymbolizable (Trans)Action. Boundary 2 30 (2): 65–96. Pevear, Richard. 1994. Foreword. In Notes from Underground, ed. Fyodor Dostoevsky, vii–xxii. New York: Vintage. Rampersad, Arnold. 2007. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf. Wacquant, Loïc. 1993. Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory. In Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward Li Puma, and Moishe Postone, 235–262. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 2009. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton.

PART II

Life Writing and the Production of Knowledge

CHAPTER 6

“On the Margins of One Group and Three Countries”: Exile, Belonging, and the Sociological Imagination in Reinhard Bendix’s From Berlin to Berkeley Katja Sarkowsky The “Sociological I”: Self-Narration, Implicit Sociology, and Reinhard Bendix’s From Berlin to Berkeley “How I became an American sociologist…. and how I came to write about it. There is an autobiographical side to the writing of autobiography. Sociologists, with their claim to detachment, ought to practice what they teach their students” (Bendix 1990c, 452). Thus begins one of the many autobiographical essays that Reinhard Bendix, an American sociologist of German-Jewish heritage, exile from Nazi Germany, expert on Max Weber, and ardent bridge builder between postwar German and American academia wrote in the course of his life. Bendix sets out to narrate his intellectual biography in this essay, and he makes an important case for the

K. Sarkowsky (*) Amerikanistik, Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_6

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grounding of intellectual interest in biographical experience as well as for the academic’s necessity to reflect upon such grounding in order not only to understand one’s life and intellectual development but also to adequately place the narration of one’s life as a source of knowledge. “Self-­ knowledge, not preoccupation with the self,” as he puts it elsewhere, “seems to me an important methodological tool” (Bendix 1989a, 8). Bendix’s essay was included in a collection entitled Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiography by Twenty American Sociologists, edited by Bennett Berger in 1990 and published in the context of a critical debate in sociology about the status of biography and autobiography that concerned both the use of autobiography as valid sociological material and the autobiographical practice by sociologists like Bendix. In a caustic “Editor’s Column” to The American Sociologist in 1995, Jonathan Imber sees Berger’s volume “filled with conventional, that is, unexamined first-­ person narratives that are given an illuminating quality by virtue of the convention to which they conform. A critical, sociological eye on such autobiographical reflection would challenge such conventions and conformities and thus seek after something more about the person who writes and the world written about” (5). Imber’s irk is directed at what he sees as the silliness of attention seeking that he ascribes to autobiography, including (or particularly) those by his colleagues, while for him, they simply “do not mean enough” (6). While Imber was not alone in his skepticism of the debate about autobiography, others clearly thought the attention to sociological autobiography as productive and interpreted the “sociological eye” that he calls for in very different ways and to different effects. For Robert Merton, “the sociological autobiography is a personal exercise  – a self-exemplifying exercise – in the sociology of scientific knowledge” (Merton 1988, 19). Liz Stanley, drawing on both Merton’s and feminist approaches, highlights in particular the social situatedness of knowledge production explicitly acknowledged in the use of an autobiographical ‘I’ (Stanley 1993, 49). And pace Randall Collins’ coinage of the term, Peter J. Stein—sociologist and memoirist—has reinterpreted the “sociological eye” more recently “as a way to probe beneath the surface of a situation to identify social patterns” (Stein 2020, 1341). Stein’s elaboration on writing a memoir as a sociologist can be read as to an extent merging the “sociological eye” with the homophonous “sociological I” positioned against notions of objectivity and detachment. “Writing my memoir,” Stein insists, “led me to

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appreciate the utility of Mills’ sociological imagination and how history, biography, and social structure intersect” (1343). Stein’s reference to C.  Wright Mills’ understanding of the “sociological imagination” is as crucial here as it is in the context of other sociologists’ autobiographical practices and, more generally, the validity of the auto/biographical in the context of studying social structures and practices. For Mills, the sociological imagination enables the development of the “idea that the individual can understand his [sic] own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances”; it is the sociological imagination, then, which “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation between the two within society” (Mills 5). A “sociological imagination,” as Stein’s autobiographical reflections illustrate, is not restricted to scholarly writing but also fruitfully applies to both fictional and nonfictional literary genres. Helmuth Kuzmics’ discussion of the relationship between fiction and sociology in Norbert Elias’ work and the questions he raises in this context are equally valid for autobiography as a literary genre. “To use fiction sociologically can have two meanings,” Kuzmics writes. “A rather conventional approach sees it as a ‘source’ or a ‘document’ providing evidence for sociology. The other would be to give literature the status of a serious contribution to sociology itself,” and he continues to ask whether “literature is not only able to but sometimes even privileged to offer ‘true’ representations or mappings of the social world” (Kuzmics 2001, 118). Contra Imber, many sociologists have indeed highlighted the second meaning outlined by Kuzmics and applied it to autobiographical writing. Anthony Giddens, for instance, regards autobiographies as a “corrective intervention into the past, not merely a chronicle of elapsed events” (1991, 72) and hence as “interpretative self-histories” (76) closely intertwined with the institutional processes of late modernity. And in his review of more recent models of ‘biographical sociology,’ Jeffrey Shantz claims that “auto/biography plays an integral role in the construction and development of both individual and cultural meanings and political and economic engagement” (2009, 116) and that therefore “biographical sociology offers a unique approach to understanding individual-society relations. Moving beyond stale structure-­ agency debates, it allows for a situated analysis of agency-in-structure, of the reflective individual engaging society. It is not, as critics would maintain, simply the study of an individual life” (117).

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In short, for Giddens, Shantz, and others, autobiography is not mere documentation and at best material for sociological readings, but a highly reflexive and constructive genre. To push Mills’ notion of the sociological imagination a step further, it is not only manifest in autobiographical texts, but autobiographical practice helps shape the increasing awareness of the individual’s complex embeddedness in their specific time, place, and social position; it is not only reflexive but also constructive, and it emerges— socially as well as narratively—in a number of what Paul John Eakin has called “relational environments” (1999, 68). So, if the sociological imagination programmatically connects the individual to their historical and social context, and if the sociological eye is trained not only at others but also at the self as thus embedded, then autobiographical practice can be seen as a process that not only manifests but also—deliberately so or not— produces a form of reflexive self-knowledge and displays what Christa Buschendorf and Astrid Franke have called an “implied sociology” (2014, 75) of literary texts that in the case of sociological memoirs both applies and tests sociological categories. It is this understanding of autobiographical practice that this contribution seeks to explore and put to the test by focusing on Reinhard Bendix’s auto/biography From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities, published in 1985. Bendix was born in Berlin in 1916 to assimilated Jewish parents and, fleeing the Nazi regime, emigrated to the United States in 1938 where he entered the University of Chicago and was awarded a degree in the newly established discipline of sociology; he taught at UC Berkeley from 1947 until his retirement and died in 1991. He is best known for his work on Max Weber, whom he introduced to an American audience as not only a functionalist but “above all a political sociologist on a global scale” (Collins 1998, 299); at the same time, the Anglo-American political sociology of citizenship of the early postwar years is associated with Bendix (Brubaker 2010, 65), and his scholarly work as well as his autobiographical texts are very much invested in questions of citizenship and belonging. From Berlin to Berkeley is in many ways an unusual memoir. While the dual role of observer and observed is constitutive for the genre of autobiography—as J.M Coetzee has aptly put it, “all autobiography is autrebiography” (Attwell and Coetzee 2006, 216), taking the self as another, and Merton has highlighted the “dual participant-observer role” (1988, 18)— the structure of Bendix’s text adds to the complexity of perspective: It is not only the autobiography of Reinhard Bendix but also the biography of

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his father, Ludwig Bendix, a lawyer, labor judge, and judicial theorist in the Weimar Republic, who left Germany 1937 for Mandatory Palestine and then, 10 years later, with his wife joined their son in the United States. As such, From Berlin to Berkeley is a “filial memoir,” as Thomas Couser has called the genre (2012, 154), differing from most of its kind in its structural setup that divides the text into the father’s life story entitled “A Father’s Heritage: Ludwig Bendix (1877–1954)” and the narrative of the relationship between father and son and the son’s narrative of maturation entitled “Crises of Affiliation: Reinhard and Ludwig Bendix.” When exempting the paratexts, it is, as I will discuss in more detail below, the father’s life that frames the son’s narrative. This and other of Bendix’s autobiographical writings do not fit easily into established categories of either academic, specifically sociological, memoirs or autobiographical writing by exiled scholars from Nazi Germany: It differs from the kind of academic memoirs Cynthia Franklin has more recently analyzed and that she sees as providing “not only an index of scholars’ lives and why they matter, but also unparalleled ways to catch the currents that define the U.S. academy” (2009, 90) in its comparatively reduced attention to Bendix’s distinguished career as a sociologist; where academic issues play a role, Bendix is more interested in the development of sociology as a discipline in the 1940s and 1950s and his own theoretical and thematic concerns than in his actual career. And biographical circumstances distinguish Bendix’s account of his life as an exile fleeing Nazi Germany from those social scientists who had already professionally established themselves as academics by the time they fled Germany and Austria: When Bendix emigrated in 1938, he came as a young man of 18 and embarked on his academic training in the United States; so he did not enter the United States as a trained, let alone an established scholar. Nevertheless, From Berlin to Berkley displays important overlaps with both categories of autobiographical writing: Sociological categories and theories, and both a “sociological imagination” and a “sociological eye” are crucial to Bendix’s understanding and narrative rendering of his and his father’s lives; the experience of exile and uprooting, the horrors of the Holocaust centrally mark the text and the lives it depicts, and it forms the bedrock of Bendix self-understanding as he presents it in his memoir. These overlaps as well as the distinguishing characteristics of this text are important when looking at how From Berlin to Berkeley narrativizes the lives of Reinhard and Ludwig Bendix, how it applies a sociologically grounded and informed scrutiny to these lives, and, vice versa, how the

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autobiographical mode functions to test the limits of sociological categories. For the purpose of this contribution, I will focus on the second part that not only highlights the relationship between father and son but also— as the title indicates—the crises of affiliation and identification that Reinhard Bendix interprets by taking recourse to sociological concepts. Bendix conceived of From Berlin to Berkeley as a sociological case study (Bendix 1989b, 51). But, as I set out to show, he not only uses his and his father’s lives as exemplars of how the experience of exile affects the two generations very differently and explains these differences in sociological terms and concepts; these concepts have a twofold function: They form the basis of how Bendix narrates his life and that of his family, particularly his father’s, and of how he generalizes experiences of forced migration and assimilation as well as intergenerational conflict. In turn, sociological models also provide the reading matrix for these experiences. At the same time, the structure of this auto/biography also reveals, I suggest, an always-remaining ‘autobiographical surplus’ that threatens to at least partially undo the control over the life narrative presented by the sociological categories. There is a tension between a son’s and a sociologist’s perspective in this text that sometimes work in productive conjunction, but that also occasionally present unresolvable contradictions. Lives, after all, as Berger remarks in the introduction to the aforementioned collection, “are more complex than categories” (Berger 1990, xxv), and thus, these tensions and unresolvable contradiction may well not only contribute to— invoking Kuzmics again—“‘true’ representations or mappings of the social world” (Kuzmics 2001, 118) but also are productive for the constant reexamination of analytical categories. In the following pages, I would thus like to focus on three different aspects that highlight facets of how literary and sociological modes of perceiving and constructing the social interpenetrate. I first look at From Berlin to Berkeley as a narrative of intergenerational conflict and as an exploration of generationally different experiences of exile, in which Bendix both reads the conflicts between his father and himself through sociological theory and, in turn, draws from that relationship generalized conclusions as to generational shifts in the context of migration. In a second step, then, I focus on the way in which Bendix uses Georg Simmel’s notion of the ‘stranger’ and particularly Robert Park’s concept of the ‘marginal man’ as a framework for the presentation and interpretation of his and his father’s life stories. The third aspect I would like to raise can be understood as a response to the conflicts highlighted in the other two:

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While the auto/biography stresses largely the experiences of dislocation, uprooting, and exile, the narrative also presents the autobiographical narrator’s attempt to carve out an alternative space of belonging, and that is the position of the sociologist as a cosmopolitan figure. In closing, I will consider the implications of Bendix’s specific way of connecting literary and sociological modes of constructing, imagining, and reading the social for conceptualizing an ‘implicit sociology’ of life writing more generally (cf. Giddens 1991).

Generations, Conflict, and the Experience of Exile The title of Bendix’s auto/biography captures central aspects of the text’s narrative framing: the forced geographical movement (from Germany to the United States) and its implications for identity formation—or rather, formations in the plural, for it might plausibly refer to both Reinhard and Ludwig Bendix’s different as well as shifting identifications and identities in light of their respective experiences. David Sorkin has read the book as “a vindication of the ‘assimilationist’ position in German-Jewish history,” seeing Bendix’s choice of title as contrasting “his memoir with Gershom Scholem’s Zionist From Berlin to Jerusalem” (1988, 290), which had been published less than ten years prior in 1977. Read thus, the title opens up a complex trajectory of displacement and potential homecoming for father and son: it is the United States, not Palestine as I will discuss further below, that provides a ‘home’—not to the father, but to the son.1 The book’s genesis reflects the important role that language plays for the two protagonists throughout their lives in exile and in the narrative. It was written in English, but published first in its German translation by Holger Fliessbach in 1985, before the English original was published one year later. The ways in which Bendix has adapted the two versions to English- and German-language audiences demonstrates not only his awareness of the different perspectives and frameworks in which his auto/ biography would be read, but they also mirror the linguistic as well as the cultural translation processes that provide an important undercurrent in the second part of the book, and particularly its three final chapters and the epilogue.

1  I am grateful to Bettina Bannasch for this observation and for her suggestion to follow up on Bendix’s allusion to Scholem’s title.

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The book both enacts and depicts this translation process, and in this autobiographical narrative not only does Reinhard Bendix have to engage in this process with his new American environment, but it is also a central element in intergenerational tensions. These are, of course, first and foremost, those between Reinhard Bendix and his father, and they are most pronounced in the time period after Bendix’s parents left Mandatory Palestine and joined their son in the United States in 1947, nine years after he had immigrated from Germany. While Bendix describes the previous relationship between father and son as intellectually inspiring but mostly shaped by emotional distance, the situation of the parents—who were unable as well as unwilling to make Palestine their home—is now characterized by multiple losses that severely impact not only the individuals but also their relationship: the loss of their extended family, their property, and their home country and its culture, and of a clearly defined place in the world they were to inhabit. Given his specific professional training, the importance of the German language for it, and his lack of the necessary competence in either Hebrew or English, Ludwig Bendix—a respected lawyer and juridical theorist before Nazi laws barred him from practice— has no professional future either in Palestine or in the United States. This creates a position of dependency that weighs heavily on the relationship to his son, who is just about to start both his own career and family. As Bendix puts it at the beginning of the chapter entitled “My Parents’ Immigration (1947–1952)”: Our high expectations regarding this reunion were probably naïve, therefore we were bitterly disappointed. I had been twenty-two when my parents had left Berlin for Palestine; I was thirty-one when I greeted them on their arrival in the United States. None of us could turn the clock back; and in our case the difficult relations between parents and their grown children were complicated by immigration, language, and the clash of cultures. My parents never came to feel at home in America. (Bendix 1990a, 259)

The mutual disappointment addressed in this and other passages is, of course, experienced as individual and personal disappointment, but Bendix painstakingly seeks to contextualize and explain it in terms of the family members’ flight and exile and their vastly different relations to past and future. Indeed, the difficulties Bendix highlights in the auto/biography by far exceed those he mentions in the previous quote; passing time and exile certainly complicate the relationship between parents and their adult

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children, but the experience of dislocation, dispossession, and exile shapes it in fundamental ways that Bendix narrates, but does not fully acknowledge. ‘Loss’ and ‘opportunity’ are doled out to different degrees. But Bendix even further generalizes this interpersonal tension and situates the expectations and disappointments in a more general framework of intergenerational conflict. The just-cited passage is positioned late in the chronology of the auto/biography and has to be read in the context established at its very beginning. Here, Bendix already indicates that he wants his and his family’s story read not as a special case but as exemplary for a particular constellation in the twentieth century: The tensions of the twentieth century are reflected in the conflict between generations. As parents age, their claims as models and their expectations of respect and affection, often collide with the growing independence of their children. The burden of our time is also reflected in the loneliness of adults. The pursuit of our individual interests loosens the ties with those we love, and because we belong to many groups we do not belong entirely to any. (Bendix 1990a, 1)

In the context of this conflict, the dual structure of the book is not only a pragmatic creation of chronological order, but at the same time an attempt at reconciliation that highlights both the distance and the closeness between father and son in this larger framework. As previously indicated, the structure of the text—its beginning with Ludwig Bendix’s birth in 1877 and the ending with his death in 1954—emphasizes the life of the father; the father’s life story at the same time structures the narration of the son’s life, the father’s birth and death narratively framing it (while the introduction and the epilogue, in turn, frame the story of the father-son relationship). The core of the autobiographical narrative ends with Ludwig Bendix’s illness and death in January 1954. Reinhard Bendix is at the time, of all places, in Germany, near Frankfurt am Main. He describes his agony over the question of whether or not to return to the United States when he receives notice of his father’s serious illness: But this was before the age of jet travel, and we decided reluctantly that it was probably too late. I sent a wire to my father, saying how much I owed to his inspiration and hoped he would get better soon. This last was unlikely, but I learned later that my expression of thanks and affection had given him

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pleasure. He died on January 3, 1954. When I received the bitter news, I walked for a long while in the wintry landscape of the Taunus forests. (Bendix 1990a, 286)

Closing the core narrative at this point is plausible in light of the text’s overall emphasis, which is, as Bendix highlights in the preface, on his father’s life and his own interaction with him (1990a, x). This structural decision nevertheless accomplishes something else. Having it end here concludes Reinhard Bendix’s own transatlantic journey—while the structure of the book refers to the father’s life, the title—From Berlin to Berkeley—refers to the son’s. At the same time, the ending closes the transnational triangle created by the interwoven life stories between Germany, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. It could even be argued that the son returns in place of the father who to the very end adhered to his cultural identification with Germany and never really arrived elsewhere. Neither father nor son ever seemed to have considered returning to Germany, but while Reinhard Bendix positioned himself anew in a postexilic constellation of his American life, his father was never able to do so. In his preface to the German paperback edition, Bendix calls his auto/biography a “modernes Klagelied,” a ‘modern elegy’ only possible three decades after his father’s death (Bendix 1990b, xiv); the mourning implicit in this choice of words may refer to his father’s loss of a lifeworld. But the book can also be seen, as will become clearer further below, as a tribute to the shaping influence of a father the direct acknowledgment of which appears to have failed between father and son. The book ends—in both language versions—with an epilogue in which Bendix explicitly addresses questions of location in transnational constellations such as his. Breaking down his own location and positionality— understood as both a spatial and a social placement—to that of a scholar, he writes: “For me, the university may be a home and as such it provides chances to add to the common good” (1990a, 298). As I will further discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, the only positionality that—for Bendix—is not characterized by ambivalence but by constant reaffirmation is that of the scholar. This does not mean that this is a ‘safe’ position. “It is not a refuge,” he continues, “for ultimately, there is no refuge for anyone” (298). But it is, as he highlights, a stable and decisively transnational positionality the understanding of which has clearly impacted Bendix’s sociological work, which was comparative and transnational (cf. J. Bendix 1998).

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In light of his explicit understanding of the importance of the biographical, the emphasis on transnationality is obviously linked to his father’s and his  own experiences of exile. In his essay “Emigration, Generations, and Ideas,” Bendix contextualizes the presentation of both their life narratives in a larger context of forced emigration from Nazi Germany: “Since our fate is completely overshadowed by the number of victims over time, it is important to preserve a sense of proportion, particularly if one deals with one’s own story” (Bendix 1989b, 51). This “sense of proportion,” I suggest, finds a manifestation in how in his auto/ biography Bendix narrates these experiences as processes of uneven transnationalization. Sociological concepts can help generalize such processes; the concept that Bendix refers to is Robert Park’s ‘marginal man.’ By drawing on this notion, he carefully sets out to frame his and his father’s lives in both a generalized context of transnational migration and a generation-­specific process of German-Jewish identity formation before and after the Holocaust and exile. The generalization inherent in the use of such a concept to explain individual lives, as I want to show in the next section, is not an end in itself. Rather, it helps narratively frame and explain the life stories of father and son; this is not so much a contextualization as it is an interpretation. At the same time, this narrative and analytical choice also puts the explanatory value of Park’s concept to the test: While Bendix operates with the notions of marginality and hybridity that are so crucial for Park’s notion of the ‘marginal man,’ he uses them to explore the different impact and manifestations they had in his and his father’s lives. As with regard to the generational experience of loss, the autobiographical approach, I want to claim, complements and amends the sociological in ways that exceed the autobiographer’s self-reflection; while fiction may offer a ‘messier’ view on the complexities of social relations, autobiography offers one characterized by the tension between the desire of narrative control over an individual’s life story on the one hand and the constant failure to fully attain such control on the other.

Of Strangers and Marginal Men: Uneven Transnationalizations “My principal emphasis in the book [From Berlin to Berkeley, K.S.] is on my father and myself as marginal men, to use Robert Park’s phrase, men ‘who come today and stay tomorrow,’ as Georg Simmel defined the

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stranger in his Sociology,” writes Bendix in his already-cited essay “Emigration, Generations, and Ideas” (1989b, 51). Bendix’s account thus follows a particular interpretation in American sociology that tended to closely link or even equate the stranger and the marginal man (cf. McLemore).2 Both figurations are characterized by a tension between mobility and emplacement, between detachment and attachment, distance and proximity, and hence by marginality as a permanent relation and position in a context of power asymmetries and social stratification. Both— formulated before the Holocaust—regard European Jewry as paradigmatic; for Park, “the emancipated Jew was, and is, historically and typically the marginal man, the first cosmopolite and citizen of the world” (1928, 892), a notion he directly links to Simmel’s stranger as “the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not got over the freedom of coming and going” (Simmel 1971, 143). Bendix does not present his and his father’s life stories as illustrations of the concepts; rather, they selectively serve to narratively structure the presentation and interpretation of Reinhard and Ludwig Bendix’s lives, and the conceptual use of the ‘marginal man’ also creates a sense of continuity between Jewish lifeworlds and identifications—particularly as a cultural identification— before and after the Holocaust. Both Park and Simmel regard the liminal position of the ‘marginal man’ and the ‘stranger’ as enabling to the individual whose dual or even multiple attachments come with simultaneous detachment or even “objectivity […] defined as freedom” (Simmel 1971, 145). This doubling of perspective integral to the marginal man’s position is not identical with the kind of split habitus identified by Bourdieu (see, for instance, the contributions by Christa Buschendorf and Milena Feldmann/Markus Rieger-­ Ladich in this volume), but—picking up on W.E.B. DuBois earlier notion of the double-consciousness—it anticipates the potentially conflicting loyalties that may arise out of different forms of geographical or social mobilities. Park’s ‘marginal man’ is a “cultural hybrid” situated “on the margin of two cultures and two societies” (1928, 892), and the marginality of this 2  Identifying both the stranger and the marginal man as figurations central to the narrative of his and his father’s life stories, Bendix implies an aspect of the stranger that ties in with a specifically European tradition of, as Philip Riley has proposed, regarding the stranger as a foreigner (2008). By drawing on these related concepts, Bendix might be seen as placing himself in a particular intellectual genealogy: Park studied with Simmel in Germany, and Bendix’s “principal teacher” (213) at the University of Chicago, Louis Wirth, was a student of Park’s.

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position may result in a particular kind of instability. So more strongly than Simmel, Park highlights the potential conflict, even crisis of this position (893). Bendix draws on this dual potential for a more ‘objective’ view on the one hand and the “crises of affiliation” indicated in his section title on the other. Even though he presents Park’s concepts explicitly as an interpretative matrix for both life stories, there is clearly a difference between the narrative constructions of these lives. The post–World War II perspective of From Berlin to Berkeley allows Bendix to explore not only the explanatory potential, but also the limits of these categories and to conceptualize his father’s life and his own as examples of failed and successful transnationalization, the potential for multiple attachments and for permanent crisis allocated differently in the experiences of father and son. Reinhard Bendix built a new life for himself in a new country; it was not a move without pain or difficulties, not one that resulted in full and unambiguous immersion in American society, but indeed that of a multiply attached cosmopolitan. In contrast, Ludwig Bendix never fully recovered from his internment at Dachau, the forced dislocation, and the multiplicity of losses brought on him and his family by the Holocaust. His attempts to build up a new life first in Mandatory Palestine and then in the United States are described as a step-by-step process of further marginalization, linguistically, culturally, and economically, and by a continuous “loss of status” (Bendix 1990a, 275). Reinhard Bendix identifies with a position of multiple marginalizations as well, but much more affirmatively so and more attuned to the creative potential of a double vision. Modifying Park’s above-cited phrase slightly, he describes his own identification as that of a “determined cultural hybrid” (3) who sees himself situated “on the margins of one group and three countries” (297). Reinhard Bendix does not present his father’s difficulties as a personal failure, of course, but scrupulously highlights the very different circumstances of their respective flights from Germany—his father’s age at the time of emigration, his limited ability in foreign languages that made him dependent on translators for his publications in both Palestine and the United States, as well as his professional expertise in German labor law that bound him in professional practice to the very national and cultural context that expelled him.3 In his son’s account, Ludwig Bendix is the 3  Bendix discusses the generational impact on his and his father’s fundamentally different experiences of emigration and exile in detail in the essay “Emigration als Problem geistiger Identität” (1988).

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marginal man who does not realize that he always was a marginal man; with the instability of his position in Germany revealed by Nazi legislation, internment, and expulsion, his move first to Palestine and then the United States foregrounded another kind of marginality which, in his case, is characterized more strongly by conflict and crisis and less by the ability of a dual perspective. The ‘marginal man’ is thus a social or ideal type in Simmel’s sense (Simmel 1971, 148; Riley 2008, 6), but this does not yet say anything about the individual ways of coping with the conflicts and complexities of a particular social position. While Reinhard Bendix delineates his father’s— and by extension, his father’s generation’s—difficulties in coping with emigration as type-specific, he complements this sociological perspective with that of a son and charges his father with an inability to adequately reflect upon his position, and thus upon the nature and consequences of his marginality. The failure of Ludwig Bendix, as his son presents it, lies in the insistence that the intergenerational relationship remain unchanged amidst drastic upheavals, and in his ensuing refusal to understand his son’s expressions of recognition and appreciation as such—clearly a strongly personal and psychological, not a sociological interpretation of his father’s difficulties and the ramification for the father-son relationship. In 1951, Bendix published the essay “Social Science and the Distrust of Reason,” a text in which he, as he says, “deliberately followed up on some of [Ludwig Bendix’s] own ideas” (1990a, 271) and which in another autobiographical essay he sees as his first step of his “subsequent contributions to American sociology” (1990c, 467). So this was clearly a crucial text for the autobiographer to which—to Reinhard Bendix’ great disappointment— Ludwig Bendix “gave a rather tepid response” (1990a, 271). This appreciation by emphasizing intellectual influence, tellingly, is one by which Reinhard Bendix seeks to replace the intergenerational relationship undone by forced migration with the establishment of an intellectual genealogy across borders, academic disciplines, and different notions of practice. Ludwig Bendix’s refusal to acknowledge the establishment of a genealogy as an appreciation of his own work is not only a personal disappointment to his son; it can also be read—at least in Reinhard Bendix’s account—as a refusal of the changed framework of recognition in which father and son find themselves and their respective positions in it. Specific as they are, the difficulties between father and son are nevertheless constantly reflected upon primarily as a manifestation of a social dynamic, not individual incompatibility, and this dynamic is made the

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incentive for their discussion in the first place. “I want to explore the difficulties arising among us because the problem of generational succession is widespread, however unique our special version of it may be” (1990a, 270). The son and the scholar alternate in speaking, and occasionally the scholar enables the son to create the necessary emotional distance to the estranged father and to depict his own process of migration as one of successful transnationalization and the carving out of an affirmative positionality. In contrast to what he presents as his father’s failed transnationalization, Reinhard Bendix narrates his own as that of an agent who eventually manages to position himself permanently and deliberately on the margins of groups, personally and intellectually. Reinhard Bendix is the ‘marginal man’ who defines this position “on the margins of one group and three countries” (1990a, 297) as one of intellectual productivity and agency, a ‘successful’ transnationalization that does not erase or replace earlier attachments but that foregrounds their complex simultaneity.

Sociology, Profession, and Affirmative Self-­Positioning: Concluding Remarks So while the process of Ludwig Bendix’s transnationalization seems to tragically fail, that of the son appears to succeed, and this success Reinhard Bendix attributes—besides his younger age and different circumstances of emigration—on the one hand to his “American family.” “As an American immigrant,” he writes, “my family has provided me with an anchorage I could not have achieved on my own. My sense of being an immigrant remains, and Europe’s and especially Germany’s cultural heritage continues to be important in my work” (1990a, 294). Also, it is his family, which allows him to rethink his position as a son from his own position of fatherhood; he evaluates the generational gap that he considers central to the relation to his own father now from “the perspective of a father,” reflecting upon the fundamentally different experiences of his own children for whom a culturally hybrid family background is nothing unusual (294–295). On the other hand—and for the question of autobiographical self-­ positioning apparently even more decisive—he attributes his successful transnationalization to his professional career. Being an academic, a sociologist, is not just a profession, it is also a transnational identity very much in line with the position of the ‘marginal man,’ as Bendix applies it. As Jeremy Popkin has argued, “Bendix came to believe that isolation and

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marginality were in some senses inherent to modern academic life, a result of the degree of ‘specialized competence’ that the modern world requires” (2017, 70). In the introduction to From Berlin to Berkeley, Bendix develops the notion of “partial group membership” as a “partial association with many groups” (1990a, 5), which he sees as an intrinsic condition of modernity (5); as such, it has been read as a rejection of any understanding of identity as organic, essential, or all-embracing (Popkin 2017, 70). At the same time, partial group membership and the marginalization it entails are obviously more urgent and immediate for some groups than for others; for Bendix, Jews and intellectuals are prime examples, and he shared both identities with his father. In light of this commonality, Reinhard Bendix’s successful transnationalization, his auto/biography suggests, decisively depended on the opportunity to institutionalize his status as an intellectual and have it recognized by others, a possibility his father lost with the rise of the Nazis to power and his flight from Germany. The institution providing him with this kind of recognition is the university: While I live on the margins of one group and three countries (the United States, Germany, Israel), I participate to the extent of my ability in one institution: the university. As a friend suggested to me some time ago, the university is my home. In the classical sense, I am a citizen of all universities. (1990a, 296)

It remains vague in the text what Bendix means by “classical sense,” but his own work on citizenship—for example in Nation-Building and Citizenship (1964)—suggests that it refers not to the formal status of the citizen in a national context, but to a sense of “substantive belonging,” as Brubaker has identified the kind of approach to citizenship that Bendix pursued (2010, 65). In this sense, the somewhat odd phrase “citizen of all universities” can be read as an analogous conception to the cosmopolitan as a ‘citizen of the world,’ with an emphasis on the university understood as a scholarly community that offers both membership and belonging. Crucially, this kind of institutional self-positioning is not part of the core text but explored in the epilogue, the placement signaling a different, less narrative and more strongly framing function. Yet, while the extensive introduction is theoretically oriented and academic—a place for Bendix to conceptualize his understanding of partial membership—the epilogue remains personal. It nevertheless compliments the initial thoughts on group membership and cultural self-positioning with considerations on

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the very possibility (or impossibility?) of ‘home’ and on the subjective perception of such a possibility, further interweaving the scholarly and a personal approach to the narrativization of his life that is so characteristic of this auto/biography. From Berlin to Berkeley thus does not only present the development of a “determined cultural hybrid,” as Bendix calls himself in reference to Park, but also is in many ways a hybrid, when it comes to the implicit sociology of life writing. The text is a hybrid because it combines explicit with implicit sociology, providing not only stories on individual experiences in social contexts and the individual’s reflections of these experiences as part of individual and collective process of meaning making; the text also contextualizes and conceptualizes these observations as generalizable and uses sociological frameworks to explain and structure the narrative of these experiences. It is in Merton’s sense an exemplary sociological autobiography in that it “utilizes sociological perspectives, ideas, concepts, findings, and analytical procedures to construct and interpret the narrative text that purports to tell one’s own history within the context of the larger history of one’s time” (1988, 18). As such, it is also a filial memoir and an autobiography of exile that presents the protagonists’ lives through a “sociological eye/I.” At the same time, as I also hoped to show, this sociological perspective is time and again interrupted and called into question by what in lack of a better term I called ‘autobiographical surplus’; the son and the sociologist do not always concur. The ending of the core text discussed in the second section is an example of how structural decisions might express more than is explicitly been said, and this is one of the instances that seems not accessible to the otherwise scrupulously detailed socio-biographical analysis. Narrative control is not limited to questions of how to productively deal with a recurring problem of autobiographical writing, the necessarily fallibility of memory. When looking at the genre of life writing more broadly, then, Bendix autobiographical writings may at first appear precisely as not generalizable, for the average autobiographer does not necessarily have such instruments of reflection and contextualization at their disposal. Yet, as Merton rightly observed, “not all autobiographies by sociologists qualify as sociological autobiography just as not all sociological autobiography is written by credentialed sociologists” (1988, 21); for him, the classification depends on the analytical tools used by the autobiographer. I nevertheless want to suggest that the difference between ‘sociological’ and ‘non-sociological

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autobiographies’ is less one of kind—as Merton seems to imply—and rather one of degree. Where Bendix explicitly reflects sociological models of explanation and utilizes them for the presentation and structure of his life narrative, others tend to do so implicitly. As Giddens has highlighted, under the conditions of late modernity, the self “has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change” (33). Giddens is concerned with strongly individualistic notions of modern self-identity; life writing theories of the past decades have, in contrast, focused more strongly on relational forms of narrative self-­ constitution. Yet, his observation is relevant when addressing the potential of the seemingly individualistic genre of autobiography as a form of social theorizing and production of social knowledge. While—as a genre—autobiographies and other forms of retrospective life writing do not necessarily come up with explicit social theories (which they don’t have to do, anyway), they nevertheless present reflections not just on social experiences and structures but also on the constitution of the self as relational, even of the social, and thus implicitly (or as in Bendix’s and other sociological autobiographies, explicitly) theorize its very construction—to put it again with Kuzmics, they present a “serious contribution to sociology itself.”

References Attwell, David, and J.M. Coetzee. 2006. All Autobiography is Autre-Biography. In Selves in Question: Interview on South African Auto/Biography, ed. Judith Lütge Coulie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H.  Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver, 213–218. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bendix, Reinhard. 1988. Emigration als Problem geistiger Identität. In Exil Wissenschaft Identität: Die Emigration deutscher Sozialwissenschaftler 1933–1945, ed. Ilja Srubar, 23–36. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———, ed. 1989a. A Memoir of My Father. In Embattled Reason. Essays on Social Knowledge. Volume II, 7–27. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———, ed. 1989b. Emigration, Generations, and Ideas. In Embattled Reason. Essays on Social Knowledge. Volume II, 51–65. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. 1990a. From Berlin to Berkeley. German-Jewish Identities. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. 1990b. Von Berlin nach Berkeley. Deutsch-jüdische Identitäten. Trans. Holger Fliessbach. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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———. 1990c. How I Became an American Sociologist. In Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiography by Twenty American Sociologists, ed. Bennett M. Berger, 452–475. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bendix, John. 1998. Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix. Sociological Theory 16 (3): 302–312. Berger, Bennett M. 1990. Introduction. In Authors of Their Own Lives. Intellectual Autobiography by Twenty American Sociologists, ed. Bennett M.  Berger, xiii– xxviii. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 2010. Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions of the Politics of Belonging. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41 (1): 61–78. Buschendorf, Christa, and Astrid Franke. 2014. The Implied Sociology and Politics of Literary Texts: Using the Tools of Relational Sociology in American Studies. In American Studies Today: New Research Agendas, ed. Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf, 75–104. Heidelberg: Winter. Collins, Randall. 1998. Introduction. Sociological Theory 16 (3): 298–301. Couser, Thomas. 2012. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories. Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. English, James. 2010. Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘The Sociology of Literature’. New Literary History 41/2: v–xxiii. Franklin, Cynthia. 2009. Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Later Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Imber, Jonathan B. 1995. Editor’s Column: Autobiography among Sociologists. The American Sociologist 26 (4): 3–8. Kuzmics, Helmut. 2001. On the Relationship Between Literature and Sociology in the Work of Norbert Elias. In Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, ed. Thomas Salumets, 116–136. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. McLemore, S. Dale. 1970. Simmel’s ‘Stranger’: A Critique of the Concept. The Pacific Sociological Review 13 (2): 86–94. Merton, Robert K. 1988. Some Thoughts on the Concept of Sociological Autobiography. In Sociological Lives, ed. Matilda White Riley, 17–21. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Mills, C.  Wright. 2000 [1959]. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, Robert. 1928. Human Migration and the Marginal Man. American Journal of Sociology 33 (6): 881–893. Popkin, Jeremy. 2003. Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust. History & Memory 15 (1): 49–84.

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———. 2017. History, Historians, and Autobiography Revisited. a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 32 (3): 693–698. Riley, Philip. 2008. The return of ‘The Stranger’: Distance, Proximity and the Representation of Identity in Domain-Specific Discourse. Le Revue de Geras ASP 53–54: 7–24. https://journals.openedition.org/asp/315. Accessed 8 Apr 2021. Shantz, Jeffrey. 2009. Biographical Sociology: Struggles over an Emergent Sociological Practice. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 24 (1): 113–128. Simmel, Georg. 1971. The Stranger [1908]. In On Individuality and Social Form: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine, 143–149. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sorkin, David. 1988. ‘From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities,’ by Reinhard Bendix (Review). Theory and Society 17 (2): 285–303. Stanley, Liz. 1993. On Auto/Biography in Sociology. Sociology 27 (1): 41–52. Stein, Peter J. 2020. Biography, Trauma, the Holocaust and the Sociological Eye. Sociological Forum 35 (4): 1337–1345.

CHAPTER 7

J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility Milena Feldmann and Markus Rieger-Ladich

The Rise of a New Genre Regarding the current discourse about the relation between philosophy, social science, and literature, a wording by Jürgen Habermas comes to mind: Writing about postmodernism in the 1980s, the German philosopher coined the term “new obscurity” (Habermas 1986). According to Habermas, structured conditions and distinct orders were a thing of the past. The present age was, in contrast, marked by confusion and complexity. This notion is being confirmed if one has a closer look at current developments in the theory of knowledge (Gabriel 2019). For a long time, the limits in this specific area of academic interest were defined clearly. Over the course of the twentieth century, the natural sciences emerged as the leading academic disciplines, due to their status as exact sciences. Scientific standards that were established in these areas diffused into other fields of knowledge. Because of this development, methodical training became

M. Feldmann • M. Rieger-Ladich (*) Institute of Education, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; markus.rieger-ladich@ uni-tuebingen.de © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_7

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more important in the social sciences, and analytical philosophy has become the dominant branch in philosophy today. Knowledge acquisition was henceforth to be regulated by strict standards of methodology. Literature was no longer perceived as a suitable source of academic knowledge; as a consequence, it became denigrated during the increasing professionalization of scientific pursuit. In contrast to the first half of the twentieth century, when influential sociologists like Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias and Theodor W. Adorno turned their attention deliberately toward aesthetic products (see Farzin 2019), dealing with literary texts seemed dispensable for social theory as well as for social research. Representatives of these disciplines hardly ever read fictional literature with the intent of gaining knowledge in mind. There is every indication that this perception of fictional texts is changing again. At present, boundaries between philosophy, social sciences and literature are becoming more permeable. This is apparent by numerous publications as well as by debates that are conducted in the scientific journals in question. But it also becomes apparent by the steadily growing number of texts which cannot easily be categorized in terms of genre. That is why one can currently observe a rare phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic: In the nether land somewhere between sociological analysis, philosophical reflection and literary experiment, a new genre is rising that can be characterized as “auto-sociobiography” (see Spoerhase 2017).

European Versions: Why So Successful? Some of the most important contributions to this genre came from France. It was here that the figure of the intellectual was invented about a hundred years ago, and in this tradition, writers are currently heavily involved in public debates (see Matz 2017; Schuhen 2019). French novelists are considered to be important analysts of their times. They address the phenomena of social crises, and they do not shy away from making their own person both the subject and the object of discussion. In recent texts, a particular skepticism toward the bourgeois novel can be observed. Annie Ernaux, for instance, one of the more widely known contemporary voices, explores her proletarian milieu of origin. Instead of doing so in the mode of autobiography, she stresses the necessity to invent a new form of narrative in order to do justice to her working-class parents. In the portrait of her mother, she writes: “Naturally, this isn’t a biography, neither a novel, maybe a cross between literature, sociology, and history” (Ernaux 2003,

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89). Likewise, the sociologist Didier Eribon presents neither a study in educational sociology nor a classic autobiography when describing his adolescence as a homosexual in the French province. Instead, he resorts to the theoretical apparatus of Queer Studies and combines personal memories with sociological analysis in Return to Reims (2018). The novelist Édouard Louis (2017), a close friend of Eribon, chooses yet another way of writing: As a queer boy, he also grew up in a proletarian surrounding marked by homophobia and sexism. Today, he uses pen and paper to address his experiences of being shamed and humiliated. These books are not only well received in France; they are also popular in the German-speaking world. There are various reasons for this. The literary scholar Carlos Spoerhase (2017) names three: First of all, the authors in question are educational climbers and defectors of their class. As marginal spectators, they are intellectuals par excellence. They move in different social universes and are perceived as precise observers. Second, they are considered “intellectual translators” by members of the bourgeoisie (Spoerhase 2017, 35): They are familiar with environments to which the representatives of the bourgeoisie hardly ever have access and are therefore considered authentic voices. Through them, members of privileged social groups are able to gain insights into social milieus characterized by precariousness, poverty, exclusion, and violence. As a third reason, we would like to add that some authors receive a lot of attention due to their early thematization of the success of right-wing populist parties. More than a decade ago, Eribon raised the question of how to explain that large sections of the French working class currently vote for the Front National, while a large majority voted for the Communist Party back in his youth (see Eribon 2018). In Germany, the translation of his book was published shortly after debating Brexit, when a right-wing populist party was entering the parliament of Germany as well. Ethnic-nationalist movements were receiving a great deal of attention at the time (see Gürgen et al. 2019). Thus, concerns about the shift to the right led to the fact that hardly any other book in Germany has, in recent years, been discussed as intensely as Eribon’s Return to Reims (see Rieger-Ladich and Grabau 2018). Having a look at France and Germany, two things become obvious. Anyone considering the social upheavals in both countries does not rely on scientific experts alone. A lot of the observers turn to literary texts as well as to those books that are difficult to classify due to their merging of scientific reflection and subjective considerations (cf. Blome 2020). This development on the side of reception has a correspondence on the side of

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production: There is increasing interest in breaking new ground in the quest for knowledge. Philosophers and sociologists are increasingly freeing themselves from disciplinary constraints and, in doing so, are taking up the “thought styles” (Fleck 1935) that were put to the test at the beginning of the twentieth century. The formative figures of that time were intellectuals who were interested in a variety of subjects beyond academia: Siegfried Kracauer, for example, wrote essays on cultural theory, but also hundreds of film reviews (cf. Kracauer 1977; Später 2016). Theodor W. Adorno undertook empirical sociological studies and wrote Minima Moralia (Adorno 1978). There were similar phenomena on the other side of the Rhine: Famous philosophers competed with well-known writers for the favor of the public and scandalized social grievances. Vice versa, Émile Zola, who was active not only as an author but also as a journalist, claimed to pursue “sociologie pratique” with his novels (Lepenies 2006, VIII).

De Nobis Ipsis Non Silemus? Involving the Subject of Cognition Within science itself, the greatest provocation of recent developments may have been to no longer leave aside the scientist as a person. While Immanuel Kant had preceded his Critique of Pure Reason with the Bacon quote “de nobis ipsis silemus” (cf. Kohli 1981), many thinkers in the twentieth century broke with the principle of remaining silent about themselves. Even though Max Weber vehemently demanded such a separation between subject and object of study in his speech “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (Weber 1922), the practice of excluding the subject of cognition is no longer convincing. Complementing criticisms developed by representatives of feminist critique of knowledge (cf. Haraway 1988; Keller 1996), French social theorists were particularly important. Pierre Bourdieu plays a special role among them. His sociology pursues the goal to continually increase scientific reflexivity. After demanding a self-critique of the academic field in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he radicalized this quest even further. In his farewell lecture, Bourdieu raised the question of what constitutes the scientific subject. He did not discuss this abstractly, but turned to his own person in the form of an “auto-socioanalysis” (Bourdieu 2008). He made a case for no longer abstracting from social origins or tabooing early biographical experiences, but rather considering them as

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sources of knowledge. The formation of one’s habitus as a scholar could not be satisfactorily explained if one’s own educational path was not considered. Experiences of shame and humiliation, which Bourdieu experienced while he attended famous boarding schools and universities in Paris, must therefore also be made the subject of inquiry. The new genre, which can be called “auto-sociobiography” (Spoerhase 2017), therefore owes its existence to two corresponding movements: Within science, increasing reflexivity leads to a closer look at the scientific subject itself. It is now viewed as a corporal being that is socially situated and marked in different ways (cf. Haraway 1988; Etzemüller 2015). At the same time, the need to leave bourgeois narratives behind is growing in literature. Both movements are interested in educational processes. And they pay particular attention to the phenomenon of the “divided habitus” (Bourdieu 1997, 64) and the conditions under which it was acquired. Thus, auto-sociobiographical texts come into being when a person turns back to their own social background and, through reconstructing it, seeks to understand the problems associated with their own social position. The starting point for this are often feelings of misplacement and shame. The experience of not belonging thus becomes a tool for insight (see Rieger-­ Ladich 2020). This phenomenon is not a European exception. In the US, similar developments can be observed. Here, too, science has seen a renaissance of the subject of cognition. As early as the 1980s, representatives of feminist critique of knowledge have problematized the heroization of the (male) scientist. Donna Haraway, who had also influenced the European discourse, in particular contributed to the fact that personal experience in the formation of research interests is no longer discredited. Comparable in style, but from a different theoretical position, the African American feminist literary scholar bell hooks also advocated to no longer conceal one’s own social background in one’s theoretical work. The telling title of her theoretical-biographical essay is: “where we stand: class matters” (hooks 2000). In her particular version of this new genre, the focus is decidedly not on a heroic subject, but on a subject shaped by the social background and the class-specific access to education and success. Each of the various attempts to combine personal life experiences and sociological analysis has different nuances and emphases. In many texts, collective narratives that imagine “America” as a place “where people can start over, pursue a new dream, and make a life whose many scenes spell out second and third acts and even more” (McAdams 2006, 81) are

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dominant but are sometimes also questioned and criticized. The narrative of success through individual effort characterizes many US writers—albeit in different ways. Besides stories that affirm and reproduce the narrative (and Hillbilly Elegy seems to be an example), there are also stories that critically engage with it. In the introduction to her book An Autobiography, for instance, the US civil rights activist Angela Davis emphasizes that she decided to write her life story “because I had come to envision it as a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my present commitment” (Davis 1974, 3–4). Davis stresses the external factors that shape an individual and influence his or her life story. Education is here described as a collective process of emancipation, in the knowledge that one will always remain dependent on others. Another critical look at the American Dream is taken by bell hooks. According to her, even those who do not have the prerequisites to successfully assert themselves in competitive social struggles “still cling to the dream of a class-free society where everyone can make it to the top” (hooks 2000, 6). An explanation for the prominence of this narrative, then, is that it gives hope to those who are marginalized in the white majority society, who have little capital and can hardly expect attention and recognition. While US-American writers like Angela Davis and bell hooks offer a kind of counternarrative to redemptive stories of transformation, this motif still enjoys great popularity in contemporary texts, as we will explain in more detail below.

Anglo-American Versions: Another Accentuation? The new interest in the subject of cognition was accompanied by a rediscovery of literature by philosophers and sociologists. One of the most prominent representatives of this “Literary Turn” (Stow 2012) is Richard Rorty. Like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler, two prominent representatives of political philosophy, he spoke out against conceding philosophy a privilege of knowledge (see Rorty 2010; Voparil 2012). When it comes to educating ourselves about the circumstances of individuals or groups unfamiliar to us, we should turn to literary texts. They can help us practice our ability for empathy and expand the circle of those with whom we show solidarity. In this way, they can contribute to moral progress and the further development of democracy (cf. Rorty 1998). With regard to the newly awakened interest in the subject of cognition and the great hopes placed in literature, it should come as no surprise that

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auto-sociobiographical texts are also emerging in an Anglo-American context. Here, however, other narrative traditions dominate. In the US, writing about oneself seems to be still influenced by religious discourses as well as the idea that an individual’s success is primarily influenced by his or her hard work, diligence, and talent in the classic rags-to-riches narrative (see McAdams 2006). A contemporary example of the powerful influence of this narrative in the US culture is Educated: A Memoir (2018) by Tara Westover and the way it has been marketed and read. The youngest of seven siblings, Tara grew up in a family of radical fundamentalist Mormons and, despite violence and dysfunctionality in her family and no formal schooling, made it to Cambridge and Harvard University and earned a doctorate in intellectual history. According to a review in the New York Times, Westwood “managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all, and resonant for many others” (MacGillis 2018). Westover’s editor at Penguin Random House, Hilary Redmon, expressed similar thoughts: “The idea that you can invent yourself is wonderful and alluring: your birth is not your destiny” (Redmon in MacSweeney 2018). An educational path like Tara Westover’s seems possible for everyone —with a bit of luck, diligence, and hard work. Focusing on oneself as the object of inquiry often fails to raise awareness of structural disadvantages in the educational system, a focus that is emphasized more in French versions of auto-sociobiographies (see Bourdieu 1994; Rieger-Ladich and Wortmann 2020). Against this background, we now turn to a book that has caused a similar sensation in the US as Eribon’s Return to Reims did in Germany. Hillbilly Elegy (2016) was one of the best-selling books in the US and reminded many a reviewer of Eribon (cf. Seibt 2016). Hillbilly Elegy made J.D.  Vance famous overnight and a welcome guest on talk shows (cf. Lindner 2017). His spectacular story of social ascent to become a highly paid investment banker was then translated into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese and even Chinese. J.D. Vance himself had not anticipated the great success of the book: “I told my wife a couple of weeks before the book came out that I just hoped that it wouldn’t be embarrassing with how few people read it” (AEI 2016, 0:16–0:22). But the sales figures of the book skyrocketed shortly after its publication in June 2016. The extraordinary popularity of his book is also undoubtedly connected with the US presidential election in November 2016. Many hoped that the insight into the milieu of the white underclass would help to explain

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Donald Trump’s success. Media representatives called J.D.  Vance the “Trump whisperer” and the “Rust Belt anger translator” (Heller 2017). Why do people have such high expectations when reading a book that focuses on the lives of those who some refer to as “hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash” but whom J.D. Vance calls “neighbors, friends and family” (Vance 2016, 3)? To answer this question, we first present Hillbilly Elegy and then interpret the book as an auto-sociobiographical text to find out what it might tell us about social mobility, educational careers, and institutional discrimination in the US. With the example of Eribon in mind, we also want to examine how far J.D. Vance’s narrative differs from the other texts mentioned at the beginning. In other words: Is there something specific about J.D. Vance’s version of an auto-sociobiography that exemplifies a particular view of social mobility from a conservative US perspective?

Growing Up in the Rust Belt In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance, born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, describes his social rise from the son of a drug-addicted mother from the white underclass to an Ivy League graduate and highly paid investment banker. He reflects his experiences of how he managed to leave a milieu characterized by poverty and violence against the background of his extended family history, starting with his grandparents. In search of a better life, they moved from the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky to Ohio after World War II to escape poverty and the ostracism they experienced due to his grandmother’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Their arrival in Ohio turns out to be difficult as their “hillbilly culture” stands in the way of easy integration. In the 1960s and 1970s, J.D.’s mother Bev grows up in a family where physical and mental abuse are daily occurrences. Bonnie and Jim are not able to lead the new middle-class life they expected from their move to Ohio. They compensate this disappointment with alcohol (Jim), self-­ isolation, and aggression (Bonnie). The violence reaches its peak as Bonnie follows up on her threat of taking drastic measures when her husband would be drunk again: A week later, he came home drunk again and fell asleep on the couch. Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his

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chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their eleven-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his live. Miraculously, Papaw survived with only mild burns. (Vance 2016, 43–44)

J.D.’s mother suffers from the trauma of this unstable family dynamics. She graduates with the second-best high school diploma of her year—but is already pregnant. After an apprenticeship as a nurse, she lapses into drug addiction. She finds herself unable to establish lasting relationships, and this inability repeatedly leads to the destructive partnerships and family dramas that dominate her life. J.D.’s childhood and youth are shaped not only by his mother’s drug addiction but also by the constantly changing caregivers. Vance identifies a biographical turning point in an episode when one morning Bev asks her son for a urine sample: Mom walked in, frantic and out of breath. She had to submit to random urinalyses from the nursing board in order to keep her license […] I was the only candidate. […] I refused. Sensing my resistance, Mom transitioned. She became apologetic and desperate. She cried and begged: ‘I promise I’ll do better. I promise.’ I had heard it many times before, and I didn’t believe it even a little […] [S]omething inside me broke that morning. (Vance 2016, 130)

The Turning Point: On Companionship and Willfulness The next morning J.D. moves into Mamaw’s house—and as a result his life changes for the better. J.D.’s grandmother (Mamaw) and his grandfather (Papaw) provide him with stability in a childhood full of instability, aggression, and chaos. They intervene when the situation in their daughter’s household gets out of control. For this reason, the grandfather installs a secret telephone line so that J.D. and his sister can call for help when conflicts escalate (Vance 2016, 253). Mamaw Bonnie and Papaw Jim are parents, mentors, friends, and supporters to J.D. and his sister Lindsay at the same time: It is also J.D.’s grandmother who appreciates education as an opportunity to escape the precarious life situation: “We didn’t have cellphones, and we didn’t have nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure that I had one of those graphic calculators […] If Mamaw could drop 180$ on a graphing calculator […] then I had better take schoolwork more seriously” (Vance 2016, 137). Nevertheless, he feels embarrassed by the

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living conditions. Worse than the limited financial means is the lifestyle. J.D. is ashamed of his grandmother, who is easily recognizable as a hillbilly: wearing men’s shirts and baggy jeans, driving a dented pickup truck. And so he asks her not to park directly in front of the school when she picks him up (Vance 2016, 137). Because he knows that his high school diploma does not provide him with the habitual requirements necessary to pursue an educational career, he enlists for a four-year commitment in the US Marine Corps (Vance 2016, 189). He hopes that military service will teach him discipline, offer him orientation, and strengthen his confidence in his agency: “From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. […] If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness” (Vance 2016, 163). Indeed, after a military tour in Iraq and overcoming various obstacles, he feels better prepared for university. His time in the military also influences his studies at Ohio State University. His weekly schedule is tight: He gets up early, goes jogging, attends seminars, does his homework, studies in the library, and works several jobs. Diligence and discipline compensate for initial uncertainties and lack of experience. Still, he lacks a sense for the workload he can manage —not only cognitively but also socially and financially. Nevertheless, after some hesitation, he applies to the prestigious Yale Law School.

Feeling Like a Cultural Alien At first, J.D. feels out of place at Yale; he does not see himself as having the necessary abilities to fit in. This becomes evident at an event where law firms invite students to a fancy restaurant to socialize. J.D. is not only unable to adequately use the cutlery, but he is also overwhelmed by the choice of drinks: ‘I’ll take white,’ I said, which I thought would settle the matter. ‘Would you like sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?” I thought she was screwing on me. But I used my powers of deduction to determine that those were two separate kinds of white wine. So I ordered a chardonnay […] because it was easier to pronounce. I just dodged my first bullet. The night, however, was young.’ (Vance 2016, 211)

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In this situation, he manages to conceal his insecurity in a creative and clever way, but it does not stop with these initial difficulties. Over the course of the evening, he tries sparkling water for the first time—assuming that sparkling is a descriptor for glistening, twinkling, or glittering due to the upscale setting. When he tries the carbonated water, he spits the water out in disgust all over the table (Vance 2016, 212). In a panic, he flees to the restroom to call his girlfriend Usha and ask her for advice (“What do I do with all the damned forks?” (Vance 2016, 212)). She acts as a reliable translator of the cultural codes of the upper class; she quickly introduces him to the hidden curriculum (Jackson 1968; Giroux and Penna 1983) of Yale. Although he is unfamiliar with the complex codes of conduct at the Ivy League College and feels a great distance between him and his fellow students, J.D. Vance manages to find a way of dealing with his past during his time at Yale. He no longer hides his origins from his peers and is happy that 18 relatives (!) are sitting in the audience at his graduation ceremony to celebrate with him. He attributes the idea of writing a book about his career to his experience at Yale and to Amy Chua, one of his professors and herself a bestselling author of the autobiographical book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), who encourages him to write a book about his educational biography. The writing process soon turns out to be a painful process of cognition: “It was among the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. I learned much I didn’t know about my culture, my neighborhood, and my family, and I relearned much that I had forgotten” (Vance 2016, 259).

The Character of an Auto-sociobiography At the beginning of this chapter, we addressed the question of what characterizes the new genre of auto-sociobiography, identifying three features: The authors can (1) study the social field very carefully in their role as educational climbers and defectors of their class. They act (2) as “intellectual translators” (Spoerhase 2017, 35) and present themselves as authentic voices that enable their reading public to gain insight into underprivileged milieus. It is also because of this mediating function that they are (3) able to provide explanations for sociopolitical phenomena such as the success of (right-wing) populist movements. In the following section, we will examine whether Hillbilly Elegy fulfills these characteristics and why the book can be classified in the genre of auto-sociobiography.

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We then take a brief look at other representatives of this genre and undertake a critical appraisal. Habitus Splitting as a Painful Experience Only recently, according to J.D. Vance’s introduction, did he understand, “that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of life we left behind continue to chase us” (Vance 2016, 2). As a defector of his class, he is confronted throughout his life with the challenge of moving within a social milieu whose norms, values, and behavioral patterns he cannot intuitively understand. His habitus differs considerably from that of his fellow students at the Yale Law School. The necessity to recognize and learn the established and unspoken rules as quickly as possible predestines him to be a sensitive observer of the academic field and the mechanisms of power that organize it (cf. Bourdieu 1985). His description of the law firm’s invitation to the restaurant, for example, is a perfect example of how easily an educational climber finds himself in situations in which he must fear to be exposed. For the ambitious student J.D., there is a lot at stake: In the restaurant, neither textbooks nor legal texts can help him. On this evening, a different kind of knowledge is required, for example the ability to converse on interesting topics with a certain nonchalance or to deftly cope with the intricacies of the menu. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that J.D. is overcome by panic at his inadvertent breaches of convention which, he fears, will affect his acceptance by the academic elite and his professional future. Even after his successful graduation from Yale, J.D. Vance is repeatedly confronted with what Bourdieu has called habitus splitting (cf. Bourdieu 1997; Spoerhase 2017). Neither in his original milieu nor in the social elite does Vance feel understood and comfortable—a phenomenon that the philosopher Chantal Jaquet has characterized as “double non-­ belonging” (Jaquet 2018, 135). The seemingly successful adaptation to his new life cannot hide an inner conflict: Two generations after his grandparents migrated from Kentucky to Ohio, J.D.  Vance still feels like a newcomer. [S]ocial mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-­ class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes

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unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. […] I realized that in this new world I was the cultural alien. (Vance 2016, 207)

The transformation of his habitus, which is essential for his ascension to a higher class, thus comes at a high price: It goes hand in hand with a distancing from his milieu of origin and an estrangement from family and friends (see Reuter et al. 2020). The realization that the attitudes, behavioral patterns, values, and norms acquired in childhood are no longer valid in the new world is quite painful (cf. Grabau 2020, 87–88). Though we sing the praises of social mobility it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement – to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift. In the past few years, I’ve vacationed in Panama and England. I’ve bought my groceries at Whole Foods. I’ve watched orchestral concerts. I’ve tried to break my addiction to ‘refined processed sugars’ […] I’ve worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends. (Vance 2016, 206)

Passages of this kind raise awareness of the self-evident nature of a social field, which, from the perspective of an educational climber and outsider, can provoke feelings of alienation, shame, or even hurt. In addition, they give readers an insight into the lives of fellow citizens with whom they have little or no contact in everyday life due to increasing social segregation which is of particular interest if one assumes that the reading public presumably belongs to the middle class. An Exclusive Insight into Other Living Environments This raises the question of whether or not Hillbilly Elegy can indeed take on a mediating function, serving as a bridge to a world that is largely unfamiliar to the reader. In at times very dramatic episodes, J.D.  Vance describes the conflicts, hopes, disappointments, and survival strategies of the hillbillies. The reader is introduced to the protagonists’ lives and emotions and develops a feeling for the challenges they face. In the process, readers also become familiar with the protagonists’ rough way of speaking. The people of Middletown do not mince their words: Strong expressions, blunt honesty, and emotionality characterize the sound of the book. Reading it can evoke different feelings for people in the middle class: from

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embarrassment and astonishment to compassion, disapproval and anger, sadness, or pride. Some passages confirm stereotypes and clichés, while in others the previous worldview is challenged, and images of others and oneself are questioned. Still other passages stimulate the reader’s sympathy and help to develop empathy with the characters presented in the book. The subtitle “A memoir of a family and culture in crisis” suggests that J.D. Vance is telling the history not only of his family but also of an entire region and social class. As Spoerhase (2017, 33) points out, he sees himself as a witness to the reality of life in the Rust Belt; his insights are based on his own experiences, which seem to authorize him to be a representative of the white underclass. The question of representativeness also raises the question of authenticity and truth of biographical narratives. Readers of conventional autobiographies expect that the life of the protagonist is portrayed in a reliable way. More recent biographical research, however, assumes that an autobiography reflects the meaning of life for autobiographers themselves (cf. Wagner-Engelhaaf 2006, 96–97; Günther 2001). Dan McAdams (2006) takes these considerations even further: According to him, it is about the retrospective construction of a congruent life story that is not only based on personal and meaningfully structured life experiences but also on the social and cultural environment in which the narrator is situated. In this vein, the narrative “from rags to riches” or the idea of a “self-made man” still carry great significance in the US (cf. Spoerhase 2017, 30; von Felden 2020, 24), and shape not only fiction but also autobiographical narratives. Regarding the question of genre, Vance ­ emphasizes that his book —despite the occasional reference to scientific sources —is not an academic study. Instead, he is interested in giving readers a sense of the reality of life, the goals and hopes, the disappointments and obstacles that confront “his” hillbillies. On the one hand, this may appeal to wealthy cosmopolitan readers of the book who are promised an insight into the lives of rural working class people, separated from them by an increasing gap of wealth and income. On the other hand, however, Vance also describes the social class he climbs into: He navigates two social worlds through the eyes of a “double insider” (Blome 2020, 543), and this makes his book illuminating to sociologists and educational scientists. The fact that Vance chooses a subjective approach to capture the small and large vibrations in the life of his family, and his region is a typical characteristic of autobiographies. Hillbilly Elegy can be considered as an auto-­ sociobiography insofar as Vance embeds his personal family history in a larger social and historical context. He analyses the political and

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socio-economic background of his community and also takes a look at the historical conditions. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relieved by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search for a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty – emotional, if not financial  – had followed her. Something had made her later years eerily similar to her earliest ones. What was happening? (Vance 2016, 142)

The Political Dimension of Auto-sociobiographies At this point, the last question can be addressed: Does Vance fulfill the role of the “Rust Belt anger translator” (Heller 2017) mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? These expectations were supported by the publication date of the book. After Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, journalists as well as social and political scientists searched for a plausible explanation for his popularity in economically disadvantaged regions like the Rust Belt. In numerous interviews, Vance was presented as a specialist on the white underclass and repeatedly felt obliged to comment on the presidential election —even beyond the US media landscape (see, among others, Wetzel 2016; Berenson 2016; Heller 2017). In these interviews, he explicates and interprets the experiences described in Hillbilly Elegy as authentically representative of the white underclass. In doing so, he explains his hypothesis that the frustration of his fellow people is also the result of the ever-widening gap between the well-educated, liberal, and urban elites and the isolated rural regions where unemployment, drug problems, and hopelessness are commonplace. In addition, he attributes a lack of confidence in their agency to the white underclass: According to Vance, they, and here he refers in particular to beneficiaries of state welfare programs, tend to blame society and the government for their problems. This tendency is reinforced by some conservative politicians, who, although enjoying Vance’s sympathies, sometimes undermine the ambition of the white underclass to improve their precarious living situation. Conservative policies, Vance diagnoses, foment a certain kind of detachment and fail to address the real challenges facing their constituents. Thus, the right’s message falls on fertile ground: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault” (Vance 2016, 194). Vance points to

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the differences in attitudes and behavior between the old and new white working class to explain social dislocation and political conflict (see also Pruitt 2016): Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hard-­ working. My mother, and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful. (Vance 2016, 148)

He explains the fact that large parts of the white underclass are turning to right-wing populist politicians because of their resentment. The distinction between the “traditional working class” and the group of nonworking welfare beneficiaries leads the traditional working class to turn away from the Democrats’ welfare programs and turn toward right-wing populist promises. In addition to poor educational opportunities and circulating conspiracy theories (Vance 2016, 190–191), components such as envy, frustration, and a lack of agency are—according to Vance—responsible for dissatisfaction in the region; it is these components that push hillbillies into the arms of populists like Donald Trump. These hypotheses are neither new nor spectacular. Characteristic for Hillbilly Elegy is that the book largely refrains from scientific argumentation. Instead, it offers its readers the opportunity to gain insight into this milieu from an insider’s perspective. It provides access to the emotional states and living environment that are present here; it opens up spaces of experience and raises understanding for the concerns, doubts, and anger of members of a milieu that has not been heard in public very often. This demonstrates again that literature relies on the mode of demonstration, whereas science relies on the mode of argumentation (cf. Gabriel 1991; Rieger-Ladich 2014). The special characteristic of Hillbilly Elegy is therefore its hybrid form, that is, its productive combination of autobiographical experience and sociological analysis. Vance is neither interested in merely explicating statistics and studies in the mode of scientific writing nor in a description of his experiences that are based on the rules of autobiography with a heroic bourgeois subject. J.D. Vance’s symbolic capital consists of the fact that he is considered the legitimate advocate of the white underclass. By giving the readers access to his experiences and feelings, he offers them an insight into the reality of life of the white

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underclass. That seems to be one of the main reasons why his book has enjoyed such great popularity.

American Narratives and European Objections However, Hillbilly Elegy’s overwhelming success may only be fully understood if the models and narratives that shape the US-American self-image are regarded more closely (see McAdams 2006; Sandel 2020). Hillbilly Elegy undoubtedly belongs to the genre of auto-sociobiography, but—this is our proposition—it has to be understood as a specifically US-American variant. The specific way in which J.D.  Vance explores the connection between class flight, educational climbing, and social mobility with recourse to his own biography is less due to individual experiences than it might seem at first. At this point, we cannot elaborate on books that have been presented in recent years by the writer Annie Ernaux, the sociologist Didier Eribon, the political activists bell hooks and Angela Davis, or the cofounder of Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall (see Spoerhase 2017; Jaquet 2018; Rieger-­ Ladich and Grabau 2018; Rieger-Ladich 2020). Still, they are very well suited as a “counter-horizon” (cf. Bohnsack 2014) to sharpen the eye for the characteristics of J.D.  Vance’s book. Unlike the aforementioned authors, who were trained in the humanities and social sciences, he may not be familiar with texts on structural forms of discrimination, symbolic power dynamics, or practices of subjectivation. Vance emphasizes the virtues of the individual while neglecting phenomena of institutional discrimination and structural violence. As a result of this perspective, social success appears to be the fair reward for individual efforts. Although Vance seems to sense that many of the slogans that still shape political debates throughout the US have long since lost their power of persuasion, he avoids a fundamental criticism. In contrast to the African American literary scholar bell hooks, who also grew up in Ohio and sharply criticizes classism in her auto-sociobiographical text (cf. hooks 2000), he cannot, it seems, bring himself to do the same. In contrast to the African American activist, J.D. Vance refers to himself as a social conservative. The way in which the narrative of the self-made man is reflected upon thus seems to depend not only on class status, gender, and ethnicity but also on political orientation. The neoliberal assumption that everybody can be the architect of their own future by displaying diligence, ambition, and perseverance also invites a lot of criticism, as

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found in the anthology Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (see Harkins and McCarroll 2019). At the heart of the criticism lies Vance’s tendency to hold the hillbillies responsible for their own misfortunes. The contributors of the book, who come from a range of different academic backgrounds, distance themselves particularly from the so-called magic three, which Vance offers as a solution strategy for the white lower class: hard work, healthy families, and the inclusion into a religious community. Vance’s insistence on the individualistic perspective is somewhat unsettling insofar as he has a very keen sense that the meritocratic promise—anyone can take their fate into their own hands and be rewarded accordingly, without the state limiting their ambitions in any way—has long since been broken (see Packer 2013; Sandel 2020, 37–38). Yet Vance shrinks away from criticizing this. This becomes clear when he talks about Barack Obama, the departing president at the time: He is brilliant, wealthy and speaks like a constitutional law professor – which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up. His accent  – clean, perfect, neutral  – is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening […]; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. […] President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not for them. (Vance 2016, 193)

It is extremely enlightening—and one of the strengths of Hillbilly Elegy— how J.D.  Vance once again highlights habitual differences and then explains why the meritocratic promise is met with great skepticism throughout the Rust Belt. However, with his tendency to bring character traits to the fore, to emphasize attitudes and virtues, and to praise the individual, he is in danger of catering to the abovementioned narrative. The promise to achieve social advancement and success in the US through hard work, discipline, and willpower is centuries old, but it has attained a special stamp since the political era of Ronald Reagan—and it has contributed to the growing social division. In his book The Tyranny of Merit (2020), the moral philosopher Michael J. Sandel demonstrated convincingly that the very model of meritocracy is partially responsible for the increasing loss of solidarity and the continued erosion of social cohesion. Referring to studies in the sociology of religion and education, he shows how the enticing promise of fair competition can in fact have the

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opposite effect. A society that is characterized by hardened inequality structures and a decreasing chance of upward social mobility (cf. Clark 2014), and that nevertheless describes itself as meritocratic, inevitably produces winners and losers. But not only that—in addition, a poisoned social climate is created in which cohesion dwindles and demands for the redistribution of resources are hardly ever heard. The result is a “tyranny of merit,” which is not only blind to varying conditions and the “contingency of our lot,” but that also leaves “little room for solidarity” (Sandel 2020, 42). This prepares the ground for merciless competition. Hence, the arrogance of those who emerge as winners from the race for places at the most coveted (and most expensive) universities corresponds to the “nagging self-doubt” (Sandel 2020, 43) of the losers, who do suspect that the competition for the few places is not fairly organized, but are unable to criticize it because they lack insight into the complicated admission procedures and selection principles (see Karabel 2005). The result is a dire demoralization of the losers, which Sandel pointedly describes: Seen from below, the hubris of the elites is galling. No one likes to be looked down upon. But the meritocratic faith adds insult to injury. The notion that your fate is in your hands, that ‘you can make it if you try’ is a double-edged sword, inspiring in one way but invidious in another. It congratulates the winners but denigrates the losers, even in their own eyes. For those who can’t find work or make ends meet, it is hard to escape the demoralizing thought that their failure is their own doing, that they simply lack the talent and drive to succeed. (Sandel 2020, 43)

Vance does suspect this; he hints at it again and again in Hillbilly Elegy, but he hardly ever gets beyond the articulation of a vague unease. His auto-­ sociobiographical text is not really able to develop its analytical power, as its author tends to moralize and individualize by focusing on factors for personal and social success. Unlike Angela Davis or bell hooks, he is thus an example of the meritocratic faith as described by Sandel. In addition, Vance holds on to typical conservative values of Christian faith and the importance of family to provide a child with stability, opportunities, and future prospects (see Vance 2016, 255) and never really doubts the validity of these assumptions. He thus becomes the victim of what Chantal Jaquet calls the “ideology of personal success” (Jaquet 2018, 29): Success is attributed individually, character traits are elevated, contingencies are faded out, and questions of power are neglected. It is by no means the case

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that the “combinatorial thinking” advocated by Jaquet (2018, 97), which reckons with nonsimultaneousness, netlike forces, and conflicting actors, is never apparent in the work of J.D. Vance. But it rarely goes beyond a narrative that focuses on the individual and factors such as talent, ambition, virtue, and character.

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CHAPTER 8

Literariness and the Double Bind of Stigma Lisa Spieker

Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one-­ fourth of the population experiences ‘mental illness’ at some point in their life (WHO 2014), the stigma incurred by ‘madness’ is both widespread and severe: Studies showed that large parts of the general population are unwilling to work closely or socialize with persons with ‘mental disorders’ because of ascriptions of dangerousness or incompetence, expectations of poor prognosis, and a general desire for social distance (Corrigan and Shapiro 2010, 908–920). These prejudicial attitudes toward people with ‘mental illnesses’ are often expressed through acts of discrimination that occur on an individual or a societal level. Persons with ‘mental disorders’ may experience individual discrimination in areas such as housing, employment, social relationships, whereas societal discrimination expresses itself through inadequate funding for research on and the treatment of ‘mental health’ problems (cf. Parcesepe and Cabassa 2012). Moreover, the recipients of discriminatory actions and prejudice frequently internalize stigmatizing beliefs, which adds to the emotional burden of ‘mental disorders’ and prevents many from seeking help (cf. Pescosolido et al. 2010). This chapter discusses how memoirs by persons with ‘mental disorders’ draw upon the psychiatric discourse and use distinctly literary means to

L. Spieker (*) Bildungszentrum Bocholt, Bocholt, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_8

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negotiate the stigma that is attached to their condition. Authors of what I call mental illness pathographies1 use psychiatric concepts and labels not only to make sense of their lived experience but also to educate readers about the causes (etiology) and the forms (symptoms) their condition can have. By drawing on the dominant discourse of psychiatry—which fashions ‘madness’ as a condition that can be bureaucratized and therefore known—authors of mental illness pathographies reduce the fear reaction many persons have when interacting with ‘the mentally ill.’ At the same time, authors use literary means, such as ambiguity, self-referential language, or references to canonical literary texts to convey the affective reality of ‘madness’ and present themselves as persons rather than merely objects for the psychiatric discourse. Moreover, the use of distinctly literary means and references to canonical literature counteracts stigma beliefs about the conflation of ‘madness’ and mental incapacitation and can thus further support the authors’ attempts to claim a voice in the cultural debate surrounding ‘mental disorders’ and persons diagnosed with them. I hold that the radical openness of meaning of literary texts and the “hyper-protected cooperative principle” (Culler 1997, 25) enable mental illness pathographies to do “cultural work” (Tompkins 1986, 200) that has fortuitous stigma-political effects. In other words, memoirs of ‘madness’ present themselves as literature by emphasizing ambiguity, using unusual narrative structures or stylistic devices, which “increase the difficulty and length of perception … [and] remove objects from the automatism of perception” (Shklovsky 2013, 11, 13). According to literary theorist Jonathan Culler, the hyper-protected cooperative principle is in place when readers are convinced to put up with these difficulties by institutional gatekeepers to the label literature: When editors, journalists, and committees pronounce a text to be well constructed—it has been published, reviewed, singled out for praise—they “giv[e] us reason to expect 1  I use “mental-illness pathographies” as a specification of Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’s term “pathography,” which she introduced in her groundbreaking 1999 monograph Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. Hawkins defines pathography as “a form of autobiography or biography that describes personal experiences of illness, treatment, and sometimes death” (Hawkins 1999, 1). I specified the term because I hold that ‘madness’ occupies a different cultural space and calls up different tropes than somatic illnesses like cancer, HIV/AIDS, or lupus. Moreover, persons diagnosed with ‘psychiatric disorders’ face stigma beliefs that equate their condition with mental incapacitation and unreasonableness, which requires them to use other discursive strategies when trying to gain the right to speak knowledgeably about their lived experience. For more on these strategies, see Spieker 2021.

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that the results of our reading efforts will be ‘worth it’” (Culler 1997, 27). Readers then assume the literary mode of reading, which is characterized by a readiness to explore ambiguity and look for additional meanings. It is then that literature can do “cultural work,” which means that it “provid[es] society with a means of thinking about itself, defin[es] certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatiz[es] its conflicts, and recommend[s] solutions” (Tompkins 1986, 200). Moreover, the literary mode of reading allows memoirs to circumvent some of the internal protective mechanisms of stigmatization that cannot be overcome by the straightforward, fact-based texts that frequently feature in educational campaigns. In this manner, memoirs can function as a valuable addition to more traditional stigma-political efforts. In this analysis, I use the terms ‘madness,’ ‘mental illness,’ and ‘mental disorder’ to refer to conditions of the mind. ‘Mental illness’ and ‘mental disorder’ refer to the narrow psychiatric understanding of these conditions, whereas ‘madness’ signifies a “dizzying superabundance” of meaning (Zimmerman 2007, 478) and includes a wide variety of behaviors and states of mind that deviate from the norm.2 As I argue elsewhere: [‘madness’] is a palimpsest of meanings that contains a broad array of positive and negative associations, deep-seated cultural tropes, it ties in with multiple discourses such as pre-nineteenth-century medicine, philosophy, art, literature, and religion as well as the supposed causes these discourses suggested for extremes of mood and thought. (Spieker 2021, 22)

The single quotation marks around ‘mental illness,’ ‘madness,’ and ‘mental disorder’ and their synonyms draw attention to the discursive construction of these conditions. Following Michel Foucault’s claims in Madness and Civilization and Psychiatric Power as well as widespread tenets in Mad Studies (cf. Fee 2000, 1–4), I hold that the definition and meaning of ‘madness’ is constantly (re-)negotiated by various individual and 2  The terminological shift from “mental illness” to “mental disorder” in the psychiatric dispositive reflects psychiatry’s recent findings about ‘madness’: According to the American Psychiatric Association, “disorder” denotes a kind of pathology that is closer to ‘madness’ than the kind denoted by “illness” (cf. Aftab 2014). I use ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental disorder’ interchangeably. This allows me not only to reflect both Hornbacher’s usage—she uses ‘mental illness’—and current psychiatric findings but to keep an analytical distance to both. See Aftab 2014 for the debate surrounding the terminological shift in the psychiatric discourse and a problematization of both terms.

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institutional discursive agents in fields such as medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, activism, the humanities, religion, the media, and art. Accordingly, the understanding of ‘madness’ varies across cultures and time, and there is no essential quality to it. Similarly, I consider ‘normalcy’ and tropes and generalizations such as ‘the dangerous madman’ and ‘the mad’ to be discursively constructed. The understanding of ‘madness’ as a discursive construct does not deny the suffering caused by this condition but allows for analyses of how the condition is conceptualized and experienced within contemporary social, intellectual, economic, and cultural structures as well as how life writing can change those meanings and experiences. (Spieker 2021, 2)

Mechanisms of Stigmatization and Common Stigma Theories To illustrate why more traditional stigma-political efforts struggle to effectively challenge prejudices, I need to discuss the mechanisms of stigmatization itself. On a very basic level, stigmatization is about the categorization of people into two groups: those with whom interactions are safe or beneficial and those who should be avoided at all cost. The word “stigma” originated in Ancient Greece, where it referred to burns or cuts that marked the bodies of traitors, slaves or criminals and thus made it easier to evade them. In contemporary usage, “stigma” refers to the disgrace itself rather than the sign thereof, yet stigmatization still revolves around the desire for social distance to certain groups of people. The sociologist Erving Goffman very succinctly described the processes that guide this categorization of people. According to him, we have normative expectations about what kinds of people we are likely to meet in certain kinds of situations. Most of the times, we only become aware of these expectations when a person deviates from them, and if these attributes are judged to be less desirable, they become a stigma. Once an undesirable deviation is discovered, “[w]e tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one” (Goffman 1963, 5), for example weak will, dangerousness, and immorality. Despite other, valued traits, the individual is then “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” and is in extreme cases considered to be “not quite human” (Goffman 1963, 3, 5). As a result, stigmatized

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individuals frequently experience discriminatory actions, which are justified by “a stigma theory, [i.e.,] an ideology to explain his [the stigmatized person’s] inferiority and account for the danger he represents” (Goffman 1963, 5). These stigma theories are then (re-)produced in various discourses such as literature, art, religious texts and myths, medicine, and psychology until they become part of what Gramsci called “common sense,” that is, sediments of knowledge that are shared by the general public and which have accumulated in the social stratum over centuries (1971, 419–425). There are a few recurring themes or thematic clusters in stigma theories about persons with ‘mental disorders,’ meaning that certain assumptions tend to appear together in representations of ‘the mentally ill’: For example, closely related assumptions about the purported dangerousness, potential for violence, unpredictable behavior, lack of morality, and deviousness of ‘the mad’ tend to be fused into the trope of the ‘dangerous madman/woman.’ However, not all related stigma theories that appear together form recognizable tropes, which is why I chose to call them clusters. These clusters of stigma beliefs actively influence how those diagnosed with ‘madness’ are represented in cultural products and the media, shape institutional responses to persons with ‘mental illnesses,’ and affect their everyday social interactions with “normals,” which is Goffman’s label for persons who do not have the stigma in question (1963, 5; cf. also Pescosolido et al. 2010, 1324). The first recurring theme in stigma theories on ‘madness’ is the ascription of badness, more specifically immorality, unpredictability, and dangerousness. In the Old Testament, ‘madness’ has been understood as a form of divine punishment for godlessness or sinfulness, or else as possession by demons, which renders the person who is possessed both dangerous and immoral (Scull 2016, 16–24). Moreover, mid-nineteenth-century medical theories—which were later adopted in the eugenics movement—saw ‘madness’ as the result of a degenerative process and ‘the mad’ themselves as “biologically inferior lot” (Scull 2016, 243), which needed to be incarcerated in asylums. Otherwise, these “tainted creatures” were prone to “attend upon the calls of their instincts and passions as does the unreasoning beast” and “to act as parents to the next generation” (Strahan 1890, 337, 334, quoted in Scull 2016, 244–245). In this case, stigma theory suggests unpredictability as well as dangerousness because ‘the mad’ do not act according to the distinctly human quality of reason and because it envisions them as actively, biologically polluting agents. Currently, the themes of immorality,

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unpredictability, and dangerousness are particularly visible in horror movies about ‘insane’ (serial) killers, sensational tabloid press coverage of crimes committed by ‘the mentally ill’ (cf. Cross 2010), and the punitive, brutalizing treatment which inmates with ‘mental disorders’ still frequently receive in the U.S. penal system (cf. Reiter and Blair 2015). The second, and somewhat related, cluster of stigma theories about ‘madness’ centers on the ‘mad person’s’ responsibility for their condition, that is, their blameworthiness. In the Old Testament, sinners brought the divine punishment of ‘madness’ upon themselves through their actions, as did many literary characters such as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who descended into ‘madness’ as a result of her lust for power. The medical discourse on ‘madness’ also theorized on the individual’s responsibility for their ‘insanity’ at multiple points in history: In the eighteenth century, for example, many doctors believed that melancholics and hysterics had indulged in too much abstract thought, theater-going, and novel-reading, and had thereby overstimulated their nervous systems (Foucault 1988, 213, 157; Cross 2010, 94–128). Contemporary studies show that many people resent individuals with ‘mental illnesses’ for supposedly causing their conditions through bad life choices or for perpetuating them by not pulling themselves together (Monteith and Pettit 2011, 485). Ascriptions of responsibility such as these directly affect how much compassion is felt toward suffering individuals, and, according to Martha Nussbaum, compassion is central to social change (2013, 143). I therefore suggest that this cluster of stigma theories “not only leads to anger and social avoidance (‘I don’t want that weak-willed person around me!’)” (Corrigan and Watson 2004, 477) but may also influence the institutional processes such as the allocation of funding for research on and the treatment of ‘mental illnesses.’ The third recurring theme exists in a state of tension to the ascription of blameworthiness and is sometimes called “the benevolence stigma” (Corrigan and Watson 2004, 477–478). There is a long history of depicting ‘the mad’ as fools, or as helpless, childlike, and innocent or to conflate what is now called ‘mental disorders’ with what is now called intellectual disabilities (Scull 2016, 106–109). While this stigma theory neither blames ‘the mad’ for their state nor ascribes any sort of dangerousness or moral flaw, it represents individuals with ‘mental disorders’ as utterly incapacitated and suggests that ‘madness’ is a stable condition. Consequently, cultural representations—most frequently, comedies that play on the supposed hilarious eccentricity of ‘the mad’—encourage the assumption that

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persons with ‘mental illnesses’ cannot (ever) live independently or make their own life choices but need continuous treatment or support, either by a parental figure or by an institution (Corrigan and Watson 2004, 477; cf. also Wahl 1995, 14–35). These views are therefore utterly disempowering and likely contribute to job discrimination which persons with ‘mental disorders’ experience (Corrigan and Shapiro 2010, 913). The fourth and last cluster of themes in stigma theories that I address here also illustrates another key mechanism of stigmatization.3 As Erving Goffman points out, not all characteristics that are imputed on the basis of the stigmatizing trait are inherently negative. He states that there are “some desirable but undesired attributes” (1963, 5), which are also ascribed to the bearer of the stigma, such as the belief that blind persons are highly intuitive or that individuals with ‘mental disorders’ are (creative) geniuses. In Ancient Greece, ‘madness’ was seen as a blessing by the gods that grants poetic inspiration and prophetic abilities, and it was strongly connected to great feats in philosophy, art, and love (cf. Scull 2016, 36). This association of ‘madness’ and creativity was eventually rediscovered in the Renaissance when “melancholia became a somewhat fashionable affliction with the intellectual elite” (Spieker 2021, 30). Black bile, that is, the melancholic humor, was connected to a stimulation of the intellect and imagination, so poets and scholars were particularly prone to the lowness of spirits that is now called depression. A couple of centuries later, Romantic poets like Lord Byron and William Blake further popularized the notion of the ‘mad artist,’ and to this day ‘madness’ calls up images of romanticized suffering and creativity (Scull 2016, 86–120). As this brief summary of the four clusters of themes goes to show, stigma theories not only “have an inherent tension between supposedly positive and negative traits” (Spieker 2021, 31), but even the unequivocally negative additional imputations have strong internal contradictions.

Combatting Stigma Even though some of these sediments of knowledge and stigma theories are more pronounced in contemporary discourses that others, none of them have vanished entirely and can be easily revived (cf. Cross 2010, iii). 3  For a more complete cultural and intellectual history of the meanings that ‘madness’ has held, see Morrall (2017) and Scull (2016). For an analysis of other stigma theories related to ‘madness’ and how they are negotiated in contemporary memoirs, see Spieker 2021.

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I suggest that it is because of these internal contradictions of stigma theories that traditional anti-stigma campaigns have mixed results at best. Genre conventions for informational texts, such as those featured in educational campaigns, dictate a straightforward style and the avoidance of internal contradictions. Studies on the efficacy of these campaigns have shown that while they may succeed in weakening respondents’ belief in one stigma theory (Corrigan and Watson 2004, 477), they invariably activate another, opposing theory. I call this internal protective mechanism of stigmatization the “double bind of stigma” (Spieker 2021, 92). In the last two decades, some of the most visible and well-funded campaigns for the reduction of stigma against people with ‘mental illnesses’ have focused on eradicating the second cluster of stigma beliefs, that is, ascriptions of personal responsibility for ‘madness.’ These campaigns stressed that ‘mental disorders’ are not a sign of weak will, lack of moral backbone, and malingering but that, as the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) used to put it, ‘mental illness’ is a brain disorder. While NAMI has abandoned the term “brain disorder” in their more recent publications, their website still links ‘mental illnesses’ (mostly) to circumstances beyond the individual’s control. In the case of schizophrenia, the section entitled “causes” lists genetics, environmental factors such as “[e]xposure to viruses or malnutrition before birth,” and “[p]roblems with certain brain chemicals, including neurotransmitters called dopamine and glutamate” as three of the four causes for schizophrenia—the fourth being substance abuse, particularly at a young age (NAMI 2008). While the majority of U.S. citizens now embrace a neurobiological understanding of ‘mental disorders’ and psychiatric treatment—rather than punishment—as the most appropriate response to ‘madness,’ the desire for social distance remains the same (cf. Pescosolido et  al. 2010, 1321). In fact, several studies found that campaigns that reframed ‘madness’ as a collection of brain disorders even increased the benevolence stigma and a strong sense of Otherness: While respondents exposed to these campaigns no longer blamed persons diagnosed with ‘mental disorders’ for incurring their conditions, they were more pessimistic about the potential for recovery and saw individuals with ‘mental illnesses’ as “innocent children whose lives need to be controlled by a parental figure” (Corrigan and Watson 2004, 477). Additionally, the campaigns’ focus on neurobiological explanations for ‘madness’ provoked “harsher behavior” and exacerbated perceptions of people with ‘mental disorders’ as “fundamentally different,” “physically distinct,” “less human,” and “almost as a different species”

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(Corrigan and Watson 2004, 478). These results thus demonstrate that educational campaigns may spread knowledge about recent medico-­ psychiatric research on the causes of ‘mental disorders’ but do not produce the desired results. Protest campaigns, by contrast, are efforts that “highlight the injustices of various forms of stigma,” raise awareness of widely held stigmatizing views about ‘the mentally ill,’ and “ask people to suppress prejudice” (Corrigan et  al. 2012) or to stop using stigmatizing language. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has produced many campaigns of this type. In one campaign, a word cloud of stigmatizing labels such as “wacko,” “psycho,” “nutjob,” and “lunatic” appears on-screen. Actress Mayim Bialik then pokes the word cloud with her finger, causing it to shatter and fall from view. She turns to face the viewer and explains: You may not realize it, but these words used to describe someone with a mental health condition can be very harmful. In a country, where one in five is affected by a mental health condition, it’s time for all of us to step up and change the conversation. Just because someone’s struggle isn’t obvious on the outside, doesn’t mean they aren’t hurting on the inside. We need to see the person, not the condition. (NAMI 2016)

In these few sentences, Bialik not only challenges the widespread myths that people affected by ‘mental disorders’ are easily recognizable, urges viewers to consider the harmful effects of ableist language, disseminates information about the prevalence but also calls viewers to stop reducing people to their psychiatric conditions. Even though there is anecdotal evidence that campaigns such as these can curb harmful media representations, most studies agree that these efforts tend to exacerbate “negative views … [by] activat[ing] participants’ prejudicial cultural beliefs regarding mental illness” (Schulze 2008, 121)—which in this case is that ‘the mad’ are easily recognizable. Consequently, this form of traditional anti-­ stigma campaigns also fails in the face of the complexity of processes of stigmatization. Studies indicate that direct contact to persons with ‘mental illnesses’ in educational formats who talk about their lived experience is the most effective way to reduce stigma beliefs (Yamaguchi et  al. 2011, 405). However, in addition to being more time consuming and costly than the production of educational videos or pamphlets, most studies don’t make claims whether the format effected actual changes in discriminatory

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behavior (cf. Yamaguchi et al. 2011, 405). I moreover suspect that narrations of lived experience in these settings run the danger of being affected by the double bind of stigma as well. Because educational presentations that feature autobiographical narrations by discredited individuals are not safeguarded by the hyper-protective cooperative principle, listeners will have little patience for the messiness of lived experience. Any internal contradictions, ambivalence, or lack of coherence—which generally characterizes everyday experience in the moment of living it—needs to be “resolved into sharp contrasts and clear-cut issues” (Hawkins 1999, 14) and then be shaped into recognizable narrative patterns. Otherwise, these autobiographical talks run the risk of strengthening the stigma-based association of ‘madness’ with incoherence (cf. Wood 2013, 1–3) and thereby undermine the claiming of voice by ‘the mentally ill’ on their own condition. However, any ‘mad person’ who draws upon recognizable narrative patterns of overcoming adversity through hard work, self-reliance, and resourcefulness risks affirming the stigma belief that those among ‘the mentally ill’ who are not (yet) successfully managing their condition are too weak-willed to pull themselves together or malingering. Moreover, as this narrative pattern may emphasize the agency that individuals with ‘mental disorders’ have in the management of their condition and empowers listeners to do the same, it also undermines calls for more institutional support in the overcoming of or living with ‘mental illnesses.’ By contrast, any ‘mad person’ who draws upon narrative patterns of deliverance by a higher power and applies it to the secular salvation they found in successful treatment by the psychiatric dispositive, may inadvertently strengthen the benevolence stigma, which assumes that ‘the mad’ cannot take charge of their own lives. Even the most promising formats of traditional anti-­ stigma campaigns therefore run the risk of being caught in the double bind. Another strategy of challenging the stigma that is attached to conditions of the mind is to attempt to replace the disease paradigm that sees ‘madness’ as an illness or disorder that should be cured with the so-called (neuro-)diversity paradigm.4 Within this diversity paradigm, ‘madness’ is 4  This paradigm originated in the late 1990s among activists with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and is called neurodiversity. Even though stable coalitions between advocacy groups for individuals with ASD and those for people with ‘mental disorders’ are somewhat rare, neurodiversity in its academic usage has come to include affective disorders such as depression and bipolar disorders as well as psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia (cf.

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understood as a variant of human difference that comes with advantages and disadvantages rather than a pathological deviation from the norm. In this view, ‘madness’ becomes “a social category among other categories like race, class, gender, sexuality, age, or ability that define our identities and experiences” (Liegghio 2013, 10). However, this stigma-political strategy is far more visible in the academic discourse of scholar-activists on identity politics than in well-funded public campaigns. One reason for this may be that this strategy exists in direct opposition to the hegemonic psychiatric discourse. Audiences not steeped in Foucauldian practices that challenge the production of “power/knowledge” (cf. Foucault 1980) will “likely resolve … contradiction[s] between a dominant dispositive and a discredited person in favor of the former” (Spieker 2021, 43). This is especially the case since there is a long history of conflating the attribute “mad,” with a loss of reason, the erosion of intellect, and “a flawed or disordered way of seeing, perceiving, judging, and thus, knowing” (Liegghio 2013, 123). Any attempts by ‘mad persons’ to challenge the pathologization of their condition will therefore have to compete with a powerful discursive agent and long-standing “common sense” notions that undermines ‘mad people’s’ “social positions as legitimate knowers” (Liegghio 2013, 125). In the face of the limitations of traditional and academic stigma-­political efforts, memoirs by people with lived experience of ‘madness’ can become a useful supplement in fighting stigmatization and educating the public about the complexities of living with ‘mental disorders.’5 Unlike educational campaigns, which seek to impart knowledge through straightforward informational texts or autobiographical narratives of individuals with ‘mental disorders’ in educational contexts, memoirs are markedly literary texts that may actively embrace the contradictions and ambiguities that come with (the) lived experience (of ‘madness’). Because many of the more well-known memoirs by American authors who live with ‘mental disorders’ have been reviewed favorably, been reprinted, and received prizes, the authors’ status as discredited individuals does not endanger the hyper-protected cooperative principle, which encourages readings of these Lewis 2017, 117). For more on the neurodiversity movement, see Armstrong 2015; Herrera and Perry 2013. 5  For an in-depth analysis of how authors of ‘mental illness’ pathographies draw upon, problematize, qualify, and supplement medico-psychiatric knowledge of ‘madness’ as ‘mental illness,’ see Spieker 2021.

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texts as literature. In other words, readers are more willing to explore contradictions and ambiguities in the productions of meanings of ‘madness’ if they encounter them in the context of literature. It is this mechanism that allows mental illness pathographies to circumvent some of the internal protective mechanisms of stigmatization.

Responding to Stigma in Memoirs of ‘Madness’ Rather than rejecting or disproving stigma theories about ‘the mad’ or attempting to generate outrage about acts of discrimination they have experienced, authors of mental illness pathographies affirm and contradict all of them. They draw upon multiple established narrative patterns such as narratives of overcoming that focus on the experiencing self’s resourcefulness but also produce narratives of redemption and salvation in which a helpless experiencing self is lifted from the torment of ‘madness’ by psychiatric treatment.6 They present themselves as childlike and innocent but also activate the trope of the ‘dangerous madman or woman.’ They include confessions of complete incapacitation as well as narrations of times when their ‘madness’ was an enabling quality, a source of inspiration or joy. Memoirs of ‘madness’ draw upon the disease paradigm and the psychiatric discourse to make sense of their condition but also adopt the neurodiversity approach to reject a pathologization and present ‘madness’ as another way of being in the world. Because all of these contradictory conceptualizations are embedded as common sense in the public consciousness— that is, they match deep-seated, conscious or unconscious expectations we have about ‘the mentally ill’—and therefore ring true, dragging all of them to the surface over the course of a single book does nothing less than forcing readers to question all of their assumptions on ‘madness’ and the nature of stigma directed at those affected by it.

6  The narrating self in autobiographical texts refers to the author in his or her function as narrator who looks back on his or her life, shapes individual experiences into a coherent narrative, and has the benefit of hindsight. The experiencing self acts as the protagonist of the autobiographical narrative. Additionally, I use the term “textual selves” to refer to “the totality of textual self-representation.” (Spieker 2021, 24)

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Claiming the Right to Speak on ‘Madness’ as ‘Mental Illness’ Marya Hornbacher is a bestselling author of ‘mental illness’ pathographies, and in the following I will draw upon Madness—A Bipolar Life (2009) and, to a lesser extent, Wasted—A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998). As the title of the former suggests, Hornbacher lives with bipolar disorder, a condition previously known as manic depression. The memoir recounts a life that, from early childhood onward, was characterized by violent mood swings that ranged from the high energy and euphoria of mania over the abject horror of psychosis to the crushing lows and incapacitation of depression. Rather than presenting a clear-cut narrative of overcoming, for example by narrating how the experiencing self  abandoned dysfunctional assumptions about her condition in favor of others that helped attain a state of carefully managed stability, the memoir switches back and forth between contradictory understandings of ‘madness’ without ultimately privileging one over the others. As the psychiatric conceptualization of ‘madness’ as ‘mental illness’ occupies a dominant discursive position, Hornbacher responds quite extensively to the paradigm of pathology. However, true to the ambivalence that is present in her memoirs, she not only embraces psychiatric knowledge as a tool for interpreting her lived experience but also points to the ways in which the language and concepts of psychiatry fail to convey the complexity of her life. Hornbacher’s reliance on psychiatric knowledge is already visible in the presence of diagnostic labels in the memoir’s titles: The labels announce the extent to which Hornbacher fashions herself as an object of psychiatric truth production and how much she relies on the psychiatric discourse for meaning-making.7 The titles Madness—A Bipolar Life and Wasted—A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia illustrate how ­psychiatric ‘truth’ provides a mode of interpretation and a sense of relief: In both cases, the chaos and (emotional) complexity that is evoked by the terms “madness” and “wasted” is reduced to clearly defined psychiatric conditions. This categorization and bureaucratization of ‘madness’ by 7  In line with Foucauldian thought (cf. 2006, 247), I reject the notion of independent, transcendental ‘truths’ that can be discovered and instead hold that ‘truth’ is discursively produced by individual and institutional agents who draw upon culturally and historically specific methods of truth production such as the scientific method or confession. Consequently, ‘truth’ is a discursive construct, and I draw attention to this by using single quotation marks just like I did with ‘madness’ and ‘mental illness/disorder.’

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psychiatry suggests that ‘madness’ can be understood and treated in a manner akin to somatic pathologies and thereby soothes fears about conditions of the mind in both individuals diagnosed with them and ‘normals.’ Using psychiatric knowledge as an interpretive framework therefore has psychological benefits and fulfills stigma-political tasks. The psychological and stigma-political benefits of using psychiatric diagnoses in self-labelling are made more explicit in the passage when the experiencing self was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The narrating self comments on the sense of relief the experiencing self felt at finding herself shielded from stigma theories through her diagnostic labels: She reasons that her newly received diagnostic label means that her condition is “a real thing, not merely my imagination going wild … it isn’t merely an utter failure on my part” (2009, 67). In other words, she feels as if the status of bipolar disorder as a medico-psychiatric condition counteracts the stigma theory of blameworthiness which states that ‘madness’ is either the result of weak will, immorality, and other character flaws (“utter failure on my part”) or that those affected by it could snap out of it if they tried hard enough (“not merely my imagination going wild”). By presenting psychiatric discourse and ‘mental disorders’ as the central organizing forces of her life, Hornbacher embraces the medico-psychiatric understanding of ‘madness,’ including all its tenets about the genetic and environmental origins of her conditions and the need for psychiatric treatment. Just as the diagnostic labels encourage a narrow, psychiatric interpretation of the more evocative terms “madness” and “wasted,” Marya Hornbacher’s narrating self reinterprets her early life events in light of her diagnosis. In Madness, Hornbacher structures her life story through a teleological narrative of the development of the experiencing self’s condition and, finally, the inevitable ‘correct diagnosis.’ The narrating self announces as much in the prologue to Madness after she muses on a particularly dramatic manifestation of her condition, an attempted suicide: “No one even thinks bipolar . . . Later, this will seem almost incredible, given what a glaring case of the disorder I actually have and have had nearly all my life” (2009, 7). Over the next couple of chapters, she develops this claim by including detailed accounts of a family history of ‘mental illnesses’—thereby gesturing toward the genetic component of ‘mental disorders’ and implicitly rejecting the stigma belief that the ‘mad person’ is responsible for their condition—as well as long descriptions of her overexcited four-year-old experiencing self. The narrating self recounts the rapid-fire way in which the four-year-old experiencing self demanded a

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camel, opera glasses, or to go ice-skating in the middle of the night, how she asked for the car keys—“Of course I can drive” (2009, 11)—mentions fears about monsters that watch her (2009, 12), and the other children’s pronouncements that she is ‘mad’ for “running around like a maniac, laughing like crazy . . . spilling the wild, lit-up stories that race through my head, or when I burst out in raging fits that end with me sobbing hysterically” (2009, 15). While the narrating self does not explicitly reinterpret these behaviors as symptomatic—racing thoughts, increased energy, grandiosity, rapid mood swings, rages, manic impulses, and delusional fears are all features she describes when she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her mid-twenties (2009, 59–67, 74)—it is at least strongly implied: The narrating self states that the ‘truth’ of her psychiatric condition (“the disorder I actually have”) was not pronounced because in the 1970s the idea of a child with bipolar disorder is unheard of and it’s still controversial today. No psychiatrist would have diagnosed it then – they did not know it was possible. And so children with bipolar were seen as wild, troubled, out of control – but not in the grips of a serious illness. (2009, 17)

In this manner, Hornbacher understands her earliest behavior as an expression of her psychiatric condition, thus providing narrative cohesion through the teleological movement toward the pronouncement of psychiatric ‘truth.’ Hornbacher furthermore demonstrates how psychiatric diagnoses can reduce shame and blame for transgressive behavior by reframing it as symptomatic rather than a character flaw (“wild, troubled, out of control” vs. “in the grips of a serious illness”) and educates readers about possible manifestations of bipolar disorder. In this manner, her memoir mimics mechanisms of traditional educational anti-stigma campaigns. Additionally, Hornbacher’s self-fashioning as a person with “a glaring case of the disorder” (2009, 7) or as “a textbook case” (2009, 74) legitimizes her attempts to claim a voice in the psychiatric dispositive and to contribute her inside perspective to the ‘truth’ production on bipolar disorder.8 Here, Hornbacher’s memoir evokes strategies embraced by the neurodiversity movement, advocacy groups of the differently abled as well as other marginalized groups which are encapsulated in the slogan: “Nothing about us without us” (cf. Charlton 2020). While the text does 8  In Wasted, Hornbacher (1998) even provides excerpts from her patient files to support her self-fashioning as a textbook case of severe anorexia and bulimia.

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not include any direct political statements of this nature, Hornbacher’s self-fashioning suggests a preoccupation with the politics of ‘truth’ production and the narrating self’s desire to claim a voice in it. However, Hornbacher’s statement “I’m a textbook case” (2009, 74) and the subtitles A Bipolar Life and A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia also point to the problems that arise when ‘the mentally ill’ adopt a medico-­ psychiatric understanding of their condition and themselves. While the former title suggests that the dominant characteristics of her life are mood swings and a psychiatric diagnosis, the latter implies that the memoir revolves around eating disorders, not Hornbacher as a person beyond her pathology. In both cases, there is a strong objectifying impetus and an erasure of the personhood beyond the pathology: The statement and the subtitles speak to psychiatry’s status as “a specific mode of subjection [that] was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a scientific status” (Foucault 1975, 24). On the one hand, psychiatry’s “symbolic imposition of order on the disorder that is ‘madness’” (Spieker 2021, 29) may reduce fear reactions among normals by bringing ‘madness’ under control conceptually and also weaken belief in the stigma theory of the ‘mad person’s’ blameworthiness for their condition. On the other hand, these textual elements illustrate that anti-stigma campaigns which focus on the dissemination of psychiatric ‘truth’ can exacerbate the perception of ‘the mentally ill’ as fundamentally Other and “not quite human” (Goffman 1963, 5) by emphasizing pathology over personhood and individual responsibility for a condition. However, the radical openness of meaning in literature also undermines this stigma-political strategy by demonstrating that psychiatry’s translation of complex mental and emotional processes “into the definitive vernacular of illness and disease” (Liegghio 2013, 240) fails to convey the complexity of lived experience. While the titles to her memoirs can be read to foreshadow the reinterpretation of Hornbacher’s lived experience through the lens of psychiatric thought, the opposite reading is also possible: The title Madness—A Bipolar Life (and, to a lesser extent, Wasted—A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia) begins with a highly evocative term that resonates with the wide variety of historical and contemporary discourses discussed above. ‘Madness’ evokes (artistic) genius, romanticized suffering, abject horror, the loss of distinctly human qualities, and, generally, extremes of mood and thought (cf. Scull 2016, 10–15). Putting these terms in the prominent first position and relegating diagnostic labels to the subtitle suggests that Hornbacher does not unequivocally privilege the psychiatric

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discourse. Moreover, it exemplifies that clinical language cannot convey the multifaceted emotional reality of the lived experience of ‘madness’ in the same way that literary language and poetic structures can. It suggests that there are cultural and social dimensions to the experience of ‘madness’ that the psychiatric understanding disregards. To convey these cultural and social dimensions, Hornbacher uses highly evocative literary references. For example, when enumerating what Hornbacher’s experiencing self and a friend who is also ‘mad’ discuss during lunch, the list concludes with “our husbands, and how very odd it must be to be married to us, for we are, as Shakespeare said, passing strange” (2009, 253). By describing their ‘madness’ with a quote from Othello (“passing strange”), Hornbacher claims “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 247) and implicitly rejects the benevolence stigma, which conflates ‘madness’ with (mental) incapacitation.9 Moreover, she evokes a variety of meanings that far exceed a neuropsychological understanding of her condition. As Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson points out, Desdemona uses “passing strange” to call Othello’s story “exceptionally unusual” (2011, 8) but the phrase also “signifies both the attraction and repulsion one feels when one acknowledges one’s desire both to be Other and to be with the Other” (2011, 9), just as Desdemona did when she wished “[t]hat heaven had made her such a man” as the daring “Moor” Othello (Shakespeare 2016, Othello Act 1, scene 3, 163). In Hornbacher’s case, the phrase in the sense of “exceptionally unusual” alludes to the statistical rarity of her specific condition as well as her unique personality. With regard to her husband, the phrase may allude to the changes in mood that make Hornbacher’s experiencing self “excited, exciting, full of ideas and energy, great to be around” (2009, 102)—someone one would like to be and someone one would like to be with—but also aggressive, paranoid, needy, and overall “too much for any sane person to bear” (2009, 103). The phrase therefore acknowledges the social reactions to a condition that form part of lived experience and the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by Otherness, thus contributing to a presentation of ‘madness’ as a variety of human difference that comes with 9  Pierre Bourdieu defines cultural capital as an individual’s social assets such as education or intellect, which are expressed through ownership of art, academic credentials, as well as behavior and opinions. Cultural capital provides an advantage in achieving a higher social status and is therefore valuable for discredited subjects who want to overcome their marginalization (1986, 247–250).

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advantages and disadvantages. Diverging from the paradigm of pathology and instead embracing alternative meanings of ‘madness’ offers several stigma-political and emotional advantages to those who live it. By emulating practices and discursive positions similar to those put forward by the neurodiversity movement, authors like Marya Hornbacher are able to do several things: They can claim the privilege of self-labeling, position their ‘madness’ in a long philosophical and artistic context, and, lastly, present their alleged pathology as a way of being in the world that holds advantages and disadvantages. The expression “passing strange” also comments on the emotional impact of the experience of ‘mental illnesses’ and (self-)stigma, thereby drawing upon strategies of protest campaigns that decry the harmful effects of stigmatization. The phrase evokes the modern usage of “passing”—that is, light-skinned persons of color who presented themselves or are seen as white and receive social and economic privileges, especially during the Jim Crow era (Thompson 2011, 9). In Hornbacher’s case, “passing” alludes to her continued sense of being an impostor when things go well in her life and her fear of being found out for living a life which she thinks she does not deserve, because she is ‘mad’ (cf. Hornbacher 2009, 103, 162–163). Moreover, the phrase alludes to the impossibility of telling with certainty whether someone is ‘mad’ or ‘sane.’ It also aligns the experiencing self with persons of color, a group that has been historically marginalized, thus creating a (problematic) parallel to the discrimination against ‘the mad.’ Lastly, the reference to a Shakespeare play that is arguably about race and racism as well as a practice in (American) race relations marks Hornbacher’s ‘madness’ as a variety of human difference, the basis for an identity, and a way of being in the world akin to ethnicity. Hornbacher’s adoption of the diversity paradigm also ties in with her embrace of the stigma theory that ascribes (artistic) genius to ‘the mad.’ When thinking back to her mid-twenties when the experiencing self attended “a tiny little school with a degree in poetics” (2009, 103), the narrating self states, “[i]f there is one thing that mania is good for, it’s school” (2009, 103). She then goes on to explain how mania fueled her academic exploits: “I can bury myself in centuries of poetry and philosophy, I can write hundreds of papers, do research, pour out poetry, I can argue and debate and critique” (2009, 103). Despite the fact that she never even graduated from high school, the experiencing self is taking “all graduate classes,” and staff at the college were so impressed with her intellect that they hired her to teach undergrad classes (2009, 103). The

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narrating self further strengthens this connection between creative genius and ‘madness’ when she claims toward the end of her memoir, “while I think and feel, like Byron says, a bit too wildly at times, I also delight in the workings of the intellect and imagination” (2009, 279). Note how Hornbacher claims cultural capital by drawing a connection between herself and one of the most famous ‘mad artists’ and frames her ‘madness’ as a source of joy and an enabling characteristic. By narrating her personal achievements and embracing the trope of the ‘mad genius,’ Hornbacher thus not only rejects the stigma-based conflation of ‘insanity’ and an erosion of intellect but also produces ever more contradictions between opposing understandings of ‘madness.’ Unlike many anti-stigma campaigns that stress that ‘the mentally ill’ are not inherently dangerous (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services 2017), Hornbacher does not shrink away from the more threatening, transgressive aspects of her lived experience of bipolar disorder. In fact, she actively affirms the beliefs that ‘mad people’ are violent and unpredictable when the narrating self recalls how the experiencing self can unexpectedly and quickly turn from “calm” to “raging” (2009, 56): Julian [her husband] and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it’s dark and I am screaming … turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall … The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls … Slow down! I am screaming at myself, Marya, slow down! And the madness screams back, I won’t! It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something … Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch. (2009, 56–57)

Note how the segment cited above fashions Hornbacher’s experiencing self as dangerous and destructive but also externalizes blame by fashioning her lived experience as a Gothic horror story of possession. Even though the experiencing self wrecks the apartment and endangers both herself and her partner, the narrating self also presents her as the helpless victim of a personified ‘madness.’ Much like antagonists in Gothic horror stories (cf. Spieker 2021, 128–163), this personified ‘madness’ can physically enter the experiencing self’s body and exert complete control (“slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking”). Once it takes over, the

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personified ‘madness’ causes her to be indiscriminately aggressive (“need to … hit something”) and imbues her with supernatural strength. However, unlike the traditional trope of the ‘dangerous mad person’ that features prominently in many horror movies (cf. Wahl 1995) and tabloid press stories (cf. Cross 2010), Hornbacher’s memoir maintains that she was a victim in these events as well: During the periods of possession, ‘madness’ also robs the experiencing self of her ability to communicate her situation coherently (“They control my voice”); she can only scream and throw herself against walls. This victimization is further accentuated by the rather literary and antiquated expression “abject terror” that evokes the Gothic mode and its (mostly female) helpless protagonists. In the segment cited above, Hornbacher thus acknowledges the fear-inducing aspects of her condition but still manages shame and blame by externalizing responsibility through the literary trope of possession. Hornbacher further intensifies the contradictions in her claims about ‘madness’ with passages that stress her blameworthiness as well as her fundamental incapacitation. In addition to the teleological narrative toward the final correct diagnosis, Madness also features a didactic narrative that illustrates how the experiencing self overcame misconceptions about her condition and an unhealthy lifestyle and finally took responsibility for managing her condition. After receiving her diagnosis, the experiencing self initially responded by not taking it seriously, ignoring her psychiatrist’s advice while also misleading him about her moods, drinking excessively, and using her medication to achieve “that perfect high” (Hornbacher 2009, 69). The narrating self then interrupts these recollections with a somber description of her current state: I wonder what difference it might have made in my life if I’d taken my bipolar seriously right then. . . Maybe learned something that. . . might have altered—maybe dramatically—the way the following years played out. I sit here now, writing these words, just out of the hospital for the umpteenth time this year. My vision is blurry, my speech is slurred, I can hardly keep my fingers on the keys. I’m not safe to drive, I can’t make a phone call; I woke up the other day in a hospital bed, staggered out to the nurses’ desk, and demanded to know how long I’d been there. ‘Eleven days’ came the calm reply. (2009, 69–70)

The narrating self then explains that these hospitalizations, which she spends in a “haze of medication and chemical malfunction” (2009, 70),

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happen “like clockwork, every few months” (2009, 70). These passages, as well as others where the narrating self confesses that she dreams about an alternate world where she does not live with bipolar disorder and can “speak for [her]self, decide for [her]self, just go about [her] day” (2009, 276), illustrate that the lived experience of ‘madness’ is not only characterized by periods of inspiration that turn those affected with it into ‘mad geniuses.’ Instead, Hornbacher reveals that—because of her own life choices—she is incapable of living as independently as she would like to and repeatedly requires intensive support from medical professionals as well as her family and friends. In this manner, she endorses the connection between ‘madness’ and incapacitation she rejected at other points in her memoir and produces her condition as a serious affliction, which she is responsible of exacerbating. While these passages support ascriptions of blameworthiness and thus work contrary to stigma-political goals that are usually pursued in the address of normals, they also constitute a stern reminder to readers who are also diagnosed with bipolar disorder to actively manage their condition to minimize incapacitation and disempowerment. This goes to show that memoirs of ‘mental illness’ fulfill multiple functions that differ among audiences and can therefore do complex cultural work.10 I hold that a central component of this cultural work is the destabilization of stigma beliefs about ‘madness.’ By producing a thoroughly literary text that not only alternately affirms and rejects multiple stigma theories about ‘madness’ and ‘the mad’ but also makes use of the radical openness of meaning (as seen in the titles of her memoirs), Marya Hornbacher implicitly reveals the contradictions that immunize stigma theories against straightforward rejections and counterexamples by stigmatized populations and their allies. It is only by revealing these contradictions that the entire system of stigmatization can be challenged in a meaningful manner. Madness—A Bipolar Life in turn affirms and contradicts multiple stigma theories. When Hornbacher draws upon psychiatric research that conceives of bipolar disorder as a pathological condition that has its root in genetic predispositions and environmental factors, she rejects ascriptions of blameworthiness. However, affirming the pathologization of ‘madness’ also runs the risk of encouraging patronizing and coercive behavior toward 10  For a more detailed analysis of the different work ‘mental illness’ pathographies do in the address of readers who also live with the condition in question, “normals,” and psychiatrists, see Spieker 2021, Chap. 3.

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‘the mentally ill’ because, in medical contexts, “[w]e typically defer to professional/expert authority over diagnoses and treatment, and we accept certain forms of segregation and state intervention  – medical, social, institutional – as both legitimate and necessary” (Liegghio 2013, 240). Hornbacher further affirms the benevolence stigma with passages that narrate how the experiencing self was so incapacitated that she had to rely on doctors, family, and friends to help her complete basic tasks and to make important life decisions for her. However, internal contradictions in the text arise, because of passages that reaffirm the experiencing self’s blameworthiness: These passages not only illustrate that Hornbacher’s experiencing self had to accept responsibility for her own well-being but that she was also responsible for exacerbating her ‘mental disorder’ by excessive drinking and not taking her medication as directed. Hornbacher’s discursive production of the meaning of ‘madness’ becomes yet more complicated due to sections that destabilize the understanding of ‘mental disorders’ as something that needs to be overcome and instead fashion it as another way of being in the world and actively romanticize it. Lastly, the memoir represents the experiencing self as happily, innocently ‘mad’ in some passages but as dangerous and violent in others. Since no single interpretation of the causes and meanings of ‘madness’ is privileged, Hornbacher’s narrative demonstrates that stigma beliefs are an undue simplification of the complexities of lived experience of ‘mental illness.’ This, of course, does not meant that ‘mental illness’ pathographies can replace traditional anti-stigma campaigns. The cultural and stigma-­political work done by authors like Marya Hornbacher strongly depends on their audience’s willingness to employ the literary mode of reading which sees the inclusion of contradictions between the various stigma theories as a literary technique that reveals a larger meaning about Western society’s conceptualization of ‘madness’ rather than the historical author’s mental incapacitation or inability to tell a coherent story (cf. Wood 2013, 1–3). Unless audiences are ready to assume that these contradictions serve a larger communicative purpose, memoirs of ‘mental illness’ also hold the danger of affirming all kinds of stigma theories and do so with all the authority of lived experience. It is for this reason that memoirs of ‘mental illness’ should find a meaningful place within larger anti-stigma efforts and supplement more traditional campaigns rather than replace them.

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References Aftab, Awais. 2014. Mental Illness vs Brain Disorders: From Szasz to DSM-5. Psychiatric Times 31/2. www.psychiatrictimes.com/dsm-­5/mental-­illness-­vs-­ brain-­disorders-­szasz-­dsm-­5. Accessed 5 Jan 2019. Armstrong, Thomas. 2015. The Myth of the Normal Brain: Embracing Neurodiversity. AMA Journal of Ethics 17/4: 348–352. https://journalofethi c s . a m a -­a s s n . o r g / a r t i c l e / m y t h -­n o r m a l -­b r a i n -­e m b r a c i n g -­ neurodiversity/2015-­04. Accessed 10 Jan 2019. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.F.  Richardson, 241–258. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: Greenwood Press. Charlton, James. 2020. Nothing About Us Without Us. Berkeley: University of California Press. Corrigan, Patrick W., and Jenessa R.  Shapiro. 2010. Measuring the Impact of Programs That Challenge the Public Stigma of Mental Illness. Clinical Psychology Review 30 (8): 907–922. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cpr.2010.06.004. Corrigan, Patrick W., and Amy C. Watson. 2004. Stop the Stigma: Call Mental Illness a Brain Disease. Schizophrenia Bulletin 30/3: 477–479. Corrigan, Patrick W., et al. 2012. Challenging the Public Stigma of Mental Illness: A Meta-Analysis of Outcome Studies. Psychiatric Services 63/10: 963–973. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201100529. Cross, Simon. 2010. Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Culler, Jonathan D. 1997. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fee, Dwight. 2000. The Broken Dialogue: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience. In Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience, ed. Dwight Fee, 1–17. London: Sage Publications. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Vintage. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. ———. 2006. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–74, ed. Jacques Lagrange. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Picador. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

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Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New  York: International. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. 1999. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Herrera, Christopher D., and Alexandra Perry. 2013. Ethics and Neurodiversity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Hornbacher, Marya. 1998. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 2009. Madness: A Bipolar Life. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, Bradley. 2017. A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism. In The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis, 102–118. Oxford: Routledge. Liegghio, Maria. 2013. A Denial of Being: Psychiatrization as Epistemic Violence. In Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, ed. Brenda A. LeFranҫois et al., 122–129. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Monteith, Lindsey, and Jeremy Pettit. 2011. Implicit and Explicit Stigmatizing Attitudes and Stereotypes about Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 30/5: 484–505. Morrall, Peter. 2017. Madness: Ideas About Insanity. Oxford: Routledge. NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). 2008. Schizophrenia. www.nami. org/About-­M ental-­I llness/Mental-­H ealth-­C onditions/Schizophrenia. Accessed 5 Feb 2021. ———. 2016. #StigmaFree: Mayim Bialik. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Gzk7sSOHGSQ&list=PLlZf3Rbl5IeoTZMUOexDg0Uo__ Ow-­H04J. Accessed 5 Feb 2021. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Parcesepe, Angela M., and Leopoldo J. Cabassa. 2012. Public Stigma of Mental Illness in the United States: A Systematic Literature Review. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research 40/5: 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-­012-­0430-­z. Pescosolido, Bernice A., et  al. 2010. ‘A Disease Like Any Other?’ A Decade of Change in Public Reactions to Schizophrenia, Depression, and Alcohol Dependence. American Journal of Psychiatry 167/11: 1321–1330. https:// doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.09121743. Reiter, Keramet, and Thomas Blair. 2015. Punishing Mental Illness: Trans-­ Institutionalization and Solitary Confinement in the United States. In Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration, and Solitary Confinement, ed. Keramet Reiter and Alexa König, 177–196. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schulze, Beate. 2008. Evaluating Programmatic Needs Concerning the Stigma of Mental Illness. In Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness: Theory and

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PART III

Literary Texts and Beyond

CHAPTER 9

Civilization and Its Discontents: Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club with Norbert Elias Dietmar Schloss

The last decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new type of fiction which combined the depiction of extreme acts of violence with detailed descriptions of modern consumer and media society—Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) are the most well-known examples of this kind of literature (Dix et al. 2011). The explicit portrayal of gut and gore in some of these novels—American Psycho in particular—caused a public outcry when they were published. The authors were reproached for capitalizing on shock and outrage, if not for outrightly promoting misogynism, violence, and proto-­fascism. Since then, different ways of explaining the provocative use of violence in these novels have been proposed. One group of critics has considered this use of violence as a distinctive feature of “blank fiction,” the new genre under which these novels have been classified. Having emerged out of the New Realism and Minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s (Sári 2012; Collado-Rodríguez 2013,

D. Schloss (*) Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_9

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2–3), blank fiction uses violence and bodily detail to create a “reality effect” (MacKendrick 2009, 11). The protagonists in these fictions—“the little man or woman, the figure in trouble with the law, the delinquent, the infirm or depraved” (MacKendrick 2009, 9)—are part of this rhetoric of reality as is the hard-boiled, laconic tone of the narrators. Critics have connected blank fiction with the New Journalism à la Tom Wolfe and new media formats, such as the POV (“point-of-view”) video games, both of which excite the reader rather than raise his or her critical awareness.1 Another group of critics sees these fictions as novels of social critique— interpreting the acts of violence as forms of protest against the consumerism and materialism of late modern or postmodern capitalism. Within this group, some have drawn on neo-Marxist theories of societal modernization, particularly those of Althusser, Foucault, and Baudrillard. Those who use Foucault and Althusser see US society as a system of discipline in which the body becomes the site of resistance against systemic control. The violence committed by the protagonists is interpreted as an assertion of freedom, however futile it may seem (Ash 2009, 76; Riekki 2009, 95). Critics drawing on Baudrillard see individuals as being imprisoned in the technology-created simulacra world of hyper-capitalist America. The protagonists’ acts of violence are considered as attempts of pursuing a certain form of authenticity. Other critics have drawn on contemporary gender theories to explain the violence in the novels. Recognizing that primarily young males are the perpetrators, these studies identify a change in gender roles brought about by postmodern capitalism as being responsible for the violence. These critics understand the novels as instruments of enlightenment: while the protagonists’ acts of resistance may fail, the novels provide insights into the mystifications and ideologies produced by the capitalist system. In this chapter, I will read Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club with Norbert Elias’s sociological theory. What makes Elias’s sociology interesting to the literary scholar is that it is deeply responsive to the historical gestalt of worldmaking in literary works. Elias connects the “long-term structural development of societies” with the “changes in people’s social character 1  Chuck Palahniuk’s explains the use of bodily images in a short essay dealing with the minimalist writer Amy Hempel somewhat in this manner: “Hempel shows how a story does not have to be some constant stream of blah-blah-blah to bully the reader into paying attention. […] Instead, a story can be a succession of tasty, smelly, touchable details. What Tom Spanbauer and Gordon Leish call ‘going on the body,’ to give the reader a sympathetic physical reaction, to involve the reader on a gut level” (Palahniuk 2004, 145).

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and personality make-up” (Mennell 1990, 207). The latter (which includes manners, cultural dispositions, and modes of experience and feeling) relates to the domain of literature. Elias’s sociology can therefore help us to contextualize the social habitus depicted in a literary work with regard to the institutional structures at a particular historical moment. In his major work, The Civilizing Process (2 vols., 1978/1982, orig. 1939), he is less interested in exploring the abstract power modalities and class relations of modern societies than in analyzing how these societies regulate human behavior and the emotions. While certain allegorical elements in Palahniuk’s novel do indeed express a social critique in the vein of Foucault and Baudrillard, the way Fight Club renders the experiential reality of those living in modern society is therefore more appropriately accounted for by Elias’s sociology. Furthermore, Palahniuk does not seem to condemn modern representational and disciplinary regimes in the same fundamental way as Foucault and Baudrillard do. In that respect, too, Elias seems closer to Palahniuk than the other thinkers. Elias presents his theory of modernization under the conceptual frame of a theory of civilization. Still a humanist of sorts, he views the civilizing ‘machinery’ as not entirely opposed to ‘the human,’ but as something that is required to bring the human to fruition. While he is well aware that the restraints imposed by society on individuals may bring them emotionally to a breaking point, he feels that it is the challenge of modern society to actively address and manage this danger. In fact, Elias developed a particular interest in studying the way modern societies negotiate the civilizing restraints in the realm of culture by advancing a sociology of modern leisure time. He considers the sphere of leisure-time activities as a quasi-separate institutional space which provides compensatory functions. Elias’s prime example for such leisure-time activities is modern sports. Particularly his analysis of the compensatory role of sports in modern society will help illuminate the plot and character developments in Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Since Elias’s general sociological theory is well known, I will not introduce it here in any great detail;2 however, I will briefly sketch his lesser known theory of sports as laid out in his essay “The Quest for Excitement in Leisure” (1969, 2008a) before turning to the novel. 2  Useful outlines of Elias’s sociological theory can be found in Stephen Mennell’s Decivilizing Processes: Theoretical Significance and Some Lines of Research (1990) and Civilizing Processes (2006).

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Elias’s Sociology of Leisure Elias began lecturing and writing about sports in the 1960s and often cooperated with the British sociologist Eric Dunning. The essay that interests us most here, “The Quest for Excitement in Leisure,” was first published in 1969 and reappeared in the collection Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (1986, 2008), which contains their essential writings on sports sociology. Elias and Dunning saw modern sports emerge in the eighteenth century, coinciding with the rise of urban, industrial, democratic capitalism. Having also studied earlier forms of sports in Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, they discovered in sports many tendencies similar to those present in other spheres of social life: a decrease in violence, the introduction of more and more complex rules and regulations, and an increase of self-control and efficiency. They saw indications that sports were used by both participants and spectators as a way of getting out of Weber’s “iron cage” of modern society; nevertheless, they saw sports subjected to the same pressures that organize other spheres of social life (Weber 2001, 123). Although Elias and Dunning focused their research on sports, their larger interest was centered on developing a sociology of leisure time in modern societies. In fact, in “Quest for Excitement” they present the following rather diverse list of leisure-time activities that resemble sports in their view: “going to the theatre or a concert, to the races or the cinema, hunting, fishing, bridge, mountaineering, gambling, dancing and watching television” (2008a, 50). In other contexts, they also include collective festivities. They justify their focus on sports by maintaining that in this field the characteristic emotional structures of modern leisure-time activities are most clearly apparent. In their sports writings, Elias and Dunning thus propose an innovative theory of the emotional-spiritual role of culture in modern society which also includes literature and art. The sphere of leisure-time activitiesis considered an enclave within modern society. It facilitates ‘controlled relief’ from the pressures of everyday life. However, this enclave does not simply designate a place for the occasional spontaneous letting-off steam; instead, it provides an institutional space where relief is sought and found regularly via socially learned practices. Elias and Dunning argue that members of modernized societies are engaged in a “quest for excitement” in their leisure time. What they seek are not pleasures of a placid and moderate kind, but they long instead for an emotional revolution—here, Elias brings Aristotle’s concept of

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“enthusiasm” into play. This type of emotional excitement is usually accompanied by physiological changes (sweating, heart racing, and breathlessness) and bodily reactions (compulsive movements, groans, shouts, laughter, tears, etc.) and often occurs in communal contexts where individuals are brought into close physical contact. Elias and Dunning see these states of emotional agitation in opposition to the routines and controlled practices in other spheres of modern life (work, family, and marriage), in which displays of excited emotionality are discouraged. Most sport activities involve the body. They can be traced back to physical struggles in which the human body is placed at high risk, for example combats. For Elias and Dunning, the body under the threat of violence and death is the most riveting—and most devastating—emotional experience human beings can go through. It is this moment of ultimate crisis in which human individuals feel to be most emphatically ‘alive’ and in which they are brought to an awareness of their fragile and vulnerable existence; it is also the moment when they are most ‘excited.’ While in the earlier stages of the civilizing process, human beings experienced threats to their bodies with quite some regularity—Elias and Dunning mention “famine, floods, epidemics, violence by socially superior persons or by strangers” (2008a, 44)—these threats have become rare in modernized societies. Although life under the conditions of modern security and routine may have many advantages, it also produces a certain emotional numbness, which is seen by Elias as a matter of concern and as a health issue. Leisure-time activities—and the excitement they promise—are sought out by members of modern society to remedy this very numbness. The cure that is chosen, however, is a rather paradoxical one. In order to escape the numbness produced by modern civilization, people voluntarily confront themselves with the most painful human experience, namely the threat of violence to the body. To explain this paradox, Elias and Dunning draw on Aristotle’s concept of mimesis outlined in his theory of tragedy (Poetics). According to Aristotle, human beings have the possibility of experiencing the world in two different modes: in the “reality” mode and in the “mimetic” mode. Mimesis is the mode of playful imitation— Aristotle refers to the way a child has a desire to imitate the action of grown-ups. The mimetic mode of action and experience is an important part of the human setup which is also the basis of all artistic endeavor. Adopting the mimetic mode of experience is only possible when we have a certain distance to real events. We can only experience violence in the mimetic mode if we are out of danger. Civilization has set up certain spaces

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(for example, the theater and the sports arena) in which the mimetic experience is the norm—they are part of what Elias and Dunning call the “mimetic sphere” (2008a, 53). For Elias, modern sports is a “mimetic” or “play” activity: the struggle between the combatants is playful; there is no real threat to their bodies. At the same time, however, something of the threat of the real combat remains alive, so that the emotions and physiological reactions experienced by the participants and observers resemble those encountered in a real struggle: The mimetic character of a sports contest such as a horse race, a boxing match or a football game depends on the fact that aspects of the feeling-­ experience associated with a real physical struggle enter the feeling-­ experience of the ‘imitated’ struggle of a sport. But in the sports experience, the feeling-experience of a real physical struggle is shifted into a different gear. Sport allows people to experience the full excitement of a struggle without its dangers and risks. The element of fear in the excitement, although it does not entirely disappear, is greatly diminished and the pleasure of battle-excitement is thus greatly enhanced. (Elias 2008, 292)

Elias and Dunning clearly point out the double character of the mimetic experience: it must evoke the original fear and sense of crisis in the participants and also provide them with awareness of their safety. In the mimetic mode, “the feeling-experience of a real physical struggle is shifted into a different gear”: only in this special, namely aesthetic, gear can we experience violent threats as pleasurable (2008, 292). In another passage, Elias and Dunning use a musical metaphor when they describe how the feeling experience of a real struggle is “transposed into a different key,” so that it can be “blended with a ‘kind of delight’”—here, they quote a passage from Milton, in which he comments on Aristotle’s concept of the tragedy (2008a, 61). Only if this double requirement is met will the curative effect, namely “catharsis,” be felt. For both, Aristotle and Elias, catharsis has a quasi-medical function—it restores the soul to health. However, Elias does not think so much of catharsis as a cleaning process, but as a form of rejuvenation, as “a refreshment of the soul” (2008a, 53). At the same time, Elias and Dunning do not consider this relief to be a simple form of letting go and soothing relaxation. Rather, to be relieved from the tension of self-restraints effectively, we need to expose ourselves to an advanced

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form of tension—shock and crisis. Entspannung in modernity can only be reached through Anspannung. An additional point that needs to be highlighted here concerns the structure of mimetic or play excitement (2008a, 50). This structure has changed in the course of the civilizing process as the mimetic character has become more dominant (see 2008b). In ancient Greek festivals, fights were still fought in the spirit of war. A fighter fought for his kin group or his city, and his goal was to win. There were few rules to regulate the fights, nor were there attempts to made match the contestants in size and strength. While the combatants were given a chance to display their endurance and skill, all the attention was placed on the moment of decision, victory or defeat, while the dynamics of the game were considered as less important. In contrast, sports contests in modern societies are highly regulated and governed by an ethos of fairness. The players or teams are matched in size and strength; rules are established, and the space within which the activities take place are clearly defined; the use of crude force is largely banned; skill and virtuosity play a much greater role than in earlier times. As a result, the dynamics of excitement in modern sport contests are quite different from those in ancient times. Quoting Elias, the “all-too brief pleasure in the outcome of a sports battle, in the moment of consummation or victory” [in ancient sports contests], is “prolonged” and “extended” in modern sports (2008b, 120). Rules and regulations ensure that the ‘plot’ of the contest is extended and becomes more complicated— a game that goes back and forth is more exciting than one in which the victor is apparent from the beginning. This plot, as in a drama, provides a grid for the exertion of the emotions. In modern sports, the dynamics of tension excitement are much more elaborate and sophisticated. They promise a more effective balancing act of the emotions and thus sustain individuals in the civilizing process.

The Sociology of Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk was probably not familiar with Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process and his writings on sports when he wrote Fight Club; however, the way he renders the emotional life of human beings in contemporary society, in particular their modes of seeking relief from its pressures in their leisure-time activities, resonates deeply with Elias’s sociology. I will engage Palahniuk’s novel at two levels: I will first read it as a quasirealistic novel or a novel of ideas and reconstruct its social analysis. I will

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show that Palahniuk is particularly interested in exploring the conditions of life for white men in postmodern consumer capitalism. He investigates the restraints and self-restraints that are placed upon them and studies the mechanisms they employ to emotionally negotiate these restraints. However, Fight Club does not only offer an abstract allegorical sociological analysis of postmodern civilization and its discontents, but aesthetically performs this discontent through a sophisticated narrative and stylistic form. In the second step of my analysis, I will therefore suggest that we should read the novel as a “mind movie” created by the narrator to afford himself relief from the mental pressures of postmodernity. This mind movie can also be understood in terms of Elias’s concept of mimetic activity, even though it seems less ritualized and collectivist in orientation than the sports activities. Everyday Life in Late Capitalism The action of the novel is clearly situated in the world of late modern capitalism.3 The unnamed narrator is in his early thirties and associates himself with the demographic of young professionals. He works for a car company where he handles recalls of cars with production defects (Palahniuk 1996, 31). As a “recall campaign coordinator” (49), he weighs the costs of a recall of a car series against the expenses incurred by the company due to lawsuits from individual drivers who suffer accidents through the defective cars. His decisions are indeed momentous as they affect human lives. As he tells us, the decisions are made on the basis of a “formula” (30) and dictated by the economic interests of the company. While he would like to think of himself as working on the management level, he has no 3  When we try to reconstruct the sociology of the novel, we need to be aware that we are dealing here with a first-person narrative and that all the information we are given about the external world and the inner lives of people are provided by a narrator who will reveal himself as increasingly unreliable. This narrator steps on the stage with quite some authority and presents himself as someone who is ‘in the know.’ In fact, he sometimes acts in the role of a social and cultural critic and delivers the sociological analysis himself. He often renders it in a hardboiled, ironic tone suggesting that he entertains a critical distance toward what he reports; in certain moments, he adopts the role of a satirist who pokes fun at the world and at himself. The majority of the critics have taken the narrator’s opinions at face value and equated them with those of the author. It is however important to realize that the narrator’s sociocultural criticism is subjected to a critique that is articulated through formal aesthetic means, namely the development of the action, the constellation of characters, and the narrative style.

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decision-­making power and often feels humiliated by his supervisor. He is constantly flying all over the United States, but his trips are not glamorous, as he inspects the accident-damaged cars and is confronted with blood and carnage (99). He also gives us interesting glimpses into his private life. He appears to be paid fairly well because he owns “a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise” (41). In his leisure time, he occupies himself with buying furniture and decorating his apartment. He talks about his consumerism and the feminizing effect it has on him with self-irony while observing that he has become a “slave to [his] nesting instinct” (43) and that this consumerism has displaced his sex drive: “The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue” (43). Even though the narrator occasionally shows a certain pride for his professional and private achievements, most of the time he is profoundly discontent. The constant traveling leaves him in a state of continuous drowsiness and makes him experience the world at a distance—“as a copy of a copy of a copy,” as he says, throwing in a quote from Baudrillard (21). Suffering from insomnia, he fantasizes about death: “I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. […] I wanted a way out of my tiny life” (172–173). The term “tiny life” runs through the novel like a leitmotif indicating how deeply humiliated he feels by his circumstances and his lack of agency. The narrator’s ‘sociological’ analysis of his life as a white-collar worker in a postindustrial capitalist society squares well with Elias’s sociology. The occupational sphere enforces a highly routinized and rational type of behavior, and although the narrator faces human tragedy on a daily basis, he feels the need to exhibit a high degree of self-discipline and self-­ restraint. In the private sphere, he tries to relieve his tensions with consumer goods. However, they add additional stress because they restrain his libidinous energies to secure the smooth functioning of the capitalist machine. Quite in line with Elias’s theory, the narrator describes his socialization as a ‘taming’ process. By linking taming to a process of feminization, however, he genders and evaluates it negatively—an implication Elias resisted. Quite a number of critics have interpreted Palahniuk’s novel as a record of and response to the “crisis of masculinity” which, according to

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sociologists and cultural historians, affected American men in the later twentieth century (Baker 2006, 7; Grønstad 2008, 175). According to this theory, certain shifts in postindustrial capitalism—globalization, downsizing, the growth of the service sector, the new importance of consumer goods as identity markers—affected the traditional gender hierarchy: politically, they gave women new power in the work place and, through the rise of feminism, a new voice in the public sphere. As a consequence, many men felt eclipsed and suffered a dramatic loss of selfesteem.4 Without doubt, the narrator draws on the crisis-of-masculinity argument to explain his malaise. Although there are moments when he pokes fun at his feminine leisure-time habits, most of the time he shows himself deeply ashamed of having consumer culture allowed to compromise his male agency. In addition, he presents himself as traumatized by the experience of growing up with an ‘absent father,’ which is also identified as an important feature in the crisis-of-masculinity narrative: “My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise” (Palahniuk 1996, 50). Considering himself a member of “a generation of men raised by women” (50), the narrator lets us know how much he suffered from the lack of male guidance when he was growing up.5 Leisure-Time Activities of Sorts: The Narrator’s ‘Quest for Excitement’ The information about the narrator’s suffering from constraints of everyday life is dispersed all over the novel. Its ‘action’ begins with a description 4  In describing the crisis-of-masculinity, I follow Susan Faludi’s argument in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999) which reads in some segments as if it had been inspired by Fight Club. 5  In an article discussing Fincher’s film adaptation (of Fight Club), Sally Robinson makes a case against scholars who side with the narrator’s apparently countercultural critique of modern consumer capitalism and its purported feminizing effects (2011). In her view, the film promotes a notion of human authenticity which is deeply hostile to women as it considers them to be ‘inauthentic’ by ‘nature’ (Robinson 2011). By drawing attention to the gender stereotypes implicit in many contemporary critiques of consumer capitalism, Robinson makes a valuable point. However, it falls short when it is leveled at Palahniuk’s novel as it conflates the narrator’s point of view with that of the author. In fact, the novel lays open the gender stereotypes that inform the narrator’s search for authenticity. At the same time, it does not propose an easy fix, as it considers this desire for the authentic as a product of modernization and to be deeply ingrained in the modern psyche. See my discussion of Marla below.

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of the measures the narrator takes in order to get relief from his pain. He adopts these measures in his leisure time, as he still sticks to his regular job. The narrator’s leisure-time activities are, of course, quite extreme and a far cry from the ones discussed by Elias and Dunning. His emotional crisis has obviously advanced beyond a point where sport activities of the ordinary kind can provide relief. His choices of alternatives are borderline and test the limits of what is both culturally accepted and emotionally bearable. Nevertheless, these activities still share important features with the sport activities analyzed by Elias and Dunning: all of the narrator’s relief strategies engage the body. He seeks relief from the civilizational constraints by uncovering what civilization has put ‘behind the scenes.’ What he finds there is not the beautiful body, but the ugly, mutilated, and decaying body. The experience of the body at risk, the body at the verge of death, and the body under the threat of violence produces excitement in him, which leads to the recovery of the sense of life and to the promise of a cure for his emotional and experiential numbness. In addition, Elias and Dunning’s categories can help to better understand the emotional dynamics behind the particular sequence of his leisure-time activities: his experiments with the body placed at risk are at first conducted from a safe space; he is happy to pursue them in the mimetic mode—as play activities. However, at a certain point, the mimetic experience is no longer perceived as satisfactory; the narrator craves the ‘real’ and goes on a destructive and self-­ destructive rampage. This development from mimetic to real violence marks an important turning point in the emotional development of its narrator and signals deep trouble for modern civilization. In the first regular ‘action’ scene of the novel, the narrator’s head is buried in the sweaty breasts—“tits,” as he calls them (Palahniuk 1996, 17)—of a bodybuilder by the name of Bob. The narrator enjoys a profound sense of comfort in this moment. Both men are crying. Bob suffers from testicular cancer, a result of the steroids he has taken over many years—his body is fat and deformed. The studio he had once owned is gone, and his family has left him behind. The scene occurs during a meeting of a cancer support group “Remaining Men Together” (18) in the basement of the Trinity Episcopal Church, and the embrace is part of a bonding ritual (16–18). We find out that the narrator has been attending the meetings for two years, although he does not suffer from testicular cancer himself. A visit to the support group had been suggested by his psychiatrist, who told him that his insomnia is a luxury disease and recommended that he take a closer look at people who truly suffer.

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At this stage, the narrator actually visits several different support groups at the same time—every night a different one. These visits have become his favorite leisure-time activity—they are his “vacation” (18). The proximity of bodies so close to death puts him in awe and gives his existence a new seriousness and importance. In his mind, the terminally ill enjoy an unprecedented “freedom” (“Losing all hope was freedom” (22)). Being in contact with them sets him free, too. When, during a round of embraces in the brain parasites support group, Chloe, a “little skeleton of a woman” (19), bluntly confesses her bodily desires to him (“all Chloe wanted was to get laid for the last time. Not intimacy, sex” (19)), he feels both threatened and thrilled. In addition, he deeply enjoys the attention he gets from his ‘fellow sufferers’: “I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around” (22). This daily contact with the doom of death hanging over others not only cures his insomnia (“And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well” (22)) but also revives his zest for life: “Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. […] Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born” (22). The narrator’s rendering of emotional release as a consequence of his visits to the support groups seems to follow point-by-point Elias and Dunning’s description of the cathartic effect of sport activities in leisure time. His encounter with death in the support groups is a form of a mimetic or play activity: his voluntary exposure to the fear of death of the terminally ill, via an act of sympathetic imagination, triggers in him a memory of when he himself had experienced a threat to his life. The result is an emotional crisis, which makes him lose his numbness and come alive. This crisis can only be experienced as pleasurable because he is positioned at a safe distance from death. The narrator seems to have some kind of awareness of the vicarious and exploitative nature of his experience, as his self-ironizing, flippant tone conveys a perverse satisfaction. Interestingly enough, this double vision—being deeply immersed in the experience and yet looking at himself from the outside—does not undermine the cathartic effect of his visits. However, his pleasure is suddenly destroyed when he discovers that another person is engaged in the same ‘dark tourism.’ The novel turns this discovery into a dramatic moment: a woman he knows from the tuberculosis support group shows up in Remaining Men Together, and he feels outed as a “faker” (18): “With her watching, I’m a liar” (23). From now on, he cannot lose himself in Big Bob’s chest anymore; his “vacation” is spoiled. In a rare moment of self-criticism, he acknowledges the

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discrepancy between the situation of the support group members and his own and shows himself even capable of compassion: “all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats” (23). A profound self-­ consciousness takes hold of him and strips the mimetic experience of authenticity: “all of a sudden even death and dying rank down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event” (23). After this event, his insomnia is back and he is once again an inhabitant of Baudrillard’s simulacra world. The narrator’s second strategy to find excitement aims at the recovery of traditional masculinity. The tool for this recovery is the ‘invention’ of Tyler Durden, the creation of an alter ego. As the narrator tells us, he meets Tyler during a short vacation after one of his business trips. Waking up from a nap on a “nude beach,” Tyler is just there—“naked and sweating, gritty with sand,” building a giant wooden sculpture out of driftwood (32). Tyler is associated with the stage of hunters and warriors at the beginning of civilization and helps the narrator to transport this archaic world into modernity. Tyler has everything the narrator lacks: he is self-­ confident, extrovert, aggressive, and sexually active. While the narrator maintains his civilized life during the day, at night he engages in subversive activities adopting Tyler’s persona. Initially, they resemble pranks involving bodily functions which civilization has placed ‘behind the scenes.’ The idea of a fight club is born when Tyler asks the narrator “to hit [him] as hard as [he] can” (52). He explains to the narrator that there can be a certain satisfaction in “self-destruction” (52). Civilization instills in people a desire for “self-improvement” and perfection. This desire, however, acts as a disciplining regime and is deadening to the soul. Tyler presents violence and self-destruction as subversive and liberating activities. They promise the excitement that cures civilized numbness and invigorates one’s sense of identity. After their first fight, the narrator and Tyler are “lying on [their] backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights” (53); they are enjoying a moment of happiness not unlike that experienced by Huck and Jim on the raft in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Fight club takes the quest for excitement to a new level. Unlike in the support groups, where the narrator passively observed how other people experienced a threat to their bodies, in fight club he puts his own body at risk with the clear knowledge that it can be harmed. Nevertheless, this can

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still be subsumed under Elias and Dunning’s category of mimetic or play activity. The way the novel sets up the fight club experience clearly marks it as a routinized leisure-time activity that occurs in an institutionalized space. The meetings take place at a fixed time (Saturday night until Sunday morning) and space (in the basement of designated bars). Tyler develops a set of rules which make sure that the fighting experience attains a certain organized shape. Rule one—“you don’t talk about fight club” (48)—gives fight club the character of an arcanum. It is set up as an alternative to streamlined modern anonymity; in fact, it tries to recreate an antimodern, archaic environment. The “only two guys to a fight” rule evokes the epic duel (49); it enforces a face-to-face encounter between two individuals who give each other their full attention. The “one fight at a time” rule guarantees that combatants enjoy an attentive audience (49). That the fighters confront each other naked and without objects or weaponry gives the fights a ‘handmade’ quality; bodily and mental skills rather than technological superiority determine the outcome. “The fights go on as long as they have to” rule assures that the contest is allowed to follow its ‘natural’ course and is not structured by ‘artificial’ time limits (49). The rules thus strive to recreate an archaic battle environment that places the bodies of the fighters at a considerable amount of risk. In fact, the fights described by the narrator show that the participants, at times, mutilate each other brutally—the scars in the narrator’s face never heal in the course of the novel. Nevertheless, Tyler imposes one rule that prevents the fights from ending fatally: “when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he’s just faking it, the fight is over” (49). Although the fights are experienced by the narrator as authentic, they are clearly marked as belonging to the category of play excitements. The rules are minimalist and are devised in such a way that the fights do not attain the sophisticated civilized structure characteristic of modern sports games. However, they still prevent the fights from degenerating into uncontrolled violence. They establish a safe distance of sorts between the combatants, which allows them to experience the fights as pleasurable. The narrator celebrates the excitement attained in fight club in similar terms to the one experienced in the support groups: “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club” (51); “After you’ve been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex” (50). In the long run, the narrator’s second relief strategy fails, too. This failure marks a radical turning point in the narrator’s emotional

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development—a turning point that catapults him out of the pacified sphere of modern civilization altogether and makes him reject all cultural—and culturally sanctioned—forms of emotional compensation. It is telling that this point occurs when he attains a full awareness of the mimetic character of the fight club format which strips the experience of its cathartic-curative power. One night, he tells us, he was matched in fight club with a newcomer, a “beautiful mister angel face,” and fought himself into such a rage that he almost beat his “beautiful” opponent to death: “Tyler told me later that he’d never seen me destroy something so completely. […] ‘You looked like a maniac, Psycho-Boy’” (123). This is the moment when the narrator crosses the borderline between mimetic and real violence. Speculating afterward about what may have made him abandon himself to such raw aggression, he says that fight club did not produce a cathartic effect anymore: “I felt like crap and not relaxed at all. I didn’t get any kind of a buzz”; and he adds: “You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger” (123). He seems to have gotten so used to mimetic violence that he now requires a stronger stimulant. “That night,” the narrator tells us, “Tyler knew he had to take fight club up a notch or shut it down” (123). The “notch up” is Project Mayhem. In his “quest for excitement,” the narrator can no longer be satisfied by the mimetic form of violence but now craves real violence. Henceforth, in his nighttime Tyler-Durden identity, he renounces all civilizing restraints and goes on a rampage of destruction. The goal of Project Mayhem is quite different from that of fight club. It is no longer a remedial space which offers emotional relief to individuals suffering from the identity-defeating pressures of modern civilization. (Obviously, the narrator is beyond the stage where he thinks that the discontents can be remedied within the civilized space.) Rather, Project Mayhem is dedicated to the destruction of modern civilization altogether. In the culminating scene of the novel, the men of Project Mayhem take over the Parker-Morris Building, “the world’s tallest building” (203), and blow it up. Tyler hopes that “the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national museum” (14). The very fact that Tyler wants to destroy both the Parker-Morris Building, the epitome of modern capitalism, and the national museum, the archive of civilizational achievement, makes it clear that he considers the civilizing process—from the earlier forms of tribal organization to hyper-modernity—as one continuous process of failed order-making; a process which has ruined the earth and enslaved a large portion of humankind. Project Mayhem is

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effectively meant to bomb civilization back to the beginning, to the hunter and warrior stage: “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle” (124). Nothing will be spared from the great rampage, neither the great works of art—“I wanted to burn the Louvre; I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa” (124)—nor the creatures of nature—“Birds and deer are silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating” (124). Although Tyler gives Project Mayhem an emancipatory and liberationist rhetoric, the narrator indicates that the movement’s inner drive is not politically but emotionally motivated: “I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have” (123). At this point, only destruction can provide relief for his discontent. Project Mayhem is a “notch up” from fight club not only in its goals, but also in its organizational form. Tyler understands that his clientele is craving for another type of leader by now, which is why he begins to establish a dictatorial or fascist leadership model (149). No. 1  in the new sequence of rules is “you have to trust Tyler” (130). The rules of fight club initially had a democratic cast—they aimed at providing the men with an experience of self-empowerment and a sense being recognized by others as equals. Project Mayhem aims at the extinction of the individual self. Its members, the “space monkeys,” are committed to absolute and blind obedience: “No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (130). The movement wants to combine individual members into one force uniting them for the greatest destructive potential possible: “All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction” (119). Tyler uses the different fight club franchises to build a new organizational structure: ‘committees’ for “Arson,” “Assault,” “Mischief,” and “Misinformation” (119, 135) are set up to train recruits in different subversive disciplines and to coordinate the destruction procedures. In addition, he turns the house on Paper Street into a paramilitary boot camp, which serves as a production unit for the manufacture of explosives to help finance the movement. It is noteworthy that with the transformation of fight club into Project Mayhem, the narrator develops a certain distance vis-à-vis Tyler. The time of frolic and friendship that characterized the fight club period is over. When describing Tyler’s new organizational structure as “The Bureaucracy of Anarchy,” or when labeling the new Project Mayhem offices “Organized Chaos” (119), he uses an ironic tone which indicates the beginning of this

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distance. Obviously, he is drawing attention to the fact that Project Mayhem’s apparently subversive activities duplicate the very organizational and economic structures of modern society which it seems to oppose. A similar irony enters the narrator’s description of the alienating life and working conditions in the Paper Street factory. He tells us that he feels like “being a mouse trapped in this clockwork of silent men with the energy of trained monkeys, cooking and working and sleeping in teams. Pull a lever. Push a button” (130). Commenting on what Tyler’s regime did with his old friend Big Bob, he reverts to a Thoreauvian sarcasm: “So what brainless little honor has Tyler assigned him, I ask. […] Has Tyler promised Big Bob enlightenment if he spends sixteen hours a day wrapping bars of soap?” (131). Furthermore, he clearly recognizes the cruelty of Project Mayhem’s ethos and the contempt for human life it entails, when he tells us: “Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not” (122). These passages give us early indications of the narrator’s desire to distance himself from Tyler’s regime; however, this organized power structure has attained such a momentum that he remains trapped in its forcefield. Marla Singer, the only female among the ‘main characters’ of the novel, has received short shrift from critics. Either she is left out of the critical consideration altogether or she is considered as a mere distraction from the central conflicts enacted between the males. This neglect is somewhat astonishing considering the significant role that the narrator attributes to her: “the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer” (14). Marla enters the narrator’s life before Tyler does and remains in the picture until the end. She is undoubtedly important to his crisis and to the critique of civilization offered by the novel. When the narrator first meets Marla in the support groups, he experiences her as a threat. To his mind, women are closely associated with the civilizing process, which he experiences as a threat to his masculinity and agency. A love relationship with a woman would push him back into the very feminized existence he wants to escape from. In a phone conversation with his father, he expresses his doubts whether “another woman is really the answer I need” (51) However, the kind of woman Palahniuk puts in the narrator’s path is definitely not the feminine consumer type that the narrator has in mind. In fact, Marla shares many of his habits and predilections: she is a loner and feels a profound distance to the routines of modern life. In opting out, she actually seems a step ahead of him as she has

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committed herself to a precarious fringe existence. Her home is a shabby hotel where the poor, elderly, and homeless live. She has no regular income and no health insurance. When she needs new clothes, she steals them from the washing machines in laundromats. She reappropriates the meals delivered by Meals on Wheels to neighbors who are dead. Working in a funeral home, she finds the support groups for the terminally ill emotionally much more rewarding and gives up her job: “Funerals are nothing compared to this,” she tells the narrator, “Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death” (38). Marla chooses the same strategies of relief to ward off her discontent as the narrator does: she, too, seems to turn the experience of the body close to death into a mimetic or play activity and enjoys—at least for a certain time—its curative effect. With Marla, the novel offers an alternative to the narrator’s way of coping with modernity’s discontent. As we find out later, her grief tourism is somewhat differently motivated than his. She actually has symptoms of a life-threatening disease and her visits to the support groups are thus partly rooted in a feeling of communality and compassion with fellow sufferers. She veers into violent bodily practices, too, but while the narrator’s violence is directed against others, hers is focused on her own body (cutting herself, burning herself with cigarettes, and finally trying to commit suicide). In addition, although she has withdrawn from society at large, she maintains a desire to communicate. We learn of two instances when she feels in danger of committing suicide and reaches out to the narrator asking him for help. Also, she is not totally defined or consumed by her depression. There are moments when she is self-confident and cheeky and she often tries to draw the narrator out of his reserve. All in all, she appears to be emotionally much more mature than he is. From the beginning, she seems to recognize how similar they are in their suffering, and she signals to him many times that she would be ready to engage in a serious relationship with him (see, for example, chapter 4). A serious relationship—perhaps even a love relationship—with Marla would offer the narrator a simple way out of his malaise.6 As long as fight club is going strong, however, he gives no attention to her. With the 6  In an Afterword which Palahniuk added to the 2006 Vintage paperback edition of Fight Club, he insists (twice) that the novel is a “romance”: “Really what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. […] It was a classic, ancient romance but updated to compete with the espresso machine and ESPN” (Palahniuk 2006, 216).

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advent of Project Mayhem, however, the situation changes and he is increasingly trying to reach out to her. We see this change in the way he answers her phone calls. The first time she calls him with suicidal thoughts, he has Tyler answer the phone (who takes care of her in his own way, namely by engaging in mindless sex acts with her). The second time, he not only accepts her call but goes to visit her in her hotel room. He comforts her and exhibits a gentleness one would not have thought him capable of (chapter 13). After this meeting, they start having romantic tête-à-têtes in the garden of the Paper Street house under the eyes of the watchful space monkeys—Tyler being strangely absent. Their rapprochement seems to become complete soon after he declares his love to her—or something of the sort: I think I like you. Marla says, “Not love?” This is a cheesy enough moment, I say. Don’t push it. (197)

This scene, indeed, suggests a change in the narrator’s mind. It occurs at a moment when Project Mayhem’s destructive potential is increasingly spiraling out of control and one can sense his growing desire to distance himself from Tyler. The above scene is given a kind of replay at the end of the novel, where we see the narrator engaged in a fight with Tyler on top of the Parker-­ Morris Building—while the space monkeys are creating havoc in the building below and are preparing its destruction. The scene symbolizes the narrator’s own suicide attempt. Having finally realized that he is Tyler Durden, he sees no other way to stop Project Mayhem but to kill himself. Just before he carries out his plan, Marla miraculously appears on the rooftop having the people from the different support groups in her train. They shout at him to stop and offer help. Marla takes up his words from the ‘proposal scene’ and offers them back to him with a somewhat different meaning: “It’s not love or anything […], but I think I like you, too” (205). Of course, Marla ‘loves’ him, but love is not what she wants to offer him in this moment. Instead, she brings what the members of the support group came to offer him, too: friendship, sympathy, human solidarity— caritas. The scene has the character of a religious tableau, an altar picture; Marla-Maria joined by the angels—here, the suffering of the world—urging him to come back into their midst. The ethos of caritas has been traditionally connected with women. Sympathy, empathy, and care for others

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are also achievements of the civilizing process. For the narrator, to follow Marla’s and the support group members’ invitation would mean to join a network of some kind, which would allow him to be socialized and domesticated again. It would also signal a return back into the folds of civilization. Of course, this gesture of outreach by Marla and the support group members is as “cheesy” as the narrator’s earlier offer to enter a traditional romance relationship with Marla. It seems indeed naïve to offer the ethos of caritas to the inhabitants of the world of late twentieth-century consumer and media capitalism in the hope of stopping them in their self-­ centered pursuit of authenticity, their elaborate mimetic violence games, and their fantasies of world destruction. And yet, I think this is exactly what Palahniuk strives to do: he ultimately offers something “cheesy,” because the sophisticated structures of negotiating desire that shape the habitus of the late twentieth century—and the modern individuals’ various ‘quests for excitement’—leave no other remedy but a return to the naïve. In an interview with Matt Kavanagh, Palahniuk gestures at this ethos of caritas, when he describes what his characters are struggling toward: They’ve had a taste of success and the isolation it buys, and my characters realize that isolation will destroy them. So, they destroy their own ‘success’ and force themselves back into community with other people. Maybe this is my catholic upbringing, but my characters know that God is only present when two or more people are together. Their salvation lies on being forced to interact with others. (Kavanagh 2009, 187)

The novel suggests (perhaps) that a return into the folds of civilization—and an embrace of the woman’s world of care—would be the sane and humane thing to do; however, it seems too late for such a return. The narrator confesses his ‘love’ to Marla in the very moment when his world is falling apart—when he realizes that he and Tyler are the same person and that he—as Tyler—is responsible for the death of several people. There is also a sense that as much as he wants to back out, Project Mayhem has him in his grips. The narrator has no choice anymore. He sees no other option to relieve himself and the world from Tyler than to kill himself. Though Marla and the members of the support group prevent him from committing suicide, they cannot really save him. The book ends with the vision of the narrator in heaven or a psychiatric hospital—desirous to

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be with Marla, yet haunted by the voices of Project Mayhem’s space monkeys.

Fight Club as a Mind Movie Fight Club is not an easy read. The novel is a kind of extended inner monologue by a first-person narrator and appears to follow the flow of his associations. Events are given in a highly fragmented manner and often without context. As they reoccur at various points of the narrative, it is difficult to situate them on a linear timeline. Although there are dramatic moments in the novel, which are highly memorable, one does not leave it with a clear sense of what has happened. Critics generally do not give much attention to the complex narrative mode of the novel. Most of them read Fight Club as a quasi-realistic novel about a countercultural movement that articulates a critique of modern consumer capitalism in an allegorical manner. That the events are presented in such a confusing way is usually attributed to the fact that the narrator suffers from “dissociative personality disorder” (Palahniuk 1996, 168), which is seen as impairing his reliability. But this rarely leads to a detailed consideration of the nature of ‘reality’ in the novel and the literary means by which it is produced. James R. Guiles is one of the few critics who has given some attention to the representation of time and space in Fight Club (2013). Drawing on categories developed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974), he sees the narrator veering between objectivist and socially grounded modes of experience and more subjective ones. In Guiles’s view, the narrator’s reports about his professional life, his condo, his visits to the support groups, and his dealings with Marla are rooted in reality, while the events involving Tyler (fight club, the house on Paper Street, Project Mayhem, the climatic struggle between the narrator, and Tyler on the Parker-Morris Building) are figments of his imagination (Guiles 2013, 36–43). Laurie Vickroy, who approaches the novel from the perspective of trauma theory, discards the realistic framework altogether. She sees the narrator suffering from “socially induced traumas” (the absent father, the fear of being abandoned as a child, and his fear of being emasculated) which are so painful and shameful that he can only deal with them via a subterfuge (Vickroy 2013, 61). The events represented in Fight Club are thus not something the narrator has necessarily experienced, but they are—in Geoffrey Hartman’s term—“‘externalizations of an internal state’” (qt. in Vickroy 2013, 69). Although I have some qualms with Vickroy’s

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trauma reading of Fight Club (as it places the narrator’s experience too indiscriminately under the ‘evasion of reality’ label), I find her observation that the plot should be considered as an “externalization” of the narrator’s conflicting emotions on target. I would like to push this argument a step further and propose a nonrealist and nonallegorical reading of the novel, one that also includes a consideration of its literary dimensions, which is missing from Vickroy’s account. In this reading, the narrative is itself considered a mimetic or play activity through which the narrator tries to process and perhaps even cure his civilizational discontent. I read the novel as a phantasmagoria or as a kind of mind movie produced, directed, and imaginatively enacted by the narrator to ease his emotional constraints. Of course, the experiential reality provides the raw materials and his emotional pain is the driving force; but the plot and the characters are the creation of his own subjectivity. I have already mentioned oddities in the chronology of the narrative: while the narrator gives the reader the sense that he did in fact experience the events in a certain sequence (support groups/fight club/Project Mayhem), the way they are represented in the narrative calls this orderliness and coherent structure into question. Initially, he leads us to believe that he has terminated his visits to the support groups after Marla showed up there; however, later there are hints that he has been keeping up these visits all along (chapters 4, 7, 27); just before his final showdown with Tyler on top of the Parker-Morris Building, we get a scene from a Bowl Cancer Night meeting in which the narrator and Marla are quarreling (194). In a similar vein, he tells us at a certain point that he is through with fight club; yet during the second half of the book, Project Mayhem activities are presented side by side with fight club events. In fact, in one of the last chapters (chapter 28), three fighting scenes from the club (in which the narrator/Tyler is most brutally beaten up) are paired with memory fragments from the murder scene of the mayor’s special envoy; the latter’s extermination is a Project Mayhem ‘assignment.’ Crucial happenings such as the bombing of the apartment occur several times at different points of the narrative (chapters 5, 14, 27). In addition, while we see the narrator engaged in his intense and time-consuming leisure-time activities, we find him working in his office or traveling from airport to airport. Looking at the plot events with some scrutiny, one gets the sense that all of these activities are happening simultaneously—and primarily in the narrator’s head.

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This impression is confirmed when we consider the handling of time and space in the individual chapters. Although the narrator describes certain developments in his life from hindsight and gives us appropriate temporal markers (“This is how I met Marla Singer” (17); “This is how I met Tyler Durden” (25); “How I came to live with Tyler” (40)), one can never really tell from which position he is looking back at the events he happens to relate; instead, he always seems to be right in the middle of them. This is also communicated by frequent switches in the novel’s tense structure. Often the narrator starts a chapter in the past tense (Chapter 2: “Bob’s Big Arms were closed around to hold me inside”), situating an event at some point in the past; however, very quickly he slips into the present tense creating a sense of experiential immediacy (“Going around the church basement full of men, each night we met; this is Art, this is Paul; this is Bob” (16)). In many chapters, fragments of events, dialogues, reflections, and utterances are wedged together without apparent rationale; yet, they resonate with each other. In chapter 3, for example, descriptions of the narrator’s waking up at different airports (“You Wake UP at Air Harbor International”; “You wake up at O’Hare”; “You wake up a La Guardia.” (25)), reflections on his insomnia (“Some people are night people. Some people are day people” (25)) alternate with descriptions of Tyler’s night-shift jobs as a movie projectionist and a banquet waiter (Tyler has not yet been introduced at this point!). The interior monologues, in which these particles of experience are jumbled together in a stream-of-consciousness manner, suggest that the narrator is not recuperating a sequence of events from the past, but arranging fragments of experience in accordance with his emotional needs. In addition, the narrator frequently uses the second-person singular pronoun “you” (“You wake up at O’Hare”), the meaning of which is ambiguous. Is it an impersonal you (‘One wakes up at O’Hare.’)? Or does he address an (imaginative) listener such as Tyler or Marla? Or even the reader? The novel draws here on the conventions of the postmodern second-person fiction (Parker 2009, 99), and shows the narrator engaged in imaginative identity games. I argue that the narrator hallucinates not only Tyler’s existence and Tyler-related events but also the entire plot and the entire ensemble of characters. The latter are imaginary figures made to perform their part in a drama of an identity under pressure. Marla is as much a figure in this drama as Tyler is. As the narrator’s emotional crisis revolves around the issue of agency, which is connected to historical-cultural developments of gender roles, the plot evolves as a play on gender identities. The narrator

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does not only share similarities with Tyler and Marla, but there are also similarities suggested between Marla and Tyler. In the house on Paper Street chapters toward the middle of the novel (chapters 7, 8, and 11), scenes in which the narrator interacts with Tyler alternate in a fast-paced manner with scenes where he deals with Marla. He never encounters the two together, a fact he notices and reflects upon while wondering “if Tyler and Marla are the same person” (65). Certain details—Tyler using Marla’s library card and signing her name at the post office (89); Marla speaking like Tyler when she explains to the narrator why Collagen is superior to silicone in the reconstruction of lips (91); Tyler burning himself with cigarettes; Tyler’s kiss mark and Marla’s imagining herself with “Paris lips” (91); Marla and Tyler both stealing clothes from gyms and laundromats (89)—do indeed suggest that the two figures are emanations of his own soul. Marla is the feminine side of the narrator’s personality articulating discontent in a masochistic manner. Tyler is his male side by means of which manifestations of sadism and aggression toward others are externalized. The changing dynamics of his relationships to these two figures drives the plot of his emotional drama. In the middle part of the book, the narrator is at an experimental stage in his play with gender identities and uses the figures with a certain autonomy. In the last half of the novel, however, the narrator-artist loses control over his figures and his plot and becomes a victim of his own contrivance. Although he would like to follow Marla’s path, he finds himself trapped in the figure and plotline of Tyler’s discontent and falls victim to violence he himself has called forth. Fight Club is—to use a phrase from a famous poem “Of Modern Poetry” by Wallace Stevens—“a poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice.” When dealing with the tensions of his inner world, the narrator adopts the role of a modernist writer availing himself generously of the latter’s aesthetic toolbox.7 While his experiential reality provides the raw materials, his narrative ‘transmutes’ these materials—I am using here concepts from T.  S. Eliot—into ‘art’ (see Eliot 1975, 40–42). Scenes, themes, characters, objects, events, sentences, and single words become “objective correlatives” through which the narrator tries to construct a 7  In the climactic scene on the Parker-Morris Building, the narrator reminds Tyler that if he wants to become a legend (like Jesus), he needs an apostle to commemorate him. He thereby positions himself in the role of the literary creator turning his subjectivity into the authorized source of the events: “Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels? […] you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you a legend. I have been here from the beginning. / I remember everything” (15).

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new aesthetic “order” which is to give him emotional and spiritual relief (Eliot 1975, 48). They are leitmotifs appearing in ever new variants and in different places in a work of art the narrator performs to himself. Like the rules of a sports game, the formal devices of the modernist narrative provide a rhythmic structure for an emotional journey to final catharsis. In the end, however, the mimetic-artistic grid the narrator has constructed for himself does not provide the desired cure. Although Tyler promises that the narrator will get a “real opera of a death” (203), the last act of Fight Club turns into a nightmarishly roaring cacophony. And while the quiet coda with which the novel ends (chapter 30) suggests that the narrator has calmed down, the voices he hears in the hush do not forebode anything good.

Conclusion Reading a novel with Norbert Elias means reading it as a seismograph that measures the emotional tensions produced by the shifting tectonics of a civilization at a particular moment in time. The data compiled and captured in Fight Club’s seismographic survey are worrisome. Following Freud, Elias tells us that no civilization will fully succeed in bringing the emotions into a perfect balance—there will always be a certain amount of discontent. Modern civilization, while it has made life safer, easier, and more democratic, produces an uneasiness of its own. In Fight Club, Palahniuk tackles modern civilization at an advanced stage—the stage of postindustrial consumer and media capitalism—and detects discontent at an alarming level. The characters of the novel experience the institutions that regulate their professional and private lives as sapping their life force and taking away their agency. The cultural sphere designed to offer emotional respite fails to fulfill its function—it seems to be coopted by the institutions—and leaves people in a state of emotional numbness. As a consequence, the characters sidestep the sanctioned cultural forms of relief, and engage in practices that civilization has either outlawed (violence) or ‘put behind the scenes’ (bodily functions, sex, bodily decay, and death). Reading the novel with Elias’s writings on sports can reveal the emotional logic behind the characters’ desire of engaging in them. According to Elias, the experience of the body under threat is the most riveting experience in life. The characters in Fight Club resort to these extreme practices because they seem to cure their numbness and appear to

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restore their life force and agency which modern civilization had taken away. While this return to the forbidden space of the body is initially practiced from a safe distance—in the aesthetic form or, in Elias’s terms, in the form of a mimetic or play activity—the individuals increasingly crave for the ‘real’ thing and desire to cross the threshold where they want to destroy themselves and others. Reading Fight Club with Elias helps one to see this threshold crossing as a crucial moment in the development of modern civilization. It indicates that the discontent has reached a new level and can no longer be contained by the cultural habitus offered by society. People are so desperate to treat their numbness and to recover their sense of life that they no longer care about the consequences of their actions—consequences for themselves, for others, for society at large. The attraction of crossing the threshold indicates that the civilizing institutions have lost their authority and persuasive power and that those living under their sway are no longer willing to cooperate. In the 1960s, Elias and Dunning developed an interest in the phenomenon of hooliganism in the field of sports because they saw it as an indication that modern civilization was in trouble. Palahniuk’s novel from the 1990s presents us with the discovery that this spirit of hooliganism pervades a larger segment of the US population than expected, and it asks us to take this development seriously. Despite appearances to the contrary, Fight Club is a deeply humanistic novel committed to civilization, compassion, and care. However, it recognizes a paradox at the center of the modernization process which Elias did not have so clearly before his eyes. The novel shows that modern civilization—in its very tendency to stabilize and routinize the processes of life— creates a craving for the authentic that might become insatiable and could eventually destroy this civilization. Palahniuk’s insight that modernization generates a desire for a permanent revolution of the emotions which bodes ill for society has been prophetic. It can explain why so many young members from advanced Western societies joined the war waged by ISIS in the Middle East as it can explain why so many ordinary American citizens participated in the Storm on the Capitol. It may even explain why former president Trump was constantly so reckless in the office.

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References Ash, Scott. 2009. Going to the Body: The Tension of Freedom/Restraint in Palahniuk’s Novels. In Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, ed. Jeffrey A.  Sartain, 73–88. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing. Baker, Brian. 2006. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945–2000. London: Continuum. Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco, ed. 2013. Introduction: Chuck Palahniuk and the Posthuman Being. In Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, 1–17. London: Bloomsbury. Dix, Andrew, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner. 2011. The Contemporary American Novel in Context. London: Continuum. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilising Process I: The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1982. The Civilising Process II: State Formation and Civilisation (US: Power and Civility). Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2008. Appendix I: Nemesis and Catharsis. In Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, ed. Eric Dunning, 291–292. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. 2008a. The Quest for Excitement in Leisure. In Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, ed. Eric Dunning, 44–72. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. ———. 2008b. The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem, Part 1. In Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, ed. Eric Dunning, 107–133. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Eliot, T.S. 1975. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 37–44. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Faludi, Susan. 1999. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. London: Vintage. Grønstad, Asbjørn. 2008. One-Dimensional Men: Fincher’s Fight Club and the End of Masculinity. In Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema, 172–186. Amsterdam: University Press. Guiles, James R. 2013. Violence, Spaces, and a Fragmenting Consciousness in Fight Club. In Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, ed. Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, 23–43. London: Bloomsbury. Kavanagh, Matt. 2009. Of Failed Romance, Writer’s Malpractice, and Prose for the Nose: A Conversation with Chuck Palahniuk. In Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, ed. Jeffrey A.  Sartain, 178–192. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing. MacKendrick, Kenneth. 2009. Chuck Palahniuk and the New Journalism Revolution. In Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, ed. Jeffrey A. Sartain, 1–21. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing.

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Mennell, Stephen. 1990. Decivilizing Processes: Theoretical Significance and Some Lines of Research. International Sociology 5 (2): 203–223. ———. 2006. Civilizing Processes. Theory, Culture & Society 23: 229–431. Palahniuk, Chuck. 1996. Fight Club: A Novel. New York: Norton. ———. 2004. Not Chasing Amy. In Stranger than Fiction: True Stories, 141–146. New York: Anchor Books. ———. 2006. Afterword. In Fight Club, 209–218. London: Vintage. Parker, Joshua. 2009. ‘Where you’re supposed to be’: Apostrophe and Apocalypse in Chuck Palahniuk. In Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem, ed. Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin, 88–96. London: Routledge. Riekki, Ron. 2009. Brandy, Shannon, Tender, and the Middle Finger: Althusser and Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels. In Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, ed. Jeffrey A. Sartain, 89–101. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing. Robinson, Sally. 2011. Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-Consumerist Critique. Genders Archive 1998–2013. https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-­2 013/2011/05/01/ feminized-­m en-­a nd-­i nauthentic-­w omen-­f ight-­c lub-­a nd-­l imits-­a nti-­ consumerist-­critique. Accessed 20 Apr 2021. Sári, László B. 2012. Minimalist Contentions: Fight Club as Critical Discourse. Amerikana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 8/2. https://americanaejournal.hu/vol8no2/sari-­b. Accessed 23 Apr 2021. Vickroy, Laurie. 2013. Body Contact: Acting Out Is the Best Defense in Fight Club. In Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, ed. Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, 61–75. London: Bloomsbury. Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 10

Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias Johannes Voelz

The storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, eliminated any lingering doubt that the oldest existing modern democracy is under pressure. The US finds itself in the company of many former liberal democratic states, including Brazil, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey (to name only a few), in which, over the past two decades, populist movements have brought to power leaders who are systematically demolishing the separation of powers and the rule of law and who are entrenching a cultural dynamic of populism reliant on polarization and unbridled majoritarianism. While in the US the populist reign, at least for the time being, has been ended by the means of elections—though with a transfer of power that can hardly be called peaceful—populism is poised to remain a potent political force in the US for the foreseeable future. Within the range of academic responses to this crisis of democracy, relational sociology—an approach that Christa Buschendorf has put on the agenda of American Studies with particular forcefulness and foresight— has found itself gaining relevance. The following reflections on the potentials of relational sociology for advancing our understanding of populism

J. Voelz (*) Goethe-Universität, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_10

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are deeply and immediately indebted to Christa Buschendorf’s vision and determination of establishing the work of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu as central reference points in American Studies. The ascent of populism across a wide array of democracies has made it urgent to come to an understanding of the causes and mechanisms of populist movements. In the US, scholars, pundits, and journalists frequently argue over the question of whether the primary mobilizing force of populism is to be seen in economic inequality or deep-seated racism and white supremacy. Relational sociology—particularly the work of Bourdieu and Elias—can help us understand that while right-wing populism in the US cannot be understood without taking into account both economic inequality and racism, neither of these two explanations are satisfactory in and of themselves. From the perspective of relational sociology, populism is rather to be explained by the struggle over social status and symbolic power. This struggle incorporates both the dimension of racism and the economic inequality. Such an approach to populism does not propose to replace class or race simply by culture, but by a perspective that is sociocultural. Rather than focusing on culture per se (understood here as a repertoire of practices expressive of a shared worldview and values held in common), a sociocultural approach to populism embeds cultural repertoires of expression in social structures of unequal power. In other words, from the perspective of relational sociology, populism appears as a particular political culture that can be deciphered only if understood against the ongoing struggles over social status. It should be noted briefly that the analysis of status in relation to populism has a long history. As Anton Jäger has recently elaborated, in the American context that history goes back to the 1950s, as consensus historians and sociologists, including Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell, reassessed the original American populist movement of the 1890s (organized in the People’s Party) in an effort to come to terms with a crisis of their own time: McCarthyism. While the agrarian populists of the late nineteenth century had initially been discussed primarily in economic and class terms, the postwar intellectuals culturalized the materialist paradigm and put status in the place previously occupied by class. Postwar intellectuals turned to status for more than one reason and consulted more than one source in doing so. The reconstruction of this genealogy makes for fascinating—and in the eyes of some on the left,

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regrettable—intellectual history.1 But the historical context of that shift notwithstanding, the turn to status opened analytical doors that were elaborated much more fully—and independently of the study of (American) populism—by theorists such as Elias and Bourdieu. Elias and Bourdieu may not have been aware of the embrace of the analytical category of status by American scholars in the 1950s, nor may they have much cared. Their own understanding of status was indebted to one of the founding fathers of modern sociology—Max Weber (2009, 180–195)—who is credited with having reframed the Marxist category of class as status (Stand). Even if Elias and Bourdieu had no notable interest in the study of populism, their work has become newly prominent in this field of research as several recent theorists of populism have begun to utilize their ideas. For the present populist moment, the turn to status is promising because it allows us to take into account the observation that populism is a movement characterized by exploding the boundaries of the political sphere. Populist movements, particularly of the contemporary kind, extend politics into the sphere of culture and everyday life. Hence, the analysis of populism must incorporate an understanding of how populism culturalizes politics and in turn politicizes culture. These interdependent processes of culturalization and politicization do not happen randomly; they are embedded in symbolically mediated structures of inequality. Indeed, populism can be understood as a class struggle manqué, in which politico-cultural identity has taken the place of class-consciousness. This is what is entailed in the statement that populism is not driven directly by economic inequality or racism but by struggles over status. In this conception, populism is unthinkable without economic inequality and anxieties over the material dimension of life. But in populism, the economic dimension is not politicized directly, but in mediated fashion, via the struggle over status. 1  Jäger attributes the turn to status to the influence of the studies on the authoritarian personality published by Adorno et al. in California. Adorno’s framework was steeped in the Freudo-Marxist analysis of repressive culture (developed by Wilhelm Reich and elaborated by various Frankfurt School thinkers, among them Erich Fromm; see Majewska 2019). The Freudian cornerstone of these analyses was Freud’s Mass Psychology and Ego-Analysis, from 1921. This is significant because Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process is also built on Freud (his differences from the Frankfurt School notwithstanding); his indebtedness to Freud, and in particular to Freud’s Mass Psychology, becomes visible particularly in his analysis of the rise of National Socialism in The Germans. Indeed, it appears that the turn to status in scholarship on fascism and populism cannot be reconstructed without the Freudian tradition.

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Within the field of populism research, which is dominated by scholars from the political sciences, there are currently several interrelated paradigms that are indebted to relational sociology, though these debts are rarely elaborated upon. Of particular relevance here is the “sociocultural approach” developed by Pierre Ostiguy. This approach shares important common ground with the project of analyzing the “aesthetics of populism” I have recently pursued in several publications (Voelz 2018, 2021; Voelz and Freischläger 2019). I argue that both the aesthetic and the sociocultural approach to populism can profit from an elaboration of Bourdieu’s and Elias’s ideas. In brief, while Bourdieu is particularly helpful to understand the synchronous dimension of the ways in which populism politicizes cultural styles, Elias emphasizes the diachronic dimension of the status struggles between what he calls “the established and the outsiders.” I will begin by comparing the aesthetic to the sociocultural approach to populism, then indicate how these approaches stand to profit from Bourdieu and Elias. Ultimately, the aim of this chapter is to work toward a theoretical foundation for the analysis of the aesthetics of populism.

An Aesthetic Approach to Populism The aesthetic approach to the study of populism I have recently begun to develop starts from the observation that populist leaders make use of a particular kind of “representative claim” (Saward 2006). They appeal to their followers not as representatives who speak for their constituencies— and who therefore remain distinguishable from those for whom they speak—but as immediate embodiments of the people. “I am not myself anymore,” Hugo Chávez claimed in characteristic manner. “I am not an individual: I am a people!” (quoted in Ostiguy 2017, 50). This claim to embodied unity relies on performative means. Populist performances are designed to address the senses in such a way that claims to embodied unity are experienced as real. At the heart of populism therefore lies what Hannah Arendt (1958), with a rather different intention in mind, calls a “space of appearance”: a performative production, by aesthetic means, of a unified body of “the people.”2 This explains why populist movements— in this regard, like the fascist movements of the 1930s—rely so heavily on 2  In Arendt’s conception, the space of appearance doesn’t aim for unity but for the emergence of a shared world based on plurality and difference. Her notion of the space of appear-

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the format of the assembly, and why, in the case of Trump, the rally became a standard feature of his politics. While in representative democracies of the liberal stripe, assemblies and rallies serve the purpose of mobilization and campaigning but are distinct from the act of governing, populists like Trump are always in campaign mode. Indeed, once they are in power, there is a growing need for demonstrating that they still embody the vox populi, that they have not crossed over to the elites and “betrayed” the people. The fiction of embodiment hinges on the substitution of representation by immediate presence, and such presence must be staged over and over again. The representative claim of populism is therefore a “claim to presence” that must disguise that it is merely a claim by constant reiterations of acclamation. While scholars of populism have emphasized for a long time that populist leaders cultivate a particular style, traditionally they have aimed to decipher that style by investigating populist rhetoric (Canovan 1984, 1999; Kazin 1995). Only more recently have researchers approached style as a matter of mediated aesthetics. Political scientist Benjamin Moffitt stands out here. He defines political style “as the repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance made to audiences that are used to create and navigate the fields of power that comprise the political, stretching from the domain of government through to everyday life” (Moffitt 2016, 28–29). My own approach to analyzing the aesthetic of the populist space of appearance builds on Moffitt’s attention to performance but operates with a different concept of performance. Whereas in Moffitt’s work, performance primarily refers to the manner in which leaders act before their followers (whether they address them live or through the use of media), I build on a notion of performance influenced by drama studies (Fischer-­ Lichte 2008). In this understanding, performance is conceptualized not merely as a mode of address but as an interactive process—framed by the parameters of space, duration, and rhythm—in which the roles between actor and audience are frequently reversed. As I argue elsewhere (Voelz 2018), a close analysis of the populist space of appearance as exemplified by Trump rallies demonstrates that the performative effects of unity and fusion between leader and followers are highly unstable: they are momentary, interactive, and characterized by affective dynamics of ebb and flow. Analyzing the performative aesthetics ance is modeled on the republican polis; it is the inversion of the populist public that is built on the fiction of overcoming plurality in unity.

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of populism sheds light on a larger characteristic of the populist community: its impermanence. Making the populist bond lasting beyond climaxes of affective intensity is the greatest challenge for any populist movement. This anxious relation to impermanence points to a difference to liberal-­ democratic parties, factions, and movements. Liberal-democratic collectives are built on the condition of their own finitude and historicity. They are premised on the idea that opinions, persuasions, and mindsets can change (most importantly, perhaps, through deliberation) and that political constellations will not last forever. This openness to a contingent future lies at the core of democracy itself: only if the state of things is not set in stone is it plausible to claim that the social and political order is responsive to a discursively evolving will of the people. Populist movements, by contrast, are premised on the idea of timelessness. The fusion of people and leader is imagined as an organic, natural entity that lies outside of history. Populist movements falter not because of internal dissent but because they run out of steam. The political logic here is thoroughly aesthetic, akin to the vicissitudes of a rock star whose success and sudden failure in attracting an audience remain opaque from extra-aesthetic perspectives. Particularly right-wing populist formations reignite their intensity by invoking a litany of enemies. In this regard, populist communities are relational: they create coherence and offer up identities by invoking enemies. These enemies are various. They include external others as well as those who are uneasily recognized as belonging to the people but are cast as internal enemies. Populist leaders typically make use of a double reference: they designate the community they claim to embody as “the people,” but at the same time claim to constitute only a part of the people (the “true,” “authentic,” or “real” people). Put differently, they position themselves at once pars pro toto and (in a phrase of Nadia Urbinati’s) pars pro parte (Urbinati 2019, 94). Because of this double reference, populist movements depend on aesthetic strategies that are polarizing, geared at creating a fault line between “us” and “them.” In order to account for populism’s relational structure, the aesthetic approach to populism needs to go beyond the populist space of appearance and analyze the expressive and affective repertoires of polarization (Voelz and Freischläger 2019). Although it is primarily populists who boost polarization, polarization takes hold only when both populists and anti-populists begin to subscribe to it. To avoid misunderstanding, the term “polarization” as used in this context requires clarification: polarization does not mean political radicalization, although populists on the right

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tend to move further to the extreme of the political spectrum in a dynamic of ongoing radicalization. The same, however, is not necessarily true for the other side. Nor does polarization in this context describe a process that is symmetrical. Indeed, it is asymmetrical in two different senses: first, as the case of Trumpism makes clear, it is populist forces who play a much more active role in pushing polarizing divisions than anti-populists; second, populists tend to polarize by means of transgression. This means that those inhabiting the polar opposite of populists are pushed into a position of conserving the status quo. These two poles—transgression and conservation—are complementary to one another but they are asymmetrical inasmuch as they are difficult to compare ideologically, aesthetically, and affectively. In effect, in the current constellation of American politics (and in contemporary populism more generally), one side of the divide aims to overthrow liberal democracy while the other is committed to defend it. The asymmetry between them is so pronounced that it may seem dubious why it makes sense to speak of polarization at all. The purpose of describing the aesthetics of populism in terms of polarization is to make clear that both populists and anti-populists increasingly identify along the divisions insisted upon by populists. Such boundary lines are not primarily based on ideological differences but on affective identification (Abramowitz 2018). Polarization finds expression in manners, styles, and ways of comporting oneself in public. Seen in this larger framework, approaching populism as an aesthetic extends into the polarizing aesthetics of everyday life. In my analysis, the aesthetics of polarization give expression to two complementary dominant affects, each of which processes inequality in relational terms and each of which has the capacity to color everyday life. One side is organized around the affect of resentment, and the other around the affect of indignation. While resentment is based on a position of perceived inferiority, indignation is informed by a righteous claim to superiority, which entails a demand to uphold generalizable standards (captured by Michelle Obama’s phrase, “When they go low, we go high”) (Voelz and Freischläger 2019). Both affects antagonistically relate to the other side, but from different self-­positionings in a hierarchy of moral and behavioral standards. Approaching populism aesthetically thus requires looking far beyond the traditional realm of politics so as to understand everyday affective and expressive repertoires of affective polarization. It is at this point that the aesthetic approach to populism shares significant common ground with the “sociocultural approach” developed by political scientist Pierre Ostiguy.

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A Sociocultural Approach to Populism Like the aesthetic approach to populism, Ostiguy’s sociocultural analysis of populism starts out from the premise that populism needs to be analyzed in relational terms: it creates identities by construing a “hostile relation” between the populist dyad (made up of the populist leader and his or her followers) and “a ‘nefarious’ Other” (2017, 73). Ostiguy’s innovation is to chart this antagonistic relationship in sociopolitical space. Populism, he argues, “breaks down or erases traditional political alignments and restructures sociopolitical space around a different – and often highly polarizing  – competitive axis” (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 26). While (according to Ostiguy) the traditional left-right axis hinges on the politicization of economic matters (small vs. big government, free market vs. redistribution, etc.), populism politicizes the vertical high-low axis that is “more clearly sociocultural and politicocultural in nature” (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 26). Low and high are defined relationally, in line with specific “civilizational projects” (Ostiguy 2017, 75). Here Ostiguy seems to be riffing on Norbert Elias’s notion of the “civilizing process,” although the reference remains oblique (as we shall see, he refers to Elias at other points of his argument). In any case, the idea is compatible with Elias’s concept (Elias 2000). The latter describes long-term historical processes in which ever longer chains of interdependence develop alongside increasing demands for self-restraint that are enforced by an emergent sense of shame. According to Ostiguy, it is against such demands for internalized self-control that populism rebels by performing—and thus politicizing— whatever is experienced as shameful: The precise nature of that “proper,” civilizational project can vary widely, from liberalism, to multi-culturalism, adapting to the ways and manners of the First World or the West, orthodox “textbook” economics, European integration, racial integration, colonial France’s “mission civilisatrice,” or any other. . . . This project’s so-called “Other” can be recognized as such if it provokes shame or embarrassment for “decent,” “politically correct,” “proper,” or “well-educated” people. The political entrepreneurs flaunting this Other, in turn, claim to be speaking in the name of a “repressed truth” (especially in Europe) or (more often in Latin America) of “previously excluded social sectors” or (in the US) the “silent majority.” (Ostiguy 2017, 75–76)

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Populism, in this framing, rests on performances of whatever is defined as the low. In Ostiguy’s signature phrasing, these are performances of “flaunting of the low” (2017, 78). Ostiguy furthermore analytically differentiates the low into a sociocultural and a politico-cultural component. In the first case, “flaunting the low” comprises “manners, demeanors, ways of speaking and dressing, vocabulary, and tastes displayed in public” (Ostiguy 2017, 78). In the second case, the politicization of the high-low axis concerns “forms of political leadership and preferred (or advocated) modes of decision-making in the polity.” Here, the distinction lies between the different forms of authority outlined by Max Weber (2009, 196–252), ranging from the charismatic (on the side of the low) to the bureaucratic-­ rationalistic (on the side of the high). In charismatic leadership, chains of interdependencies are imagined as short and personal (in line with what I call “the claim to presence”); in bureaucratic leadership, they are long and impersonal. As Elias would argue, charismatic rule invites abandon and bureaucratic rule requires self-restraint. The populist preference for charismatic rule is thus another way in which the standards of appropriate behavior are rejected. For both the sociocultural and the politico-cultural components, Ostiguy explicitly draws on a combination of Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, without, however, exploring these theoretical foundations at any length. In Ostiguy’s (somewhat unorthodox) terms: This first, social-cultural, component is in fact a politicization of the social markers emphasized in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in his classic work of social theory on taste and aesthetics (1979). From a different theoretical perspective, it is a politicization of the – empirically quite similar – differences in concrete manners at the core of Norbert Elias’s seminal work (1982). Bourdieu emphasizes cultural capital as a “legitimate” form of distinction or credential and marker of respectability. Elias’s historical sociology was more concerned about a gradual, irregular, and long-term process of “civilization” in manners. In both sociologists’ works, however, one pole of the spectrum—whether long-term historical or status related—is a kind of propriety (and even distinction or refinement) that is legitimate by prevailing international standards, especially in the more developed countries. From that standpoint, the popular classes’ and certain “third-world” practices often appear more “coarse” or less “slick.” (2017, 78–79)

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Ostiguy’s invocation of Elias and Bourdieu promises a remarkable advance for the study of populism, and I will spend the remainder of the chapter exploring some of the potentials and complications of incorporating their work into an analysis of the populist aesthetic. A key point of Ostiguy’s phrasing is to be noted at the outset: in order to make Elias and Bourdieu usable for the analysis of populism, it needs to be understood that populism politicizes the figurations of status made observable by Elias and Bourdieu. Building on Bourdieu’s own language, one might say that in populism markers of distinction in behavior and taste are transformed into “political capital.”

Populism with Bourdieu “Both Elias and Bourdieu,” observes the sociologist Nico Wilterdink, “were preoccupied with questions concerning the nature, causes, and consequences of relations of unequal power, privileges, and prestige” (2017, 23). As we just saw, in populism such relations of unequal power, privileges, and prestige become politicized in an identitarian manner based on the opposition of us and them. If we don’t want to rest at a mere description of these acts of politicization, we must take the aesthetics of populism as a set of signs that can lead us back to the “nature, causes, and consequences” of the relations of inequality expressed in populism. In other words, we must attempt, with the help of Bourdieu and Elias, a sociologically grounded analysis of the aesthetics of populism. My aim here is to work toward a theoretical approach that allows us to make legible the structures of inequality that ground and pervade the populist aesthetic. This returns us to a question I broached at the outset of this chapter, namely the relation between the expressive repertoires of populism and the class structure. Bourdieu is helpful here, given that his major innovation lies in theorizing the relation between symbolic hierarchies of status and economic inequality. Bourdieu remained committed to the legacy of Marxism inasmuch as he accorded a privileged position to economically defined structures of inequality. But importantly, he expanded the materialist approach to inequality by introducing a complex theory of social fields, each of which is equipped with its own type of capital. Social, cultural, and symbolic capital may seem to be modeled on materialist conceptions of capital, but in fact, in introducing these new forms of capital, Bourdieu put the economies of each of these fields on a nonmaterialist footing. In Bourdieu’s theory, no matter how different these fields appear

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to be, they share some fundamental traits. Most crucially, in each field actors attempt to amass as much capital as possible. But the reason they do so is not that they are possessive individuals who get satisfaction—and power—from ownership, but that the ownership of capital provides them with distinction in relation to the other actors in the field. In effect, Bourdieu converts the materialist idea of capital into a theory of recognition: actors strive for capital gains not because they want to become rich, but because they want to become recognized by others in competitive games of distinction. They are after gains in relative status (Bourdieu 1986, 1992). Markers of distinction often appear as arbitrary. Their value is defined relationally and can only be deciphered by reconstructing the rules of the game in each field. This is also true for the processes of polarization that increasingly structure everyday life in the US.  Political scientists have begun to observe how more and more facets of life become charged with political meaning (Hetherington and Weiler 2018; Klein 2020; Mason 2018). Structuring one’s life around a set of politicized signs allows for the creation of an affective identity that signals both in-group membership and polarizing differentiation from the out-group. Amassing symbolic capital within an economy of polarization thus holds out the possibility of distinguishing oneself on two different levels: it allows for an individual advance of status within the group of affiliation, and it affords the achievement of a collective identity vis-à-vis the other. But polarization runs deeper than the conscious, rational pursuit of symbolic capital. Polarized identities also become a matter of embodiment, of what both Elias and Bourdieu refer to as habitus. As markers of political identification begin to shape identity, they sink down to the level of unconscious bodily comportment, including posture, gait, and inflection of the voice. Moreover, they shape aesthetic judgment, that is, the sense of taste by which individuals process the outer world (Bourdieu 1984). Finally, they create desires and aspirations, and they give contours to the imagination. As polarized political identification sinks down to the level of the bodily dispositions of habitus, these embodied dispositions in turn become the resource and condition for the pursuit of symbolic capital. In Bourdieu’s theory, social actors don’t engage in the status contests of their field as the kind of self-interested actors imagined by rational choice theorists. Rather, in order to succeed, they need to buy into the game of their field (Bourdieu here speaks of illusio) and commit themselves wholeheartedly to it. Truly speaking, it is a matter of hearts and

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minds, of body and soul (Bourdieu 1992). In other words, if we want to explain populism with Bourdieu, we need to understand that political polarization becomes a matter of identification that shapes individuals’ habitus to the point where embodied and affective dispositions as well as aesthetic tastes allow for the pursuit of polarized and polarizing distinction. While markers of distinction are arbitrary (in the sense of being relational), they sometimes make obvious an underlying class structure ultimately defined by material rather than symbolic inequality. The symbolic arena of consumption is suggestive here. Take the example of the politicization of major grocery shopping chains. Companies like Whole Foods have taken on a liberal connotation and become opposed to mainstream chains like Safeway. Whole Foods puts a premium on natural products that promise to be healthy and environmentally friendly; it is part and parcel of the lifestyle of the progressive bourgeoisie, which is reflected in the price of the products on offer. In this case, the politicization of everyday life is indicative of the underlying economic class structure: quite simply, not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods. But the correlations between politicized allegiance and economic inequality are less clear in other arenas of the symbolic struggle over everyday life, even if we remain within the realm of consumption. The choice of car is a good example. Recalling the apt title of a study by political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, Pickup or Prius, we see how two different types of car have become highly charged with politico-­ symbolic meaning. Yet symbolic differentiation here is not directly based on price and thus on available economic capital (not least because pickup trucks are offered across a wide price range). Politicization in this example works in more mediated fashion. Both types of cars are endowed with symbolic meaning regarding values, priorities, and politics, and these symbolic meanings emerge in antagonistic relation to each other. Toyota’s Prius model, with its functional and unobtrusive design, is a car that deflects attention from itself. It expresses that a car is not a status symbol (a paradoxical message, to be sure, given that it is this message that turns the Prius into a status symbol in its own right). More importantly even, the Prius pioneered hybrid car technology and thus has come to stand for environmentally conscious driving. Indirectly, owning a Prius allows for the symbolic rejection of cars becoming ever larger and more fuel consuming—a trend embodied above all by pickup trucks and SUVs. While SUVs are symbolically linked to the nuclear family, pickup trucks symbolically

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link back to outdoor work (their original purpose). Instead of family and community, they thus evoke a sphere of masculinity defined by the rough conditions of nature, labor that is physically so demanding that it requires massive engines and all-wheel drive, and, not least, the separation from the familial community (only recently have pickup trucks become so large that they can incorporate auxiliary back seats). The pickup truck, in other words, is the myth of the frontier condensed into a car. The politico-­ symbolic differentiation of these cars is thus mediated by cultural meanings and political concerns that have a tenuous relation to economic structures of inequality. Importantly, however, for Bourdieu, the relation to the economic class structure is never absent, even if it is difficult to make out. As he argues, even when individual fields operate under the illusion of their own autonomy, they are in fact not truly autonomous. In Robert Moore’s succinct phrase, “symbolic struggles are, in effect, aspects of class struggle” (2008, 96). But how can this assertion be made plausible? What does the choice of Prius versus pickup have to do with the economic class structure? Bourdieu’s answer is that the various fields, with their respective sorts of capital, each relates back to the economic field through a homologous relation, that is, a structural correspondence. Each form of capital can thus be imagined as a transubstantiation of economic capital. Because of this transubstantiation, the different forms of capital may appear to be unrelated, autonomous, and arbitrary, yet in truth they are structurally linked to economic capital. And once the process of transubstantiation is analytically reversed, the derivative chains that have their origins in structures of economic inequality can be reconstructed. The idea of structural correspondence holds the key for this analytical operation. In a recent proposal on how to theoretically enrich Ostiguy’s cultural-­ sociological approach to populism with the help of Bourdieu, Linus Westheuser has elaborated on the indebtedness of Bourdieu’s idea of homology to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. Analyzing totemism of “primitive” societies, Lévi-Strauss had argued that in indigenous societies, totems—elements of nature endowed with sacred meaning—did not carry substantial but relative meaning. “On the one hand,” wrote Lévi-Strauss in Totemism, “there are animals which differ from each other . . . , and on the other are men . . . who also differ from each other. . . . The resemblance proposed by so-called totemistic systems is between these systems of differences” (Lévi-Strauss 1991, 77; quoted in Westheuser 2020, 262; emphasis in original). In Westheuser’s gloss, the upshot of

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Lévi-Strauss’s argument is that “human cognition in all societies” is totemistic since totemism, properly understood, refers to “metaphorical thought, by which one object comes to stand for another, including the symbolization of social group differences by culturalized objects of the external world” (Westheuser 2020, 262). In other words, the symbolic system of differences (Prius vs. pickup) is a metaphor of the inequalities of social structure. At this point, one might understand Bourdieu to be saying that all symbolic differences lead back to a class structure that is defined economically and materially. At the core of the aesthetics of populism, we would then find capitalist relations of exploitation. If this were the case, Bourdieu’s analysis would quite simply update the Marxian relation of base and superstructure. At times, Bourdieu indeed flirts with such a position. Overall, however, his point is not that the “true” social structure is that of economic class, with every social field standing in a metaphorical, totemistic, relation to this originary set of differences. The analysis is more complex, trying to do justice to the complexity of contemporary society. On the one hand, every sort of capital is linked to economic capital by way of homology. In that sense, the economic dimension holds a privileged position in Bourdieu’s analysis. On the other hand, economic capital no longer organizes the class structure by itself. The class structure emerges from the interaction of the various kinds of capital (social, cultural, economic, etc.). Each symbolic difference (say, Prius vs. pickup) therefore stands in metaphorical relation to the entire set of differences that make up the (more than economic) class structure. These interacting sets of differences that make up the symbolically complex class structure bring forth political alliances that no longer map onto a traditional, economically defined set of classes, although this old class structure continues to resonate in the new system of differences. The class structure, in this sense, is not a stable and fixed foundation upon which politico-symbolic struggles of differentiation, identification, and polarization play out. Rather, the distinctions that are politicized and mobilized in symbolic struggles—including the symbolic struggles of populism—both reflect and shape a constantly changing class structure. In the case of populism, we can observe how material inequality interacts with various types of symbolic difference, generating populist class alliances in which people with little economic capital come together with those who have little cultural capital. Other sorts of capital also play into the mix, in the case of the US most distinctly racial identity (see also

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Lowndes 2017, for the need to integrate race into Ostiguy’s sociocultural approach). Being identified as white, black, person of color, and so on, too, is part of a symbolic force field that, in Bourdieu’s framework, plays into the larger structure of class. Race is a particularly context-dependent kind of capital. Being a person of color in the US means being subject to both immediate (interpersonal) and systemic racism. Being white, in this context, means being privileged, often to the point where violent acts of racism against black people and people of color go unpunished. At the same time, as “diversity” becomes the official doctrine supported by symbolically and economically powerful groups of society, some whites experience their “racial capital” to depreciate in value. As white supremacy, once unquestioned, comes under scrutiny, whiteness undergoes a relative loss of status. With the help of Bourdieu, then, we can observe how in and around populism alliances take shape in which the old taxonomy of economic class remains an important, but far from the only, component. Populism brings together social actors whose position in social space is marked by low-level capital ownership or the prospect thereof, whether the capital sort be cultural, economic, racial (in the above sense of depreciated supremacy), and so on, or a combination thereof. More precisely, different combinations are more likely than others. A low level of cultural capital is more central to the mix than a low level of economic capital. Westheuser summarizes the relevant empirical findings as follows: “Income rarely shows up as a clear predictor of populist support, but. .. comparatively lower levels of education are virtually always among the strongest structural predictors” (2020, 268). Even if the wealth of cultural capital is more decisive than that of economic capital for the support of populism, it needs to be remembered that for Bourdieu cultural capital is structurally homologous to economic capital. Economic capital thus has two kinds of presence in the symbolic economy of populism: as a component of the populist class alliance and as a structural trace in the other forms of capital organizing the alliance. Given that we are dealing with symbolic economies, the populist aesthetic is instrumental in finding expressive symbols for these positions of relative scarceness of capital. In doing so, populism articulates a cross-class aesthetic repertoire expressive of a sense of depreciation, to which is attached an affective vocabulary consisting of felt injustice, anger, and resentment. It is in this sense that populism symbolically and affectively politicizes inferiority. But in “flaunting the low,” the emerging alliances of

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populism also make an effort to “own” depreciation. In creating an aesthetic out of the low, the depreciated becomes a resource for revaluation (or reappreciation). Populism does not just flaunt what is shameful in an act of épater la bourgeoisie, but turns the shameful into a source of pride (see also Westheuser 2020, 273). In All the King’s Men, his novel on American populism, Robert Penn Warren makes observable reappreciation in action. His protagonist, Willie Stark, has his breakthrough moment as a populist orator when he appropriates the demeaning epithet “hick” for himself and then hurls it at his listeners: “Listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me” (Warren 1946, 93).

Populism with Elias Bourdieu’s theory offers an explanation of the polarizing processes of distinction by which the expressive repertoire of populism takes shape. As just outlined, it can help us make sense of the ways in which populists turn the dearth of capital—especially of the cultural sort—into a resource for stylized acts of reappropriation and reappreciation. The limitation of this theoretical model, however, is that it operates with snapshot accounts of capital balance sheets, as it were. Yet, to understand populism, it is not sufficient to look at the amount of capital actors possess at any given time. What is crucial is the larger trajectory of their fortunes.3 Why this makes a difference can be illustrated most clearly by a look at racial capital. Here, a momentary glimpse at the balance sheet and the resulting relative position in social space is insufficient for comprehending why, and how, race 3  This is not to say that Bourdieu’s model is static, only that it works particularly well to locate positions in social space based on current account statuses in capital. In Bourdieu’s thinking, behind such balance sheets lie processes of change. His concept of hysteresis captures the mismatch and time lag between field and habitus: changes in the field can happen radically, but the actors’ habitus adapts only slowly. In The Weight of the World, Bourdieu and his co-authors collect individual experiences of suffering resulting from the hysteresis effect. Bourdieu includes the story of two French farmers (recorded by Bourdieu in 1983) who have inherited small tracts of land and have spent their lives trying to realize the myth of independent farm life, thus falling out of step with the larger structural changes that work against the viability of agriculture (1999, 381–391). In the course of the interview, one of the two farmers expresses sympathy for the supporters of far-right populist Jean-Marie Le Pen (390) and even for Len Pen himself (383), who is just beginning to rise in French politics then. This is a moment at which Bourdieu comes close to the theoretical perspective which I will develop from the theories of Norbert Elias.

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becomes politicized in populism. In the age of Trumpism, whiteness continues to mark a position of relative symbolic dominance, which is another way of saying that there is widespread systemic racism in the US. But seen against a longer trajectory, it also becomes apparent that white supremacy has come under pressure. It is this downswing of the symbolic value of whiteness (what I have been calling its depreciation), rather than the present position in social space, that explains why whiteness is such a crucial component in the affective and aesthetic repertoire of contemporary populism. The process of depreciation is experienced as a position of inferiority when, in fact, whiteness is still in a position of relative dominance. This may explain why many right-wing populists seem to sincerely think that there is no noteworthy racism in the US. Their perception of their loss of status regarding racial capital blinds them to the power they actually hold, and simultaneously moves them to reassert white supremacy. (This is not to say that there are not also those on the right who recognize the pervasiveness of anti-black racism and white supremacy, consent to it, and strategically deny it.) The aesthetics of populism is informed not merely by scarceness of capital, then, but by loss. Loss is a temporal category that puts past, present, and future in relation with one another. It is in Norbert Elias’s work that we find tools with which to theorize the temporal dimension of relational struggles for status. Particularly in such late works as The Established and the Outsiders (the prefatory essay of which was written in 1976) and The Germans (first published in German in 1989) did Elias conceptualize the dynamics of changing power relations. His term “figuration” aims to freeze in time instances of such temporal processes. It is noteworthy how Elias’s freeze-frames differ from those of Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s maps of social space suggest that momentary constellations of hierarchical differentiation are telling in and of themselves inasmuch as the symbolic economies he studies are shown to reproduce existing inequality. By contrast, Elias’s snapshots serve the function of indexing processes of growing or decreasing power differentials, as well as the ramifications these changes have for both those groups relatively high in rank (Elias calls them “the established”) and those of relatively lower status (“outsiders”). For the study of populism, which (as I have been arguing) politicizes loss of status, this marks a clear advantage over the framework offered by Bourdieu. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s analysis is more suggestive about how populism politicizes the symbolic distinctions in everyday life. In order to

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advance our understanding of the aesthetics of populism, the challenge is thus to find ways of fusing both approaches. In order to explore what such a fusion could look like, it is necessary to first look more closely at Elias’s framework. Taking into consideration his theory of the civilizing process, the first insight offered by Elias is that the emergence of populism can be understood as a side effect of a long-term process toward greater equality. Given that Elias’s argument is historical in nature, it is necessary to flesh it out in historically concrete terms—even if this means shifting the point of reference to Germany, his object of study in the book on which I will focus in the following pages. Because Elias draws generalizable conclusions from his observations, it will nonetheless be possible to draw analogies to contemporary American populism. In a passage of The Germans in which he discusses West Germany during the second half of the twentieth century, Elias observes that from the nineteenth century onward Germany has been on a track of functional (as opposed to political) democratization. Though this process was not linear and experienced a number of setbacks, Elias observes that from a long-­ term perspective, the power differential between the established and the outsiders has become increasingly smaller. As noted, by “established” and “outsiders” Elias refers to structural positions (what Bourdieu calls the “dominant” and the “dominated”) rather than specific groups. Thus, in the course of functional democratization (what he elsewhere calls the civilizing process), different groups came to inhabit these structural positions. As Elias lays out, the end of the World War I marked the beginning of the end of a long-term class struggle (which, for Elias, is a struggle over status) between the German aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; its completion, resulting in the total disappearance of the formerly established group, ensued soon after, with the rise to power of the National Socialists. In the further course of the twentieth century, the contenders in the major struggle over status shifted to the bourgeoisie and the working class. This shift alone marked a relative rise in status of the working class. Additionally, over the next decades the power differential between these two groups continued to shrink. “Social differences are certainly still fairly great,” Elias contended in the late 1970s, “but in the course of the process of democratization, the power differentials have lessened” (1996, 35). Crucially, this development toward diminished difference in status has had repercussions on the level of individual affect management. “Correspondingly,” Elias notes, “we have had to develop a relatively high degree of self-restraint in dealings with all people, including social

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subordinates” (1996, 35). What makes Elias’s perspective particularly interesting is that he emphasizes both sides of this process toward greater equality. From the perspective of relationality, diminishing power differentials imply both an increase in status for outsider groups and a relative loss of status for the established. For the latter, this creates conflicts in the socially embedded disposition of affects. On the one hand, the established are expected to accord respect and dignity to groups that, in their former position as inferiors, were not treated as equals and thus did not command the according treatment. Now, the social structure increasingly forces the established to internalize the newly emerging equality: “Hand in hand with the small shifts in power to the disadvantage of former established groups, and to the advantage of former outsider groups, goes a change in conscience-formation for both” (Elias 1996, 26). Yet, the established generally have a difficult time adapting to new figurations in which their status is diminished. Indeed, as Elias argues in The Established and the Outsiders, established groups develop forceful techniques of closing ranks against outsider groups (2008, 4). They assert their superior position by excluding and stigmatizing outsiders, they shun contact with them so as not to be “contaminated” by them (Elias 2008, 12), and they reinforce their own group charisma by creating we-ideals to which all members of the established must commit themselves. Should individual members of the established resist the pressures of in-group conformity, their standing in the internal status competition can suffer dramatically, leading, in the most extreme cases, to excommunication (Elias 2008, 24–25). Once the process of greater equality has set in, however, the old mechanisms of shoring up group cohesion against the outsiders begin to lose in effectiveness. Indeed, greater equality by necessity means that for the established, the old techniques of closing ranks and generating group charisma begin to lose their effectiveness. Elias observes that at this point manners (habitus) undergo a change. To capture this change, Elias speaks of informalization. This term, I suggest, is a key relay for linking the theories of Elias and Bourdieu, and for making Elias useful for the analysis of the aesthetics of populism. A closer reading of Elias reveals the complexity, even ambiguity, of the concept of informalization. Its primary analytic purpose lies in allowing for a distinction between a general loosening of behavioral norms (as could be observed, for instance, during the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s) and the complete overthrow of behavioral constraints

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in periods of barbarization, during which the civilizing process reverts to a decivilizing process (exemplified most drastically by the reign of the Nazis). In the first sense, informalization is itself the result of diminishing power differentials between the established and the outsiders. As affective restraint and behavioral control become the norm in dealing with all people (and not just with the members of the established), behavioral norms become more implicit. They are no longer imposed as external constraints by a limited group but rather become a matter of self-restraint. As a result of the shift from external to internal restraint, manners become more relaxed, less firmly scripted, and less clearly differentiated by social status. But they demand an even higher level of self-control from the individual, who must now improvise and adapt to “structural insecurity” about how to properly interact with others (Elias 1996, 37). In The Germans, Elias is adamant that this type of informalization must not be confused with decivilizing processes: In the relationship between the generations, too, there is increased social pressure towards self-regulation, or, in other words, a thrust towards individualization. If such a change is regarded as decivilizing, then this is because the theory of civilizing processes has been misunderstood. (1996, 47)

Yet, strikingly, at some points in his text, Elias also refers to the process of decivilizing as informalization (even if he demarcates it, with a hint of irony, as a “particular kind” of informalization; Elias 1996, 78). It is at this point that Elias takes us back to the disintegrative ramifications that can ensue when the established lose in standing. This particular kind of informalization happens, Elias argues, because the norms of constraint that had so far controlled the behavior of the established no longer have the binding force they had before. Underlying this argument is an equation of the costs of affect control. According to Elias, affective restraint is an imposition that individuals are only willing to shoulder if they get something in return. That something used to be the pleasures flowing from the group charisma available to members of the established. Elias now suggests that once the established lose a part of their standing, belonging to that group no longer offers the gratification required to offset the burden of self-­ control and general adherence to behavioral standards of the group. “The gain in pleasure, the heightened feeling of self-esteem, the narcissistic premium, which together balance out the costs of obeying the prescriptions

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and proscriptions specific to the stratum, are diminished and weakened. And, thus, the capacity for following the class-specific code and for bearing the frustrating constraint it imposes upon each person becomes correspondingly weaker” (Elias 1996, 73). In other words, this is a case in which the loss of relative status leads to a loss of self-control and thus ultimately to a willingness to embrace violence. In such a situation, “an informalizing spurt of a very particular kind can be observed. A mode of behavior characterized by a specific pattern of self-constraints becomes brittle and crumbles, without there being another in sight to put in its place” (Elias 1996, 73). We have, then, two cases of informalization: one of heightened self-­ control and one of collapsing self-control. Both, however, are set off by the same process, namely the diminishing of the power differential between the established and the outsiders. If we left our analysis with the either-or of these two choices, we would end up drawing a picture ultimately incompatible with the insights gained from Bourdieu’s framework. After all, through that lens, it became possible to see how what is depreciated in symbolic value becomes repurposed by those “flaunting the low,” first in order to set themselves apart from established norms and, second, in order to symbolically reappreciate the low and turn it into a new source of pride. By contrast, from what we have so far seen, Elias’s theory would suggest that diminished social standing leads either to an increase in individualized self-control (here the established and outsiders become increasingly indistinguishable and coexist peacefully) or to a decivilizing process in which individuals, disembedded from what once was a cohesive group endowed with group charisma, live lives of (potentially) violent self-abandon. It is striking, however, that neither of these options conforms to what Elias describes for the greater part of The Germans. His main interest is dedicated to what he calls “the breakdown of civilization” during the “Third Reich,” but that breakdown is a far cry from total anomie. What Elias shows is a process of decivilizing in which a third kind of informalization takes place. In this type of informalization, a group (the Germans) responds to the loss of status by finding ways of collectively denying the reality of their altered standing. In The Established and the Outsiders, Elias refers to this collective mechanism as a “fantasy shield”: For a time, the fantasy shield of their imagined charisma as a leading, established group may give a declining nation the strength to carry on. In that

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sense it can have a survival value. But the discrepancy between the actual and the imagined position of one’s group among others can also entail a mistaken assessment of one’s power resources and, as a consequence, suggest a group strategy in pursuit of a fantasy image of one’s own greatness that may lead to self-destruction as well as to destruction of other interdependent groups. The dreams of nations (as of other groups) are dangerous. An overdeveloped we-ideal is a symptom of a collective illness. (Elias 2008, 28–29)

In this description, it appears that pursuing a fantasy image is dangerous because it can lead to catastrophe. Being increasingly out of touch with reality, groups that favor fantasy over processing their loss of status set themselves up for all-out destruction: once reality crushes the shield and fantasy breaks down, there will be nothing that can control the pent-up affects. The release of emotional energy, now unconstrained by group charisma, will bring on rampant decivilization. One would expect, then, that the unfathomable violence committed by the Nazis is the best example of such a descent into barbarism. Yet, while Elias minces no words about the extremity of Nazi atrocities, the point of his reconstruction of Germany’s “breakdown of civilization” is that until the very end of the war Germans held on to their fantasy shield. Violent destruction didn’t follow the breakdown of the collective fantasy image; it accompanied it. More precisely, the “breakdown of civilization” consisted precisely of the “discrepancy between the actual and the imagined position of one’s group among others” (Elias 2008, 28). Toward the end of his analysis of the National Socialist reign, Elias formulates a general insight that ties these observations together: It can be observed in many other nations – and not only in nations: threatened with a loss of power, ruling groups in all ages experience in the eyes of their members a corresponding loss of meaningfulness and value. Innumerable examples show that ruling groups of every type – tribes, elites, estates, classes or nations – whose power is dwindling seldom vacate the field without a fight even if the chances of maintaining their power and rule may be nil. The weaker they are, the more insecure and threatened their superiority is in fact, the crasser, the more reckless and unrealistic as a rule are the measures likely to be with which they seek to preserve their position. (Elias 1996, 357)

Putting up a fight in the face of threat can take physical form, but more often it remains limited to the realm of the symbolic. It is a process that is

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directed both inside and outside. On the inside, it requires the strictest adherence to a collective fantasy image, to conspiratorial fantasy tales, and to alternative realities increasingly unmoored from actual reality. All of this is necessary to generate meaning and value in a situation in which the loss of status takes away the foundations of collectively conferred meaning and value. Regarding the outside world, the fight raises routines of devaluation and discrimination, long practiced when the group was still properly established, to a fever pitch. Thus, the third type of informalization begins to take on a recognizable shape. It is a type of informalization that does not put individualized self-­ restraint in place of collectively enforced behavioral restraints; on the contrary, declining groups under pressure create new, binding forms of behavior required for fortifying the fantasy shield. For the same reason, neither does this type of informalization lead to violent self-abandon (except, perhaps, in the moment of total group disintegration); here, too, the social forms of collective fantasy maintenance continue to keep the individual under constraint. Rather, this third kind of informalization is defined by the prospect of looming decline (which has, in fact, already taken place), which mobilizes a range of affects, including fear, panic, aggression, and resentment, that are necessary for the construction and defense of an ever brittle fantasy shield as well as for the devaluation of those groups (and their characteristics) that have gained in status. While these emotions and affects are regulated in the sense of belonging to a repertoire, they steer against the kind of affect control that characterizes the civilizing process at large. It is the intensification of affect—the cultivation of strong feeling and strong expression—that marks the informal character of this transformation in habitus structure. It hardly needs to be spelled out that these descriptions are largely applicable to the dynamics of Trumpism, ranging from its excessive reliance on conspiracy theories and “alternative facts,” to the invocations of prior greatness (“Make America Great Again”) in the face of decline of status of both the nation as a whole and the standing of the Trump base within it, to the cultivation of strong affects and the readiness to commit violent acts both “reckless and unrealistic.” How, then, do these reflections link back to the aesthetic approach to populism? Informalization, I suggest, describes processes by which collective behavioral patterns undergo transformation. Much like in Bourdieu’s theorization, these habitual patterns do not just constitute specific ways of behaving; they communicate, by way of stylization and affective

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expression, relational differences regarding the position of status. But while in Bourdieu’s thought, economies of distinction demarcate and reproduce status-laden locations in social space, from Elias’s perspective, the changing habitual patterns indexed by the category of informalization do not directly point to the location in social space. Rather, they point to a movement through social space, to rise or decline, and in the case of decline, they do so with an extra layer of mediation. This layer is provided by the shield of fantasy. It is intended to disguise the declining group’s true position and, at the same time, to undo the reality in which the decline must be confronted. It is like claiming you had won an election you have in truth lost, while also claiming that the election was rigged and must not count. Combining Bourdieu and Elias, then, allows us to understand populism as a phenomenon in which the decline of status becomes veiled in such a manner that it can be turned into a symbolic resource of pride. By approaching populism aesthetically, we can begin to analyze the fantasmatic dimension of polarizing politicization. In the attempt to undo and reverse the diminishment of value that has already become a reality, populism embraces loss by placing it behind the shields of fantasy.

References Abramowitz, Alan I. 2018. The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump. New Haven: Yale University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1986. The Forms of Capital. Trans. Richard Nice. In Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.E.  Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press. ———. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre et  al.1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et  al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Canovan, Margaret. 1984. People, Politicians and Populism. Government and Opposition 19: 312–327. ———. 1999. Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies 47: 2–16.

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Elias, Norbert. 1996. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schroeter, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell, Rev ed. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2008. Towards a Theory of Established-Outsider Relations. In The Established and the Outsiders: The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, ed. Cas Wouters, vol. 4, 1–36. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1922. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. J. Strachey. London: International Psycho-Analytical Press. Hetherington, Marc, and Jonathan Weiler. 2018. Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Jäger, Anton. 2019. The Masses Against the Classes, or, How to Talk About Populism Without Talking About Class. Nonsite.org 28. https://nonsite.org/article/ the-­m asses-­a gainst-­t he-­c lasses-­o r-­h ow-­t o-­t alk-­a bout-­p opulism-­w ithout-­ talking-­about-­class. Accessed 25 Jan 2021. Kazin, Michael. 1995. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Klein, Ezra. 2020. Why We’re Polarized. New York: Avid Readers Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1991. Totemism. Trans. Rodney Needham. London: Merlin Press. Lowndes, Joseph. 2017. Populism in the United States. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 232–247. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Majewska, Magda. 2019. Lust und Limit: Der postmoderne Roman und die sexuelle Befreiungsbewegung in den USA. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moore, Robert. 2008. Capital. In Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell, 101–118. Durham: Acumen Press. Ostiguy, Pierre. 2017. Populism: A Socio-Cultural Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 73–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostiguy, Pierre, and Kenneth M. Roberts. 2016. Putting Trump in Comparative Perspective: Populism and the Politicization of the Sociocultural Low. The Brown Journal of World Affairs 23: 25–50.

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Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Saward, Michael. 2006. The Representative Claim. Contemporary Political Theory 5: 297–318. Urbinati, Nadia. 2019. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Voelz, Johannes. 2018. Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 34: 203–228. ———. 2021. Verletzte Formen, Formen der Verletzung: Zur Ästhetik des Populismus. WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 18/1: 141–151. Voelz, Johannes, and Tom Freischläger. 2019. Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 35: 261–286. Warren, Robert Penn. 1946. All the King’s Men. New York: Hartcourt Brace. Weber, Max. 2009. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H.  Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge. Westheuser, Linus. 2020. Populism as Symbolic Class Struggle: Homology, Metaphor, and English Ale. Partecipazione e Conflitto (PACO) 13: 256–283. Wilterdink, Nico. 2017. The Dynamics of Inequality and Habitus Formation: Elias, Bourdieu, and the Rise of Nationalist Populism. Historical Social Research 42: 22–42.

CHAPTER 11

Reading the Social in Photography: Emotional Practices, Power Relations, and Iconography Astrid Franke

Reading a literary or visual text for knowledge about the intricacies of social relations or, vice versa, using sociological tools to understand a work of art invites the charge that this kind of reading will overlook the artistic features who follow their own dynamic and thus produce that excess of meaning which leads to variations of reading between generations and cultures of readers. In other words, it will overlook important characteristics of art. This danger is particularly pertinent when the artistic object is seemingly quite transparent with regard to the rules that govern its composition and the politics it wants to express, as in one of the most famous photographs of the “classic phase” of the Civil Rights Movement by Will Counts.1 1  The phrase is Bayard Rustin’s, a leading figure of the Civil Rights Movement. See Nicole Hirschfelder (2014); Jerald Podair (2008).

A. Franke (*) American Studies, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_11

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Fig. 11.1  Will Counts: “The Scream Image.” September 4, 1957

With people looking away from the camera or being cut off at the margins, the photograph (Fig. 11.1) follows the rules of press photography that create a sense of snapshot rather than a posed picture. Its composition of the diagonal line between the two women moving along it and the emotional intensity stress a skillful choice of the right moment by a photographer who was enrolled in an MA program at Indiana University at the time and would later cite Henri Cartier-Bresson as one of his admired models (cf. Counts et al. 1999, 33). Politically, the photographer and his photograph express sympathy with the black woman whose stoic endurance and respectability, visible in her immaculate dress, came to stand for the nonviolent resistance by early civil rights activists so much admired not just by “Northern liberals” but all over the world—much has been written about what is problematic about this, and I intend to add to this problematization (cf. Squires 2009; Morgan 2006; Berger 2011). But all of this might still be said to be “proclaimed” by the photograph, not

Figure 11.1: do?itemId=P0026600

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/archivesphotos/results/item.

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“betrayed,” to use a distinction Bourdieu made in his “Introduction” to Photography: A Middle-brow Art: Adequately understanding a photograph, whether it is taken by a Corsican peasant, a petit-bourgeois from Bologna, or a Parisian professional, means not only recovering the meaning which it proclaims, that is, to a certain extent, the explicit intentions of the photographer; it also means deciphering the surplus of meaning which it betrays by being part of the symbolism of an age, a class or an artistic group. (Bourdieu et  al. 1981, 6–7, my translation)2

The idea that a work of art betrays through the “symbolism” of socially distinct groups leads to the demand to read with an eye to both art and sociology. The problem here, as in Bourdieu’s reading of photographs in the book, is that if we already know about the group we assume to be relevant to the picture, the readings may merely elaborate on its tastes betrayed by its aesthetic choices. But as research on the photography of the Civil Rights Movement has shown, a lot of groups had stakes in the visual representation of the political protest: the activists themselves, white liberals in the North and in the South, white Southerners opposed to desegregation, Southerners worried about the image of the South, a wider African American public, and so on. The notion of intersectionality that the photograph so clearly calls for further complicates the notion of the symbolic language of one group, and the knowledge that Will Counts was a young white Southern journalist is yet another example of the manifold aspects of a habitus that needs to be unpacked before this knowledge can help to decipher the image. 2  The original reads, “Comprendre adéquatement une photographie, qu’elle ait pour auteur un paysan corse, un petit bourgeois de Bologne ou un professionnel parisien, ce n’est pas seulement reprendre les significations qu’elle proclame, c’est-à-dire, dans une certaine mesure, les intentions explicites de son auteur, c’est aussi déchiffrer le surplus de signification qu’elle trahit en tant qu’elle participe de la symbolique d’une époque, d’une classe ou d’un groupe artistique.” “Significations” may point to Saussure via Barthes and underline a social construction; the opposition between “proclame” and “trahit” also points to Charles S. Pierce: “It is the belief that men betray, and not that which they parade, which has to be studied.” Bourdieu acknowledges Pierce and Dewey in his last lectures on Manet, for instance. Pierre Bourdieu, “Introduction.” Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965), 25. Of course, the urge to look behind what men proclaim to find out what they may want to conceal is a critical attitude fundamental to the humanities and the social sciences alike.

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So in the following, I want to embark on not just a close but a deep and dynamic reading of the above photograph in an attempt to disentangle the symbolic languages used here and the groups that are mainly responsible for it: By deep and dynamic, for lack of better words, I want to acknowledge that the meaning of the picture has not only been produced by aesthetic choices made by Counts but also by Hazel Bryan and Elizabeth Eckford, the two young women focused upon in the picture; further collaborators in the production of meaning are prominent readings drawing attention to different aspects of the photograph; finally, and most importantly, to avoid what Norbert Elias criticized as “process reduction” (Elias 1978, 112), I want to acknowledge that the photograph comes out of an archive of visual language and simultaneously contributes to it as collective memory; as such, photography has to do with emotions, feelings, thoughts, and appreciation which lead to choices as to what is worth storing or forgetting in time. By pushing my reading as far as possible, I hope to be able to arrive at an overlooked aspect of the photograph and also at a demonstration of the different theoretical strands that might contribute to a visual reading of the social.

I The photograph by Will Counts first appeared on September 4, 1957, in a local paper, the Arkansas Democrat, documenting events of the morning. It shows one of nine African American teenagers, Elizabeth Eckford, 15, pursued by an angry mob as she was trying to find an entry into Little Rock High School. One of the most vocal members of that mob is the young woman behind her, Hazel Bryan, also 15. To call the picture iconic points to the fact that it has gained significance and recognition that reaches far beyond that of documenting a particular moment in history: it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; it was commented on by Bill Clinton on its 40th anniversary, and it was named one of the top 100 photographs of the twentieth century by The Associated Press.3 It is used in various didactic contexts, such as “How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration” in the Captured History series (Tougas 2012). The first of these openly didactic representations happened three days later, when the

3  Cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/10/09/news-­photographer-­ will-counts-70-dies/2afcf34b-4de2-462c-84a2-2940e59fad8d/

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photograph was reproduced in a clipped version in the Arkansas Gazette, in a privately sponsored add by one Davis Fitzhugh. Clearly, people see something in that picture; it stirs them, sets them in motion as the picture itself depicts two emotional practices: angry and threatening pursuit by one, and stoic self-control, an attempt not to show fear or anger by the other. To understand emotions as practices and thus connected to doing something (screaming, holding back tears, and walking) underlines the connection between feeling with expression, movement, and attitude of the body. Following Monique Scheer’s lucid elaboration of “emotional practices” and drawing, as she does, on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, this approach also emphasizes “that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical” (Scheer 2012, 193).4 But that does not mean that everyone sees the same thing in that picture. The photograph captures a moment charged with a high degree of tension, but this is not simply transferred across to others. Rather, it prompts different reactions which may name other emotions (naming is an important practice in this context) so that a dialogue ensues about appropriate responses. Here is, for instance, Bill Clinton’s moving description of the photograph on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock High: Forty years ago, a single image first seared the heart and stirred the conscience of our nation: so powerful most of us who saw it then recall it still. A fifteen-year-old girl wearing a crisp black-and-white dress, carrying only a notebook, surrounded by large crowds of boys and girls, men and women, soldiers and police officers, her head held high, her eyes fixed straight ahead. And she is utterly alone. On September 4th, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked to this door for her first day of school, utterly alone. She was turned away by people who were afraid of change, instructed by ignorance, hating what they simply could not understand. America saw her, haunted and taunted for the simple color of her skin, and in the image we caught a very disturbing glimpse of ourselves. (Clinton 1997, 1233)

4  Sara Ahmed and her The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) may come to mind here, too, as a (feminist) theorist emphasizing the relational quality of emotions and the role of the body in cultural practices. For my purposes, Scheer’s term “emotional practices” will be more important as more explicitly tied to practice theories.

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As president of the United States, as a Southerner, and as a gifted orator, Clinton is wise enough to focus almost entirely on Elizabeth. Hazel is not mentioned; she becomes subsumed under “people who were afraid of change,” haunting and taunting Elizabeth and ultimately standing for something abstract: a disturbing flaw in American political life. This reading leaves what is meant to be admiration for Elizabeth, but the repetition of “utterly alone” also contributes to the myth of the female individual in the Civil Rights Movement otherwise exemplified by Rosa Parks. One day she is just tired and does not give up her seat—even a critic like Judith Butler buys into this narrative that sees Parks as acting all on her own and thus as somewhat unpolitical (cf. Butler 1997, 147). In fact, even though no one had foreseen the exact events on that September morning in 1957, if Elizabeth had not been thoroughly coached by both her mother and the president of the local chapter of the NAACP, Daisy Bates, just as Rosa Parks had learned about resistance and activism at the Highlander Folk School and engaged in the NAACP, it seems likely that neither of the women would have withstood the pressure the way they did. Visually, Clinton’s reading is not a misreading, but as the parallel with depictions of Rosa Parks clearly shows, making Elizabeth “alone,” the emotional center of our response is a misreading with political implications. Another reading is provided by David Margolick in 2011, who tried to reconstruct how not only Elizabeth but also Hazel has been marked and scarred by this photograph. Margolick is sensitive to the visual features that make Hazel fascinating: When it comes down to it, Counts’s famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford is really more of Hazel Bryan: it is on Hazel that the eyes land, and linger. Despite the tricky lighting, her face is perfectly exposed: the early morning September sun shines on her like a spotlight. It hits her from the side, painting her face in a stark chiaroscuro that makes it look more demonic still. She’s caught mid-vowel, with her mouth gapingly, ferociously open. At that instant, and in perpetuity, Hazel Bryan, always the performer, has the stage completely to herself. (Margolick 2011, 63)

Margolick’s careful reading with regard to artistic details makes him think that the picture is really about Hazel as a woman seeking public attention: she does not just look furious but fierce, wild like a beast and demonic—as though her fury puts her beyond the ordinary human. This makes him associate the scene with something theatrical, a public performance arising

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from the psyche of an individual woman. A third reading, somewhat related but not identical to Margolick’s, is Fitzhugh’s ad mentioned earlier: “If you live in Arkansas” it read, “study this picture and know shame. When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds a voice, God help us all” (Margolick 2011, 73–74). Fitzhugh had been with the American army in postwar Germany and had, as a lay historian embarking in oral history, started to ask Germans who had witnessed the deportation of Jews, what they had done—or why they had not done anything. This, he later claimed, moved him to sponsor the ad: it focuses on the white woman and again reads her as an expression of something abstract, though of a lesser degree than Clinton: to him, she stands for hate and fanaticism, which is emphasized through Elizabeth as merely a contrasting figure. The contrast elicits emotions Clinton did not name: embarrassment, fear, and shame—not exactly over the existence of hate and bigotry but over its public display. It is not really surprising that the photograph elicits different readings and emotional responses: It is, after all, an explicitly political photograph, but the implicit political situation is complex. It concerns the attempts of civil rights activists to change customs after the law has already been changed. Three years before, the Supreme Court, in its landmark decision of Brown v. the Board of Education, had declared the segregation of schools unconstitutional. The law is on Elizabeth’s side; what the mob insists on is custom that preserves their privilege. The embodiment of the preservation of custom is Hazel, the angry woman. Her head projected forward, eyes in slits, mouth open with teeth visible—her facial expression might come from a textbook in psychology to signify anger, aggression, the threat to use physical force—a facial expression that connects us with related species. The black woman’s face and posture, however, conveys the impression of admirable composure. To understand this as a reversal of racist and sexist expectations, we need to acknowledge the ways in which the legitimacy of open anger, and, more specifically, expectations concerning the control of affect in public are culturally formed and differ between groups that dominate and groups that are dominated. In the idealized self-understanding of white Southerners, their civilized manners are based on their ability for self-control, and this pertains in particular to the control of the sexuality of the white woman, the “Southern Belle,” both by herself and, of course, by white men. In contrast, and to enhance their idealized self-understanding, whites depicted and stereotyped African Americans, both men and women, as lacking self-control, particularly of their sexuality and also of their anger (cf. Bederman 1995,

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46–50; Woodward and Mastin 2005, 270; Rosenthal and Lobel 2016, 416). As Norbert Elias has pointed out, this is a pattern of a power relation between “Established and Outsiders,” a figuration of oppression that can be legitimized through not only race but also gender, ethnicity, religion, and other categories, wherein those in power accuse the oppressed group for their alleged lack of self-control, they are “untrustworthy, undisciplined and lawless”—an accusation that then justifies the control exerted by the dominating group (cf. Elias and Scotson 1994, xxv). The photograph questions two ascriptions simultaneously: Elizabeth’s posture contradicts the stereotype of the sexually loose or erotic or angry black woman, while Hazel questions the stereotype of the white woman in need of protection: fragile, demure, pure, pious, gentle, and so on—to be leading a mob is not part of her role, though being part of it has been, as lynching photographs have shown. But this draws attention to the fact that in the entangled categories of race and gender, chasing a black man would have been a more familiar spectacle, and if the main person chasing would then also have been an angry man, the image could most certainly have elicited tacit approval—it would have been read as documenting the desire of Southern men to protect their daughters and sisters. As it is, there are men in the picture, but they keep to the second row behind the women. In the following, I want to focus particularly on Hazel Bryan and show a certain logic at work in choosing a woman to stand for all those “afraid of change, instructed by ignorance, hating what they simply could not understand.” I do this because although I agree with the claim that Hazel’s portrayal caters to whites who want to see her as the face of racism, I am also interested in how else we may want to read her image, especially from a feminist point of view, taking the intersections of gender, race, and class into account. After all, it is her presence which gives this photograph its particular political and emotional poignancy: a furious woman in pursuit of someone in public is more than just a furious woman5; her anger on public display is seen as inappropriate, but she also elicits a strange fascination in excess of the supposed ugliness and inappropriateness of female anger; the pursuit tickles our curiosity and even desire to see how the pursued party reacts and whether they will be able to escape and what will 5  As opposed to a wife’s “private” pursuit of her husband with a rolling pin, as in so many caricatures, and likewise as opposed to a furious woman not in pursuit, like an image of an angry Nancy Pelosi, for instance.

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happen if they do not—potentially terrible things, one imagines. This ambiguity is produced by a form of “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 2009) we employ in reading this picture which feeds of, but also into, an iconographic tradition and gendered practices, such as dressing, parenting, schooling, and protesting. In other words, many people are able to read the faces and bodies and their expressions in this picture in variations of Clinton’s, Fitzhugh’s, and Margolick’s readings without necessarily knowing why, partly because they may not have the tools to make the reasons explicit. And in the same way, Counts has “had an eye” (Bourdieu 2015, 99, my translation) for a poignant image and the skill to capture it that he did not have to be fully conscious of—let alone explain to a critic.6 I believe a toolbox may be put together by joining ideas about collective memory with sociological aspects underlying repeated (emotional) practices. A suitable way to begin is the collective memory objectified in an iconographic tradition.

II The iconographic tradition using the irritation caused by furious women in pursuit for depicting a conflict between two social formations is that of the Erinyes or Furies, the Greek or Latin words, respectively. For anyone familiar with depictions of these ancient goddesses, the comments by Clinton, Margolis, or Fitzhugh resound with echoes of words attributable to them: haunting and taunting, demonic, ferocious, the mouth gapingly open, with hate unleashed. In Greek myths, they were said to pursue and punish transgressions of the young against the old, of children against parents, hosts to guests—in other words, they protect customs and traditions. In this role, they usually do not play a central role in most narratives; an exception is the Trilogy on Orestes by Aeschylus and here in particular the last of the plays, The Eumenides, another name for the Erinyes. Since the play is the basis for numerous visual depictions of the furies throughout the ages, it helps to know the story line behind it: Clytemnestra has killed her husband for sacrificing her daughter Iphigenie to the gods, and also for cheating on her. Her children Electra and Orest plot to kill 6  Bourdieu has not read Polanyi, as far as I can see. But when he describes a learning process through imitation and the practices of a painter like Manet based on “dispositions,” he is operating with the tacit knowledge acquired through a habitus. Cf. Bourdieu’s “Theory of Dispositions” as a theory of practices in Manet 92–102.

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Clytemnestra in revenge; Orest has doubts but is urged on by Apollo. This is where the Erinyes as a chorus appear and, together with Clytemnestra’s ghost, chase Orest. Unlike kinsmen, the Furies can pursue a murderer beyond the boundary of the polis—their desire for revenge knows no bounds, both literally and metaphorically, and this allows the plot to move from Argos to Delphi, which is where the last play of the trilogy begins, and then to Athens, where Orest is brought by Apoll to stand trial, presided by Athena. As many critics have noted, the major part of the play would have been recognized by contemporaries as a representation of the relatively new form of homicide trials at the Areopag, cast in legal language and rituals (cf. Fuhrer and Hose 2017, 28; Hose 2010, 418–435; Sommerstein 2010, 25; Leão 2010, 40). On the one side is Orest, defended by Apoll, who, as the Erinyes point out, is the actual accused and “entirely responsible” (Aeschylus 2009, 381). The prosecution of the homicide is undertaken by the Furies—at this point in history somewhat dated gods of vengeance who stand in for Clytemnaestra’s kinsmen (cf. Phillips 2008, 62). Thus, both sides have divine sanction and both sides, as the dialogue shows, have valid arguments. For the Erinyes, the murders are not all the same but arranged in the order of increasing transgression: the sacrifice of a daughter is deplorable but understandable within an old divine order believing in human sacrifice. The murder of a husband as revenge of a mother for the killing of her daughter is understandable. But matricide is an entirely different matter! It is the killing of kin whereas the murder of a husband is not “murder of a person of the same blood” (Aeschylus 2009, 383). That the Erinyes are not just a bunch of howling, bloodthirsty women but have to be taken seriously in their argument and legal knowledge needs to be stressed because the beginning of the play depicts them as horrible and “an astonishing troop of women” “– no, I don’t mean women, Gorgons rather” (Aeschylus 2009, 361–363). Their monstrousness is underlined by Apoll: They belong not to Delphi or Athens but with the cruelty of non-Greeks and barbarians, such as the Persians, for instance, with whom the Greeks had been at war. But by the end of the play, the Erinyes, who complain to Athena and Apoll, “you younger gods, you have ridden roughshod over the ancient laws, and taken them out of our hands into your own” (Aeschylus 2009, 457), are integrated into the new order as Eumenides, well-wishers. No household, Athena says, shall flourish without them. At the center of the plot then is the transition of an older social order to a new one and from older to younger gods. Among the

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gods, the transition is made harmoniously and as an aesthetic consequence, the furies are ugly only as long as they clearly stand for a sense of justice that is to be superseded: They are not rejected because they are beastly, cruel women but they are depicted as such because their cause is to be rejected—because they will be losing out to a younger generation and their views, which, at least in this play, are not yet entirely convincing. Aeschylus’s younger contemporary Euripides creatively adapted two more furious female characters in plays named after them, Hekuba and, most famously, Medea, who is related to and sometimes explicitly called an Erinys (cf. Knight 1995, 271; Littlewood 2004, 37). Together with Medusa, a gorgon also compared to the furies (and vice versa), they form a squad of furious women whose memory has survived many centuries until today. As feminists from Susan B. Anthony to Sara Ahmed have been quick to point out: Whenever women’s anger leads them not to subordinate themselves to men, “their heads are cut off” like that of Medusa; conversely; when men wish to cut down or ridicule a woman, they depict her as angry and irrational.7 In the long process of adaptation of classical myths, especially in the visual arts, there is less and less to remind us of the various injustices—the murders, rapes, and betrayals—that caused the women’s fury in the first place. What is usually left are women seeking revenge: Carrying torches, whips or snakes, the furious women follow and scare someone relentlessly in their desire for a kind of justice which is perceived as no longer adequate—partly because we literally lost sight of what caused their anger. It was for feminist artists and scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first century to uncover and rediscover the reasons for their anger because especially in visual representation, these had often disappeared from view, both literally and metaphorically.8 What the iconographic approach reveals is the tradition of depicting an older social order in conflict with a newer one by an angry female figure. A feminist approach to that tradition prompts the uncomfortable question about the cause of her anger. It is uncomfortable because in the case of the photograph, there seem to be obvious answers such as “racism” and “hatred.” If one wishes to refrain from understanding racism as rooted in individual psychology, one should inquire more about Hazel and her expression of anger by understanding the power relations she (and other  Susan B. Anthony quoted in Traister (2018, 52).  Cf. Hélène Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of Medusa” (1976), Carol Ann Duffy’s “Medusa” (1999), or Louise Bogan’s, “Medusa” for only a few examples. 7 8

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women like her) is part of. This investigation needs to be added to the discovery of a tradition of representation to ground the realm of symbols in actual practices by artists, their subjects, and also interpreters of artworks.

III It was Aby Warburg who first suggested concepts that would help explain how bodily forms of emotional expression and the meanings attributed to them could survive from ca. 450 BC, Greece, to 1957 and a moment of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Dismissing biological or “racial” explanations, Warburg (and Maurice Halbwachs) shifted “the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one” (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 125). Warburg and members of his school pointed to the afterlife of antiquity in the fine arts, but also in architecture, advertisements, or the figurine on a Rolls Royce as forms of “objectified memory” that ensure a continuous tacit knowledge of embodied emotional practices. Transitioning from acknowledgment to critique, Jan Assmann writes: “We are indebted to Warburg for emphatically directing attention to the power of objectivation in the stabilizing of cultural memory in certain situations for thousands of years. Yet just as Halbwachs in his treatment of mnemonic functions of objectivized culture, Warburg does not develop the sociological aspects of his pictorial memory” (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 129). This lack of a sociological framework for emotional expression and its representation—or what we may want to call emotional practices—has several consequences that are worthy of critique: In its development of iconographic readings, the method of tracing the meaning of gestures or postures from, say, a Renaissance painting back to antiquity has developed into a kind of scholastic exercise where the art historian, armed with a secret code, can ‘unlock’ the meaning of a painting. In this, Warburg’s readings and Panofsky’s iconography are rather like Saussure’s linguistics or Lévi-­ Strauss’s culture: In all cases, as Bourdieu has pointed out, the scholar assumes that underlying observable surface phenomena (a bodily posture, a spoken sentence, a ritual practice) is a symbolic structure that can be accessed by the scholar through a medium or “code” (Bourdieu Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis 139, quoted in Bourdieu 2015, 155). This code— invisible keys or schemata—allows the scholar to get away from the specificities of the body, the utterance, or the ritual in their situated relations—it

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distances scholars and goes hand in hand with their scholastic disposition or bias. The task for scholars now is not necessarily to reject this in total— as Bourdieu reminds his audience, he himself paved the way for Panofsky’s reception in France by translating Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Bourdieu 2015, 154)—but to distance themselves from the scholastic bias in turn, recognizing its shortcomings, blind spots, and misuses: Of all misunderstandings involving the code, the most pernicious is perhaps the ‘humanist’ misunderstanding, which, through negation, or rather, ‘neutralization’, in the phenomenological sense, of everything which contributes to the specificity of the cultures arbitrarily integrated into the pantheon of ‘universal culture’, tends to represent the Greek or the Roman as a particularly successful achievement of ‘human nature’ in its universality. (Bourdieu 1968, 590–591, n.3)

The reason why the depiction of angry women can be so similar from antiquity to today is, in this mistaken view, that Greek women displayed anger in a universal way which women even nowadays can still relate to because that specific cultural moment in the distant past brought out some anthropological constants, forever copied in subsequent periods in history. It is easy to recognize how this method simultaneously contributes to and is brought forth by a Eurocentric idealization of antiquity as an apex of human civilization. Until today, this supposed exceptional status of Greece and Rome and thus the prestige that comes with knowledge about it serves as upholding social hierarchies, particularly though education. The German “humanistische Gymnasium” or the British public school teaching classical languages as markers of distinction may serve as examples here. An alternative explanation for the persistence of certain images is that they are produced by the same power relations between people that, in turn, generate the same emotional practices. As Bourdieu has argued in Masculine Domination, gender relations are a form of domination that is particularly interesting to study with a view to “the hidden constants” (Bourdieu 2001, 54) of what has not changed over long periods of times: It is indeed astonishing to observe the extraordinary autonomy of sexual structures relative to economic structures, of modes of reproduction relative to modes of production. The same system of classificatory schemes is found, in its essential features, through the centuries and across economic and social differences, at the two extremes of the space of anthropological

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­ ossibles, among the highland peasants of Kabylia and among the upperp class denizens of Bloomsbury. (Bourdieu 2001, 81)

The longevity of masculine domination is, strictly speaking, not due to an absence of change but the result of the work of “eternalizing the arbitrary” (Bourdieu 2001, vii) that keeps the forces of change away from this particular aspect of human relations. This relative stability has made it possible that the myths of antiquity can still seem relevant, even urgently significant to us: When it comes to furious women, what lies behind them are assaults on themselves and their children, molestations and rape, betrayals, abandonments, various humiliations, and illicit love that today’s women can still relate to. What is more, though, is that they can relate to the expectation that they control their anger and do not seem aggressive and certainly do not seek redress or revenge; if they do, they will be dismissed, ridiculed, and regarded as monstrous like the furies. Having examined gender relations in some American female poets’ work on myths, Christa Buschendorf writes: Gender relations are an example of one of those figurations whose change of power-relations has been slow over the centuries. In fact, the change in the balance of power between the sexes has been, at times, unnoticeable. Thus it is the aspect of the stability of gender roles that is reflected in Greek myths, in the stories of love and strife among gods and goddesses, heroines and heroes, handed down to us in innumerable versions. (Buschendorf 1998, 617)9

It is not really surprising that poets and painters, journalists, photographers, and feminists all share the sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit knowledge that the representation of the furious woman still evokes a powerful mix of feelings such as aversion, fascination, perhaps admiration, but also irritation, contempt, embarrassment, or shame. And inasmuch as women have become increasingly part of public life, the representation of

9  As Buschendorf has noted early, Bourdieu’s and Elias’s thinking in terms of power relations—here she uses Elias with regard to gender relations—are quite similar as both are examples of figurational or relational sociology. Others who have noted this are Emirbayer (1997), Dépelteau (2013), Corcuff (2007), or Dunning and Hughes (2013). Buschendorf’s article points to the way this sociological approach might inform the large field of studying the afterlife of antiquity; from there it is but a small step to this article.

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female politicians as angry has also become a political tool of their opponents: Do a Google image search on any of the powerful women in politics or public life, […] and you will turn up scores of photos of Waters and Pelosi, Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren with their mouths open, unrestrained: mid-yell, spittle-flecked, the very act of making a loud noise a sign of their ugly and unnatural personalities. The best way to discredit these women, to make them look unattractive, is to capture an image of them screaming; the act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly. (Traister 2018, 54)10

One reason why twentieth- and twenty-first-century images hark back to ancient symbolic gestures is because, in this case, these gestures arise from the specific power relations between men and women that have remained surprisingly stable underneath all changes. This becomes clearer if we look at images not just from the point of view of recipients but also from that of producers (Bourdieu 2015, 132). Having focused on symbols and ideas, we should now look more directly at the practices of the people involved in making the photograph and, perhaps inadvertently, producing the symbols. There is Will Counts, of course, and the practice of representing angry women, but what produced the photograph was not only Counts’s choice of that moment but also what Elizabeth and Hazel did— and not just at this moment but long before it, as I want to show. For if we can detect patterns in their behavior that are not idiosyncratic but shared with larger groups over time, we may be able to see how the photograph may do both capture a moment in 1957 and yet, at the same time, capture a relationship in a historical process that transcends that moment. It does so not because of some anthropological constants underneath but because of specific power relations with a long history. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on the three most important “producers” of the picture, Elizabeth Eckford, Hazel Bryan, and Will Counts. Of the three, Elizabeth’s preparation for the day is documented best because, as in the case of Rosa Parks, it is an acknowledgment of the Civil 10  Conversely, Sara Ahmed and Soraya Chemaly have suggested to use female anger as a productive and progressive force in politics. There is a whole discourse on female anger now that may have the potential to create an awareness of the trap this emotion presents for women usually. Whether it helps to abolish the trap itself is another question. Cf. Sara Ahmed (2004), Soraya Chemaly (2018), and also Barbara Rosenwein (2020).

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Rights Movement as collective action in which women played a prominent role: It is widely recognized that one of the central figures in the campaign to desegregate Little Rock High School is Daisy Bates, who had been elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP branches in in 1952. She helped select the nine students, approached the families, and coached the teenagers. As such, she is also a conduit for the “politics of respectability,” to be conveyed by excellent grades of the students, dignity of posture and facial expression, and, of course, the impeccable dress, made at home. Bates herself dressed with style, as is visible in the photographs showing her at the March on Washington (cf. Ford 2013, 651). But Elizabeth’s dress with its complicated pattern of plaits does not just signal respectability but also pride and the desire to honor the beginning of school. It expresses an appreciation  of education. According to Margolick, it had been a tradition in the Eckford family to wear new dresses for the beginning of school—this is indeed a routine shared by many American families until today. But in addition, Elizabeth’s mother was a teacher, and, as in so many African American families, a grandparent (Elizabeth’s grandfather) had been important as a model of pride and dignity, encouraging Elizabeth to pursue her dream and go on to college. Where working parents are the norm, the important role of grandparents should not come as a surprise, of course.11 All in all, Elizabeth was encouraged in valuing and honoring education. While the dress is external, the attitude and posture conveying extraordinary self-control is at least as important and something to be taught. Of course, the sunglasses cover part of her face and may hide tears and expressions of fear—after all, what is marching behind her is potentially a lynch mob. However, a quick look at photographs of the faces of African American women who display a similar stoic attitude in the situation of mourning—Mamie Till-Bradley, Coretta King, Myrlie Evers-Williams come to mind—may suggest yet another emotion that is controlled here: anger (cf. Evers-Williams 1999, 49–50). It is the more dangerous emotion in her situation, of course. For centuries, African American parents have tried to prepare their children for encounters with white authorities by teaching them the control of both anger and fear—during the last couple of years, young adult readers have learned about this through reading Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give and its reference to “the talk” (Thomas 2017, 21). Parental guidance and warnings, explicit coaching in  Cf. Christa Buschendorf (2011) on Frederick Douglass’s grandmother.

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nonviolent resistance, a sense of self-worth and even pride, supported by the appropriate dress—all this already helps to cut an admirable figure. A final factor is religion and faith with rituals of prayer, song, and recitation to steel oneself against a hostile environment: Altogether they may help a young black woman to withstand the pressure, maintain an erect posture, and walk slowly, not letting anyone see tears. It does not prevent her from getting hurt, of course. But it contributed to the creation of a picture in which she resists the iconographic tradition wherein the pursued, through flight and open expressions of fear, seems to express guilt over a transgression thus acknowledged. The figure who evokes that tradition, Hazel Bryan, is more difficult to describe in her routines. There is less research on her, and what little there is, is quick to label and arrest her in this moment. Margolick, as stated earlier, believes she is primarily seeking attention through her actions, both on the day captured by the photograph and also, subsequently, when she called Elizabeth, apologized, and urged her to appear with her to promote racial conciliation. He brushes over an earlier suicide attempt as merely self-dramatization of a young woman whose only interest was “boys” (Margolick 2011, 43). In reference to the photograph, the historian Nancy Isenberg writes that Hazel’s is “the face of white trash. Ignorant. Unrepentant. Congenitally Cruel. Only capable of replicating the pathetic life into which she was born” (Isenberg 2016, 247). The last statement is simply not true as Sarah Dustan has pointed out in her review of Isenberg’s book. If Hazel and Elizabeth are contrasted by race and emotional expression, and the contrast is underlined by their common gender, it is also underlined by their common poverty, which plays out differently for the two: Elizabeth’s experiences of oppression did not end with the desegregation of Little Rock High School. For years, she suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder and tried to kill herself several times. She was unemployed and on mental health disability, had her children in foster homes, and basically struggled all her life. Hazel Bryan, though she dropped out of school at 17, got married, and lived in a trailer for a while, subsequently, “[i]n both financial and socio-cultural terms, […] left the poverty associated with white trash behind” (Dustan 2017, 133). One factor in this upward social mobility was her husband, who has had a successful business. It is through him that Hazel, as a white woman, was able to participate in the economic wealth created in the postwar period. Given this well-known way out of poverty for young white women, some of the decisions made by Hazel may be understood as quite sensible.

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In the picture, Hazel stands out because she, too, is dressed up. Her dress is not immodest but tight, stylish, perhaps sexy in the manner of actresses like Monroe or Mansfield, drawing attention to her body. For more homely dresses and hairdos, one may look at the two women to the right of Elizabeth. Hazel is also the only young woman without books in her arm as though she never intended to go to school that day anyways. Another reason she stands out is that the young woman’s face immediately to her left cannot be seen because that woman just turned around—presumably because her father wanted to talk to her (Margolick 2011, 63). This draws attention to the fact that behind the young women is a row of men, at least one of whom is a father apparently looking out for his daughter. Hazel’s father, however, is a disabled war veteran; neither he nor Hazel’s mother had finished high school and obviously neither one looked out for Hazel that day. And so here she is: all dressed up with an emphasis on her body as one of the few assets she possesses. Without external constraints put upon her by a protective father, she does all she can to express and draw attention to herself. There are only rare occasions for poor young women to express anger publicly, though they may have plenty of reasons stemming from the constraints and indignities put upon them as both poor and female—the ratio is even worse for black women, of course. As part of the Southern poor— disparagingly called “white trash” or “crackers” by better-off blacks and whites alike—she is the target of a specific aspect of the American “promise” to whites, a perverse comfort for those who could not make the American dream and rise: the promise that no matter how low they would sink, blacks would always stay below her. In her book on the racial order in the United States as one of “caste,” Isabel Wilkerson enlists a number of social observers who have described the ideological function “race” has had for the exploitation of labor at the bottom of American society. Essentially, it serves to divide those who would otherwise realize their common interests: By the middle of the twentieth century, the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, “has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of ‘skin color’ and ‘white supremacy’ as spiritual nourishment.” Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest

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white.” […] In the midst of the Great Depression, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois observed that working-class white Americans had bought into the compensation of a “public and psychological wage,” as he put it. “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.” They had accepted the rough uncertainties of laboring class life in exchange for the caste system’s guarantee that, no matter what befell them, they would never be on the very bottom. The American caste system, which co-­ opted this class of white workers nearly from the start, “drove such a wedge between black and white workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests” who are “kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interests,” Du Bois wrote. (Wilkerson 2020, 176–177)

All these observations have white men in mind, delicately not mentioning their privilege of possessing and dominating white women as part of the deal, too. There is no such analogous pay-off for white women—they have race alone to feel superior to black men or, less risky, black women. History and literature provide us with a number of ugly examples of how poor white women have thus used the little power they had to pursue, even destroy African Americans, and here particularly men: Ida B. Wells pointed out how consensual love relations turned sour are behind many of the lynchings of young black men; examples of white women accusing black men and even teenagers include 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant accusing Emmett Till of whistling, or Victoria Price and Ruby Bates accusing the Scottsboro Boys of rape, or, as a fictional example, Mariella Ewell making the same accusation about Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. That novel with its careful description of power relations and interactions may help us further to understand what is at stake for poor white women, when the traditional racial order is challenged. Norbert Elias offers a useful description of the particular power relations in the American South by using the racial and class stratifications of the novel’s fictional setting, Maycomb, to elaborate on his model of Established and Outsider relations. Basically, his analysis aligns with those listed above by Wilkerson, but he adds an important clarification: In the eyes of the citizens of Maycomb, blacks and whites form their own hierarchies of respectability and class that exist side by side but do not merge into one social formation. And so it is possible that the respectable fictional Tom Robinson and the scholarly ambitious Elizabeth Eckford, though both poor, rank quite highly in their respective black

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communities, whereas Hazel and the fictional Mariella live close to the bottom of their respective white communities. But Mariella and Hazel can draw some comfort and self-respect from their views that the segregated social universe of black people as a whole is below them (cf. Elias [1990] 2008, 207). This is why desegregation can plausibly be regarded as a threat to one of the few sources of self-worth and feelings of superiority that a poor, young white woman—more so than a poor, young white man—might have. The more these social formations merge, the more likely it seems that someone like Elizabeth might rise above Hazel in social standing and income. Hazel is no sociologist, of course. From what we know about her subsequent statements as a teenager, she was not particularly articulate even about her racist ideas. But her anger is about a change which she senses will mean a loss to her, and though we may want to disagree with the notion of a zero-sum game where one woman’s gain must be another woman’s loss, and though we know now that her fear actually did not come to pass, a feminist awareness might at least prepare us to acknowledge that her anger had a dimly felt reason. One irony of the photograph is that she is already visually competing with someone she does not want to compete with, and, in the eyes of many, she is already losing. Will Counts, as a Southerner, undoubtedly had a deep-seated understanding of the intricate drama unfolding in front of his eyes and his camera. He knows about the Southern Belle, the angry black woman, or a lynch mob not only as literary stereotypes or historical figures but as lived experiences and expectations some of which are, in this case, reversed. That is, he understood not only the obvious political relevance of the situation but also the ways it is related to history and the processes the power relations have been undergoing. At the time, Counts lived in Little Rock which undoubtedly helped him to mingle in the crowd and find the best possible angle to shoot from. As an experienced white male press photographer, a student in an MA program on visual communication, and an admirer of Henri Cartier Bresson, his framing of the situation is guided by recognizable principles. The value of the press photograph lies in the capture of a “special moment,” possibly a symbolic moment with one dominant meaning often achieved by cutting; nevertheless, it should never appear staged but, rather like a lucky snapshot of a dynamic situation, characterized by movement; people might be cut off on the margins, turn away, or be out of focus to further underline the authenticity as opposed to staged character of the scene (cf.

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Boltanski 1981). As a white man sympathizing with the civil rights movement, Counts, like many of his colleagues, focused on the passive resistance of African American activists, trying to create a dignified image of them as suffering the violence of whites—as Berger has shown, this and the tendency to read the images accordingly, made the images “nonthreatening to whites” and contributed to a lack of tolerance for more active forms of resistance (cf. Berger 2011, 7). But Counts thus also contributed to an archive that made white people visible, as did Frank Blackwell with his famous photograph of the sit-in at the Woolworth Lunch Counter some six years later, where teenagers poured condiments over the heads of three activists.12 A notable difference between these photographs is that the aggression at the lunch counter comes from men only, whereas Counts here focuses on young women. This is partly because the men wisely stayed a bit behind and partly because there is a vague eroticism of the display of wild fury that is especially fascinating for the male gaze—is, indeed, ‘meant’ to be seen by males—not in the sense of individual intention but inasmuch as women are socialized into routines of being on display: Everything in the genesis of the female habitus and in the social conditions of its actualization combines to make the female experience of the body the limiting case of the universal experience of the body-for-others, constantly exposed to the objectification performed by the gaze and the discourse of others. (Bourdieu 2001, 63)

I already pointed out that no one, particularly no man, needs to have an education in art history or the classics to be vaguely attracted, even excited, by an angry young woman in pursuit of another. Counts does not have to have an academic understanding of the emotional power of this moment; what is important is that he has the tacit knowledge and the technical skill to capture what Elizabeth and Hazel have themselves been prepared for and thus prepared for him to see.

 Cf. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM2381

12

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IV Following Warburg, Hazel’s face and body posture may remind us of some archaic experience: In her hand she holds not a torch but a paper; she follows Elizabeth and screams at her; and she is not naked but is read as displaying naked aggression. What Hazel stands for is not simply hatred but a thirst for revenge for an unknown assault, a relentless pursuit that is meant to restore justice but is usually impotent to do so: Times have changed, and while the cause may once have been justified to pursue, it is so no longer. What Counts recognized and felt is that Hazel and Elizabeth are subject to forces much larger than themselves: They act individually and decide which dress to wear for instance, but these decisions are part of routines, sometimes developed over centuries, specific to their race, class, and gender. This partly explains the fascination with the photograph; another reason it has attracted so much attention is that it gave some people what they wanted to believe, namely that racism was on the way out. While superficially the picture documents the resistance to integration on a particular day at a particular place, through its iconographic allusions it makes a much larger claim about history. It makes this claim through a complex aesthetic and emotional structure, centering on two women who dramatize a confrontation of tradition with a new social order. The old is embodied in the embarrassing but fascinating figure of the angry woman in pursuit who is thus marked as inappropriate. She may be at the center of attention for the moment, but she is on the losing side of history. For this era to be pushed aside, it has to be presented as a woman, leaving men out or at the margin of the picture, so to speak. If you agree with this interpretation, then we also need to critically reexamine its ideological import. The picture is distorting in a number ways: First, the image is misleading because by representing a racist social order by an angry woman, it suggests that racism has a face and a voice that may be recognizable, indeed, visible. As we are now beginning to understand, while throughout the 1950s and 1960s an all-too-visible kind of racism became embarrassing and considered inappropriate, Americans began to update racist practices like segregation as a means to keep African Americans away from valuable resources by subtler means. One example of achieving segregation with indirect and systemic means is city planning, as explained in Benjamin Houston’s The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City. While lunch counters

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and schools were desegregated, Nashville’s city planners destroyed a thriving African American community clustered near Fisk University and a prestigious African American Medical School, bordering on Tennessee State University. By building highways cutting through that area, they created a form of segregation that is efficient and sustainable but less easy to detect than a law explicitly stating it. Second, the history of racism is not primarily women’s history, with men standing on the sidelines or in the second row, as in this photograph. Racism, too, is gendered, and this does not only pertain to its victims but also to its agents and perpetrators, as this photograph shows. In contrast to Aeschylus’s tragedy, the photograph does not give us a central view of a white man who will emerge as a benefactor of a confrontation between women, and this makes it more difficult to understand the complex figuration of power underlying the drama in front of us. There is a last way—a tragic one—in which this picture and its iconographic tradition is belied by history. In the visual depiction of relentless pursuit, revenge is never carried through. But in 2003, one of Eckford’s sons was shot by the police: he had pointed and shot a rifle at them—possibly a “suicide by cop,” Elizabeth said (Margolick 2011, 261). His death through state violence, like so many other, similar ones, belies the idea that the fury and the old order she stood for—one where white supremacy is upheld by the ancient means of physical violence—was on its way out in 1957.

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Index1

A Aesthetics, 2–5, 7, 19, 21n11, 28n22, 39, 40, 45–47, 45n45, 49, 56, 57, 62–63, 70, 73, 74, 82, 96, 102, 120, 125, 154, 210, 212n3, 226, 229, 230, 236–240, 242–244, 246–251, 261, 262, 269, 280 Affect, see Emotion B Bendix, Reinhard, 5, 6, 133–150 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13–50, 56, 56n2, 57, 80–102, 144, 156, 157, 159, 164, 193, 193n9, 233–256, 261, 261n2, 263, 267, 267n6, 270–273, 272n9, 279 Masculine Domination, 3, 120n13, 271

Rules of Art, 120n13 Sketch for Self-Analysis, 123 C Capitalism, 5, 24, 32, 206, 208, 212–214, 225 Class, see Social status E Elias, Norbert, 3, 4, 13–50, 135, 154, 205–230, 233–256, 262, 266, 272n9, 277, 278 The Civilizing Process, 36, 37n31, 37n32, 41n36, 207, 207n2, 208 The Established and the Outsiders, 249, 251, 253–256 Ellison, Ralph, 4, 6, 7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Franke et al. (eds.), Reading the Social in American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1

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INDEX

Emotion, 5, 7, 22, 23, 37n31, 42, 44, 48, 59n5, 60, 110, 110n6, 112, 114, 116, 121, 127, 165, 208, 210, 216, 238, 239, 250–252, 254, 255, 262, 263, 263n4, 265, 273n10, 274 F Field academic, 156, 164 literary, 18, 18n8, 46, 50, 57, 122 G Gender, 7, 14, 120, 169, 187, 206, 213, 214n5, 221, 227, 266, 269, 271, 272, 272n9, 275 Goffman, Erving, 3, 180, 181, 183, 192 H Habit, 3, 4, 6, 23n14, 29, 55–75, 90, 92, 95 Habitus, 6, 20, 20n10, 22, 23, 24n16, 28–31, 28n22, 33, 36, 40, 45, 49, 90–94, 111, 121, 121n14, 123, 123n20, 124, 124n21, 124n22, 126, 127, 164–165, 207, 224, 230, 243, 244, 248n3, 251, 255, 261, 263, 267n6, 279 split, 4, 6, 8, 124, 126, 127, 144, 157, 164; cleft, divided, 6, 123, 123n21, 124, 126, 127, 157 Hornbacher, Marya, 5, 189, 194, 196 I Illusio, 4, 6, 115, 115n9, 116, 119, 127, 243

J James, Henry, 3, 4, 34, 43, 47, 58, 59n5, 61–64, 61n8, 63n12, 68n19, 69, 71, 72n22, 73, 74, 80–102 James, William, 3, 4, 42n37, 58–62, 60n6, 64, 68–70, 73, 73n24, 74, 95 K Knowledge literary, 7, 8 sociological, 3, 5, 7, 8 M Manners, 2, 23, 26n20, 43, 43n40, 58, 62, 63, 69, 69n20, 95, 206n1, 239, 241, 251, 252, 256, 265 P Palahniuk, Chuck, 5, 205–230 Performance, 5, 7, 34, 92, 116, 236, 237, 241 Photography, 259–281 Populism, 5, 7, 230, 233–256 Proust, Marcel, 58, 59n5, 71–74, 71n21, 72n22, 73n23, 74n25, 74n27 R Race and racism, 26n19, 67, 116, 118, 127, 128, 171, 187, 191, 194, 210, 234, 235, 247–249, 266, 269, 275–277, 280, 281 Recognition, 4, 13–50, 72, 108, 110n6, 115n9, 146, 158, 243

 INDEX 

S Social status, 15, 17n4, 17n5, 18, 20, 22, 23, 23n14, 27, 29, 34, 37, 45, 47, 48, 64, 67, 68, 87, 96, 100, 101, 113, 120n12, 155, 163–166, 168–170, 187, 193n9, 234, 235, 242, 244–247, 250, 252, 275–277 Sociological autobiography, 5, 134, 149 Sociological imagination, 133–150 Sociology, figurational, 1, 126, 127, 233, 234, 236, 272n9 Sociology, implicit, 84, 85, 94, 98, 99, 102, 133–139, 149

Sociology, relational see Sociology, figurational Stigma, 108, 177–198 V Vance, J.D., 4–6, 153–172 Violence, 2, 4, 29, 30n23, 42, 68, 107, 108, 110–113, 112n7, 116, 118–121, 120n12, 123, 123n19, 124, 124n22, 127, 128, 159, 160, 169, 205, 206, 209, 215, 217, 253, 254, 281

287