The omnivorous theory is the main thesis of Shamus Khan in this book “Privilege”. It’s not just about liking/enjoying a large spectrum of low/high culture, but being able to act comfortably and relaxed along the gamut. E.g. “eating taco bell after watching the met opera”
There's a lot of debate in sociology about this. One theory seems to be that since the 1960s there was a cultural shift away from Bourdieu's "pure form" culture toward omnivorism basically because what was previously upper-class culture become too easy to for everyone else to access and master. The "solution" was for the upper-class to shift into something that's even harder to understand and imitate.
I wonder how much of that shift is due to the decoupling of price/accessibility and quality. When those are tightly coupled "more expensive" means "better", but when they are separate being able to signal how smart you are by saying "The more expensive one isn't as good as this clever super cheap one I found" becomes an option. Status based on knowing actual quality instead of just signals of quality, I suppose.
I think this could go two ways: 1. is the omnivore theory, the second might go along the lines of Veblen's conspicuous consumption, just in cultural sense. Since most of culture - high or low-brow - is kind of easily accessible (internet, generally lower costs of culture than in the past?, etc.) - people who can afford it will gravitate toward most ridiculous artsy stuff, because the mid-brow stuff now spans almost the entire spectrum. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such artistic heights, which means I'm a cultural plebeian I guess.
I also wonder if this might have to do with the influence of American culture globally. There is a classic New Left essay that I can't find now on how historically in America high culture and low culture continually mixed --- think Shakespeare in Wild West saloons. What would differentiate elites in such a circumstance would be breadth, not pure differentiation. And if this trend spread (say, post-WW2 to other Western nations), we might see the 1990s sociologists disagreeing with Bourdieau.
This made me think of the cake walk. A traditional dance created by African-American Slaves, co-opted by upper class whites, reinvented and co-opted again by American Slaves. Or for a more modern take David Chang taking a hot dog and turning it into a Michelin star dish. There's something about taking expectations and creating friction that capitalizes on assumptions, so not necessary breadth but inherent bias.
Is "scarcity" or "cost of acquisition" the relevant variable here? If it's easy to imitate upper-class culture (for example, the distribution cost of opera went to 0 thanks to YouTube and Spotify), then it's no longer upper-class because there's a finite amount of high-status stuff to go around around. Instead, now upper-class becomes some other hard to acquire thing - oh, check out this didgeridoo player from an Indigenous person in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia that I just discovered.
The difficulty of accessing the thing is a good way to determine if it could become upper-class/high-status. Hope you're able to pick some sense out of the word jumble I put up.
Yes, this whole topic seems like fertile ground for neuroticism. It's good to think about, but you probably don't want to think about it *too* much, because it's not really possible to "rise above" it and if you try you'll sort of drive yourself insane.
Had a mother from a nice mid-family (still do in a way) who was obsessed with being part of high society, so she married my father whose family was ye olde city builder, engineer-style. She went to the opera but dad hated it (she would sniff slightly at Puccini and suggest Wagner).
Point is, with all her efforts at raising cultured children, all of us ended up severely struggling with the meaninglessness of existence and have avoided the culture trap.
Rather than force culture upon our children we moved to a European country which still has their culture mostly intact. It's an extraordinary contrast to the english-speaking countries. I just have them reading a lot and following innate talents.
And... fwiw there are a few computer-music guys who are LEGENDS in the headphones.
Very interesting story, thanks for sharing! But just to make sure I understand—do I understand correctly that you're saying and your siblings struggled with the meaninglessness of existence as a consequence that you were raised in a culture that itself didn't have a lot of, uh, culture? And that the issue is that it "takes a village"? (At first, I thought you might be saying that your mother's efforts were somehow harmful or counterproductive, so I just wanted to be sure.)
Nothing against music made with computers BTW—I love music made with computers!
The greater culture (in a small, mostly wealthy city) was a culture of sports, theatre and outdoor pursuits, that's all fine; but it was like being strung up between two worlds where anything cultured was a token of ableism. We were taught the old traditions; formal manners, details in dress, speech, habit etc., but it became a liability. There was too much hypocrisy in what we were being taught and what we were seeing, and this is very difficult to explain!
We lived the old British model with the hard-core communist manifesto stealth-bombing the psyche from a place just out of sight. So we all bailed in our own ways.
I couldn't see how my traditional parents version of life could work in the world that was coming through, and really, it can't.
Cultural traditions inflicted from a dying culture. Tradition is being overhauled, I'm all for it in some ways. I don't regret the information, though we're basically ascetics now.
Thanks, all that sort of stuff will come next year. This year I have to get the technical foundation stuff down. It's a total slog. Appreciate the vote though. :)
This hypothesis of classism would appear to extend to the far-left "woke" and far-right "MAGA" classes of ideological identities.
Ideology has arguably always been a dimension of class, but what seems to be distinctive in our current political-classist sorting is that the presumably high-class "woke-sim" has effectively shut down debate over the power of their ideas, replacing debate with ideological certainty that "the system" is far more powerful than any specific evidence that might be brought to bare.
Whereas the MAGA right-wingers are more organized around a proletariat-class rebelling against this high-political-class argument that "system" is rigged, and therefore direct their ideological fervor exclusively on the anecdotes and exceptions that disprove the rule.
"Thus, in the dominant class, the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels […] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for beautiful photography."
thanks for writing this post. i picked up one of bourdeiu's books during the one semester i spent at harvard out of feeling very inept at keeping up with the kinds of things people were into and talking about. i could never actually get myself to read it and was really happy to see this post :)
it seems impossible to avoid getting drawn into at least one of these cultural signaling games because we're all embedded (consciously or not) into some social construct that's not entirely under our control (otherwise it just gets really, really lonely). i think i've been through several of these and have noticed a couple things:
1. there tends to be some haterade for the cuture/class just adjacent to you but "lower". its the group you tend to have more exposure to and try to distinguish yourself from. i noticed this working in int'l development where there were these fairly high class people trying to connect to lower class folks on high class culture stuff. the lower class folks were mostly just interested in middle class stuff (wwf, mma, rick ross) but often felt some weird pressure to speak to other things like charles dickens, philsophy and whatever else. i think upper class people end up having some fascination for lower class culture (they can't access) and some distaste for middle class culture which is more or less what the lower class people strive towards. middle class love the upper class and often have a fair bit of distaste for the lower. this is all captured in the stuff they are into.
2. the infinite level of nuance and/or taste diversity in the upper classes can suffer from some serious diminishing returns and start to feel pretty arbitrary. different for the sake of being different. after going through several of these phases and still feeling empty inside it was sort of a relief for me to re-embrace pragmatic/practical needs (food/water/shelter). obviously those were not constraints i faced but turned towards addressing those constraints for others.
Cool. Kind of want to read more about this myself.
Recently, while talking about some mundane chores with my wife, I had a rare moment of clarity and realized that a whole bundle of my moral intuitions around hard work, "eating everything you're served", "acts of service", etc. are all suspiciously well-tailored to functioning well with a low middle class income, which I grew up in. It even strikes me that a lot of this framework holds legacy features that likely come from the much poorer class of my grandparents.
Thanks for tying that insight into a much broader context.
Man whenever I see reviews of these older critiques on class vis a vis "taste" I always feel insane that nobody ever seems to think "people with more money can do more things and have more options and so will naturally have different preferences, guy with 40 choices is gonna have different preferences from guy with 5 choices" and was ready to despair again here until we got to the omnivore part which at least gets most of the way there.
I recently told my wife that we need to be able to enjoy middlebrow culture, food, and so on. I can't quite recall how I arrived at that conclusion. I may just be trying to signal more culture omnivore upper class status, or I may be instinctively recoiling from any suggestion that I have to act a certain way. I think it's the latter, but once you get into the funhouse of mirrors, it's hard to tell!
The whole thing is pretty confounded by the fact that once you get into something, it tends to become interesting. Even baseball (I hear).
I don't think you are right about 'Black English' being associated with the working class in the US--Black English is associated with some segments of the Black population, and with a certain fraction of upperclass whites who introduce snippets of it into their normal upperclass speech, because they think it is cool. I don't think it is used by the working class at all, except ironically-- and that the working class would consider actual use of it as an indication of socially undesirability.
The omnivorous theory is the main thesis of Shamus Khan in this book “Privilege”. It’s not just about liking/enjoying a large spectrum of low/high culture, but being able to act comfortably and relaxed along the gamut. E.g. “eating taco bell after watching the met opera”
There's a lot of debate in sociology about this. One theory seems to be that since the 1960s there was a cultural shift away from Bourdieu's "pure form" culture toward omnivorism basically because what was previously upper-class culture become too easy to for everyone else to access and master. The "solution" was for the upper-class to shift into something that's even harder to understand and imitate.
I wonder how much of that shift is due to the decoupling of price/accessibility and quality. When those are tightly coupled "more expensive" means "better", but when they are separate being able to signal how smart you are by saying "The more expensive one isn't as good as this clever super cheap one I found" becomes an option. Status based on knowing actual quality instead of just signals of quality, I suppose.
I think this could go two ways: 1. is the omnivore theory, the second might go along the lines of Veblen's conspicuous consumption, just in cultural sense. Since most of culture - high or low-brow - is kind of easily accessible (internet, generally lower costs of culture than in the past?, etc.) - people who can afford it will gravitate toward most ridiculous artsy stuff, because the mid-brow stuff now spans almost the entire spectrum. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such artistic heights, which means I'm a cultural plebeian I guess.
I also wonder if this might have to do with the influence of American culture globally. There is a classic New Left essay that I can't find now on how historically in America high culture and low culture continually mixed --- think Shakespeare in Wild West saloons. What would differentiate elites in such a circumstance would be breadth, not pure differentiation. And if this trend spread (say, post-WW2 to other Western nations), we might see the 1990s sociologists disagreeing with Bourdieau.
This made me think of the cake walk. A traditional dance created by African-American Slaves, co-opted by upper class whites, reinvented and co-opted again by American Slaves. Or for a more modern take David Chang taking a hot dog and turning it into a Michelin star dish. There's something about taking expectations and creating friction that capitalizes on assumptions, so not necessary breadth but inherent bias.
Is "scarcity" or "cost of acquisition" the relevant variable here? If it's easy to imitate upper-class culture (for example, the distribution cost of opera went to 0 thanks to YouTube and Spotify), then it's no longer upper-class because there's a finite amount of high-status stuff to go around around. Instead, now upper-class becomes some other hard to acquire thing - oh, check out this didgeridoo player from an Indigenous person in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia that I just discovered.
The difficulty of accessing the thing is a good way to determine if it could become upper-class/high-status. Hope you're able to pick some sense out of the word jumble I put up.
Somewhat unrelated, but whenever I hear about signaling and counter-signaling I am reminded of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Yes, this whole topic seems like fertile ground for neuroticism. It's good to think about, but you probably don't want to think about it *too* much, because it's not really possible to "rise above" it and if you try you'll sort of drive yourself insane.
Had a mother from a nice mid-family (still do in a way) who was obsessed with being part of high society, so she married my father whose family was ye olde city builder, engineer-style. She went to the opera but dad hated it (she would sniff slightly at Puccini and suggest Wagner).
Point is, with all her efforts at raising cultured children, all of us ended up severely struggling with the meaninglessness of existence and have avoided the culture trap.
Rather than force culture upon our children we moved to a European country which still has their culture mostly intact. It's an extraordinary contrast to the english-speaking countries. I just have them reading a lot and following innate talents.
And... fwiw there are a few computer-music guys who are LEGENDS in the headphones.
Very interesting story, thanks for sharing! But just to make sure I understand—do I understand correctly that you're saying and your siblings struggled with the meaninglessness of existence as a consequence that you were raised in a culture that itself didn't have a lot of, uh, culture? And that the issue is that it "takes a village"? (At first, I thought you might be saying that your mother's efforts were somehow harmful or counterproductive, so I just wanted to be sure.)
Nothing against music made with computers BTW—I love music made with computers!
The greater culture (in a small, mostly wealthy city) was a culture of sports, theatre and outdoor pursuits, that's all fine; but it was like being strung up between two worlds where anything cultured was a token of ableism. We were taught the old traditions; formal manners, details in dress, speech, habit etc., but it became a liability. There was too much hypocrisy in what we were being taught and what we were seeing, and this is very difficult to explain!
We lived the old British model with the hard-core communist manifesto stealth-bombing the psyche from a place just out of sight. So we all bailed in our own ways.
I couldn't see how my traditional parents version of life could work in the world that was coming through, and really, it can't.
Cultural traditions inflicted from a dying culture. Tradition is being overhauled, I'm all for it in some ways. I don't regret the information, though we're basically ascetics now.
Not sure if it's too personal, but consider writing a post telling this story in detail—I'd love to read it!
Thanks, all that sort of stuff will come next year. This year I have to get the technical foundation stuff down. It's a total slog. Appreciate the vote though. :)
>I’ll just admit—to me, the everyone-is-oppressed-by-everyone-else discourse sometimes seems a bit unhinged.
This is the point I'd most like to explore more. Especially straight white men.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/04/the-male-victimhood-complex.html
For what it's worth, I'd like to discourage comments here with this kind of tone.
Deleted. Apologies.
This hypothesis of classism would appear to extend to the far-left "woke" and far-right "MAGA" classes of ideological identities.
Ideology has arguably always been a dimension of class, but what seems to be distinctive in our current political-classist sorting is that the presumably high-class "woke-sim" has effectively shut down debate over the power of their ideas, replacing debate with ideological certainty that "the system" is far more powerful than any specific evidence that might be brought to bare.
Whereas the MAGA right-wingers are more organized around a proletariat-class rebelling against this high-political-class argument that "system" is rigged, and therefore direct their ideological fervor exclusively on the anecdotes and exceptions that disprove the rule.
This quite enjoyable documentary comes to mind
https://youtu.be/TCI7KvYi1m0?si=5dsGDWju0l9CmKiX
Your comics are beautiful by the way!
"Thus, in the dominant class, the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels […] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for beautiful photography."
In short: the midwit meme rules supreme.
I used to just think I had eclectic tastes. But now I learn that that I'm actually an upper class cultural omnivore. Cool!
Now that I realize I'm a member of the upper class, what do I get?
thanks for writing this post. i picked up one of bourdeiu's books during the one semester i spent at harvard out of feeling very inept at keeping up with the kinds of things people were into and talking about. i could never actually get myself to read it and was really happy to see this post :)
it seems impossible to avoid getting drawn into at least one of these cultural signaling games because we're all embedded (consciously or not) into some social construct that's not entirely under our control (otherwise it just gets really, really lonely). i think i've been through several of these and have noticed a couple things:
1. there tends to be some haterade for the cuture/class just adjacent to you but "lower". its the group you tend to have more exposure to and try to distinguish yourself from. i noticed this working in int'l development where there were these fairly high class people trying to connect to lower class folks on high class culture stuff. the lower class folks were mostly just interested in middle class stuff (wwf, mma, rick ross) but often felt some weird pressure to speak to other things like charles dickens, philsophy and whatever else. i think upper class people end up having some fascination for lower class culture (they can't access) and some distaste for middle class culture which is more or less what the lower class people strive towards. middle class love the upper class and often have a fair bit of distaste for the lower. this is all captured in the stuff they are into.
2. the infinite level of nuance and/or taste diversity in the upper classes can suffer from some serious diminishing returns and start to feel pretty arbitrary. different for the sake of being different. after going through several of these phases and still feeling empty inside it was sort of a relief for me to re-embrace pragmatic/practical needs (food/water/shelter). obviously those were not constraints i faced but turned towards addressing those constraints for others.
Cool. Kind of want to read more about this myself.
Recently, while talking about some mundane chores with my wife, I had a rare moment of clarity and realized that a whole bundle of my moral intuitions around hard work, "eating everything you're served", "acts of service", etc. are all suspiciously well-tailored to functioning well with a low middle class income, which I grew up in. It even strikes me that a lot of this framework holds legacy features that likely come from the much poorer class of my grandparents.
Thanks for tying that insight into a much broader context.
Man whenever I see reviews of these older critiques on class vis a vis "taste" I always feel insane that nobody ever seems to think "people with more money can do more things and have more options and so will naturally have different preferences, guy with 40 choices is gonna have different preferences from guy with 5 choices" and was ready to despair again here until we got to the omnivore part which at least gets most of the way there.
I recently told my wife that we need to be able to enjoy middlebrow culture, food, and so on. I can't quite recall how I arrived at that conclusion. I may just be trying to signal more culture omnivore upper class status, or I may be instinctively recoiling from any suggestion that I have to act a certain way. I think it's the latter, but once you get into the funhouse of mirrors, it's hard to tell!
The whole thing is pretty confounded by the fact that once you get into something, it tends to become interesting. Even baseball (I hear).
I thought there would be some mention of the empirical law of double jeopardy after reading “Unlike people who buy stuff based on marketing” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_(marketing)#:~:text=Double%20jeopardy%20is%20an%20empirical,and%20also%20lower%20brand%20loyalty.
I don't think you are right about 'Black English' being associated with the working class in the US--Black English is associated with some segments of the Black population, and with a certain fraction of upperclass whites who introduce snippets of it into their normal upperclass speech, because they think it is cool. I don't think it is used by the working class at all, except ironically-- and that the working class would consider actual use of it as an indication of socially undesirability.