Status and Culture (Marx, W. David)
How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
Marx, W. David. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Penguin Publishing Group, 2022.
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction: The Grand Mystery of Culture and the Status Taboo
As with the moptop and thousands of the other micro social movements we call trends, humans hop en masse from one set of arbitrary practices to another, for elusive reasons.
From this perspective cultural change appears bizarre. What were Stu and his imitators hoping to accomplish with a moptop? What changed their taste? Neither evolutionary biology nor economics can explain this behavior—
A recent book trying to explain the mechanics of taste concluded by raising a white flag, dismissing changes over time as a “random walk” akin to the stock market’s short-term fluctuations.
“viral contagion,”
And when we examine the history of cultural change, there are clear patterns in how humans move from one practice to another.
The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise.
there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans
the Japanese street fashion brand A Bathing Ape amassed its cultlike fan base through a counterintuitive marketing strategy of hard-to-find stores, undersupplied products, and no advertising.
theories and case studies to explain how culture works as a system and why culture changes over time, I realized that there was one key concept that links everything together—and that is status.
an individual’s position in an informal ranking of social importance.
Thorstein Veblen’s writings about conspicuous consumption in the Gilded Age,
We’ll gain new clarity on old questions of taste, authenticity, identity, class, subcultures, art, fashion, fads, media influence, retro, and canons.
the changes to the status structure are conspiring against the widespread adoption of new cultural trends at the same frequency we experienced in the twentieth century.
how status and culture function as a system.
Grand Mystery of Culture, which we’ll break into three parts:
Why do individuals cluster around arbitrary behaviors and take deep meaning from them?
How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities emerge?
Why do we change behaviors over time, and why do some behaviors persist?
We come here to deconstruct status, not to praise it.
Part One: Status and the Individual
Chapter One: The Basics of Status
four crucial lessons
First, status denotes a position within a social hierarchy based on respect and perceived importance.
second lesson from Lassie is that every status position comes with specific rights and duties, with the most desirable benefits accruing to those at the top.
The third lesson from Lassie is that status is bestowed by others.
final lesson. Our status position is always contextual, based on how we are treated in a particular time and place.
hierarchies “are a human invention to manage social situations.”
we care more about higher relative income than absolute income.
70 percent of research subjects would give up a silent raise in salary for a more impressive job title.
Jordan Peterson points to hierarchies in lobster communities as proof that humans evolved an “unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings” that “monitors exactly where you are positioned in society.”
we need some form of superior treatment to perceive the esteem.
After I began winning tournaments, I told the same jokes, and all of a sudden, people thought they were funny.”
“status syndrome” to describe the poor health of people at the bottom of the status hierarchy.
common psychological malaise known as status panic, status tension, or status anxiety.
Status is zero-sum.
There may be decreasing marginal utility for money and power, but achieving status makes us want more.
“People are more attracted to relationships, groups, and communities in which they would have reasonably high status rather than those in which they would be low status.”
Research has shown that local status is more important to personal happiness than global status,
Status envy is a common source of conflict in multiethnic states.
“Society,” writes Daniel Miller, “is not to be understood in terms of a simple hierarchy, but as a continual struggle over the hierarchy of hierarchies.”
Four important principles emerge from the internal logic of status hierarchies:
Status maximization: We desire high status and fear low status.
Status achievement: We can modify our status through talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
Status integrity: We should not claim more status than we deserve.
Status mobility: We can choose to move ourselves to new social contexts that better value our talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
Chapter Two: Conventions and Status Value
more elementary requirement to gain status: conformity to group norms.
first major intersection between status and culture:
arbitrary denotes choices where an alternative could serve the same purpose.
once we settle on a particular behavior, we no longer see our decisions as arbitrary.
Our brains provide us with post facto rationalizations for our arbitrary acts.
To illuminate the relationship between status and culture, we must become experts in conventions. They are the “molecules” in the chemistry of culture—
And from whence do conventions draw their power? Status. We ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval
We learn conventions from our family and friends through the chameleon effect, where we unconsciously mimic our peers in body movements and speech.
This process converts conventions into habits.
In eighteenth-century France, carriages drove on the left, but the leaders of the French Revolution switched traffic to the right as a “democratic” rejection of the ancien régime.
Humans become very susceptible to the is-ought fallacy—
Paradigm describes these macro-conventions—the underlying beliefs of a group that set the overall rules for permissible actions, offer guideposts in times of uncertainty, and build the frameworks for understanding and explanation.
there are always political dimensions to who starts a convention and who maintains it. “Norms of partiality” benefit one group over another.
culture “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”
conventions are the individual units of culture.
Grand Mystery of Culture: why humans repeatedly choose arbitrary practices over valid alternatives.
Every society has a status structure, and every society has a culture—
In 1906, future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson warned from his bully pulpit at Princeton University, “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the automobile. To the countryman they are a picture of the arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness.”
multiple conventions where brand affiliations mapped to specific status tiers.
Lifestyle, in other words, is both a requirement of social rank and an expression of it.
Even without the experience of living among those with higher status, we can learn the proper conventions from glossy magazines, which exist for this purpose.
This particular knowledge is known as cultural capital,
This explains why the neighbors of lottery winners also end up buying fancier cars.
British upper-class terms of condemnation have included “NLU” (not like us) and “NLO” (not like one).
But alas, unconventional acts are tolerated only for those who already have high status.
For the status-disadvantaged, the most efficient way to move up is clear and bold emulation. The status-advantaged, by contrast, can pursue subtler forms of individual distinction.
Chapter Three: Signaling and Status Symbols
Signaling is a communication process. We make a status claim to others through communicating certain signals, and then others perform a status appraisal by interpreting those signals.
Cues that place individuals as members of certain classes are also known as social shibboleths.
Besides signals and cues, there is an important third category of information used in status appraisals: significant absences.
signaling reveals that status must be earned from strangers through a subtle act of communication.
In semiotics, “symbol” is a technical term for a sign that requires preexisting knowledge to be interpreted.
The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis—reasons for adoption other than status seeking.
“The functionality of goods comes afterward, adjusting itself to, rationalizing and at the same time repressing these fundamental structural mechanisms.”
We use a specific word to indicate these high-status associations: cachet. The term comes from lettres de cachet, royal communications in medieval France that carried the official seal of the king.
five common signaling costs.
The first and most obvious is money.
The second cost is time.
The third cost is exclusive access.
The fourth cost is cultural capital—
The final cost is norm breaking.
Linguists speak of semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time.
Chapter Four: Taste, Authenticity, and Identity
Bad taste, thought Voltaire, was a “sickness of the spirit.”
the only way to make sense of taste is to analyze it as a social mechanism.
To gain status from great taste involves progress across three attributes:
deep knowledge,
congruence,
and bounded originality.
crucial meta-category required to tie his status claims together: authenticity.
Authentic goods are still more valuable than exclusive goods. And an individual’s taste must match their backstory.
Which “I” are we talking about? There appear to be three: persona, identity, and self.
Over the last 150 years, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have warned us against attributing too much authenticity to our thoughts. Our brains are always engaged in rationalization:
So, with respect to persona, identity, or self, status determines much of who we are.
While not everyone seeks the same status levels or will pursue the same assets, we now see that there are a finite number of strategies:
Status Strategy #1: Perform better against the status criteria—and reveal it in signals.
Status Strategy #2: Pretend to be high status.
Status Strategy #3: Change the status criteria in your favor.
Status Strategy #4: Form a new status group.
Part Two: Status and Creativity
Chapter Five: Classes and Sensibilities
New Money’s love for ostentation leads us to the main topic of this chapter: the sensibilities underlying taste are never random, independent results of idiosyncratic and irrational minds.
How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities form?—we’ll examine the creativity that emerges from three categories of status groups: classes, subcultures, and avant-garde artists.
Max Weber warns, “A class itself is not a community.”
sources of capital tend to cluster, so we can make useful divisions through just two particular types: economic and cultural. Economic capital consists of money, property, and wealth, whereas cultural capital is the knowledge of high-status conventions required to gain normal status from those in established high-status groups.
we should expect future cohorts of New Money to continue buying expensive things simply because they are expensive. Economists call this the “Veblen effect”:
Old Money, on the other hand, has an advantage in the longevity of their status superiority, which can be demonstrated through social capital (strong relationships with other rich families) and cultural capital (knowing how to behave at the very top of society).
Old Money thus pursues Status Strategy #3: Change the status criteria in your favor.
deploy status symbols that emphasize time being rich over sheer wealth.
This is how the Earl of Lonsdale defended his shabby appearance: “In London, nobody knows who I am, so it doesn’t matter. In Cumberland, everyone knows who I am, so it doesn’t matter.”
Old Money individuals have not achieved good taste—they embody good taste.
Old Money taste focuses on what the anthropologist Grant McCracken calls “patina,” visual proof of age in possessions.
the professional class considers their competence in these areas as justified criteria for higher status. Their most valuable signals, then, are not based on money or time being rich, but the exclusive possession of privileged information.
“Taste is entirely a Middle Class concern. The Lower Class don’t have it and the Upper Class don’t need it.”
The Condé Nast magazine empire—from Vogue and GQ to The New Yorker—was built upon teaching the latest high-status conventions to the professional classes,
For many the quickest path to higher social position is Status Strategy #2: Pretend to be high status. When pretending, whom do they copy? New Money makes for the best idols, because extravagance is a universal language.
Every neighborhood had its own sneaker conventions: Nike was popular in uptown Manhattan, Adidas in Queens, FILA in Brooklyn.
the lack of capital results in differences between signaling at the bottom of the ladder and at the top. These limitations create two unique sensibilities: kitsch and flash.
“Consumers of kitsch,” writes the philosopher of art Tomáš Kulka, “do not buy kitsch because it is kitsch; they buy it because they take it for art.”
Minimalism is always a privilege; in signaling, the poor can’t afford to look generic.
Counterfeiters, who target poorer consumers, copy the luxury brands’ most famous, logo-driven styles rather than subtler models. There is thus an important overlap between New Money extravagance and lower-status flash: both groups want big logos. But only New Money can easily buy the real thing.
Luxury brands, meanwhile, market themselves as purveyors of premium goods for the wealthy, but in practice, they make billions each year through entry-level goods intended for low-level conspicuous consumption.
The end result is that a majority of society’s cultural artifacts and stylistic conventions—at least the most conspicuous ones used in signaling—exist in large part to serve the distinction needs of classes.
New Money’s use of economic capital in signaling spurs the creation of expensive luxury goods such as sports cars, limousines, mansions, yachts, summer homes, designer clothes, and furniture. Old Money’s countersignaling and focus on patina and cultural capital incentivize companies to make classic, modest goods with a functional appeal. The professional class’s signaling through information creates a market for middlebrow mass media/ consumer guides, functional goods, artisanal goods, and copies of Old Money lifestyles. Underprivileged individuals’ desire to take part in culture and outdo peers pushes companies to offer kitsch and flashy entry-level luxury goods.
These effects of class on consumer choice challenge the idea that taste could be based on universal standards of beauty. In particular, the oft celebrated “elegance of simplicity” isn’t an innate human preference but arises from a countersignaling strategy.
Chapter Six: Subcultures and Countercultures
For those already at the bottom of the status ladder—and cynical about their prospects for upward mobility—the most attractive path forward is to adopt Status Strategy #4: Form a new status group.
Chapter Seven: Art
Conspicuous consumption relies on signs so simple that they serve as obvious evidence of wealth rather than symbols.
Status-driven cultural invention tends to be rebellious but not revolutionary.
“Rebellion has turned into procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony. Negation is no longer creative.”
Part Three: Status and Cultural Change
Chapter Eight: Fashion Cycles
difficulty in identifying the exact causes of cultural change among economic, technological, and psychological factors.
“Culture determines and causes culture; culture is to be explained in terms of culture.”
final part of the Grand Mystery of Culture: Why do we change behaviors over time, and why do some behaviors stick around?
But alibis work well because even we can’t understand the source of our own desires. Our hearts draw no clear lines between functionality, pleasure, and status seeking.
innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
Where does a fashion cycle begin? It kicks off exactly where the principles of status suggest it would: among the highest-status individuals.
Invention may arise anywhere in society, but its broader diffusion requires a boost of cachet.
Elites flock to three particular categories of items that fulfill their needs: rarities, novelties, and technological innovations.
The media supports the diffusion of innovations through four key functions: selecting the most appealing conventions, broadcasting them to a large audience, explaining why individuals should adopt, and explicitly evaluating quality.
Chapter Nine: History and Continuity
culture is more than an accumulation of the latest fashions: it’s a complex sediment of new and old, dynamic and static, superficial and deep, unconscious and conscious.
What is the appeal of historical value? First, there is a survivorship bias:
In the 1970s, Kentucky Fried Chicken ran an advertising campaign in Japan making the dubious claim that Americans ate fried chicken on Christmas Day. Since that time, eating a Christmas bucket of KFC has become a Japanese holiday tradition.
To create a canon, academics and critics curate explicit lists or keep certain works in circulation through repeated mention and reference.
“lastingness is imposed not by intrinsic physical properties but by the social system.”
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
unoriginal work, the mediocre or manqué, reveals the spirit of its own times in a sharp and direct way precisely because it remains a document and not a monument.”
Part Four: Status and Culture in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter Ten: The Internet Age
The twenty-first-century economy has skewed media and consumption so decisively toward coastal elites as to be perceived among the lower middle class as a demeaning erasure.
paradoxical present, a present that ceaselessly exhumes and ‘rediscovers’ the past.”
Thus the very appeal of TikTok is its “mediocrity,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings: “No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.”
Today culture exists in infinite quantities, information barriers have been reduced to zero, and fashion cycles are fast and shallow—all of which work against the creation of status value. As this combines with a new nouveau riche emerging outside of the West and hungry to climb up the global status ladder, economic capital has reemerged as a clearer status criterion than cultural capital.
Conclusion: Status Equality and Cultural Creativity
Civilization is fundamentally symbolic, and every choice communicates social position.
The lessons in this book lend credence to the Marxist idea of hegemony, which is defined by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as “the shaping of the society’s culture in the image of that of the dominant class.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed inequality was responsible for “a multitude of bad things and very few good things”; Immanuel Kant countered that it was a “rich source of much that is evil, but also of everything that is good.”
Bertrand Russell stated the obvious drawback of our current system: “The forms of happiness which consist of victory in a competition cannot be universal.”