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JUST AS THIS IS AN AGE OF GREAT WEALTH inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential, the fact-filled internet has only heightened the pre-Google asymmetry between those, on one side, loyal to Baconian methods of patient, inductive gathering of facts — the ways of the card catalog and the archive, of the analysis and evaluation of empirical data — and those, on the other side, who didn’t need to read Foucault or the Frankfurt School to nurture a suspicion that positivist orders of knowledge mask a hierarchy of power in which they are meant to occupy the lowest rungs.
ooh i love the ending
[...] As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials.
Jean Baudrillard once suggested an important correction to classical Marxism: exchange value is not, as Marx had it, a distortion of a commodity’s underlying use value; use value, instead, is a fiction created by exchange value. In the same way, systems of accreditation do not assess merit; merit is a fiction created by systems of accreditation. Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor’s degree becomes democratized, the master’s degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondly —and very dimly —a system for imparting knowledge.
hell yeah
As the credentialism compulsion seeps down the socioeconomic ladder, universities jack up fees and taxi drivers hire $200-an-hour SAT tutors for their children. The collective impact may be ruinous, but for individuals the outlays seem justified. As a consequence, college tuitions are nowhere near their limit; as long as access to the workforce is controlled by the bachelor’s degree, students will pay more and more.
locally optimal, but globally absurd
[...] major political questions are rarely complex in that sense. They are much more likely to be complicated, in the Avril Lavigne sense, meaning that they involve reconciling disagreements among competing stakeholders —or, as the situation may demand, ratcheting them up.
Quadrupling the supply of gold stickers is one way to devalue the credential; getting rid of the sticker system altogether is another. In our pay-to-play society, many of those toward the bottom of the educational pyramid are getting fleeced; others, though, are getting a leg up. Because it’s callous and unreasonable to ask the disadvantaged to decline opportunities to advance, subverting credentialism must start at the top. What would happen to the price of a bachelor’s degree if the 42,000 high school valedictorians graduating this spring banded together and refused to go to college? And is it too much to ask the Democratic Party to refrain from running any candidate for national office who holds a degree from an Ivy League school?
Then there are our own credentials. Che Guevara once declared that the duty of intellectuals was to commit suicide as a class; a more modest suggestion along the same lines is for the credentialed to join the uncredentialed in shredding the diplomas that paper over the undemocratic infrastructure of American life. A master’s degree, we might find, burns brighter than a draft card.
maybe the thiel fellowship is praxis
The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as—in an opposite way—the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogorrheic style, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers (which more and more is just to say writers) had little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.
[...] when I trawled for their names on the 1860 census I came up empty. No enslaved African American was named on an antebellum federal census; they were counted, eighty to a page, and the count was made, by 1860 at least, by supplying the rough age, sex, and color of the individual, either black or mulatto. Prior to the search, it had made sense to me that three generations back I might face a wall of silence. But when I discovered the simple facts, witnessed the script on the census ledger, and interpreted the hash marks in a column, the historical record took on another kind of life altogether. It seemed—well, the word I would use is close: uncomfortably present, not in the past, not safely tucked away at all.
When black Americans who barely knew the legal names of their own grandparents—people whose ancestry dates back to American shores for ten or eleven generations—look back to the era of bondage, we do this from the perspective of the families that we know today. The now-grandfatherly male cousins we have who have never, in all of their lives, had regular employment. The people known by “street” names, who never grew into adult names. The sisters, aunts, and female cousins raising children in poverty, sometimes with genteel flair, sometimes not. We are seeing immigrants of every hue offer lip service to our historic plight, take advantage of the legislation that we pioneered for two centuries, and then pass us by. We are thinking about the mental illness that seems as much a style as a neurological disorder. We are thinking about black people using illegal drugs and frowned-upon remedies for a hundred years for the same reason that tens of millions of Americans have sought prescriptions from physicians for relief. We are thinking about people who, for as long as they can recall, have experienced a simmering anger that was sometimes addressed with alcohol and narcotics, an anger that became a kind of manufactured commodity that fed an industry of incarceration, security, and hospitalization. We are thinking about neglected communities and decaying houses and public services that operate under multiple standards. We are thinking that in every new place we have ever traveled in the United States, we found a community with posh homes, quaint comfortable businesses that catered to desires we had yet to fully form, and regular traditions that we found enchanting and seductive—and yet just on the other side of the tracks were the crumbling huts for us. Even when these wore fresh coats of lavender or lime or canary or fuchsia paint, it didn’t ease our sight of blemish on the country that willed it.
this killed me
The danger is that the critical insights of what was called “critical sociology” have been repurposed as the status-quo thinking of “concerned liberalism”—the very thing that it set out to subvert. Thinking of everything as a scripted game show hasn’t led to change. Instead, sociological thinking has hypostatized and celebrated the script. Or to put it another way: hate the players, love the game. Even the sinister David Brooks managed to use (and only partly travesty) Bourdieu, when he suggested that the rise of “bourgeois bohemians” had largely solved the titanic conflicts of the Sixties. In such instances, sociology, which intended to explain in order to criticize the glacial stability of bourgeois society, has passed almost seamlessly into the hands of those wanting to justify that society.
Arguing that an epiphenomenon of an unjust society exists to rationalize that society’s injustice: it’s a silencing maneuver that cultural sociologists have perfected, making them unbeatable on their own terms. The ordinary person, genuflecting before his unfreedom, cries “uncle”—which the sociologist reads as a cry for more sociology. The form of this move can be glimpsed in Guillory’s explanation for the rise of French theory during the period he covers. Theory, according to Guillory, was perfectly in keeping with a “technobureaucratic” turn in intellectual work itself and in the economy overall: “The emergence of theory,” he writes, “is a symptom of a problem which theory itself could not solve.” Well, if theory can’t solve this problem, nobody can. But wait — who’s that tweedy figure in the sky, with his WebCASPAR data sets, coming to save us?
Being no closer to a society free of domination, injustice, and inequality than we were in 1993, we may ask whether the emergence of cultural sociology is a symptom of a problem that sociology itself cannot solve. Anyone who’s spent some time soaking up the discourse can point out that access to critical sociology is now one of the goods people purchase with their tuitions at elite institutions of American higher education. Of course the question and the observation that leads us to ask it turn out to be framed in sociological terms.
not exactly unpretentious but i love it