damn, these elites aren’t as smart/cool/moral as I thought they’d be!
Bourdieu uses two metaphors to describe field (the space of relations you, a social agent, have with others) — one that comes from science (an electromagnetic field), and one that comes from sport, with the metaphor of the game. Bourdieu, who was a rugby player in his youth, returns again and again in his writing to the terminology of the game. The types of capital you accrue — economic, cultural, social — allow you to make certain moves in the field. Reading Bourdieu, it’s hard not to think of humans in society as just so many Monopoly tokens.
When I was in my class on him, a tiny seminar I’m auditing with the sociology department’s resident Bourdieusian and a motley crew of pupils — one undergrad prodigy with the waist-length blonde hair and painted nails of a Haight-Ashbury flower child, two sociology PhDs, a French lit first-year, and visiting law professor who sounds like Obama when he talks — the sociology professor started talking about how Bourdieu sees social and cultural fields as dynamic and adversarial, constantly agonistic. I wonder how the game metaphor plays into all of this. I think of the aliens in the movie Arrival. In the movie aliens have landed; now we have to talk to them. The linguist protagonist expresses horror when she learns that the Chinese delegation is teaching the aliens mah-jongg as a means of communication. Metaphors matter, she says, and teaching language through such an adversarial exercise teaches them winning and losing, a zero-sum game. It makes warriors where there might have otherwise been none.
Bourdieu came from a working-class background and spoke with an accent that marked him, to the French elite, as provincial. Despite this background he ascended far past what would have been expected of someone of his station, attending the École Normale in Paris (in a cohort that included Derrida). By the end of his life he had become one of France’s most famous intellectuals, a cultural theorist and sociologist whose prestigious position at the Collége de France entailed solely research and delivering a few public lectures a year. But I think on his provincial origins when I read his lines:
“What exists is a space of relations which is just as real as a geographical space, in which movements have to be paid for by labour, by effort and especially by time (to move upwards is to raise oneself, to climb and to bear the traces or the stigmata of that effort).”
In that arresting parenthetical you see the depth of feeling associated with social mobility — the way that it is hard, grinding, marking. Stigmata are the crucifixion marks on Jesus. If this is a game, it seems like a glum one.
Bourdieu says there’s a way that social actors are not rational but reasonable, that we know our place, and our bodily dispositions and autonomic reactions to many things often keep us there. I wonder if this, more than the incongruousness of my age, was what made my childhood bouncing around idea conferences sometimes feel deeply jarring. At TED, where I spoke in the springtime in 2010, when I was twelve, everyone had their job title on their durable printed lanyard, a heavy plastic plate dangling from red straps. I saw CEOs and founders and famous people. Bill Gates and Al Gore and Steve Wozniak, James Cameron and Will Smith and Cameron Diaz. Everyone knew the tickets cost $6000 or more, and it was just really fucking weird being around that much wealth and influence when I was a kid from a house where my parents often told us to put on more clothes instead of turning up the thermostat in the winter.
(This is a selective point of comparison. I was also a kid from a house where a young woman my parents hired came to teach my sister, me, and a few other participating kids for several hours every day. The arrangement would more closely resemble a Brontëan governess situation if our teacher, who we nicknamed Beastie, didn’t teach us how to say things like George W. Bush is a war criminal who should be baked in a chimichanga in Spanish and go on to write, excellently, about weed.)
(In class, we talk about how everyone at Yale masks their privilege, especially the undergraduates. One of the sociology PhDs and the visiting law professor reminisce on how they took an undergraduate class together, how all the kids were quick to tell stories of personal struggle. The law professor says, In a room like that I would introduce myself as the son of immigrants, which is true. But also…both my parents are doctors.)
I wonder if Bourdieu talks about what happens when you spend time above your station and you feel grossed out, disillusioned or even disdainful about the people who move in the higher-up game. Like damn, these elites aren’t as smart/cool/moral as I thought they’d be!
The part they cut from the video of my 2010 speech, probably for the best, was my irreverent beginning. I stepped out onto the round red carpet and said, I ran into someone this morning coming from the hotel [it was a long-haired scientist from a prominent museum] who said he was still hungover from last night. Didn’t realize you all came here to party. Or something like that, disparaging everyone for drinking so much. I was a sanctimonious kid. But I think I was also attempting to say I was frustrated with what felt like the major way people interacted, which was getting drunk and standing around little tall tables cloaked in black cloth and talking to each other about whatever was on people’s lanyards. The people running the world seemed kind of asleep at the wheel. They weren’t better, less awkward, or more inclusive than anybody else. Maybe it was my fault for imagining they would be.
They paid a lot of attention to me after I gave my talk and invited me to give speeches at their glitzy events, in Mexico and India and the UAE. The conferences weren’t bad; in fact, they could be really fun. The older I got, the more they felt like giant parties, and also like a lite version of school for people who liked ideas but didn’t have the attention span for books.
To prepare for all the speeches for these events, which had different names but all the same idea — a ten or fifteen or twenty-minute talk, some concrete anecdote and narrative arc, some facts, to make everyone feel like they’d learned something, but also enough pathos to make them laugh and/or cry — I remember watching so many TED Talks, reading their transcripts in order to get a sense of the cadence and timing, learning it like a formula. I wanted to know the rules of the game well enough to win. I spoke as long as I was young enough to be a curiosity — look, the child speaks!
In class we discussed how Bourdieu’s three forms of capital (economic, social, and cultural) could form circuits: how convertible are the forms of capital to each other, like social capital to economic? (They say weak ties help you get a job.) My moving mouth paid for college. What kind of capital circuit is that?
It’s been many years since I watched a TED Talk. Maybe the cultural zenith of that thing, the neatly packaged idea in an 18-minute video, is in the past now, or maybe I just moved to a different social field, one where winning looks like getting published in a journal none of my friends outside academia have heard of. It wasn’t an especially principled move, just where my interests took me. Recently, a bunch of TED Fellows resigned because of the organization’s decision to invite Bill Ackman and Bari Weiss to speak on the main stage at the 2024 conference. Sometimes it’s better to leave a game than win it.
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a new word I learned, on January 17th:
congeries: a disorderly collection, a jumble (from Latin — congerere heap up)
book I thought was really interesting: this cultural history of fitness in the U.S., Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. It’s a long book but one of the big takeaways was people didn’t always want to be swole!! Going to a gym to work out was once considered pretty low-brow, or gay. See: Arnold Schwarzenegger (as I sent to my housemates):
Can’t wait to go to the gym tomorrow!
Image: Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley-Boit