As I’ve done in the past, I plan on occasionally sharing one or more of La Rochefoucauld’s (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959, first published in 1665), commenting when the mood strikes. Permit me to introduce one of the foremost reasons these maxims continue to enchant us with some characteristically incisive observations from Jon Elster:
“Alone among the moralists, La Rochefoucauld offered something like a theory of human motivations. In fact, his views about unconscious motivation and unconscious cognition are probably more valuable than anything found in twentieth-century psychology. To some extent it is true, as Jean Lafond says, that ‘a certain verbal exuberance together with the exaggeration required for an original assertion turns the psychology into mythology.’ Yet…some systematic views can be extracted from what first appear as a random collection of diamond-like maxims.” — Elster on “the French Moralists” in a work that evidences his singular capacity to see with remarkable clarity both the forest and the trees in the study of emotions, namely, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
The four writers he treats in one part of the book—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—“mark the beginning and the end of the greatest era in French intellectual and cultural history.” This amounts to an implicit and unflattering comment on the overweening infatuation with postmodern French philosophers among quite a few intellectuals in the academy.
“Our self-esteem is more inclined to resent criticism of our tastes than of our opinions.”—La Rochefoucauld
Rochefoucauld’s maxims were penned when early aesthetic theories or philosophies more or less revolved around a notion of “taste” (beyond its gustatory meaning, literal or metaphorical) while the centrality of this concept in aesthetic theories has greatly diminished (with notable exceptions) since then, it persists in everyday societal and cultural practices and judgments, often as a sign or insignia of class and status, of wealth and privilege (and among the middling and upper classes, as a judgment on the ‘tastes’ of the hoi polloi, the masses, despite their attempts to emulate and imitate those above them in the social order). Reflections on our own tastes may bring in their wake insecurity, anxiety, and envy to the extent they affect our self-esteem and amour-propre more widely.
The more I think about this maxim, the more I’m inclined to believe it is not true. In other words, in general, we’ve become fairly tolerant of different tastes (in an aesthetic sense, however crude or dimly understood) than of opinions, if only because we have so many choices when it comes to the kinds of objects thought to incarnate or reflect our tastes, thus implicating taste in the nature of capitalist societies (be they affluent or less so). Perhaps one corresponding irony is the fact that such toleration goes, in an extravagant sense, hand-in-hand with an obsession with such matters. As Nicholas Xenos reminds us, “the utility of goods becomes secondary to the value they come to have as elements within a symbolic order of consumption.” Thus taste becomes bound up with our desires, dreams, fantasies, illusions, what have you, all of which are indissolubly tied to conceptions of abundance and opulence, to conspicuous consumption and gratuitous wealth. Marketing managers and advertisers (through ‘branding’ in today’s jargon) are experts in stimulating or expanding the reach of our desires, dreams, illusions, and so on through the manipulation (not always successful and occasionally modified by consumers themselves) of our sense of style and fashion, as well our often narcissistic need for social esteem.
Building on the thoughts of both Thorstein Veblen and George Simmel on this topic, Xenos notes that
“while it is clear that fashion, in the up-to-date, exclusionary sense, requires the constant creation of something new, in order for it to function as a means of social differentiation it must be articulated within a common set of understandings—fashion as an ongoing activity in a broader sense. There must be novelty, but it must be novelty that is recognized as a mark of fashion and that is at least potentially capable of being imitated and purchased. In this way, fashion can act at one and the same time as a force of social differentiation and cohesion.
The fashionable objects that serve as signs of social inclusion and individual or group demarcation thus have no intrinsic social value of their own, their value is derived solely from their use as signs, whatever utility such objects may have is completely secondary and socially irrelevant. [….] For a brief moment, an object that exists in great quantity may attain to the level of fashion when it is incorporated into a particular style that transforms it, makes it no longer ordinary. When this occurs, it makes no sense to say that the object has a scarcity value—although once the fashion has caught on there may be a temporary lack of available supply of it to satisfy an unexpected fashion demand. What does have scarcity value is the transforming style itself: the object in its fashionable surroundings becomes scarce because only some people have the stylistic acumen to display it in this particular way. In this sense, the stylish always possess a scarce resource independently of the things themselves that they make fashionable.
The emulation that is typical of modernity and is institutionalized in fashion can be characterized as an effort not only—or not at all—to possess what others possess, but to imitate their style. [….] The more natural that style appears, the less effort in construction it seems to require by its possessor, the more appealing it may be, particularly because when we think of our own style it is hard to think of what we are naturally. [….] Fashion advertising, like much advertising in general, is selling a style [and mode] of consumption, not only the particular goods contained within a photograph [or TV commercial]. [….]
The acceleration of changes in fashion noted by Simmel and Veblen is attributable to the instability built into the fashion code as a result of the relative positions within it. The struggle to establish one’s identity and position is ceaseless because there are not objectively fixed statuses [insofar as this is the capitalism of would-be egalitarian democratic societies], but the struggle tends to reproduce the de facto statuses that do exist. The wealthier find it easier to shift consumption from one set of objects to another than those with less wealth. A competitive hierarchy is established, with no rest for anyone but with real upward movement forestalled—the dynamism of individual and group aspirations is thus institutionalized into a form of social stasis. The deep stability of the struggle for competitive identity is concealed by the sometime frantic manipulation of appearances. Those at the top of the social order cast their glances sideways and downward, cultivating a style that appears natural and that imbues the objects that are signified within its objects of elite consumption serve as markers of group identity. Such objects may be located at either end of the temporal spectrum: they may be identified by their antiquity or by their newness. In either case, their authenticity or their timeliness will ensure their scarcity. With new objects governed by fashion, only an elite possesses, by self-determination, the requisite aesthetic sensibility [‘taste’] to see them properly, at least in the short term. [….] [G]ood taste requires the abandonment of fashionable new objects once they have common currency [this is in keeping with, or at least analogous to, an ethic of transgression], and hence no longer marks of distinction, although it sometimes happens that the fashionable set, accustomed to the rapid changes in style necessitated by its precarious social lead, moves on to new styles without the old ones filtering down….
Along with its stylistic acumen, the uppermost strata cultivates an appreciation of antiquities as a sign of taste but also as a sign of ancestry. Thus history is wedded to nature; the stylish not only possess the seemingly natural stability to decipher newly coded fashions but also possess a heritage. The age of an antique (and frequently the lineage of its ownership [save for those cases in which the object was improperly or illegally acquired, as the history of museum acquisitions informs us]) confers a legitimacy on its possessor’s taste—the owner, in Walter Benjamin’s formulation, shares in the aura of the unique original object. The appropriation of the past is a pseudo-aristocratic substitute of the fixed identity conferred by family and rank in the pre-bourgeois era.
For those below this upper crust—that is to say, for most everyone—status identity requires a panoramic view. Identity is established horizontally, but only in small part [as when one envies the new car bought by a neighbor]. More important are the views upward and downward. Positions in the social order are most precarious in the great middle of the middle class, where identity is poised uneasily between relationally defined extremes and where catching up to the styles previously adopted by those above instantaneously results in the debasement of those same styles—the accomplishments of “high” culture become middle-brow, designer labels no longer carry a cachet of exclusivity.” — Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 1989): passim.
Comments