the limits of egalitarian taste-making
david marx’s 2022 status and culture is the best bad book i’ve read in a while. bad because the central arguments fail—spectacularly—over and over again; best because it is really really rich in anecdote and insight. it is as delightful as paul fussell's classic in the genre, and also as infuriating (not for its classism, but for its sloppy core argument). any serious student of the subject should read it.
the book’s central goal is to solve what marx unironically calls “Grand Mystery of Culture: why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?” (xiii). the rest of the book’s ten chapters are dedicated to defending an answer cast in terms of status. to do that, marx argues that the choice between cultural practices is arbitrary and that the best explanation for why we choose form one over another is because of the status advantages these choices confer.
the view is popular, but arguments for it—including marx’s—are weak. if we want to break out of contemporary cultural stasis, we need to understand why.
why should we think the choice between cultural practices is arbitrary? this is a surprising and bold claim. examining our lives, these choices usually feel anything but. for marx the sociologist though, “arbitrary denotes choices where an alternative could serve the same purpose” (26). serving the same purpose for him means that cultural choices establish and promote conventions which enable us to solve social coordination problems, “conventions provide a ‘solution’ when trying to coordinate behavior with others” (30). but the kind of coordination problem marx says most culture solves is determining social hierarchies, “we ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval and avoid social disapproval” (28-9).
the argument goes like this: the choice between cultural practices is arbitrary; since it is arbitrary, the best explanation for why we select some over another is our desire for status,
“the fundamental desire for status offers a clearer explanation in demonstrating why rational individuals end up forming the most commonly observed behavior patterns” (263).
and whatever status we achieve through adopting a set of practices is then rendered ultimately unjustified—the result of power dynamics rather than the result of skillfully pursuing things hip, beautiful, or cool. given this “deconstruction” of culture to status, the enlightened cultural connoisseur must be what he calls an “omnivore,”
“the virtuous ‘cultured’ individual should consume and like everything—not just high culture but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated…in many ways, omnivorism is the only possible taste left. a singular notion of good taste is unjustifiable in a cosmopolitan world… to proclaim superiority of preferred styles over others is accordingly an arrogant and bigoted act” (242).
this conclusion leaves marx in an uneasy position. on the one hand, he firms believes that “we have been cursed to understand the mechanisms of culture too well, making earnest taste nearly impossible” (243). on the other hand he laments the persistent cultural sclerosis brought on by the short-form internet and pop-postmodernism—trying to seriously argue that,
“a robust, diverse, and complex cultural ecosystem is better than a bland, stagnant monoculture. complexity doesn’t have to involve impenetrable or esoteric art, just the skillful manipulation of higher-order symbols in new and surprising ways.” (269)
when forced to give a reason why we should prefer his preferred state of cultural complexity over the myriad arbitrary alternatives available to us, marx can only muster a facile psychologistic appeal: “complexity is good for our brains” (270).
it’s easy enough to see that marx and the cultural omnivores who think like him have gotten themselves into a tricky spot here. by their own lights, they do not have much ground to insist that their preferred cultural forms (the radically egalitarian ones) are better than others (non-egalitarian ones)—all cultural preferences are arbitrary and unjustified. yet they desperately want to progress culturally and politically and they feel perpetually stuck.
and it’s no wonder why. as marx comes close to conceding—the only winners in the omnivore’s world are: the old guard endlessly remixing yesterday’s hits (music, movies, fashion); the latest viral upstart from tiktok—here today, gone the next; and, powering it all, the algo-driven, ad-fueled media companies who do not care which direction it goes as long as it is moving.
this “detente with capitalism” as marx puts it, is an odd place for an otherwise egalitarian project to end up. having eviscerated their power of critique, the omnivores and their bourdieu-loving leaders have abdicated the cultural stage to whatever the people deliver (through the profit-mediated internet). the people, in turn, eat up whatever the feed delivers, and the creatives churn out whatever is most likely to get eaten. there is no obvious escape from this state, and while seemingly aware of this, marx is blind to the role his ideology plays in the loop.
the central move in critical theory is to look at normative practices and “unmask” or “deconstruct” them by arguing that adherance to the practices can be fully explained in causal terms rather than as the result of an (imperfectly) rational process where we believe the ideas which appear to be best. critical theories then go on to argue for political objectives like increased equality by further arguing that these causally-explained practices develop as sustain as tools of exclusion, and should be abandoned as such. to omnivores (most of whom are college-educated), this mode of argument should sound familiar. it has been common since the o.g. marx (karl) argued that all ideology (except socialist egalitarianism) is the mere expression of power—to be overcome through unmasking, and where that fails, violence.
even if they aren’t schooled in the core tenets of critical theory, omnivores believe it is axiomatic enlightened life to believe that basically all cultural preference is arbitrary. taste is personal, and probably oppressive unless it is undiscriminating. to question these ideas risks ire and opprobrium—outing oneself as unwoke at best, and a classist bigot at worst. there is no appetite to entertain the idea that egalitarianism might coherently coexist with objectivity about aesthetic and cultural judgements. the idea of such a thing would likely seem incoherent to omnivores—marx included.
that is a shame. marx’s book would have been better if he had taken more time to locate himself within debates about egalitarianism and aesthetics. his passing references to the kantian tradition are far from charitable. he does not give voice to those who have sought to explain how we can make sense of radical differences in cultural practice across time and space while still believing that people are sometimes justified in believing that their choices are right.
consider an alternative explanation of cultural practice: the choice between cultural practices is rarely arbitrary; there are always an abundance of practical reasons appearing to push us one way or another; we endlessly debate the merits of each as we sort out who we want to become and what our friends and fellows should strive for. when we choose one over another we usually say it is because one thing was cooler, more hip, more beautiful, moving, meaningful, tasteful, subtle, fitting, fun, etc. when our choices earn us esteem, it is because they demonstrate that we choose well. when it’s revealed that we don’t choose on the basis of the practical reasons counting in favor of one practice over another, but just do so for the esteem alone, we lose it. esteem is not based on a regard for a person on the basis of the thing chosen, it is based on a regard for the person on the basis of the choice. we admire what it says about their character—that they want the right things. whether they succeed in getting them is usually secondary.
such talk will alarm the omnivore, but should it? i would submit marx hasn’t given us enough reason to think that this naively realist description of our state isn’t also the deep truth. we rarely ever face cultural choices where there’s no practical reason to do one thing over another. the vantage from which it looks like we do is an artificial construct of sociological inquiry—a remove which completely ignores the level of contextual grain at which it would not make sense to not wear black tie to a black tie event (one of marx’s go-to examples of an arbitrary practice). rarely do we find ourselves in spots where we have to “solve a coordination problem” and so spin up a “convention” out of an array of equally plausible alternatives. every human who has every lived has made their cultural decisions against the backdrop of an already rich culture which presented myriad reasons purporting to count for one choice over another.
knowing which cultural choices are the right ones is obviously not so easy. it takes practice—and even the most sage will not always be in a position to convince the most philistine of their views. but marx and the omnivore seem to think that we’re forced into arbitrariness if we cannot say in advance which choices are right by deducing principles which hold across time and space. they usually motivate this idea by asking us to imagine two different cultural practices and ask which is better and why. when their interlocutor’s are unable to produce an explanation, they declare victory; we should just go on accepting all cultural practices (except of course, the most radical, which get extra esteem, and the exclusive or conservative, which are bad taste).
this old trick assumes that comparative questions about different cultural practices can be meaningfully raised when they are divorced from their contexts, but it is not obvious that they can. it is kind of silly to consider asking whether the practice of wearing black tie to dinner is “better” than the imperial roman practice of wearing tyrian purple—the contexts are just so radically different it’s kind of impossible to find the reasons which appear to count in favor of the one in the radically different context of the other.
it’s at this point that the omnivore’s cosmopolitan instinct comes out—acutely aware of many conflicting cultural preferences co-existing on earth right now, they will want a way to know how we can be confident in any one set over another. this is difficult, but there’s no special difficulty here—it is just the difficulty of getting on with daily human life: it is the messy business of getting people to see your perspective, finding mutually acceptable pathways from their beliefs to your own and the other way around, or explaining to children what makes something desirable or disgusting. there is no deep problem with this, except for the fact that in a hyper-connected, globalized world we’re constantly bombarded with radically different ways of life and still have to make one for ourselves while collectively enabling one for our communities. the fact that we can’t find cheat codes to procedurize this process does not mean that we cannot succeed in any particular moments.
every time a casual dinner table conversation around ethics or aesthetics turns into an historical inquiry into the origins of the attitudes in question, we see the influence of the omnivore’s critical theoretic tradition at work. this is far from fringe stuff. the legacy left by the french tradition marx quotes so approvingly has become popular enough to have made the american mainstream: in a terrible plot twist and horribly confused reaction formation, critical theory is on the ballot in us elections.
***
marx is not alone in the difficulties he encounters at the end of the book. critical theoretic reductionists always ends up in an uncomfortable position: wanting to advance a normative project while simultaneously undercutting the grounds upon which they could sensibly do that. marx’s reduction of culture to unjustified status-seeking cannot coherently coexist with his insistence that we embrace a radically-creative culture to break out of an endless cycle of short form videos and longform reboots.
his egalitarian motives are well-taken though. marx is right to try and find a balance between the competing goals of reducing harmful social hierarchies while recognizing that cultural talents meriting esteem are not evenly distributed across humanity. not everyone is born with the dispositions that can be channeled into creative talent. and not everyone born with these dispositions will have the opportunity to cultivate these talents. even among those who have both the dispositions and the opportunity to cultivate them, not all will choose to develop creative talent. cultural competence just will be unequally distributed, and those who exemplify it deserve praise for their exceptional achievement just like the athletes who compete in our olympics.
there are well-known alternatives to strike this balance between esteem which is earned in virtue of cultural competence and esteem which is deserved simply in virtue of being human. the first is to increase opportunity to cultivate talents (through familiar stuff like better education, etc.). the second is to minimize the harms of unequal distribution (through methods that seek to minimize the places where cultural competence gates access to significantly better quality of life that cannot be had in other ways). strategies for both abound, and neither require attempting to eviscerating the merit behind cultural esteem through negation or deconstruction.
marx quotes wittgenstein throughout the book but seems unaware of the project that was most central to the philosopher’s life. wittgenstein taught his students to beware Grand Mysteries in philosophy. every time we are presented with something purporting to be one, we should look for the origin of the mystery in the framing of the question itself. like nearly every other philosophical or social mystery, marx’s Grand Mystery becomes a mystery after he gets us to believe that changes in human cultural practice occur for “no practical reason” and so cry out for some kind of explanation. for an egalitarian trained in sociology, the critical theoretic tradition looks like basically the only game in town.
it is not. we can explain the divergence of aesthetic judgments and cultural practices across time and space while still making sense of these judgments as actually merited rather than just disguised assertions of power. there are many, many views in philosophy which attempt to do this; i won’t list them here. while it would have been a much better book if marx had located himself in conversation with these traditions and argued against more than straw person alternatives, his book is still well worth reading. the impressive assemblage of cultural data and the local insights about their relations benefits the entire field. seeing why it fails benefits everyone else.