Status and Culture
How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
by David Marx
2022
David Marx is not a professional sociologist, but his book Status and Culture very effectively summarizes and synthesizes existing social theory and research into an account of the human desire for status, how we all use cultural objects to signal our status to each other, and how the way that we navigate each others' signals helps to drive cultural change. He marshals a lot of examples, connects dots that are often left separate, and writes accessibly for an educated but non-expert audience. There's real value in this kind of science writing, though it's more common to see a journalist sharing insights from physics or biology this way, and I think Marx has made a contribution here by bringing these things together and showing the steps of the larger process.
Marx's overall goal is to solve what he calls 'the grand mystery of culture' - basically, why do we agree to do some things and not others, and why does what we agree on keep changing, particularly in areas of life where we can't possibly point to a linear narrative of scientific advancement or technological improvement as an explanation? And his answer is status. High status people make certain choices to distinguish themselves, most of the rest of us try to imitate them to try to attain higher status for ourselves, us doing so reduces the status-value of those choices, and so those high status people move on to something new, starting the next lap of the chase. Some lower status people who don't have much hope of doing well in the race try new things that let them gain a bit of status locally, and a few of those attempts end up well-known when higher status people choose them for their own next round of distinction.
In the first part of the book, Marx talks about status, which is like, the esteem your fellow humans feel for you. You can have normal status, high status which means others consider you a 'good person,' or low status which means you're considered 'bad.' One source of status is possessing rare talents that are beneficial to the group; then higher esteem is your reward for helping everyone, and an incentive for others to do the same. But also, a lot of our status is determined by group membership, which we're likely born into, and only modified somewhat by our behavior. A mediocre aristocrat still outranks an excellent peasant. How much each component matters varies over time and place. The rewards of status are things like respect, deference, attention, praise, and access to scarce resources. Status feels good, so everyone has an incentive to want to maintain at least normal status, and to try to improve their position.
Among people who know you well, your status is determined by your category and actions, but among strangers and acquaintances, it's going to be based on who they think you are from the limited information they have available. So it's going to be based on cultural signals. It's difficult to lie with your signals, because you probably lack the knowledge and money to depict yourself as much higher status than you are, and being perceived as false or inauthentic is discrediting. But everyone has an incentive to present the best plausible version of themselves, to try to secure as much good treatment from others as they can.
In part two, Marx looks at the most common strategies for using culture to signal status, based on social class. People with new money fortunes signal their status with things that are obviously expensive and have low symbolic complexity, and thus can be understood by anyone who sees them - things like big houses, sports cars, flashy jewelry.
People with old money have less liquid cash, but more cultural knowledge, and have the prestige of having had their fortunes for a long time. They signal with things that are expensive but in ways that are less obvious to people with less knowledge - art, antiquities, and things that are very well-made. This provides what Marx calls an 'alibi' - they can tell themselves and others that they aren't buying these things for their status value, but for their high quality.
Professionals tend to imitate old money; they can afford some artisanal goods but mostly at the lower end, and not like, family estates. People without much capital tend to imitate the new rich, with things like sports logos, pricey sneakers, custom-decorated cars.
Historically, old money and professionals have insisted on the inherent superiority of high-complexity symbols, though as Marx notes (as did Bourdieu before him,) people with low capital have been denied the opportunity to receive the education needed to enjoy complex cultural objects. Low-complexity symbols require no special training to enjoy.
Attempting to increase your status outside of these strategies is riskier. It can pay off if you do something innovative that ultimately gets accepted, or it can result in lowered status if people think what you're doing is ugly or immoral. Subcultures are usually low-status young people trying to invent a new criteria for judgment, one that favors them. Although Marx doesn't mention it, sociologist Shyon Baumann has written about how both social movements and art movements are attempts to claim greater respect by elevating a particular social group or artistic medium up into normal status.
In the third section Marx shows how status drives cultural change, following the steps of Everett Rogers' model of the diffusion of innovations. Marx argues that while new cultural innovations can occur anywhere, it's only when they follow the path he's describing that they end up as society-wide trends. Already high-status people start the cycle by innovating some new cultural symbol as a mark of distinction. Historically, anything that uses rare materials or is expensive to make - because it needs a lot of time, labor, or skill - is a promising starting point. The innovation could also be lifted from a subculture or an artist. The point of every new trend is to mark its trendsetters as different, and better, than everyone else.
In order to reach a larger audience, the trend has to be reported on in the mass media. Initially, these reports will be limited to elite, tastemaking publications, where they will be seen by people outside the elite who want to emulate them. As a book critic, I'm participating in this step of the process, albeit in the least effectual way possible. Because the trend, in its initial form, is probably too complex and too expensive, it will be simplified as it passes from its innovators to the early adopters. It becomes a bit more standardized and defined. One of Marx's original insights is that trends necessarily change as they pass to larger audiences.
Once a trend is established among the early adopters, companies realize there's money to be made in mass production. This involves simplifying and cheapening again, but also allows a proliferation of (more-or-less formulaic) variants. The early majority mostly doesn't take their cues from the press, but from what they see on the shelves. To they extent they are reading reviews, they don't want to know that something is cool, they want to know that it's good, and why. (Actually, it's possible that my reviews fall here...) The early majority are people who fear losing respect due to following a trend that their peers will think is bad, but are happy to engage with something that is itself sliding down from high status to normal status.
Once something is fully normalized, it's also picked up by the late majority, who adopt the trend because they fear being perceived as low status if they don't. By this point, the original elite innovators have already jumped ship to the next new thing that will give them distinction again. At this point the trend has reached its simplest form and become ubiquitous as mass culture.
In Marx's final section, he talks about status and culture in the age of the internet, when trends no longer seem to mark the passage of time by replacing each other in succession, but instead appear to pile up in a perpetual now.
I thought this was a really effective overview of what social scientists have learned about status and culture, and that Marx put these ideas together in a more complete way than you usually see them. He also drew attention to lesser-discussed features of theories, and added his own insights, in ways that enlarged the value of the project. He also used a wealth of examples from nearly every domain of culture - fashion, music and art, food, etc in a way that helped illustrate the processes he described.
Marx's overall goal is to solve what he calls 'the grand mystery of culture' - basically, why do we agree to do some things and not others, and why does what we agree on keep changing, particularly in areas of life where we can't possibly point to a linear narrative of scientific advancement or technological improvement as an explanation? And his answer is status. High status people make certain choices to distinguish themselves, most of the rest of us try to imitate them to try to attain higher status for ourselves, us doing so reduces the status-value of those choices, and so those high status people move on to something new, starting the next lap of the chase. Some lower status people who don't have much hope of doing well in the race try new things that let them gain a bit of status locally, and a few of those attempts end up well-known when higher status people choose them for their own next round of distinction.
In the first part of the book, Marx talks about status, which is like, the esteem your fellow humans feel for you. You can have normal status, high status which means others consider you a 'good person,' or low status which means you're considered 'bad.' One source of status is possessing rare talents that are beneficial to the group; then higher esteem is your reward for helping everyone, and an incentive for others to do the same. But also, a lot of our status is determined by group membership, which we're likely born into, and only modified somewhat by our behavior. A mediocre aristocrat still outranks an excellent peasant. How much each component matters varies over time and place. The rewards of status are things like respect, deference, attention, praise, and access to scarce resources. Status feels good, so everyone has an incentive to want to maintain at least normal status, and to try to improve their position.
Among people who know you well, your status is determined by your category and actions, but among strangers and acquaintances, it's going to be based on who they think you are from the limited information they have available. So it's going to be based on cultural signals. It's difficult to lie with your signals, because you probably lack the knowledge and money to depict yourself as much higher status than you are, and being perceived as false or inauthentic is discrediting. But everyone has an incentive to present the best plausible version of themselves, to try to secure as much good treatment from others as they can.
In part two, Marx looks at the most common strategies for using culture to signal status, based on social class. People with new money fortunes signal their status with things that are obviously expensive and have low symbolic complexity, and thus can be understood by anyone who sees them - things like big houses, sports cars, flashy jewelry.
People with old money have less liquid cash, but more cultural knowledge, and have the prestige of having had their fortunes for a long time. They signal with things that are expensive but in ways that are less obvious to people with less knowledge - art, antiquities, and things that are very well-made. This provides what Marx calls an 'alibi' - they can tell themselves and others that they aren't buying these things for their status value, but for their high quality.
Professionals tend to imitate old money; they can afford some artisanal goods but mostly at the lower end, and not like, family estates. People without much capital tend to imitate the new rich, with things like sports logos, pricey sneakers, custom-decorated cars.
Historically, old money and professionals have insisted on the inherent superiority of high-complexity symbols, though as Marx notes (as did Bourdieu before him,) people with low capital have been denied the opportunity to receive the education needed to enjoy complex cultural objects. Low-complexity symbols require no special training to enjoy.
Attempting to increase your status outside of these strategies is riskier. It can pay off if you do something innovative that ultimately gets accepted, or it can result in lowered status if people think what you're doing is ugly or immoral. Subcultures are usually low-status young people trying to invent a new criteria for judgment, one that favors them. Although Marx doesn't mention it, sociologist Shyon Baumann has written about how both social movements and art movements are attempts to claim greater respect by elevating a particular social group or artistic medium up into normal status.
In the third section Marx shows how status drives cultural change, following the steps of Everett Rogers' model of the diffusion of innovations. Marx argues that while new cultural innovations can occur anywhere, it's only when they follow the path he's describing that they end up as society-wide trends. Already high-status people start the cycle by innovating some new cultural symbol as a mark of distinction. Historically, anything that uses rare materials or is expensive to make - because it needs a lot of time, labor, or skill - is a promising starting point. The innovation could also be lifted from a subculture or an artist. The point of every new trend is to mark its trendsetters as different, and better, than everyone else.
In order to reach a larger audience, the trend has to be reported on in the mass media. Initially, these reports will be limited to elite, tastemaking publications, where they will be seen by people outside the elite who want to emulate them. As a book critic, I'm participating in this step of the process, albeit in the least effectual way possible. Because the trend, in its initial form, is probably too complex and too expensive, it will be simplified as it passes from its innovators to the early adopters. It becomes a bit more standardized and defined. One of Marx's original insights is that trends necessarily change as they pass to larger audiences.
Once a trend is established among the early adopters, companies realize there's money to be made in mass production. This involves simplifying and cheapening again, but also allows a proliferation of (more-or-less formulaic) variants. The early majority mostly doesn't take their cues from the press, but from what they see on the shelves. To they extent they are reading reviews, they don't want to know that something is cool, they want to know that it's good, and why. (Actually, it's possible that my reviews fall here...) The early majority are people who fear losing respect due to following a trend that their peers will think is bad, but are happy to engage with something that is itself sliding down from high status to normal status.
Once something is fully normalized, it's also picked up by the late majority, who adopt the trend because they fear being perceived as low status if they don't. By this point, the original elite innovators have already jumped ship to the next new thing that will give them distinction again. At this point the trend has reached its simplest form and become ubiquitous as mass culture.
In Marx's final section, he talks about status and culture in the age of the internet, when trends no longer seem to mark the passage of time by replacing each other in succession, but instead appear to pile up in a perpetual now.
I thought this was a really effective overview of what social scientists have learned about status and culture, and that Marx put these ideas together in a more complete way than you usually see them. He also drew attention to lesser-discussed features of theories, and added his own insights, in ways that enlarged the value of the project. He also used a wealth of examples from nearly every domain of culture - fashion, music and art, food, etc in a way that helped illustrate the processes he described.
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