T
he world’s largest living organism is mostly invisible. The rhizomorphs and underground networks of mycelia of a honey fungus spread across 3.7 square miles in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, looking for new hosts to consume. The only way it can be seen is through the patterns of its destruction—visible via aerial photographs of dying trees—or by the small, yellow-brown mushrooms that appear above ground, which are the delicious, fruiting bodies of this much larger organism.Culture and language are often thought of in much the same way: while it is difficult to see the underlying structures that unite the fruiting bodies, it is easy to imagine that they exist. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure expressed this methodological problem in the dichotomy between the langue, or language system, and the parole, or individual speech act: the only way to see the underlying system of language is through the buds of the individual speech acts. Speech is individual, but “language exists perfectly only within a collectivity”: “If we could embrace the sum of word-images stored in the minds of all individuals, we could identify the social bond that constitutes language” (Saussure 1961, p. 14).
In the past, capturing “the sum of word-images” of all individuals was a time- and labor-intensive process, such as that of compiling the recently completed Dictionary of American Regional English. The bulk of the data for this study were collected between 1965 and 1970 by eighty fieldworkers sent
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to 1,002 communities to collect answers to a 1,847-item questionnaire. It took five years for the 2.3 million answers provided by nearly three thousand people on reel-to-reel tape recorders to be converted into computer punch cards and another ten years to produce the first volume of the dictionary (Schuessler 2012).
By the time the fifth and final volume of the dictionary was published in 2012, aggregate, geotagged conversations on Twitter had begun to provide linguistic researchers an unprecedented dataset to comb through and identify similar regional variations—such as whether people in different parts of the country are more likely to use the word “uh” versus “um,” “soda” versus “pop,”
or “hella” versus “very” (Lee 2011; Parry 2011; Sonnad 2014; Springer 2012).
With a little fine-tuning, these analysts have been able to produce maps of speech spreading into language akin to the aerial photos identifying the de-structive signature of the honey fungus.
In their introduction to theories of communication, Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart (1998) note a recurring trend in the use of biologi-cal metaphors to describe the relationship between human societies and the systems of meaning, power, and value through which they reproduce and sustain a collective order. In sociology, perhaps the most famous example comes from Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”
in his Principles of Biology, suggesting that the success of the rich and the death of the poor were akin to the process of natural selection revealed in Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Like Karl Marx, Spencer predicted a withering away of the state, but the mechanism for this decline would be the evolution of society as “the spontaneous, integrated growth and not a manu-facture, an organically evolving context for the development of heterogeneity and differentiation among the individuals who compose it” (Sciabarra 2006, p. 404). In his understanding:
Industrial society is the embodiment of “organic society”: an increas-ingly coherent, integrated society-as-organism in which functions are increasingly well defined and parts increasingly interdependent.
In this systematic whole, communication is the basic component of organic systems of distribution and regulation. Like the vascular sys-tem, the former (made up of roads, canals, and railways) ensures the distribution of nutritive substance. The latter functions as the equiva-lent to the nervous system, making it possible to manage the complex relations between a dominant centre and its periphery. (Mattelart and Mattelart 1998, pp. 8–9)
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In Spencer’s early reactionary philosophy—which emerged not coinci-dentally just after a massive wave of revolts and revolutions in 1848 (Rapport 2009)—the existing social order is akin to a spontaneously generated natural order: the top 1 percent is many hundreds of times wealthier than those in the bottom 1 percent (or even the bottom 30 percent in the United States of the present) simply because they are the thoughtful, fearless innovators who ultimately make that order work. On the flipside in this biologized theory of meritocracy are those who experience lives of servitude, sickness, and early death due their poverty, people who are probably the least fit of our species.
In this philosophy, the deaths of those at the bottom are for the best. Spen-cer called on the thinking of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who claimed that behavioral traits could be inherited, to sug-gest that criminals and those with other mental or behavioral abnormalities should be sterilized or institutionalized to prevent their passing these traits to the next generation. The more recent alt-right reliance on terms like “lib-tard” connect to the now well-known eugenic consequences of this notion of an organic society, leading to some of the history’s most heinous crimes against humanity. Of course, some members of the so-called alt-right clearly either disbelieve or revere the Holocaust, so even the notion of it as a crime may be in dispute.
Lamarkism is now purportedly in disrepute, yet Charles Murray and other peddlers of Lamark’s intellectual cousins in nineteenth-century race science continue to be influential, not only on the right (the Heritage Foundation recently deployed one of Murray’s students to argue for the severe restriction of immigration by claiming that most immigrants suffered from poor IQs, a trait that would be passed on to their children, leading them to be expensive burdens on society) but also in other dominant cultural venues, such as Na-tional Public Radio. In 2012, the latter hosted an online, Buzzfeed-style quiz asking its listeners and readers “Do You Live in a Bubble?”—a theme Steve Bannon and others have harped on in Donald Trump’s victory lap and the middle-left has partially adopted as an explicans for his success. The bubble in question related to Murray’s 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. The quiz asked questions including “Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?” and “During the 2009–2010 television season, how many of the following series did you watch regularly: American Idol, Undercover Boss, The Big Bang Theory, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Two and a Half Men, etc.?” Answers to the latter question indi-cated the drift of Murray’s argument in Coming Apart, or at least one com- ponent of it.
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Murray contends that the major divide in the United States is between what he calls a new “narrow elite” and the rest of the country, especially in terms of the “new and distinctive culture among a highly influential segment of American society” (2013, p. 29). Jumping off from the equally sketchy pop-sociology presented by his conservative colleague David Brooks in the book Bobos in Paradise (2001), he argues that this narrow elite was previ-ously forced to endure the same popular culture as everyone else—drinking Jack Daniels, wearing clothes off the rack, and watching Ozzie and Harriet.
Like all cultural portrayals of the time, “It was taken for granted that televi-sion programs were supposed to validate the standards that were commonly accepted as part of ‘the American way of life’—a phrase that was still in common use in 1963” (Murray 2013, pp. 11–12). In short, the way you can determine whether you are part of the bubble created by this “narrow elite”
or belong to the “broader elite” is by noting whether you have had to endure the latest Chuck Lorre production or have had better things to do with your time: “Much of that viewing in mainstream America consists of material that is invisible to most of the new upper class—game shows, soap operas, music videos, home shopping, and hit series that members of the new upper class have never watched even once” (ibid., p. 44). This shearing of the everyday culture of the elite and the pedestrian is purportedly the root of many of our political conflicts (especially if, like Murray, by “our” you mean white people of all classes).
He does not explain the what or why of the particular content or practices of this new upper-class culture, but he says it has come into being because more intelligent people (defined by high IQs, which he argues are correlated with higher education and higher income) are intermarrying (elite colleges serve as their primary mating grounds), living with other people with high IQs, and developing a taste bubble to distinguish themselves from the rabble.
Murray wants to criticize this bubble and the inequality that it causes, il-lustrates, and reinforces. But he falls back on pseudoscientific notions of the United States as an IQ meritocracy, where economic and social privileges are legitimately passed on from one generation to another due to the intermarry-ing of highly educated, highly intelligent, wealthy people. This conception is tenuously joined with his market-oriented explanation of cultural products:
if there is now an elite culture, it must be that there is an elite niche market to buy it.
While Murray’s Lamarkian assertion of inherited traits (including IQ and helicopter parenting) is a holdover from his earlier work, what is more interesting for our purposes is the assumption that this elite culture is sim-ply an outgrowth of the groups’ coalescing. As he puts it, “Put people with
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greater educational and cognitive similarity together, and you have the mak-ings of greater cultural similarity as well” (Murray 2013, p. 73). But the tran- sition he is discussing should actually create the opposite: the ability of Har-vard or Yale to attract the most elite talent from across the country—or even the world—suggests the potential for more cultural diversity (depending on what we mean by that term). But instead, out of these underground net-works of genetically similar elites supposedly sprouts a common culture that, whatever its content, is emblematic of the inherent values and concerns of that elite. Indeed, the difference today is not so much in the ways in which culture emerges from this common ground—1950s TV, after all, was part and product of a common culture—than the fact that there is a divide in the body politic.
Murray is far from the ideal cultural theorist, but the role of culture in his explanation of the contemporary hegemonic crisis is exemplary for our purposes, both for the questions he asks (and does not) and the assumptions embedded in his reasoning. He is concerned that the relationship between the organic society and its culture has fissured. Some of this concern is infused with his reactionary notions about race as a kind of genetic bond similar to the honey fungus; class inequality, however, has severed this racial unity. The un-derlying rhizomes are not of the same genetic stock, and therefore they are no longer producing the fruiting bodies of culture. But, as with many accounts of culture, his description of culture as a widespread practice or media product flips this metaphor on its head. Is culture the common “way of life,” the every-day colloquial practices of the average individual? Or is it the mediated repre-sentations of those practices? And what is the order of determinations? Does the common everyday culture produce the media representations? Or do those media representations suggest, validate, legitimize, stigmatize, and ultimately produce and reproduce the practices of the everyday? If the organic society is an allegorical honey fungus, this would mean that the cultural mushrooms precede and determine the direction of the rhizomatic growth beneath; or, to return to Saussure, it would mean that the speech act precedes and even produces the structure of the langue.
In effect, then, although Murray is as far away from a Marxist as one can be in the current ideological climate, his rendering of the process through which the culture of the “narrow elite” is produced and then imposed on the rest of the country—through this group’s control of the means of cultural production—is almost identical to that discussed in Karl Marx and Fried-rich Engels’s The German Ideology (2011). Their contentions about the divi-sion of cultural labor and the relationship between the economic base and the ideological superstructure are infused in Murray’s mechanistic rendering of
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the process whereby the elite developed its own culture. On the other hand, his frustration with this elite is that its members also produce a separate cul-ture of which they are (evidently) not consumers: owners of massive chain restaurants and Budweiser, Hollywood movie producers, and Oprah Winfrey are all members of this narrow elite that shapes the cultural environment for the majority, yet they do not partake in the culture they produce. So, to invoke Stuart Hall’s “Two Paradigms” (1980a) of cultural studies, we have culturalism for the rich and structuralism for the poor.
If Murray were to extend this concept to a critique of the larger political economic system, he might be on to something. But instead, he longs for a different moment—a moment when the organic society and its culture ex-isted in unison, for all [white] Americans. Murray’s nostalgia for the TV and culture of the 1950s is a perfect illustration of the assumed “value consensus”
that Hall says motivated early media and cultural studies. In his article “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” Hall points first to the dominant paradigm in sociology, a more rigorous itera-tion of the organic society: Talcott Parsons’s structural funcitera-tionalist “social system.” In this system,
values played an absolutely pivotal role; for around them the integra-tive mechanisms which held the social order together were organized.
Yet what these values were—their content and structure—or how they were produced, or how, in a highly differentiated and dynamic modern industrial capitalist society, an inclusive consensus on “the core value system” had spontaneously arisen, were questions that were not and could not be explained. (1982, p. 60)
The key word here is “spontaneously.” The notion of the organic society relies on the assurance that either no coercion is involved—no one forces the values on anyone else—or the hierarchies and values that exist are the self-evident common sense that has developed over the course of history: the result of a process, but a process that is now over.
The content of this culture, these values, is irrelevant because it is as-sumed, after the fact, to be the result of an achieved consensus. In Murray’s telling, abortion, drug use, and crime were stigmatized and stay-at-home mothers and working dads were valorized because these were the statisti-cal norm of the everyday lives of average Americans. And if the Hollywood Production Code dictated these values for all films produced in the United States, that was because the media that emerged from this culture was, to quote Hall again,
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held to be largely reflective or expressive of an achieved consensus. The finding that, after all, the media were not very influential was predi-cated on the belief that, in its wider cultural sense, the media largely reinforced those values and norms which had already achieved a wide consensual foundation. Since the consensus was a “good thing,” those reinforcing effects of the media were given a benign and positive read-ing. (1982, p. 61)
The media studies work of Hall and other early cultural studies scholars began by questioning these two assumptions—that the dominant culture was the result of a broad consensus and that the media culture was merely a reinforcing reflection of that consensus. Their “rediscovery of ideology” was facilitated first by the sociology of deviance, especially the work of How-ard Becker (1997). Murray claims that in “1963, people drank like fish and smoked like chimneys, but illegal drugs were rare and exotic” (2013 p. 14).
Becker contends that this was not the result of consensus but an indication of “the power of the alcohol-takers to define the cannabis-smokers as devi-ant” (Hall 1982, p. 62). This “hierarchy of credibility” gave certain groups
“the power to define the rules of the game to which everyone was required to ascribe” (ibid.). And with these rules in place, Louis Althusser’s explanation for the mechanisms of “the reproduction of the relations of production” be-came all the more relevant: the ideological apparatus of the media and culture served to reinforce the rules that were ultimately enforced by the repressive apparatus of the police and prisons.
Culture, then, was a site for the mutual constitution of meaning and power. From one direction, the world must be made to mean, and, in Hall’s words, “in order for one meaning [of the same event] to be regularly pro-duced, it had to win a kind of credibility, legitimacy or taken-for-grantedness for itself. That involved marginalizing, down-grading or de-legitimating al-ternative constructions” (1982, p. 67). Power tries to fix meanings by mak-ing it impossible (or inadvisable) to imagine an alternative meanmak-ing. This struggle over the meaning of events is most transparent when it is the least reified. In the United States, we regularly see this semiotic struggle after mass shootings, such as those in Newtown, Connecticut, or in San Bernardino, California. In the current U.S. context, the meaning of each of these trag-edies is different, depending on which hegemonic bloc you subscribe to. For gun-control advocates, both are further examples of the problems caused by easy-to-acquire firearms. For those resistant to gun control, Newtown’s killer played violent video games and fell through the cracks of our feeble mental health system, and the San Bernardino couple were associated with “radical
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Islamic terrorism,” a string of signifiers so powerful that Trump claims that only brave politicians will articulate them.
And, as Trump knows all too well, by fixing meanings in a certain way, it legitimizes power and/or generates value. For instance, the Newtown, Con-necticut, “truther” movement (led by, among other people, Trump supporter Alex Jones) argues that the event itself was staged—no children were killed, no shooting occurred—by the Barack Obama administration in an elaborate plot to generate public demand for stricter gun laws. Followers of the 9/11
“truther” movement share similar beliefs. Jones gained a number of his fol-lowers through his participation in that movement, producing and
“truther” movement share similar beliefs. Jones gained a number of his fol-lowers through his participation in that movement, producing and