Catherine Liu
The Values of Prestige
Having lived almost my entire adult life in the wake of recessions and hand wringing about the Humanities, I thought the most recent economic crisis and subsequent cuts to higher education would precipitate an intensive engagement with critique, economics and culture. Despite improvements in University of California funding, majors in the Humanities at UC Irvine have continued to decline. Our students are rightfully anxious about their futures and the value of their degrees. English, once the prince of the disciplines in the Humanities at UC Irvine, has seen a steep decline in numbers of majors, as have History and Art History, despite the administration’s best attempts to put a good face on things. We can no longer ignore the numbers or argue, as certain departments and professors have in the past, that there is a simple negative correlation between quality and quantity.
While the decline in student interest in the Humanities at a UC campus is worrying, competition between Research 1/AAU universities for professors and prestige and student numbers replicates the competitive/assessment-oriented ethos of all neoliberal institutions hoping to mime the “free market” in the frenzied production of both distinction and prestige. The marketing of the higher-education credential to economically marginal youth and older unemployed people has been remarkable for its success at creating an entrenched debtor class. For working-class people of all races who saw the degree from an obscure institution and student loan debt as a way out of a life of underemployment and minimum wage jobs, the monopolistic prestige economy of higher education has played a cruel joke on the most economically fragile populations. While upper-middle-class families hire $200-an-hour tutors to groom their progeny for the college admissions Hunger Games, working-class people across the country looked to for-profit and community colleges for badges and degrees that might burnish their resumés in the face of a punishing post-Fordist employment market. What the working-class family could not see and what the wealthy family could was the economy of prestige: a college degree from a prestigious university is more valuable than an equivalent degree from an “ordinary” institution. The connections and networks and attitudes that students who attend prestigious universities and colleges acquire are extremely valuable. One measure of prestige is admissions rates; the lower the rate, the more prestigious the school; the more prestigious the school, the more valuable the degree. After a spate of articles asking the question “Is College Worth It?” The Economist discovered that for newly minted engineers, the prestige of their degree-granting institutions was much less important than for arts and humanities majors. Perhaps what we humanists are doing is trading in a dark economy of prestige.1
In the years immediately following the crash of 2008, with the newly elected Obama’s bailout of big banks and his initiative to fund community colleges in order to promote economic opportunity for working-class youth of all races, I thought that we in the Humanities should address head-on the ways in which the economy of prestige has been reconfigured in the post-industrial world. The collection of papers that follows is a preliminary attempt to provide new perspectives on ways of analyzing the economy of prestige from the points of view of urban studies, urban history and American studies, television studies, cultural studies and finally literary studies.
The topic of the conference was simply “Prestige.” We were lucky enough to have Jim English in attendance. His 2008 book The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value is the most thorough investigation of post-industrial prestige production in the Anglo-American world to date.2 English explores the profound ambivalence we feel towards prize culture: cultural prizes and awards provoke both deference and contempt. English reminds us that rejection of prize culture and prestige production is not an adequate response to the spectacle of distinction-making. Spectacle has become the production of distinction itself—from US News and World Report’s College Rankings to the Oscars, to Rotten Tomatoes, to Yelp!—entire industries are designed to help us sort through cultural products by entertaining us with information.
Because aesthetic judgment was imagined by its greatest bourgeois theorists (Schiller) as legitimate because “disinterested,” prize culture’s complicity with sales and marketing has always provoked a profound sense of revulsion and adulation. English cites Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art, a study of the 19th-century Parisian art world based on a sociological mapping of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.3 Flaubert’s novel makes fun of the bourgeois attempts to secure an autonomous space of aesthetic judgment and intellectual “playfulness” by making his hero Frédéric a pleasantly pretentious and mediocre young man who rejects his Philistine mother’s ambitions for him—get a “practical degree” in the law, marry the right girl with a bit of money—for a non- existent aesthetic calling and a failed romance with a married woman. Frédéric’s modest fortunes allow him a detached view of political turmoil and the struggle for economic survival that his friends and denizens of the demimonde around him are engaged in, but at the end of the novel, he has made nothing and written nothing. His dreams of artistic autonomy and great fortune have come to very little. As a foil for Flaubert himself, a man of prodigious talents, Frédéric is the ultimate bourgeois mediocrity, but his sentimental education became a template for dreams of art for art’s sake and the infernal machinations of markets to debase ambitions and ideals.
Elaine Lewinnek’s “From Ferguson to Irvine: Why Suburban Diversity Matters” lays out the urban history of white flight, urban planning, segregation and financial discrimination that led to the production of troubled suburban cities like Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed by the police in 2014, setting off a month of rioting. Ferguson has one of the most troubled school systems in Missouri, a brutal police force and is lacking in every kind of of city service. Making a connection between Ferguson and Irvine, Lewinnek also points to the rise of the Homeowners Association as a suburban institution and desirable feature of a suburb like Irvine itself. HOA’s are meant to restrict access to neighborhood amenities, creating a set of exclusive restrictions and gates that are deftly defined by real-estate developers to control access to exclusive neighborhoods. In laying out the new face of suburbia, diverse in very different ways, Lewinnek makes critical connections between Ferguson and Irvine. Virginia Arce’s “Splendid Intensity, Splendid Subversion” also deals with urban history and leisure. In her essay, Arce historicizes and theorizes a uniquely Los Angeles phenomenon from the 1990s, the “ditch party.” Spontaneous backyard parties that emerged in Los Angeles’ Latino neighborhoods, ditch parties welcomed young people who played hooky from school in collective rejection of the economies of austerity, welfare and education reform and the punishing policies that led to the criminalization of working-class and Latino youth in Los Angeles. If Jim English cites Bataille’s theory of excess to explain the appeal of prize culture, Arce looks to the non-rationalizable spaces of hedonism and rebellion and their eventual monetization and institutionalization in Bataillean terms as well.
The three essays on television offer a fascinating overview of Television Studies history and methodology. First, Michael Mahoney’s “On Air and Undressed: Jim Spagg and the No-Frills Utopia of Public Access Television” deals with the legacy of Portland public television personality Jim Spagg, who notoriously defecated on live television. Situating Spagg’s “work” as the degraded predecessor to the voyeuristic, non-narrative drive to see it all of “reality TV,” Mahoney engages with the excremental content of Spagg’s public access television as a space of Utopic “freedom” and DIY, non-industrially produced content. In contrast to lower than lowbrow television content produced by someone like Spagg, Quality TV emerged as the redemption of a much feared and maligned medium. Michael Newman gives us a political and historical framework in which to understand Norman Lear’s successful narrativization of liberal points of view in the creation of an extremely profitable new niche market of television audiences made up of discerning, white collar professionals. Tracing the origins of Mad Men and its power and ambiguous historicization of the 1960s, Newman shows us that Quality TV contributes to segmentation of television markets while broadcasting a “liberal” sensibility that determined the political agenda of enlightened bi-coastal elites, many of whom were Jewish- American media figures who made television content that reassured liberals and reinforced their taste cultures. Finally, Elana Levine looks at the vicissitudes of daytime soap operas in American television by looking at its attempts to re-invent itself with reference to other media and media worlds. Although denigrated as feminine and lowbrow, soap opera production was the center of the US television economic and production activity until the 2000s. Levine looks at James Franco’s involvement with General Hospital and the soap’s embrace of the movie star/performance artist’s participation in the show. Levine argues that General Hospital and its audiences did not benefit from Franco’s intervention as much as Franco’s star image and art career were enhanced by his alleged courage and creativity in starring in a non-prestigious genre of television programming. All three essays deal with our culture’s unresolved ambivalence about television as medium: policy and industry strategies are meant to elevate an all-important medium that is still struggling to define its place in prestige economies.
Finally, the last two essays deal more with the interests of literary study, albeit from two unusual points of view. Jim English is now interested in algorithmically generated forms of ranking and rating of literary works. His understanding of big data and big data gathering, as well as his deep engagement with new media platforms of content distribution like Netflix, Amazon and Goodreads, should give us new insights into the development of taste culture and cultural hierarchy in the digital age. Eschewing the populist/elitist opposition, English is genuinely interested in the ways in which readers, consumers and viewers make sense of culture industry products. In his own classroom investigations of taste and experience, he finds a correlation between prestige and lack of pleasure that is a sign of the remnants of modernist cultural authority and reflexive deference toward “difficulty.” Finally, Michael Szalay offers a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which is an ambitious attempt to update Bourdieu’s reading of a fictional world as an allegory for social order. For Szalay, Ishiguro’s protagonist, the artist Masuji Ono is a uniquely ambiguous narrator. Even though he is appalled by the commercial nature of contemporary Japan and he lives in nostalgia for an authoritarian and feudal past, Ono profited from his political and aesthetic reputation in the 1930s when he is able to purchase an otherwise unaffordable house by dint of his artistic reputation. Ono’s nostalgia is deeply reactionary. Szalay’s analysis of Ishiguro’s writing emphasizes the links between the production of cultural and aesthetic prestige, nostalgia for pageantry and glory and the seductions of Fascism itself.
The topic of cultural prestige and aesthetic judgment and order- making is not at all exhausted in this collection. Critical engagement with prestige will always have to account for the irrational and pleasurable rites and rituals in prize culture: these essays allow us, however, to look at the production of sensibilities, the arrangement of audiences and the deployment of false consensus around value that contributes to a hard core of resentment, indifference and deference that prestige cultures can produce.
1. “Is College Worth It?” April 5, 2014, accessed July 31, 2016, http:// www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-many-degrees-are-waste- money-return-higher-education-would-be-much-better.
2. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
3. Pierre Bordieu, trans. Susan Emmanuel, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emmanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
English, James P. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
“Is College Worth It?” The Economist April 5, 2014. Accessed July 31, 2016. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-many- degrees- are-waste-money-return-higher-education-would-be-much- better.