Lecture 19
In her recent book Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, the cultural theorist Elizabeth Wilson charts the process whereby in cities such as Paris, London and New York, artists, intellectuals and their hangers-on, adopted a life of excess and anti-middle class norms. A similar lifestyle was pioneered in Sydney's Kings Cross. But who or what is a bohemian? And has the bohemian lifestyle been appropriated by capitalism and the cultural industries (for eg, in order to make inner-city living more appealing)? The lecture will explore the consequences of the mainstreaming of bohemianism through popular culture.
COMMENTS on Audio Lecture:
From Kings Cross to the Mainstream (about Bohemians)
Cultural resonance of significance
Old categories made no sense anymore. In the 2000s
Bourgeoise were the square practical once, standing for tradition and middle class morality, working for corporations and lived in suburbs and went to church.
Meanwhile there were the Bohemians, free spirits, artists intellectuals hippies and beats. They clinged to the values of the radical 1960s while the Bourgeoise had the yuppie spirit of the 1980s.
In the late 1990s, the American Bohemians and Bourgeoise were all of a sudden all mixed up. It was getting harder and harder to distinguish anti-establishment from pro-establishment.
It seemed like this was the consequence of the information age. The world of information merges with the world of money and also intellectual capital and cultural industries. People engaged in this world have one foot in the creative world of the Bohemian and one foot in the ambitious world of capitalism. Members of a new intellectual elite.
Bohemianism seems tom become more mainstream.
Deviance is a socially constructed category of behavior (Becker). It is a label.
Talks about labeling – sociology is all about labeling, finding the right drawer for something or someone. Categorising the human world.
Why does anybody want to b different? There is a price to pay. Becker says that Jazz musicians saw themselves as jazz musicians and everybody else were squares.
Bohemians are people who have deliberately chosen to be outside the mainstream. Hippies, artists…
Bohemians quite often subside to opinions that challenge the mainstream of society.
Bohemians may have the perception of mainstream middle class people that they lead boring lives sporting a materialist attitude. (Conspicuois Consumption: ‘Keeping up with the Jones’)
One famous American Bohemian was Virginia Woolf.Comments on video: La Vie Boheme (Das Leben in der Boheme) – Classic and first novel about the Bohemian Lifestyle. Justine Ettler (author) regards herself as a Bohemian, because she lives in a one room flat by herself, where she is absolutely independent and can work whenever she likes. She also thinks that not having a mortgage or debits beongs to this lifestyle, as it keeps her independency.
Barbara Kapinsky is a performer who regards herself as a Bohemian – sex sells…
She has a wayward vision and an unusual view of live.
Chris Mikul (publisher) thinks that Bohemians believe that they are superior to general middle class life around them. And they might even think that they are better bohemians than those before them.
Albert Tucker (painter) says that it requires continuity to make sense of the past. Otherwise we would not be able to undersand the past.
Film Bohemian Rhapsody (edit)
Continue the lecture: Documentary dates from 1987. People who want to be different and there seems to be a clear distinction demarcation mark who is in the incrowd and who’s not. Literature recommendation: Bougoise versus Bohemian. Looking primarlily French authors.
Modernity and Modern culture lead to an iron cage of disenchantment, isoltatation (Max Weber). Rathwer then to be rational Bohemians said, turn around be irrational and do wild things. Bohemians glamourise poverty, because they are not making any money from their art.
Sharon ( ) - Loft Living (1982) about people who move into Warehouses. There is a certain glamour associated to this behavior. Artists and the Bohemians. Capitalism has used Bohemia to redefine and revalue industrial warehouses where nobody wanted to live. Proximity to cultural produzcts was the reason to move there for yuppies and Bohemians.
Bohemian myth is reproduced from generation to generation. Bohemians spend a lot of time on their appearance – they try to turn themselves into a piece of art (re. Barbara Kapinsky). It’s about heroic individualism.
There are particular places associated with bohemia – Toulouse Lautrec with a Brothel, places like Kings Cross and their bars and cafes that are singled out as places for Bohemians.
Contradictions: Being laid back, blasé, but on the other hand not really lazy instead also working hard for certain times. Respectability is not asked it is important to do outrageous stuff.
There is a connection between Bohemianism and the cultural industry. The connection is created through the establishment of art school. As a result Bohemia produces fashion, music etc.
Malcolm McLaren is cited as saying, the most radical thing you can do is make money. – Very convenient ideology.
Art schools are an important part of Bohemia, but it is really the Bohemian values that musicians picked up by performing for friends, in lofts, cafes and bars that ceeated the kind of radical pop music we are talking about here.
Bohemia have influence on popular culture.
Bohemians always pioneered counter cultures: Punk, Goths, Beatniks…Memberships is prescribed by your aesthetic sensibility - the way you behave, the cloths you wear, the art you like, where you like to hang out…
Bohemians have a romantic kind of conception about artists: genious, someone who rebels, someone poetic, can’t help themselves, susceptible to drugs – all part of the myth. Jim Morrison is a great example.
Of course a fraction of the contemporary elite has Bohemian attitudes.
Comments on the Wilson Reading:
P. 231
‘Yet on both sides of the Atlantic, Punk, this howl of rage, was assimilated with surprising ease into the Reagan-Thatcher years of greed and brutal politics; bohemian cultural nihilism could be adapted without too much difficulty to express the moral nihilism of capitalist economics. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee was an avant-garde homage to Punk at its most intransigent and destructive; but Desperately Seeking Susan less than ten years later marketed a sweetly humorous version stripped of fear.’ I don’t think there was anything surprising about the ease with which Punk assimilated into the Thatcher Reagan aera. In fact, the situation gave Punk an even deeper meaning. The politicians above, their attitude and what they were representing was everything that Punk dismissed.
‘Trends such as these elicited further requiems for Bohemia, with the difference that now mass culture rather than the welfare state was blamed for its demise. Art critic Tim Hilton, for example, asked: ‘Can there be such a thing as a postmodernist Bohemia?’ Without hesitation he answered himself in the negative: ‘Of course not! ... Bohemia has now almost disappeared, pretty much unmourned and without an obituary ... where are the young bohemians? ... All swept up in a youth culture that doesn’t differentiate between art and entertainment.’ (Tim Hilton, ‘The Death of Bohemia’, The Guardian, London, 20 March 1991, p 17.)
Lecture 20
In their book Cool Rules, Pountain and Robins make the argument that contemporary consumer culture is governed by the principle of 'cool'. While it is hard to pin down exactly what it is, and it often refers to contradictory phenomena, advertisers seem bent on exploiting it in the marketing of goods. But how was consumer culture able to start cashing in on 'cool'? And who gets to decide what is or isn't cool? We will see that cool highlights the intersection of two themes discussed in this unit: consumerism and deviance.
Comments on the Lecture:
Connections with bohemianism. Generation after generation kids reject what their parents regarded as cool.
Adolesence cool is the central behavioural trait – argiument is that when kids who are teenagers decisce wether to wear schoolclothes or what kinds of music they are into. Corporations like Nike (Phil Knight is supposed to have said, if I can find five cool kids at a school to wear my sneakers I can be sure that in no time the rest of the school will wear them). Deliberately targeting this age group (very influential in terms of cool.
Cool and hipness are compared – sharp fashionable dressed people (Norman Mailer talks about the white negro).
Books about cool date on from the 1990s. Before that there was abviously a lack of academic and journalistic interest in cool.
Cool Jazz – Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
Cool emerged as a style originally. There is more significant stuff happening except for cool jazz.
From Cool rules by Poutain/Robbins: Cool is the defining social principle of contemporary culture. They suggest that cool is for post industrial culture what the protestant work ethic that Weber described was for modern industrial capitalism
The essence of modernity is that we submit ourselves to something called the protestant work ethic. This got modernity going.
Discipline and hard work that created the modern industrial society.
Post Industrial society rely on something called cool.
So what is post industrial? The shift of post industrial society suggests that whereas the economy that is the production of goods and services used to rest on manufacturing in the industrial period, today its information, communication, culture and knowledge. As a knowledge worker you could include academics as well as IT Specialist. Most important sector. A pattern that we see in the US, Australia, Europe and Japan is that an increasing number of people are being employed int his sector. Producing cultural things.
Cool is the predominant ethic.
Cool is an attitude or a disposition. It is about checking your behavior. To loose the heat of passion or excitement.
Saying that you think Tarantino Films are cool you are probably saying about a lack of compassion. The idea is that it is an ironic detachment. Shooting an ear off is not cool, but in the Tarantino film style it is cool. It’s an ironic comment.
Not everybody ever acclaimed to be cool will fit one and the same mould. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were described as cool, but this was a more aristocratic kind of cool. Rebels without a course are also cool – men like Marlon Brando (masculine young male). Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda are another kind of cool in the Hippie epic Easy Rider.
The ability to pull something of is regarded as cool too.
Cool can be about people as well as consumer items (sun glasses, saxophones, Marcello Mastroianni…)
Funny that sociologists cannot find a drawer to put cool into… Must be annoying, when you are used to categorise everything.
Cool seems to be the centre of innovation. So cool really is what’s hip.
Cool has redefined consumerism. Individualistic and at the same time tribal.
Read Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures, about the cultural differences of London clubs.
Cool creates a new aristocracy.
Cool also redefines politics, talking about Tony Blair (before he went to war) and Bill Clinton. Both had strong support from young people.
It’s cool to exclude uncool people.
Talk about consumer culture. Putting consumerism and deviance together. The price you pay for wanting to be different. With cool they both come together. What s cool today will be mainstream tomorrow.
READINGS
Dick Pountain and David Robbins (2000) 'What is Cool?' in e-Reserve. Comments and citations on the reading:
‘Cool has been a vital component of all youth subcultures from the ‘50s to the present day, although it has sometimes had to change its name (and even more frequently its costume) to confuse its parents.’
‘If, as we believe, Cool is destined to become the dominant ethic among the younger generations of the whole developed world and billions of ‘wannabes’ in developing countries, then understanding it ought to be a matter of some urgency for educationalists and health agencies. That is, if we are to avoid debacles such as the now infamous British Health Council poster that showed a wasted young man ravaged by heroin. (It had to be withdrawn because young people sought copies as pin-ups for their bedroom walls.)’
‘Around the time of the plant closures Levi Strauss’s vice-president of marketing was reported as saying that ‘What kids want is to be acceptable to their peers’ (reported by Hal Espen in The New York Times), but that is only half the answer, and is profoundly symptomatic of how far wrong Levi Strauss had gone. Kids want simultaneously to be acceptable to their peers and scandalous to their parents. What originally made Levi’s Cool in the ‘50S was that they were garments associated with the working classes — the term ‘blue-collar’ is a reference to denim work-shirts. In the ‘5os and ‘6os, for a middle-class kid to wear blue denim rather than grey flannel was an act of symbolic rebellion. But in the ‘90S those sartorial rebels are parents and still wearing their Levi’s, so their own children must find something different to express their rebellion.’
‘We will argue that Cool is an attitude or personality type that has emerged in many different societies, during different historical epochs, and which has served different social functions, but is nevertheless recognizable in all its manifestations as a particular combination of three core personality traits, namely narcissism, ironic detachment and hedonism.’
‘Stearns offers a nice anecdote to illustrate the consequences of such ironic reversals: ‘A university student writes in an examination that Columbus received a hearty welcome on his return to Spain; when asked why he made such an egregious historical error, he points to the textbook which states quite clearly that the explorer had received a cool reception.’
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