The dirtiest thing I've ever heard of!
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
My favourite poem is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; I love the sound of the words, their rhythm and imagery, and especially the way Eliot himself reads them. However, I’ve avoided reading literary criticism about the poem and biography about Eliot because I’m worried that analysing the poem would disenchant it; a magician should never reveal how the trick is done. Some things are best left unexamined. Which?
Cherished childhood experiences probably fall into this category. Eliot’s poems have a special resonance for me because I received a copy as a prize when I was 13; but I also feel similarly about my grandfather’s farm, which he sold that same year. Many of my happiest and most formative childhood memories were made in those fields and buildings, playing with horses and axes and tractors, but I’ve never been back to Shropshire since; I don’t want to spoil the memory.
It’s also probably dangerous, especially for older people, to test load-bearing beliefs about the world. We all develop a value-system and outlook that justifies our life choices and outcomes, and too much examination of those beliefs leads to existentialism and even suicide. On a collective level, there are also shared beliefs that shouldn’t be questioned because they act as shibboleths, marking an in-group and an out-group. That’s a really important function - practices like going to college at 18 or not eating pork are essential to the working of some social groups - the individual benefits that come from living a more rational life (perhaps) are outweighed by the harm done to one’s social connections.
However, there’s a much larger set of ideas and practices that we should question, but don’t. They’re neither inscrutable (i.e. we can’t understand them) nor ineffable (we can’t describe them). Nonetheless, people tend to strongly resist a careful analysis of these things. Paul Fussell, an American social historian and critic, illustrated this point elegantly in his 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System:
Although most Americans sense that they live within an extremely complicated system of social classes and suspect that much of what is thought and done here is prompted by considerations of status, the subject has remained murky. And always touchy. You can outrage people today simply by mentioning social class, very much the way, sipping tea among the aspidistras a century ago, you could silence a party by adverting too openly to sex. When, recently, asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," people tend first to straighten their ties and sneak a glance at their cuffs to see how far fraying has advanced there. Then, a few minutes later, they silently get up and walk away. It is not just that I am feared as a class spy. It is as if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals." Since I have been writing this book I have experienced many times the awful truth of R.H. Tawney's perception, in his book Equality (1931): "'The word 'class' is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit."
Especially in America, where the idea of class is notably embarrassing. In his book Inequality in an Age of Decline (1980), the sociologist Paul Blumberg goes so far as to call it 'America's forbidden thought.' Indeed, people often blow their tops if the subject is even broached. One woman, asked by a couple of interviewers if she thought there were social classes in this country, answered: 'It's the dirtiest thing I've ever heard of!' And a man, asked the same question, got so angry that he blurted out, "Social class should be exterminated!"
Actually, you reveal great deal about your social class by the amount of annoyance or fury you feel when the subject is brought up. A tendency to get very anxious suggests that you are middle-class and nervous about slipping down a rung or two. On the other hand, upper-class people love the topic to come up: the more attention paid to the matter the better off they seem to be. Proletarians generally don't mind discussions of the subject because they know they can do little to alter their class identity.
Fussell justifies his book succinctly: “Since we have [classes], why not know as much as we can about them? The subject may be touchy, but it need not be murky forever.”
In this essay, I’m going to discuss two books which shed light on murky and touchy subjects. Each of the books set out to make the implicit explicit; the authors focus on patterns of behaviour that are only rarely examined and exposed. In Impro, Keith Johnstone discusses how great actors simulate the “status transactions” which cannot help but engage in when we interact with others; and in The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker thoughtfully lists the deliberate and counterintuitive techniques that go into creating both magical and prosaic social events. In one of her chapters, Parker makes a point very similar to Fussell’s:
When I raise the question of the host's role to clients or friends, whether in preparation for business meetings or family get-togethers, I am often greeted with hesitancy. This is because to talk about their role is to talk about their power as a host, and to talk about that power is to acknowledge that it exists. This is not what most people want to hear. Many people who go to the serious trouble of hosting aspire to host as minimally as possible.
Let’s dive in:
Impro
As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind. I’ve since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours.
Keith Johnstone was a teacher and script-reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1950s, where he spent his career discovering the secrets which great actors us to create magical performances. As such, he had to become an acute observer and teacher of human behaviour. In the first chapter of Impro he describes a particular aspect of that behaviour: the concept of status.
Johnstone’s insight was that high-status and low-status are not adjectives, but verbs. Status is something people do, and they do it all the time. Despite what you might think, it’s impossible to be neutral - every single action either raises or lowers your status. At the heart of these ‘status games’ is what Johnstone called the see-saw principle - if my status goes up, yours goes down. Once you start interpreting actions as raising or lowering status, you can see the effects everywhere. He gives a great example of dialogue that shows status in action
I ask a student to lower his status during a scene, and he enters and says:
A. What are you reading?B. War and Peace.
A. Ah! That’s my favourite book!The class laugh and A stops in amazement. I had told him to lower his status during the scene, and he doesn’t see what’s gone wrong. I ask him to try it again, and suggest a different line of dialogue.
A. What are you reading?
B. War and Peace.
A. I’ve always wanted to read that.A now experiences the difference, and realises that he was originally claiming cultural superiority by implying that he had read this immense work many times. If he’d understood this he could have corrected the error.
A. Ah! That’s my favourite book!
B. Really?
A. Oh yes. Of course, I only look at the pictures…
Good teachers who maintain a strong relationship with their class are status experts - they know when to be friendly and low-status, and when to show high-status authority. Much of comedy works through status - Johnstone illustrates this effectively:
Customer: ‘Ere, there’s a cockroach in the loo!
Barmaid: Well, you’ll have to wait for him to finish, won’t you?Or again:
A. Who’s that fat noisy old bag?
B. That’s my wife.A. Oh, I’m sorry…
A. You’re sorry! How do you think I feel!
In these jokes, the humour comes partially from subverting the expectations of the audience, but also from watching the status transactions in play - the customer’s complaint makes him high-status, until the barmaid mocks the seriousness of his complaint. Similarly, each subsequent line of dialogue in the second joke inverts the status hierarchy between A and B.
Johnstone’s concept of status is eye-opening - it feels like moving through Plato’s Cave. It reframes familiar events in new ways, creating new meaning. Reading about it makes me feel a bit like when I first read Edward Said’s Orientalism, which applies Foucault’s idea of discourse to the Western encounters with Asia and the Middle East: I couldn’t see how anybody could do without it! How could you possibly understand 19th and 20th century history, Renan, Flaubert, and Kipling, without Said’s ideas? It feels like theory in the sense described by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Hul Chan:
Theory offers more than a model or a hypothesis to be proven or disproven by means of experimentation. Strong theories such as Plato's doctrine of Ideas or Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit are not models that could be replaced by data analysis. They are founded on thinking in the emphatic sense. Theory represents an essential decision that causes the world to appear wholly different -in a wholly different light. Theory is a primary, primordial decision, which determines what counts and what does not - what is or should be, and what does not matter. As highly selective narration, it cuts a clearing of differentiation through untrodden terrain.
None of these books are at the level of abstraction achieved by Plato or Hegel; but they do seem to be doing the same sort of thing.
I’m particularly intrigued, however, by the fact that status is simultaneously ubiquitous and forbidden. As Johnstone puts it, “normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions unless there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions happen all the time… Normal people are inhibited from seeing that no action, sound, or movement is innocent of purpose.” This, I think, is exactly the dynamic that Fussell described with respect to class, and Parker with respect to hosting - it’s unspoken, but ever-present.
However, status is easier said than done. It’s enlightening to analyse transactions through the lens of status - but that doesn’t mean we can necessarily change our behaviour, modulating our status transactions to produce certain results. Most of us tend to play either high or low status, but the skill of knowing how and when to change status is extremely difficult to acquire. Indeed, the teaching of this skill was Johnstone’s full-time job at the Royal Court - and he didn’t believe that you could acquire acting skills simply through reading. I’m reminded of Marx’s eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
The Art of Gathering
Johnstone taught actors to simulate everyday behaviour on special occasions; Priya Parker’s job is to make everyday occasions special. Her book is guide to hosting gatherings, based on her education at Harvard and MIT and her experience in conflict resolution and event facilitation. It was recommended to me by a friend planning his wedding, but it’s been useful to me for thinking about how I host people for dinner; but it’s themes are surprisingly similar to both Class and Impro. The book is about the things we don’t want to discuss; the secrets to gathering that we leave implicit. She discusses things that we assume are effortless, but in fact are rather difficult to do well. And she eulogises counterintuitive concepts such as exclusion and authority as being key to successful events.
The book starts with a paradox. “There are so many good reasons for coming together that often we don’t know precisely why we are doing so. You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp, purpose.” Her point here is that we tend to gather for multiple implicit purposes; instead, she advocates a single explicit purpose. She cites the Japanese idea of Ichi-go ichi-e - "one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again” - and asks what you want to be different because you gathered. She illustrates this idea with the story of S., who had wanted to organise a dinner in service of two different purposes: to entertain her close friends, and to help her husband connect with his business partners.
Making her gathering about one big something excited S., but it also scared her. She was scared because the dinner she was originally heading toward, however purposeless, was simple. It would likely have gone off without a hitch - uneventful, low-key, no pressure. To gather in the way I was guiding her toward was to commit to some big something.
'Who am I to gather in this way?' people often ask themselves. 'Who am I to impose my ideas on other people? A big purpose may be fine for a state dinner or corporate retreat, but doesn't it sound too arrogant, ambitious, or serious for my family reunion/dinner party/morning meeting?'
This modesty is related to a desire not to seem like you care too much--a desire to project the appearance of being chill, cool, and relaxed about your gathering. Gathering well isn't a chill activity. If you want chill, visit the Arctic. But modesty also derive from the idea that people don't want to be imposed on. This hesitancy, which permeates many gatherings, doesn't consider that you may be doing your guests a favor by having a focus."
Parker is making a decision here, and one that is only appropriate in certain contexts; she’s choosing to be a hedgehog, not a fox. I think she’s justified though; relaxed gatherings of friends will always occur, but the kind of focused gatherings she advocates only occur after deliberate effort. However, that effort, which she discusses throughout the book, feels uncomfortable to us - just like discussing class or status. Johnstone has a fascinating argument about this sensation of discomfort, based on Joseph Wolpe’s theory of systematised desensitisation: “If we were all terrified of open spaces, then we would hardly see this as a phobia to be cured; but it could be cured. My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds very well to 'progressive desensitisation’”. Similarly, we have a universal phobia of organising other people, of reaching out and imposing authority and creating purpose, and this phobia is both irrational and amenable to progressive desensitisation.
Parker’s work proceeds through three interesting paradoxes; we have already discussed the first, that we have so many reasons to gather that we fail to just pick one. The second paradox, however, concerns the guest list. Parker argues that a good gathering involves exclusion; to gather with purpose, you have to exclude with purpose.
Barack Obama's aunt once told him, 'If everyone is family, no one is family.' It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation. The same is true of gatherings. So here is a corollary to his aunt's saying: If everyone is invited, no one is invited - in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.
Her point is that the purpose and the group are closely connected; it’s impossible to create the kind of focused purpose she seeks without the right group around it; and anyone not fulfilling the purpose of the gathering is detracting from it. Her framing here is deliberately provocative. We normally prefer to ignore exclusion, or at best to treat it as a necessary evil; but nonetheless, it happens all the time; whenever we invite, we also exclude. Exclusion is exactly the sort of thing R.H. Tawney was describing: “to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.” I think Tawney has a point here: even though exclusion is an important thing for the host to think about, it would still be bad for them to talk too much about it.
Parker’s third paradox concerns authority. Her book proposes an alternative way of hosting, and the biggest obstacle in her way is the idea of chill.
A ubiquitous strain of twenty-first century culture is infecting our gatherings: being chill. The desire to host while being non-invasive. 'Chill' is the idea that it's better to be relaxed and low-key, better not to care, better not to make a big deal. It is, in the words of Alana Massey's essay 'Against Chill', a 'laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis'. It presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations'. It 'takes and never gives'. Let me declare my bias outright. Chill is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings
…
Behind the ethic of chill lies a simple fallacy: Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means that guests will be left alone, when in fact they will be left to other guests. Many hosts I work with seem to imagine that by refusing to exert any power in their gathering, they create a power-free gathering. What they fail to realise is that this pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill.
This reminds me of the line from Yes, Minister: "Bernard, if the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it!" Parker wants the host to be a benevolent dictator, exercising what she calls “generous authority” - power exercised for the benefit of the guest. Her primary example of a generous host sounds like a genuinely wonderful and inspirational person: Nora Abousteit.
Abousteit is an entrepreneur living in New York City. Born in a small town in Germany to a German mother and an Egyptian father... she is, you could say, an extreme gatherer. She hosts and attends more gatherings than most people I know, and she hosts more generously and seriously as well. Abousteit will think nothing of gathering forty people in her home for a banquet multiple times a year. She cohosts large dinners on the eves of conferences around the world. She hosts regular brunches for anyone who happens to be in town on a Saturday. Her home has an open-door policy, and she hosts friends of friends, even if she has never met them, to give them a temporary sense of belonging while they navigate a new city. In all she does, she incarnates generous authority- protecting, equalizing, connecting
...
Abousteit connects her guests to one another as if it's her job. At one party she hosted, as friends streamed up the stairs to the main room, she stood at the top with a big smile on her face, welcomed each guest, and told them that she loves nothing more in the world than the people she loves meeting one another, and that they have one job before dinner: make two new friends. And because she's so authentic and explicit about it, people make an effort to talk to new people, in part because she's given them the social cover to do so."
Parker’s description of Abousteit’s wedding really resonates with me: “her deepest desire was coming true: the disparate parts of her life were melting into a tribe.” Many of the people who mean the most to me have barely met each other - not least, my brothers and sisters - and so I deeply appreciate every opportunity I get to connect them. Abousteit uses her generous authority to create her gatherings, exercising power on behalf of other people; that feels right to me.
It does feel like there is a tension here between the exclusion discussed earlier in the book, and Abousteit’s extraordinary inclusivity. I think that comes, however, from the kind of gathering Abousteit chooses to host; the single stated purpose is inclusion and connection, rather than (for instance) stimulating discussion or reassuring familiarity; as such, exclusion is by definition not part of the gathering, and Abousteit uses her authority to enforce that purpose. Exclusion matters to Parker because it shapes the purpose of a gathering; as such Abousteit’s purpose is the exception that proves the rule.
All three of these ideas - explicit purpose, deliberate exclusion, generous (and un-chill) authority - seem counterintuitive and even forbidden. That’s why I think they’re similar to the ideas of class and status discussed above. However, if we really want to go somewhere counterintuitive and forbidden, how about Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt?
Carl Schmitt is perhaps the most controversial philosopher of the 20th century; his provocative and insightful early work in the 1920s and 1930s relates closely to his later arguments in favour of the Nazi regime. It seems impossible that he could have anything in common with Priya Parker, the gentle and multicultural conflict mediator. However, the patterns of his thinking about the nature of politics, really do seem to match Parker’s ideas about gathering.
Schmitt, like all German thinkers of his generation, was heavily influenced by both Nietzsche and Hegel, and in Chapter 7 of The Concept of the Political he quotes Hegel, who offered the “first polemically political definition of the bourgeois. The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere." Nietzsche had a fairly similar opinion - take, for instance, this passage from paragraph 208 of Beyond Good and Evil:
The sceptic, that gentle creature, is all too easily frightened. His conscience has been trained to jump at every no, or even at a decisive and hardened yes, and to feel it like a bite. Yes! and No! - this is contrary to morality, as far as he is concerned. Conversely, he loves to treat his virtues to a feast of nobles abstinence, when, for instance, he says with Montaigne: 'What do I know?' Or with Socrates: 'I know that I don't know anything.' Or 'I don't trust myself here, there aren't any doors open to me.' Or: 'Even if one were open, why go in right away?' Or: 'What good are rash hypotheses? It might very well be good taste not to formulate any hypotheses at all' ... Paralysis of the will: where won't you find this cripple today?"
In these passages, Hegel and Nietzsche discuss an unwillingness to take risks, to make decisions, to impose authority, as being emblematic of a certain class of people. Parker’s book attempts to deal with the same kind of unwillingness to lead gatherings; and Fussell draws attention to the bourgeois unwillingness to discuss their own social standing. These ideas also influenced Herman Hesse, another writer of Schmitt’s generation, who had this to say in Steppenwolf:
Members of the bourgeoisie will typically try to lead a life in the temperate zone between the two. They will never surrender themselves, never devote themselves either to dissipation or to asceticism. They will never be martyrs, never acquiesce in their own destruction; on the contrary: their ideal is not self-surrender but self-preservation. Neither sanctity nor its opposite is the goal they strive for; for them absolute goals are intolerable. ... Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of self. But there is nothing members of the bourgeoisie value more highly than self, albeit only at a rudimentary stage of development. Thus, at the expense of intensity, they manage to preserve their selves and make them secure.
This is more or less what Fussell sees as the distinguishing characteristic of the upper classes: "their imperviousness to ideas and their total lack of interest in them... life among them is comfortable so long as you don't mind never hearing anyone say anything intelligent or original." Moments of decision and distinction are exactly what the bourgeoisie seeks to avoid. Parker wants to help us create them, and Johnstone wants to elucidate them. These moments, in a chillingly brutal way, lay at the heart of Schmitt’s political thinking:
Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy.
Schmitt identified the existential distinction between friend and enemy, closely connected to Hegel’s idea of the trial by death, as the key to politics; even though we might like to pretend that politics is about social or economic issues, real politics always involves the most fundamental division of all. Perhaps this sheds some light on the awkwardness with which people talk about class and status and exclusion; these concepts are adjacent to a concept which cannot be openly discussed. My issue with Schmitt’s argument is that it’s like quantum physics: irrelevant to our daily life. However Fussell, Johnstone, and Parker’s books could not be more relevant to our daily life - each exposing the unspeakable ideas that structure our experience.