I guess that should be reason enough to plop yourself down and read a book, but frankly the fact that I, the bibliophobe, am taking the time at all tells you how deeply troubled I've been by The End of Men, since I'm really only interested in fact-checking Rosin's appeals to the concept, given as she is to dropping breezy, shallow references where more depth might be helpful. As it turns out there's not much to get worked up over this time around: Florida's book, like Rosin's, is not really about artists at all. Really, then, it's all those mid-aughts blogmongers who deserve a slap on the wrist for getting just a bit over-excited that artists and musicians suddenly were being posited as members of an ascendant class uniquely well-positioned to thrive in a Brave New World of impermanence and volatility. If you'd asked, we could just have told you that those forces are wreaking havoc with our lives and careers as well.
Instead, our presence is mostly just a convenient indicator to mercenary job-hoppers that a given place is good enough for them. We're lumped in with Florida's "super-creative core" because, well, how could we not be? Creativity is central to what we do, whereas the smaller, secondary category of "creative professional," while granted honorary membership in the larger Creative Class, is merely required "to think on their own" and "engage in creative problem solving" (69) without necessarily being expected to innovate, design, or build. So how many "super-creative" musicians are pulling down near the average annual salary Florida cites for his Super-Creative Core ($42,719 in 1999 dollars)? Probably not too many. One enviable point about us, though: we care about what we do and we know why it matters.
Indeed, the most interesting chapter to me so far is called "The Machine Shop and The Hair Salon," wherein Florida lays out not only anecdotal but also extensive empirical evidence that self-fulfillment matters more than ever to today's labor force, exceeding even financial compensation in many cases. He speaks of "the growing number of young people who are 'good with their hands' but choose to wrap their hands around a tattooing needle, DJ turntable or landscaping tools rather than the controls of a turret lathe" despite the latter skill's greater marketability and stability. His is at least a far more satisfying, less d-baggy list of metiers than Rosin's ("publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter"). The loss of manufacturing jobs has been a real trend, but so, evidently, has a growing distaste for them among young people who might in earlier generations have mindlessly gravitated in that direction. "I don't think guidance counselors can change this," says Florida, and really, how could I or any of my music school compadres on either side of the stand observe crops and crops of glassy-eyed, ill-prepared frosh and doubt that he's right?
Now, Hanna Rosin on the "seesaw marriage:"
Couples are not chasing justice and fairness as measured by some external yardstick of gender equality. What they are after is individual self-fulfillment, and each partner can have a shot at achieving it at different points in the marriage. The arrangement got established in an era where the creative class moves more fluidly through jobs and no one expects to stay in the same job forever. It thrives in a culture that privileges self-expression over duty. It's progressive in it's instinctive gender blindness and rejection of obligatory work, and utterly conservative in its comfort with traditional marriage.
[my boldface emphasis throughout]
There is a hidden premise here; it is well-hidden indeed, but I for one insist on "going there." Why exactly is it, Ms. Rosin, that both partners can't chase individual self-fulfillment concurrently rather than being limited to doing so in shifts? What exactly is this shadow force tying down our otherwise adept, Creative, educated married couples, alternately derailing one's quest for happiness, then the other's? Clearly it is exists; you just wrote a whole paragraph about it. But does it have a name? It couldn't be...children, could it Ms. Rosin? You wouldn't consider...children such an obvious, non-negotiable component of your own notions of self-fulfillment that their wet-blanket effect on virtually every other such avenue could avoid being directly articulated for chapters on end, would you? Ah, but that's precisely what has happened here. "Domestic work" is such a weasel-word euphemism in so many books on gender: no pair of grown adults creates so many dirty t-shirts and cereal bowls by themselves that cleaning them up becomes a second full-time job. It's the kids, stupid! Lose the a priori assumption that domestic partnership = childrearing and suddenly the world opens up.
Why is this so hard to do? For once, Rosin cannot claim to be a just a reporter and not a theorist; in fact she does theorize in spates, for example that the seesaw marriage is "progressive in it's instinctive gender blindness and rejection of obligatory work, and utterly conservative in its comfort with traditional marriage." Bullshit: what she describes here is an overwhelmingly conservative orientation; the taken-for-granted assumption that procreation is an essential feature of heterosexual domestic partnership colors every square inch of it. Seriously, having a kid doesn't create any "obligatory work?!" And the "gender blindness" part? It merely dictates that instead of the woman being derailed entirely and the husband hardly at all, both partners instead take turns getting derailed. "Do you do, or don't you don't" as professor Zappa said, but the root of "progressive" is "progress" and I respectfully disagree that there's more than a smidge of that represented here, at least not with the world's population, wealth distribution, and natural resources standing where they each do at this moment.
(Am I saying humans should stop reproducing altogether and just go extinct the old-fashioned way? It wouldn't break my heart, nor that of any polar bear or grey wolf you might stop to ask.)
6 comments:
”I began to realize why people believe the legend that Hollywood corrupts writers,” wrote Dalton Trumbo, himself a screenwriter. “But they’re quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so that they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it’s getting married and having kids that really corrupts them.”
Neal Gabler, "An Empire of Their Own." Ch. 3, p. 111.
Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)
Ch. III, "Divorce and the "Decline of the Family""
"There are good reasons to think that the decisive change in the character of the family occurred not at the beginning of the twentieth century but at the end of the end of the eighteenth, and that the Victorian family, therefore, which we imagine as the anithesis of our own, should be seen instead as the beginning of something new—the prototype, in many ways, of the modern household."
(p. 37)
"The family by its very nature is a means of raising children, but this fact should not blind us to the important change that occurred when child rearing ceased to be simply one of many activities and became the central concern—one is tempted to say the central obsession—of family life. This development had to wait for the recognition of the child as a distinctive kind of person, more impressionable and hence more vulnerable than adults, to be treated in a special manner befitting his peculiar requirements. Again, we take these things for granted and find it hard to imagine anything else. Earlier, children had been clothed, fed, spoken to, and educated as little adults; more specifically, as servants, the difference between childhood and servitude having been remarkably obscure throughout much of Western history (and servitude retaining, until fairly recently, an honorific character which it subsequently lost). It was only in the seventeenth century in certain classes—and in society as a whole, only in the nineteenth century—that childhood came to be seen as a special category of experience. When that happened, people recognized the enormous formative influence of family life, and the family became above all an agency for building character, for consciously and deliberately forming the child from birth to adulthood."
(pp. 37-38)
Bob Thomas
Building a Company (1998)
"Gunnar Mansson, who rose from Stockholm manager to [Entertainment Franchise] head in all of Scandinavia, was a constant concern for Roy [Disney]. A handsome Swede and expert skier, Mansson clung to his bachelorhood. He recalls, "Every time Roy saw me, he said, 'Are you married yet?' He was always disappointed when I said no. 'We don't like that,' he said. 'We run a family business, and we like our managers to have families.' He added with a smile, 'Then we can keep them under our thumb.'"
(Ch. 21, p. 212)
Here is a Captain of Industry with little formal education articulating in layman's terms the nexus of Managerial Culture, Image Mongering, Family Values, and Social Control. The overeducated, few of whom know this nexus firsthand, have spent decades reverse engineering it from a safe distance and subsequently dressing up their conclusions in all manner of flowery verbiage. Undoubtedly most of us so inclined would freely acknowledge that such observations have more power coming from the horse's mouth; but of course part of the game is not to talk about it quite so candidly as Roy does here.
There is, furthermore, a reminder here that patriarchy per se consists in prevailing norms and relationships between and among men as well as it does between men and women; that "male privilege" in its purest form is, while very real, also quite scarce, enjoyed only by the biggest ape in the colony, by the exceedingly few men who are essentially accountable only to themselves.
Bachelorhood, then, is quite the multi-dimensional threat to those executives who prefer managers they can keep "under our thumb" precisely because the bachelor is less leveraged, less accountable, than the sole-earner of a nuclear family. Worse yet for the Captains, living simply and buying/using only what one needs is, if you will, the new economic bachelorhood, seeing that it similarly elides accountability to the consumerist mainstream and the fantasy of endless economic growth as well as putting into living practice the Debordian assertion that first-world consumerism has "overshot the target" vis-a-vis quality of life.
[Looks like this was logged and written years ago but got lost on the way to press. It has been touched up as of this posting.]
Steve Golin
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
(1988)
"Sanger had been swept away and transformed by the Lawrence strike, but her experience of Paterson was very different. "I was thoroughly despondent after the Paterson debacle, and had a sickening feeling that there was to be no end; it seemed to me the whole question of strikes for higher wages was based on man's economic need of supporting his family, and that this was a shallow principle upon which to found a new civilization.""
(p. 230)
Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
[121] "These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition...is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. ...
"But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal... How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. ... It is
[122]
not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not feel justified in his work and independent in the world. ...
"It is advantageous to the smooth functioning of the organized system if its personnel are married and have home responsibilities. (E.g., it's much harder for them to act up and quit.) But the smooth functioning of the organized system may not be advantageous to the quality of the marriage and fatherhood."
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[169] "The great lesson of Rank's depreciation of sexuality was not that he played down physical love and sensuality, but that he saw—like Augustine and Kierkegaard—that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition, that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships.
"...people need a "beyond," but they reach for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. ...
[170] "Most people play it safe:... they accept the cultural definition of heroism... Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution... It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man's condition:...
"Women are particularly caught up in this dilemma, that the now surging "feminine liberation movement" has not yet conceptualized. Rank understood it, both in its necessary aspect and in its constrictive one. The woman, as a source of new life, a part of nature, can find it easy to willingly submit herself to the procreative role in marriage, as a natural fulfillment of the Agape motive. At the same time, however, it becomes self-negating or masochistic when she sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements into her immortality-symbol. The Agape surrender is natural and represents a liberating self-fulfillment; but the reflexive internalization of the male's life role is a surrender to one's own weakness, a blurring of the necessary Eros motive of one's own identity. The reason that women are having such trouble disentangling the problems of their social and female roles from that of their distinctive individualities is that these things are intricately confused. The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed, as Rank saw. The problem is further complicated by something that women—like everyone else—are loathe to admit: their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom. This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own."
(more)
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