Culture, Digested: Class Traitors Cruise
social mobility in university, media, the arts, and the cruise essay
It’s accelerating, the writers go on cruises essays are coming out with less and less lag time in between. Part of this is because the media industry only has one or two ideas at a time, which they pass between them in the saddest blunt rotation in the world. But also, the media class has a deep anxiety about its bubble. Assigning editors wake in the night, drenched in sweat, screaming into the darkness, “We need to find some real people. Where are they?” The answer comes, like a vision from god: real people are on cruises.
Hey, remember how the New York Times didn’t know any Trump voters, so once they found some they just kept asking the same seven people to give their opinions and insights into Trump’s decisions over and over again? The cruise essay is like that but coupled with David Foster Wallace daddy issues stuff. This time, it’s writer for Succession and professor at Columbia’s MFA program Gary Shteyngart who takes a cruise for the Atlantic.
American media is alienated from “real people,” and I don’t say real people in a way that agrees with Republican rhetoric about how people running agribusiness in the Midwest or filling arena-sized Mega Churches are realer than New Yorkers who have two different types of harissa in their kitchens. I just mean people who are not in the artificial environment in which American media operates and claims to speak for people they have never met. I mean, did you read Schaller/Waldman new book about White Rural Rage? It’s been given the stamp of approval by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. The book is a chaotic mess of stereotyping, pseudo-theorizing, and misinterpretation. But people love it, because it tells them exactly what they want to believe about the scary people in flyover country, and this reinforces their belief that everyone outside their bubble is somehow lost and crazy and not worth engaging with.
The cruise essay, when it acknowledges that other people exist because not all of them do, poses the sensitive, intellectual writer against the unfeeling mob of Trump voters and Disney Adults, heavy drinkers of Barefoot wine and sugary cocktails, and people whose only emotional engagement with the world is through frantic consumerism. Shteyngart is horrified to learn that no one on the ship seems to have watched the show he worked on, Succession. He declares the American cruise enjoyer to be spiritually and morally dead. “In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large.” The essay is just a series of encounters with people he finds disgusting.
It’s funny, too, that the foil of sophistication to the mouthbreathing masses the Atlantic comes up with is a soft-edged satirist whose highest register of brow is a middling HBO series that a lot of media types confused for brilliant because it made the mistake of taking them all seriously. The cruise and what it represents (wanton American imperialism, the soul annihilating effects of neoliberalism, the total lack of care and curiosity your average Westerner contains for the rest of the world as they demand to be floated to the treasures of civilization so they can empty their bowels on them) is a hideous construction, but figuring all that out is not what these essays are for. In fact, none of them really dare to approach the idea of America just being an all-you-can-eat buffet of mediocrity, nor do they understand they just have a slightly better table at the same restaurant.
These essays are there to draw a big thick line between subject and object. It’s a way of reassuring the media environment that vast swathes of the country are not worth paying any attention to, that they are just irredeemable because they watch Yellowstone instead of Succession. It doesn’t make an attempt to understand the mass tourism mindset, because there’s nothing there to understand.
And it makes an argument for being “cultured” without having to advocate for culture. I’ve spoken before about the real hostility to difficult art that exists within the art circles these days – professors and critics laughing that they would never read something like Ulysses unless forced at gunpoint, the professors who work at classics departments and hate the classics. This is why sophistication is tied in these essays to slightly different television shows and not at all challenging (except to stay awake) books like My Struggle. There is no high art in America, and certainly the cultured and the artistic have not participated in it since the 20th century. Professors brag about listening only to Beyonce or K-Pop. No one can make an argument for why the humanities are important other than “it builds empathy” or “it makes you more competitive on the job market.” So gesturing at the horrific endpoint of an American culture that doesn’t study literature, that doesn’t enjoy a Rothko at a museum is a roundabout way of advocating for your own continued existence and employment without having to get into the grey area of what any of this is for.
But all of this lacks the ambivalence of Wallace’s original cruise essay, which was what made it interesting. To be from a place but not of it, to identify with and want to create distance from, to be familiar with and yet wholly baffled by a culture, a people, a region is fertile stuff. But it’s also hopelessly out of style.
I was reading Melissa Osborne’s Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility, about the psychological and social difficulties faced by university students from working class or otherwise economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They can face rejection and approbation from their family, exclusion from their campus peers, and a kind of disorientation from the perspective they get on their backgrounds and childhoods. Osborne writes about “the dramatic changes in class position that social mobility via higher education produces result in a crisis of identity that often leads to familial tension, the erasure of working class identities, and increased prevalence of attrition.”
The book is perhaps too careful and mindful about causing offense to be really good -- there are pains taken to be respectful about things like working class culture while being fuzzy on what that culture and identity might be. But that’s probably because Osborne is, herself, from the working classes but works in the university system. With someone who shares my background, I might joke that American “working class culture” is alcoholism and religious fanaticism, but in a room with writers with MFAs, I’d probably make a solemn tribute to the toughness and the pragmatism of the women in my family.
But ultimately, attempting social mobility in the 21st century leads to a constellation of exclusions – exclusion from the family of origin because your education and trajectory can make them uncomfortable, exclusion from your peer group because they do not share your experiences and reference points, and exclusion from your career because of imposter syndrome and the very real limits on society’s ability to recognize and celebrate you. There are advantages – cultural, economic, social – to social mobility, but can also create dissonance and ambivalence that can be difficult to manage. Leaving one place but never fully arriving at another can leave one with the sense of permanent dislocation.
A healthy literary eco-system would allow a writer the space to explore these ambivalences. I got addicted to Little Review editor Margaret C. Anderson’s memoirs because I understood her feelings of exclusion from her Midwestern background with all of its artistic deprivations and venomous politeness while also relating to her fury at the provincial attitude of the supposedly cosmopolitan urbanites who ran publishing. She loved and hated with abandon, and these strong feelings helped reshape art as she published and championed the voices of the disconnected, the adrift, and the exiled, from James Joyce to Ezra Pound to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
But today there is no space for ambivalence, because the socially mobile writer has two paths in today’s industry: perform either hate for the cloistered media class or love for the rabble. (Or pretend that you were created from spontaneous generation, like Venus on a clamshell you simply appeared out of a lifeless mass on the Harvard campus fully formed at 19.) Either write inaccurate and hateful things about where you came from, like Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, for an audience of New Yorkers who have no idea that you are full of shit; or, write smug little things about all the frauds and phonies in the media sphere, which is a huge proportion of Substack, the anti-abstract art guys on social media, but it is also a lot of these Dimes Square types. Even something like Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, which is supposed to be a kind of winky and knowing account of the publishing industry’s discomfort with class but is only really enjoyable as a publishing insider – much like the “satire” of American Fiction, it somehow only entertains the subject it is feigning to criticize. It gives the thrill of “oh we are so bad, aren’t we” to the insider and has nothing to offer anyone else.
The career of French superstar Edouard Louis is an illumination of this refusal of ambivalence. Back when it was trendy to write inaccurate and hateful things about “the working class” and the provinces, he made his name writing about the homophobia, misogyny, and ignorance of the lower classes. When the publishing industry shifted and the preference turned to empathy for the lower classes who are oppressed by neoliberalism and structural discrimination, he started writing love letters to his parents. It’s always one or the other, love or hate. Unfortunately, both are creatively bankrupt and boring, but they do please the small number of people who still read books.
As Osborne writes about how the hidden “full impact of trying to support and reshape first-generation students into elites is fundamentally misunderstood by selective colleges,” it’s also misunderstood by the creative class. Also, I think, by the individual people who try to shape themselves in an elite by what the elites want, which will always be shifting and you as an outsider will always disappoint. Because there are very thin networks now of the truly ambivalent and the mobile, the ones who can’t turn out cultural products from their backgrounds of deprivation. The institutions are all creative class coziness and daddy’s money and daddy’s networks and daddy’s legacy. Anyway, social mobility in the States doesn’t even happen anymore, or at least the mobility of the upward kind, and unless you are going to the very top tier schools college doesn’t really lead to the kind of stable improvement that it used to. It just mostly prevents you from slipping alllllll the way down.
When I write about the Midwest, I get a lot of hate mail from people in the Midwest. It comes in two flavors. The first comes from an individual who assumes that because I have bylines in The New York Times and the Guardian that I went to an Ivy League school, and they call me a phony and an elite and not a real Midwesterner. Telling them I didn’t go to college doesn’t change their opinion; for them I am part of the New York media scene, so there must be something about my background (rural, red state, Christian) that is faked.
The other kind of hate mail I get is from those from those angry that I am “casting the Midwest in a negative light.” That if I am going to be a representative from my background, it is my obligation to romanticize the Midwest and show the place in a way that informs and enlightens in a way that shows the simple dignity and quiet pleasures of the small town life. “I’m sorry, that is not my experience,” is all I can think to say.
My Kansas childhood was not Little House on the Prairie, nor was it a Ken Loach film. I don’t recognize my hometown in the empty-headed quirkiness of Gilmore Girls, nor in the working class poverty fetish work where it is all squalor and addiction and despair and never any joy. But neither am I interested in pretending I am self-created, spontaneous, aloof from any specific time or place. And when I try to read something about Kansas, I only seem to find these days the disgust of someone like Lerner or the indistinguishable-from-a-political-pamphlet memoirs like Heartland. Each one is a more concentrated effort at branding than literature.
In my version, there was love and hate in equal measure, and, like Margaret C. Anderson, I believe in experiencing both in abundance and exploring the strange connections that come from not belonging to any recognizable (to outsiders) class, culture, identity, or background. Even if it means the Atlantic will never send me on a cruise.
Recommended:
Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon is one of the few truly ambivalent books about social mobility, and it’s a stunner.
Small Press Distribution went under, stranding a lot of presses who were dependent on them to distribute their books. It’s unlikely to be as catastrophic to the publishing scene as the bankruptcy of the distributor PGW was around 15 years ago, but that’s because the publishing system in the US is basically fucked right now. It’s not “small” presses hurting so much as micro-presses, because the economics of running an independent small to medium sized press right now is impossible without conglomeration, independent wealth, or nonprofit status. Still, it’s a big deal, and I haven’t seen much coverage of it, except for this.
I liked this snarling essay about the supposedly “revolutionary” roots of dance music. “It’s not like music cannot offer commentary on the world as it is. But when it is as pathetic as Pitchfork telling you which artists to support on Juneteenth, or Resident Advisor’s suspending ratings and its comment section, lest an offensive review rankle its custodian-of-the-oppressed image, you have to wonder if all of this activity is simply a way of burnishing irrelevant brands as forces of social change.”
Also at the Baffler, a good look at the career of Edouard Louis.