Ch. 6: Non-Verbal Communication

OK, we'll do this and then we're on our midterm break. How are you guys? You guys are good? I hope? I hope so, anyway.

So we're looking at non-verbal communication. And some of you, you already know, because … I was teaching this same thing to some other class from your school last week and one of the students said, you know, politely and all, but still... “we did this in high school.” So, I don’t know. Maybe you did do this before. Maybe you did do this in High School. You went to a fancier High School than I did, in that case. Anyway, the point is, it doesn't matter. We're doing it again.

And just to add to the embarrassment, the guy I'm teaching here is A.) French - so one of your guys - and B.) evidently I can't even pronounce his name. I've read him. I bought his books. I used him a lot when I was doing my PhD. And thinking back on it now, I probably said his name a million times. And apparently every time I said his name, I was saying it wrong.

Anyway, Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote about the idea of “cultural capital” and you all know the idea of “cultural capital” on some level. I mean, on some level you know it, because you're wearing the shoes you're wearing and listening to the music you listen to. That the clothes that you wear and the music that you listen to or the books that you read - all that stuff that’s at the top of the iceberg in Hall’s iceberg model of culture. The stuff you can see. It's also a lot more than personal taste. You're showing off. You're signifying. You're - trying, anyway - to tie yourself together to the tribe. "Hey, you like Zeppelin?! I love Zeppelin!" And then, if you have any sense of survival at all, you scurry back home and listen to all the Zeppelin you can find. Look, the subculture. The subgroup. The tribe. Who doesn't need a life raft? What, you think you might never throw rocks at the the Yeshiva School? If it's that or drown? I know it's wrong, but if the alternative is drown? You might throw a rock. I might throw a rock. I mean, I might throw and aim to miss, but...

And I bet you and your friends probably wear the same kind of clothes, more or less. Your friends probably listen to the same kind of music, more or less. Mine certainly do. And if somebody listens to a different kind of music you and your friends… "I mean, they're nice and everything, but..."

You know, that’s “them.” That’s not "us".

And by the way, those guys are doing the same exact thing with you with you. You know, "I mean, they're nice and everything, but..." They’re looking at your clothes and they’re saying “yeah, that’s them. That’s not us.” I mean, it really is High School. So returning this to Bourdieu, the idea that “taste” is not an innocent choice. That taste is political. Taste is a way of preserving social hierarchy, I guess. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that and where that came from. How that happened.

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Alright, here we go. Defining non-verbal communication. Types of non-verbal communication, and then non-verbal codes; eyes, face, proxemics - what do you do with your eyes, right? In some cultures, if you want somebody to believe you, you look them in the eye. That's how you establish trust, a firm look and a strong handshake. In other cultures, that seems kind of hostile, right? It’s a little confrontational. It’s a little aggressive. And in those cultures if you look somebody in the eye it’s challenging, and if you look down it’s respectful.

So what happens when those two cultures meet? “I can’t trust him, he won’t look me in the eye.” versus “He wants a fight.” How do you get those groups to negotiate?

And then “proxemics”, personal space. And different cultures have very different ideas about how much space you give somebody.

I had a student once - I can’t remember where she was from, but years ago I had a student and she would come to the class and wherever she was staying - some out-there northern Dublin suburb out by the airport - she used to get on the bus to come into the city to take the class, and when she got on the bus in the morning there was usually only one or two other people on the bus, it was mostly empty. And she would always go sit right next to the one other person on the bus, right? And start a conversation. “Hi!” Right? “How are you?” Because where she was from, it would be considered rude not to do that. To pretend that somebody wasn’t sitting on the bus with her. Whereas in Ireland, that’s the last thing you would do. Here, you would give people as much space as possible. And, you know, this is where people get the idea that people are “cold”. Or whatever. The Germans are “cold”. People project their own anxieties - I know I certainly do - all the time - projecting their own anxieties onto other cultures behaviour.

Cultural space, which is really about the way that territory is marked in an area. Or the way that cities are designed. Paris is a really interesting example of this. When Hausmann redesigned Paris after the revolution, he was doing a couple of things. First of all, he was making sure that the streets were wide enough so that you could send an army through in case there was another uprising. Which, you know, there was. But the other thing he was doing was saying “OK, we are an empire and a world power and we need to project that discipline and power. We’re getting rid of all of this chaotic mediaeval shit and we're starting from scratch. Because a world capital has structure and order and discipline.”

 

 

You know, New York I guess, to an extent. Washington D.C., I think, is a really interesting one because it decided that it was going to be the birthplace and capital of the new Democracy - not just the capital of a country but the capital of an ideal. And so it was modelled - sort of - on Athens. Because Athens was, you know, the birthplace of the original democracy, at least as far at they were concerned. So when you're looking at all the white columns and domes and that sort of stuff - although I guess maybe the domes are Roman, but either way “Classical European Architecture” - it was staking a claim as the inheritor of Roman Empire and Greek Democracy. No castles but plenty of columns. No castles and plenty of columns.

 

I don’t really know other cities in France well enough to talk about them with any kind of … I know that Dublin, for example, which is about a thousand years old, whenever the Vikings settled it, and it’s horrible to drive through Dublin because it’s still essentially an accidental mediaeval city. It's a lot of fun to walk around it's almost impossible to just drive across town, from Point A to Point B. It wasn’t really planned, it just kind of grew. It just kind of sprawled around. Which I guess is what Paris must have been like before Hausmann showed up with his t-square.

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I don’t know if you remember before when we were defining “communication” and we said it was the intentional conveyance of an idea, right? I have an idea in my head and I’m trying to put that same idea into your head. I mean there’s certainly such a thing as unintentional non-verbal communication. I mean, that … we talked about that before. They're called "tells". The things that people do when they’re lying, for example. Where they touch their nose or they look up or scratch their chin or whatever. I mean, there’s a whole science to watching people. And I think we all kind of have an instinct for that, as well. “That person is lying to me.” The police are very good at that, or at least the police are who are good at their jobs are good at that. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We're talking about intentional...

And intentional non-verbal communication socially shared. Right? Because verbal or non-verbal, it’s still a set of symbols. It’s still a language. And for that to work, we have to "speak" and understand the same language. And so there are gestures that … I’m sure, the only specifically French gesture that I know, which I really like a lot, is the shrug-while-blowing-air-through-closed-lips gesture. Which I think essentially translates into “Whatever.” It’s so French. It’s one shoulder, too. Not both, that would indicate caring too much. One shoulder and “pfffft.” And it’s pretty instantly recognisable, but it still depends on everybody knowing what it means. In France everybody understands that gesture, but in India that same gesture doesn't mean much. I mean, they can probably guess, but...

And we’ll talk more about expressions in a minute. You know, there are learned expressions, and then there are universal expressions. And we’ll talk more about that in a minute. And then gestures, the things that you do with your hands or whatever. Body language, touch, both of those are kind of interesting. The idea of… I don’t know, do the French touch? I mean, I know you do that “bisous” thing, that kissing thing, but besides that I don’t think the French are an especially touchy/tactile people, are you? Do you guys hug? I mean, the Italians, they kind of touch, right? The Spanish touch. I don’t think the French do, so much.

I remember in the early days of the coronavirus, when nobody knew what the hell was going on - and I don’t know if this turned out to be true or not, but in the early days - there was a theory floating around that part of the reason that it was spreading so quickly through places like Italy and Spain and Brazil was that in those cultures everybody touched, everybody got close. And in a close environment like that, transmission was very easy.

Yeah, and I don’t either. It makes me really uncomfortable when people get too close. But then everybody in my family was either Scottish or German, and they don't hug. And then they moved to the South, and they don't hug, either. Certainly not the men. Not in Kentucky, they don't.

Eye contact, I just talked about that a little bit. That whole “do you look somebody in the eyes or do you not?” And if you do, for how long? There’s this kind of creepy thing that some guys do, I’ve seen them do it, where they kind of … like if there’s a guy and he’s interested in a girl - or maybe in another guy for that matter, I don’t know - where he just keeps staring at the person. Right? And they don’t stop. And I don’t think that’s ever worked. In the history of relationships, I don’t think any woman has ever said “Wow, that guy I don’t know has not stopped staring at me like Charles Manson from across the room for twenty minutes. I should really go talk to that guy.” I mean, maybe it has, but I would think the response would be more along the lines of “If you don't stop I'm calling the police.”

And then artefacts. Clothing. Architecture. The stuff that you can see. The stuff that you can hold. That signals a meaning beyond itself. Or that signals tribal affiliation. That kind of thing.

And then finally paralanguage. The sounds that come out of your mouth that aren't words. It could be the speed you speak in. Or it can be the tone or it can be the volume. Do you remember we talked about “code switching”? When you go from one environment to another and you speak differently depending on the environment that you’re in? Washington Heights to the Midtown office job? Well, this is part of code switching.

I always thought it was interesting in New York, when you look at different ethnic groups in New York City, the way they communicate, and one of the things to look at is the speed that they speak in. So, for example, take Italian and Jewish and Irish communities. As far as timing goes, the Jewish and Italian speakers are pretty close. I mean, there are distinct differences, but both tend to be kind of fast. New York “Goodfellas” kind of thing. "Rat-a-Tat-Tat." And then the Irish in New York tended to speak more slowly. And I don’t know if it’s because … here’s my theory, anyway. My completely unfounded and unscientific theory. Historically, the Irish tended to work their ways into levels of street-level authority, like cops. Firemen. Union Representatives. Priests and Bartenders. And if you’re in that position of authority, you don’t have to talk quickly. In fact, there’s a certain power in not talking quickly. Because everybody else has to wait for you to finish, nobody’s going to interrupt you. You get to set the pace and tone of the conversation, which takes power away from the other people in the conversation. I’m not sure how credible it is, but I like it. I’m sticking with it.

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Theoretical Approaches

 This I think is kind of interesting, this idea that … well, did we talk before about how people who are born blind don’t see things in their dreams? You can only work with the input that you receive, right? And the blind don't live in a visual world. However, people that are born blind do smile when they’re happy. Which doesn’t, strictly speaking, make any sense. After all, a smile is a visual indicator that you're happy. But there are universal gestures. There are universal expressions. If you go anywhere in the world and somebody is surprised, they make the same face and you recognise it immediately. Or if somebody’s happy, or if somebody’s angry, you know what that looks like. Those gestures are innate, they’re involuntary, and they’re universal.

As opposed to specific gestures, and things like, uh … I’m trying to think, I don’t know if … I was going to say “eye-rolling” but I think eye-rolling might be universal. I think most cultures do that. Where there are teenagers, there are eye-rollers.

When I was a kid there was something called a “gas face” which was supposed to signal a kind of disbelieving contempt, basically the face you’d make if somebody farted. That somebody's presence was essentially the equivalent of a fart. And there's that upper-lip fishhook thing, which I guess signals contempt. The fishhook-thing-eye-rolling combo is a classic. But there are gestures and symbols that … We talked before about stereotypes, that in Italy people tend to use their hands when they speak. Which is generally speaking true, although it also depends on the region and the dialects and so forth, it’s not a negative stereotype or really even a positive one. It’s just an observed generalisation. A culturally specific generalisation. But what I didn’t realise, until I started teaching a lot of Italian kids, was that a lot of those gestures were very specific, and they go with very specific meanings. So this gesture means this, specifically. And that gesture means that. This means somebody’s beautiful, and this means somebody’s gay. This means you're hungry. This means you think the person you're talking to is being thick. So those are very specific learned things, and they depend on the person you’re speaking to understanding those gestures. Which I didn’t. And mostly still don’t. But it's so much fun.

Now, this idea of the natural or biological origins of universal gestures. This gets kind of interesting.

Do you remember when we talked about Samuel Morton, the guy in Philadelphia who collected skulls to measure cranial capacity using birdseed? Remember? He used to fill the empty skulls with birdseed and the more birdseed he could fit in, the more intelligent the owner of that skull obviously was? The “disputes over defining culture” class, the science of ethnicity and the scientific justifications of racism? OK, great. So around that same time, in the 1850s there were a lot of guys who were using new technology and new science to support pre-scientific theory. Specifically film. People would try to photograph spirits, for example. Or fairies.

  

You know, Samuel Morton was using “science” - at least what he honestly considered science - it wasn’t very good science, but it was science, to prove intelligence differences by race through evolution. Right?

And at the same time, in France, there was this guy - this is the biological origins thing - there was this guy, the Duchenne de Boulogne, who ran a series of experiments that... The Duchenne Experiments. He was a doctor, a scientist, and what he wanted to do, as far as I can tell, is he believed that we all had a soul, right? That God had given us all a soul. A universal soul. And what he wanted to do was find out what that soul looked like. Visually looked like, something he could document. So he said “OK, well, everybody - no matter where you come from, China, France, Brazil, whatever - everybody smiles when they’re happy and everybody cries when they’re sad and that’s universal, it’s involuntary and it’s not culturally determined, so it must have come from God. Right? That must be the soul. The thing that humans are born with and can’t change deliberately or intentionally.

So what he did is he took a camera, and he took an early electric generator, and he took a volunteer, and then he basically zapped that volunteer with electrodes to bring out every involuntary expression that he could. Which he then photographed and catalogued and presented. You know, “Here, this is the soul. This is the involuntary face of the soul God gave us all.” He believed that “the face was the gate to a man’s soul”. Do you understand what I mean? I mean, I know it’s kind of a jump now, I know it sounds crazy now, but like Morton and like Darwin even and like a whole bunch of other scientists at the time, they were trying to figure out what humans were. I mean, Darwin got it right and Morton got it wrong and the Duchenne got it wrong as well, but the point is at this stage nobody really knew any better. And religious belief had always been kind of central to answering questions of “what is a human” - so it made sense to start with that. And so that’s what this guy was doing in France, in 1862.

And about ten years later, Darwin comes along and he says “Well, no. Not really. I mean, if you really want to know why we have a uniform set of involuntary gestures, it’s because we’re all the same species of animal. And animal species have uniform involuntary gestures. I mean, a cat might not react to fear the same way a giraffe does, but a cat in Brazil reacts exactly the same way to fear as a cat in Japan.” If we come from the same evolutionary tree as cats and dogs and gorillas. Animals have gestures and we are animals and we have gestures, too. And we can read other animals' gestures and they can read ours. And you need the gestures to communicate and to signal.

I mean, if any of you guys have a dog, you know what I'm talking about. You can tell a dog’s emotions pretty quickly. Right? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a dog look at you like it’s sorry? It’s contrite? “Come on, we’re still friends, right? I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that.” Because they’re trying to communicate a thought to you, and it’s working. Which is probably a pretty big reason why we don’t eat dog. We see too much of ourselves in them. They’re animals, we’re animals, we’re communicating. I have a couple of cats, right? And I didn’t realise until recently that when cats look at you and they close their eyes and then open them again? And then you close your eyes and you open your eyes again? You’re talking to your cat. And your cat’s answering. It’s limited, and I’m not trying to be sentimental here, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Your cat’s telling you everything’s cool, and you’re answering that everything is indeed cool. It’s a very limited conversation, but it is a conversation. And it’s a cross-species conversation.

Which makes eating them that much harder.

So, Darwin came along with this kind of rebuke to the Duchenne, “The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals.” Animal origins, it isn’t a spiritual interpretation, it’s biological. “Which argues for a single evolutionary origin of the human species.” And, you know, he catalogued happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. And he catalogued those because those are all universal human emotions. Involuntary universal human emotions.

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Functions of Nonverbal Communication

OK, the functions of Nonverbal Communication. Why do we do it? And now I’m talking about intentional nonverbal communication, so we're moving away from both Darwin and the Duchenne.

Well, one of the reasons we do it, obviously, is if the person can’t hear you. That’s a fairly obvious one. To replace spoken messages for whatever reason. Noise. Language differences.

Or the next one, to signal or send uncomfortable messages. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this situation, you probably have at some point in your life, when you walk into a room and you immediately know that something bad has happened. That somebody in the room has bad news for you. You walk in, you look at them, and you go “OK, what is it?” Do you know what I’m talking about? And there’s a reason you’re able to read the environment. Right? I mean, you can tell from the way the person is … You know, the air is heavy, but it’s not just that the air is heavy. It’s that you are reading a lot of signals that you don’t necessarily know you’re reading. The body language. Or the expression. And those signals are there for a reason, because they’re preparing you for whatever news that you’re about to hear. Or that you have to give. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to give somebody bad news, which is also really awkward. And so you do a lot of things - willingly or not - just to prepare them so that it isn’t just like getting punched in the face.

And then the next one, to establish or clarify relationships or hierarchies. One really obvious example of that would be the military, you salute - and you have hold that salute until the person who is higher in ranking than you, until they salute. Only then you can stop. But until they do it, you can’t. Because they have power with what you do with your own body.

Or where somebody sits at a table, is an indication of hierarchy too. Right? Are they at the head of the table? Do they sit at the right hand of the head of the table? I mean, all that King Arthur stuff. In my family me and my brother had this big rivalry about who got to sit where in the car. I’m sure some of you you probably had that, too. And it wasn’t even about … it wasn’t even necessarily the best seat in the car, it was about power. That’s my spot. You can’t have my spot. And it turns into this whole fight, and your parents are just in despair. Why does it matter? But it does matter, because that's my spot. And you can't have it. And now I’ve got two sons, and they’re doing the same damn thing.

Or to regulate interaction. If we were in a real classroom right now, instead of this Zoom thing, and if you had a question, you’d raise your hand. Maybe. I mean, it depends on the size of the class. It depends on the mood of the class. And I would point at you and you would speak and then somebody else would raise their hand and that way everybody could get their thought out. Which I suppose, when you think about it, is also kind of a hierarchy thing and also kind of a collectivist thing. We all agree to the terms, you don’t speak unless I point to you, but I only have that power over you because you give it to me, and the only reason for you to give it to me is for the good of the group as a whole. I mean, objectively, why should I have the power to tell whether you can speak or not?

And then to reinforce or modify verbal messages. If I say “Oh, I saw your brother yesterday. He looked tired” what am I saying? It’s not a trick question. “I say your brother yesterday, he looked tired.” How did your brother look?

He looked tired, exactly. OK, good. We’re going to go again.

“Hey, I saw your brother yesterday. He looked, uh… tired.” And I put these little air-quotes around “tired.” Or I raise my eyebrows. How did your brother look yesterday? What am I telling you? Well, maybe he was drunk. Maybe he was sad. Maybe he was hung-over. But the one thing he wasn’t, he wasn’t just tired. So the thing that you do while you’re saying the word to either undermine the message you’re giving out, or throw a little spin on it.

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OK, great. We’ve talked about this a little bit before. The idea of monochronic and polychronic time, and how it kind of fits into high-context and low-context environments and how it kind of ties into individualistic versus collectivist environments. Because they all kind of nicely fit into each other, and one of the central aspects of that is the contrast between industrial and agricultural way of living, and how the shift from one to the other really changed the way that we operate in the world and our relationship to the world.

Are any of you guys “list” people? I am. I have one right in front of me. This is a list of things that I have to do today, and I’ve got lists all over the place. My desk is just one giant pile of lists. I’m always making a list and then crossing something off and then making another list and then getting kind of anxious if I can’t find my list and buying little notebooks that I put lists into and … are you like this? Maybe you’re not as neurotic as me. Yet.

OK, so maybe it’s a little neurotic, but that's the idea of monochronic time. You get one thing done and then you do the next thing. And then you get that done, and then you do the thing after that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I can’t do that until I do this. Yeah, maybe it's a little neurotic, but it gets things done.

Highly structured, linear.

I think we talked before about the idea of linear time and religion, didn’t we? I think we did. Right? Judeo-Christian-Islamic, it’s all one straight line? Like, if you think of Christianity, the story of Jesus and all that. Once upon a time, there was this woman named Mary and her husband Joseph and then this bird came down from heaven and then she got pregnant without having sex and then she had a baby and it was Christmas and then the baby grew up and turned into this guy and he talked to a lot of people and then a lot of people followed him but then he seemed like a threat to the Romans and so they killed him, and then he died and then he came back and then he went to heaven. The End. Well, not the end, but the end until the real end. Right? And it’s a story, right? I’m not saying it happened or it didn’t happen, but I am saying it follows a story structure. And that’s also the way we think about time in the West, as well.

I always thought that that was kind of interesting, the idea of our lives following a story structure. I mean, how old is the novel in popular culture? As popular entertainment? Since mass literacy, right? So a couple of hundred years? Not long, right? Because most people couldn’t read. So the idea that you would read a book for fun, and then later you’d watch TV or see a movie or whatever. Although I guess theatre’s older than that. But that kind of changed the way we think of ourselves as the hero of your story. Right? Life isn’t just a bunch of random things that happen, life is a story. It’s got a beginning, it’s got a middle, and eventually it’ll have an end. And there’s either a happy ending or a sad ending. Right? Well, that’s a relatively new way of thinking about life.

I mean, once upon a time - and not all that long ago - life was just sort of a repetition of specific events, a lot of them tied to agriculture and survival, that would happen and a bunch of random things that would happen on top of that. Every October you bring in the harvest. If God was angry at you, your horse might die. If God was in a good mood, you might find some money on the road. But every October you bring the harvest in, just like your dad did and your children will. Every day you get up and you go to work and sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s either random or it’s explained on Sundays when you go to church.

But if you think of it as a story, you go “No, wait, I am the hero and I’m working towards a specific goal or at least a specific end.” I mean, hey, no pressure...

And I know we talked before about the idea of “polychromic” and agricultural collectivist and high-context … The whole "generations on a farm" thing, right? Because look, now we all live in cities, right? Well, not all, but now a majority of us either live in cities or work in cities or get our culture from cities, right? And we all work in offices and factories and all that sort of stuff. But for thousands and thousands of years we were more or less agricultural animals. I mean, that’s what most of us did, we lived on a small piece of land and we grew things on it and then we ate those things and then we died. But the family was still on that one piece of land, right? So, like, THIS is the farm. We’ve been on this farm forever. People come and go, but there is a constant and the constant is the work. And the constant is the food the work provides, right? The years may be different, but Spring is Spring and Fall is Fall.

And then you move to the city and all of a sudden that doesn’t exist anymore, that relationship of where you are and circular time. In a city, “nine o’clock” has a very specific meaning. It is nine o’clock, it is time to go to work. Computer needs to be on. On a farm, “October” has a very specific meaning. Or April, or May, or whatever. Because this is when you … you do this thing in May. You have to do something else in October. But “May” doesn’t mean anything in a factory, just as “nine o’clock” doesn’t mean anything on a farm. If you know what I mean. So it’s a very different approach to time and nature and your place in both.

So with industrialisation our relationship to time changed.

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Clothing and physical appearance I think is interesting. The idea of claiming or announcing your place in society through the clothes you wear. You know, I … the school I work in here in Dublin, usually the students that we get are from France and Spain and Germany and more recently Russia. More Russian students recently. And one of the interesting things, I think, is that the students for the most part, certainly the ones from France, their families tend to have some money. They’re pretty comfortable. And by that I mean they live comfortably, but they’re also comfortable living comfortably. They’re not necessarily super rich, but they’re … they’ve got some money. Same with the Germans, same with the Spanish.

And the same with the Russians. But the difference is, let me see if you understand what I’m saying here. The difference is... let me see, how do I say this? The difference is that most of the French families that have money have had money for a while. They have money, their parents had money, their grandparents had money. There’s always been a certain level of assumed comfort. Right? Whereas for the Russian kids, they’re not comfortable living comfortably. Comfort is a new thing. It’s a relatively new thing. Maybe their parents made the money, maybe their grandparents made the money, but for the most part it’s a new post-Soviet phenomenon. They have money and they can travel around Europe and study business and all that sort of stuff. The grandparents, for the most part, couldn't.

So what’s interesting is when you see their clothes. Right? Because the Russian kids, they really go for the labels. I remember there was this one guy Dimitri, out of Kaliningrad, and he had this huge gold “Dolce & Gabbana” belt buckle. And he was always polishing it. He was always making sure that his belt buckle was nice and shiny. Because he wanted everybody to know that he had an expensive belt buckle. On an expensive belt. And he was always really neat, you know? Shirt tucked in, hair perfectly combed. But the thing is, the French kids would look at his belt buckle and his hair that was perfectly combed and they weren’t impressed. And he couldn’t figure out why they weren't. It’s kind of a sad story. The French kids would look at him and “Yeah, OK, he has money because he can afford the belt” but at the same time, because it was gold and because it said “Dolce & Gabbana” on it, there was a certain … “Yeah, you might have money but you don’t have class.” You’re not quite there yet. If you have to show it that much, then it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It doesn’t quite work. Having money isn't enough, but how are you supposed to know that if you've never had money?

There are a couple of places outside of New York where people with money go for the summer. One of them - I doubt if you’ve ever heard of either of them, I don’t know why you would - but one of them is called Martha’s Vineyard and another one is called the Hamptons, right? Northampton and Southampton. And Martha’s Vineyard is an island off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s near enough to Boston, but not too near. And it’s really nice, if you go there it’s really nice. You’re out there in the ocean and the houses are cool and all, but you wouldn’t … I mean, they’re like very nice suburban houses up in Westchester or wherever but you wouldn’t … The houses are kind of tucked away behind the trees, it's all very woodsy, and it doesn't look like "money", you know? If you don’t know what money looks like. And the cars are all good cars, but they’re kind of rusted. They’re kind of muddy around the wheels. And everybody dresses in jeans and t-shirts and sweaters and all that sort of stuff. They dress down. The whole feeling is nice suburban middle-aged liberals with hippie kids. I don't know if you ever saw the movie "Get Out" but... yeah, that kind of thing.

And then you go to the Hamptons, which out at the end of Long Island, and everybody looks sharp. Everybody’s wearing white clothes, and there’s a lot of gold and expensive sunglasses and expensive watches and people are driving white SUVs. No mud on the tires. And the houses are big and they’ve got glass balconies and fancy swimming pools. And what’s funny is Martha’s Vineyard is where the older money is. Or at least the comfortable money. The Hamptons, I mean, yeah, you have to have money to live there, but at the same time … look, if you’ve got to show it, if your car has to be white and spotless, if your sunglasses have to be Versace, you’re already kind of losing on the Cultural Capital front. It’s Dimitri's belt buckle, essentially.

Which all brings us right back to Pierre Bourdieu. Cultural Capital. And basically what he was looking at… Well, this isn’t by him, this is on the back of his book... “In the course of everyday life, we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. The social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which small distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.”

So, you see the clothes somebody wears and you use that to put them into a social context. “Tommy Hillfiger and boat shoes? OK, got it. Yeah, that’s the kind of person you are.” And they’re doing the same thing with you. Right? “Carhartt jacket and skinny jeans? OK, I understand.” I mean, this all cuts both ways. It cuts both ways. If you're judging them I can guarantee you they're judging you as well. And then you have to ask where this whole hierarchy of taste came from. How do you know what to wear? How do you learn that? How do you know what’s cool and… Well, yeah, acculturation. Basically, this thing that Bourdieu’s talking about. That the aesthetic choices you make and the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the books that you read - which is where that whole “Zoom Background” phenomenon comes from, what books does Tom Hanks have on the shelf behind him? Or the kind of car that you drive. You know, it’s just semiotics again. Something that signals a meaning beyond itself.

And then the question is, well, how did that happen?

Well, here’s kind of how it happened. If you remember before when we talked about the generations of families that worked on the same piece of land? Right? “This is the land my great grandfather worked on and then my grandfather worked on it and now…” When we were talking about time? OK, great.

So, once upon a time, as we said before, we were mostly agricultural animals. We had a piece of land, we figured out how to make it feed us, and we stayed there. And a community grew up around there. So not only did I stay on the farm forever, but the people that lived on the next farm over, there were there forever too. The people who lived in the valley stayed in the valley. And there was a whole community of people that lived there and they established their own culture. And it was “folk” culture, it was agriculturally based. You know, like Oktoberfest and May Day and Halloween and all of that. There was this whole agricultural and seasons-based set of traditions and rituals, which brings us right back to Hofstede’s four components of culture. Parties and pageants and festivals and all that sort of stuff. Usually tied in with the seasons, there’s a spring festival which is usually tied into fertility - again, May Day and all that kind of stuff, and it was a culture that was developed by these people and they were both the performers and the consumers of their own culture. It was this self-generating and self-contained and pre-literate - they weren’t writing things down, they weren’t reading instructions on how to … I mean, with the exception of the local priest or mayor or whatever, they couldn’t read or write. But what they could do is they could play music and they could tell stories. They had everything they needed to sustain culture for culture’s sake, they just didn’t have a formal education. So that was folk culture.

And then, over in the cities, behind the walls of the cities, you had this other culture going on, the culture of the elite. And these guys could read, right? So everything was written down. And they were writing books, and they were writing music, and they were going to the theatre, and the music that they played was “classical” music and it was all notated. You know, that kind of thing.

And so there were two separate cultures and they didn’t really interact with each other much. The people in the cities would buy crops and pass laws, but on a day to day level there was a sort of semi-permanent separation. And as far as social hierarchy was concerned, the elite were the people who had power and could read, and the folk were the people who had less power and couldn’t. Essentially. But then, over a couple of hundred years with the rise of industrialization, people moved from agriculture to industry, and they moved from the country to the city. They left the farms, and they got jobs in factories, and all of a sudden the “folk” became the “masses”. So now you move from a folk culture to a mass culture.

The thing is, when people moved to the cities, and they started working in factories instead of working on the farms, they also … their kids went to school. People started getting an education. At least some base level of education. And that changed everything. Because once upon a time, you know, you could either read or you couldn't. And because these guys couldn’t, that put them in a lower level. And because these other guys could, that put them at a higher level. But once everybody could read and write, that’s not enough anymore. “Oh, you can read? That’s great. I can read, too. And so can he and so can she and so can those guys over there. We can all read.” Now it doesn’t matter that you can read, everybody can read. What matters is what you read. And this is where taste becomes weaponised, you know … everybody can drive a car, it’s the kind of car you drive that matters. Do you understand what I mean?

There was this critic, this American critic named Clement Greenberg, and he wrote an essay back in the late 1930s called “Avant Garde and Kitsch”. At the time he was mostly worrying about what was going on in Germany and how the Nazi government was using culture to influence German public opinion. And so “Folk Culture, High Culture and Taste.”

Right, so what he’s saying there is that if you can appreciate “art”, for example, that means you had a formal education that taught you how to appreciate art. And if you had that education, that meant that you didn’t have to go to work when you were twelve or whatever, you could go be a student. And if you could be a student, that already indicates that, you know … Your formal culture already indicates the education which indicates the social and economic standing of your class, right?

Here’s the interesting thing, though. Do you remember we talked about "hegemony"? The governing agents of popular culture? Everybody saw “Friends” and then everybody wanted to move to New York and live like they do in “Friends”? So this was Greenberg’s main point here, when he says “Losing their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption.”

That's the warning. Remember, he was trying to figure out how the general public in places like Germany or Italy could be won over by fascists, that's why he was writing. And this is why hegemony fits in.

Once upon a time, these guys made the culture that they took part in, and it existed through a kind of consensus. If people didn’t like it, or they didn’t agree with it, if it was boring or too offensive or not offensive enough, they didn’t do it twice. The music that they danced to? They made that music. The rituals they had, they made those rituals. Their stories and jokes and all that they told each other were theirs. But after industrialisation, after they moved to the cities, they still needed culture, but they didn’t make it anymore. They became the consumers of culture rather than the producers and consumers of culture. You understand what I mean by that? They got a job that kept them busy and they got a radio that kept them entertained.

Now here’s the thing. Once I trust somebody else to provide me with “my” culture, then that culture doesn’t necessarily speak to my values anymore, but it still continues to shape my values. Right? You see something on TV or in the movies or whatever, and you still respond to it, but you had no hand in making it, you’re just the one who’s taking it in. And these guys, the “folk” from the Brueghel paintings or whatever, you fast-forward five hundred years, and these are the … this is basically the white working class who supported Trump, or who voted for Brexit, or think Le Pen’s got some pretty good ideas. Right? I mean, these are the same people. They went from the country to the city, they got working-class jobs, they got jobs in factories, and they consumed a culture that was made for them but not by them.

And the reason hegemony is interesting is that a lot of the reason these guys would have supported Trump is because they saw him on TV being an all-powerful successful billionaire. And they said “Aha! Well, if he’s a successful billionaire, he must be smart and he must be a good leader.” And he was, at least on TV. And, because he was still a populist, and not really a snob in that Martha's Vineyard kind of way, his supporters recognised him as one of the folk at heart, a shit-kicker like them, but unlike them a shit-kicker with enough power to speak to their grievances and stand up to the elite. Which, and this goes right back to Dimitri's belt-buckle, making fun of Trump because of his hair or his tie or whatever, making fun of his weight, was such a stupid thing for his opponents to do. You don't give people who already resent you, who already know you're looking down on them, reason to resent you even more. I said this before, when I was talking about my student from Texas, nobody's going to listen to you after you call them stupid.

Anyway, sorry. Digression.

Weight, which I mean … I know the stereotype in America is that Americans are fat, and there are plenty of fat Americans. But inside America itself, fat is also a class issue, right? Rich people tend not to be fat. Generally speaking in America, the poorer you are, the fatter you tend to be. Because you’re eating cheap food and because you’re eating too much of it and because you’re not getting any exercise and all of that. But the point is that weight is a pretty decent indicator of social standing as well. Really, there’s a lot of class issues involved there too, right? So there’s a certain hierarchy to health and spirituality as well. Everybody should be able to do yoga” and "everybody should eat organic". "Stock up on your essential oils." Essential in what world?

So there’s that.

And this is just this George Orwell quote where he’s basically saying the same thing Paul Fussell did. People ending up dying in the class they’re born in.

It's been increasingly interesting, because just like how ethnicity and race is the taboo issue with my French students, class has always been the taboo issue with my American students. And what’s even more interesting is how quickly that’s changing. Just as my French students are suddenly really eager to talk about multiculturalism and racism, my American students are starting to really interested in issues around class inequality. Or maybe more of class immobility. Which is weird, how that flip happened so fast. And with my American students, of course class has been a taboo issue, because it goes against the whole notion of the American Dream. Which traditionally has run along the lines of “You make the money, and then you move up the ladder.” And I think people are starting to move away from that as an accepted truism as the numbers of people who aren't making it up the ladder grows.

You remember we talked about power distance before? You know, the accepted ratio of power in a society? I think people are beginning to recognise that there isn't that mobility, at least not as much mobility as they thought there was. I always think it’s interesting when I have my American students. Usually it’s not the black kids that have a hard time reconsidering the idea of the American dream, because generally speaking they were never invited to the American Dream in the first place. It’s usually very defensive white kids from the suburbs already up to their eyes in student loans who get upset. “No, that’s not true!” And if it is, that’s a hard lesson. Because again, these kids are up to their eyes in debt and they’re twenty years old. And they took out the debt on the promise of the dream. And even if the dream’s not real, the debt sure is.

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This is just a couple of things about clothing. I guess we're still talking about Dimitri's belt buckle. I’ve got these three guys here and in retrospect, I don’t know about the kid in the middle. I mean, he’s so specific to a subculture that he doesn’t really fit into the class distinctions thing I was going for. What’s interesting to me is what's going on between the rich money kid and the Brooklyn hipster kid. Because this guy, the rich money kid, actually looks a lot like a lot of the students that I’ve had over the years. And he wants you to know that he has money. I mean, that’s the whole point of his look. He doesn’t have a gold Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle, he’d never have a gold Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle because he knows better, but he’s telling you he’s got money. And he’s fit, and he goes to the gym - that’s the point of the slim fit white shirt he’s wearing - and he has a nice watch and his hair is perfect and he's got a little bit of designer stubble. This guy's on the winning track.

Meanwhile, our Brooklyn guy, he’s also trying to give you a specific message, and this guy’s message is “I don’t care about your value system.” Which, of course, on some level means he really does. To this guy, the other guy might as well be wearing a gold Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle. I mean, he has some money somewhere.

Obviously he has some money because he’s living in New York and you have to have money to live in New York, and he’s got his coffee and he’s got his books and he’s got his vinyl collection. Sooner or later he'll have a dog. And from where he's standing, he wins, because the other kid, the rich kid in the slim fit shirt, can’t read his language. He can read the rich kid’s language, the rich kid can’t read his. The rich kid looks at the bohemian kid and since he doesn’t see any obvious recognisable indications of money - there’s no watch, for example - he sees somebody lower down on the food chain. I mean, this guy needs to show you that he has this watch. This watch is very important to his self-image and all. And I’m sure he’s doing fine. He’s doing Hamptons fine. The other guy, he doesn’t have a watch, but he’s doing the same thing. It’s just a little more subtle, the game that he’s playing. And the guy in the middle, the guy with the cowboy hat? He isn’t playing the game at all. He’s playing the “I’m a cowboy” game.

But the bohemian kid is playing a different game. He looks like he’ll probably end up being a college professor. If the rich kid doesn’t have money, he loses the game he’s playing, because money is the terms of the game he's chosen. The Brooklyn guy, he doesn’t have to have money to win the game, because culture is the terms of the game he's chosen. He wins by not playing, if you understand what I mean. He wins by reading the right books. By living in the right post-industrial Brooklyn neighbourhood. The neighbourhood that the rich guy's kids will one day move into, but we'll talk more about that in a minute.

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And then, what kind of books do you read? The idea of high-brow culture, middle-brow culture, and low-brow culture goes along with economic class, too, to a large extent. But what's interesting, it doesn’t have to. Right? I mean, books all cost more or less the same. A copy of “Mrs. Brown’s Family Handbook” costs the same as a copy of “Ulysses”, which costs the same amount as “Normal People.” But, going back to that Clement Greenberg quote, “this is a book for people that could afford the education to understand “Ulysses”. Which goes back to our rich kid/ Brooklyn kid dichotomy. This guy can win the cultural status game without having as much money as the other guy because he knows which books to read. I’m guessing. I’m projecting a lot on to them all, obviously. These are just pictures of total strangers I found on the internet, and I'm a guy who reads books talking to a class full of people who reads books. And that's just us. But look, in fairness, if you're even in this class, there's a pretty good chance we're all on the winning side of this culture competition already. And you get the idea.

And then, what kind of music do you listen to? Miles Davis or AC/DC? I mean, I actually kind of like both of these records. But …

I don’t know if this is true for you, but when I was thirteen or so, fourteen … well, first of all, have you ever heard of a band called “Kiss”? They were like this sort of silly spectacular … they wore lots of black and white make-up and breathed fire and they wore these fantastic costumes and there were fireworks going off onstage everywhere and… I mean, it was a spectacle, really. It was kind of like a circus. Do you know who I’m talking about? OK, great. So when I was thirteen, we all loved them. Because, you know, they’re designed for thirteen year old boys. That’s their ideal audience. I loved them, my friends all loved them, we had their posters on our walls. In fact, I saw them in a concert. When I was about thirteen. My first concert.

But when you’re fourteen or so … When I was about fourteen I stopped listening to them and I started listening to, like, English rock. Right? I started off with stuff from the 1960s, you know, like The Who and The Kinks. And when I got a little older I started listening to bands like The Clash. And I started hanging out with kids who were listening to the same kind of music that I was listening to and we all started reading the same kind of books and all that. Meanwhile my friends, who I had started off liking Kiss with, they all started getting into heavy metal. Like Black Sabbath and Scorpion and stuff like that. And then they started hanging out with other guys who were listening to the stuff they were listening to. Right? And eventually, my new friends were really into things like comedy and movies and stuff and their new friends were really into cars and all of a sudden you find yourself in a different subcultural orbit. You know?

And it’s all kind of based on aesthetic choices. Choices in taste. Do you know what I mean? And I think to a large extent the reason I ended up living in Dublin, I think, was because at fourteen I started listening to The Who. It sends you off into this direction. So there you go. I mean, nothing's predetermined, but it certainly spins you off in a certain direction. You buy a record, forty years later… You never know.

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And then the last thing I’m going to talk about is urban space. Space, architecture, territory. That kind of thing.

First of all, I mean, in Greece, when they were designing Athens, they had a couple of very distinctive and intentional things that they did to shape the way that people lived there and used the space. They had this one idea of an open-air theatre, the pnyx, which focussed attention on a single speaker at a time. I was trying to think of a contemporary one and the first one that I thought of was … well, Rome, maybe? At the Vatican, St. Peter’s Square, where the Pope stands at the balcony, or in London when the Queen stands out on the balcony. Or, I mean, if you think of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., it’s where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, it’s designed so that a lot of people can focus on one person speaking. And it’s still periodically where people give speeches to the people and kind of with the people. And it’s designed basically as an outdoor stage.

At the other end of the spectrum, where it’s about people mixing together and congregating, is the agora. In Paris, I suppose it would be the Place de la Republique, that’s where everybody goes and where everybody can meet with everybody and where if you have a protest, for example, that’s where you go. It’s an open, democratic area. I guess in New York it would be downtown, there’s a park called Union Square which had that same kind of political agency. There was a journalist in New York named Jane Jacobs and she wrote a lot about mixed spaces and the importance of unplanned interactions and even though there are a couple of serious problems with her theories she's really interesting and this would be her kind of thing.

Paris, for example, you have the Grand Aix, you know? The Metro, along the “One” line, you have the whole history of modern France on this Northwest/Southeast diagonal line, right? You have the Bastille. OK, well, they stormed the Bastille. You have the Louvre. OK, well that’s where the king lived. And then you have the Place de la Concorde, and that’s where the king stopped living. And then eventually you have the Champs Elysse, and then I guess the Arc de Triomphe, so we’re with Napoleon now. And then you keep going and then all of a sudden you have modern post-war France with La Defense.

And that’s not an accident, I mean, they planned that. Well, I mean, maybe the One Line is an accident, and whoever built the Louvre probably wasn’t envisioning the Arc de Triomphe, but whoever built the Arc de Triomphe was certainly thinking about the Louvre.

And then over here, and I don’t know if you know what this is or not, but this was Hitler’s plan for the city that he was going to replace Berlin with after the war. What he wanted to do was destroy Berlin - and, you know, you’ve got to give him credit, he did destroy Berlin - he wanted to destroy Berlin and then build this new world capital. Literally the capital of the world. Called “Germania”. And it’s the same idea, this wide intimidating boulevard with an arch - like in Paris, or with Washington Square New York, for that matter. But it’s all about the grandness of the … the scale of the city.

And then just getting back to New York and the transition of Times Square from a democratic place to a more aggressively commercial one. Andreas Huyssen wrote: “The discourse of the city as image is one of urban developers trying to guarantee revenue from mass tourism and commercial rent. Central to this is aesthetic space for cultural consumption, blockbuster musical events, and spectacles of many kinds, all intended to lure that new species of city tourist, the urban vacationer, who has replaced the older, leisurely flaneur who was always figured as a dweller rather than a traveller from afar.”

I mean, obviously this is pre-covid, but you get the idea. The city as an experience - a money-making experience hopefully - rather than a home. And the experience of being in the city as a kind of amusement park ride. Or something. And he was talking specifically about Times Square. That’s where they do the New Years Eve ball drop and all that sort of stuff. What I didn’t know, until just with the recent election is that this is where people would gather - it’s called “Times Square” because the New York Times had its offices there. And during elections, before TV and radio, the way people would find out who the next president was is they would all go there and they would wait for the newspaper office to put up a sign saying, basically, “these guys won.” So this was the area where democracy was decided.

I guess if you had the energy you could expand on it. I guess you could expand on the commercialisation of... the commodification and entertainment value of democracy as competition. But, I don't know, that seems like a lot of work.

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Finally, and we're almost done here, street art and gentrification. I mean, you guys all know Banksy, and there’s probably a French “Banksy” as well, I don’t know who, but I’m sure there is. But, you know, this is about territoriality as much as it is about art. You put your name on a wall, and even if you don’t own the wall that means it’s your wall. It’s got your name on it. And again, going back to Greenberg and going back to Bourdieu, you have to have a little bit of an education to appreciate Banksy. Right? And so once Banksy shows up and paints something on your wall, that means that the neighbourhood is more expensive than it used to be. Banksy paints a picture on your wall and your rent goes up. It's got to be affordable enough before he starts painting on the wall in the first place, right? Because otherwise he'd be arrested before he even started. But once he's even halfway done...

 

For example, here are two pictures I took in Dublin, and these two walls are about a ten minute walk from each other. This one is in an alleyway where homeless people smoke crack, basically. And then this, ten minutes away, is this sort of hipster area where … you know, and it’s a nice poster, and it references the Magritte “pipe” picture we were looking at a few classes ago, and you have to have enough of an education to go “Ah, how clever! That’s a joke about the Magritte pipe painting, that’s pretty funny. I get that.” Which fits right in to cultural capital, right? The neighbourhood makes sense of the art and the art makes sense of the neighbourhood. And the neighbourhood gets progressively more expensive.

And then finally, and then we’re done. In Northern Ireland street art is a little different, right? Because in Northern Ireland territoriality is a little different. Do you remember earlier when we talked about Northern Ireland and we talked about subcultures and subgroups and all of that? The Catholics and the Protestants and the fifty-year low-level war that’s been simmering along. so if you see this kind of thing painted on the side of a house, you know you’re in a Protestant neighbourhood. And if you see this other kind of thing painted on the side of a house, you know you’re in a Catholic one. And the walls tell you who owns the area. And I think I told you the story about the Belfast taxi driver? I can’t remember.

And these last pictures are also from Northern Ireland, in the Protestant part of East Belfast. Where suddenly they don’t hate Catholics as much anymore - I mean, they still do, but - suddenly they just hate anybody who’s even more different than Catholics were. So, “Romanians Out!” is on this wall here and “No Muslims” and “No Blacks!” And this is territoriality. And I’m sure it’s the same in France. I’m sure they do the same thing in France. This is our territory, not your territory. You know, that old idea that nothing beats a prejudice like a stronger prejudice.