It has always been true in social classes dominated by fashion that to escape being left behind by a swing of fashion requires the ability to adopt new fashions rapidly; to escape the danger of a conviction for being different from the “others” requires that one can be different—in look and talk and manner—from oneself as one was yesterday. Here, also, it is necessary to see precisely what has changed. In general the processes of fashion are expanded in terms of class and speeded in terms of time. In the leisure economy of incipient population decline the distributive machinery of society improves, in terms of both distribution of income and of commodities. It becomes possible to accelerate swings of fashion as well as to differentiate goods by very minute gradients. For, in its late stages, mass production and mass distribution permit and require a vast increase not only in quantity but in qualitative differences among products—not only as a consequence of monopolistic efforts at marginal differentiation but also because the machinery and organization are present for rapidly designing, producing, and distributing a wide variety of goods.
This means that the consumer trainee has a lot more to learn than in the early days of industrialization. To take one example, the foreigner who visits America is likely to think that salesgirls, society ladies, and movie actresses all dress alike, as compared with the clear status differences of Europe. But the American knows—has to know if he is to get along in life and love—that this is simply an error: that one must look for small qualitative differences that signify style and status, to observe for instance the strained casualness sometimes found in upper-class dress as against the strained formality of working-class dress. In the days of etiquette the differences were far more sharp.
One must listen to quite young children discussing television models, automobile styling, or the merits of various streamliners to see how gifted they are as consumers long before they have a decisive say themselves—though their influence in family councils must not be underestimated. Children join in this exchange of verdicts even if their parents cannot afford the gadgets under discussion; indeed, the economy would slow down if only those were trained as consumers who at any given moment had the wherewithal.
The wider ambit of socialization of taste today is shown in still another decisive change from the era depending on inner-direction. Then, by the rules of etiquette and class, certain spheres of life were regarded as private: it was a breach of etiquette to intrude or permit intrusion on them. Today, however, one must be prepared to open up on cross-examination almost any sphere in which the peer-group may become interested. It may become fashionable, as some articles in the “Profile of Youth” series in the Ladies’ Home Journal have shown, for young girls to discuss their rivals’ necking techniques with their particular partner.1 While the game of post office is old, the breakdown of privacy for reasonably serious love-making is new. Dating at twelve and thirteen, the child is early made aware of the fact that his taste in emotions as well as in consumer goods must be socialized and available for small talk. Whereas etiquette built barriers between people, socialized exchange of consumer taste requires that privacy either be given up, or be kept, like a liberal theologian’s God, in some interstices of one’s nature. Before the peer-group jury there is no privilege against self-incrimination.
The same forces that consolidate the socialization of tastes also make for more socialized standards of performance. The other-directed child, learning to play the piano, is in daily competition with studio stars. He cannot remember a period when either his peers or their adult guides were not engaged in comparing his performance with these models. Whatever he attempts—an artistic accomplishment, a manner of speaking, a sleight-of-hand trick—the peer-group is on hand to identify it in some way and to pass judgment on it with the connoisscurship typical of the mass-media audience. Soon enough this process becomes internalized, and the child feels himself in competition with Eddie Duchin or Horowitz even if no one else is around. Hence it is difficult for the other-directed child to cultivate a highly personal gift: the standards are too high, and there is little private time for maturation.
The newer pattern of popularity depends less on ability to play an instrument than on ability to express the proper musical preferences. In the fall of 1947 I conducted some interviews among teen-agers in Chicago concerning their tastes in popular music and also consulted professional musicians, juke-box listings, and other sources to round out my impressions. My interest was principally in seeing how these young people used their musical interests in the process of peer-group adjustment. Like the trading cards which symbolize competitive consumption for the eight-to eleven-year-olds, the collection of records seemed to be one way of establishing one’s relatedness to the group, just as the ability to hum current tunes was part of the popularity kit. The requirements were stiffer among girls than boys, though the latter were not exempt. Tunes meant people: roads to people, remembrances of them. At the same time the teen-agers showed great anxiety about having the “right” preferences. When I had the occasion to interview a group its individual members looked around to see what the others thought before committing themselves—at least as to specific songs or records, if not as to a general type of music, such as symphonic or hillbilly, where they might be certain as to their group’s reactions. Readers who have not themselves observed the extent of this fear of nonconformity may be inclined to dismiss it by remarking that young people have always been conformists in their groups. True; yet it seems to me that the point is one of degree and that the need for musical conformity is today much more specialized and demanding than it was in an earlier era, when some children could be, or were forced by their parents to be, musical, and others could leave music alone.
Even among those interviewed who took piano lessons musical interest as such seemed virtually nonexistent. One boy of fourteen did appear to have genuine musical interests, playing “classics” on the piano. His mother told the interviewer, however that she was not letting him practice too much lest he get out of step with the other boys, and was insisting that he excel in sports. “I hope to keep him a normal boy,” she said. These experiences in my research seem to hint that preferences in consumption are not viewed as a development of the human ability to relate oneself discriminatingly to cultural objects. For the objects are hardly given meaning in private and personal values when they are so heavily used as counters in a preferential method of relating oneself to others. The cultural objects, whatever their nature, are mementos that somehow remain unhumanized by the force of a genuinely personal, idiosyncratic attachment.
Moving somewhere beyond mere exchanging of taste are those opinion leaders2 who try to influence verdicts as well as to repeat them—a dangerous game indeed. The risks are minimized, however, by playing within the limits imposed by marginal differentiation. Thus my interviews showed that each age group within a limited region and class had its own musical taste; the younger ones, for instance, liked “sweet” stuff that was “corn” to those slightly older. Within this general trend a girl might decide that she could not stand Vaughn Monroe or that Perry Como was tops. If she expressed herself so forcibly in detail, the chances were that she was, or wanted to be, an opinion leader. For many of the young people did not express any strong likes or specific dislikes—though they might share a strong revulsion against a whole range of taste, like hot jazz or hillbilly. These latter were the opinion followers, scarcely capable even of marginal differentiation.
The other-directed person’s tremendous outpouring of energy is channeled into the ever expanding frontiers of consumption, as the inner-directed person’s energy was channeled relentlessly into production. Inner-directed patterns often discouraged consumption for adults as well as children. But at other times, and especially in the higher social strata less affected by Puritan asceticism, the inner-directed person consumed—with time out, so to speak, for saving and for good behavior—as relentlessly as he (or his progenitors) produced. Most clearly in the case of upper-class cons
picuous consumption, he lusted for possessions and display, once the old tradition-directed restraints had worn away. He pursued with a fierce individualism both the acquisition and consumption of property. To be sure, his goals were socially determined, but less by a contemporary union of consumers than by inherited patterns of desire, hardly less stable than the desire for money itself. Goals such as fine houses, fine horses, fine women, fine objets d’art—these could be investments because their value scarcely changed in the scale of consumer preference.
These relatively stable and individualistic pursuits are today being replaced by the fluctuating tastes which the other-directed person accepts from his peer-group. Moreover, many of the desires that drove men to work and to madness in societies depending on inner-direction are now satisfied relatively easily; they are incorporated into the standard of living taken for granted by millions. But the craving remains. It is a craving for the satisfactions others appear to attain, an objectless craving. The consumer today has most of his potential individuality trained out of him by his membership in the consumers’ union. He is kept within limits on his consumption not by goal-directed but by other-directed guidance, kept from splurging too much by fear of others’ envy, and from consuming too little by his own envy of the others.
Today there is no fast line that separates these consumption patterns of the adult world from those of the child, except the objects of consumption themselves. The child may consume comics or toys while the adult consumes editorials and cars; more and more both consume in the same way. In the consumers’ union of the peer-group the child’s discipline as a consumer begins today very early in life—and lasts late. The inner-directed child was supposed to be job-minded even if the job itself was not clear in his mind. Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.
This is visible early in children’s play-at-consumption, facilitated by a noticeable increase in the range of children’s toys. Added to boys’ toys, for example production-imitating equipment like trucks and steam shovels or toy soldiers and miniature war materiel, is a whole new range of objects modeled after the service trades: laundry trucks, toy telephones, service stations, and so forth. Added to girls’ toys, the doll and her wardrobe, are juvenile make-up outfits and voice recorders.
These props of the child’s playtime hours, however, are not so striking as the increasing rationalization of children’s preferences in everything they consume. In the period of inner-direction children accepted trade-marked cereals largely because that was what was set for them at table. Today they eat Wheaties, or some other breakfast food, to the tune of some specific reason that all can talk about: “Wheaties makes champions.” And comics, children will say if pressed, “relax champions.” In this way the other-directed child rapidly learns that there always is and always must be a reason for consuming anything. One reason is that the commodity he is consuming is the “best” in its line. As the child develops as a consumer trainee, advertising no longer is given all the credit for answering the question of what is the best in its line. The product approved by most of the others, or by a suitable testimonial from a peer consumer, becomes the “best.” The most popular products, by this formula, are the products that happen to be used by the most popular. And to be sure, these pace setters themselves have a “reason,” often enough picked out from the mass media, if not from the advertising pages; thus the hunt for the reason goes on in an endless regress. Blake wrote: “The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons/Are the fruits of the two seasons.” In the consumers’ union, toys and reasons become amalgamated and, as already stated, the line between childhood and age tends to become an amorphous one.
These patterns place extra burdens on girls, partly because women are the accepted leaders of consumption in our society, partly because women, much more than men, feel pressure to play any role they are accepted in by the men. At every social level boys are permitted a greater amount of aggression than girls; they are also permitted a wider range of preferences and can get by with a good deal of aggressive resistance to the taste-exchanging process.
Finally, the child consumer trainee becomes a tutor in consumption in the home circle, “bringing up” mother as well as father. Life magazine once ran a leading article on “Teen-age Fun,” showing the etiquettes and pastimes prevailing in certain American cities; these pastimes were news even to some recent high-school graduates. Teen-agers must initiate adults rather than vice versa; typical is the case, also cited in Life, where teachers at a Denver high school imitated the idiomatic greeting style of the “most popular” boy.
THE ANTAGONISTIC GOOPERATORS OF THE PEER-GROUP
It is, possibly, no accident that it was his greeting style on which this boy exercised his gifts for opinion leadership and marginal differentiation. For indeed, over and beyond the socialization of consumption preferences and the exchange of consumption shop-talk by this consumers’ union, the membership is engaged in consuming itself. That is, people and friendships are viewed as the greatest of all consumables; the peer-group is itself a main object of consumption, its own main competition in taste. The “socio-metric” exchange of peer-group ratings is ceaseless and is carried on, as a conversation with the self, in “private” also; who is my best friend, my next best, and so on, down to the most disliked. The more thoroughly other-directed the individual is, the more unhesitatingly able he is to classify his preferences and to compare them with those of others. In fact, as compared with their inner-directed predecessors, other-directed children are extraordinarily knowledgeable about popularity ratings. Physical prowess probably remains a chief road, though declining, to status among working-class boys. However, popularity among upper middle-class boys and girls seems to hinge on much more vague criteria, frequently impenetrable to the adult observer but, while they last, crystal clear to the peer-group itself.
The tremendous competitive energies which the inner-directed person had available for the sphere of production and, secondarily, for consumption seem now to flow into competition for the much more amorphous security of the peer-group’s approval. But just because it is approval for which one is competing one must repress one’s overt competitiveness. Here the phrase “antagonistic cooperation,” borrowed from other contexts, is apt.
This transformation is so important that we devote several sections to it in Chapter VI, but now we need only note a few reference points. The parents, harking back as they do in their character structures to an earlier era, are themselves competitive —more overtly so than the children. Much of our ideology—free enterprise, individualism, and all the rest—remains competitive and is handed down by parents, teachers, and the mass media. At the same time there has been an enormous ideological shift favoring submission to the group, a shift whose decisiveness is concealed by the persistence of the older ideological patterns. The peer-group becomes the measure of all things; the individual has few defenses the group cannot batter down. In this situation the competitive drives for achievement sponsored in children by the remnants of inner-direction in their parents come into conflict with the cooperative demands sponsored by the peer-group. The child therefore is forced to rechannel the competitive drive for achievement, as demanded by the parents, into his drive for approval from the peers. Neither parent, child, nor the peer-group itself is particularly conscious of this process. As a result all three participants in the process may remain unaware of the degree to which the force of an older individualistic ideology provides the energies for filling out the forms of a newer, group-oriented characterology.
IV
Storytellers as tutors in technique: changes in the agents of character formation (continued)
A. I like Superman better than the others because they can’t do everything Superman can do. Batman can’t fly and that is very important.
Q. Would you like to be able to fly?
A. I would like to be able to fly if everybody else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous.
From an interview with a twelve-year-old girl.1
Language, as we noted in the previous chapter, becomes a refined and powerful tool of the peer-group. For the insider language becomes a chief key to the currents of taste and mood that are prevalent in this group at any moment. For the outsiders, including adult observers, language becomes a mysterious opacity, constantly carrying peer-group messages which are full of precise meanings that remain untranslatable.
When we look more closely at the use of language in the young peer-groups we see how various its aspects are. Language itself becomes a sort of consumer good. It is used neither to direct the work economy, nor to relate the self to others in any really intimate way, nor to recall the past, nor yet as sheer word play. Rather it is used in the peer-groups today much as popular tunes seem to be used: as a set of counters by which one establishes that one is “in” and by which one participates in the peer-group’s arduously self-socializing “work.” And the peer-groups, while they exercise power more than ever before through the use of words, are more than ever before the victims of words. While they learn to cling desperately to words—most signals are given in words—at the same time they learn to distrust them. As we have seen, verdicts in the peer-group are often quite ambiguous. Some of the older words, such as “bastard” and “skunk,” remain, but their meaning is vaguer—they may even be said with a smile! Whole new glossaries crop up every few years.
The peer-group stands midway between the individual and the messages which flow from the mass media. The mass media are the wholesalers; the peer-groups, the retailers of the communications industry. But the flow is not all one way. Not only do the peers decide, to a large extent, which tastes, skills, and words, appearing for the first time within their circle, shall be given approval, but they also select some for wider publicity through contiguous groups and eventually back to the mass media for still wider distribution. If we look at this process we see that the individual who develops, say, a particular style of expression, is either ignored by the peers or accepted by them. If he and his style are accepted, his style is taken over by the group, and in at least this sense it is no longer his. But the same thing can happen to a given peer-group in its turn, as in the case of the boy with the individual greeting style we spoke of at the end of the last chapter. The mass media play the chief role in thus reducing to impersonality and distributing over a wide area the personal styles developed by individuals and groups.
The Lonely Crowd Page 16