When Dominant Culture Doesn't Dominate . . . Or, Cosplay, Geek Culture, and Bourgeois Culture

It's pretty self-explanatory

By Steven McLain

In the 1940s, Stetson Kennedy undertook an anti-racism campaign premised on a simple idea.  Whenever someone heard bigoted speech, that person should frown.  It's brilliant in its simplicity, and highlights the power of ostracism and social acceptance as a means of change.  Stetson was a landmark figure in the struggle against Jim Crow laws, and his bravery in infiltrating and revealing the secret rituals and codewords of the Ku Klux Klan seriously undermined that organization.

After infiltrating the KKK he filtered their secrets to the Superman radio drama, when engaged the popular icon in a fight against bigotry and exposed the organization to its own farce. 

Seriously, how cool a name is Stetson?

Kennedy died in 2011, but both his infiltration of the KKK and his "Frown Campaign" are useful in analyzing the power and delineations of culture.  These in turn can help us identify when and where certain cultures exist, when they have been appropriated, and when they have willingly submerged themselves into the bourgeois culture.

I'd like to make a couple of definitions clear from the outset, since I'll be using them in somewhat esoteric ways (which also differ from social scientists' and semiologists' definition).  First, let's acknowledge that culture is a tough thing to define, since it is inherently nebulous.  But if you can't define what exactly culture is, you can at least define its function.

For the sake of this argument, culture consists of the transmittable values and practices which signify inclusion in a group.  Basically, culture delineates "us" from "them" and includes language (including jargon, accent, patois, etc.), styles of clothing, taboos, rituals, and meaning attached to specific markers (such as flags, buttons, logos, brands, etc.).  You're probably not aware of these things until you enter a different culture, but it's abundantly clear when someone doesn't belong to your culture by the way they walk, talk, or dress.

Kennedy (and Martin Luther King, Jr. incidentally) believed that the bulk of people were good, and could challenge bigoted attitudes by expressing their disdain.  Frowning was a way to demonstrate disapproval, and subtly alter perceptions.  But it relied on a shift in the bourgeois culture so that bigotry was a cultural distinction.  In a sense, bigotry alienated you from bourgeois culture.

Now, generally when we talk about culture, we use hierarchical words of dominance and submission which disguises the real nature of culture as a progressive continuum.  That is, while there are major and minor cultures, one need not inhabit one or the other; indeed, one can occupy multiple cultures at the same time (and probably does).  Instead of dominant or submissive cultures (sub-cultures as they're often called), bourgeois culture reflects the idea that communities often embrace a single, overarching culture under which multiple, fluid identities can emerge and flourish.

When Martin Luther King identified racism, poverty, and militarism as evils, it was precisely because they dehumanized individuals as means to an end, or by obscuring their humanity by overlooking their individuality, or through bigotry.

King said of poverty:

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.”

 And racism:

“Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual and physical homicide upon the out-group.”

And militarism:

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war- ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This way of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

MLK

But if he were alive today, I have no doubt Martin Luther King would include consumerism on his list of modern evils right there with racism, poverty, and militarism.

Consumerism exists in that same spectrum of evil by reducing individuals to means of acquiring.  Rather than basing individual worth on the merit of being a human being, what you own determines your worth.  These aren't new criticisms, and shouldn't shock you, but take a moment to really consider what it means that bourgeois culture is also a consumer culture. 

The word "bourgeois" has a tortured history.  It initially indicated the French middle class which emerged between the aristocracy and peasants.  During the French Revolution it acquired a pejorative status which persisted into the nineteenth century, where it eventually acquired its labor implications.  Marx and Engels used bourgeois to signal the propertied owners of capital who alienated workers from their labor.  This is the meaning it largely kept through the mid-twentieth century, until it came to first signify the bureaucratic authority emerging in the Western world; finally it acquired a class signifier in the early twenty-first century and was appropriated by trend-setters and the petty intelligentsia when it was crafted into the patois.  "Bougie" became an indication of pedestrian pretension. 

An example from the Seattle Times helps emphasize that distinction:

“In an urban environment, in the elements, you want to feel protected,” says Gregg Andrews, fashion creative director at Nordstrom. “You don’t want to feel that you can’t walk on broken concrete. There’s this fashion utility to a boot that makes it very appealing.”

Plus, he says, “boots are sorta like sunglasses — they give you instant attitude . . . A woman could own an entire closet of boots that really would change the look of everything that’s in her wardrobe.”
We will mix and match so many shirts, sweaters, jackets and pants that they couldn’t possibly add up to a cohesive outfit, yet make it look fresh and “seasonless,” to borrow a term used to describe the direction in menswear for the coming year.

We will pair soft fabrics with the leather that will be everywhere this fall, wear white after Labor Day and shamelessly pile on two or three shades of the season’s go-to colors: green, blue and red. We will make tie-dye look bougie and make [ombré] look hippie." [emphasis my own]

Oh, those French

But despite definitional slippage, bourgeois maintains its connection to the middle class, to a system of virtue ethics firmly tied to a social and economic class.  The rise of the middle class is a historical phenomenon which pre-dates the industrial revolution.  It is tied to social movements even today, and indicates a broadening access to political and economic power.  The decline of the middle class is not a signifier of declining economic power per se, but rather points to gradual lessening of access to that power by the largest segment of nation's population.

That intersection creates a unique cultural imperative which includes and supersedes every other culture.  Bourgeois culture in America (and perhaps in most of the developed and emerging world) is associated almost entirely with consumerism.  Worth and value are predicated on one's ability to acquire and conspicuously consume.  These cultural assumptions are what underpin Apple's yearly unveiling of new and only slightly improved iPhones.  Fundamentally, the iPhone and the iPhone 5 are no different (let's not even mention the distinction between the S and C), and the iPhone itself represents only minor aesthetic improvements on pre-existing technology.

Rather, the acquisition and conspicuous consumption of these technology signify inclusion within a particular culture.  That the gold iPhone 5 is seen as a status symbol should surprise no one.  Rather, as an indication of the power of bourgeois culture, the iPhone is the most obvious example of one culture embraced and enfolded by bourgeois culture.

This is not a condemnation of either bourgeois culture, or any of the cultures which oppose or embrace it.  Indeed, many cultures are complementary, or even supplement, bourgeois culture.  Some cultures actively reject bourgeois culture and try to embrace self-sufficiency and autonomy, or see the obvious environmental damage our particular bourgeois culture causes and attempt to meliorate their own impact. 

Culture-jacking

Other cultures which began in conscious opposition to bourgeois culture lack the power or the organization to successfully reject it and either embrace or are co-opted by bourgeois culture.  Consumerism is such a prevalent and powerful force that the latter is more likely the case.  Bourgeois culture may colonize alien cultures and gradually incorporate them into itself, expressing alienness as novelty (culture-jacking, if you will) -- the Asian fetish of the early twentieth century and the television show "The Big Bang Theory" are equally representative of this phenomenon.

It's also what lends legitimacy to a particular culture.  Legitimate cultures consciously articulate a particular vision of the good life.  What that vision is remains irrelevant.  Rather, what is important is that a culture express that vision through its cultural markers.  Remember Kennedy and his frown campaign?  The power of bourgeois culture overruled deeply ingrained bigotry (along with the active participation of civil rights activists, legislators, and the oppressed themselves).  Kennedy was able to de-legitimize the KKK by exposing their secrets to ridicule.  Their cultural signifiers became markers of absurdity.

By appropriating those markers instead, the bourgeois culture maintains the sense of separateness while utilizing the power which separates culture to advance its own agenda.  Geek culture, which peaked in the 80s and early 90s, offered a significantly peculiar version of the good life to differentiate it from bourgeois culture of the time.

Highlighted by a preoccupation with science and technology, geek culture presented furthering of knowledge as an end to itself.  Geek culture embraced the rational enlightenment virtues of previous generations and molded it with a fascination of technology.  The result was a vision in which science and technology were lauded for their own sake, and elevated what bourgeois culture considered hobbies to ends of themselves.  Geek culture appropriated the mode of bourgeois culture as the means for its own ends; this appropriation both legitimized and enabled geek cultures to oppose bourgeois culture.

By Ibrahim Evsan

But by the early twenty-first century, bourgeois culture responded by re-appropriating the symbols of geek culture into itself.  The pre-eminent example is the colonization of Comic-Con by a consumer culture marked by conspicuous consumption and acquisition as a determination of worth.  And we should be clear that legitimation is not itself a moral judgement, but rather a statement of definition.  That is, to be legitimate, a culture must correspond itself to a peculiar vision of the good life which differs from another culture.

Indeed, the simple proliferation of Comic-Cons (San Diego, New York, Portland, OR, etc.) are not indicative of the power of a particular culture, but rather representative of the appropriation of geek culture to bourgeois culture.  Geek culture may persist, but incoherently.   

Legitimization is both a strategy and goal of bourgeois culture.  As a strategy, it allows bourgeois culture to colonize peculiar cultures.  This is also why I suspect that cosplay is itself not a legitimate culture.  Emerging from both geek and nerd culture (historically an offshoot of Renaissance Fairs and, I imagine, the costuming impulses of Halloween) it allows both men and women an opportunity to assume alternate and deviate identities.

Though I can't speak to motivations, and while much of it seems like a harmless vacation from the self, cosplayers such as Ani Mia, Jenni Hashimoto (who was featured in a Business Insider expose of the New York Comic-Con) and other members of that community who peddle their wares (as it were) on the internet or on cable reality television (such as The SyFy Channel's "Heroes of Cosplay") have either consciously adopted bourgeois culture, or been appropriated by it.  Failing to cogently express a vision of the good life, and adopting the vision of a competing culture reveals their complicity in delegitimizing their peculiar culture.

The "Fake Geek Girl" controversy raging throughout the interwebs is a clear indication that geek communities understand that their culture is being appropriated.  Alice Vega, a geek commentator, offers a few words of live-and-let-live that hints at libertarian moral laissez faire but fails to recognize the invidiousness of these cultural appropriations.

"First off, a Fake Geek Girl is defined as a female of any age faking it in the geek culture, i.e. cosplaying characters she doesn’t know, saying she’s a gamer but has never touched a Playstation, etc. You might have seen some of these girls or know some yourself. But here’s a newsflash: Who the fuck cares?"

Vampirella at Rose City Comicon

Her rant betrays her naivety.  "Heroes of Cosplay" may indeed introduce outsiders to a niche hobby, and may help inspire new fans to go out and indulge their self-obscuring fantasies.  And "fake geek girls" may indeed by culture-jacking geek culture as a means to garner attention, or they may be intentionally sexualizing themselves as a means of re-appropriating their sexuality from a dominance culture they navigate at their own peril.  What commentators like Vega and the geek community in general fail to understand, however, is that they are willing participants in their own appropriation.

So while the libertarian in me is crying "no harm no foul," the better part of my nature is worrying that people are building castles in the air and failing to address the real problem.  As a self-identified geek I understand the frustration of the community, but want to point out that it's already too late.  Unless we can re-craft a peculiar vision of the good life, bourgeois culture will always win.