⚘Branch thought from Why learn History #1 Protecting institutions for what they do vs. for what they are
Do some words get in the way of expressing the ideas they contain?
What the idea of “bourgeois” evokes: more than necessary?
My impression is that the concept of being “bourgeois” used to wield a penetrating power, a particular potency in achieving its purpose. It served as an instrument to put our finger on, denormalise and/or denounce a way of looking at our daily life decisions and values, revealing it to be the historical product of socioeconomic conditions that developed fairly recently, namely with the dawn of the European Modern age (around the 17th century, then flourishing and consolidating in the 19th century, give or take).
Now, I am thinking about the associations it evokes at the top of my head, beyond its formal definition and the intellectual debates that developed around it across the decades. What do I associate this concept with when someone invokes it as a way of describing and qualifying a particular social phenomenon or attitude towards life?
The word evokes images of material comfort prioritised over deeper meaning: plush furniture, polite dinner parties, manicured appearances.
It carries undertones of spiritual and intellectual complacency: culture consumed as a status marker rather than deeply engaged with, education valued for credentials rather than transformation.
It suggests a preoccupation with respectability and social status, propriety over authenticity.
It certainly conjures the face of Karl Marx and other figures of 20th century: Soviet revolutionaries and politicians, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, Marxist intellectuals.
It makes me think of mid-20th century critical theory, of black-and-white scenes of student protests, banners, classrooms sit-ins, late-night alcohol-fuelled discussions among enthusiastic students, engaged chainsmoking public intellectuals. It brings to mind images of men in black coats and tall hats, of newspapers by fireplaces, of grainy colour photographs of American suburban tranquility.
It also makes me think of its reactionary opposites, such as so-called “Bohemian lifestyles”, of nomadism as a lifestyle, of intentional communities such as Kibbutzim or collective shared-housing, of hippies and biker gangs, of an artistic class of people expressing their loathing of bourgeois values.
Associations abound. “bourgeois” is a word loaded with meaning if there ever was one. It carries these vague associations alongside more specific ones -its provenance, its derivations, and so on. It is also loaded in distinct ways depending on who is saying it to whom. For example, a person who has concluded that Marxism is inherently evil, will see a particular series of associations highlighted, while a neutral person with a certain level of cultural knowledge might draw from a broader, more varied collection of associations.
The risks of using big fat abstractions
The point is that “bourgeois” classifies as one of those big, complex abstractions that have infiltrated common speak, and have become rather liberally employed.
When we use this term as an adjective to describe something, like a specific attitude that we see in another person, we are burdening this person with an extensive set of assumptions and views of the world that extends far beyond the few elements of the idea of “bourgeois” that we likely wish to convey.
And this can easily lead to misunderstandings: our conversation partner with might not know us well, or might have developed a conception of “bourgeois” that emphasises other parts of the term that we were not really thinking of when using it. They might even have adopted a negative predisposition toward our arguments, and look for some of the innumerable elements composing the term “bourgeois” that they could use to expose contradictions on our argument, or construe it as meaning something that was far from our intention.
In fact, “bourgeois”, that big, fat abstraction, contains plenty of useful, clear, real and/or timeless social, political and personal dynamics that could illuminate many of our current existential woes. Yet, it is also a sticky thing. It has tumbled down history’s slope for too long, gathering the debris, scraps, rubble of all the contingencies and twists and turns that it has participated in, and all the causes it has been weaponised for. It is a big, fat, snarled mess of meaning and associations (at least in its general understanding, among the unspecialised majority who would benefit the most by its insights).
The tragedy lies in how employing this term to try to capture something in words, something that the only single word we feel we can use to signify is “bourgeois”, we are setting up an enormous target for others to easily hit. And if that big, unwieldy, vulnerable target is hit, its fall will drag down all the useful elements with it as well (the useful elements among which reside those that we meant to communicate when using the term “bourgeois”).
That is a tragedy, as we were possibly meaning well: not to accuse of bad intentions, nor condemn of unacceptable behaviour, but to reveal something dysfunctional that, if addressed could improve the situation for everyone. In this case we would have been attempting to articulate and communicate it to others. Unfortunately, all that debris clinging to our word of choice has contaminated our expression beyond repair. These unwieldy layers upon layers of debris silence all the timeless truths, that incisive capturing of a particular attitude towards daily living that this term has once succeeded in doing. As a result, our word “bourgeois” fails to fulfil its purpose.
The bourgeois idea of compartmentalising life as a default state
For example, we can speak of a particular “bourgeois” attitude that would be worth extracting from the concept of a “bourgeois” way of life and put it in other words, more supple words carrying less debris with them. This attitude simply consists in living the rhythms of daily life and of personal planning, both short and long-term, with an unquestioned acceptance that the separation of work and leisure is an undeniable fact of life in society. It is an assumption that both of these spheres are unified by the red thread of the bourgeois project of acquiring a better home and climbing the social ladder. It is the assumption that there is a default state of life outside of work where we touch ground and where we “rest and recreate”. It is the conviction that these are the real material conditions of life.
When we come home after a day of work, and after we fulfil other responsibilities with, say, family, friends, chores, household affairs, we touch ground on this default state of “free time”, an empty box of time that needs to be filled with anything that does not belong to the other types of activities that I listed. And so, daily life becomes a cycle of a precisely scheduled alternation between these spheres, punctuated by holiday periods. Our sense of forward motion in life, of real forward motion, follows this previously mentioned red thread. These are the rails upon which the cycles of daily life turn, built from a particular set of aspirations: financial security, property ownership, career advancement, status acquisition, creating a family home.
Of course, this represents this separation at its most rigid. Real life is richer in details, variations and seepage between these areas. Yet, the tendency remains that whatever project we embark upon (although better than “project1”, I would call it “embodying one’s authentic drives in the adventure of life”) always becomes secondary, subsumed under the cycle of alternating life spheres rolling along the rail of “bourgeois” aspirations. These two spheres are a default state of sorts, as they are the ground we touch upon once we abandon our projects, amateur pursuits and hobbies, which are meant primarily to fill up the empty box of the leisure life area, providing conversational subjects, and mostly ornamental additions to our identities, outwardly defined by our socioeconomic role and our selection of symbolic attributes such as taste, leisure preference, style, and such.
In essence, our more personal drives, life-callings if you will, can be dispensed with in the forming of our identity, as their content is not as important as their role in filling up the leisure and hobby compartment among our other life spheres. At least that is the socially acceptable thing to do, as long as we do not renounce the compartmentalisation of life in spheres, with the daily cycle of alternation between them and the red-thread of bourgeois aspirations.
Unfortunately, the reverse is not true: we cannot discard the latter (bourgeois convention) while retaining the former (authentic drive), because the established framework for the development of one’s identity and presentation to the world (which delineates what is acceptable to say, and what is repudiable and potentially conducive to stigmatisation) is not secondary to our authentic drives. That is, the bourgeois model is like the water filling a basin, and the authentic personal drive is seen as a cup superfluously submerged within it. The cup is supposed to be useless without the water, but the water can do away with the cup. In an ideal place, this relationship could very well be the other way around.
An alternative analogy might compare this bourgeois convention to soil, with authentic drives merely a plant growing and drawing sustenance from its fertility.
Successfully communicating some of a word’s ideas without letting the word get in the way
This is just a reflection upon one of the many sides of this prismatic idea of what “bourgeois” means. There are many more sides that can be examined, and which would also be appropriate. The idea of this exercise in extracting only one element of this big, fat abstraction is to redirect a listener’s attention back to the idea itself, while doing away with the rest of the accumulated baggage, which could lead to misunderstandings and futile derailments.
It is a practice of reclaiming useful ideas that have been buried within loaded terms, cutting them off from this lineage and infusing them into other discourses. It is a deconstruction of the term in smaller bits that can permeate the pores of a self-defeatingly unreceptive attitude (where a prejudiced misconstruction of the term would normally block access to beneficial insights from its content). Through this deconstruction -purging its best components from its baggage and reutilising them in new discourses- we are also renewing the idea’s relevance, because after all the word is just a word2, not the idea that we intend to preserve.
When I described some of the truths within the concept of “bourgeois” as timeless, I meant the following: that our language does not evolve in a linear progression towards a superior, better researched language, where new words are better suited to describe the world because they have been developed by a more advanced society. In fact, even though the use of the term “bourgeois” can sometimes feel less like an appropriate qualifier to describe something and more like a statement of ideology, we are far from overcoming many of the problems that it addresses3. We have not outgrown this term, at least regarding many of the essential ideas it encapsulates, even though its historical baggage might be considered a relic that was more applicable to other times.
Of course, it is impossible to solve this issue of the communicative effectiveness of “bourgeois” without doing away with the word itself. This verbal carcass, beginning with “b” sound and ending with that French “wah” sound, cannot be restored to an ideal, tabula rasa state. It needs to be dismembered with the consideration that it deserves, its valued parts salvaged, and scavenged with due care. This follows nothing more than the most natural pattern there is: that circular, not linear, cycle of life, death and renewal that governs so much of existence.
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- Curiously, project originates from the Latin pro-iacere: to throw [iacere] something forth [pro]) ↩︎
- I am not saying that the word itself is not valuable, it certainly is because of all of its baggage and its historical potency. However, it does not hurt to seek other ways of giving an idea back its power. ↩︎
- In fact in the ancient Romans’ Latin there was this distinction between negotium roughly translated as “busyness” and otium referring to “self-realisation activities”. In Spanish and Portuguese, these words have survived almost fully intact to the present, in the forms of negocio and ocio. ↩︎
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