William Rodney Herring

It's all ("Dinner at the Foodies’: Purslane and Anxiety") predicated on this stupid statement:

in New York, where there are fewer status indicators.

Uh...is this a willful blindness to the fact that our society is pervaded by status indicators, which find illimitable and usually complex forms of articulation or embodiment?

And while I'm at it, who thinks this is news?

And for him, serving a dish that is on the menu at several good restaurants in the city right now — a fava bean salad with shaved pecorino, for instance — would be like being caught reading “The Lovely Bones” right after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

Duh! Distinction was a massive study of precisely this phenomenon 30 years ago.

Of course, my dismissive tone toward the NYT article may seem a little like I'm endorsing the behavior of these foodies. Far from it. I'm just not surprised.

But perhaps my tone reveals the attitude that such people shouldn't be publicized since that in some way validates their absurd behavior. Instead, should we shun such superficiality out of existence (as though we could)? It's not like this article is an expose with the thrust of ridiculing these people. In fact, a Vassar professor ridicules himself (admitting he's a "propagator" of foodiness), but of course that doesn't stop him.

Predictably, this is not unlike the insidious, self-ironizing liberal (such as perhaps that prototype Basil March) habit of thinking that adequate embarrassment about one's sins will forgive one for continuing to commit them.

Just after her marriage to Curtis Jadwin, Laura spends her days reading and waiting for Jadwin's return home from work, so they can read together in the evenings (189-90). In the afternoons before her husband's arrival, Laura "rarely—for she had not the least interest in social affairs" attends "teas or receptions" (190). What's curious about this fact is that the narrator has spent the last several pages describing Laura's less-than-satisfied attitude toward the monstrous house bought and remodeled for them by her husband. It is, of course, the remodeling that annoys Laura—and it is only after a trip abroad, in which she acquires some furnishings and art for the new home, that she finally "succeeded in fitting herself to her new surroundings" (188). In this moment, The Pit exhibits for us the class differences between Laura's new-moneyed husband and herself (though she's more petit- than established bourgeoisie). So it's no surprise that immediately after this moment we get a comparative analysis of Laura's and Curtis's tastes in novels. What's less clear is why, since Laura doesn't like to be social or to entertain, she cares what her house looks like. But this subsequent analysis is a reminder that Laura has always been a consumer of bourgeois literature and an indication that the observer for whom Laura must make her house tasteful is herself.

Dana Anderson. "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 37:3 (2004). 255-74.

How does one account for unconscious action in Burkean dramatism? Given that Kenneth Burke's humanism—he defines humans as "the symbol-using animal"—draws a sharp distinction between action and motion ("things move, persons act"), how do we begin to describe motive when actions effect unintended purposes?

These are precisely the questions that drive Dana Anderson to Pierre Bourdieu in search of an explanation for habituated action. In fact, Anderson shows that for Burke actions don't really have to be conscious to be analyzable—they simply have to be purposive. In other words, what we want to know is how we can wrest purpose from the agent’s ability to anticipate the outcome of her act.

But what is meant by purpose is nearly as unclear in Anderson’s article as it is in Burke (take A Grammar of Motives, for instance, wherein Burke lumps agency and purpose together—unlike his separate discussions of scene, agent, and act—a peculiar grouping, given that agency and purpose basically equate to means and ends). By purpose, do we mean intended effects (as in when something is done “on purpose”)? Or do we mean simply results (as in when something is done “to no purpose”)? If we mean the former, then clearly intention or consciousness is at issue. And if we mean the latter, we might instead need to distinguish between unintended, unforeseeable, and counter-intentional consequences. Anderson does not attend to this ambiguity of purpose. However, instead of seeing this non-attendance as (merely) a blind spot in Anderson’s essay, I think we should see it as an untapped potential.