Original Bobos

 Douglas Holt's 2004 book on cultural branding—discussed last time—devotes some passages of cultural analysis to David Brooks's famous theory of the "Bobos," or "bourgeois bohemians," which he propounded in his 2000 work of cultural criticism, Bobos in Paradise. Brooks's fundamental thesis, as recapped in Holt and a plenitude of other books and articles, is that the professional elite of the 1990s was distinguished from their predecessors by their appropriation of the iconography of bohemia. Torn between a conventional striving for upper-middle-class success and a fear of selling out, they clung to countercultural paraphernalia as a way to set themselves apart from the supposedly unimaginative, culturally reactionary, and philistine bourgeois classes of prior generations. 

I, in turn, don't think that Brooks was wrong. I just think that the phenomenon he identified was not new to the 1990s. Rather, it relates to a fundamental dilemma at the heart of all countercultural projects that has marked every version of bohemia from the days of Murger on. For evidence, I point to Wyndham Lewis's 1918 novel Tarr (which I read this weekend in its 1928 revised and expanded edition favored by its author and the editors of the Oxford World Classics). Lewis, we discover from the OUP's front matter, in fact originally intended to call his book "The Bourgeois-Bohemians." And most of the novel's satire is directed against precisely this milieu, which Lewis identified with the middle-class poseurs who circulated on the Rive Gauche in the early twentieth century.

Now, Brooks may have made the point himself that the Bobo phenomenon is not entirely new. He may even have had Lewis in mind in deriving his term—I'm not sure. I have no way of knowing, since I've never read the source text, Bobos in Paradise, itself. It is the sort of book that has been summarized so many times by other social commentators, and whose fundamental thesis appears to go no further than its title (rather like The Culture of Narcissism, say) that one cannot keep faith that one might be surprised by its contents (even if this is unfair). The title-as-précis is always fatal to that curiosity essential to any reading project, and so Brooks's book has long since joined for me the ranks of those tomes of which T.S. Eliot once said, "the longer you leave them unread, the less desire you have to read [them]."

Be that as it may, my point is simply that Brooks intended to indict a type of cultural double-mindedness (calling it "hypocrisy" at the outset might be begging the question) that he thought peculiar to the 1990s. Yet here we are with a text from the opposite end of the twentieth century denouncing a similar phenomenon by the same name. Lewis's immensely funny and biting novel (written in his utterly sui generis prose style in which a farrago of unexpected adjectives and metaphors threaten to overwhelm any reader expecting straightforward description) depicts a set of ostensible painters in the bohemian Paris café society of the early twentieth century who spend a lot of time speculatively discussing their "work," and very little of their time actually doing it. 

Mixed in amongst the avant-garde artists in Lewis's novel are the aforementioned middle class poseurs. The German girlfriend of the eponymous English painter Tarr, for example, is marked as belonging to this class by her conventional choice of objets d'art around the house—a bust of Beethoven, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, etc. Tarr himself denounces her inwardly as a "bourgeois-bohemian," and uses the same epithet to refer to her circle of friends. The dilemma of the book relates to his choice between this girlfriend and the more intellectually-sophisticated Anastasya—a bifurcation Lewis uses as a metaphor to explore the familiar question of the antithesis between art and life. Tarr's initial position is that the pursuit of purity in art is incompatible with intellectual life in the domain of romance. 

(The sexism of all of this is real and inescapable—one can hold no brief politically for the proto-fascist Lewis, who even by the low standards of Modernist writers charted a particularly disgraceful political course through the early decades of the twentieth century. But Lewis's anti-feminism is at least leavened by the fact that the joke is ultimately at Tarr's expense. When Tarr propounds sententiously to Anastasya his theory that the true artist can only mate with the philistine, so that his life will not absorb any of the creative energies that should only be directed into his art, Anastasya chides him accurately that all he really means is that he demands a partner who "takes you more seriously than other people would be likely to." "[T]hat," she adds, is "what all your 'quatsch' about 'woman' means.")

The "bourgeois-bohemians" represent for Lewis and Tarr, in short, the fleshy antithesis of the world of pure forms and spirit that distinguishes the artist. If the artists cannot separate themselves from this mundane world entirely, then it is better to opt for the flesh utterly in the field of their daily life, so as not to risk contaminating their art with the fleshly impulses. The solution is somewhat akin to Flaubert's famous advice: namely, that the artist ought to be conventional and bourgeois in their quotidian existence, so that they can be revolutionary and destabilizing in their art. One could say then, that in Tarr's vision, the bohemian actually needs the bourgeois in order to complete themselves. They are locked in a kind of Hegelian dialectical symbiosis, in which the thesis of one answers the antithesis of the other. 

Tarr's German shadow-self Otto Kreisler finds another use for the bourgeois-bohemians, however. One of the more amusing portions of the book recounts the always hard-up Kreisler's attempts to cadge francs from his friends, and so we begin to see that Tarr's idealistic dialectic between the bourgeois and the bohemian is not the only sense in which one depends on the other. Kreisler introduces a more materialistic basis for Tarr's dialectic, and so succeeds in turning it on its head, much as Marx purportedly did with Hegel. The dialectical materialism of Otto Kreisler would proceed as follows: the bohemian needs the bourgeois quite simply because someone in the picture must have some ready cash. (Anastasya denounces her "bourgeois" parents in one scene, for instance, but the word at which Kreisler really perks up, in listening to her speech, is "rich.")

I opt for the Kreisler interpretation. This, I take it, is the true reason for the "Bobo" phenomenon, and why it is endemic to every version of bohemia and the counterculture, not just the subset of the professional elite of the 1990s that Brooks was describing. 

The appeal of the the bohemian myth, after all, is that it is portrayed as one of what Douglas Holt calls the "populist worlds." He defines this term as referring to those social spaces where people engage in activities primarily because they have intrinsic value to them—artistic or creative gratification, or simply fun—rather than because they provide money and status. Every "identity myth" derives from a quasi-legendary "populist world," Holt maintains—for obvious reasons. We seek relief from our own status anxieties by imagining that there exist people somewhere who have simply opted out of them, and so imagine that we might one day opt out ourselves (without ever actually doing it). 

The notion of the bohemian enclave where status anxiety and competition for money no longer exist has obvious appeal to the middle class and the professionals, because they are plagued by competition and status anxiety each day. No one simply arrives in the middle class and stays there, after all. People in the more desirable strata of social life instead feel themselves to be on a treadmill that resembles the "Red Queen effect"—you have to run fast and faster "just to stay in place." Those in such a social position will inevitably fantasize about a world in which people simply don't care about any of these things. They just spend their days doing what they find intrinsically satisfying. Of course the middle class strivers wish to appropriate imagery they associate with such a life. And thus the "bourgeois-bohemian" is born. 

The problem with the myth of the bohemian "populist world," however, is that in reality, every way of life—even the bohemian—must have an economic foundation. No one is truly able to "opt out" of the rat race. Those who apparently are most able to do so are often simply those empowered to drop out provisionally by the fact that they already inherited a lot of money. Thus, the pseudo-artists that Tarr and Kreisler both resent most are the prosperous English idlers who adopt the regulation dress of the Latin Quarter and make a fuss about constantly being "interrupted" in their work without ever appearing to produce anything. They are the idle rich, who are able to avoid bourgeois life simply because they already have enough funds. But if the ability to live the "bohemian" "opt-out" lifestyle in fact derives from privilege and money—does this not mean that the bohemian is always at root a bourgeois? 

And so we discover at last that the "bourgeois-bohemians," far from being an aberrant offshoot of the countercultural experiment, are its foundation. Bobos are inescapable because the "true," the "authentic" opt-out that people imagine does not exist. As D.H. Lawrence pointed out in his poem "Wages," not a single one of us can actually escape the rat race. We are either inside the prison toiling, he writes, like the "bourgeois" on their status treadmills—or, if we are so fortunate to be able to adopt the appearance of opting out, like the idle English rich Tarr describes, it is only because there is a hidden economic substrate keeping us afloat. The substrate does not mean we can escape economic and status anxiety, as the bohemians are alleged to do—just that we redirect it. "Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison," Lawrence writes, "in terror lest you have to go in."

And so perhaps instead of worrying about "Bobos" as a symptom of hypocrisy or cultural decline, we should accept that they are in some sense the only kind of bohemians who can actual exist on a sustainable basis. Instead of worrying about who has "sold out" and who is "authentic," we should accept that all human life has an economic foundation. The question then should become, not how we can opt out of economics culturally (such an escape is not possible, for reasons Lawrence lays out). Rather, we should be trying to figure out how that economic foundation can be extended more broadly, so that the material foundation exists for us all to live the lives we want to live, and to spend more of our time each day on the activities that we find most intrinsically satisfying.