Progress narratives fail to explain fast cultural changes like crazes
Evidence
Do we switch to new behaviors in pursuit of improved efficiencies? Greater pleasures? Alternative ways of thinking? Curiosity for the new and boredom with the old? The idea of progress is always the most compelling: we replaced our impractical iceboxes with sensible electric refrigerators and primitive rotary landline phones with wireless mobile handsets. And we’re also familiar with the downstream effects of changes to material conditions. Suburbs and supermarkets followed the rise of automobile ownership, and fifties youth culture arose when teens could listen to rock ’n’ roll in their rooms on cheap transistor radios. When we find no obvious links between culture and material conditions, we assume ideological and spiritual realignments. Hippie men grew out their hair, we believe, in the principled rejection of oppressive middle-class manners and morality. … These arguments, however, are better for explaining slow-paced cultural change over decades and centuries than fast-paced cultural change exhibited in crazes for things like moptops, pop art, and shortboards. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 520
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The dominant theory treats cultural change as random viral contagion — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 16; Norms persist only while conformity benefits outweigh deviance rewards — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 139; Ritual and narrative forms defy acceleration because they are syllogistic — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 164 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Art-historical period concepts fail because cultural change has no real beginnings or endings
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 662 - Chronological periodization distorts the meaning of historical processes.
#corroborates(0.82) - Totalizing cultural analogy cannot account for genuine historical change
#corroborates(0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 664 - Cultural stasis is constant novelty without ordered sequential change
#corroborates(0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 18