#dan fox

When we believe a person’s authority on a subject we call them a connoisseur or specialist. If that knowledge makes us uncomfortable, we damn them as geeks or ‘self-appointed’ experts, we accuse them of lording their obscure tastes over our common, shared references.

“For Marr to say of two museum visitors he’s never met, ‘I hate them’ is cheap, them-versus-us populism, but it speaks to an ugly intolerance for difference, to an expectation that people must share the same aesthetic tastes and appearances and that if they don’t they must be complicit members of an elitist racket hell-bent on excluding ‘ordinary’ people from its world.”

Of course, not all social groups share the same criteria for judging each other. In his 1963 book Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, Howard S. Becker analyzed the social worlds of marijuana users and jazz musicians. Becker had worked in Chicago as a jobbing pianist while studying for his PHD and observed up close how the subculture of jazz players shaped itself in opposition to “square” society. Through those experiences Becker came to understand that “deviance” could only be understood in relation to a set of rules being violated, and the social group that maintains those regulations. “Deviance is not a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it.” Deviance, like pretentiousness, is in the eye of the beholder, in the gap between one individual’s baseline of acceptable behavior and the actions of another. The conservative who brands someone a “deviant” for their appearance or lifestyle choice is trying to maintain a particular set of rules in which they have an emotional investment. When a furious reviewer slams a book for being pretentious, they’re essentially angry because it deviates from the aesthetic standards or worldview they’ve chosen to subscribe to.