Emigration intérieure

I’ve told several writers for this site that a perfectly acceptable post would be a paragraph or two from something that caught their fancy plus a bit of commentary. So, in the spirit of finishing my taxes, allow me to demonstrate:

This weekend I needed something to read while waiting for my copy of The Essential Wallerstein to arrive from Amazon (thanks to a recommendation from Mr. Godfree). At the local used book shop I picked up The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities by Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology and the humanities at NYU. It’s not bad so far.

Sennett is talking about the separation of public and private, exterior and interior. He brings up a piece of nineteenth-century French history that I didn’t know. When Louis-Philippe became king in 1830, he needed support from the nobility and asked them to publicly support him. The nobles refused to support the “citizen king,” essentially the creature of the new bourgeoisie, and withdrew from public life, an event known as the émigration intérieure. Sennett discusses this withdrawal in the context of the rise of industrial capitalism, specifically the rise of the notion that an individual’s worth was to be valued monetarily and not, as the aristocracy preferred, by traditional measures such as pedigree, title, service to the king, etc.:

The émigration intérieure seemed at first sheer lunacy; no sane man voluntarily gives up power. But within a few years the public found the actions of the old families more understandable — especially the younger public. In France, as in England, Prussia, and America, the first signs of the new industrial era were making their impress on the consciousness of young people; the vacuity of living life as though it were an accountant’s tally of gains and losses was beginning to affect their impressions of everyday life. Echoing the old nobles, they felt an ever-stronger desire to retreat from the world, even though the wealth of the new order furnished them, too, great opportunities. They sought sanctuary through a willful act of psychological withdrawal.

This generation of 1840 knew how to make signs of how estranged it felt: the shrug of irony about studies or careers, the jeer at the old men who, like the king, became pear-shaped from too much rich food and too little intellectual nutrition. Chronicles of ambition shifted from those of Balzac’s young men to Flaubert’s, from Balzac’s depiction of Rastignac’s passionate desire to conquer Paris, shaking his fist on the height of Montmartre at the glittering, inaccessible prizes below, to Flaubert’s portrait of Frederic Moreau’s ambivalence about similar desires. Frederic was a young man of the 1840s; he had learned he ought to at least show some shame about his strivings. He sought to understand his true self in those moments when he felt disgust with the world. However, unlike the émigration intérieure of the landed aristocrats of 1830, the affirmation of a decade later of one’s inner integrity was burdened with a certain self-loathing. One was denying the circumstances of one’s childhood, denying those parental dreams that in the early years sing as one’s own truth. The psychological aristocrat was seldom at home in his own past. The search for a refuge ended in unease. There was no clarification in the withdrawal; one lost instead one’s moorings.

The last bit got me. I used to think that the basically Marxist point about the monetizing of social relations under capitalism was overblown. But lately I’ve been feeling it. We’re no aristocrats; even most aristocrats aren’t really aristocrats anymore, so thoroughly bourgeois has the industrialized (post-industrial?) West become. So if we object to the empty promises of capitalism and try to take ourselves outside of the “accountant’s tally of gains and losses,” we too easily end up like the young French of the 1840s: ashamed of our bourgeois origins, ironic in a self-hating manner. This would explain, among other things, why hip urbanites (as opposed to urban hipsters, but those too) can’t stand other hip urbanites. Why everyone clucks about gentrification but perks up their ears when they hear about a new, cheap, charming neighborhood. Capitalism has blocked the possibility of escape from the values of capitalism, or, more accurately, diverted the escape route into swamps of self-loathing and self-indulgence. It’s a dead end, it seems, to define oneself by what one is not.

Louis Philippe as a pear

A caricature of Louis-Philippe turning into a pear, by Honoré Daumier after the original drawing by Charles Philipon (for which Philipon was imprisoned).

13 responses to “Emigration intérieure”

  1. Godfree says:

    I enjoyed your analysis of the psychological burden of shifting modes of production. I do think there is more at play here in generational self-loathing. I wish I had time to properly explore this subject.

    But for those who doubt the power that capital considerations have on social relations, just imagine what your family dynamic might look like if one of your relatives won some mega lottery. Do you think they’d still be schlepping to grandma’s house for Christmas, or that you’d all have Christmas at their place?

  2. I like most of what I’ve read from Sennett, including parts of _Eye_. This, though, seems to be more from the mind of someone born in the 1950s or after than someone born in the 1820s:

    One was denying the circumstances of one’s childhood, denying those parental dreams that in the early years sing as one’s own truth.

    Or have our psychological structures remained pretty consistent for the last 150 years? It does ring true for a certain self-loathing bohemian mindset, as you suggest, and I suppose that’s a psychological structure that’s been around for a good 150 years.

    Did parents in post-Napoleonic France have “dreams” for their children or an imperiled or tenuous sense of entitlement?

  3. Dave says:

    B: I’m mostly enjoying the book, but some of it feels like stuff that’s been used in broadly sweeping undergraduate lectures.

    I don’t see why bourgeois parents in post-Napoleonic France wouldn’t have had dreams for their children. But I’m not a historian, and I really don’t know much at all about post-Napoleonic France.

    G: I don’t know if my analysis is much of an analysis at all. But I’d like to hear more of what you think on the topic of the post.

  4. Dave says:

    And everyone: sorry for a boring post. But figuring one’s taxes, it sux. And look: a king turning into a pear!

  5. LT says:

    No apologies, Dave! It’s more than most of us could pull off during tax time. Sennet is all over the rhetorical theory classes I’ve been slogging through this last year. I’m pretty interested in the ideas from Corrosion of Character, where he says we deny our position in the capitalist system, in the individualist power that money brings, by believing in universals– like, for example, that all kids are assessed equally under legislations like No Child Left Behind! A quote I like (and have used) from the book: “…there is a surface on which everyone appears on an equal plane, but breaking the surface may require a code people lack.” Do you think we lack the code? Is the code outside of the superstructure?

  6. bw says:

    #3: it’s just that the idea of “dreaming” for your kids sounds so, well, american middle class. in an older order people assumed their kids would get what was coming to them by right of entitlement. of course the revolution messed that all up — but aristocrats still think like aristocrats, revolution or no. it’s upwardly mobile striver parents, not downwardly mobile nobles, who think in terms of “dreams.”

  7. #4: Hey, I liked the Pear-man. And if you hadn’t posted it here, I wouldn’t have seen it!

  8. LP says:

    Here’s a metaphor for that trapped feeling you get doing your taxes. Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building in New York for 41 hours. The security camera inside filmed his entire ordeal, and the video has been sped up here. I watched it twice, drawn in by the sheer, horrible time-lapse drama of it, and by the Windham HIll-esque musical accompaniment, which adds to the pathos.

    The good news is, he gets out at the end.

  9. LP says:

    Oops, the bad news, as I just discovered reading the accompanying New Yorker article, is that he’s never quite recovered from the ordeal. Yikes.

  10. Adriana says:

    Dave, I was thinking about this all day. Of course, I hate the idea that I’m trapped under this market ideology like an ant under glass. But what I spent the most time thinking about is bougie self loathing — why? If it’s about having choices, do we loathe ourselves and other middle-class strivers for our/their mediocre choices? That, given a wide range of possibilities, we choose over and over again to bend to the predominant priorities of accumulating wealth while minimizing risk?

    And do we hate our fellow urban hipsters because we know what bullshit it is that buying a certain hat has anything to do with making riskier, more original choices?

    Over a week ago I boasted to some friends (and a GW contributor) that Lane and I were living against the system. Oh yeah, we’re living la vie boheme, eating from art sale to art sale, article to article, thumbing our noses at those dual-career, amibitious treadmill-marchers in our neighborhood. Fuck that! We’re doing our own thing.

    Of course, we’re doing our own thing with the cushion of an apartment paid for partly by earnings from my former go-getter career, partly from our investments. We’ve got a little safety net (very small) — again, earned through jobs and investments. We’re not so radical. And maybe someday I’ll give a shit about striving in a career again. Who knows.

    Lane and I were talking this morning about the Martu (Western Austrialian Aboriginal community) idea of “holding” to the land. Rather than land being a posession, the idea is that you hold yourself to it, that you hold yourself to the people in your community, that you retain just what you need to get by.

    Isn’t that a lovely idea? Possible if you’re living in the middle of a desert no one else wants, isolated enough not to know what you’re missing in terms of posessions, raised with a fluid idea of posession in the first place.

    Is it better, then, to embrace all — turning either/or to yes/and? Without resorting to Bobos in paradise, can I say I want a well-funded retirement but I don’t need a lot of crap or a big house to feel OK? Does having working-poor Mexican immigrant ancestors constitute a get-out-of-jail card, or does it just complicate my story?

  11. lane says:

    “partly from our investments.”

    well let’s put it all out there. partly due to an insurance accident payout back in 1990.

    which only serves to highlight how everything in life is an accident. some are born rich, some are born poor and some are born with that rarest of all gifts . . .

    math skills.

  12. Dave says:

    Adriana, I’m not sure the self-loathing — a better word, from Sennett, is “unease” — is from making “bad” or “safe” choices among the options available to us. I think it’s more due to the limited range of options itself and the recognition of that limit.

  13. PB says:

    I was going to comment on the fact that everyone I know makes less money than their parents by far and what does that mean, but then read the elevator article and now I am all disturbed.

    king – pear – king – pear

    PS – a perfectly acceptable post would be a paragraph or two from something that caught their fancy plus a bit of commentary – finally! a formula!