The Houston Chronicle ran a book review with a rigorous critique of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA this weekend, highlighting some of the aspects of the book that were confusing to Chronicle reviewer Steven Alford, but raises some interesting concerns about how applicable Conley’s arguments are to a lay-reader, or any middle-class American.
Conley claims, “changes in three areas of our lives—the economy, the family, and technology—have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional … the intravidual [who] has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.” (Isn’t he describing a mother of twins?)
This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society—the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter—and it seems he’s going for a larger reader demographic—then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don’t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and “us,” constantly conflating the author/reader “us” with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.
This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, “lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.” Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they “change partners more than they change locations.”
They live in the Elsewhere society, “where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or guidebook.”
Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map/guidebook). The reason I’m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere’s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to “we,” “us,” and “Mr. and Mrs.” [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he’s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.
But has Conley’s written an ‘Encyclopedia of Sociology’ in this volume?
To call the book’s prose “breezy” would be akin to calling a hurricane windy. On any given page, it seems that an Encyclopedia of Sociology has exploded and we are sifting through the remains. All the usual suspects appear — C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills — but they are presented adrift from their important historical and social context, applied at will to the present moment, picked up and put down like so many discarded Legos.
For example, Conley explains Marx’s four types of alienation — no doubt helpful to many readers — and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it’s on to the next topic. Wait: If a postmodern person is alienated, how does that compare to the modernist figure who was the object of Marx’s analysis? And apparently one of the marks of an intravidual is his/her internationalism: Identity is no longer a function of place and space. But what of Marx’s proletariat, which was international by definition? What’s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently “nowhere men” are “the necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,” an observation not made until page 131, and dropped again without elaboration. The author then talks about rational taxation schemes, the monetization of the Internet and other bubbly topics only peripherally, if at all, related to his subject.
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