{"id":685,"date":"2009-04-14T08:39:17","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T14:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=685"},"modified":"2009-04-12T08:46:12","modified_gmt":"2009-04-12T14:46:12","slug":"a-critical-perspective-on-elsewhere-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2009\/04\/14\/a-critical-perspective-on-elsewhere-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"a critical perspective on Elsewhere, USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>The Houston Chronicle<\/a> ran a book review with a rigorous critique of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA<\/em> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alford writes<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Conley claims, \u201cchanges in three areas of our lives\u2014the economy, the family, and technology\u2014have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional \u2026 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.\u201d (Isn\u2019t he describing a mother of twins?)<\/p>\n

This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society\u2014the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter\u2014and it seems he\u2019s going for a larger reader demographic\u2014then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don\u2019t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and \u201cus,\u201d constantly conflating the author\/reader \u201cus\u201d with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.<\/p>\n

This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, \u201clawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.\u201d Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they \u201cchange partners more than they change locations.\u201d<\/p>\n

They live in the Elsewhere society, \u201cwhere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map\/guidebook). The reason I\u2019m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere\u2019s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to \u201cwe,\u201d \u201cus,\u201d and \u201cMr. and Mrs.\u201d [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he\u2019s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But has Conley’s written an ‘Encyclopedia\u00a0of Sociology’ in this volume?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

To call the book\u2019s prose \u201cbreezy\u201d 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 \u2014 C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

For example, Conley explains Marx\u2019s four types of alienation \u2014 no doubt helpful to many readers \u2014 and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s proletariat, which was international by definition? What\u2019s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently \u201cnowhere men\u201d are \u201cthe necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Alford writes:\u00a0 Conley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[29,39112,36,131],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-class","tag-culture","tag-economics","tag-economy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}