My kind of bourgeois
I wrote a novella trilogy that traces a family, the Piranesi, across a century. They describe themselves as bourgeois, by which they mean a commitment to fair dealing and a clear sense of the limits of the market. The third novella raises the question of scale. This reflects my sense, shared with Ivan Illich, that we’ve lost a sense of proportion. When this happens, the usual limits of things are disregarded. It gives us late capitalism’s oddly sterile “mass” and a luxe (or maybe an haute) that reflects this.
Bespoke is the Piranesi’s word for whatever falls outside of mass. The two, bespoke and mass, are in a constant if indirect dialogue, each looking enviously at the other. There’s a running delusion on both sides that it can be the other, partly because the boundary conditions seem vague and porous. Yet when we consider the trespassers across this divide, we know almost immediately if we’re looking at a breakthrough or a travesty.
Mass and bespoke are subject to their own rules. Especially in retrospect, we note and respect any mass that creates a supporting frame for demotic diversity. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century mill buildings and industrial lofts, row houses and pattern houses, and the organizing power of some street grids are examples of this. Mass buildings today are more like mass products, packaged for “curb appeal.” There’s an effort to mass customize, but not much room is made for what small businesses and households routinely bring to the life of a street. Bespoke provides a counterpoint to mass that, when it’s properly done, mass supports and enables. If context is taken into account, mass can be neighborly, respecting view corridors and enabling mid-block porosity, for example, and other sources of urbanity.
Petit bourgeois is a pejorative, but cities are enlivened by myriad small acts that reflect a wanting to fit in and yet modestly stand out. Orthodoxy, we could call it: it turns a blind eye to demotic interpretation so long as it stays within loose and yet widely shared ideas about what a community is about, especially as a series of places we experience on a daily basis, the everyday we call “here” and expect to find evolving incrementally rather than jumpily or cataclysmically. It’s endangered and I want to protect it.
Marx noted that the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchy, freeing us from feudalism. Capitalism reinstated versions of it as some of them acquired outsized wealth and set themselves up as oligarchs. We’re in that phase again, our federal government now their plaything, but their hubris will likely set them squabbling among themselves, sparking a reaction. My kind of bourgeois finds such oligarchs as noxious as the monarchs we once overthrew. Unlike the condottiere of the Italian renaissance, they lack cultural ambition. It’s in this sense that Trump is their perfect presiding force, a narcissist-in-chief whose touchstones are Mar-a-Lago, his gilded Manhattan penthouse, and his nostalgically bad taste in music.
My kind of bourgeois is with Illich on the need to tune communities to themselves and temper the hubris of late capitalism with modesty. How much excess do we need? None, I would say, the word itself conveying its wretchedness, as with Trump’s penthouse. We can admire luxury and frivolity for their inventiveness, and yet deplore their commodification, limiting the inventiveness of the street, of art and craft for their own sake.
In my novella trilogy, Leo mentions “mass” in the sense of a communal, sacred gathering. It’s one use of the word she finds positive, although she acknowledges that mass in another sense exists to meet mass needs, the categories of needs as markets see them or, failing to see them, ignore them. My kind of bourgeois has an allegiance to Jesus on this score, his sense that the meek will inherit the earth because they live with it on a daily bread basis, aware how tenuous it is, and what a gift it is to be alive at all, an act of providence despite its manifest drawbacks, short and brutish all too often. Why are we here? This is the question we ask ourselves, a daily bread kind of question, with bread as the beginning of an answer. The kingdom of heaven is within us, we might add, seeing the plum trees blossom.
