G ünter l eyPoldt Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 1. Being Spoken to From Above A consecrated artifact can give us a sense that it “speaks to us from above,” as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, in a reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908). In Rilke’s famous poem, the fragment of the sculpture of a human figure (which he probably encountered in the Louvre in Paris) seems to be looking down at the poet from a superior position, as if to say to him: “You have to change your life [Du must Dein Leben ändern].” 1 The sheer presence of this artifact urges Rilke to raise himself up, towards a higher sphere, towards contact with a higher principle. Sloterdijk considers this a perfect image for what he calls the “vertical tension” 2 of cultural space, the phenomenon that whenever we enter the field of cultural production, we seem to experience this as a space that is polarized into more or less attractive regions, regions that we perceive as having a greater or a lesser “pull,” as being closer to or further away from a source of cultural authority or power. The American sociologist Edward Shils presumably had something similar in mind when in the 1950s he adapted Max Weber’s concept of charismatic authority to suggest that modern societies had a “charismatic center” around which they construct their systems of core values. 3 In contrast to Max Weber’s definition of the charismatic as an “extraordinary [außeralltägliche]” 4 form of authority that intermittently disrupts the normal course of modern organizational rationality 5 but rarely survives “routinization [Veralltäglichung]” or “institutionalization,” 6 Shils conceives of charisma as a more lasting, often low-grade intensity at the level of “the routine function of society” that “not 1 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) 22ff. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, transl. Stephen Mitchell (NY: Modern Library, 1995) 66-7. Rilke possibly refers to the Louvre’s torso of a standing nude youth, Kouros from Miletus, ca. 490-480 BC (Louvre MND, 2792). 2 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life 13 3 Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) sec II. 4 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985) 141. 5 Hitler’s effect on the masses has often been considered paradigmatic for this conception. See, for example, Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010). 6 According to Weber, charisma becomes diluted and unstable when it is transformed into “charisma of office [Amtscharisma]” or “inherited charisma [Erbcharisma].” See Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 146. 46 G ünter l eyPoldt only disrupts social order” but “also maintains or conserves it.” 7 Whereas Weber regards charismatic rule as a throwback to the premodern that increasingly disappears with modernity’s process of bureaucratic reason and secular enchantment, 8 Shils suggests that modern democracies continue to produce sites of charismatic authority or “deference.” And in contrast to the vernacular meaning of charisma as a personality trait (which locates the source of charismatic attraction in a powerful personal magnetism, the specific charm, allure, or je ne sais quoi of such naturally gifted performers as John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King), Shils puts emphasis on a dispositif of social relations: charismatic attractiveness is thrust on individuals (or things, institutions, and texts) who happen to embody a felt core of charismatic value. If we apply Shils’ view to Rilke’s poem we might say that the speaker experiences the torso in the Louvre with such life-changing force because it performatively puts him in touch with what he or she intuits (or aesthetically perceives) as society’s charismatic center. Of course the idea of a “center of values” sounds counterintuitive today, given the plurality of value systems in the world. We like to frame contemporary society in terms of a subtraction narrative that associates modernization with an erosion of authority (a decline of the sacred, a subversion of normative values, a loosening of status hierarchies, an increasing ability to tolerate difference, etc.). 9 But even in today’s most “open” democracies, the perception of values continues to be polarized by hierarchical distinctions (sacred/ profane, high/ low, pure/ impure, deep/ superficial, etc.). 10 As the pragmatist social theorist Hans Joas has argued in a recent book on human rights, some values can touch us with an “affective intensity” and “subjective certainty” that recalls the phenomenology of the sacred because our attraction to these values eludes the skeptical questions of rational or scientific discourse (the rise of human rights, Joas says, is not simply a result of “objective” moral reasoning; it required a slow and complex historical process, the “sacralization of personhood,” that gave the moral reasons for the protection 7 Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 257. 8 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 681. 9 Two important variants of this subtraction narrative come to mind: The first is a Frankfurt-school type of declension story about cultural “incorporation” - an advancing capitalism pushes back the frontiers of inalienable value to create an empire of commodities (“all that is solid melts in the air”); since our cultural values have yielded to the economic rationalities of the marketplace, our lives have not only become less authentic; we also suffer from a loss of experiential intensities (“diminishment of aura”) that we compensate with various forms of ersatz-authorities (“commodity fetishism”). The second variant is a story of increasing procedural neutrality - modern societies are able to tolerate a plurality of values by creating procedural (that is, content-blind) mechanisms of elimination that separate moral, aesthetic, or religious values from the public, relegating them into a private sphere (where people may be as irrational as they please so long as they do not hurt their fellow citizens). The sphere of the public becomes a domain of reasonable common sense or value neutrality (as suggested in, for example, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Belknap, 1971]). 10 See, for example, Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 47 of human rights their historically and geographically specific performative power). 11 Whether or not a cultural experience (a value, a thing, a person, a practice, a site, etc.) strikes us as speaking to us from above does not therefore primarily depend on its connection to a specific social domain (religion, say, or morality); it rather depends on whether a collective cultural topography connects this experience with cultural regions that are associated with “weak” or “strong” value judgments. When we are in the sphere of “weak” valuation - “I like strawberry and you vanilla” 12 - we can be near relativists and practice an almost complete tolerance of the radically other. But as we move from disagreeing about ice-cream flavors to debating strong values (abortion, say, Guantanamo Bay, human rights) we are more likely to touch upon a core of charismatic “hypergoods” 13 that raises the temperature of dissent and makes the public less open to tolerance or procedural neutrality. An aesthetic or literary artifact, too, can be perceived in terms of either weaker or stronger valuations: for some the difference between The Scarlet Letter and The Wire is merely about the question of what entertainment one prefers (I like Hawthorne, you like HBO), for others it is about contact with the higher moral life of the culture. 14 2. Regimes of Taste Acquisition (Lerner in the Prado, Reynolds in the Vatican, Oprah in Princeton) If consecrated space is supposed to speak from above, why is it so often experienced with a sense of anti-climax? (You get bored in a famous museum; fall asleep over a prestigious avant-garde novel, your eyes glaze over while visiting an eminent site of memory). We have all at one time or another expected to be deeply touched by a higher object, but then felt nothing much at all except, perhaps, a nagging sense that this non-response is somehow inadequate. Ben Lerner’s recent novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) provides a good account of this predicament. The narrator’s anxiety is triggered by a man who breaks into rapturous sobs when contemplating canonical paintings in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, presumably because, as Lerner’s narrator-alter-ego puts it, he is having “a profound experience of art”: 11 The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown: U of Georgetown P, 2013) 173. Joas reminds us that the sacred/ profane distinction is not identical with the secular/ profane. His approach is Durkheimean in that it takes the sacred seriously as a social thing, without suggesting a functional view often associated with Durkheim (which collapses the distinction between the sacred, the religious and the cultural). 12 Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011) 297. 13 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 63ff. 14 “Moral life” here does not pit the moral against the aesthetic, a binary that, though it dominates literature and art criticism, is unhelpful for understanding the ways in which we orient ourselves within our imagined cultural space. On how pragmatists from Dewey to Rorty have contested this binary, see my “The Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty’s Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making,” New Literary History (Special Issue: Remembering Richard Rorty) 39.1 (Winter 2008): 145-63. 48 G ünter l eyPoldt I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. […] Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. 15 Lerner’s fears and suspicions sound contemporary enough; let us consider a comparable but historically and socially more distant moment: In an anecdote he recorded in his old age, the eighteenth-century British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds recalled that when as a young man he encountered the famous Raphael frescoes for the first time in the original (during a visit of the Vatican in the 1740s), he was “disappointed and mortified at not finding myself enraptured with the work of this great master.” 16 Not being touched by Raphael was “one of the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me” (xi). The higher object speaks to you from above, but your aesthetic perceptions seem unable to register an adequate sense of beauty. But when Reynolds “confessed” this to others, he found that many of his peers in fact admitted that they, too, had been unmusical to Raphael in their time of youth and innocence. Reynolds concluded from this that “the relish for the higher excellencies of art” was an “acquired taste” necessitating “long cultivation and great labor and attention” (xii). In other words, he felt that he needed to engage in a regime of aesthetic training to improve his embodied perception. Oprah Winfrey drew similar conclusions after having selected Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise for the thirteenth episode of Oprah’s Book Club (1998). 17 When it turned out that Winfrey and her audience failed to “connect” 15 Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 2011) 8-9. Thanks to Merve Emre for bringing this passage to my attention. 16 The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols., ed. Edmund Malone (London: Cadell, Davis, 1797) I: xi. 17 The Oprah Winfrey Show was the highest-rated US talk show almost from its inception in 1986 until its conclusion (May, 2011). Oprah’s Book Club became a regular feature in 1996, shortly after Winfrey shifted her programming towards themes of moral and spiritual uplift (“Change your Life TV”) that distanced her from the tabloid scandals that surrounded the daytime talk show genre in the mid-1990s. Her own celebrity and her show’s national medial presence produced the legendary “Oprah effect,” which converted her selections into immediate bestsellers and made her a taste-maker in the market of serious literature for middle-class audiences. Toni Morrison visited Oprah’s Book Club four times, forming an iconic relationship that began with the book club’s second episode in October 1996 (featuring Song of Solomon). Morrison was then already an internationally acclaimed novelist who represented the cutting edge of literary innovation. Her literary credentials aided Oprah’s efforts toward genre-gentrification, while the Oprah effect propelled even her more experimental works into the paperback bestseller lists. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 49 therapeutically 18 with Morrison’s difficult text, Winfrey decided to move the televised discussion of the novel to a classroom at Princeton University, presided over by Morrison herself - “we needed help,” she explained, “because some of us couldn’t make it to Paradise.” 19 The task was to find, with the help of the author, more adequate ways of engaging with the high-cultural literary artifacts: “Ms. Morrison, are we supposed to get it on the first read? ”, one of the participants asked; Morrison and Winfrey replied that in order to connect with the mysterious object everyone should work on “opening” themselves to a higher reading practice. Regimes of taste acquisition can be hard work. For Reynolds this process took several years of unlearning his English taste: it was “necessary,” he said, “that I should become as a little child” again, and to submit to a rigorous routine of deand refamiliarization: “Notwithstanding my disappointment” with Raphael, “I proceeded to copy some of those excellent works. I viewed them again and again.” This training program led Reynolds through a period of nagging negativity that turned him into a momentary snob: “I even affected to feel their merit [i.e. of the Raphael works he was copying], and admire them, more than I really did.” Eventually his embodied perception followed suit: “a new taste and new perceptions began to dawn upon me.” 20 Why, one might ask, did Reynolds commit to such a daunting training regime? This question emerged more clearly at Oprah Winfrey’s Princeton session, when one of her guests said: “I really wanted to read the book [i.e. Paradise] and love it and learn some life lessons from it,” but when “[Paradise] was so confusing I questioned the value of a book that is that hard to understand, and I quit reading it.” And indeed, if Toni Morrison’s novels leave me cold, whereas popular romances (or in fact day-time television talk shows) strike me with a powerful sense of affective intensity or therapeutic growth, why should I feel the need to adapt my aesthetic habitus? 18 On The Oprah Winfrey Show’s relation to therapeutic discourse, see Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (NY: Columbia UP, 2003). On the therapeutic in postwar literary culture, see Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011) 26-31. 19 Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Oprah’s show refer to the thirteenth bookclub episode (Harpo Production Inc., March 6, 1998) devoted to Morrison’s Paradise that was filmed at a classroom at Princeton University and featured Oprah, Toni Morrison, and twenty-two selected guests. See Michael Perry, “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr, Jamie Harker (Albany: State U of NY P, 2008) 119-140; Timothy Aubry, “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on the Oprah Winfrey Show,” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 350-73; Rona Kaufman, “‘That, My Dear, Is Called Reading’: Oprah’s Book Club and the Construction of a Readership,” Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004) 221-255. 20 The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds x. 50 G ünter l eyPoldt 3. Charismatic Trust One way of approaching this issue is to ask what exactly it is that we desire from a cultural artifact - what do we want from an experimental Morrison novel, a painting by Raphael, a sculpture in the Louvre, a painting in the Prado? According to Charles Taylor, when we orient ourselves within the moral polarities of our life world we tend to classify “our desires in such categories as higher or lower, virtuous and vicious, more and less fulfilling, more and less refined, profound and superficial, noble and base,” and so on. 21 Similarly, an artifact for which we have little direct use (because it seems neither pleasurable nor instructive) can seem worth exploring if we sense its “connection” to the sort of higher cultural sphere that Edward Shils calls society’s “charismatic” center. Consecrated artifacts, in other words, inspire an atmosphere of social trust. If the most intuitive reaction to an artwork that truly eludes our horizon of expectation is to wonder whether familiarizing ourselves with the perplexing object is worth the trouble, the “social magic” of institutional charisma lies in its power to convince us that the effort of further engagement is justified: “I encourage you to stay with Ms. Morrison,” Oprah Winfrey said when she announced her selection of Song of Solomon: “Put your trust in her because she knows what she’s doing.” 22 But trust in what exactly? There is a tendency to define the uses of literature and the arts in terms of more or less tangible kinds of audience satisfaction - the work is considered to possess an intrinsic ability to deliver concrete aesthetic-cognitive effects: pleasure, knowledge, wisdom, catharsis, epiphany, moral growth, political instruction, etc. Putting it in these terms (literariness as a set of deliverable goods) makes our faith in literary institutions a relatively simple question of calculative probability: If Oprah’s selections have reliably provided you with pleasure, knowledge or moral insight, trusting her literary authority would seem no less rational than trusting the Italian grocer, say, whose wine selections have reliably satisfied your tastes. In other words, to trust Toni Morrison in this sense is a matter of strategic calculation or rational choice. Consider, however, how even such a seemingly straightforward pleasure as drinking coffee can qualitatively change if it takes place at an establishment where the consumption of caffeine is refined by a sense of higher 21 “What is Human Agency? ” Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1. (Cambridge: CUP, 1985) 15-44; 16. For example, a drug addict can have a very strong desire for a drug, in fact spend most of his time on drugs, and yet classify his wish to be free of the drugs as a higher desire. In a similar way it is common to distinguish the “pleasure of reading” into higher and lower forms (think of the nineteenth-century distinction between the addictive pleasure of superficial beauty and the more edifying, “expansive” pleasure of difficult beauty; or consider Roland Barthes’ distinction between the plaisir of reading a realist novel and the jouissance of reading the late novels of James Joyce). 22 18 Oct. 1996. See Rona Kaufman, “‘That, My Dear, Is Called Reading’” 230. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 51 purpose (Starbuck’s “coffee ethic,” for example). 23 This implies a more complex kind of trust, based not on calculative strategy or rational choice but on our relational perception of an object’s proximity to power. Objects that give us a sense that we are being spoken to from above invoke a charismatic rather than calculative kind of trust that follows from our relational perception of power, the feeling that we are being put in touch with something larger than ourselves. The question of whether an experimental novel or a painting (or perhaps unfamiliar tasting coffee) seems worth exploring even if it does not at first seem to delight or teach us much, hinges on our trust in its “connection” to a “charismatic” value center. Since we experience this connection through a practical sense of spatial orientation (rather than calculative reason), charismatic trust is perceived aesthetically - we do not so much rationalize the issue (“Toni Morrison has the Nobel prize, so it is reasonable to assume she must be a good writer! ”) as sense an upward pull we like to phrase in the semantics of the sublime: a presence, an aura of a work that we perceive with our senses. Consecrated artifacts thus differ from more profane ones in that they can produce two kinds of intensities that should be analytically distinguished (even though they might produce similar affective symptoms): the one concerns the intensity of a more immediate aesthetic/ cognitive/ moral engagement with an artifact (which eluded Reynolds, in his first encounter with Raphael, and Oprah and her audience, when they failed to submit Paradise to a therapeutic reading); the other intensity concerns our attraction to something larger that the artifact embodies for us (an attraction that motivated Reynolds and Oprah and her audience to submit themselves to a regime of rehabitualization). Of course it would seem commonsensical here to invoke the problem of authenticity: if one does not like the coffee at Starbucks but still goes there because of a gentrified coffee ethic; if one detests experimental novels and yet submits to tedious classroom routines to learn how to read them; or if one is bored by Raphael paintings but nonetheless changes one’s life to acquire a taste for them, does this not mean that one mistakes the real event - the pleasure of caffeine, the power of literature, the beauty of painting - for something that is merely added, or “thrust upon” the real event by an institutional or economic system? This skeptical question comes so natural to literatureand-art criticism that we hardly notice its main conceptual move, namely to sustain the unity of the aesthetic event by distinguishing between primary and secondary affective reactions to artworks. Accordingly, primary aesthetic pleasures are those that are deemed “rational” in the sense that they are considered to be grounded in the “logic of the work” (the “politics,” “structure,” “meaning” of the aesthetic event itself). “Irrational” pleasures are the 23 See Slavoj Žižek’s take on “cultural capitalism,” where the consumption of organic apples or Starbucks products (with its “coffee ethic” and “‘Ethos Water’ program”) implies connection to a higher realm of meaning (“we are not merely buying and consuming” but “simultaneously doing something meaningful,” such as “showing our capacity for care, and our global awareness, participating in a collective projects” (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [London: Verso, 2009] 52-4). 52 G ünter l eyPoldt fetishistic, ersatz-religious, or libidinous emotions that emerge in commercial markets (a culture industry) and consecrating institutions (elitist canons, art religions). These are classified as secondary because it is assumed that the logic of the work precedes markets and institutions and can therefore not be held accountable for the affective reactions produced by markets and institutions (fits of weeping, charismatic trust, fetishistic desire, undemocratic high-low distinctions, etc.). 24 From this viewpoint, Lerner’s museum visitor, Rilke in the Louvre, Reynolds at the Vatican, and Oprah at Princeton are either fraudulent snobs (pretending to be touched by the higher objects while in reality playing for social distinction) or else commodity fetishists: They may think they are enjoying the beauties of art but in reality are in the thrall of something else: for instance, the “theological quirks of the commodity” that turn aesthetic objects into surrogates for absent parents, religious certainties, or sacred presences. 25 4. The Two Bodies of Things But what if “theological quirks” are what we want from cultural artifacts? Perhaps the charismatic attraction of aesthetic objects (as things that embody something larger) is just as relevant as their more direct uses (as things that delight and instruct and have a hermeneutic “meaning,” a “politics” or “ideology”). I would suggest that we consider charismatic and direct uses of artworks not as alternative but potentially simultaneous functions. Let 24 Note how the primary/ secondary distinction emerges from the agency of literary criticism’s tools of the trade: Our traditional skills (cultural hermeneutics, narrative analysis, and ideology critique, for example) want us to ground the aesthetic experience or political-ideology value in “the work” because the idea of a “science” of literature and art that can analytically reconstruct a work’s “politics of form” best legitimates these skills. If we can trace the essence of the aesthetic to an internal structure (the ability of Rilke’s torso to “glisten like a wild beast’s fur,” say) and find a compelling reason how this structure becomes political (how the glistening “wild beast’s fur” eludes the beholders’ conceptual understanding, producing in them a state of mental “free play” that in turn enables a radical politics), our scientific tools seem well exercised and worth their while. If, on the other hand, we allow that people’s affective reactions are irreducible to the structure of a work (because they are co-produced by charismatic institutions), our skills in hermeneutic reading and formal analysis become less central to our critical practice than the skills of ethnographic observation that traditionally belong to cultural anthropology, religious studies, and the social sciences. Hence the defensive tendency in literature and art criticism to downgrade the question of whether or not an object produces charismatic trust to a question of “significance” (as opposed to “meaning”), as if this question could be left to reception historians, literary sociologists, and cultural anthropologists while the “real” labor of literary criticism requires allegorical “readings” or structural-formal analysis of “the work.” 25 “[D]ie theologischen Mucken der Ware” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Band 1, Erster Abschnitt, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke Berlin/ DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1968. 23: 49-98; 85). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 53 us say that cultural artifacts can possess two bodies in Kantorowicz’ sense: 26 a “mortal” body that circulates through the profane world of the everyday (where it may be locked in rapid cycles of being commodified, desired, used, exhausted, and discarded), and a more enduring, iconic, transubstantiated body that invokes contact with a higher order. While the former inhabits the “lower” economies of short-term desires for weaker values, the latter body provides us with long-term desires and strong valuations we tend to associate with a sphere beyond the ordinary. These simultaneous materialities of things follow differing rhythms of growth and decline: The most mundane commodities (shower gels, tooth pastes, entertainment media, BMWs) can acquire a second, socially magical existence when they become attached to an imagined space above the quotidian. Take Theodore Dreiser’s classic exploration of consumer magic: when the protagonist of Sister Carrie (1900) is seduced by the siren voice of department store wares (“‘Ah, such little feet,’ said the leather of the soft new shoes; ‘how effectively I cover them. What a pity they should ever want my aid’”), 27 this is not just a clear case of commodity fetishism. It is true that Carrie’s response may also have to do with the more profane materiality of shoes (their use as quotidian objects of short-term desires that might range from a banal need for good footwear to a fetishistic interest in leather shoes). But Dreiser’s point is surely that the department store strikes Carrie with a sense of accessing the charismatic, so long, that is, as she feels “keenly the fact that not any of these things [are] in the range of her purchase.” 28 When towards the end of the novel she is a celebrity actress earning more money than she knows how to spend, the world of department stores has virtually disappeared, in her perception of charismatic centers, behind the Arnoldian culture that now orients her moves (Balzac rather than sentimental fiction, tragic acting rather than cabaret, Ames rather than Hurstwood). The discontinuity of the higher and lower bodies of things subverts simplistic distinctions between commodities and singularities, and - in literature and art criticism - the attempt to locate “the work” as a singular object in cultural space. At the lower end of the spectrum, the most commercial entertainments may develop a charismatic body, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a best-selling sentimental novel that also became The Novel That Caused the Civil War); Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (an easy accessible gothic romance that also embodied, for Europe’s elites, fascinating concepts of medievalism and nationhood), or Zola’s L’Assommoir and Nana (sensationalist bestsellers that also became credentialed as “naturalist” scientific experiment). At the higher end, the most consecrated cultural objects (Picasso paintings, rare antiquities, Shakespeare) might develop parallel 26 E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957). See Jeffrey Alexander, “The Democratic Struggle for Power: The 2008 Presidential Campaign in the USA,” Journal of Power 2.1 (April 2009) 65-88; 75. 27 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006) 72. 28 Dreiser, Sister Carrie 16. 54 G ünter l eyPoldt lives in a secondary process of commoditization that ranges from auctioneers trying to price the priceless to the merchandising of reproduced cultural icons in “heritage” markets and museum shops. The two bodies of things often exist in separate historical moments, as we can see in the characteristic lag between emergent and institutionalized avant-gardes, 29 and they can also emerge in differing spaces of social practice or differing audience sensibilities, when a specific artifact is disseminated across socio-institutional divides. Toni Morrison’s cross-over to Oprah Winfrey’s turf is a good example of this. When the Oprah effect catapulted Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon into the 1996 bestseller list, Morrison expressed her gratitude to Oprah for infusing her work with a “new life that is larger than its original life.” 30 But Song of Solomon has in fact been given numerous lives: Apart from the novel’s diverging historical presences (peer-recognized experiment in 1977, consecrated museum object in 1996), its “higher” and “lower” bodies were flourishing in relatively separate social regions: the more profane life of Morrison’s text, as an object of entertainment, edification, or instruction, arguably thrives best among audiences whose reading habits allow them to “consume” her often opaque prose with a certain ease. Experiencing a novel like Song of Solomon as ordinary reading (a “page-turner,” meaningful commentary on the African American condition, or source of redemptive self-knowledge) requires a degree of familiarity with recent literary tradition. Such familiarity would seem most likely within the social sphere of Wendy Griswold’s “reading class,” the “highly educated, affluent, metropolitan” social elite that comprises about 15% of the general population in today’s developed countries. 31 Conversely, within the atmospheres of less restrictive cultural markets (the popular terrain of Michael Crichton, say, or Dan Brown), the consumption value of experimental prose becomes nearly insignificant, though such loss of consumability can heighten a work’s symbolic power. Within Oprah’s 29 Emergent avant-gardes are authorized by a relatively small establishment of professionalized peers (an “art world”). Their most defining feature is not a “counter-cultural” sensibility but a specific “economy of prestige” (see James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005]), characterized by lower economic profits and higher elite recognition (think of Wordsworth around 1800, Whitman in the 1860s, Henry James or T.S. Eliot in the 1910s, or Toni Morrison in the early 1970s). Once avant-gardes are institutionalized in canons and museum, they become more widely known cultural icons, with the effect that their charismatic authority translates into wider public recognition (for example, Wordsworth as a leather-bound Victorian commodity, T.S. Eliot lecturing in 1950s football stadiums, or Toni Morrison on Oprah), although their charisma as “cuttingedge” might be replaced by the “historical” charisma as a site of memory (think of how Walter Scott’s image shifted from peer-recognized literary innovator to that of a heritage figure, as the inventor of the historical novel and the founder of Scottish nationalism). 30 18 Nov. 1996. See Edith Frampton, “Toni Morrison, Body Politics, Oprah’s Book Club,” The Oprahfication of American Culture, ed. T.T. Cotton, and K. Springer (UP of Mississippi, 2011) 145-160; 146. 31 Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2007). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 55 world the elusiveness of Morrison’s writing - its resistance to “therapeutic” reading - seems to have increased its magnetism, in a similar way, perhaps, to how conventional languages can become magic from the perspective of those unfamiliar with the relevant codes (medieval books among the illiterate; the Latin Mass for non-Latin-speakers, or consecrated novels for the uninitiated). 32 By the same logic Oprah’s institutional charisma becomes less intense within the sphere of the “reading class.” As we can gauge from comments by reviewers and academic critics, more bookish audiences, even as they welcome the Oprah effect as a worthy attempt to “get the whole country reading again,” 33 they also tend to look down upon Oprah’s Book Club as a mere mediator institution, a distributor of literary works rather than a legitimate authority on their real literary value, which is considered to be established elsewhere, within a higher consecrating institution (“over our heads,” as Winfrey said at Princeton). Even Morrison’s own consecrated status becomes thinner among the high-status groups of readers who are more familiar with third-level English classrooms and tend therefore to be more cynical about the validity of the Nobel Committee’s decisions. The published poet and MFA graduate Kathleen Rooney, for instance, insists, in her discussion of the Oprah phenomenon, that Paradise is “unnecessarily cryptic and impenetrable in style and composition.” 34 Arguably the confidence with which Rooney can dismiss Morrison as an emperor without clothes has to do with her familiarity with the academic institutions that play a more significant role than Oprah in shaping Morrison’s cultural prestige. Rooney might rejoin that her verdict is based on a structural logic that precedes questions of higher or lower charisma or prestige, namely a distinction between literary works that merit multiple rereading (“James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, or even The Sound and the Fury by Morrison’s antecedent William Faulkner”) and those that, like Morrison’s Paradise in Rooney’s view, are “needlessly muddled” and “deliberately and unnecessarily obfuscating” (82). The scientistic implication is that this finest of distinctions - between gratuitous and justified literary difficulty - has an objective basis in the work itself, visible to those who acquired the necessary expertise. This suggests that the superiority of some reading practices (“Princeton”) over others (Oprah’s world) simply derive from an inequality of invested labor. When Oprah and her readers acquaint themselves with the “logic” of experimental prose, the argument goes, they will see that Paradise is a perfectly ordinary artifact, and Morrison’s charisma will be exposed as a mirage. But it is a fallacy that educational labor and adequate reception are in a linear 32 On medieval books as holy objects, see Christopher De Hamel, “Books and Society,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. II: 1100-1400. ed. N. Morgan, R. Thomson (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) 3-10. On the Latin Mass, see Amy Hungerford, “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass,” Contemporary Literature 47: 3 (2006): 343-380. 33 The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 17, 1996. 34 Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. 2nd Edition (2005; Fayettesville: U of Arkansas P, 2008) 82. 56 G ünter l eyPoldt relationship, however persuasive the analogies to the applied sciences (better trained engineers will build better bridges). In the humanities the value of a practice hinges not on the quantity but the authority of invested labor - it is possible to spend a great amount of time and effort to “professionalize” forms of knowledge or skills that, within the shifting hierarchies of generational succession, might well turn out as relatively esoteric (like Longfellow studies, say, or mid-twentieth-century Prague structuralism). Whether or not we find Rooney’s rejection of Morrison convincing thus depends on our charismatic trust in the judgment devices on which her verdict is based. 35 5. Charisma as Embodied Perception Scholarship on trust often characterizes non-calculative trust relationships as a kind of belief or faith. 36 This analogy to religious belief can provoke an attitude of critical realism: Surely we can resist charismatic attraction by adopting an “atheist stance” and refuse to believe in consecrating institutions? 37 The suggestion is that any “naïve” trust in the authority of consecrated things (Reynolds’ Raphael, Oprah’s Morrison, Rilke’s torso) can be dispelled with a healthy dose of enlightened reflection. This misconception is apparent in the media scandal over Jonathan Franzen’s public remarks after Oprah announced The Corrections as a bookclub selection in September 2001. Franzen stumbled into a now infamous public relations debacle when in a string of promotional interviews during his book tour he voiced his ambivalence about his association with the Oprah label. The media fastened on his comments about literary taste - in a radio interview he had placed himself “solidly in the high-art literary tradition” and mentioned that Oprah’s more sentimental (“schmaltzy”) selections made him “cringe.” When Winfrey promptly rescinded her invitation (“It 35 This in turn depends on our trust in the consecrating institutions to which these judgment devices are linked. The main institution behind Rooney’s book is E.M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), which will seem weightier in Oprah’s world than in the practice space of professionalized criticism. And again, our trust in Forster will have less to do with the question of appropriate intellectual labor (whether Forster is “over-” or “under-theorized,” say) but mainly concern Foster’s critical consecration (whether he is trusted to be profanely “dated” or singularly “fresh”). 36 Since we can never be sure that our trust in a probable outcome will be rewarded (if we could be sure we could rely on this outcome), genuine trust necessarily implies a “form of faith,” according to Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity [Oxford: Polity, 1990] 27), or, in Georg Simmel’s formulation, a “social-psychological” kind of “‘belief’” that seems somehow “related to the religious” (Philosophie des Geldes [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1900] 151-196). See Guido Möllering, “The Nature of Trust: From Georg Simmel to a Theory of Expectation, Interpretation and Suspension,” Sociology 35.2 (2001): 403-20; 413; and Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006) chap. 5. 37 Pascale Casanova’s concept of a Greenwich literary meridian encourages such a reaction when she implies that “one way to resist” the allure of consecrated world-literary space “is to adopt an ‘atheist’ stance, and not to believe” in the “dominance” and the “prestige” of such space (“What Is a Dominant Language? Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality, New Literary History 44.3 [Summer 2013]: 379-399; 380. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 57 has never been my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or conflicted”), 38 Franzen backpedaled with a series of apologetic retractions. He conceded that the high-low distinction was “meaningless,” 39 and that he had “no-one but myself to blame.” 40 But blame for what exactly, other than having badly managed his media appearance? The most vehement condemnations came from critics who took Franzen’s discomfort itself as an offensive gesture: no-one cringes about popular culture unless they look down upon the mainstream. It was assumed that Franzen’s dislike of Oprah’s selections presupposed a creed or ethics that justifies such dislike. In the manner of the new-atheist critique of religion as essentially consisting of false propositional statements about the world (fantastic beliefs rather than verifiable realities), Franzen was accused of a faith in the existence of “the middle-brow” that critics attributed to the “sacred conversations” of a reactionary “priesthood of English professors.” 41 Understandably, Franzen declared himself an unbeliever: “I know,” he said to the Chicago Tribune in November 2001, “that the distinction between high audiences and low audiences is false.” 42 Franzen presumably meant to acknowledge the equal dignity of all tastes, and who would want to disagree? But how does such an abstract philosophical position affect the empirical realities of our embodied reaction to differing aesthetic atmospheres or intensities? 43 Rooney’s engagement with Oprah is a case in point: Highly critical of Franzen’s insensitivity, she prefaces her account with a disclaimer that her academic expertise as a reader does not “negate the value” of the experience of any less educated member of Oprah’s club, who “may deal with fiction in a different way than a member of the academy” (79). 44 This democratic principle did not prevent Rooney, however, from experiencing Oprah’s more accessible picks as painfully simple, predictable, overly schematic and sensational, 45 nor has her theoretical tolerance mitigated her practical aversion to what she perceives as Oprah’s “studiously immature” and “sophomoric” (159) response to literature. Rooney and Franzen 38 Susan Schindehette, “Novel approach,” People Magazine (12 November 2001): 83-4; 83. 39 David Kirkpatrick, “‘Oprah’ Gaffe by Franzen Draws Ire and Sales,” New York Times, 29. Oct. 2001. <http: / / www.nytimes.com>. 40 Julia Keller, “Franzen vs. the Oprah Factor,” Chicago Tribune (12 November, 2001) <http: / / www.chicagotribune.com> 41 Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2012) 21. 42 Keller, ibid. 43 See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (NY: Polity, 2000) 184-5. 44 Careful to dissociate herself from the harsher critics of Oprah’s book club, Rooney stresses that she has learned how to tolerate difference: she says that in the “original draft” of her book she had still “announced with great fanfare” that she was “‘qualified’ to distinguish good literature from bad” (“owing to my extensive literary education”). Yet upon “further thought” she had realized how “reactionary” it would be to believe “that only a minority of trained professionals can interact critically with texts” (78-9). 45 Such as Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth (1997); Chris Bohjalian’s Midwives (1997); Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife (1998); Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road (1998); and Elizabeth Berg’s Open House (2000) (85ff). 58 G ünter l eyPoldt both “cringe” in the atmosphere of the middlebrow because their embodied sense of high and low (or singular/ cheap, sacred/ profane, pure/ impure, etc.) goes deeper than their ideas (ethical, political) about this distinction. These bodily reactions indicate that institutional charisma does not originate from belief but from “the sense of something larger or more deeply meaningful about which we may have beliefs.” 46 To speak of a “sense” implies a tacit, practical kind of knowledge about an object’s location (its proximity to charismatic authority) that can be felt relatively independently from one’s belief about this object. It is hard to see how any author who, like Franzen, moves mainly in the more prestigious literary spheres where success is defined by prizes instead of large print runs would feel unambiguous elation when crossing over into the atmospheres of middle-brow book clubs and daytime TV. This does not mean, as critics have suggested, that authors striving for peer recognition cannot at the same time be thrilled (as Franzen said he was) with the prospect of the Oprah effect turning them into national bestsellers. Since the desire for money and recognition are located in different spaces of practice (an economy of the sacred vs. an economy of the everyday), it seems entirely coherent to be both glad and ashamed about having an Oprah label stamped on your novel. Unlike Toni Morrison, whose worldwide prestige made her immune to any contact-stigmatization, Franzen, as a non-experimental writer with fewer credentials, had a more vivid feeling of downward mobility upon being shelved with the “schmaltzy” company of Oprah picks. The feeling of downward mobility, to be sure, is not the only reason for Franzen’s response, which can be better understood if we distinguish the charismatic and aesthetic intensities that make his body cringe. One element of discomfort is about relational orientation, the feeling of moving away from charismatic authority. This might be reinforced by another, essentially different, element, the perception of crude emotionality with which professionalized readers typically experience literary artifacts intended for less bookish audiences. The latter perception has to do with the weak or short-term values of aesthetic taste: Franzen’s professionalized reading practices have ruined Oprah’s picks for him for everyday literary consumption. To make middlebrow texts viable for him Franzen would have to “unlearn” his aesthetic habitus by submitting himself to a training regime no less comprehensive than Reynolds’ replacement of “English taste” with a taste for Raphael. Of course, Reynolds’ efforts were motivated by the upward pull of Raphael’s charismatic attraction. It is harder to see why one would want to change in the opposite direction. 46 Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010) 11. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 59 6. The Charismatic and the Social If cultural upward-mobility involves a sense of moving closer to a charismatic center, such a move is not identical with social advancement or “distinction.” But charismatic values have a way of embodying themselves in social materialities, that is, they situate themselves within constellations of places, people, practices, and institutions that are collectively experienced as closer or further away from authority. While in theoretical space, an object can have an intrinsic meaning that seems extraterritorial to social hierarchy, in practice even the most abstract meaning comes already “bundled” with some materiality that influences its “social biography.” Just as you cannot have, according to Webb Keane, the quality of “redness in abstraction” (“redness in an apple,” for instance, “comes along in a spherical shape, light weight, sweet flavor, a tendency to rot, and so forth”), 47 concepts, things, practices, places can become radiant, banal, or obnoxious depending on the material economies in which they are embedded. The meaning of Morrison’s Paradise, for example, has a thingness that can come in the shape of a singularity (when its resistance to non-professional readers produces the phenomenology of sacred objects), it can exist as a quotidian commodity (when professional audiences “consume” it as bed-table reading), and in the generational succession may well acquire the thingness either of a consecrated site of memory (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) or that of trash (if in the future literary field it is no longer relevant). As contemporary museum theory reminds us, the most obvious material aspect of the sacred is that the process of consecration usually includes a removal of things from the spheres of everyday uses, meanings, laws, and markets - collection pieces develop the phenomenology of the sacred when they are withheld from quotidian cycles of consumption, 48 just as avant-gardes in literature and the arts tend to draw their aura (“autonomous,” “disinterested,” “priceless”) from their momentary distance to large-scale consumption. The trouble with the emphasis on the removal process is that it can encourage a reductive view of sacralization as based on an object’s evasion of the social, as if the materiality of the sacred could be recognized simply by its distance from quotidian markets and pragmatic uses. Indeed literature and art criticism have a long history of elevating resistance to pragmatic uses to the defining trait of literariness or beauty. Consider, for instance, how Toni Morrison discussed the difficulty of Paradise in her session with Oprah at Princeton: she said that rather than writing a novel that could be reduced to an idea or thesis (“a book in which there was a formula and a perfect conclusion 47 Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke UP, 2006) 182-205; 188. 48 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) 64-94; and Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things 1-63. On the history of museum in the context of sacralisation see Karl-Heinz Kohl, Die Macht der Dinge: Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte (Munich, Beck, 2003) and Stefan Lauber, Von der Reliquie zum Ding: Heiliger Ort - Wunderkammer - Museum (Berlin: Akademie, 2011). 60 G ünter l eyPoldt and that was the meaning and the only meaning”), she had wanted to create an open literary space that, by withholding positive clues, would entice its readers towards more “powerful” ways of engagement. Forcing the audience to face an unfamiliar world would heighten their aesthetic experience and ethico-moral astuteness (as Oprah rephrased Morrison’s point: “Wise author that she is, she knows the rewards are twice as great when we readers get to unlock the secrets on our own”). This idea that the relentless negativity of the work itself produces or heightens its literariness draws from the delivery model of literature in a way that recalls the literary ethics of Martha Nussbaum: just as a forbiddingly heavy burgundy wine rewards us with a deeper satisfaction, the refined complexities of Paradise (in Nussbaum’s account, the later Henry James) are more likely than “easy” entertainment to improve our ethical-political powers of judgment. But clearly the merits of textual alterity vary with social context. Just as the outside of the cultural market contains all manner of unfamiliar, inaccessible, enigmatic things that can still be experienced as trivia or trash, an alterity becomes charismatic only if it is pulled, not only out of the quotidian, but also upward in cultural space, towards a site of power. Morrison’s Paradise seems worth exploring to those who trust its connection to society’s charismatic center, which in turn depends on Morrison’s location within a hierarchical structure of consecrating institutions (Oprah, a network of literary prizes, an art world, prestigious journals, editors, critics, English departments, the reading class, etc.) that inevitably differ along various scales of symbolic power, on the basis of the degree of trust they muster, the singularity-levels they generate, the cultural centrality they invoke. To be sure, if consecration means to rise upward in cultural space (towards charismatic institutions), this seems hardly possible without moving up in social space (towards empowered elites). For positions of institutional charisma - in the 1890s, for example, the Atlantic group of magazines, the Metropolitan Opera, the Henry Jamesian novel, etc. - are not only privileged sites within the sacred-profane polarity of cultural space, they also connect certain aesthetic practices with real networks of people and social goods, thus accumulating a great deal of social power (prestige, economic wealth, political agency, etc.). To put this point with Martina Löw, the “atmospheres” 49 that distinguish consecrated from more profane cultural sites are also shaped by how we perceive the people and things that are “spaced” within or connected to these sites. It is hard to separate, in other words, the consecrated atmosphere that emanates from the “white cube” of the modern art museum or the short-list of the Booker Prize from the social atmospheres of things, people, practices that our spatial 49 Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space,” The European Journal of Social Theory 11.1 [2011]: 25-49; 44. See also Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Fink, 2001). To say that atmospheres emerge from pre-interpretive experience is to suggest that they are felt rather than rationally deduced, but it does not imply that such experiences are natural or universal; the perceptive schemes for this need to be acquired and trained. On the problems of the term “pre-interpretive” see John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (NY: Free Press, 1995) 133-4. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 61 orientation locates in a similar region of practice to art museums and literary prizes. To suggest that atmospheres are rooted in social configurations is not, however, the same as reducing them to aesthetic illusions whose deeper reality consists in sociological “hard facts” in Philip Fisher’s sense. 50 Focusing on certain “hard facts” about socioeconomic hierarchy is one kind of practice; experiencing an atmosphere as higher, more sacred or charismatic is another; but just how both practices relate to one another would seem to depend on the individual case. Consider, for example, an account of Oprah, Morrison and Franzen that describes their motivations in terms of a rational exchange of social “assets.” We can then see Oprah’s adding a book club segment to her commercially successful show as a financial investment (a Maussian “gift”) 51 in an economy of social prestige. Hosting literary authors in order to “get the whole country reading again” 52 is an expensive business, paid for with low ratings, but its symbolic returns have given The Oprah Show a cultural clout beyond the reach of any other contemporary daytime talk-show (completing a gentrification effort she began in the 1990s). This context makes Oprah’s cooperation with Toni Morrison a win-win situation for both participants - she connects herself to the Nobel Prize, while Morrison sells a great deal more books. But the Franzen incident temporarily disturbs this exchange: less confident about his status than the securely credentialed Morrison, Franzen weighs the middlebrow stigma of the Oprah label against its financial value and hesitates, for a moment. He may have realized immediately that the minimal symbolic risk was not worth the scandal, but having now voiced his shame in the press, he performatively (however unintentionally) ruined his value for Oprah, who now had little to gain from hosting an author whom the media had come to associate with an exposure of her middlebrow taste. Sticking to her disinvitation despite Franzen’s apology was a rational move, as was her immediate turn towards classic authors (Tolstoy, Faulkner, Dickens) who were unable to wince in her company. It was equally rational, finally, for Oprah and Franzen to restore their gift exchange once the settling of the dust had enabled them to do so (in 2010, Franzen appeared on the show with his new novel Freedom, describing himself as “mellowed”). This story of investments and returns pleases the part of our scholarly self that prizes literary critique for its ethos of hard-headed exposure of concealed politico-economic agendas. And indeed, this story is not false or uninteresting (it would be disingenuous to deny the motivating power of social prestige). But neither does the emphasis on a rational exchange of assets exhaust the complex realities of charismatic attraction. Since the “social magic 50 See Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (NY: Oxford UP, 1985). 51 See Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) and Mark Osteen, “Gift or Commodity? ” The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2002) 229-47. 52 The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 17, 1996. 62 G ünter l eyPoldt of institutions” can “constitute just about anything as an interest,” 53 Oprah’s sense that Morrison puts her in touch with something larger (genius, the infinite, her best self, etc.) may well be more vivid than her sense of a gain in social prestige. This would also seem to be Dreiser’s point, when towards the end of Sister Carrie he suggests that Carrie’s social rise had little to do with strategic motivations (“reason had very little part in this”). As a sensitive artist type (a “dreamer” who simply “follows” “the sound of beauty”) Carrie “instinctively” moves towards sites of attraction (places that offer “more of loveliness than she had ever known,” where people wear “fine raiment” in “elegant surroundings” and “see[m] to be contented”), 54 that is to say, she is drawn towards an atmosphere in which power, wealth, beauty, and higher values seem to become indistinguishable or reinforce one another through spatial contact. It seems that the promise of the charismatic is based on a relational trust that subverts strictly value-rational moves, encouraging a leap of faith and a suspension of skeptical questioning. 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