Hysteresis and the Mark-Makers

The American center-left through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories

The mark-maker class lives in the gap between the signs and the systems. They comprise those who produce, coordinate, teach, and manage the functioning of symbolic order on the one hand, and those who remix, stylize, dream, and craft the cultural tones in which life is rendered bearable, on the other. These are not two classes, but one diffuse stratum, braided of institutional and aesthetic lives, of spreadsheets and metaphors.

Once insulated by the seeming security of letters and credentials, the mark-makers now find themselves in hysteresis: lagging in the face of an accelerating world that no longer waits for meaning to catch up.

Let us begin plainly: the mark-makers are the children of meritocracy and the heirs of cultural capital. They edit magazines and syllabi. They write copy and curricula. They organize panels, set agendas, design campaigns, host salons. They administer knowledge, express feeling, cultivate interpretation. They are the functionaries of shared symbolic sense. One half—the professional managerial class, in Ehrenreich’s sense—draws power from moralized expertise and institutional standing. The other half—the creative class, as canonized by Florida—claims social distinction through the production of style, wit, mood, design. But they share a habitus: a mode of being that orients itself toward meaning, toward legibility, toward the shaping of taste and time.

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Bourdieu teaches us that when the field moves faster than the habitus can adapt, a lag sets in. “The hysteresis effect,” he writes, “means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late, and that habitus tends to lag behind the changes in the field.” This lag is not benign. It is lived as confusion, disorientation, ridicule, even rage. What was once a reliable feel for the game becomes a stale reflex. The mark-makers—who for decades moved with the grain of modern institutions—now find their instincts misfiring. Their ways of knowing, their modes of speaking, their cultivated manners now appear quaint, procedural, indulgent. They are mocked by populists as condescending, and by radicals as co-opted. Worse, they are made redundant by machines that now wield, with eerie fluency, the very tools they mastered.