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.

What then are we to make of the sudden intrusion of AI into the mark-maker’s field? Generative models write, draw, summarize, design, simulate. They produce legibility without understanding. They conjure fluency without labor. To the mark-maker, this is not just economic disruption—it is ontological violation. The slow burn of symbolic competence, the years of coded apprenticeship in reference and refinement, the careful tuning of style to meaning—these are not merely skills but identities. And now, suddenly, they are optional. Not obsolete, not destroyed, but revealed as contingent, copyable, almost decorative.

This is not new. The photograph once terrified the painter. The printing press disoriented the cleric. The synthesizer scandalized the symphonist. Each time, a domain of consecrated expertise was destabilized by a technology that shifted the basis of value. But in each case, a new aesthetic regime eventually emerged. Photography did not kill painting; it provoked Impressionism. The press did not destroy authority; it redistributed it. The synthesizer did not end music; it cracked it open to the world. These were hysteretic convulsions that gave rise to new alignments. But they took time, and left scars.

What is perhaps novel today is the simultaneity of pressures. AI is not acting alone. It arrives entwined with a volatile politics that has already marked the mark-maker class as suspicious. On the right, they are painted as decadent elites, drunk on jargon, detached from production. James Burnham’s old vision of the managerial technocrat has been given new populist flesh: the expert as tyrant, the bureaucrat as priest, the planner as parasite. On the left, meanwhile, they are accused of laundering neoliberalism through style—serving power while pretending critique. Their embrace of AI is read, by radicals, as a final betrayal: a cheerful surrender to their own replacement, a complicity in the erasure of labor’s last refuge.

The mark makers find themselves not merely disoriented but politically disarmed, unable to forge or rally behind a durable center. The institutions that once brokered their compromises—parties, media outlets, universities, foundations—now flicker with ambivalence or buckle under suspicion from all directions. In their absence, various would-be vessels for adaptive reinvention have surfaced: wonkish third-way think tanks, centrist social media influencers preaching reasonableness, vague “new liberalism” reboots, techno-optimist civic platforms, even AI-governance salons in digital cities. Yet each suffers from a common anemia: an imagination too tepid for the times. These efforts mistake the crisis for a public relations problem or a simple narrative vacuum, rather than the profound hysteresis between embodied social reflexes and the volatile field conditions reshaping them. Their failure lies not in reasoned moderation, but in mistaking technocratic clarity for symbolic legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the more vivid ideologies—both revolutionary and reactionary—feed on precisely what the mark makers lack: heat, myth, totalizing clarity. And so the symbolic middle finds itself squeezed between fiery polemics and tepid reform. Not quite scapegoats, not quite leaders, they drift into a liminal role, too anxious to renounce their own past, too prudent to leap into a new one. The mark maker’s tools—careful abstraction, delayed judgment, hybrid allegiances—have gone momentarily out of phase with political time. They lack a poetics of necessity, and until one is forged, the institutional scaffolding of their relevance will continue to fray.

Thus AI becomes a triple mirror: it reflects the right’s conviction that the mark-makers are dispensable; it confirms the left’s suspicion that they are opportunists; and it exposes to the mark-makers themselves the terrifying fragility of their craft. To produce a poem or a policy brief, an ad campaign or a lesson plan, and to realize that a language model can do so faster, cheaper, and passably—this is not a simple technological challenge. It is a trauma of self-definition. It calls into question the source of one’s dignity.

What makes this even harder to metabolize is the internal division within the class itself. Some mark-makers rush toward AI with open arms, seeing it as a creative partner, a superpower, a tool for amplification. Others recoil, mourning the loss of aura, resisting what they see as aesthetic colonization. The same split can be found in the broader politics of the class: some seek accommodation, others retreat into fortified legitimacy. These are not merely strategic disagreements. They are clashes of habitus. They speak to different tempos of adjustment, different tolerances for ambiguity, different gambles on what might still matter.

And yet the class persists. Not as a coherent bloc, but as a web of practices that still gird the culture. Symbols still need to be made, interpreted, taught. Even in their supposed obsolescence, the mark-makers remain infrastructural. But their position is no longer secured by institutions that grant them the right to symbolize. The university, the newspaper, the design studio, the think tank—these no longer function as automatic consecrators. Their authority has become erratic, their pipelines leaky. In the past, these institutions acted as exchange sites, allowing the managerial and creative modes to validate one another. Now they are sites of contestation and anxiety.

There are, of course, those who hope for adaptive reinvention. Perhaps the mark-makers will find a way to reassert their relevance, to fuse their symbolic fluency with new tools and terrains. Perhaps they will become midwives of post-AI culture, guides through the uncanny jungle of simulation. But this will not be accomplished through nostalgia or moral panic. It will require aesthetic risk, organizational invention, and a new compact with the public. What Bourdieu might call a restructuring of the field, such that new stakes, new positions, and new forms of capital can emerge.

It is tempting to ask whether this class deserves to survive. Whether its historically peculiar mix of privilege and precarity, of vanity and virtue, of earnestness and gatekeeping, is worth saving. But perhaps this is the wrong question. The mark-makers are not simply a class—they are a mode of mediation. They help societies metabolize complexity. They name, frame, interpret. When they become brittle or defensive, they are insufferable. But when they adapt and attune, they make intelligibility possible. The goal is not to preserve their current form, but to enable their transformation into something that still serves the collective symbolic metabolism of an era that no longer believes in symbolic authorities.

Hysteresis, in this context, is both a danger and a gift. It is the gap that reveals the lag, but also the field in which invention must occur. As Bourdieu reminds us, “One has to be present in the present with all the weight of one’s past.” The task now is to bear that weight lightly, and to mark again—with courage, precision, and humility—the contours of the new.

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Recipe

Describe the protocol we used to develop this final essay

Here is a clear and structured description of the protocol we used to develop the final essay “Hysteresis and the Mark Makers.”

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1. Thematic Excavation and Theoretical Orientation

We began by exploring the core concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, especially:

• habitus (embodied disposition),

• field (structured social arena),

• capital (social, cultural, symbolic, economic),

• and hysteresis (lag between habitus and field transformation).

This phase focused on understanding how social inertia and disruption manifest when embodied expectations are misaligned with evolving field dynamics. We connected this to political and technological transformations.

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2. Application to the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)

We developed a Bourdieu-informed diagnosis of the contemporary center-left, using the PMC as our subject. Key steps:

• Framing the PMC through Ehrenreich's and Burnham's definitions.

• Mapping its current unraveling via hostile milieus on the far right and far left.

• Identifying hysteresis caused by accelerated sociotechnical change.

• Constructing a 2×2 scenario matrix to forecast plausible futures.

This culminated in a 2-page policy-style brief followed by a poetic Montaigne-style essay capturing the same diagnosis in a more literary tone.

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3. Parallel Analysis of the Creative Class and ML Disruption

We then turned to the creative class and explored how:

• The rise of generative AI (LLMs, image synthesis) echoes earlier disruptions (e.g. photography’s effect on painting).

• A similar hysteresis appears in the split between AI-embracing and AI-resisting creatives.

• Historical analogies helped surface adaptive reinvention pathways and their limitations.

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4. Conceptual Merger: The “Mark Maker Class”

Noticing overlaps between the PMC and creatives, we proposed a merged reference group:

• Coined the term “mark makers” to denote symbolic laborers (in politics, culture, media, knowledge).

• Clarified their shared habitus: meritocratic values, aesthetic refinement, ethical discourse, symbolic distinction.

We then:

• Merged political and cultural analysis into a single essay.

• Integrated earlier material on institutional fragility, historical hysteresis, and reinvention failures.

• Used AI as both a symbolic and practical accelerator of the crisis.

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5. Style, Mood, and Visuals

• Composed the final essay in flowing poetic prose, without explicit section headers, channeling Montaignean commentary.

• Designed a custom image prompt capturing the semiotic fragility of mark makers.

• Rendered this image to accompany the essay.

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6. Reflexive Integration

Before finalizing, we:

• Diagnosed existing centrist efforts (think tanks, Substacks, civic tech) as insufficiently imaginative.

• Identified historical reinvention successes and missing ingredients in today's context.

• Wove all of this into the essay’s middle section as commentary on strategic imagination and symbolic decay.