But has news of the Nobel left you unsettled? Are you feeling cultural anxiety at the prospect of living a life of prizelessness? Here at Shifting Baselines, we are most interested in time series trends and, with the world humming this week with Nobel news, this interest collides with the rise of prizes in society. There is no better book that addresses the wild proliferation of prizes from 1900 onward than The Economy of Prestige by James English (Harvard University Press).
I doubt that James English is a forthcoming candidate for the Nobel. The Economy of Prestige did not, unsurprisingly, win a lot of awards. The New York Magazine awarded it Best Academic Book in 2005 and that was about it.
The entire award community seems to have upturned its glossy, blue-ribboned nose at English, who has a distinctly different take on prizes as a whole and the Nobel specifically (I found it delightfully refreshing). English believes prizes are "cashed in" ("the Nobel laureate's out-of-print titles suddenly appearing in attractive new boxed-sets and translated into every major language"--to which even Lessing will not contest) and "culturally laundered" ("Nobel's profits from the manufacture of deadly explosives converted into a mantle of supreme literary achievement"). But the Nobel has one thing all other prizes do not: it was first (established in 1901).
And this firstness has established Nobel with the cultural prestige that we really seek. And the clams, too. "The International Congress of Distinguished Awards, which was founded in 1994 in a futile but symptomatic effort to control and regulate this chaotic scene, counts more than a hundred 'distinguished' prizes carrying cash awards greater than $100,000." The Nobel, for instance, comes with a $1.4 million 'grant' (read: cash prize, since most of the recipients are retirees).
The rise of prizes over the past century [shown graphically in the book's Appenix], and especially in their feverish proliferation in recent decades, is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society than can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success, and that is fast replacing a rich and varied cultural world with a shallow and homogenous McCulture based on the model of network TV. Prizes, from this vantage point, are not a celebration but a contamination of the most precious aspect of art.
This is certainly a valid point in light of the fact that a film can only be eligible for an Academy Award (the Nobel of film) if it was shown in a New York or L.A. theatre for at least seven consecutive nights and if the filmmakers agree to be at the ceremony to receive the prize ("Oscars have become a huge marketing lever for promoters and a major source of revenue").
On the theme of Oscars, I'll finish with a well-worn line from Annie Hall (one English also uses; Is there ever a time when quoting Woody Allen is not opportune?): "Awards! That's all they do is give out awards. I can't believe it. 'Greatest Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.'"
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Thanks for sharing these observations.
I'm reminded that economics was not on Nobel's original prize list. The econ prize that carries Nobel's name was added relatively recently, and it's kind of ... interesting ... to look up its history.
Does the English book mention that at all?
ETBNC,
I do not recall that it does. Please do share!
Here's one last favorite (and slightly verbose) excerpt from English:
Chinweizu, attacking the Swedish Academy's tastes in African literature, sounds much like the critics of Afropop who mocked the Grammy judges' enthusiasm for 'Graceland' earlier the same year. In Africa, wrote Chinweizu, the Nobel can be won only by a writer of "sophisticated literary versions of airport art," a writer who carefully applies just enough "Africanesque patina and inlays" to his Euro-assimilationst texts to satisfy "a Western tourist taste for exotica." From this vantage, world literature, no less than world music, is a neo-imperial euphemism for what Graham Haggan has termed the "postcolonial exotic."
Nobody likes a party pooper -- I think that's what English suffered from with his book. And it's the same thing John Horgan got in the mid-90's when he wrote a book titled, "The End of Science: Facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age." All you have to do is look at the distribution of reviewers scores on the Amazon page for the book to see how much the science world disliked what he had to say.
And what he had to say was that at least in some fields of science, significant discovery cannot go on forever. For many fields, there are a limited number of major discoveries to be made. Once those are made, what remains is either trivia, or beyond the reach of our resources or will power.
All of which is the the last thing in the world cheerleaders for science want to hear, no matter whether it's true or not.
The bottomline is that most people want to be positive, giving out awards, blindly cheering for everything to go on being the same forever and ever, amen. Anyone who tries to step in the way of that party, even if they are speaking the truth as English and Horgan have, is committing heresy and won't find much support.
A nice piece. I did find one factual error though:
But the Nobel has one thing all other prizes do not: it was first (established in 1904).
I guess that should be 1901.
Although Nobel's will established the prizes, his plan was incomplete and, due to various other hurdles, it took five years before the Nobel Foundation could be established and the first prizes awarded on December 10, 1901.
Guru, Merci! Date noted and corrected.
I'm a little late adding this comment but if you want to know more about the Nobel prize in Economics, have a listen to what Alfred Nobel's great-great-nephew had to say on the topic on CBC Radio's "The Current":
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200710/20071009thecurrent_sec1.ram
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