It’s funny how human brains work, isn’t it? You can spend your entire life viewing the world through one lens, only to swap it for a wholly different paradigm after you’ve wrapped your brain around a new concept with explanatory power. Your entire habitus can get flipped on its head simply by fully understanding a framework that you either weren’t familiar with before or, by contrast, wrote off as so universal as to have little theoretical utility.
There are two such concepts for me: dialectical materialism and schismogenesis, and it’s the latter that we’ll be discussing today.
Schismogenesis is a concept that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s ever read much in the way of anthropological research. The term was coined by Gregory Bateson in 1935 to describe “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals.” And, as always, I assure you I’m going to tie this highfalutin gobble-gobble back to a discussion of hi‑fi and audiophilia, but before we get there, a digression feels necessary. Bear with me.
Although the broad strokes of schismogenesis have been lingering around in the back of my mind for years, the concept didn’t really hit home for me until I recently read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. And yeah, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’m just now reading this important tome. But in my defense, when it came out in 2021, I was simultaneously fighting for my life on a near-daily basis, in the hospital more than I was out of it, and also still deeply depressed about the death of Graeber, whom I consider to be one of the most important public intellectuals of the 21st century, and not merely because of his pioneering work in his chosen field. I try very hard not to have heroes, but with Graeber—as with Dr. Floyd Toole—I have failed.
So, for nearly five years now, The Dawn of Everything has sat on my nightstand unread, and I only recently picked it up because I wanted—perhaps even needed—Graeber’s unique perspective on how and why humanity has allowed itself to get into its current mess and why things only seem capable of getting worse. What I didn’t expect was to be fully convinced of a concept I’ve long found intriguing while remaining skeptical of its actual utility.
In typical Graeber (and, I’m learning, Wengrow) style, the book doesn’t merely present a correct-sounding idea and hang supporting evidence around it; instead, the authors rely on archeological and anthropological evidence to prod the concept and see whether it stands up to scrutiny.
But before that, they begin with what I consider to be one of the most illustrative (if hypothetical) explanations of what schismogenesis even is:
Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide—even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well.
Graeber and Wengrow go on to give further examples:
Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If “national character” can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.
No doubt, you can start to see where I’m going with this. But in case it isn’t clear, reading Graeber and Wengrow’s discussion of Marcel Mauss’s work on the subject of schismogenesis really drew me out of the domain of prehistory and into the present realities of the schisms in the hi‑fi community.
. . . [I]f everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts, and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer, Mauss felt, is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbours.
Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal . . . surprisingly, Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits. He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
. . . Crucially, Mauss noted, this process tends to be quite self-conscious . . . “Societies,” wrote Mauss, “live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”
Nor are such reflections limited to what historians think of as “high” (that is, literate) civilizations. Inuit did not simply react with instinctual revulsion when they first encountered someone wearing snowshoes, and then refused to change their minds. They reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be. In fact, Mauss concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbours that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups.
If I quote much more than that, I’m going to have to give Graeber and Wengrow co-author credit on this month’s editorial. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of their convincing argument for schismogenesis as a useful framework in anthropology and world history. The thing is, I don’t think I need to do much more to explain why I also think it’s a useful framework for understanding the strange tribalism in the realm of hi‑fi enthusiasm.
It’s weird how the timing of things works sometimes. A little over a month ago, if memory serves me, Ron Resnick of The HiFi Five YouTube channel called and asked me if I’d come on the show to discuss ways in which we might bridge the subjectivist/objectivist divide. Bury the hi‑fi hatchet, so to speak. At a minimum, get those who are opposed to measurements to understand why the rest of us appreciate their value. And since I’d written an entire article about a desire to do so barely two years ago, I figured I had something to say on the matter.
But I had to bow out for personal reasons, so I recommended that my podcast cohost and former SoundStage! Solo editor, Brent Butterworth, take my slot and use it much more effectively than I would have. And I’m honestly glad I did. Because after finally embracing schismogenesis as a concept, I think my entire position in this argument has changed. I’m starting to think that if audio enthusiasts weren’t squabbling over whether or not there’s such a thing as objective reality, we’d be squabbling over something else. Anything else. Insofar as you can call anything human nature, this seems to be exactly that.
Mind you, although it now seems clear to me that, for example, tube fans are defining themselves as much by their opposition to solid-state fans as they are their own inherent love of thermionic valve technology—and vice versa—I don’t think that necessarily has to rise to the level of hostility we see between opposing hi‑fi camps in these times. And I don’t think schismogenesis is enough to explain that hostility. I get not understanding—or, if I’m being charitable, understanding but not caring about—the utility of measurements as a tool to provide a sanity check and to confirm or contradict what we heard in our listening sessions. What I didn’t get until now is why some pure subjectivists (not all, mind you) are so inclined to attack those of us who do value measurements, then go full DARVO and accuse us of being the mean ones when we dare defend ourselves.
Maybe that’s just what happens when your preferences become part of your identity, and your preferences are defined by opposition to someone else’s preferences. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Graeber and Wengrow were, in this first of what was supposed to be three volumes, exploring origins, not endings. And endings, I think, heighten these sorts of schisms. Anyone paying attention to the world right now who knows anything about history recognizes that the United States is a dying empire. And as empires die, their rage is directed inward. Polarization ramps up.
Not only that, but we’re so obviously living through what any economist worth his or her salt has to admit is the very final stages of capitalism, before that system of exploitation collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. (If, for whatever reason, you don’t believe that’s true, ask yourself why the capitalists are all currently building doomsday bunkers in New Zealand.) Here’s the thing about the collapse of any world order, though: the uncertainty that results from having no way to know whether what follows will be better or worse—whether or not you would even articulate it like that—is sending shockwaves of polarization around the world. So everything is getting nasty, everywhere, all at once.
But again, I’ve already spoken too much on the subject of world history and prehistory. Let’s bring this back to audio. Is it that much of a stretch to say that the audiophile empire that started with the likes of J. Gordon Holt, Harry Pearson, and other such luminaries has, at the very least, been waning for a while? And let me be abundantly clear about something here: I’m not saying that hi‑fi is going away anytime soon, if ever. As I continue to repeat, in as many ways as I can think to repeat it, I truly believe that high-quality sound reproduction is far too important for it to go the way of the Aztec Empire. What I’m saying, though, is that audiophilia as we currently define it—and by that, I mean simply “the aesthetic choices of boomers with regard to music playback”—probably doesn’t have many more years in it than does capitalism.
On the upside, I feel a little more optimistic that whatever comes after our current audiophile regime will almost certainly be objectively better from a technological and value point of view. But as a younger, more scientifically literate crowd finally finds room to join the hi‑fi enthusiast ranks, I’m frankly starting to become convinced that they’ll split into us-versus-them factions, too. Maybe it’ll boil down to tiffs about the merits of virtual versus mechanical VU meters? Perhaps future hi‑fi enthusiasts will find themselves looking at each other across battle lines about volume knobs versus screens? Passive versus active speakers? Maybe we’ll get back to fighting about separates versus integrated amplifiers or receivers?
Either way, I think when hi‑fi no longer suffers under the weight of its current end-stage capitalist contradictions—when the entire conversation doesn’t feel like it’s being driven by whether or not six-figure audio cables are worth the coin and why dead-broke twentysomethings don’t care about good sound because they don’t buy six-figure audio cables (an exaggeration, to be sure, but by how much?)—there’ll be room for the entire hobby to grow and flourish. Never to its previous heights, of course. Never up to the level of that bygone time when hi‑fi was really the dominant form of home entertainment and when seemingly every print magazine of every sort ran ads for stereo gear. There are simply too many media alternatives now.
But still, if we can kill the infatuation with needless excess and adherence to old truisms, there’s plenty of room for hi‑fi to grow, in forms we probably can’t even (or don’t want to) imagine today. And yeah, there’ll still be schisms. At least, if this whole schismogenesis concept holds as much water as I now think it does, there will be. But maybe those schisms won’t be so nasty, because they’ll no longer be a manifestation of an extinction burst.
Maybe one day Ron will invite me onto The HiFi Five again to discuss the objectivist/subjectivist divide. And maybe I’ll actually have time for it. But I think my contribution to the conversation will be radically different than it would have been just a few weeks ago. Because, at least for now, no, I don’t think we objectivists and subjectivists can really get along. At least not at scale. We’re simply too entrenched in our camps, and the shrinking territory of hi‑fi doesn’t leave us a lot of room for middle ground. But I maintain an optimism of the will, if not the intellect, that things will get better. Again, high-fidelity sound is simply too important for me to believe otherwise.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
