Fly on the Wall—Bougy is As Bougy Does and Wears – But When?

Fly on the Wall—Bougy is As Bougy Does and Wears – But When?

“That’s a bit of a bougy getup you’re wearing!” This catchphrase, bougy, has gained currency lately to dress down a person’s perceived pretense.  At first blush its meaning is clear: the term bougy conveys a certain decadence and formality—privilege combined with trite aphorisms about opportunity, innovation, and networking (not the type that leads to terrorist cells across the world but the type that leads to fast food chains across the world).  A person can act bougy by deploying TED talks jargon, therapist couch psychobabble, or any other type of trendy expressiveness that decries one’s humbler, “I saw you fall off the stage during Friday night karaoke” background.  Implied, perhaps, in this flattening impulse leading is that in each moment we either are talking down to one another or aspiring to higher social ideals.  “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” famously intoned Oscar Wilde in the late 1800s.

Historically speaking, bougy’s linguistic and cultural origins abide on an opposite pole to the expansive, globalized, think-globally-and-act-locally concept of your typical well-connected and upwardly mobile citizen.  The bourgeois sensibility has its origins within the term bourges, a word for a large market town of artisans and shopkeepers, and deeper than that to burg, denoting medieval walls around a castle or town.  In other words, the stuffiness and pretense of living behind walls, or demanding their erection to protect one’s marketplace (of goods or ideas), coincides when hoity-toity methods and dress appear.  But, as the Industrial Revolution ascended, the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie, frugal in spirit but ostentatious in ambition, differed starkly from the glitzy-but-vacuous, bloated aristocracy.  Castle walls gave way to walls around merchant depots.

Only behind walls that protected their markets from highwaymen and hordes did the bourgeois class arise and consolidate their power into modern banking and industry—a fact described in the 18th and 19th centuries by thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith.  To be strong and free, economically, requires that markets be free to operate within a relative zone of serene sanctity.  It’s like a scene from a novel.  Think here of the dulcet tones playing from speakers inside a shopping mall that has just opened for the day.  Only a few market-goers line its halls, furtive, almost, under the owl-eyed scrutiny of hired goon rent-a-cops who, besides sensing the impending end of their night shift patrolling the parking lot, also have to shift their focus from their on-duty drug deals to picking up their children from the ex, thereby to drop them off at school.  An ideal market setting, in other words, is as regimented as a military barracks – no photos, no protests, and nothing out of the ordinary is permitted.

The recent graduation of an acquaintance from Sprott-Shaw community college, an archetype of pay-as-you-go no-nonsense education, reminded me that, in the popular imagination, the whole function of schooling is to find some way to serve our economic masters while simultaneously protecting those ruler’s dignity by collaborating in various ways with prevailing ideological notions.  And oh yeah: pay one’s own bills.  We aren’t just asked to “put a smile on”; we’re supposed to swallow the spirit of Capitalism as our forebears ate a communion wafer.  Perhaps it’s a semi-conscious awareness of this playing the part of loyal ideological toady that leads us in 2024 to at times deploy the derogatory label bougy.

Propping one’s image up in a mirror of respectability came to be associated with an emergent business class, always leeched onto and protected by minions and fandoms, but also, crucially, by an emergent intellectual class.  At Athabasca, far from the show-up -and-shut-up sensibility common amidst some of our more vocational-minded peers in other settings, we hopefully are studying not only to learn and grow but also to draw our own conclusions from the world without feeling infernally impelled to force our opinions onto others, as happens in a litany of online settings.

Humour helps. In making light of a situation, think of how the phrase bougy shines light on the Sisyphean futility of really putting oneself across as more respectable than one’s essence.

Here Bob Dylan, poet savant and songwriter of Baby Boomer generational rebellion and intrigue, gives his take on bougy tendencies amidst the ruling class:

“In 1838, Mexico and France went at it when King Louis-Philippe discovered that an expatriate pastry chef named Remontel had not received reparations when his Mexican cafe was ransacked by looters.” (213)

Karl Marx in his time concurred:

“In the course of 1843 Marx came to agree with French socialists about the ‘bourgeois’ character of modern representative government.  Its nature was summed up by the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Phillippe.” (103)

While our distance education takes us nowhere but the confines of our home-scape and landscape, we can find affinity with thinkers who lived outside the walls—literal in terms of private property, figurative in terms of intellectual rights—of an ascendant business class society.  Bruno Bauer was one philosopher who fits the bill of philosophic self-awareness:

“Bauer took up farming in the Berlin suburb of Rixdorf, mainly to support the orphaned daughters of his brother.  Despite the miserable existence in “a wasteland, a scenic stupidity” he remained intellectually engaged (102).  His conclusions about the culture he saw around him are not so far afield from those filed by the likes of Naomi Klein’s assault on consumer culture logo fetishes and superficial designer aesthetics.  In Bauer’s time, the issue was a two-month display of a Holy Relic: the Holy Robe of Trier.  Like an activist aghast at a stampede of shoppers lining up in unison for the release of a new iPhone or the hawking of a limited number of Taylor Swift tickets, Bauer saw the Robe as inescapably a sign of the an emerging modern culture of sallow superstition mixed with intellectual superficiality.  From this spectacle, Bauer concluded that, where it mattered most, society was “a mass that stirs only dully and that can scarcely be raised from its indifference”.

To overcome this entrancement with symbols of authority, in 2024 bougy terms, this means neckties or dress shoes, Bauer prescribed a questioning of any unified truth conveyed by authorities.  “There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion.  Take from religion its privileged position and it will no longer exist.” To this end, speaking academically, awareness of the heterogeneous nature of truth, not least of which interdisciplinary methodological methods of knowledge production that vary depending on which ‘ology you adhere to, might be the ultimate form of atheism as it relates to cultural hegemony.  But we have to be careful: the world is full of people convinced that they have questioned authority, been sanctified with certain truth and method, and now feel tasked with spreading their new gospel, political or personal or both.  To this tendency, be it backed by a degree from a university or merely by a weekend binge-watching speeches and pundits, Dylan provides a final rejoinder:

“You’re high principled, chivalrous and Mr.  Respectable, Mr.  Don Juan, but you don’t have to pretend with me.  You’re the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud-the stool pigeon, the scandalonger-the prowler and the rat…You’re the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you’ve got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate.  Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you’re a party to it all.” (207)

Delineating aristocrats and bourgeoisie gives a sense of how, in Marxian theory, one ruling class replaces another as history unfolds; the fact that the bougy person today appears to be a denizen of the upper crust reveals the invariable fact that, some day, those who run society will experience a fall from grace.  Maybe.  Anyway, as students, we seek to find meaning where raw assumptions hitherto prevailed.  And so next time you resort to an urban dictionary epithet remember that you also possess an opportunity to promote a little historical awareness.

In other words, conflict in an ocean of theories or a marketplace of ideas can say more about our egos than about our better impulses.  Education can be a seething stew of concepts, each treated like an item to be hawked on a fairground or at a Christmas craft sale.  Yet, lifelong learning suggests that we treat the task of our studies as an end in itself.  One that, while changing our lives and those around us, thereby changes the very methods by which we express ourselves.  To pick and flick the bougy out of our countenance we must first admit its presence!

References
Bauer, B.  (1809-1882).  AZQuotes.  Retrieved from https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-there-is-no-longer-any-religion-when-there-is-no-longer-any-privileged-religion-take-bruno-bauer-80-33-70.jpg
Dylan, B.  (2022).  ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’.  Simon and Schuster. 
Marx, K.  & Engels, F., Gareth Stedman-Jones (Edited by).  (2014).  The Communist Manifesto.  Penguin Classica.
Thuglife, T..  (2005).  Urban Dictionary.  Retrieved from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bougie..
Wilde, O.  In Tearle, O.  (Loughborough University).  Interesting Literature.  Retrieved from https://interestingliterature.com/2021/07/we-are-all-gutter-but-some-looking-stars-wilde-meaning-analysis/