C. Wright Mills as Designer

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The American Sociologist ISSN 0003-1232Volume 45Number 4 Am Soc (2015) 45:335-360DOI 10.1007/s12108-014-9196-y

C. Wright Mills as Designer: PersonalPractice and Two Public Talks

A. Javier Treviño

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C. Wright Mills as Designer: Personal Practice and TwoPublic Talks

A. Javier Treviño

Published online: 14 February 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract C. Wright Mills repeatedly assumed two main roles throughout his life: thoseof designer and craftsman. Indeed, design and craftsmanship influenced, substantivelyand stylistically, most everything he did. Mills’s implementation of these two qualitiesextended to a number of areas including writing books and building houses, but also tomotorcycle mechanics, photography, and carpentry. After consideration of Mills’sbiography and philosophy in the context of design, style, and craftsmanship, two talksthat he delivered in Aspen and Toronto, in 1958 and 1959 respectively, are examined.In both cases he addressed his remarks, specifically, to engineers, city planners, artists,and architects. Mills’s handwritten notes and various excerpts as well as publishedsources are consulted to show that Mills—through his biographical exemplification asdesigner and craftsman, as well as through his writings on power and the culturalapparatus—has had a decisive influence on the sociological study of design anddesigners; indeed, on designers themselves and on our understanding of design culture.But more than that, I contend that just as sociology and sociologists have whollyembraced Mills’s notion of the sociological imagination, so too must they fully espouseand embody his ideals and practices on design and craftsmanship. It is in this way thatthe discipline and its practitioners can strive for the standard of excellence that Mills setfor himself and for his work.

Keywords C.WrightMills . Sociologyofdesign.Craftsmanship.Theculturalapparatus .

Power

Introduction

Sociologists have long had an interest in the intellectual problems posed by art, style,and esthetic form in the context of modern social structures and cultural institutions(Tanner 2003). Consider Georg Simmel’s (1965, 1968, 1972, 2005) essays on fashion,

Am Soc (2014) 45:335–360DOI 10.1007/s12108-014-9196-y

You cannot “possess” art merely by buying it.… To possess it you must earn it by participating to some extentin what it takes to design it and to create it—C. Wright Mills (1958).

A. J. Treviño (*)Wheaton College, 26 E Main St., Norton, MA 02766, USAe-mail: [email protected]

Author's personal copy

esthetics, and visual art; Max Weber’s (1958, 1978a [1909], 1978b [1917], 1978c[1920]) examination of the rationalization of music, architecture, and urban develop-ment; Karl Mannheim’s (1982) commentaries on the various cultural meanings andtypes of artistic volition concerning art works and artistic style. What is more, there hasemerged a virtual cottage industry of sociological works aimed particularly at investi-gating art, style, and esthetics in everyday life. These include, among others, TheodorW. Adorno’s (1976, 1991a, b, 2002) critiques of mass culture and the culture industry,literature, esthetics, and music; Pitirim A. Sorokin’s study of change in major systemsof art (1957); Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) various analyseson the perception, production, and consumption of photography, artistic styles, andliterary genres; Jean Baudrillard and Nouvel (2002; Baudrillard 2003, 2005) critique ofcontemporary art and architecture; Howard S. Becker’s (1981, 2008; Becker et al.2006) use of photography as a research tool and his analysis of the cooperative activityinvolved in the production and distribution of various art forms including writing andpublishing, the jazz repertoire, the performing arts, editing, etc. In addition there is nowa small but growing body of literature in sociology and cultural studies concerningdesign practice and the spatial design of cities, the creative industries and promotionalculture (see for example, Sennett 1990; Castells 2002; Gutman 2009; Jones 2011;Aronczyk and Powers 2010; Molotch 2003; Arvidsson 2006). Curiously, this raises thequestion as to why, in all of these studies, there is a peculiar absence of the penetratingideas concerning design, the craftsman model, and the cultural apparatus proposed byC. Wright Mills over half a century ago.

This article draws liberally from Mills’s personal notes, literary collections, andclippings archived in the Charles Wright Mills Papers at University of Texas at Austin.These materials, along with his published writings, both popular and obscure, areengaged as data sources in order to focus on several interrelated considerations. Thefirst takes a biographical look at Mills’s personal commitment to the virtues of designand craftsmanship in all aspects of his working life. The second examines his ideas onthe creative and artistic professions as articulated in two talks that he delivered in Aspenand Toronto. The final sections consider Mills’s influence on artists and designers, thenand now. The ultimate point to be made, and the one that I hope will inspire allsociologists, both academic and applied, is that they execute Mills’s ideals and practiceson design and craftsmanship to advance their discipline and enhance their own life work.

The Wright Measure

In The Sociological Imagination (1959) Mills makes a declaration that has become afamiliar refrain to several generations of sociologists: Sociology must take into accountthe relation between biography and history and their intersection within particularsocial structures. To properly understand Mills’s ideas about the decorative arts andthe creative professions, it is necessary that we heed his directive and locate those ideasin his own biography, which is the purpose of this section. But how does one get themeasure of a man, get to understand the content of his character, and of his thought, inthe elusive dynamic of biographical development?

Mills saw biographical development as involving the different roles a person takesup and casts off in the various passages of life. For him, a person’s biography consists

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of the transformations in character that result from abandoning old roles and taking onnew ones (Gerth and Mills 1953). I contend that there are two main roles, and theirsensibilities, that Mills repeatedly assumed, in his work and as avocation, that informedhis Weltanschauung throughout his life: those of designer and craftsman. But he didmore than identify with these roles; he earnestly implemented their principles in hiswork (both academic and non-academic) and studied them and endeavored to cultivatethem in himself and others. Indeed, design and craftsmanship served as heuristicdevices, archetypes, in Mills’s life.

Throughout his adult life, Mills referred to himself, and was typically called by hismother’s British family name of “Wright.” Today the noun “wright”—with its etymo-logical origins in the Old English word wryhta meaning worker or maker—refers to aperson who creates, builds, or repairs something. The word is now most commonlyused in combination with the thing being constructed; such as a playwright, a ship-wright, a millwright. Wright Mills lived up to his name; he was a tireless worker whowrote fast and furiously, for as much as 6 hours a day. But more than an incessantproducer, he saw himself as a master builder and a skilled craftsman. Indeed, he oftenreferred to “making an architecture” out of a book, of building lectures, and ofpracticing the craft of sociology.

There have been several attempts to capture Mills’s essence, alternatively depictinghim as an “American utopian” (Horowitz 1983), a “radical nomad” (Hayden 2006), anda “disillusioned radical” (Geary 2009). But it is perhaps to Mills himself that we shouldturn to get a glimpse into what motivated him and gave him drive—what he got “keyedup” about. In a stream of consciousness mode, Mills describes some of his inspirations:

You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in thecountry, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in themorning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you wantor not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been plowed deep and thenew chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford itIrish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes atevening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touchedand all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches tohear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talkabout and yes by god the world of music which we just now discover and there’sstill hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s whatthe hell to get keyed up about. (Mills and Mills 2000: 174)

Here we find a sensualist, a lover of life; experiencing it to the fullest. Also, amongother things, it is a portrait of a worker, a thinker, and a tinker.

Architecture and Mechanics in the Early Years

Those who have delved into Mills’s early education note that he attended DallasTechnical High School where he took four courses in Mechanical Drafting and fourin Architectural Drawing by the time he graduated in 1934 (Kerr 2009). Indeed, whilestill in high school, Mills’s mother wrote to Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M)College inquiring what work was necessary for him to complete in order to enter the

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college. She states that her son “is very interested in architecture and plans to makearchitecture his life work” (Kerr 2009:29).

Whatever the degree of Mills’s affinity with architecture, in his application foradmission to Texas A&M he cited the less artistically creative subjects of Psychology,Chemistry, and History as being of greatest interest to him while in high school. Inaddition, he listed Arts and Sciences as the course of study he planned to undertake atA&Mwith the intent to enter training in Medicine after graduation. Indeed, Mills beganhis application essay by explicitly underscoring his experience with a now-past interestin architecture: “You will also note that much time, prior to this year, has been spent inarchitectural training—not only in theory but in practical work. I will not go into myreasons for not choosing Arch. as a life work. I do not, however, consider these yearswasted. I am sure I learned much that will be useful to me later” (Kerr 2009: 30).

To better appreciate Mills’s early practical training in and philosophical commitmentto craftsmanship and design a couple of facts in his college application are perhapsworthy of note. The first is that, among the occupations he identifies as having hadexperience in, he lists architectural draftsman, carpenter, and bicycle repair. As we shallsee, these technical skills served Mills well in various ways and at several points in hisadult life. The other salient fact is that, in the college application, he listed as one of hisreferences, James Cheek, the Dallas architect best known for co-designing the first self-contained shopping center in the United States, Highland Park Village, which opened in1931, around the time that Mills claimed to have had a close acquaintance with him.

No doubt Mills’s interest in architecture waxed and waned in his early years. But aquarter-century after taking all those high school courses in architectural drawing heopenly ruminated, “I still think I ought to have been an architect” (Mills and Mills2000: 268).

A Most Skilled and Artistic Family

Mills recognized that his keen sense of design and craftsmanship had been inheritedfrom his parents. Concerning artistic design Mills writes: “From my mother I havegotten a sense of color and air. She showed me the tang and feel of a room properlyappointed, and the drama about flowers. She gave me feel” (Mills and Mills 2000: 41).In regard to living craftsmanship he recognizes that from his father, who was aninsurance agent,

I absorbed the gospel and character of work, determination with both eyes alwaysahead. That is part of the America he knows, and it is part of him too. There was atime when I thought he did not possess a feeling of craftsmanship. But I waswrong. It is merely that his line of effort is one I did not understand. Lookingback, I see he always did a good job, that he never quit until it was finished.(Mills and Mills 2000: 41)

For Mills, craftsmanship, both mental and manual, had a moral, indeed a religious,quality to it. It was premised on the Protestant work ethic, or the willful feeling that theindividual can command the future to serve his or her ends. Mills always maintained afierce devotion to his father’s “gospel and character of work”—the idea of working hardfor work’s own sake. Historically, his industriousness had its heritage in the character

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structure of his English Puritan ancestors who sought to “master the world” through allthe traits that Mills personally admired: hard work, self-discipline, and control overexternal circumstances. He writes approvingly about the classic Puritan’s character type:

The heroic Puritan of seventeenth-century England could methodically pursue hisquest for salvation by disciplining himself for hard work and thriftiness, and thus byhis success assure his religious worth and his salvation in the hereafter. He could, inshort, relieve his anxieties by hard work, by work for work’s sake, and, under theappropriate premiums, take great pains to develop a new “contract morality” inbusiness relationships. Thus perfectionism and moral rigor, punctiliousness, andpleasure-denying work, along with humility and the craving for his neighbor’s loveall combined to shape the character structure of the classical Puritan who sought tomaster the world rather than adjust to it. (Gerth and Mills 1953: 188)

In connection with this discussion of Mills’s ancestral influences on design andcraftsmanship it is important to point out that these abilities and sensibilities extendedto some of his other family members; most notably his second wife, Ruth; as well as histhird wife, Yaroslava.

Ruth Harper Mills was very much a skilled craftswoman and electrician. When sheand Mills purchased an old farmhouse, which was in extensive need of repair, Ruthpainted the house with a spray gun. And it was she who, with experience with electricalcircuitry (having worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories for several months aftergraduating college), installed all new electrical wiring on the house “with dozens ofplugs everywhere” (Mills and Mills 2000: 154).

Mills’s third wife, Yaroslava Surmach, the eldest child of Ukrainian immigrants,was a noted author, illustrator of children’s books, and artist. A graduate of CooperUnion Art School, she taught art at Manhattanville College and served as the arteditor of a children’s magazine. Yaroslava is credited with reviving the centuries-oldUkrainian art of painting in reverse on glass. She also produced numerous etchings,icons, and calligraphy. In all, Yaroslava illustrated over two-dozen books. Amongher many other designs were the stained-glass windows for the St. DemetriusUkrainian Catholic Church in Toronto, and the glass entrance doors to the NewYork Senate Building.

Of Yaroslava’s myriad artistic talents, Mills had this to say: “She is one damnedgood craftswoman in wool, oil-paint, silver, wood, paper (paper sculpture) and she hasjust made me a great mobile of a school of fish, which really is delightful” (Mills andMills 2000: 266). Around 1958 she painted a portrait of Mills: an oil composition titledThe Survivor that appears to be done in a bold, gestural style reminiscent of mid-twentieth century Expressionism. The portrait depicts Mills in strong emotional terms:severe, intense, introspective.

But Yarsolava’s most direct artistic contribution to sociology is the cover shedesigned for the dust jacket of the first printing of The Sociological Imagination: ablack-and-teal spare modern layout with an abstractly drawn running motif at thebottom created by a band of connecting figures, both child and adult forms, linearlydrawn. While other notable paperback covers have graced the various printings of TheSociological Imagination (including Roy Kuhlman’s abstract expressionist design forthe Grove Press edition and Enzo Ragazzini’s optical art design for the Pelican edition),

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Yaroslava’s presentation is the one with which several generations of sociology stu-dents are most familiar.1

Motorcycle Maintenance and Photography

Mills’s implementation of design and craftsmanship extended to a number of areasbeyond the two for which he is most well-known—writing books and buildinghouses—to motorcycle mechanics, photography, furniture making, and even breadbaking. This artisanal need for doing things with his own hands and on his own termsis described by his former student and friend, Dan Wakefield (2000), on his initial visitto Mills’s new apartment in New York City in late 1957:

He was cooking for himself, attacking that art as he had previously attacked (andmastered) motorcycles and photography, and, as with any of his newfoundenthusiasm, he looked with mock scorn on anyone who hadn’t discovered thisnew key to the universe. On my first trip, after he served me a home-cookedmeal, Mills asked me incredulously, ‘My God, man, you mean you don’t bakeyour own bread?’ Just as he would ask in the same tone, “You mean you’d live ina house you didn’t build yourself”? (Mills and Mills 2000: 11)

A prominent image of Millsian lore is that of the motorcycle riding nonconformistprofessor who commuted to Columbia University astride his BMW R-69 motorcycle.Perhaps it was merely an evolution in ability and interest from when he was as ateenager doing bicycle repair in Dallas that, years later, compelled Mills to learn how toassemble his own motorcycle in the BMW factory in Germany. Indeed, his first trip toEurope in early 1956 was on a 2-week service-training course, in Neckarsulm andMunich, on the repair and maintenance of small BMW motors, receiving a factorydiploma as a first class mechanic. In a rare instance that shows his preference formechanical operations over architectural displays, prior to leaving for Germany Millswrote that he expected to be “pretty busy at the factories because honest to God I’drather hear the roar of an R-69 being bench-tested by a man who knows his motors thansee the finest cathedral in the world” (Mills and Mills 2000: 197).

But just as Mills not only rode motorcycles, he also understood the intricacies oftheir mechanical workings, so it was with his photography. He took pictures anddeveloped the film himself. More than this, he built and designed his own photographicdarkroom, complete with a low bench on which he mounted an enlarger for producingphotographic prints and set up a wet bench with processing trays and print drying racks.He even installed shelves for storing his camera equipment.

1 Yaroslava’s and Mills’s child, Nikolas, was not quite two when his father died of a heart attack in 1962.When Nik was recently born Mills expressed that his son would turn out to be “an honest carpenter or racingmechanic.” Mills’s hope for his son was prophetic, for when Nik was about 12 years old he began tinkeringwith motors, by his early twenties becoming proficient enough to completely rebuild several car engines (Millsand Mills 2000). Trained in art and design, Nik is today a sculptor who works in several mediums—metal,concrete, ceramics, video work, and computer graphics—specializing in furniture and outdoor sculpture. Hestarted out in fashion design in New York City in the 1980s, and began designing painted jackets, all wearable;some of which are on display, like the Pink Zig-Zag Jacket and the Colored UPC Jacket, in the PermanentCollection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His Map Jacket has been exhibited in the Museé de Arte et duCostume in Paris.

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It seemed to Mills that the better part of wisdom “is to exploit the strong points ofany medium,” including photography. As such he noted the advantages of the cameraas a way of seeing and of showing the world “as it is”:

The camera, properly handled, can do four things superbly well, in fact, betterthan painting, or sculpture, or any other medium:

1. A wealth of intricate detail can be shown. More detail than the naked eye.[Edward] Weston of the f/64 group of seven [believed that] focus[ing] foratmospheric depth by blur[ring] is phony.2 [The] eye sees that, yet it can scanand focus for detail in an instant. Print can provide the eyes that possibilityand extend [them] in that connection. This isn’t to say that it isn’t goodphotography to intentionally blur sometimes; certainly it should be done… .

2. The camera also extends the eye, better than other media, into the micro-scopic world of the bigger-than-life-size close-up.

3. [The black-and-white photograph shows] planes and volumes and supplewaves in3 or 4 distinct shades and tones [similar to the] poster-like designs of E.McKnightKauffer ([e.g.,] “The Power of London”).3 But waxes and wanes on gradation.

4. [The camera allows for] simultaneous … seeing [through] double-exposurephotography. These are not tricks.

Now these 4 things are conducive of possibilities of the camera. As such they are atthe disposal of the lensman as means to some expressive ends. But does the cameraset such ends? No. In fact, the old adage that “great ideas make great pictures” ishalf nonsense. The print is its own justification and to see it is in itself a conser-vatory activity.4

2 Group f/64 consisted of seven California photographers that included Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and ImogenCunningham. Formed in 1932, Group f/64 (named in reference to the f/64 settingwhich is the smallest aperture on thelens of a large-format camera) shared a photographic style characterized by sharp-focus andmaximum depth-of-field.Their photographswere usually of landscapes of theAmericanWest and close-up images of natural forms. Group f/64constituted a revolt against the soft-focus, artistic style of photography that was popular at the time. The members ofGroup f/64 believed that the camera should be used as a pure and simple documentation of reality and inveighedagainst manipulation of the photograph and imposition of the artist’s personal interpretation onto it.3 American-born E. McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was one of Britain’s most influential poster artists andgraphic designers during the 1920s and 1930s. He is best known for the over 140 posters that he designed forthe London Underground and the London Transport. The posters show abstract influences, including futurism,cubism, and vorticism. “The Tower of London” was one of a series of three posters that Kauffer created for theLondon Transport in 1934.4 These passages, which are expediently and judiciously edited here, are found in a notebook that Mills titledArt & the Lens: The Photographic Vision; The Camera Eye (archived in the Charles Wright Mills Papers,1934–1965, box 4B350, notes and clippings, 1958−1960, “Art and Artists, 1955−1958,” Briscoe Center forAmerican History, University of Texas at Austin). Other jottings found in the notebook indicate items thatMills proposed to “get.” These include 50 issues of the photographic journals Camera Notes (1897−1902) andCamera Work (1903−1917); the British poet, Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s poem, Ode (1874) in which he coinedthe phrase “movers and shakers” and which phrase Mills uses to refer to the poem; the third volume in theautobiography of arts aficionado, Mable Dodge Luhan’s, titled Movers and Shakers (1936); Ida M. Tarbell’sarticle “AGreat Photographer,” on the portrait photographer George C. Cox (McClure’s Magazine, Vol. 9, May1897); articles on “The New Photography” (Century Illustrated Magazine, Vol. 64, Oct. 1902); Charles HenryCaffin’s Photography as a Fine Art (1901); Jerome Mellquist’s The Emergence of an American Art (1942);Meyer Schapiro’s “Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly Vol. 1, Jan.−Mar., 1937); Marion Downer’sDiscovering Design (1947).

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Mills would often take several rolls of film during his summer vacations, which hesubsequently developed in his darkroom. But he would sometimes travel from hisoffice at Columbia and go downtown to shoot pictures of life in New York City. On oneof these jaunts to Lower Manhattan, Mills took an extraordinary photograph; one whichhe subsequently used in the dust jacket to his White Collar: The American MiddleClasses (1951).

The book is a social psychological study of the new middle classes and their white-collar world: their place within the social structural context of mid-twentieth centuryAmerica. Here Mills strives to uncover how the economy’s rationalization and bureau-cratization affects the psychological character, the social biographies, and the socialroles of the white-collar employees of the new salaried middle class. Some years beforeit was published and with the manuscript still very much in progress, Mills describedthe book on white collar workers as being a “book for the people”:

It is all about the new little man in the big world of the 20th century. It is aboutthat little man and how he lives and what he suffers and what his chances aregoing to be; and it is also about the world he lives in, has to live [in], doesn’t wantto live in. It is, as I said, going to be everybody’s book. For, in truth, who is not alittle man? (Mills and Mills 2000:101)

The “new little man,” the product of impersonal white-collar worlds, declares Mills,“seems to have no firm roots, no sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it a center … .Perhaps because he does not know where he is going, he is in a frantic hurry; perhapsbecause he does not know what frightens him, he is paralyzed with fear” (Mills 1951: xvi).

This bleak and pitiful portrait of the postwar American middle classes that Millspaints in White Collar is aptly depicted on that book’s black-and-white dust jacket. Inthis photo, taken by Mills himself, we see toward the bottom, a solitary white-collarman—representative of the new middle class—in his long overcoat and fedora, dwarfedby the big city landscape as he scurries past the National City Bank on Wall Street.

The photograph, in the style of a sort of social realism, is composed so that it makesthe lone white-collar worker, the new little man, look dramatically estranged fromcommunity and society—and we might add, in the sense of Marx, alienated from hiswork. Although he seems to be striding hurriedly, with a sense of purpose, his figure isjust a small cog in a vast business machinery. He appears to be bearing the weight of thecompany, the organization, and the bureaucracy (illustrated by the granite base andmassive Ionic columns that form the building’s facade) for which he works. Theimposing edifice creates a sense of oppression over the human figure. This image isarguably one of the most iconic in all of sociology.

Building Houses

Whatever his skills in various areas, it is fairly well known that Mills designed, built, orremodeled houses. In fact, there were three of these: a cabin in the Canadian woods; afarmhouse in Pomona, New York; and another house in West Nyack, New York.

In the summer of 1948 he and Ruth purchased two small islands on Lake Temagami,Ontario, with the intention of building a summer home there. The following summer,relying mostly on their own efforts, they erected a cabin on one of the islands. They

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began by laying the foundation on the island’s rock backbone and then set up the entireplatform. Spending his mornings onWhite Collar, in the afternoonsMills labored on thehouse. An imposing physical specimen, he lifted telephone-sized poles for the founda-tion, chopping them while still wet and soaked from the lake. Next he set up the sillstructure and put in the subflooring. Later, with the assistance of a couple of graduatestudents they raised the roof, and the Millses finished most of the construction within afew weeks (Mills and Mills 2000: 119; 139–42). “All I need to build a house,” wroteMills shortly after completing his Temagami cabin, “is four-sided wood and sheets ofglass, electrical wiring and sheet tin, and plumber’s pipe, for I can make windows anddoors and everything according to my own design” (Mills and Mills 2000:148).

In early 1951 the Millses bought an old farmhouse in Pomona, New York. The housewas in great need of repair and Mills estimated that it required several thousand dollarsin refrigeration, plumbing, and a new ceiling. Working on the house, mostly onweekends, he renovated the kitchen; he put in steel cement windows, installed a stainlesssteel sink, erected the walls, and in between them tacked up rock wool sheets forinsulation. Within a few months Mills had added a new wing to the house that servedas a workshop and a photographic darkroom. Additionally, he set up a study that hesoundproofed by covering three of the walls and the ceiling with 12-in. square acousticaltiles. For the vinyl flooring throughout the house the Milleses decided on slate grey, acolor, Mills noted, that “unifies the house and is neutral so that it doesn’t bias for anyother color schemes” (Mills and Mills 2000: 160).

He and Ruth designed another house in 1956 while they were living in Copenhagenand he was working on The Sociological Imagination.5 At that time they made an 18-in. model of a house to exact scale, complete with furniture. “That’s really the only wayto design stuff,” explained Mills (Mills and Mills 2000: 216).

Though that house was never built, a few years later, in the spring of 1959, Mills andhis new wife, Yaroslava, newly designed and constructed a home in West Nyack, abouttwenty-five miles from New York City. For this project they enlisted the help of CharlieLinguanti, Mills’s former neighbor who was a construction contractor, and William“Chappy” Diederich, the architect who carried out the Millses basic house design.6 Inaccord with Yaroslava’s design, the house had, on one side, a huge amount of windowglass surface which provided a spectacular view of Lake DeForest reservoir.

“Social science,”writes Mills (1959: 195) “is the practice of a craft.” A craft refers tothe manual or mental processes through which workers freely employ their capacitiesand skills in creating the products of their enjoyment and enjoying the products of theircreation. Mills uses the term “intellectual craftsmanship” in referring to a reflectivestyle of work as well as “to the joyful experience of mastering the resistance of thematerials with which one works” (Gerth and Mills 1953: 397).7 The skill and artistry

5 When Ruth was in high school she, like Mills, also wanted to be an architect. An uncle was an architect andshe spoke to him about her interest in pursuing that career. This uncle told Ruth that architecture was not agood career for a woman, and this discouraged her from pursuing it further. But she remained interested inarchitecture as an adult and long after she and Mills divorced.6 Diederich, who was a descendant of the painter William Hunt Morris and the son of the sculptor HuntDiederich, worked as an architect and artist throughout a long career with a diverse clientele ranging from theNew York Housing Authority to The New Yorker magazine.7 It is important to recognize that in the designing arts the “intellectual” and “manual” types of craftsmanshipfrequently coincide. As intellectuals, designers and artists, are involved in the manipulation of symbols (e.g.,emblems, language, music) and of material things (e.g., landscapes, appliances, canvases).

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with which Mills formulated his sociological ideas, and that gave clarity and lucidity tothe writing through which he conveyed those ideas, may have perhaps found its finestphysical expression in his carpentry, house building, and furniture making.

Making Furniture

Much as he prized his photography equipment, Mills also took great care and interest inpurchasing and using machine tools. At the time when he was thinking of renovatingthe Pomona farmhouse, Mills wrote with enthusiasm and appreciation about the multi-purpose woodworking machine he had recently acquired:

Tools are going to get scarce as hell, good power tools, so right now I’m putting$500 or so into them. Will store them in Hamilton Hall [Columbia University],making out they are books in crates. What I got yesterday was a wonderful thingcalled a Shopsmith. It is a lathe, a disk sander, a table saw (8” circular blade), asharper and center [Eds. “a tool for centering wood before it is drilled”], a verticaland a horizontal drill press. Also a jigsaw. There are attachments which clamponto two parallel bars. The whole thing is about 5 ft long and 2 ft wide and about5 ft high when rigged. It is beautiful. With it I have what amounts to a miniatureplaning mill. Works on 110 V. (Mills and Mills 2000: 147–48)

Mills writes about the cabinet he was building, as a space divider, and describes it asbeing 48 in. long by 16 in. wide by 52 in. high. He was making it out of Philippinemahogany (Luan plywood), with aluminum-angle legs and plastic sides. It was aroundthis time that Charles Eames, the prominent American designer of modern furniture,began producing his Eames Storage Units. The ESU’s were lightweight modularstorage cabinets constructed of plastic-coated plywood, lacquered masonite, withchrome-plated steel angles. Most interesting is that Mills copied the Eames designfrom a photograph, and was keen to point out that while the original was priced at$108, his reproduction of the cabinet cost him only $40 to make.

Among other items that Mills built for his farmhouse in Pomona was a 30-ft wallof bookshelves as well as two 12-ft storage walls for clothing, with little cubicles forvarious items. In his soundproofed study he made a built-in flat file with 30cubbyholes. At one end of it he installed a built-in 8-ft slab of plywood to serve ashis desk; at other end he constructed shelving for all his camera equipment and books.Like the ideas he formulated and the books he wrote, these furnishings, fashioned byhis own hands, gave Mills great pride and enjoyment—and he produced them withstyle.

Literary Stylist and Sociological Poet

Mills was also an able literary stylist—writing clearly and eschewing the passive-voiced, jargon-filled sentences prevalent in the social sciences. To the beginningstudent of sociology Mills says, “I know you will agree that you should present yourwork in as clear and simple language as your subject and your thought about it permit”(1959: 217). He cautions against pretentiousness and unintelligibility, and also encour-ages the writer’s introspectiveness and the sociologist’s Verstehen:

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To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose. Itis much less important to study grammar and Anglo-Saxon roots than to clarifyyour own answers to these three questions: (1) How difficult and complex afterall is my subject? (2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself? (3) Forwhom am I trying to write? (Mills 1959: 219)

Much like the meticulous measurements he took in designing and building furniture,Mills gives the same detailed attention, rather like an ancient master builder, toconstructing meaning through clear writing:

Assume that your intended meaning is circumscribed by a six-foot circle, inwhich you are standing; assume that the meaning understood by your reader isanother such circle, in which he is standing. The circles, let us hope, do overlap.The extent of that overlap is the extent of your communication. In the reader’scircle the part that does not overlap— that is one area of uncontrolled meaning:he has made it up. In your circle the part that does not overlap—that is anothertoken of your failure: you have not got it across. The skill of writing is to getthe reader’s circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours, to write in such away that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning. (Mills1959: 220).

But while Mills exudes confidence in giving advice to the beginning student, hestruggled, as do all writers, with his own composition. This was especially true withWhite Collar, a book that took him many years to write, and “write it right.” In a letterto Hans Gerth, as he was making yet another attempt at organizing it, feelingoverwhelmed about ordering the chaotic bits and pieces of notes he had accumulatedover many years, Mills admits exasperatingly, “This designing of a book, making anarchitecture out of it, is a tricky business” (Mills and Mills 2000: 114).

Several years before finally completing it, Mills explains to his parents his progresson White Collar:

So I am trying to make it damn good all over. Simple and clean cut in style, butwith a lot of implications and subtleties woven into it. It is my little work of art: itwill have to stand for the operations I will never do, not being a surgeon, and forthe houses I never built, not being an architect. So, you see, it has to be a thing ofcraftsmanship and art as well as science. That is why it takes so long. There is nohurry. It will stand a long time, when it is finally done. (Mills and Mills 2000:101)

Much like in carpentry, sculpture, or music composition, that use the mediums ofwood, stone, and sound to impose form upon matter, Mills believed there is also anesthetic element in writing, with its medium of language. According to his favoritebook on writing, Graves’s and Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943),English is generally viewed as an illogical, chaotic language, unsuited for clearthinking; and yet no other language “admits of such poetic exquisiteness, and oftenthe apparent chaos is only the untidiness of a workshop in which a great deal ofrepair and other work is in progress: the benches are crowded, the corners piled with

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lumber, but the old workman can lay his hand on whatever spare parts or accesso-ries he needs or at least on the right tools and materials for improving them”(Graves and Hodge 1943:10). Such is the craft, and difficulty, of writing Englishprose in all its lyrical resplendence.

Indeed, a new and difficult literary style that Mills endeavored to master is what hecalled “sociological poetry”: a style of experience and expression that reports the factsof empirical social science and also, through radical political analysis, reveals thehuman meanings of these facts. A sociological poem, therefore, contains “full humanmeaning in statements of apparent fact” (Mills and Mills 2000: 112; see also Geary2009: 28). This is a type of intellectual craftsmanship, a reflective style of work thatguides cultural workers professionally, in what they produce, as well as personally, inwhat they observe and experience in their everyday lives.

The Aspen and Toronto Talks

Having considered Mills’s biography and philosophy in the context of design, style,and the craftsman ideal, it is now time to turn to two talks that he delivered in Aspenand Toronto, in 1958 and 1959 respectively. In both cases he addresses his remarks,specifically, to engineers, city planners, artists, and architects. The operant question forus is whether these two presentations, singly or jointly, can be said to constitute asociological theory of the esthetic arts.8

8 Though Mills had conducted a study on kitsch, perhaps as early as 1945, in which he looked at people’sconsumption of radio serials, movie magazines, and comic books, he was particularly interested in all thingsesthetic from 1953 to 1958. A careful examination of Mills’s various notes and clippings from this time periodreveals an impressive array of sundry items on art, architecture, literature, music, poetry, and design that hemeticulously collected. The collection includes essays on literature and religion and on the article as art byNorman Podhoretz (Commentary 1953, Harper’s 1958); on the musical comedy by the American composerand conductor Leonard Bernstein (The Atlantic 1954); on the architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes(Business Week 1958); on “disturbing” architecture by the architecture critic and writer, Ada Louise Huxtable(The New York Times Magazine 1958); on the artist in a scientific age by Pearl S. Buck and on the artisticimpulse by Wallace Stenger (The Saturday Review 1958); on art and Marxism by the British philosopherRichard Wollheim (Encounter 1955), on “Who Should Pay the Bill for the Arts?” by theatre critic HowardTaubman and on “Impressionistic View of an Art Opening” by critic Gilbert Millstein (The New York TimesMagazine 1958), on culture in America by Frank Lloyd Wright (The Progressive 1959); newspaper articleswith titles like “Ford Fund to Aid Creative Arts,” “7 Paintings Sold for $2,186,800,” “Art: Aiding the Artists,”and “True Artists Scorn Nothing” by Albert Camus (The New York Times 1958); “Mall Spurs DowntownSales” and “Packaging with the Stress on Design” (Business Week 1958); “Art and the Community” and “Artand Labour” (The New Reasoner 1958); “The Artist in Europe—and in America” (The New York TimesMagazine 1955); “Manhattan: Art’s Avid New Capital” (Time 1954); reviews of pianist Van Cliburn in theU.S.S.R. and the Moiseyev dancers in the U.S. (The Reporter 1958), French poet St.-John Perse’s bookSeamarks (The New York Times Book Review 1958); books (that were reviewed or referenced in newspapersand magazines which Mills intended to obtain, writing “get” or “get book” beside the titles) including Stage toScreen by A. Nicholas Vardac (1949), The Museum and the Artist (1958) by the Joint Artists-MuseumsCommittee, Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957), and Susanne K. Langer’s Problems of Art (1957);reprints of several journal articles by the philosopher Eliseo Vivas including, “Four Notes on I.A. Richards’Aesthetic Theory,” “The Esthetic Judgment,” “ADefinition of the Esthetic Experience,” “The Use of Art,” and“A Note on the Emotion in Mr. Dewey’s Theory of Art” (see Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, box4B336, research file, “Theory of kitsch, 1945”; box 4B339, research file, “Art and Architecture, 1948–1958”;box 4B350, notes and clippings, 1958–1960, “Art and Artists, 1955–1958”; box 4B357, “Eliseo Vivas onvalue and art,” 1938–1939).

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Designers—A Confused But Good Willing Lot

Mills’s first and most explicit sociological commentary on design and designers isfound in a paper he read at the Eighth International Design Conference held inAspen, Colorado during the summer of 1958. The conference theme was “Designand Human Problems” and Mills began his talk, “The Man in the Middle,” auspi-ciously enough.

He states that the American designer, as a cultural worker involved in artistic andintellectual endeavors, is a central figure in the cultural apparatus. By the “culturalapparatus” Mills means all those organizations and milieus—schools and theaters,newspapers and census bureau, studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines, radionetworks—in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work is being done. In the U.S.the cultural apparatus is, however, very much of a commercial enterprise that is part ofthe capitalist economy, and it is at this point that his presentation strikes a dissidentchord.9

Mills explains that since the end of World War II the designer had become caught inthe middle of two great trends. One was the shift in economic emphasis from produc-tion to distribution; the other was the subordination of culture to the capitalist economy.Designers, as cultural workers, occupy a contradictory place at the intersection of thesetrends. And because they are now involved in the commercialization of the culture theyproduce, they are experiencing guilt, insecurity, and frustration in their work. Thus,whatever the designer’s esthetic pretensions and engineering abilities, he is no differentfrom the publicist, the advertiser, the market researcher—his ultimate task, like theirs, isto sell.

Instead of servicing a variety of publics with the arts and skills and crafts, thedesigner, under intense pressure to sell, is now involved primarily in creatingneedless wants in a vast consuming public. Capitalism demands consumptionand consumption must be speeded up with all the techniques and frauds ofmarketing. What is more, existing products must quickly become outdated andoutmoded and so the designer is also involved in their planned obsolescence.“By brand and trademark, by slogan and package, by color and form, he givesthe commodity a fictitious individuality” (Mills 2008a: 178). The designer, then,becomes a marketeer, the “ultimate advertising man,” in promoting the next bigthing.

The silly designing and redesigning of products, remarks Mills with acrimony,satisfy the silly needs of salesmanship. What we are left with is a debasement ofimagination, taste, and sensibility—indeed, of culture itself.

9 Mills’s talk was published later that year in the monthly review Industrial Design and included an editorialcomment stating:

Generally when a speaker addresses members of a profession not his own, he tells them what theywant to hear. He can do it obviously, by telling them how good they are; or subtly, by telling them howbad they are, then making it all right at the end by exhorting them to be better. In either case, since hetells them only what they tell each other, he contributes only the illusion of a fresh perspective. Anexception is this paper read to the Design Conference in Aspen this summer by sociologist and author(The Power Elite) C. Wright Mills. Neither lullaby nor mock attack, it is a hard analysis of the designerin our society.

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The designer becomes part of the means of mass distribution over which he tends tolose his autonomy and creativity. All too often he becomes a commercial hack, asecond-rate mass producer of the commercially established banal and formulaic slo-gans, pulp fiction, blueprints, and jingles. Even those few designers who are commer-cial stars, whose products are in great demand and for a great deal of money, surrendercontrol to the fluctuations of the market and to the demands of production anddistribution. In this situation of the mass marketing of culture, both the stars and thehacks experience the same problem: they lose their sense of craftsmanship.10

From craftsmanship, as ideal and as practice, it is possible to derive all that thedesigner ought to represent as an individual and all that he ought to stand forsocially and politically and economically. As ideal, craftsmanship stands for thecreative nature of work, and for the central place of such work in humandevelopment as a whole. As practice, craftsmanship stands for the classic roleof the independent artisan who does his work in close interplay with the public,which in turn participates in it. (Mills 2008a: 181)

Mills, however, ends his talk on an optimistic note. The highest human ideal, heasserts, is to become a good craftsman. And designers can once again become goodcraftsmen by taking the value of craftsmanship—as a style of work and a way of life—as the central value for which they stand. They ought to do their work in accordancewith this value; and Mills enjoins them to use the joyful experience of the meaningful,independent, and self-fulfilling nature of work “in their social and economic andpolitical visions of what society ought to become” (Mills 2008a: 183).

In a letter Mills wrote to Richard Hofstadter soon after the conference, he states:

I was in Aspen, Colorado, for the International Design Conference a week or soago and had a fine time with designers, architects, city planners, artists and otherdisgruntled types. I still think I ought to have been an architect. But since it’s toolate I am going to theorize for them! God they are a confused but good willing lot.They now confront all the problems the political intellectual grappled with in thethirties; amazing really. (Mills and Mills 2000: 268)

Several points are worthy of note in Mills’s remarks. The first is that this wasperhaps the first time that he was in the company of so many practitioners of thedesigning arts—particularly city planners and landscape designers. Indeed, Mills gavehis paper in the conference’s last session, which dealt with “Individual andCommunity-Social Problems,” along with four other presenters on the same panel.All were actively engaged city planners. The first speaker, the structural engineer,Edgardo Contini, had recently overseen the master plan for the seven thousand acrePalos Verdes Peninsula in southwestern Los Angeles county and a study for the urban

10 It should be pointed out that Mills was himself not above doing hackwork when his financial situationrequired it. This was particularly the case with the anthology Images of Man: The Classic Tradition inSociological Thinking (1960b) that he edited and for which he wrote an introduction. He conceded that hedidn’t like editing readers, but was compelled to do it as he had to pay a few debts remaining on his house inRockland County. Just prior to sending the manuscript to the publisher Mills admitted that he was not ashamedof the book, adding, “But it’s just a job” (Mills and Mills 2000: 272; 281).

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renewal of downtown Forth Worth, Texas. Another presenter was the British architect,Gordon Stephenson, who after World War II had served as Chief Planning Officer inBritain. At the time of the Aspen conference, Stephenson was a consultant to the Cityof Toronto Planning Board. The city planner and public transportations expert, BorisPushkarev, presented after Mills delivered his talk. Last to speak was the landscapearchitect and garden designer, Christopher Tunnard who at the time had written severalinfluential books including Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1950) and AmericanSkyline: The Growth and Form of our Cities and Towns (1955).11 Doubtless, Mills wasclearly inspired by the conference speakers and participants; so much so, in fact, that, aswe shall see presently, he continued to address a similar audience at another conferencethe following year.

The second point to note is that Mills saw city planners and designers as strugglingwith the same problems as had the leftist intellectuals in the 1930s. Indeed, the politicalproblems of the pre-war intellectuals and the economic problems of the post-wardesigners both stemmed from controlling and co-opting structures, those of capitalismand Stalinism, respectively. As we have seen, Mills explains the designers’ loss ofautonomy and craftsmanship as due to their subservience to the vast merchandizingmechanism of corporate capitalism. Similarly, the leftward U.S. intellectuals in the1930s had their Marxist principles “nationalized” by the Soviet Union; that is to say,Marxism became savagely reduced to the statist dogma of Stalinism. The result wasthat, by mid-century, the American left had either declined or collapsed as it hadbecome too dependent on the Soviet Union as the one center of communism (Mills2008b). But while Mills had given up on the Old Left of the 1930s, the same, as wehave seen, was not the case with the designers of the late 1950s. He believed they hadthe potential to advance their imaginative standards in bringing about the “properlydeveloping society,” or the democratic order where troubles, issues, and problems areopenly debated by an alert, critical, and active public.

There is no doubt that the paper Mills read in Aspen, “The Man in the Middle,”presents an unflinching examination of the designer in U.S. society. But can we findin it a social theory—that is to say, a systematic explanation, interpretation, orcritique—of designers as a social type, of design as a profession? Before addressingthis question head-on, let us examine the final point of import in Mills’s letter toHofstadter: that after the Aspen conference he was wanting to “theorize” for de-signers, city planners, artists, and architects. To understand Mills’s initial steps attheorizing in this direction, we need to turn to an address that he delivered in Torontoduring the winter of 1959 at a conference sponsored by Canada’s CouchichingInstitute on Public Affairs.12

11 In his magisterial volume, The City of Man (1953), Tunnard refers to sociologists directly and criticizes theirtruncated cooperation with city designers. Despite their many important research studies analyzing therelationship of various urban populations and the social structure, sociologists, Tunnard contends, had beenunable to establish an urban design that is responsive to the genuine needs and concerns of the people who liveand work in cities. It was therefore left for the city planner to go at it alone. Tunnard’s answer to this uneasyassociation is a simple and balanced one: For urban designers and sociologists to be on equal footing, eachperforming specialized functions, but making joint recommendations for “creative urbanism” and pooling andfusing those recommendations. In the final analysis, however, Tunnard maintained that it is society (or arepresentative segment) or the client that is the originator and controller of the planning program, and thereforeultimately responsible for all decisions made.12 The talk that Mills gave was from a paper titled, “The Big City: Private Troubles and Public Issues.”

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The Megalopitan Way to Death

Mills’s comments in Toronto, and in Aspen, can best be appreciated in the context ofwhat he considered to be a drift toward mass society. Postwar America saw theemergence of mass society, a highly bureaucratized and impersonal social structurewhose culture is characterized by a uniformity and mediocrity—of goods, ideas, tastes,values, and life styles—that paves the way for the commercial and political manipula-tion of the mass of people. The “other-directed” social character that came to prevail inmass society, and that David Riesman identified in The Lonely Crowd (1950), hadcaused white middle-class, urban-suburban Americans to become over-conforming,emotionally numb, and politically indifferent.

Ranch wagons and ranch-style houses comprised the esthetic vapidity of the greatpackaged “instant” communities of the new suburbs that had sprung outside Americancities since the war. City planner and social theorist Lewis Mumford (1960) scornedthese suburban developments, the Levittowns, and their tracts of “little boxes,” deri-sively describing them as,

a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniformdistances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people ofthe same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the sametelevision performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from thesame freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a commonmold, manufactured in the same central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of thesuburban escape in our own time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environmentfrom which escape is impossible. (Mumford 1960: 486)

And the cities, Mills points out at the Toronto conference, are just as impersonal andinsipid as the suburbs—a condition that he would later describe as “necropolitanemptiness” and its process as the “megalopitan way to death” (Mills 1961). Cities arenot real communities, he argues; rather they are largely unplanned monstrosities inwhich people are trapped in mindless, repetitive routines and in their own narroweveryday milieus of home, workplace, and neighborhood. “[The] cities and suburbs arefilled with built-in inconvenience, with nagging frustrations of the everyday life; butbeing habituated to these, many people often take them to be part of some naturalorder” (Mills 2008c: 189). More than that, people do not possess the sociologicalimagination that allows them to transcend their limited personal milieu and gain a viewof the larger structural forces that affect their lives. And the main forces that are shapingthe big city are precisely structural forces. To confront these forces and to solve theproblems that they produce, requires everyone—designers, city planners, architects,artists, and citizens—to deal directly with the political, economic, and esthetic issues ofthe metropolis.

The main forces that have a determining influence on the city, according to Mills, arethe real estate, land development, and advertizing interests that have been involved inthe expropriation and profitable misuses of the urban environment. These greedycommercial powers, concerned only with capital gain and material accumulation, havebeen allowed to create ugly wastelands because of the civic incompetence and apathyto which the people of a mass society have fallen. Mills tells citizens that they have a

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political responsibility to organize and agitate against those economic agents that fail toconsider properly the human landscape in which they must live.

Additionally, Mills regards the city as the major locale of visual art and livingbeauty; it is the esthetic setting in which people live. As such, it is there that theyconfront the problem of the politics of esthetics. “And to solve this problem,” saysMills, “there must come about a truly wide and deep discussion of the esthetics of theurban area—which is to say, a discussion of the quality and meaning of human lifeitself in our time” (Mills 2008c: 190).

Mills then addresses, in particular, the city planners, designers, and architects. Hecharges them with lacking a view of the larger structural issues and of subordinatingtheir talents and skills to the service of the rich and powerful. Architects, Mills argues,are largely involved in beautifying and polishing up the isolated milieus of the wealthyand of corporations. They must become autonomous professionals that demand a voicein decisions of structural consequence. Designers, artists, and city planners must quitcontributing to the chaos of the commercial frenzy, the banalization of sensibility, andthe deliberate planning of obsolescence. All who are interested in the city as a place forhuman living, says Mills, need to develop reasonable ideas for re-shaping the big cityinto some kind of reasonably human environment.

A Millsian Sociology of the Applied Arts?

Do Mills’s comments at the Aspen and Toronto conferences constitute an attempt at“theorizing” for designers and other “members of those rather inchoate professions thatare directly concerned with the city” (Mills 2008c:190)? Can we find in Mills anexplicit or implicit, coherent or undeveloped sociology of art, of architecture; an urbansociology or a sociology of design? Based on his Aspen and Toronto statements, anyanswer must necessarily be a qualified one.13

On the one hand—and notwithstanding his biographical experiences and social-psychological inclinations for the gospel and character of work and for craftsmanship,for architecture and motorcycle maintenance; despite his many talents in furnituremaking, house design, and in the literary style he called sociological poetry—Millsdid not, strictly speaking, produce a distinctive, identifiable “theory of the estheticarts.” The most that can be said is that he applied his theory of the problem ofpower—the question of who does and does not make the decisions about the

13 A few years before, in 1954, Mills had supervised two empirical studies conducted by Columbia Universitystudent, Dov Rappaport. One was on the American elite and the plastic arts. This project involved addressingthree questions: (1) Who among the very wealthy and powerful collect or support art? (2) What art do theycollect and what are the reasons for this activity? (3) What happens to the collections and why are theydisposed of in those ways? The project demonstrates all the hallmarks of the best of Mills’s intellectual design:the focus on the elite, theoretical references to Veblen and Weber, the use of cross-classification as anorganizing scheme. The other study, which was more social-psychological in orientation, examined the roleconflict experienced by studio artists working for the motion picture industry in Hollywood, who were alsoprofessional fine artists. While most of the artists interviewed saw their commercial employment as anunfortunate diversion of energy from their main interest, fine art, few of them were willing to forego theirincome and job security in movie production to pursue fine art activity full-time. This second study reflectssimilar tensions and frustrations that Mills believes are experienced by designers, architects, and city planners(see Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, box 4B350, “Art and Artists, 1955–1958”).

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structural conditions under which most people live (Mills 1958a)—to an analysis ofthe members of the “inchoate professions,” much as he had previously done withlabor leaders, the power elite, and other cultural workers. In this sense, Mills wassimply moving on to the next “public” that he wanted to consider within the structureof power in American society.

On the other hand, and true to the final intention he expressed in his letter toHofstadter, Mills did indeed “theorize” for designers, architects, and city planners.He did this, first, by making them aware of their powerlessness within the political,economic, and esthetic context of mass society. He revealed to them how they hadbecome helplessness, morally irresponsible, and overly conforming as they worked formoneyed interests and within powerful bureaucracies. Second, he interpreted theirdisgruntlement as stemming from their ambiguous and insecure identity as culturalworkers; an identity that itself stemmed from the chaotic and inchoate character of theirprofession. Finally, he critiqued them severely for abnegating their independence,decision-making, and creativity to the “maniacs of production and distribution,” thereal estate developers and the financiers.

In the end, Mills did exhort designers, architects, and city planners—as professionalsand as citizens—“to formulate standards; to set forth as a conference ten or twelvepropositions on which we are willing to stand up. Let us begin this, here and now”(Mills 2008c:191).

Design(ers) After Mills

To date, there does not yet exist a fully developed sociology of design, or in the case ofthe sociology of professions, a systematic analysis of designers and other practitionersof the applied arts. 14 However that may be, it is clear that Mills—through his

14 Those few writings available do not constitute mature statements in the area. The professional placement ofwhat Arminen (2002) identifies as “design-oriented sociology,” that he believes should consider the role ofcommunicative technologies in society and their deepening penetration into the details of everyday life, is, byhis own admission, still “ambiguous.” Walden C. Rhines (2006), Chairman and Chief Executive Officer ofMentor Graphics Corp., offers what he calls a “sociology” of electronic design automation (EDA) companies.Rhines’s analysis of the structure and workings of the EDA industry in a free market environment isreminiscent of the industrial and economic sociologies of a bygone era. He perhaps more closely approachesa sociology of designers proper when he considers, in interactional terms, the design problems that arise as aresult of the specialized tools, the particular thinking, and the conflicting interests and demands betweenvarious workers in the EDA industry: between software designers and hardware designers; between designersand purchasing managers; between system architects and chip designers; between analog designers and digitaldesigners; between internal designers and manufacturers. Finally, one example of an empirical study in design-oriented sociology with practical implications was conducted by Alex Taylor and Richard Harper (2003),researchers at the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey (UK). They employ an analyticalorientation based on gift-giving to explain how mobile phones provide a medium though which teenagers,through the reciprocal pattern of giving and taking, sustain and invigorate their social networks. Taylor andHarper found that teens use text messages and voice calls, call-credit borrowing and mobile phone sharing asforms of gifting and counter-gifting, as tangible demonstrations of trust and loyalty to one another. In viewingphone-mediated social interactions between young people as forms of gift-giving, Taylor and Harper propose anumber of design suggestions having to do with the functions and features that treat texting as a form of giftexchange. The upshot for Taylor and Harper is that through a critical analysis of the relationship betweentechnology and the social world “it is possible to articulate a number of design principles relevant to thespecific contexts of use” (Taylor and Harper 2003: 293).

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biographical exemplification as designer and craftsman, as well as through his writingson power and the cultural apparatus—has had a somewhat limited and often indirect,but nonetheless decisive, influence on the sociological study of design and designers;indeed, on designers themselves and on our understanding of design culture. I now turnbriefly to a general consideration of these issues.

The Designing Process and the Designing Profession

Nearly three and a half decades after his talk in Aspen, Jill Grant and Frank Fox revisitMills’s message in their 1992 article, “Understanding the Role of the Designer inSociety.” They begin by referring to the guilt, insecurity, and frustration that Millsbelieved designers were experiencing as a consequence of being torn between theirdesire for esthetic excellence, on the one hand, and the pressures of commercialism, onthe other. But for today’s designers, say Grant and Fox, it is imperative that theytranscend these artistic and market references and instead become more socially andculturally referential.

Following Mills, Grant and Fox assert that in creating mass produced goods andimages, designers transact and shape cultural meanings in everyday life—but theyalways do so within social and cultural contexts. Only by truly understanding thesecontexts (or as Mills had put it: only by acquiring the sociological imagination) candesigners fully comprehend the impact their work has on consumers’ needs, values,interpersonal relationships, and identities. Thus, designers must not only develop anawareness of the cultural realities their designs produce, they also have an ethicalresponsibility to critically evaluate those designs in terms of the community context inwhich they work. In other words, designers become “culturally referential” only whenthey understand the effects and meanings their designs of products, packaging, andadvertising have on consumers.

In marketing their products designers frequently employ narcissistic images anddisempowering stereotypes that support the status quo and obfuscate social inequities.Designed products, therefore, have the potential to contribute to consumer alienation,dependence, and powerlessness. But designers who are socially responsible can con-tribute to cultural transformation that empowers consumers and that leads to what Grantand Fox ambiguously call “the good society”—but what we may identify with Mills asthe “properly developing society,” where the public democratically participates in thedesign process. In this way, social design can connect to consumers’ basic needs andhuman rights.

While Grant’s and Fox’s commentary is an extension, elaboration, and endorsementof Mills’s Aspen ideas concerning the design process, Melissa Aronczyk (2010)updates and revises those ideas in reference to the design profession, noting that theindustry in particular and economic culture in general have undergone dramaticchanges since the 1950s.

To begin with, the gap between “commercial” and “culture”—indeed, the verytension that Mills saw as emanating from the contradictions and inconsistenciesbetween capitalism and creativity—is now harder to discern, and, presumably, for thedesigner, to experience. Aronczyk maintains that current notions like “creative indus-try,” “experience economy,” and “national brand” are no longer regarded as oxymo-rons; rather, they are symbolic manifestations of today’s “imbrication of culture and the

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economy in everyday life.” Furthermore, she notes that the social sciences are startingto treat the work of design, as well as the related industries of advertising, marketing,and branding, not as antagonistic to culture, but as a constitutive part of culture. Thus, itis no longer realistic to point to these industries as the “debasement” of creativity;instead, the design professions have become “sources of knowledge, technique andexpertise within political and societal spheres” (2010:41). Designers are no longer the“men in the middle,” alienated and frustrated, caught between the worlds of creativityand commercialism; as consultants of the cultural apparatus they are now involved atevery stage of their work: from conception to production, from strategic planning tomarketing. Today’s designers are likely to see themselves, not as cultural workers, butas cultural entrepreneurs. Finally, Aronczyk contends that Mills’s admonition in Aspen,for designers to return to the principles of craftsmanship (intellectual and manual), nowappears more quaint than pertinent, more romantic than relevant. “Mills’s understand-ing of craft,” she concludes, “is more akin to a distant, albeit nostalgic ideal: one ofworking for the satisfaction of a job well done, without regard for the accumulation ofsocial or reputational capital” (Aronczyk 2010:44).

What would Mills make of this transformation of designers: from producers toprofiteers, from artisans to status seekers? Mills always treated cultural workers—artists, writers, architects, designers—as intellectuals, carriers of art and ideas.15 Hebelieved that intellectuals should be engaged in reflective and critical thinking, to beinvested in bringing about fundamental cultural transformation in the prevailing order.And while American intellectuals have never been “free,” in the sense of Mannheim,designers cum entrepreneurs become co-opted by the very corporate organizations theyare to critique. Rather than being independent social actors, designers as intellectualsare now put in a situation where they live off and not for ideas, thus making thempolitically powerless. It is only when designers actively shape the ideas and images that

15 In 2004, to mark its 100th issue, the British magazine Prospect, compiled a list of Britain’s top 100 publicintellectuals. While the list included architect Richard Rogers; architecture critic, Charles Jencks; conceptualartist, Michael Craig-Martin; and video artist, Brian Eno; notably missing were names from the areas of art,film, and design. This led writer on design and visual culture, Rick Poyner (2004) to post a blog on the websiteDesign Observer inquiring, “Where are the Design Intellectuals?” The question evoked comments from sometwo-dozen people, a few of whom submitted their favorites for inclusion in any list of public intellectuals. Thesuggestions included contemporary writers Steven Johnson, Donald Norman, Karrie Jacobs, Edward Tufte;cultural critic, Thomas Frank; cultural theorist Stuart Hall; as well as deceased writers Jane Jacobs andWilliamH. Whyte. One blogger remembered Mills’s contribution to the specialized field of design:

let’s not forget the parade of public intellectuals who have seen fit to speak at the International DesignConference in Aspen over the past 50 years, including Dwight MacDonald and C. Wright Mills.(Incidentally, Mills, the author of books such as The Power Elite andWhite Collar, spoke at Aspen inits early years about the designer as the “man in the middle”).

But it is perhaps Poynor’s own observation, that designers need to reach beyond themselves, that comesclosest to providing an adequate answer to the absence of designers as public intellectuals:

The [Prospect] list is best taken, perhaps, as a useful reminder of the gap that continues to existbetween designers’ glowing self-image as vital shapers of the contemporary visual landscape and thereality of their position, or rather their lack of position, in the social and political debates that influencematters of public policy. The overriding challenge for designers and those committed to design’spossibilities is to establish connection outside design (emphasis in original).

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define the human condition, that they can become true catalysts of a radical democracyand social justice.

Legacy

How, we may ask at this point, has Mills’s legacy influenced designers personally? Forthe American architect Sandy Hirshen, Mills’s belief that cultural workers held the keyto a just society provided the impetus and commitment to improving the quality of lifefor his disadvantaged clients—African Americans, migrant farm workers, NativeAmericans, the rural poor, the young, and the elderly—through a socially responsiblearchitecture.16 In a 1981 interview Hirshen was asked to identify who in particularadvanced his understanding of architecture. Reminiscing about his student days atColumbia University where he received his B.A. degree in 1957, Hirschen stated:

My undergraduate training in the liberal arts was very broad and helpful. I hadsome contact then with the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, who was trainedin architecture. He was a rebel I indentified with on many levels—politics,sociology, architecture, personal style. I mean, can you imagine coming to anivy league campus in 1952 on a BMW motorcycle, wearing Levi’s, moccasins,and sweatshirt? It was hero worship. Mills and other teachers exposed me to theworld of ideas—to the question of class struggle, to the historical evolution of ourphilosophical positions, to Marxism, and to the concept of social justice. (Hirshenand Dovey 1981: 28)

Concerned with practicing an architecture informed by social justice that meansproviding the highest possible level of satisfying architecture for the disadvantaged,Hirshen has devoted his career to what he calls the “democratization of design.” Hemaintains that because people have very little education about their environment, theydon’t have the ability to express clearly their needs and make viable choices. Hirshen’sgoal, then, is to educate his clients as to their design options. According to him,anything short of working with the client directly means that the designer ends upputting words into their mouths and any intended participatory process becomes ahoax. The democratization of design requires that the user and designer, the client andarchitect, work together to create “environments that work,” or as Mills had put it,environments that are responsive to the real needs and concerns of the people whoparticipate in them.

Byway of concluding this examination ofMills’s influence on the sociology of designand designers, I will mention just two brief examples of his continuing legacy. The firstillustration combinesMills’s trenchant analysis of the powerlessness and alienation of thewhite-collar work-world, not as a result of the introduction of office machinery againstwhich Mills inveighed (the typewriter, the adding machine, the mechanical collatorduring his time), but with the design of a now dominant form of office furniture: thecubicle. Much inspired byWhite Collar, filmmaker Zaheed Mawani explores the reality

16 In addition to being a practicing architect, Hirshen has served as Director of the School of Architecture atthe University of British Columbia and as the Chair of the Department of Architecture and Director of theCenter for Planning Development and Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

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of the office cubicle in his documentary “ThreeWalls” (Arieff 2011). The film is a socialcommentary that focuses on the absurdity of white-collar work centered around this typeof “systems furniture,” with reconfigurable components, invented by designer RobertPropst in the late 1960s. Though Propst’s original intent for the cubicle was to “giveknowledge workers a more flexible, fluid environment than the rat-maze boxes ofoffices,” his concept was abandoned as corporations embraced open-plan offices as acost-saving tactic. Much like Mills before him, who had pointed to the meaninglessnessof the working lives of the white-collar occupants of specified offices and specializedtasks, Propst regretted that the “cubiclizing” of workers in modern corporations wasnothing short of “monolithic insanity” (Lohr 1997: 2).

The second example concerns the theme of the annual conference of the Society ofArchitectural Historians Australia and New Zealand held in Newcastle, Australia in2010. The conference theme— “Imagining”— was inspired by Mills’s notion thathistorical events and people’s everyday experiences are intricately connected throughthe sociological imagination. The call for papers stated that the conference was intendedto explore the role of imagination in architecture and architectural history, posing as oneof the main questions for conference participants to consider, “How would we describean ‘architectural imagination’ in the context of C. Wright Mills?” The conferenceresulted in papers with titles such as “Urban Imagination: Design Observations in thePerformance of City and Home,” “The Architecture of the Imagination,” “Towards aTheory of Imagining Places: Collective Imagination and the Process of InscribingSites.” An architectural imagination in the context of Mills’s sociological imaginationdemands that in order to make public events intelligible and architecture sociallyrelevant, designers must consider social structures and historical contexts.

Conclusion

Let us return to the question raised in the Introduction: Why have Mills’s ideasconcerning design and designers been overlooked by sociologists and others workingin these and similar areas? The fact is that while scholars frequently appeal to Mills’snotion of the sociological imagination and make passing reference to his insights on thepower elite and the American middle classes, they quietly disregard his statements fromthe Aspen and Toronto conferences. Several reasons immediately suggest themselvesas to why this may be the case.

To begin with, the two papers in question were both written as essays intendedspecifically for artists, city planners, designers, and architects, not for social scientists.While addressing this target audience gives the essays a more intimate and frank tone,they are decidedly less academic in style. In fact, they are virtually devoid of referencesand citations.17 Mills’s advocacy of sociological poetry notwithstanding, social sciencehas generally not accepted the essay, as a type of manifesto or literary argument, as alegitimate scholarly source.18 Related, it may be that Mills didn’t much care whether his

17 “The Man in the Middle” contains one quote from and its accompanying reference to G.H. Mead.18 It is noteworthy that Mills’s two mass-market paperbacks, or “pamphlets” as he referred to them—TheCauses of World War Three (1958b) and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960a)—which were writtenfor a general educated audience outside of academe, are seldom cited in the sociological literature.

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comments to engineers and designers became salient to the discipline of sociology, orperhaps he rejected the idea that the sociology of design would be a productive subfieldof the discipline. Given how successful he was in “selling” his own vision of thesociological imagination and of intellectual craftsmanship to his peers in the academy,it is plausible that he discounted the sociology import of his lectures on design.

Additionally, the papers’ relative obscurity has made their availability somewhatdifficult for scholars. The “Man in the Middle” was published in a trade journalintended primarily for industrial designers; it, and the “The Big City” have appearedonly twice in volumes of Mills’s collected writings, published 25 years apart (Horowitz1963; Summers 2008).19

What is more, most of what Mills has to say in these essays was already being said atthe time (and has been said many times since), and perhaps regarded as somewhatredundant and not worthy of reference. For example, Riesman (1950) had previouslydescribed the advertiser’s exploitation of the consumption patterns of other-directedAmericans. And the year before Mills delivered his Aspen talk, journalist and socialcritic Vance Packard had published the best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), inwhich he critically examined the advertising industry’s use of various techniques,devised by teams of professional persuaders (public relations experts, merchandisers,publicists, fundraisers, industrial personnel experts) and motivational researchers (psy-chologists and sociologists), intended to manipulate people’s consumption habits.

As a final reckoning, we may say that Mills’s comments at Aspen and Toronto,where he aimed to provide a systematic treatment of the structural position of culturalworkers in the designing professions, situated within the power arrangements of U.S.society, have been of limited influence in sociology, cultural studies, and the designingspecialties. However that may be, there are several reasons why designers and sociol-ogists interested in design should pay attention to Mills. First, Mills remains a modelfor those who wish to become public intellectuals and shape politics and socialconsciousness. And while they will to some degree always be incorporated into thecultural industry through bureaucratization or patronage, artists, designers, and intel-lectuals, can, like Sandy Hirshen, nonetheless endeavor to bring about a greaterdemocratization in the creative process. Additionally, designers can cultivate a greaterawareness (as did, for example, Zaheed Mawani), of how their creations and designscan contribute to the powerlessness and alienation of workers and consumers.

Lastly, and most importantly, Mills’s professional statements and personal practices,as craftsman and designer, are a mirror held up to all sociologists to emulate his life andwork. While our discipline has been greatly enriched by the particular cast of mind thatMills identified as the “sociological imagination,” we would also be well served bycarrying out his ideals and means of artistic design and craftsmanship. Concerning

19 To my knowledge, no scholars have referenced “The Big City,” and aside from the articles by Grant andFox (1992) and Aronczyk (2010) discussed above, the only other (very brief) mention of “The Man in theMiddle” is made by design philosopher Tomás Maldonado. Maldonado (1972) attributes the designer’salienation and frustration, as analyzed by Mills, but more existentially, to the lack of hope. The “designerwithout hope,” says Maldonado, is involved in planning, but without believing that the world, thoughimperfect, is perfectible. He sees this designer without hope in “bourgeois society” as a Sisyphean figurewithout vision, condemned to futile and restless toil. We may say, following Mills (1951), that similar to thefears and anxieties afflicting middle-class employees, it is only by uniting work and life (not creativity withcommercialism), that designers can overcome their alienation. In other words, in order to approach work as“purposive human activity,” designers must embrace the gospel of work, the virtue of craftsmanship.

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artistic design, Nisbet (1976) has pointed out that the creative imagination of sociology,like the creative process in the arts, can be nourished through certain artistic forms—portraitures (e.g., of white-collar workers and designers) and landscapes (e.g., of themass society and the big city)—bywhich social reality is communicated. In approachingsociology as an art form, by employing various styles and media (e.g., writing andphotography), sociologists as cultural workers are able to reveal the power inequities,the debased culture, and the crackpot realism that continues to characterize much ofsocial life today. Concerning craftsmanship, we learn from Mills, as he did from hisintellectual mentor Thorstein Veblen (1898), that we possess an “instinct of workman-ship,” an artisanal predisposition toward useful, and meaningful, effort. Craftsmanshipas the process by which, as Richard Sennett (2008) puts it, “making is thinking,” canserve as our guiding intuition. Only by earnestly employing artistic design and thecraftsman model can we be helped in our personal and professional endeavors, andempowered with the determination, commitment, and excellence that typify the life andwork of one of the most celebrated sociologists of the twentieth century.

Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2012 symposium, “C. Wright Mills:The Legacy of His Writings Fifty Years On,” held at the University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway and at the2013 meetings of the European Sociological Association in Turin, Italy. I thank John Grady, Kathryn Mills,Lawrence T. Nichols, Robert Owens, Pedro Quintela, Helmut Staubmann, and two anonymous reviewers fortheir comments which greatly improved this paper.

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C. Wright Mills as Designer