This is a paper that I wrote over a 3 week period for my sociological analysis and critical thinking class. The formatting may of may not work here on WordPress, however this is the largest single writing project I’ve ever undertaken, so I think that it is worth publishing.

A few things that I need to say first. There is a section on homosexuality in the creator part of the paper which I am very uncomfortable with. The subject matter was necessary for the purpose of the paper in class, however no matter what I did, I couldn’t help feeling like a bigot while writing it. Please withhold judgement on that topic. The multimedia portion of this paper seems to have not transferred over, however I feel that it is a mute point. If you’d really like to see the multimedia versions I can email you the original word file. Besides that, and grammar aside, I’m pretty proud of this paper.

Enjoy.

Blood, Sex and Suicide

A Sociological Analysis of Fight Club

By Ben Lester

            Culture, as it turns out, is fairly hard to nail down. It is one of those concepts that is so universal that few people ever wonder what it really means. Johnny 1^st grader doesn’t get a culture lesson that explains the different viewpoints on culture. At a certain point however, it is useful to give a concrete meaning to such a common concept. That point seems to be where we acknowledge that when a concept as broad as culture is ambiguously defined, it will end up taking the blame for problems that people don’t want to work out. Israel and Palestine don’t get along? It’s a culture thing. Conflict over immigration? It’s a culture thing. Teenagers are out of control? It’s a culture thing. This defeatist use of the word is a means to an end. Namely, the end of the argument and the cessation of a solution. Perhaps with a better understanding of culture, we might be better armed to help mediate problems within our society.

So what is culture then? The first thing to flesh out is that people don’t agree on what culture is. There are two main academic schools of thought on culture. Wendy Griswold, in Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, notes the two competing academic viewpoints. The humanities, Griswold says, define culture as the most admirable qualities of civilization.[1] This viewpoint sets apart the status quo from the exceptional. In other words, humanities majors would be more likely to look for culture in a museum or an opera house than in the day to day interactions of any randomly selected citizen. Griswold argues that in the social sciences, and particularly sociology, culture is viewed as, “the expressive side of human life—in other words, to behavior, objects, and ideas that appear to express, or to stand for, something else.”[2] With the idea of bringing that statement down to earth, I think of  culture as the collection of significances that we use to order the world. Without culture, humans—lacking many of the inborn survival instincts of other animals—would theoretically descend in to chaos.[3]

            In this class, I have been tasked with analyzing a cultural object. Now, with somewhat of an idea of what culture is and why it is important, I’ll try to explain the significance of a cultural object. Griswold defines a cultural object as, “a socially meaningful expression that is audible, or tangible or that can be articulated.”[4] Here, the most important suggestion is the use of the words, “socially meaningful.” Cultural objects have no inherent meaning, they receive their meaning from the groups of people who interact with them. Even the use of the phrase ‘cultural object’ indicates that the object is given meaning by the culture to which it belongs as opposed to the word ‘object’ which might tempt us to think that it has its own inborn qualities. In other words, a wooden spoon does not define itself. American culture might associate meanings like baking with an object such as a wooden spoon. Whereas in a third world country, it might represent an eating utensil or even have associations with wealth.

So why are cultural objects worth analyzing? In the same sense that understanding culture helps us tackle problems that would otherwise seem unsolvable, understanding cultural objects  allow us to collect information on observable phenomena and use it to make claims about the larger culture which those objects are a part of. This is necessary because of the breadth of culture as defined above. Culture blankets nearly every aspect of humanity, which means that studying culture as a whole would be impractical to say the least. Imagine submitting a proposal for a research project on ‘everything.’ It is unlikely that researcher would be successful there. Rather than trying to understand culture from the top-down, this sociological analysis class is advocating that we should build an understanding of culture from the bottom-up. In other words, “what does this cultural object tell us about culture and in turn, society?” My student peers in this class have selected a wide variety of cultural objects: vinyl records, Barbie, Coca Cola, the fountain pen, the fetus, Andy Worhol, sex toys and many others.  Perhaps from twenty plus analyses of such cultural objects, we can build a greater understanding of our culture.

For my analysis, I have chosen Fight Club. Fight Club is a book that was written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996, which was then adapted in to a movie in 1999 by David Fincher and Jim Uhls. The story revolves around an unnamed narrator and his interaction with violence, emasculation, spirituality, anarchy, parental relations, control, sex, suicide, cancer, materialism, mayhem, mental illness, economics, poverty, power, death, explosives and soap. I first experienced Fight Club in movie format when I was 15. Having not been heavily exposed to subversive media, my rebellious teenage mind combined with my wild, political science obsessed social group was primed for the unflinching acceptance of the anarchical and violent qualities in the film. At that time I perceived myself as having little control over my life which made the concept of control through physical domination (fighting) an appealing idea. The concept of power through overt conflict and destruction was so appealing that for many years I did not question the philosophy embedded in the film at all. “In Tyler I trust,” became a regular statement in my repertoire, referencing a line from the movie regarding the antagonist. This past infatuation with the movie—that I no longer hold nearly so close—presents a challenge in analyzing this cultural object. The very fact that I chose this topic for an exhaustive research paper shows my bias. It is possible that I still hold some non-objective reverence for my object. This could potentially cloud my ability to evaluate the meanings that other people have for Fight Club. I have already found that my reactions to people’s interpretations of Fight Club are less than ideal for objective analysis. The most common interpretation that I hear is that Fight Club is some sort of testosterone porn. This, honestly, may be a valid interpretation. However, I cringe when I hear interpretations in that vein. My knee-jerk reaction to such interpretations is, “you’re missing the point.” The bottom line, though, is that I am not writing a paper about my interpretation of Fight Club; rather I am writing about American society’s interpretation of Fight Club. So with that in mind, with the help of my classmate peers, I will try to provide an objective analysis of Fight Club as a cultural object.

In order to analyze my cultural object I will be doing a case study. A case study is a form of scientific inquiry wherein a researcher gathers data on a specific instance. This information, properly presented, allows a researcher to use a single event to extrapolate information about larger phenomena. Researchers may also use statistical polling, experiments, or direct observation in order to conduct their studies. Each method has its own set of problems and benefits, and the case study is no exception. One major problem that I will have to be wary of while using case studies is that individual instances may point toward exceptions rather than rules. My cultural object is a case study of Fight Club as an enterprise, from the book publication, to the cultural fallout from the movie. Fight Club is a complex object given many meanings and interpretations. Specifically though, Fight Club in the context of this project is a case study of groups and perceptions. As I analyze, I hope to show the significance of Fight Club as a cultural object.

Fight Club should be interesting to people who study male culture. The underlying theme of the story, which to a certain extent excludes the narrator, is of men struggling with lack of control and power in their lives. From emasculated testicular cancer patients to meek bag-boys, these men find their own sources of power through physical release. Fight Club should also interest people who study poverty. The philosophical dogma spouted by the story’s antagonist is directly aimed at the lower and middle classes. For example he says, “I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars.”[5] Another theme in Fight Club will attract scholars who study family dynamics. Both the film and the book make references to, “a generation of men raised by their mothers,”[6] referring to weak father-son relationships and lack of understanding of the male role in culture. Other scholars might be interested in the interpretations of mental illness presented in Fight Club. The protagonist of the story has a split personality, is incredibly narcissistic and also has psychopathic qualities. While the heroin is suicidal, depressed, and wildly self-conscious, these themes have no meaning in and of themselves. However they do show some of the meanings our culture places on mental illness. Religious scholars may find interest in the story’s interpretation of god. In the film version of fight club, much of the spiritual talk is based around the antagonist’s interpretation, “our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?”[7] Whereas in the book, the main theme for god was the intentional development of hatred, better to be bad and have god take notice than to be ignoredentirely.⁶ Philosophers and sociologists will find a plethora of insightful, however shortsighted, arguments for the dominant underclass. The Story of Fight Club calls out the American dream as a farce. The antagonist says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t.[8]” The story advocates awareness of the idea that the real American dream is a story to keep people subservient. Sociologists who are interested in cults would be interested in Fight Club’s “project mayhem” group. The story portrays the actions of a cult group with little fanfare. The idea that sneaks in with this omission is that when surrounded by a large group of unflinchingly like-minded peers, it becomes hard to differentiate between the usual social norms and the taboo.

            First and foremost I will be analyzing the changes in the meanings associated with Fight Club as the object changed formats from a book to a movie. One particularly interesting thing here is that I have not found any reports of “underground fight clubs” springing up in association with the book release, whereas the movie immediately prompted many people of all ages to start their own fight clubs.[9] I intend to show that Fight Club is not a cultural statement so much as it is a cultural expression. The analysis will require breaking down the creator and his sub-culture, the mass production and the audience reception of Fight Club. The author of Fight Club served as a conduit for the society to which he belonged, not as a prophet. The ways in which the producers chose to adapt and market the movie affected the perception of the film. That perception was then reinforced by the films audience and affected the various re-releases of the film and book as well as the reactions of authorities and other groups who were critical of the it. Fight club as a cultural object has spanned fifteen years, and experienced several defining events. From the release of the book, the adaptation for film, to the start of “Fight Club” related violence which continues even now.[10] Fight Club has received widespread critical acclaim throughout its existence. The shocking themes combined with a deep and relatively long time-line lead me to believe that Fight Club is a rich cultural object.

He Wants You to Hit Him as Hard as You Can

The Sub-Cultural Creation of Fight Club

            Fight Club was created by Chuck Palahniuk. I would like to make the argument that Palahniuk was a member of social groups which shaped the creation of Fight Club. People, however individualistic, are products of the cultures in which they live. The idea behind this creator-subculture section is to identify the identities and groups that informed the creation of the object. Luckily for me (and you) Palahniuk is a person who lends himself extraordinarily well to sociological analysis.

First though, let’s concentrate on some terms that I will be using throughout this section of the project. What is an identity? I am a man, a student, an EMT, a homeowner, a football fan and the list goes on… Like culture, identity can be broadly defined. Identity, in the sociological sense, can be seen as everything that you are. However that is not a very useful definition. In Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, Griswold says that the identity is something that, “develops through interaction with others and requires confirmation from others.”[11] This gives us an idea of the sociological differentiation of identity. There is a give and take in the sociological understanding of identity that might not exist in the common conception.  Griswold puts it very eloquently, “the self tries to project a certain set of meanings onto those with whom it interacts and in return tries to interpret the meanings constructed by partners in the interaction.”[12] Beautifully put, however the description still leaves a large margin of ambiguity in my opinion. Suffice it to say that identity is a sense of self, in other words who and what you are. That, however, only tells part of the story. Identity is also who you spend time with and who you identify with. This brings us to our next subject, Subculture.

Sub-culture is an important topic, worthy of being part of the title even. What is it though? The most obvious definition of sub-culture is that it is a piece of the greater culture as defined in the introduction section. Along this line Griswold says, “a subculture exists within a larger cultural system and has contact with the external culture.”[13] Griswold is careful to state that sub-cultures have two aspects, abstract social groups and concrete sub-groups. The former referring to loose affiliations such as political leanings, and the latter referring to direct social relationships like political clubs.[14]  It seems to me that the important thing to point out about sub-culture is its relation to identity. The interactions between the people you spend time with and the people you identify with create their own sub-cultures. In other words, identity feeds sub-culture and vice versa.

With these definitions in mind, I’d like to discuss how meanings relate to identity and sub-culture. The sociological definition of meaning is deceptively simple. Meaning is significance. Earlier, I referenced the meaning behind wooden spoons in different cultures. Significance would be just as suitable a word to use in that argument. Meanings are important because they tie together identity and sub-culture. Identity is an individual collection of meanings which interact with sub-culture, and sub-culture is a group collection of meanings which interact with identity. These are important concepts to understand during sociological analysis because each of the three definitions feeds and informs the others. Understanding each of these concepts will make the analysis of Fight Club’s creator and his sub-cultures much more digestible. I will show that Palahniuk had both identities and sub-cultures which informed the meaning and creation of Fight Club.

It is important to understand just how much meaning, identity and sub-culture are in understanding the social world. In sociology we learn to abstract the self from the social world. There is no interaction that is not affected by social context. If you are familiar with the age old argument over free-will, a sociologist would say, “Free-will exists, in context.”[15] The importance here is in understanding that we can predict behavior using these tools, and conversely, if it is necessary, we can understand more complex behavior by using these tools as well. In analyzing Fight Club, understanding the identities and sub-cultures of the creator is paramount because of the diversity of themes in the story. Sociologically dissecting the identities and sub-cultures which produced the story will allow us to understand the complex interaction between the object and the culture surrounding it.

With all of that in mind, I claim that Palahniuk has five Identities that dictated the creation of Fight Club. First, he was a member of the Cacophony Society. Second, he was a member of the homosexual community. Third, he came from a divorced family. Fourth, he is member of a community of writers who specialize in transgressive fiction. Lastly, he was an escort for terminally ill patients. Between these five identities, I assert that all of the necessary ingredients for Fight Club are present.

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.

            One of the major themes in Fight Club is of social deviance. A group called Project Mayhem starts fights with strangers, blows up corporate and cultural objects and forges plane emergency instruction pamphlets just to name a few things. Palahniuk is an active member of the Cacophony Society.[16] The Cacophony Society is, “a randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.”[17] On their website, they claim that you may already be a member and not even know it! They describe themselves as, “The heart murmur that’s easy to dance to” and “the happy dog rolling on the carcass of preconception.”[18] You get the idea. Being a member of such an organization implies a meaning system dictating members perception of normalcy. Namely, the status quo is an annoyance at best, and it is outright dangerous at worst. Members of this group are willing to risk arrest or worse for the sake of their ideals. This group shares a meaning of acceptable behavior that conflict with greater society. An important idea shared between members of the Cacophony Society is that the taboo should not be avoided; rather it should be flaunted and celebrated. I assert that the meaning systems shared by members of the Cacophony Society were the base of inspiration from which the author created the concept of project mayhem.

I’m wondering if another woman is really what we need.

            One curious facet of Fight Club is the relative lack of women in the story. There are only two women named in the novel, and both are extremely vilified.[19] Another theme that is difficult to ignore in Fight Club is that of male physical contact. Also, a strong theme of Fight Club is that of people struggling to find their cultural identity. Finally, social secrecy is one of the most popular themes of Fight Club. I assert that these aspects of Fight Club were very likely influenced by Palahniuk’s sexual identity. Though far from a rule, some members of the gay community seek exclusivity in the presence of gender.[20] This group shares a meaning of safety in that respect. Another common meaning within the homosexual male sub-culture is obviously the physical contact with other men. However the strongest cultural meaning, which I feel contributed heavily to Fight Club, is that of social marginalization. The homosexual community has faced persecution in America since it was first brought in to the open.[21] Socially marginalized cultures, under certain circumstances, might feel the pressure to fight for their respective identities. There is a duality here though; fight or flight. If a group doesn’t fight for their identity then, barring assimilation, that means that they would end up taking on multiple identities which is yet another theme of Fight Club.[22] From the dichotomy of work and leisure, to the literal split in the protagonist’s personality, Fight Club is full of references to having two lives. Finally there is the concept of secrecy.[23] “The first rule of Fight Club is: you don’t talk about Fight Club.”[24] This statement bares a strong resemblance to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Palahniuk himself was reportedly “in the closet” at the time of writing Fight Club.[25] It seems plausible that this social group’s long history of social secrecy could be a major inspiration for Fight Club and its secret society. With these things in mind, it seems likely that this social group’s set of shared meanings were influential in Palahniuk’s creation of Fight Club

I am Jack’s broken home

            Another identity that Palahniuk possesses is being a child from a divorced relationship. Children from divorced families have many shared meaning systems. Common shared meanings among children of divorced parents are shame, guilt, anger, having to choose sides and the list goes on. Fight Club can be interpreted as a challenge to the American dream. If the American dream is to have a house, a happy marriage, and two and a half kids… what then does that say about people from divorced homes? Chances are that people from broken homes are more likely to view the American dream as a fallacy.[26] These views seem to be likely to have influenced the creation of Fight Club. To name another important aspect of this subculture, children in divorced families can tend toward becoming distant from the father’s side of the family when living with the mother.[27] This alienation from the father figure and the focusing of problems on the mother figure can become quite problematic for teenage boys.[28] The themes of frustration with the mother figure in Fight Club are almost certainly a manifestation of this meaning. Perhaps even the vilification of relationships and women in general could be attributed to these meanings. Another consequence of problematic paternal relationships is that men might grow up not knowing how to bond and love other men appropriately.[29] Fight Club is rife with the desire for male bonding and an acceptable way for men to congregate. Again, this cultural identity can be seen as having contributed many of the themes of Fight Club.

This isn’t a for real suicide…

            Palahniuk is considered to be a writer of transgressive fiction.[30] Transgressive fiction is a, “genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime.”[31] Authors in this genre of writing share important characteristics, not the least of which is a desire to play on the taboos of society. Authors of this genre also wish to push readers to question their own norms and values. It is very easy to make the argument that Fight Club is a case of transgressive fiction. It contains six out of nine of the characteristics listed above, and some are present in multiple cases. I assert that the collection of meanings that belong to the writers of this genre inform the creation of Fight Club as a cultural object.

You have to know—not fear—know that someday you are going to die.

            Palahniuk served as an escort for the terminally ill shuttling them to and from support group meetings.[32]  Caregivers in this situation often serve as compassionate listeners, experiencing the patient’s pain in a way that few others can understand.[33] Escorts for the terminally ill are exposed to many of the ups and downs of caring for and interacting with a terminally ill patient. One important meaning that caregivers in this setting tend to share is the increased awareness of the significance of communication. “When people think that you’re going to die, they really listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.”[34] Also, in caring for the terminally ill, caregivers will eventually adopt some form of acceptance of the death concept. While in general, people tend to have a strong taboo against talking about death, people in this subculture must learn to identify with it and soldier on. This subculture allowed for one of the main themes of Fight Club in which the protagonist attends support groups for terminally ill patients. The similarities are way too obvious here to overlook.

Did you know that if you mix gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate, you got napalm?

            So what we have here are a set of identities, subgroups and consequent meaning systems that are responsible for the creation of Fight Club. The combinations of the author’s identities manifest themselves in the object and form a seemingly original work. After reading this section you should understand that the creator merely channeled his environment while creating Fight Club. Palahniuk was a Cacophony Society member, homosexual, child from a broken home, trangressive fictionist and caretaker for the terminally ill. The interaction of these identities and the subcultures to which they belonged were directly responsible for the creation of this story. These identities interact to produce a story centered around anarchy, cultural marginalization, family relationships, taboo and death. Sounds like a pretty good summary of Fight Club to me!

From Dark Humor, to Brad Pitt’s Abs

The (not so) Hidden World of the Culture Industry.

In the previous section, I asserted that the creator merely channeled his social identities in creating Fight Club. Now with some understanding of the sociological context that went in to the creation of the object, I intend to show how something called the culture industry served as a major contributor of meaning to Fight Club. This section of the paper will focus on the two mass producers of Fight Club: W. W. Norton which published the novel, and 20^th Century Fox which produced the film. I assert that these industrial players along with the media changed the meaning of fight club from its creation through the aftermath of its release as a film.

Once again I will have to do some groundwork to build your understanding of the sociological concepts that will be used in this section. With that in mind, let us define the culture industry. Griswold says that the culture industry is, “the organizations that produce mass culture staples, such as records, popular books, and low-budget films.”[35] I relate better to Griswold’s description of the “why” rather than the “who.” She says that the culture industry, “packages creativity into predictable, marketable packages.”[36] I personally see the culture industry as a sort of puppet master; not meant to be seen, but generally understood to be running the show. More specifically, the culture industry is a group that profits from the appropriate marketing of objects. This is obviously a huge segment of society spanning an unfathomable number of genres. So in this case, specific examples are more useful in the culture industry’s description than general ones.

In trying to understand the creation of a cultural object, it is important to understand the role of the culture industry. In our culture, it is easy to overlook the culture industry due to our tendency to idolize creators. This fact may actually be an intentional manipulation acted out by the culture industry as marketing tends to work better when the audience doesn’t know they are being marketed to. The implications here are far too large for the scope of this project. However, I will try to lend weight to the subject with an example. For instance if you were to take your favorite band: you might know which member started the band, which member is the principle songwriter, even the musical background of the members and other aspects of the group. However, how many people know the agent who brought the band to the attention of a record company? How about the name of that record company, or the media players involved in hyping the group? What other bands were turned down in favor of that band? This might be known information to the most attentive music fans, however I believe that those fans would prove themselves to be in the minority if they were examined. This is significant because the culture industry’s players involved in shaping the meaning of cultural objects have the power to compartmentalize, categorize and select the intended audiences for the object just to name a few things. It is the job of the culture industry to shunt creative works in to the appropriate place; namely the place where it is most likely to be accepted. Also, notably, it is important to recognize that without this culture industry in place, many works of art would be distributed on an extremely small scale.

Mass-producers, another name for the culture industry, are important to analyze when trying to understand the social world because this group of people, maybe more than any other group, is actively adding or negating meanings associated with the objects that they are producing. Sociologists assert that creators are conduits for their social identities, and audience receptions are a reflection of their own culture. With this in mind, it is obvious that mass-producers are important players because they are a relatively small—examinable—group which has nearly limitless power to create meaning. To put it more bluntly, mass producers are in control of what objects the audience sees, what objects the audience doesn’t see, what the audience associates the objects with, and what the audience doesn’t associate the objects with. That kind of control is certainly worth examining!

In the introduction section, I referenced culture as a means to stave off chaos. The final sociological concept that I have to cover in this section is that of symbols. In the interest of staving off chaos we use symbols to make sense of the world. Griswold says of symbols, “Culture provides meaning and order through the use of symbols, whereby certain things designated as cultural objects are endowed with significance over and above their material utility.”[37] In other words, we order our world using symbols, and their meanings can be many and even ambiguous.[38] For example a flag can reflect meanings of patriotism, nationality, love, hatred, war, peace and so on. Like so many other concepts that we have been exploring here, symbols and their relationships with other symbols have such wide breadth of implications that we cannot ignore them. As you read this paper keep in mind that I will be using all of these sociological concepts to break down the mass-production of Fight Club.

So now that we have a basic understanding of the sociological concepts involved, I can show how they apply to Fight Club. Here I am concentrating on two significant timelines, one for the novel and one for the film. Each has their own set of mass producers. The following is a flow chart to help organize the major players in the mass-production of Fight Club. This chart is to be read from the top down with the exception of the dashed lines which represent feedback from the audience to the mass-producers. Notably, there are two charts because the novel and the film have two separate mass-producers. The left flowchart shows the organization of mass production for the novel, while the right-hand flowchart shows the organization of the films mass-producers.

Concentrating first on the novel, Palahniuk originally had no agent when Fight club was first published. However, once he had received some critical acclaim, he was signed by Edward Hibbert (a literary agent) who worked with the book’s publisher on re-releases and arranged the deal for the film with 20^th Century Fox.[39] Normally, an agent would act as a filter for the publisher; however that did not seem to be the case with Palahniuk at least initially. With that in mind, the first major player in the mass-production of Fight Club was the publisher, W.W. Norton. This publisher is too large to have any particular specialty; however they did publish A Clockwork Orange which has since been compared to Fight Club.[40] The presence of subversive fiction in their portfolio certainly had an effect on the publishing of Fight Club as well as providing a yardstick to measure its success and an established audience to target. Book publishers don’t seem to have the same marketing resources available to them as do film makers. You don’t see ads for an unknown author on primetime television. So Publishers must interact with notable professional reviewers, above labeled under “media,” and bookstore owners in order to get their product sold. The reviewers add meaning to the object by making statements that are reprinted on the book jacket and online. This allows a timid reader to judge the book by the more well know reviewer’s taste. The second aspect is placement. Bookstores interact with publishers to establish genre so that the novel can be placed appropriately for patrons. Another interesting aspect of the mass-production of Fight Club as a novel was the academic response. Academics have placed Fight Club on many mandatory reading lists for their classes. For example one English class has Fight Club on a list that includes Mark Twain and other literary greats.[41] This shows scholars manipulating the meaning of Fight Club to be as significant as other classic fiction. Another professor chose Fight Club to illustrate psychoanalytical points of view in his psychology class.[42] Here, the scholar compares Fight Club to American Beauty and A Clockwork Orange. This scholarly audience is applying meaning to Fight Club by association with other works that they consider similar. These are just two examples and yet, Fight Club is elevated as an important literary work which is relevant to people who study mental illness and social deviance. Another professor makes connections between One Flew Other the Cuckoo’s Nest, Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption and Fight Club.[43]

The organization the film version of Fight Club’s mass-producers is slightly more complex and thus harder to find concrete data on in some areas. The creators, with the help of Palahniuk’s agent (and, I’m sure, several unnamed parties) brought the novel to the attention of 20^th Century Fox.[44] Fox interacted with the creators of the film in order to produce the film. At that point, Fox passed the film along to their marketers. Fox gave the film to the marketing firm Wieden+Kennedy.[45] The meaning at this point in production was manipulated by the marketers to target a different audience than might have been interested in the novel. They even went as far as advertising the film on television during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts.[46] Later when I analyze some cultural objects, I will illustrate how this happened. Suffice it to say that at this point, the meaning of Fight Club was changed from a black humor, philosophical commentary bestowed by the mass producers of the novel, to a movie about well… fighting. The film industry at this point would turn to reviewers to hype the film. However, there was a notable jeer from Roger Ebert, who has a large fan-base and a lot of sway over the viewing public. Ebert worked to reinforce the marketing campaign by saying Fight Club was, “a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.”[47] Thus the audience received the meaning that fight club was about fighting from both the marketers and the media. That, I suppose, was not a particularly hard pill to swallow considering the name “Fight Club.”

To illustrate the change in meaning of Fight Club I will be analyzing a few cultural artifacts left behind by the culture industry. Like any other kind of artifact, these will give us a window in to the changing meanings and competing interests of Fight Club. The first artifact is the cover of the original Fight Club Novel which was released in 1996. A notable fact to consider is that at the time, Palahniuk was a relatively unknown author.

Let the Manipulation Begin!

The black cover of the novel along with the odd typeset lends itself to transgressive fiction. What better way to show the presence of taboo than by presenting the dark color as the stable background and then showing the light as disorganized and unreliable. The front cover shows a bar of soap which at first seems at odds with the name, but sends the viewer searching for meaning. This unstable relationship between imagery and meaning is likely to appeal to the readers of transgressive fiction. There is a certain uncomfortableness about it that lends the meaning, “this will be an interesting, and probably disturbing, read.” The reviews on the back of the jacket feature authors instead of professional reviewers: Barry Hannah, a renown novelist.[48] Robert Stone, a psychological dark-humor writer.[49] Thom Jones, a short story writer who focused predominantly on the mentally ill.[50] Dennis Cooper, another novelist who wrote transgressive fiction.[51] And Finally Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love which is centered around a cult.[52] These reviewers give meaning to the object. The astute reader of transgressive fiction would notice that this novel is being praised by these already renown authors in the genre. The marketers used these authors to capture their audience and bring them to Fight Club.[53] Finally, with the possible exception of the last review, the reviews themselves make little or no reference to fighting, which is an important negation. Instead, they use phrases like, “amazing and artful disturbance.” One author compares the work to The Stranger and Crash. The former being a novel centered around philosophical exploration,[54] and the later being a look at death and sexual fetishism.[55] These comparisons place the novel squarely in the genre of transgressional fiction.

At this point it would be prudent to reflect on what the publisher of the novel was trying to do. With the lack of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, the publisher applies meaning to the novel by comparison. Earlier I talked about symbols, well here they are. The publisher is using the every aspect of the book cover to make associations and negations with which the reader is led toward the intended meaning. With the use of these sociological tools, you can see how we can break apart a seemingly meaningless object, like a book cover, and show what the culture industry was trying to do with it. So let’s continue and analyze another cultural artifact:

http://youtu.be/_8WFzt_tKAA

This is the theatrical trailer for Fight Club. Films obviously have more tools available to show their content than a book cover. However, picking out the intended meanings is a more difficult task. Abstracting the feel of the trailer, I see a storyline which tells me that this is a movie about a guy who has a boring life which is fixed by fighting and other random acts of destruction. The trailer dwells on the action in the film, using symbols like explosions and big men with baseball bats hitting cars. Also it features many fight scenes where burly men posture and beat on each other. These combined meanings show us that the marketers are trying to sell this movie as a male targeted action film. The tail end of the trailer has a joke about fighting William Shatner which gives the sense that this action movie will also be funny.

The actors portrayed in the trailer give meaning to the film as well. Edward Norton, at that point in time, was closely associated with the film American History X which came out a year before Fight Club. With that in mind, people would associate him with the same tough guy violence that the trailer portrays. The meaning that this association projects on Fight Club is that this is a movie about tough and violent men. Brad Pitt, being a slightly more well-known actor at the time, adds even more meaning to the film. Namely, this film has two critically acclaimed actors involved, which adds a meaning of importance to the film. Pitt is also a sex symbol. People associate Pitt with films like Thelma and Louise, Interview with a Vampire, Seven and Meet Joe Black. In all of these films, Pitt is portrayed in a physically attractive manner. The imagery of him half-naked and greased up contributes to the action dynamic of the trailer. I’m not exactly sure what to call this meaning… testosterone-fueled male sex-object might cover it perhaps. Finally, Helena Bonham Carter is shown as the female role in the film. Carter was associated with films depicting troubled pre-20^th century women characters at the time of Fight Club’s promotion.[56]  However, the trailer depicts her as a troubled and sexual character which adds yet more sexual meaning to the film. Finally the reference to the—unnamed—director of the film Seven adds meaning to Fight Club. By printing this, they are trying to get the audience to associate Fight Club with Seven. Meaning that, “If you liked the movie about a crazed serial killer, you’ll like this movie,” or if you prefer, “this symbol is like that symbol.”          This is the DVD jacket for fight club and the third cultural artifact I will be analyzing. The first meaning that comes across, though not particularly visible in this picture, is that the background is green.  The color green has associations with sickness and envy,[57] which are qualities of the film that are heavily portrayed. There is writing on the wall in the background of the back cover which says, “I LIKE MYSELF.” This adds a meaning of mental illness similar to the writing on the walls in The Shining. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are featured three times each on the jacket, emphasizing the meaning of, “movie stars are in this film.” On the other hand, Carter is only featured once, and in that picture she strongly resembles a witch. Here the meaning she portrays is of a bad woman, or manipulative witch. Also, notice the quotes at the top left corner which only make mild references to fighting and focus on the films humor. Keep in mind that at this point in time (2001) people who were buying the DVD had likely already seen the movie.

What I see when I analyze these three objects are distinct changes in meaning from one medium to the next. As I stated earlier, the culture industry has a vested interest in manipulating the meanings of cultural objects in order to suite their own needs. The object, as a novel, is presented in such a way that it makes associations with other authors in the same vein of writing. This combined with a dark cover is meant to present the right combination of meanings to entice the reader of transgressional fiction. Then the cultural industry needed to change the meaning of Fight Club in order to sell it to a more broad market. To do this they used famous actors and familiar action movie motifs to lend a new “Hollywood” meaning to Fight Club. Finally, with Fight Club having had marginal box office success, the culture industry further changed the meaning of Fight Club using the DVD jacket. This time, they applied jealousy, mental illness and a female villain to the meaning of fight club. This third change in meaning was somewhat of a return towards the original novel’s meaning.

It should be apparent at this point how large a roll the culture industry plays in shaping the meaning of cultural objects. With only three seemingly passive objects we have seen the transformation of an object’s meaning over a period of time. The important thing to consider here is that this is only on a small scale. These three objects are just some of the thousands of cultural artifacts that the culture industry had an effect on regarding Fight Club. This is why analyzing the culture industry is an important part of any sociological analysis. The hidden world of the culture industry is influencing the meanings that we all associate with our culture, and that is a pretty big deal.

Space Monkeys

Analysis of the Audience Reception of Fight Club

Now we come to the interesting part. More informing than the creator or the mass producers of Fight Club is the audience who received it. As we’ve seen, cultural objects have no inherent meaning. Fight club, as an object, is precisely what meanings are associated with it. So far we’ve talked about people who have a vested interest in presenting Fight Club in a certain way. In this section, however, we get to dissect a much larger and more diverse community: the Fight Club audience. Keep your guard up, there are people actually fighting in here!

First, I must explain one final sociological concept: audience attention. Griswold explains the complex process by which a cultural object receives attention first by saying, “cultural objects compete for attention.”[58] Her argument is that for any cultural object, there is an oversupply. Take films for example, hundreds or maybe thousands are released yearly in America, however only a scant few receive significant attention from their audiences. To try to explain this phenomenon, Griswold says that social context is of paramount importance for an object to receive attention.[59] In other words, the attention an object receives is based on the social contexts and identities of the audience who receives it. In the case of Fight Club there are many diverse social groups who received it. I assert that this is what has made it such an interesting cultural object. Attention has a broad meaning here, so I will focus on what it means to Fight Club as a cultural object. Suffice it to say that attention in this context is when the audience interacts with the object giving it meaning. Also, though, attention transcends direct interaction with the object. The audience is not only shaping the meaning of Fight Club, but also changing the meanings of other object by associating them with it. Finally, attention is also economic in nature. For example ticket sales, book sales, DVD sales and so on. Like every other section so far, you should be able to see how important analyzing audience reception is. Audience reception doesn’t just tell us about the object in question; it tells us about the audience. Since the audience is the largest cross-section of humanity that I will be analyzing in this project, it stands to reason that this might have the most important sociological implications. In analyzing Fight Club, I will show the diversity of audience reception in relative chronological order starting with the book and continuing through the aftermath of the film and DVD release.

I get the “Club” but not the “Fight”

It turns out that in 1996 if people were reading Fight Club and writing about it, well there just isn’t much left on the internet. It is hard to find reference to Fight Club as a novel as opposed to the film specifically because the fans of one seem to be the fans of the other and talk about them interchangeably. However with some digging, I have found early reviewers of the novel writing about how they were inspired to cancel their cable, get rid of their TV and phone.[60] This could be construed as the reader placing an anti-materialist meaning on Fight Club. However the most common interpretation of the novel was, “thought provoking.”[61] The original fans of Fight Club gave the significant meaning of being intellectually significant to Fight Club. Notice in these examples that the presence of violence as a meaning is suspiciously on the fringe of these associations or not present at all. Enter the film industry.

Sex and Violence, the Opiates of the Viewing Masses

Earlier, I asserted that the culture industry changed the meaning of Fight Club when the medium changed from book to film. Here, I will discuss the effects of that change in the viewing audience. When Fight Club was released on film, there were a myriad of meanings that were attached to it by its audience. This was a prime example of Griswold’s statement, “The meaning drawn from the cultural objects, is not firmly and undeniably embedded in the object itself or subject entirely to individual quirks. People’s social attributes, their positions in a social structure, condition what they like, what they value, and even what they recognize in the first place.”[62] In other words, different meaningful interpretations spring from different social contexts.

I wanted to destroy something beautiful

Some people gleaned a violent meaning from the film. “Fighting is good, cool, therapeutic,” is the sense that you get from these groups. Take, for instance, the groups of kids who watched the film and immediately went out and started boxing in their back yards. At the time that the film was released, Ultimate Fighting was still a fringe sport.[63] The idea of no-holds-barred fight must have been a potent one for certain teenagers as reports of “Fight Club inspired” altercations immediately followed the release of the film.[64] This trend continues even now, probably fueled by the popular emergence of Ultimate Fighting, but still attributed to Fight Club. One newer theme is of kids filming their fights and placing the videos on youtube. Some are fairly brutal while others seem relatively benign.[65] These groups give meaning to Fight Club. Fight Club was marketed as a “fighting” movie and some of the audience members took that meaning to a whole new level. Griswold would delight in this association, because the fact that some social groups went out and started fighting, and other groups did not illustrates her earlier stated point. This is pure freedom of interpretation inside a sociological framework.

We are the all singing all dancing crap of the world

Not everyone who saw fight club decided to go out and start beating their friends to a pulp thankfully. Despite the industry’s attempt to brand the movie for the WWE fans of the world, many people placed philosophical meanings on Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk’s website contains forums in which fans discuss the philosophical meanings of Fight Club, from materialism to spirituality and anarchy. Some fans have even cast out their “comfortable possessions” in support of the films mantra, “The things you own, end up owning you.”[66] This social group has placed a different meaning on Fight Club. In a nutshell, it is that Fight Club is a commentary on the problems with the world, the frustration that men, in particular, deal with and the final solution. People in this group, in other words, are projecting the meaning of Fight Club to be a critique of the American Dream.

I want you to hug me, as hard as you can

Some people, on the other hand, have interpreted the meaning of fight club in an entirely different way. Fight Club means comedy to this group. This group congregates around the snarky narration and over the top cheesy machismo in the film. Take, for example, a frame for frame remake of the original film trailer that renames the film “Cuddle Club.”[67] Or even another organization that organizes massive public pillow fights in the spirit of Fight Club.[68]

For these groups, Fight Club is about free-spirited good times.

These groups are giving meaning to Fight Club; it’s funny.

Face Beaters for Jesus

Another interesting example of audience reception is the reaction of the religious community. The film was expected to make angry ripples in the religious community, even to the point that some of the more inflammatory lines were cut out of the film.[69] However some religious groups have begun to use Fight Club as a means to entice a younger male presence. They have “Fight Club” style church-sanctioned events in which members fight each other.[70] It is interesting to see a ministry interpret the meaning of Fight Club as a means of recruitment. Still others in the religious community interpret Fight Club as a warning about what can happen psychologically when someone is not saved.[71]

The Soup

People receiving Fight Club created their own meanings. It is the social contexts of these groups which shape the meanings that are returned to the object. Fight Club is significant because of the diversity of meanings that the audience culture gave to it. The audience even caused the rebranding of Fight Club by the industry as a “cult classic.”[72] Few other movies released in the same time period had as broad an effect on so many different groups and that is what makes Fight Club so interesting as a cultural object.

It’s Only After We Have Lost Everything That We Are Free to Do Anything

            With all this talk of meaning, there must be an underlying theme. We found that the creator had several cultural identities: Cacophony Society member, homosexual, child from a broken home, transgressive fictionist, and escort for the terminally ill. These identities inform the creation of Fight Club in all of its complexity. Then as Fight club was mass produced, the culture industry borrowed notoriety from other transgressive fictionists to give Fight Club meaning. At the same time, scholars gave Fight Club academic clout by comparing it to Twain and other famous authors. The film industry then took the object and applied a Hollywood touch. Specifically, they promoted meanings of sex and violence. Then due to audience feedback the industry rebranded Fight Club again: cult classic, art film, intellectual dark comedy. Finally the audience gave a diverse set of meanings to Fight Club: anti-materialist manifesto, fight incentive, tool of faith, comedy, and again intellectual dark comedy.

What is curious here is that an object with no inherent meaning of its own can have such diverse and widespread meanings to its audience. It seems that the catalyst for this diversity is the change in mediums. The movie-going community is part of a significantly different social group than the readers of transgressive fiction, or even the literate community as a whole. What we end up with here is a “chicken or the egg” conundrum: was it the way that Fight Club was packaged by the culture industry that caused a number of brash interpretations? Or, rather, was is the action movie-going community that picked through the content to find meanings that they identified with. Like all things, the answer is probably found somewhere in between. Regardless, the analysis of Fight Club has provided a look in to the whole of American culture which is a pretty big feat for such a small object.

Time-line

August 17, 1996 – Fight Club published by W. W. Norton

1997 – Book received Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

1997 – Book received Oregon Book Award for Best Novel.

1997 – Book interpreted for film by Jim Uhls and David Fincher.

September, 1999 – Fight Club the film debuts at Venice International Film Festival .

October 15, 1999 – Fight Club the movie is released in the U.S.

October 15, 1999 – Fight Club Receives negative review from Roger Ebert

October 17, 1999 – Fight Club the movie receives $11,035,485 in the opening weekend in U.S. box         offices.

November 10, 1999 – Media begins reporting multiple cases of teen violence related to Fight Club.

2000 – Youths begin creating their own ‘fight clubs.’ One major instance to examine is at Brigham         Young University.

2000 – Fight club Receives Best British Actress Empire Award, as well as an Academy Award      nomination for Best Sound Editing.

May 18, 2000 – Fight Club Released on DVD

2004 – Book reissued by Owl Books to take advantage of movie popularity.

November 16, 2004 – Fight Club the video game is released

2006 Fight Club acknowledged by the Online Film Critics Society as one of the top 100 films released     between 1996 and 2006

March 11, 2011 – Fight club continues to draw attention from media as 6^th graders form their own fight clubs.

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Listen, I’m very much in favor of telling people about the risks of using medications, but this is an absolutely ridiculous emission. Specifically that acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure… in people who intentionally overdose, and folks who pay no attention to the drugs that they are taking to the point that they are willing to ignore all of the warning labels on their medicines and they ” accidentally” overdose.  How about some accountability here?

This is a problem that I have with everything and everyone. I can’t argue anymore… not about anything that I really know anything about. It’s because I’ve  spent the time considering more than one point of view. The above statement from my “alternative” practitioner was skewed to promote his point of view with an absolute disregard for the truth. If I were to use the same tactics to prove my point I would say that engines are the number one cause of car crashes. Sure it might be true, but it’s meaningless. I notice similarly ridiculously skewed information at my allopathic physician’s office. How can anyone take anything seriously if people aren’t willing to be honest with the facts?

What if on Tuesday November 2nd, all of the people just went and voted as they believed they should. What if this sensationalist far-right-leaning trend completely failed in the polls. What if everyone voted and the majority actually won. Much like how Obama was elected, but more broadly and concise. Can you imagine the kind of message that would send to the political extremists out there? A clear message to the far right and Fox News that says, “that’s great that you feel passionate about your political opinions, but you are a really just a tiny minority with no legitimate potential to change the political climate.” Such an outcome would be very pleasant for me. Democracy in action, what a novel concept.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but the more likely outcome is that a very small group of politically impassioned people are going to decide what the outcome of this election will be. We, the marginalized and frustrated majority, will just become more marginalized and more frustrated. Which begs the question, why doesn’t this system work? Why don’t the representatives who preach the most popular views get elected? Judging by my personal experience, I feel that I can safely say that all of my conservative friends will vote, while less than 10% of my liberal friends will. Which brings me back to my point: wouldn’t it be nice, if the people filed into the polls on Tuesday and won a quiet victory for America.

There seems to be a fundamental difference between the way I approach academic activity and the way my classmates do. I actually get teased a lot about it because I stress about getting A’s so much. I always come back to the same thought though. School is just a long drawn-out practice session for a job. Sometimes you don’t get to do exactly what you want when you’re working, but if you choose a profession (major) that you enjoy then you’ll end up doing more of what you want. Classes that aren’t stimulating are like practice for how to handle unappealing work gracefully. When I look at my fellow students, though, I see them treating the entire school experience as a chore to “get through.” I can’t help but wonder whether or not, with today’s rapidly expanding educated workforce, the quality of academic work that students do will end up being more important than the degree itself. I know that if I was an employer right now and hiring a newly graduated student, I would be most interested in what their worst subject is and how well they performed.

That statement was false. I have only really been studying math for a year now, but one thing that I have learned is that anytime I go to a teacher with a question, I will inevitably spend more time trying to convince them to answer my question rather than the answering question that they assume that I am asking.

I am a good student. I don’t cut corners, ever. I do all the work that is required of me, and if that’s not enough to give me a strong grasp of the subject, I study even more. This work ethic is especially useful in math, because math, as I see it, is a combination of two things. I’ll call them mechanical skills and conceptual skills. By mechanical skills I mean the ability to perform operations on a problem. Examples of mechanical skills are addition, subtraction, multiplication, distribution and so on. Mechanical skills were once conceptual skills. Meaning at one point, someone has to show the student how and why distribution works. At a certain point however, the student has used the distributive property so many times that it is no longer an action that requires any conceptual thought. Building math skills seems to follow that pattern more or less to a tee: demonstrate a concept, use it until it no longer has need for the concept to be recalled and used, and then move on to the next concept. Mechanical skills become the means to solve a problem. Without a solid base of mechanical skills, the student has no hope of ever solving a problem, except by accident.

If mechanical skills are the “hows” of problem solving, then the conceptual skills are the “whats and whys.” In order to be able to apply mechanical knowledge, a student has to recognize what they’re looking at and why the problem is relevant to what they already know. This is easy when a problem asks to add two and four, but as math becomes complex, the whats and whys of the problem tend to be well hidden.

This is where the communication between my teachers and I always breaks down. When I come to them with a problem, I literally never have the question, “how do I solve this problem?” I am always asking, “why can’t I solve this problem.” In other words, “what pieces of the puzzle am I missing that are keeping me from making the necessary connections here?”

Here is how the conversation usually goes down: I say, “Hi professor, I’ve been having problems with these types of problems. Like this one. Can you give me some insight?” They say, “sure, let me see your work.” and I show it to them. Then, they look at my work and become stumped, “you got the right answer.” I say, “well yeah, I worked on it for a very long time and I got the math to work out, but if you changed the problem just a little bit I’d be at square one.” This is usually followed by either a blank stare, or an attempt to show me all of the individual operations that took place, which of course, I already knew how to do.

I’ve started to think that this problem may not be the teacher’s individual fault, but perhaps the collective student’s fault. So few students requisite work in a math class that I think teachers may have forgotten how to teach student to actually solve problems, rather than just perform operations. As for myself, the closest thing that I’ve seen to what I think I need is watching a skilled mathematician think their way through a problem. It seems to me to be the most important and useful aspect of going to a math class and now, according to this particular teacher, it is no longer useful. I say he’s wrong.

I am very excited about education. I think that it’s the bees knees, you might say. I decided to go back to school because I felt like I finally had realized it’s value and was ready to make the most out of it. So I did. I started attending community college with a plan to transfer to a university for a degree in biochemistry. I, unlike the vast majority of my classmates, do not at this point in my life have the option of obtaining federally subsidized student loans and attending school as my only vocation. I have to continue to work 72 hours a week so that I can continue to support my fiancee and myself. I often have to go to school on Monday just a few hours after I have left work with 8 or so hours of sleep over the last three days combined. Then I attend classes with students, the majority of which who are either being supported 100% by their parents or have obtained enough financial support from student loans to make ends meet so that they do not have to do anything at all besides go to school.
My quibble is not with the fact that these people are able to go to school for free (for now at least,) my problem is that these people tend to be complaining pieces of pooh who can hardly stand to spend 5 minutes outside of class bringing their grade up to a C.
This wouldn’t bother me at all except that I am in some small way enabling this behavior by paying (a disproportionately large amount of) taxes. And while I know that of the taxes that I pay, very little of it goes to these idiots. It disgusts me to think that any of my money goes to support these people.

In my opinion, if you are in school your job is to learn everything that you possibly can about the subject that you are studying.  Good grades are absolutely within the reach of the most non-intellectual people out there with only moderate effort. Please stop wasting my money!

After a plane crash, the heroine receives medical care in Atlantis from a doctor who has subscribed to the pure free market capitalist ideology. It is, of course, praised as a virtue in the book, and I can see its point… except in the field of medicine.

The problem as I see it is that capitalistic medicine betrays the very core of capitalism: choice, and freedom to make that choice as one pleases. As the book points out, freedom to choose at the point of a gun is not freedom at all. And what could possibly be a better parallel for “at the point of a gun,” than being at deaths door for any medical reason? When faced with a decision between money and life, who in their right mind would choose money? That sounds like extortion to me. No different than the extortion practiced by the villains (the government, the people) in the book.

The fact is that, while there is something to the idea of attracting the best and brightest to the field of medicine based on capitalistic ($!) incentives, the notion of medicine at its core is incongruous with capitalism. For example, the modern Hippocratic oath states, “I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required… I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.” While the integrity of the oath itself is questionable in this day and age, the spirit in which it is given seems to hold true in general. Wouldn’t it spoil the message if the oath read, “… with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. Except those who do not deserve care based on my judgment or their ability to pay me, as they are parasites on the back of civilization.”

Have a nice day.

The BS is the more common, I think that it’s because it requires a few less units.
Here’s how it breaks down: a bachelor of science degree takes a few fewer (16 quarter units I think) humanities/social science classes and no foreign language, but to make up for it, they have more classes that are major specific. I’m unclear on where these come from, but I assume they mean electives.
A BA requires a year of foreign language and must take a few extra humanities/social science classes. Again, I’m not sure where they are trimming classes from, but I assume they must be elective courses.
So here is my problem, I want to take Spanish. It seems like an important career step. However, I don’t want to miss out on any cool science classes. I am going to be on a very tight schedule for the next several years and due to CMC’s ridiculously haphazard scheduling of their science classes, I am going to have to make that BA versus BS choice within the next few months instead of years.

What do you think?