The Price of Prestige
lily
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38 chapter two
could be relatively confident that signals sent through the manipulation of
this indicator would be accurately interpreted by the intended audience.
Yet once an object is recognized as a status symbol, it starts emanating
secondary utility as well. The consumption of this good can now become
other regarding. Accordingly, the institutionalization of a status symbol
affects the relative balance between primary and secondary utility and
consequently alters the logic of its consumption. While initially actors
sought to possess such objects because of their instrumental value as mate
rial components of national power, now the same objects may be desired
simply for their symbolic value. Thus, once large navies become a status
symbol, actors may wish to procure a large navy in order to be perceived as
a great power independent of its primary utility as an instrument of power
projection.
Once this pairing of signalers and audience is established, the symbol
tends to evolve through repeated rounds of exaggeration and excess fol
lowing the logic of costly signals. In many instances, as in the case of Zam
Zammah, a cannon so big and heavy that it can no longer serve in battle,
this spiral of excess can compromise the initial instrumental value of the
object. In evolutionary terms, we can think of this process as a trade off
between “utilitarian selection,” which seeks to maximize material instru
mentality, and “signal selection,” which seeks to maximize the credibility
of communication (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997 , 67 ). Once we allow for sig
nal selection, excess becomes an integral part of even the most Darwin
ian of analyses. Within this logic of signaling, therefore, communication
and other regarding behavior are tightly connected to the acceptance of
excess and a preference for extravagance. In many ways, this process of
increasing exaggeration, which distances consumption from its original
utilitarian rationale, differentiates between a functionalist realist view of
international relations and a Veblenian one. Once consumption is ritual
ized into status symbols, which are coveted for their symbolic value rather
than solely for their intrinsic value, it can no longer fit into a strictly realist
world without auxiliary assumptions.
Mackie ( 1996 ) argues that status symbols diffuse and evolve across three
complementary dimensions. The first is a class dimension, where symbols,
which first appear in the higher strata of society, begin to trickle down
through emulation to the lower classes.^3 The second dimension, echoing
Zahavi and Zahavi’s logic of “signal selection,” is the tendency of symbols to
become extreme over time. The third dimension focuses on the geographic
diffusion of symbols, usually from the core to the periphery.^4 Patterns of
