The CSS layout for the Writing Program finally worked, so I’m kinda proud of myself. It looks OK, but still needs fine-tuning before we get it up and running in the Fall. Mostly a good learning experience: I’m happy to be moving my scant skills away from table-based layouts. I’m packing tonight, getting ready to go down to DC for the long weekend and see some friends and family. I’m still going to try to keep up my writing routine, but since my Dad doesn’t have internet access, one of my tasks tonight is to look online for 802.11b hotspots in the city. We’ll see how successful I am; if I’m not, then I might have to save up my posts ’til I get back up here Monday night.
I once again found Curtiss’s points to be useful and provocative; his argument about beer serving only as a class marker via our awareness of class difference and incongruity seems persuasive. At the same time, though, I’m not so sure.
There are certain bars I’ve been fond of where I’d never think of ordering certain kinds of mixed drink, much less a glass of wine. (Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a glass of wine at a bar. Only restaurants. Interesting. And I almost always drink beer in glasses at bars, although I’m not sure how to class that because I like draft beer better than bottled beer and it’s usually cheaper, too.) While much of my hesitation may have been bound up in perceptions of gender as well as perceptions of class (they’re often tightly related), I think that things like tastes in drinks can indicate class differently and maybe even independently of other indicators (like the wealth and privilege of Jack Welch) without necessarily being contradictory. (I’m obviously hedging a lot, because I’m uncertain.) I’ll say it again: Pabst Blue Ribbon indicates a different class than Montrachet Grand Cru, regardless of the price of either, and sometimes people will read more about your class into whether or not you drink PBR than they will into what you do for a living.
Still, I (perhaps mistakenly) read Curtiss as being somewhat outraged at the apparent presumption implicit in the Jack Welch example. I’m not outraged, partly because one component of my thesis for this disseration is that composition doesn’t have any kind of consistent or rigorous perspective on class; the ideas that rest behind our terms are all over the place — so paying attention to how the different markers get mixed up is just part of the tour here. My suspicion is that I won’t come up with any useful, unified, consistent theoretical construction of class, in part because the move towards theory can be seen (by Cartesians, at least) as a move away from the material, and turning away from material conditions is itself (as Linda Brodkey and others have demonstrated) a classed move.
Think about Roseanne Barr. One way of talking about Roseanne’s class would be to ask where she fits into Edward Reiss’s Weberian understanding of class as constructed by one’s profession
A Higher professionals
B Managerial and Technical
C1 Skilled non-manual
C2 Skilled manual
D Semi-skilled
E Unskilled
but I think the answers to such a question would be a lot less useful than the answers you would get from watching an episode of Roseanne. (Thanks to Donna for mentioning Roseanne to me as an excellent example of the ways people think about class.) This raises some difficult issues for me. First, I’ve noted my own unease with the rhetoric of “false consciousness,” the flip side to authenticity claims, with which I’m also uncomfortable. At the same time, Roseanne’s lived experience as portrayed on the show and in the public eye seems to me to offer more rich and compelling insights about class in America than does Reiss’s Weberian hierarchy. I want to say: Of course Jack Welch isn’t middle class, and we all know it. He’s of the capitalist class, up there above the Higher Professionals; in his case, wealth trumps tastes. But what about Roseanne Barr? What class is she now? What class was she when she had her sitcom? Before she got famous? (I’ve already mentioned Eminem here, and the same questions could be asked of him and 8 Mile‘s thoughtfully constructed mythologies and realities.)
Part of the problem, as I’ve also again already pointed out, is that the most basic ways in which we talk about class are flawed. Curtiss got at this in his response, too, and I think Raymond Williams, in Keywords, expresses it best. “The middle class,” Williams points out, “. . . is an expression of relative social position and thus of social distinction. The working class, specialized from the different notion of the useful or productive classes, is an expression of economic relationships. Thus the two common modern class terms rest on different models, and the position of those who are conscious of relative social position and thus of social distinction, and yet, within an economic relationship, sell and are dependent on their labour, is the point of critical overlap between the models and the terms” (65).
Pierre Bourdieu takes this stuff quite a bit further. (See, I promised I’d get to him.) He begins from the assertion that “to be an individual within a social space, is to differ,” and difference only matters “if it is perceived by someone capable of making the distinction,” someone “with classificatory schemata, with a certain taste” (Practical Reason 9). From this point, he argues that the capacity for distinction allows for such factors as income, politics, and taste to form a web of relationships that serves to both indicate and define one’s social class in France (Distinction). Bourdieu’s interest is in analyzing how position in a culture — one’s class — is linked to what one does, culturally, and so he examines the intersection of economics, education, occupations, social positions and cultural practices. For Bourdieu, there is only a continuum of class; in effect, an anti-class: while he makes frequent use of terms like “bourgeoisie” and “working,” “middle,” and “upper” classes, the entire point of his analysis is to look at the infinitesimal divisions and correspondences of class, so that the class of engineers overlaps with the class of readers of Le Figaro, which overlaps with the class of people who align themselves with the liberal right (Distinction 452). Ultimately, class is a relational quality enacted within a social space, and therefore, classes are infinite, and, for purposes of definition, nonexistent: “difference (which I express in describing social space) exists and persists. . . Social classes do not exist. . . What exists is a social space, a space of differences, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done” (Practical Reason 12). (Of course, as I pointed out in an earlier post, throwing different national conceptions of class into the mix just mucks things up even more. Still, I’m relying on Bourdieu more for his reasoning than for his conclusions.)
I guess the point of all this is to convince myself that I’m probably not ever arrive at any definition of class as a static descriptive quality, as convenient as that would be. (Little class cookie cutters: the rich are butterscotch icebox cookies, of course.) Following Bourdieu, I think I’m moving towards an understanding of class as multiple (to do the crudest reduction of poststructuralism: you’re one class at home, another at work, and so on) and relational. A lot of my understanding will be economic, certainly; that’s why I’m doing all these friggin readings in economics, even though all my training’s been in English studies. But there are things beyond the economic that influence the material circumstances of students in the wired writing classroom, and that’s the broader understanding I’m working towards.
(Why do I always have this impulse, like so many first-year student papers I see, to wrap things up in a hokey star-spangled pseudo-ennobling conclusion? What nonsense!)
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