Conspicuous Leisure

Worsley talks about “The division within the working class between the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable'”(316) and notes that when such divisions are coupled to other identity markers — ethnicity, say, or religion — class conflict and resentment can become more intense. A city near here recently agreed to receive (not sure what the proper non-paternalistic verb is here: permanently settle?) several hundred refugees from an African nation. There’s been considerable hubbub, much of it because the community in question is poorer and historically Polish and Puerto Rican and members of those ethnic communities have pointed to the inevitable heightened competition for jobs, apartments, et cetera that will result. In other words, there’s resentment in the community into which the refugees will be attempting to assimilate. This is nothing new — recall the conflicts in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing — but still, it points again to ways in which members of a particular class as economic category will struggle against one another for the same resources rather than engaging in struggle with members of other classes or in attempts to change the nature of the hierarchy.

In which case, it seems to me that the members of that class as economic category would actually become members of a class as a historical formation: class becomes a historical formation when class conflict becomes explicit? I’m not sure, but it seems to make sense at first glance.

This segmentation within and through classes (think of the way the category of “Boston Irish” cleaves through classes from Beacon Hill to Southie) is a part of the phenomenon that Worsley says Dutch sociologists have called verzuiling, or vertical “pillarization” (320) as opposed to horizontal stratification. Another example of pillarization might be church membership in an urban community: All Souls Unitarian Church, on 16th Street in Washington DC, draws a congregation that’s somewhat diverse in terms of income and ethnicity (though not in terms of politics: it is, after all, Unitarian), due in large part — I think — to its geographical location, which is liminal in many senses (in fact, it’s scant blocks from what used to be Boundary Street in the old DC, the street at the foot of Malcolm X / Meridian Hill Park that’s now called Florida Avenue, where the Piedmont Plateau drops to the Atlantic coastal plain). Class does interesting things in cities, especially in rapidly changing neighborhoods, as that part of DC — sort of the top of Adams Morgan, I guess — was ten or fifteen years ago. I don’t know what it’s like these days. I think there’s something to be said about the way that class gets performed in residential neighborhoods in urban areas: in the parked cars you see, in the places you see people, in who uses parks when. And the schools? DC’s situation makes me sad. There’s such an obvious connection between wealth, race, and political power in a city that will never have congressional representation as long as Republicans have anything to say about it (the slogan on DC license plates last year was “Taxation Without Representation”), and without congressional representation there’s even less hope of decent funding for education. So wealthy white parents will send their kids to private schools or move to Montgomery County and pretend the system isn’t broken. Actually, you can get a halfway-accurate idea of rents and incomes from looking at this blogging map of DC.

Which makes me wonder: is blogging a form of conspicuous leisure? James Vander Zanden, in Sociology: The Core (another of the entry-level soc texts I’m skimming), makes reference to Veblen’s familiar notions of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. Since political power and economic means are difficult to “see”, we often rely on the sign-systems of prestige to differentiate ourselves from one another in terms of class. (Again: not that the vectors of power, wealth, and prestige necessarily overlap.) I think about my habits keeping this weblog — which I do think of as at least partly being a sort of academic ‘work’ since it’s serving my dissertation, but I’d be lying if I said it was all drudgery — and I think about the people who keep weblogs and their reasons for keeping them (I’ve talked very briefly about this before), and what kinds of connections there are between wealth and blogging. I think if you’re working a day job as a receptionist for a dentist in Rockville, and you then take the Metro to your part-time evening gig doing data entry for a money order company in Silver Spring, and you then take the bus to your apartment on 16th Street, you probably don’t have the time or the inclination to keep a weblog, whether you own a computer or not, never mind the fact that if you’re working two jobs to make ends meet, you’re probably not interested in paying $19.95 a month for Web access. But blogging is public, to the people who can see it, and to the people who have the interest. In that sense, it’s a class marker, saying, “See? I’m like you. I have the income and the leisure time to do this.”