Kingston writes that “If classes are real, you should be able to identify their ‘members’ and show that these people have distinctive experiences. I argue that you can meaningfully talk about, say, ‘working-class culture’ only if significant numbers of people, defined by some criteria as ‘members’ of the working class, actually do share particular cultural orientations. Similarly, it’s reasonable to say something like ‘the capitalist class pursued its interests’ only if identifiable ‘members’ of this class actually did something in concert” (23). Let’s examine this homogenizing argument a little more closely: what if, for example, we replace “classes” with “sexes” (not “genders”: I’m trying to keep my example as reductive as Kingston’s argument) and “the working class” with “women”. Do “significant numbers” of women, defined by chromosomes or plumbing, “share particular cultural orientations”, even if we consider only American culture, to the point where we see “women” as a unified whole? Can we come up with a list of “womanly” cultural characteristics that exists as anything other than stereotype?
Or what about race? What “cultural orientations” would Kingston ascribe to, say, African Americans? The double bind this example puts his argument in (he can either show himself to be a bigot by attributing certain common cultural orientations to all African Americans — think the old racist stereotypes about fried chicken and watermelon — or he can declare that the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of assigning such stereotypes demonstrates that race as a discrete grouping in society does not exist) clearly displays the flawed nature of his definition of class. I’m well aware that these counterexamples lack any sort of analytical sophistication whatsoever; for me, this points not to a problem with the counterexamples, but to how fundamentally stupid Kingston’s argument is.
The rest of the book is quite similar in its oversimplifications, to the point where I’m not much inclined to further detail Kingston’s argumentative failings. I will point out, however, that despite the presence of Distinction in his references, he makes it quite clear in his discussion of musical tastes that he’s completely failed to grasp Bourdieu’s point that the power of distinction is itself a class marker, and will further add that his chapter on “Class Culture” gives no indication whatsoever that he’s understood any of the points made by Paul Fussell, despite the presence of Fussell’s book in his references, and will finally add — just to be petty and picky — that he fails to recognize Marx’s De te fabula narratur as a quotation (from Horace) and instead treats the phrase as Marx’s own invention. You’d have thought that the fact that it was in Latin would have given him a clue.
William Gass begins his notorious attack on Roland Barthes with the sentence, “Popular wisdom warns us that we frequently substitute the wish for the deed, and when, in 1968, Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, he was actually calling for it” (“The Death of the Author”, in Habitations of the Word, 265). This quotation seems to me particularly germane in the case of Marxism, which has been declared dead so often that one wonders if the end of history requires silver bullets and a stake to its heart, but also quite appropriate to Kingston’s final sentence: “Class theory: RIP” (234). If class theory does in fact ever die, we can be completely certain that the causes will have absolutely no connection to Kingston’s incogitant, incoherent and wholly fatuous efforts.
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