I’d like to ask you to momentarily ignore the somewhat scary talk about ratios when Varoufakis writes that “When a person chooses between different combinations of quantities of two experiences/commodities X and Y, the Equi-marginal Principle suggests that she opts for a combination such that the ratio of the marginal utilities from Y and the marginal utility from Y equals the ratio of the price of Y and the price of X” (63). Sure, it’s easy enough to think through, but actually what I’m interested in here is the notion of choosing between two experiences. For now, let’s work with the neoclassical economic assumptions that experiences are scarce (i.e., in contemporary American culture, there apparently aren’t enough college educations to go around) and that experiences bear an opportunity cost (i.e., if you decide to become the world’s best shade-tree mechanic, that might rule out your dreams of an acting career), and finally the utility-maximisation thesis, “founded on the idea that people care ultimately about themselves” (76) and also on the idea that utility itself is scarce (scarcity being a concept that I think has recently become more complicated — but that can wait for another post).
So if we swallow all these assumptions, and we think about choosing between two or more experiences, let’s ask: what are the choices associated with the various models of socioeconomic class and class mobility?
A model of class based primarily on consumptive and cultural practices (drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or Montrachet Grand Cru, going to a basketball game or a tennis match) can involve a certain measure of choice, limited by economic concerns (if you’re poor, it’s much more difficult to drink Montrachet Grand Cru). The same holds true for a model of class based primarily on vocation: choosing to become a carpenter has different class consequences from choosing to become a banker, though again this choice is limited by economic concerns, as is education itself. A model of class based primarily on wealth leaves much less room for individual choice, since one cannot choose the wealth of the family into which one is born, although vocation (while itself highly influenced by education and hence by family wealth) may mitigate that slightly. A model of class based upon ownership of the means of production may similarly allow for some individual choice based on vocation, but is also much more dictated by chance. And finally: what about those who define class based upon the authenticity of lived experience, as Ira Shor, Bill Macauley, Bill Thelin, Jennifer Beech, and so many others in their audience last year in New York’s CCCC did? (Like I’ve said elsewhere, this year wasn’t so bad.) Is the authenticity of lived experience an individual choice? It’s supremely individual — but how much do we choose the life experiences we have? It certainly seems as if many of the people who talk about “the working class” place considerable value upon the supposedly authentic life experiences of the working class, and would not renounce them — and in fact would privilege them over other less “authentic” experiences. Can we talk, then, about the utility of such experiences?
First maybe we’d better go back over the notion of utility. Jeremy Bentham’s early view of economic utility was of “some property, or even psychological energy, contained within commodities or experiences. The moment we appropriate them , we are awash with their utility. So, we buy an apple because of the utility that we expect to get out of this apple; as if, in other words, utility is something in the appple itself” (82). But this view leads to complications, as Varoufakis points out: “provided utility is measurable then at least theoretically it is possible to answer the question: if I take X away from Jill and give it to Jack, how much utility will Jill lose and how much utility will Jack gain? And if I can show that Jack will gain a lot more utility than Jill will lose, is this not a justification for removing X forcibly from Jill in order to pass it on to Jack?” (82). According to Varoufakis, early neoclassical economists decided to do away with the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility for several reasons: first, such interpersonal comparisons make it possible “to justify tyranny and other horrors” such as torture, since “if Jack’s utility from torturing Jill is greater than the utility she loses as a result of being tortured, then her torture has been justified” (83). Second, “by their own admission, [neoclassical economists] wanted to construct an apolitical economics” (83). And, finally, “they were particularly averse to justifications of State intervention” (83).
Ultimately, these early neoclassical economists “kept the idea of utility maximising individuals without accepting the one assumption which made it possible for Bentham to talk about the good society: the assumption that my utility from an orange can be compared to your utility from the same orange” (84), positing rather that utility in general cannot be compared across individuals. In doing so, “they also jettisoned the possibility of knowing what the common good is since it is now impossible ot add up people’s utilitis in an attempt to measure the community’s well-being” (84). Varoufakis summarizes: “In short, whereas Bentham’s utilitarianism was a primitive psychological theory of choice culminating to a theory of the good society, neoclassical economists stripped it down into something almost unrecognisable: a calculus of private choice incapable of saying much about how good or bad society is” (84).
This, I think, is why I’m having such difficulty thinking about class and the common good via an allegedly apolitical neoclassical economics: thinking about class is thinking about the welfare of groups of people, and requires interpersonal comparisons and a political economics. James Berlin, in his canonical essay “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” (College English 50.5, September 1988), offers a scathing critique of what he terms “expressionistic rhetorics” such as those advanced by Donald Murray and Peter Elbow, for which “the existent is located within the individual subject” and for which “Authentic self-expression can [. . .] lead to authentic self-experience” (688). The problem with this is that “political change can only be considered by individuals and in individual terms” (690). Berlin contrasts expressionistic rhetorics to “social-epistemic rhetorics”, which rely on “a notion of rhetoric as a political act invloving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer, with language as the agency of mediation” (692, emphasis mine), and for which “the subect is itself a social construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world” (693, emphasis mine).
I’ll point tomorrow to some of the ways in which ideologies of the individual and the social interact with concerns of ownership, reproducibility, and the social (although I’ve already noted in passing the ways in which Charlie’s thinking about ideologies of the social in relation to weblogs have really impressed me). Tonight, it seems simply sufficient to suggest that the politics of individual class authenticity so frequently invoked by Ira Shor, Bill Macauley, Bill Thelin, and Jennifer Beech in last year’s CCCC panel in New York (and, again, to a lesser degree at this year’s panel) are a useless dead end because they take for granted a solipsistically apolitical economics. To say it yet again: we need to look at class in other ways.
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