Early on, Lindquist cautions that “In presuming to describe ‘class culture,’ I am assuming that everyday experiences and predicaments are structured (if not determined) by the larger political economy” (5), and then goes on to define class as “the systemic products of a social hierarchy sustained by unequal access to resources” (6). Both statements are interesting for their cautious generalization, and both seem slightly Marxist in their perspective — but of course, in today’s America, I think that even daring to mention the existence of class as a phenomenon could be interpreted as Marxist, because to talk about class in any way is to admit to structures of economic inequality.
So I’ll certainly buy both of those statements, although they aren’t venturing much, definitionally speaking. The telling stuff comes when Lindquist gets into the meat of her study and starts describing her study’s informants to us.
Writing of her first informant, Walter Penske, Lindquist states that “His work life has consisted of exclusively blue-collar jobs, many of them involving unskilled labor” (62). Although she does not explicitly state that this is the criterion by which she defines Walter as working class, the implicit connection is made quite clearly by the sequence of ideas in the following paragraph: “Although Walter has always been a working man and wishes to be seen as just that, he seemed to want me to know that this identity had been hard-won, not just adopted uncritically or by default. He made a point of displaying his awareness of the dynamics of social class and of his own place in the social structure” (62). In other words, Walter knows that being “a working man” is, in “the dynamics of social class,” puts him in his “place” as a member of the working class.
Lindquist shows a similar implicit connection of occupation to class in her description of Joe, who “grew up in a lower-working-class suburb just outside of Chicago, but now lives in a more affluent suburb adjacent to Greendale” (64). Now, note the odd logical relationships between the assertions in the following two sentences: “He has worked for the past 4 years for a company that repairs construction equipment but has had many other jobs in his life; these have been, he says, ‘strictly blue-collar.’ Even though he is and has always been a working man, he considers himself to be ‘middle class.'” Let’s work this through: being a “working man”, as evidenced by the “Even though”, is somehow in opposition to being “middle class”, and holding “blue-collar” jobs seems to constitute one as a “working man”. Although I’m tempted to ask questions about possible alternative cases for other classes (which would probably be easily answered by a return to the point Raymond Williams makes about “working class” being a functional definition versus “middle class” being a positional definition), I think I’ll simply offer the conclusion that Lindquist’s definitions of the working class is a deeply occupational definition. (Which is to say, it doesn’t rely as much on tastes and values, or on owning the means of production, or on wealth, or on various other factors I’ve mentioned in the past.)
But this occupational angle gets even more interesting when Lindquist discusses another informant in her study, Maggie Sullivan: “Like Joe, Maggie defines social class as an economic category, and, like Joe, considers herself to be ‘middle class’ by these standards: ‘I don’t think that I’m poor, but I think I have to work for everything I’ve got,’ she said” (69). For Lindquist, defining “social class as an economic category” bears note precisely because it differs from Lindquist’s occupational definition of class: Maggie is a waitress at the Smokehouse, and we need only recall Lindquist’s claiming of working-class status partly due to her own adolescent experience as a waitress to understand that Lindquist sees Maggie as working class, and therefore sees Maggie’s self-characterization as less than accurate. What I find truly remarkable, however, is that Lindquist seems to oppose occupation to economy: “an economic category” is something entirely different from what one does for a living, apparently, and labor is not an economic activity. The logic behind Lindquist’s sequence of ideas seems to be that being middle class as an economic category means not being poor, and so economic categories concern only how much wealth one possesses — and are not an interest of Lindquist’s. Indeed, the definition of the Smokehouse as a “working class bar” means only that it “is a place where working men and women congregate daily to seek sanctuary from the world of work” (3): whatever the cultural consequences of class may be, as enacted in rhetorical practice within the walls of the Smokehouse, we are to understand that, for Lindquist, one’s occupation — one’s work — is always the cause of class, its originary point.
One last point: Lindquist repeatedly separates academia from working class culture. For Lindquist, then, the labor of the academic would seem to be something other than work. Of course we — and she — know this isn’t true; one part of the problem — as Rob points out — is that many of the shifting definitions of class we’re working with are from an older economy and a superannuated cultural logic. I think much of the romanticism that Rob describes surrounding the working class comes out of that superannuated cultural logic, and — as appealing as that romanticism may be — it doesn’t help us talk about contemporary economic inequalities in useful or productive ways.
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