Lindquist and Class 5

I finished Julie Lindquist’s excellent A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar tonight, and as with my past several posts about the book, it’s given me considerable food for thought. Here’s my angle: I think that composition, as a discipline, tends to mostly avoid discussions involving economics when it comes to students — except when we talk about class. And then, even when composition talks about class, we talk about it in a variety of really strange ways that often seem to make every effort to avoid talking about students as economic beings, especially within the context of the classroom, so that the implication is that — while we can talk about “working-class academics” and the exploitation of academic laborers — students cannot ever be economic beings. I still don’t know how or why this is, but what made it particularly visible to me was Charlie Moran’s work on the intersection of computers and economic inequality — and the funny thing is, while that was my starting-point, I’m also looking towards computers and economics as a possible interesting ending-point, with the ways that the reproducibility of information (which is something that happens in a composition classroom, digital or otherwise) is now making our society re-think fundamental assumptions about economic scarcity. And economic scarcity is deeply connected to class inequality.

So one thing I need to work on is mapping the different ways in which composition as a discipline represents class inequality. Julie Lindquist’s work is particularly helpful to me in this regard, partly because of its clarity and sophistication, but also because she seems to have very firm and well-defined ideas about what causes class — or at least what causes the class of those within the working class.

Lindquist observes that Smokehousers (the patrons of the bar that is the site of her ethnographic study) believe that “education should be practical and should teach applied, marketable skills” and that “as Smokehousers recognize the likelihood that their children will enter the workforce as crafts- or tradespeople, they value the education that will offer adequate education for this life” (93). Furthermore, “there is a suspicion that schools don’t prepare their children to be working-class any more than they teach them what they need to enter the middle class” (93). What interests me here is that while it again seems that Lindquist is relying upon a generally occupational view of the working class — perhaps one that might be usefully filtered through the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook or Standard Occupational Classification taxonomies — the implication seems to be that this work-oriented view may not apply to the middle class, or may apply in different ways. She never explicitly answers the question of precisely what it is that students learn that enables them “to enter the middle class” — which is particularly interesting to me right now in the context of what Bob Connors has said about education and class. According to Connors, compositionists in 1995 believed that “Being middle class is a somewhat ignoble status and an unsophisticated goal to wish for our students” — so what class is it better to be? — and also that “Being middle class is a reasonable thing to want or to propose for our students, and most of us are and always will be inescapably middle class.” But I’d respectfully ask Connors (if I could) and Lindquist: how does one get to being middle class — or away from being middle class?

Here’s a partial answer: according to Lindquist, among the patrons of the Smokehouse, “Whether school is valued for its ability to cultivate practical intelligence, or whether its benefits lie in opportunities for exposure to new belief systems, is largely a function of social aspirations” (95). In other words, whether one wants to remain in the working class or move up to the middle class determines what one takes away from education: learning job skills or re-orienting one’s cultural perspective. Which seems to work for Lindquist’s characterization of the working class as being defined by their relationships to their jobs, and also helps to explain Lynn Z. Bloom’s (infuriating, to me, because of the oppositions it sets up) characterization of the middle class as being defined by their values. Part of me wants to resist this — but another part of me recalls the Linda Brodkey essay (“On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters'”) that seems to handle class so well, to actually get it right, and one of the observations implied by Brodkey is that middle-class folks seem to fail (or wilfully refuse) to recognize, again and again, that their lives are nowhere nearly as directly contingent upon economic concerns as the lives of working-class folks. Which, yes, may be a ridiculously obvious observation, but I think it’s also the middle thing that Lindquist leaves out in her argument; the definitional factor that sets the working class apart from the middle class: because the middle class doesn’t have to worry about economic concerns quite so much, they can say that they define themselves by the things they worry more about: namely, culture. Does that sound workable?

It certainly helps me understand Lindquist better, especially when Lindquist writes that her informants’ “narratives of alienation bespeak the suspicion that schools are really intended to represent middle-class, not working-class, needs and interests. In talking of their own experiences of schooling, Smokehousers recount stories of class barriers — both social and economic — that have been at issue in their educational histories” (96, emphasis mine). If we take “social” as a possible semi-synonym for “cultural,” I think my tentative definition of class as the point of articulation between the cultural and the economic within the figure of the individual might actually line up with what Lindquist’s saying: “Because the common logic at the Smokehouse derives largely from socioeconomic circumstances but works at the level of cultural practice, it might be said to mediate between the two levels of social production Marxist social theorists have called ‘superstructure’ and ‘base.’ If the working class can be viewed etically [I’m still not quite clear on what she means by that term] as social body defined by structural imperatives, on the one hand, and cultural resources, on the other, the common logic might be said to be that which translates one from the other” (174).

And said lining-up would be pretty cool, ’cause — if it isn’t already clear from my devoting five recent posts to her book (God, that’s a little embarassing, in fact) — I really like her scholarship.