Class (Cultural)

Conspicuous Leisure

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Meta), Culture, Writing

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.
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Narratives of Mobility

preterite Class (Cultural), Composition Theory, Computers, Metadissertating

I had two conversations about class today and yesterday, one with a fellow PhD candidate in the Rhetoric & Composition program here, and the other with Charlie, who’s on my committee, and gleaned some small and useful insights from those conversations.

First: in composition (and in many other places as well; the Raymond Williams I so frequently invoke is certainly an example), there exists a genre of the social mobility narrative; the story of the professor from the working-class background. Victor Villanueva and Mike Rose offer perhaps the foremost examples, but there are plenty of others, and in fact one of the things I’m trying to work against is the use of the authenticity of lived experience as the class marker that trumps all others. My small insight, though: within the context of composition’s engagement with identity politics (our assumptions that race, gender, age, class, sexual preference, and other markers of identity influence the teaching and learning of writing), the narrative of the academic’s transition from the working class to the professional class is always going to be a narrative of isolation and betrayal, because the academic can no longer claim working-class status. She can’t go home again. Other identity-politics narratives of entrance into the academy are not so bound by definitions: the queer professor is not made un-queer by becoming a professor.

Second: Charlie observed that the view of technology in composition’s subfield of computers and composition has changed from an understanding of technology-as-efficiency to an understanding of technology-as-equalizer. Early theorists in computers and composition believed that word processing would make writing easier, that computers would help students to write better papers in less time. The enthusiasm for this view waned, and writing teachers began to focus more of their hopes on technology as furthering egalitarian ends, on computers as the tool that might help to remedy social inequalities in the classroom. We’ve moved from asking “How can computers make writing more efficient?” to asking “How can computers make writing more egalitarian?” In this same conversation, Charlie also again suggested that I need to consider whether I’m going to use my dissertation to ask, “How does class affect what students do in the wired writing classroom?” or to ask, “What do compositionists say about how class affects what students do in the wired writing classroom?” In other words, am I doing a literature study or classroom research? A possible answer: I think both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class; the former with the relationships of production, and the latter with relationships of privilege. And yet nobody in computers and composition ever talks about class. My research question, then, might be: how does the specter of class mobility hide behind and/or inform the discourse of computers and composition? How and why are people in the field avoiding explicit discussions of the very real ways in which concerns of class intersect with our ideals of efficiency and equality?

Sports Quiz

preterite Class (Cultural)

Doing the Friday Five thing, while other bloggers seem to like it, doesn’t feel like it would be useful to me. As far as this weblog goes, I’m kinda with Mark Bernstein: why write if I don’t have a reason? While I’ve expressed my motivations before — research weblog and all that, writing to figure things out, bla bla bla — it still sometimes feels so vague, muddled (I mean, just look at the categories, which I really, really need to overhaul; it’s like ‘class’ is my kitchen sink), nebulous, confused. Trying to pull all this disparate stuff together that keeps skating away, while I keep changing my perspective as I read. I don’t know how much this really applies, but it feels apt to the dissertating process, and it’s one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, so I thought it worth including here.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

(Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole.” From Sleeping with One Eye Open. New York: Knopf, 1964.)

But I was talking about the Friday Five, which I’m not going to do here. Instead, I hope you won’t mind if I offer in its spirit — since it often feels like a sort of abbreviated essay exam — a quick two-question quiz for discussion. Call it a Friday Two.

1. Name two sports you associate with the upper classes.

2. Name two sports you associate with the lower classes.

Yes, I’m using “upper” and “lower” as vague conveniences. Don’t think too long about your answers, please; a gut reaction is fine. We’ll discuss inside.
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Tastes Individual and Social

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic)

So I’ve been looking some at cultural tastes as markers of class. In my original taxonomy, I had lumped tastes and values together, but that may be inaccurate: tastes are linked to products, and so have an economic component, while I think values are less so. Wealth and income seem to me to be more material than tastes, and tastes more material than values. But I’m engaging in Cartesian dualism when I think this way, the same sort of dualism Wolff and Resnick pick up on when they point out that “In neoclassical theory, the achievement of a correspondence between producers’ selfish maximization of their own profits and consumers’ selfish maximization of their own preferences is also the achievement of a perfect harmony between physical and human nature, between scarcity and choice” (95).

On the material side, wages are the reward for or return on labor, and profits are the reward for or return on capital. But it seems odd to me how this inanimate entity of capital — whether in the shape of a factory or a check from a VC angel — can “produce” something. According to Wolff and Resnick, for the neoclassicals, “Wages and profits represent a balance between ‘scarcity’ . . . and ‘tastes’ . . . each individual gets back from society a quantum of wealth exactly proportionate to what each has contributed to society” (80). As I’ve noted before, I think this theory clearly doesn’t reflect reality, although it’s a wonderful way for the rich to feel good about themselves. In the free and open space of markets, the “sites of social interaction between existing owners and prospective buyers of wealth” (89) where “Individuals may offer and demand as much as they please of what they privately own and desire whether it be labor, capital, or commodities” (88), cash is instant karma.

There’s also the issue that while we historically valorize those individuals who hold the power of distinction, who have unique and individual taste and commodify their dissent because they know they’re different and they want us to know it too (such is the message of the foolish pedagogy enacted by Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society). But classes, by definition, are groups of people, and tastes have no meaning as markers of distinction except within a social network. Consider what Resnick and Wolff have to say in their description of what some critics of neoclassical economic theory say: “since neoclassical theory assumes that individuals are integral parts of society, the preferences of each must be affected by the complex economic and noneconomic actions of all the others. In a sense, that is precisely the basis on which such critics define the term ‘social’: to be a social being is to negate the possibility of having one’s choices ‘autonomously’ formed in society” (97).

Cat Class

preterite Cats, Class (Cultural)

The [no longer] last line in my “about” description, “I like cats,” is a bit of a private joke that may merit some explanation. Several years ago, I was taking a seminar called “Writing and Emerging Technologies” and working on a paper that talked about various generic qualities of Web pages when someone — it may have been me — made a reference to “I like cats” home pages. It seemed an apt description of those pages many of us in the seminar were familiar with: usually hosted on GeoCities or Tripod, #FF99CC or #CCCCFF background colors, white-haloed animated .gifs, various badges and hit-counters at the bottom, blink tags, lots of exclamation points, and lots of pictures of the page author’s cat in various poses, accompanied by descriptions of the cat’s activities, the page author’s favorite books and hobbies and other favorite things, all described in breathless prose. In this context, the declaration “I like cats” is a tool of rhetorical ethos: it positions the author in relation to two groups of people, those who like cats and those who don’t. (The male geek equivalent to the “I like cats” page that most of us in the seminar were familiar with was the “I like Pam Anderson and Deep Space Nine” page.) In using the phrase “I like cats” to describe these pages, there was an unfortunate rhetorical sneer, at least on my part. I was engaging in snobbery, constructing the “I like cats” authors as real life versions of Jean Teasdale. In that sense, for me, “I like cats” became a class marker.
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Class Mobility in the University

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Education

Minor change of plans today, in that I’m not in Adams Morgan but NoVa, King Street and St. Asaph; I’m meeting Jennifer in a couple hours here in Old Town for dinner. Lots of white shoppers carrying Gap and Banana Republic bags (the latter, being made of cream-colored paper rather than blue plastic, we all know to be more prestigious), wearing Claiborne or sometimes the now-less-ubiquitous ‘Crombie. Hot, muggy day.

My minor insight yesterday, however obvious it may have been, led me to think about how the interaction between economic and cultural understandings of class plays out in the university context. I made some overly facile distinctions about the concerns of the upper classes being less directly linked to the material, which I think are inaccurate, or at least not generally true.
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Cultural and Material Binaries

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic)

I’m a corporate stooge. A capitalist tool. But I’m staying on Capitol Hill and this Starbucks is a lot closer (3rd and Pennsylvania SE) than any of the free wireless hotspots I was able to find. I’ll see if I can get over to Tryst in Adams Morgan tomorrow; right now, Starbucks is pretty busy and I’ve got myself a window seat on busy Pennsylvania Avenue, so it’s pretty tempting not to type and just do some people-watching instead. Lots of pedestrian traffic, people heading to the day’s doings on the Mall, Marines from the 8th & I Street Barracks on their morning run, young Hill staffers with their t-shirts from out-of-state universities.

I’ve been thinking about the place of the quotidian in this weblog, given that I’ve constructed this as a research weblog, and given the tagline over at Hector Rottweiler Jr’s Weblog (which I unfortunately haven’t had time to look at today, since my connection here is crap). I get impatient with exclusively personal online journaling; the sites where the author tells the Web, “Here’s what I did today and here’s what happened to me LOL and here’s who I called and here’s what I did next LOL and here’s what I like and please buy me something from my Amazon wishlist and here’s what else I did. . .” and so on, although I’m sure they have their merits for their intended audiences. So I’m really uncomfortable that I might be perceived as engaging in similar navel-gazing self-indulgent blather.

However. I’ve been coming back again and again to the problems of presuming or suggesting that one has concerns that somehow don’t connect to the material world. I know I’m prone, in my intellectual habits, to give myself over quite easily to the easy abstractions of Theory without attempting to work out their real-world consequences. So maybe I’ll take license to continue to include stuff here that might be perceived as not exclusively academic by stating my strong agreement with the feminist axiom that the personal is political, and suggesting the corollary that the theoretical must be material.

We know, of course, that such binaries can be dangerously reductive, and that’s kind of what I’m on to today. I’ve been going on about cultural and economic markers of class and opposing them to one another, when the fact of the matter is that they’re never truly exclusive.
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Mobility and Falling

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Class (Other)

I haven’t left town yet — another hour or two before I get on the road — so I thought I’d get in one last post, since what I wrote yesterday was rather unfocused. (Although I have to say I was mightily proud of that godawful pun.) A few days ago, I cited Wolff and Resnick’s distinctions about the foundational assumptions of neoclassical and Marxian economic theories. Chris’s insightful comments on that post indicate to me that I need to think a little more about how those foundational assumptions affect students’ reasons for going to college. On the one hand, the Marxian focus on exploitation would lead me to view college as preparing students to take their proper places within the exploitative hierarchy, with the vocational and liberal education models putting students into the same relative places because class hierarchies in the base and the superstructure are roughly isomorphic. (No, I have absolutely zero support for this assertion. Fire away.) This is an understanding of class that simply feels much too monolithic to me. On the other hand, the neoclassical understanding of the student who always acts rationally and in her own best interests, in order to maximize the utility she receives from her work and life, feels far too rationalist and idealistic for me. People don’t always act in their own best interests, or even think about what they’re doing all the time.

So why do people go to college?
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The Distinctions of Complex Language

preterite Class (Cultural)

I should be thinking about Mankiw, I suppose, and the couple hundred pages of macroeconomics I’ve managed to skim through. I’m frustrated, though, because I’ve been following and participating in the discussion about complex language at Kairosnews and its branches elsewhere, and my voice is very much in the minority — as in, what feels like a minority of one.

The consistent thread that I find myself arguing against is the refrain, “Why can’t literary theorists use simpler language? Why does it have to be so difficult?” I’ve already disagreed, at Kairosnews, with the statement’s presumption that language is merely the dress of thought, to be changed plain or fancy at a whim, and I’m disappointed that — after asking twice — I’ve still not heard why people are happy to take English Studies to task for using challenging modes of expression, but would never dare to ask why the language of law, or economics, or theoretical physics has to be so difficult. Part of me suspects that it may, in fact, be class-bound: people see law, economics, and physics as “useful” professions, professions that do powerful work in the world; English and its associated studies are either pleasure reading or memoranda-writing.

I think of the often-told anecdote of the writer who is asked, “So when are you going to get a real job?” and its corollary in the cocktail-party response to the revelation that one is an English teacher: “Oh, I guess I’d better watch my grammar around you, ha-ha.” English, apparently, is the profession of self-indulgent providers of paperback entertainment and the world’s red-pen paper-checkers. I’m sorry: non serviam, motherfucker.
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