Class (Meta)

Gold Mine

preterite Class (Meta)

Via the comments at Languagehat, I’ve stumbled across a gold mine of a resource for my understanding of the multiplicitous American class system. Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s weblog Making Light has an entry on “House, home, and demographic facts” featuring links to the amazingly detailed demographic breakdowns by zip code at MSN House & Home’s Neighborhood Finder: wealth, income, culture, consumptive habits, all according to Tetrad’s sixty-odd Prizm segments. I’ll have to take a closer look, because the Prizm site doesn’t offer the consumptive habits that MSN’s site features, and that I find so interesting: I’m wondering to what degree it’s based on the government census data prominently advertised on the Prizm site. One of the commenters on the Making Light thread mentions the “iMark database”, which I wonder if I might be able to get to via the university library (a quick try says no, but I’ll ask the reference librarian tomorrow, and also see what Charlie might suggest). A couple of the commenters there also question the accuracy of how well the classes fit the zip codes, which I’m not nearly as interested in as I am in the classificatory system itself. Teresa, Languagehat — y’all have made my evening. Thanks.

Seitz: Class Analysis Part 2

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory

(Continued from yesterday’s post.)

Seitz wraps up his discussion of Diana and Mike with a careful and complex analysis of the contradictory nature of classed impulses towards solidarity and individualism, suggesting that “middle-class” students often value “social mobility” via “individual prestige” whereas “working-class” students “reject their more status-conscious classmates” and “seek economic mobility while rejecting, or remaining ambivalent to, social mobility” and in such actions practice a sort of “class solidarity” (70, 71). So we see again the potential for differential movement along the social and economic vectors of class, and — recursively — class differences in terms of values relating to that class movement.
Read more

Seitz: Class Analysis Part 1

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory

David Seitz’s essay details the results of his classroom study at the University of Illinois at Chicago of “how students from working-class backgrounds” in a “research paper course” (66) react to some of the agendas of so-called “critical pedagogies” as enacted in the field of composition. “Critical pedagogy” as Seitz uses the term seems to extend beyond Paulo Freire’s Christian Marxist (and Gramsci-influenced) philosophy of education as an always political tool for rational human subjects to understand their own oppression and through individual and collective critical praxis overcome that state of oppression and move to an ongoing process of liberatory action, and incorporate elements of poststructuralist theories about the positioning power of language, Derridean theories of difference, and first-generation Frankfurt School critiques of “mass culture”, bourgeois ideology, and alienated labor: in other words, Seitz’s “critical pedagogy” is an odd mishmash of influences that seems to know that it is critical of something but it isn’t quite sure what, and it’s never quite clear from what position the critique is being made. (And Mike pulls off yet another horribly subordinated sentence, without having read Cicero in months: apologies for all those nested clauses there.) That said, Seitz does do a good job of starting to unravel some of the strands of class twined and knotted together on both sides — teacher/academic (conflation Seitz’s) and student — of his study, though the analysis is strongest when it focuses on students, and shows some blind spots when he looks at the vague class positions he assigns to teacher/academics.
Read more

John Romero’s Revenge

preterite Class (Meta), Metadissertating

With the skimming of my last two introduction to sociology texts tonight, I’ve finished the first major chunk of my summer reading list, the basic or foundational materials. Done with Level I, I guess. (I feel like I should get some kind of message scrolling across the text editor for this, or something: “Now that you have conquered the Dimension of the Doomed, realm of earth magic, you are ready to complete your task.” Where’s my powerup?) The last two texts were Sherman and Wood’s 1979 Sociology: Traditional and Radical Perspectives (emphasis on the radical, here: these guys would make Anne Coulter do the Linda Blair 360) and Gelles and Levine’s 1999 Sociology: An Introduction (Sixth Edition). I feel kinda dorky reading the super-simple stuff, but I think my original impulse — grounding the all-over-the-place discourse of composition on class with some concepts from folks (economists and sociologists) who actually study it with consistency and rigor — was a good idea; I definitely gave myself some context, and charted for myself what seem to be the main (and often unexplored, by my discipline) avenues of examination. So: a few things from tonight’s reading.
Read more

All the Classies and Ranks of Vanitie

preterite Class (Meta)

The Tutor, in his comments, wants to know how I define class, where I see the class lines break. (And yet he uses the word “genteel”! So much in a single word! I know someone who knows someone who says she lives in “genteel poverty” as an adjunct instructor. What class are the “genteel”?) But back to the question: who’s in what class, the Tutor demands. Wants to know how what sense I make of the term. “Get over it,” he says. “Monolithic,” he says. Depends on whose definition you’re talking about, Dear Tutor. You use the word “monolithic,” I reply: that sense of class is all yours.

But he’s right to call me out, really. Lots of readings and attempts at syntheses; very little new ground broken. The Tutor rattles off a string of names, to which I won’t respond in this post, for reasons that should soon become obvious. An initial reply, though, and one again not my own, but gotten third- or fourth-hand: America, and the world perhaps, needs a new class.
Read more

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.
Read more

Easy Sociological Readings

preterite Class (Meta)

I’m skimming through a few sections on class in Peter Worsley’s Introducing Sociology, and from there I’ll move on to a couple other basic texts. Shouldn’t take me more than three or four days; there are very few surprises here. Worsley makes the familiar observation that this thing called class has vectors of wealth, power, and status, which leads me to realize that I’ve talked about wealth and status but not much about power, and in fact concerns of power are much closer to my motivations for researching class and seeing how it affects students in the wired writing classroom: I’m less interested in students having more wealth and/or status than I am in them having political power. So Worsley helps me slightly refine my understanding of my own motivations, at least, in a sort of Mr. Obvious way.

Some other ruminations come out of this understanding: the plutocracy that is the United States Congress indicates that “work,” for the very wealthy, often becomes “leading.” The salary a Senator earns is rather small when compared to the average net worth of a Senator, and that net worth is often how the Senator got into office. Still, Americans often see salary as an important marker of class, and so they look at a Senator’s salary and say, “See? She’s a public servant; she’s not really making that much more money than we are.” (Actually, this is a case where my privileging of the feminine pronoun is misguided: the boys are the ones with the big bucks here.) The work of “leadership” actually does make members of America’s owning classes into members of America’s ruling class. And once they’re in office, we focus on what they do as leaders, not what they’re worth, and thereby hide from ourselves the armature of wealth’s political interests.

One last insight, that I think Worsley is sort of deriving from Marx: for our contemporary understanding, the upper class and the working class are functioning primarily as economic categories rather than as historical formations (317). At the same time, Worsley says, “social classes. . . exhibit common patterns of behavior” (317), and in such a way function as something more than just categories: they possess class consciousness.

Time for bed.

Finishing Wolff and Resnick

preterite Class (Economic), Class (Marxian), Class (Meta), Education

Some useful clarifications from the last bit of Wolff and Resnick. I wondered recently who the capitalists were; here’s my answer: “In modern capitalist enterprises, called ‘corporations’ for historical reasons, the role of capitalist is played by a group numbering typically between 9 and 20 individuals: the board of directors” (211). Interesting that our universities have similar boards who meet on a similar quarterly basis, but the objection might be that the university (at least the public institution where I am, and where many composition programs are: as pointed out before, elite private institutions often don’t have first-year writing requirements) isn’t yet a corporation harvesting surplus labor. But I think there’s still something to be said for the construction of education as commodity, especially give the insightful discussions about instructor exploitation (streamlining the workplace, harvesting surplus value from academic or so-called “immaterial” labor) at Invisible Adjunct.
Read more

Different Ladders

preterite Class (Meta)

“Productive capitalists are those individuals who obtain surplus value (expand their capital) by appropriating surplus labor in the capitalist fundamental class process. Unproductive capitalists expand their capital by means of certain nonclass processes — processes other than surplus labor appropriation, such as lending at interest, merchanting, and renting property” (Wolff and Resnick 165). So, according to Wolff and Resnick, there are different classes of capitalists, and the class structure is not strictly hierarchical. This, again, seems closer to Bourdieu’s view, and an important insight. Despite my asseverations regarding the ways in which class markers can move independently of one another, on the whole I’ve been using the convenient assumption that class markers flock together: if you’re rich, you probably also have certain tastes.
Read more

Complications

preterite Class (Meta), Metadissertating

I’m realizing that my initial goal for the dissertation — to examine how the socioeconomic class of students interacts with their experience in the wired writing classroom, probably focusing most on the writing itself — may be impossible. The reason is that class is a system that can’t be isolated just to students. Rather, the students in any wired classroom exist in a web of relations much like the one Bourdieu details in Distinction, one involving a multitude of overlapping factors and influences.
Read more