guns and butter for sleeping in the gutter
If I had to put together an introductory crash course grad seminar for compositionists interested in economics, here’s what the reading list might look like. (I’m particularly indebted to Julie Graham’s excellent Rethinking Economy seminar for pointing me to the sources in sections 4 and 5.)
Kelly Ritter, in the abstract to her June 2005 CCC article, “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition” (CCC 56:4 601-631), suggests that “the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale,” and that “such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites” (601). In this prefatory one-sentence abstract of Ritter’s article, there are things that immediately jump out at me. First, terms: note that “commodity” indicates an object with a certain exchange value, but that the modifier “for sale” indicates a monetary exchange value for the object. This distinction between exchange value and monetary exchange value is both hidden in and central to Ritter’s subsequent discussion of what she terms “economics.” Second, note the interrelationships already evident among the terms “economics,” “cultural,” and “academic.” In their treatments of socioeconomic class, such scholars as Ira Shor, James Berlin, Henry Giroux, and Lynn Bloom all perform a move similar to the one that Ritter performs in her article’s concluding recommendations: they name an economic (or, for Ritter, monetized) problem, and then suggest a cultural (for Ritter, non-monetized, or academic) solution. This is an all too common practice: to perceive some economic problem, but to also see the economy as beyond intervention, and so to suggest a remedy for the problem as action within an non-economic sphere. Bloom, in her (famous or notorious) articles on class, admits that inequality in wealth and income (i.e., monetary inequality) is what drives class distinction, and then recommends that students adopt and internalize certain cultural practices to remedy such inequality: society’s structural problems are internalized into identity politics. Ritter, in the conclusion of her article, strongly suggests that the internalization of identity politics is a viable (perhaps the only?) solution to our contemporary problems associated with plagiarism, digital reproducibility, and intellectual property.
I think there’s much of value in Ritter’s article, particularly — as others have noted — in her deployment of the distinguishing term “whole-text plagiarism,” and although I wish she’d done more with the excellent work of Rebecca Howard and Margaret Price, I found her extended and multifaceted treatment of authorship issues a helpful spur to the work I’m trying to do on student intellectual labor and intellectual property in the classroom in my dissertation’s fourth chapter. But, as is likely already clear, I’m coming from a very different perspective on what Ritter calls “economics,” and so I’ll here try to be as respectful as possible in pointing out why I think Ritter’s perspective on property, labor, and economics is somewhat limiting.
Margaret coined the name for this dance, but she never showed me the moves. So I finally worked out the steps on my own, and I’m glad to share them here for your use, whenever you’re next at the club. As should be evident from the name, it’s a dance best done to slow, angsty, navel-gazing music.
The Dissertation Flail
And there you have it: eight bars of Terpsichorean glory. Dance, monkey, dance!
OK, so the conceit of yesterday’s post — framing my working-through of Bourdieu in the context of my theatre example — was overdone and silly. I’m trying to make this dissertation stuff interesting — really, I am — but I should probably listen to the advice several people have offered: the only people you have to write the dissertation for are the three members of your committee. But isn’t that just a horribly depressing idea? Doesn’t that work against my whole rationale for bringing blogging into the writing classroom in order to make writing matter more? I know the advice is meant to be a relief, a way to deflate a dissertator’s narcissistic and self-important anxiety — but it also makes me say: well then why bother? If I were to use the same logic with my students, I’d tell them: you’re not really learning anything here. You’re just going through the motions for a grade.
Anyway.
In the faint and narcissistic hope that it might be of interest to somebody other than my committee: where Williams traces a classed history of the social trends of ideas in English literature, Bourdieu uses a massive ethnography of French society to compose a general theory of the individual’s relationship to class and culture. According to Bourdieu, taste “functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place’, guiding the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position. It implies a practical anticipation of what the social meaning and value of the chosen practice or thing will probably be, given their distribution in social space and the practical knowledge the other agents have of the correspondence between goods and groups” (466-467). Again, class is relational, and performed as an experiential process linking multivariate individual subjectivities to overdetermined objective social structures. In describing the difficulty of defining class, Bourdieu notes “the fuzziness inherent in all practical logics,” but adds, as well, the complicating factor that “people’s image of the classification is a function of their position within it” (473). In that last assertion, we see not only a prefiguring of Linda Brodkey’s remarks on class narcissism (and an echo of Marx’s remark that “men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; every thing speaks to them of themselves”), but also the clearest indication in Bourdieu’s work of a rationale for the movement from a mass definition of class to an individuated definition of class.
New York City. Broadway tickets and dinner. What do you want to see? Where to eat? Before or after? What to wear?
I’m sure it classes me, in this post, to have vegetables before dessert. I’m afraid that, as always, I’ll talk too much, though never during the performance. And, yeah, I brought a book with me. No, honest: it was just to read on the subway. Really.
Oh, c’mon. No, what have you been up to?
The book? Well, yeah, I’m enjoying it, but it’s kinda dry.
About?
Class, I guess. Class and culture. Performance. Cultural difference.
Where’s that waiter?
In my dissertation’s Chapter 2, I survey composition’s broad and self-interested array of class definitions. Chapter 3 is centered around adding one more perspective on class that we don’t see much in composition: Bourdieu’s. For Bourdieu, class is overdetermined, performative, relational, and historical, and I want to argue that these four descriptors are ones that composition can ill afford to ignore, for reasons that will be apparent by the end of this post. I know I’ve recently had a lot to say about Bourdieu, but today I’m going to take a step back and take a look at Raymond Williams in order to try to set up the theoretical synthesis that I see as driving Chapter 3.
So I’ll start with some givens: first, industrial capitalism is a relatively new phenomenon. (If you were to ask me what the single most culturally significant event of the year 1776 was, my answer would be Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations.) Second, as Marx, Williams, and many others have noted, industrial capitalism facilitates the maintenance of human divisions of classes. There is no hierarchical structure of class domination: rather, domination exists, but it is enacted as a relational process. (This is, in Distinction, Bourdieu’s fundamental insight.) Williams, like Bourdieu, sees class as overdetermined, so I’d like to return to his concerns briefly and lay some groundwork for a future further class analysis based on Bourdieu’s work. Basically, Williams traces the literary changes in the meaning of the word “culture” and argues that “the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy, and class, in their own way, represent” (Culture xiii, emphasis in original). Williams analyzes in detail the way changes wrought in culture reflect technological, economic, and societal change, asserting in Marxism and Literature that “the recognition of literature as a specializing social and historical category” stands as
decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language. Within its terms, work of outstanding and permanent importance was done, in specific social and cultural relationships. But what has been happening, in our own century, is a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with changes in the basic means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies of language, which have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print. The principal changes are the electronic transmission and recording of speech and of writing for speech, and the chemical and electronic and composition and transmission of images, in complex relations with speech and with writing for speech, and including images which can themselves be written. None of these means cancels print, or even diminishes its specific importance, but they are not simple additions to it, or mere alternatives. In their complex connections and interrelations they compose a new substantial practice in social language itself […]. For they are always more than new technologies, in the limited sense. They are means of production, developed in direct if complex relationships with profoundly changing and extending social and cultural relationships: changes elsewhere recognizable as deep political and economic transformations. (53-54, emphasis in original)
Much of this is familiar to technorhetoricians, those of us who deal with the intersection of writing instruction with digital technologies — but what Williams introduces is a twofold attention: first, to the means of production (both economic and cultural), and second, to technological anti-essentialist overdetermination. As Williams puts it, “The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished […]. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation. […] For, even if the economic element is determining, it determines a whole way of life” (280-281). In other words, the interplay of industry, technology, art, and democracy in conjunction with economy allow one to examine the result of that interplay in what Williams calls “culture.” This studied and complicated interplay is what Gibson-Graham describes as “the anti-essentialist presumption of overdetermination” (16), which “involves an understanding of identities as continually and differentially constituted rather than as pre-existing their contexts or as having an invariant core” (16).
Because I’m defining class as the overdetermined space of articulation between economy and culture, a train of necessary arguments follows: if economic change is overdetermined, having a diverse and varied core (Gibson-Graham’s point), then I must argue as well that changes in class relations — and class itself — are overdetermined, which is the unavoidable implication of the views of Williams on changes in class, and of the views of Bourdieu on class position. As the Post-Autistic Economics movement argues, we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing microeconomic change solely to change in the tastes and values of individuals, and we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing macroeconomic change to simple fluctuations in supply and demand. Williams makes the historical observation that “In industry, there was the first rejection, alike of machine-production and of the social relations embodied in the factory system. This was succeeeded by a phase of growing sentiment against the machine, as such, in isolation. Thirdly, in our own period, machine production came to be accepted, and major emphasis transferred to the problem of social relations within an industrial system of production” (Williams 296). We’ve of course seen a similar series of reactions today (consider the changing social status of the computer geek over the past twenty-five years, and the evolution of representations of computers starting with HAL 9000 and the WarGames WOPR), and Williams suggests that similar changes were taking place in the nineteenth century, leading to what he describes as a world of “mass democracy” and “mass communication” (269).
The recent insightful comment Bill made about ironic consumption — about consumption understood not as straightforward keeping-up-with-the-Joneses but as camp, queered, kitsch — got me thinking. The back-and-forth I’ve been doing between and among Bourdieu, Williams, and Gibson-Graham for my Chapter 3 in an attempt to put together a workable theory of class, economy, and composition is pretty technical, so maybe here I can do a non-technical short version and just try and talk it out.
Using, er, beer.
See, Bill’s remarks on ironic consumption made me immediately think about the class history of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and how it was recently ironically adopted by at-the-time-trucker-hat-wearing hipsters as a mark of cultural distinction. And that got me thinking about the temporal Z axis of Bourdieu’s space of symbolic capital — no, wait, please don’t run away; this is actually really easy! And I promise I’ll get right back to the beer (and wine too) in just a minute. Bear with me, OK?
See, Bourdieu uses a geometric metaphor to describe the positions of value of various aspects of culture in a three-dimensional space. The two-dimensional map is self-explanatory: distinctions of cultural value are made on the up-down Y axis of total volume of capital, and on the left-right X axis of composition of capital, with more cultural capital being at the left end, and more economic capital being at the right end. So if Shakespeare is more elite than Stephen King, and is also more culturally elite than economically elite, then it’ll be up and to the left of Stephen King on that two-dimensional map. (Keep in mind this is all based on human valuation; the perception of a thing’s worth within that space.)
You’re with me so far?
Thing is, Bourdieu adds a third dimension to that X-Y axis: he makes the plane into a space, the square into a cube, area into volume. The Z axis, the front-back complement to up-down Y and left-right X, is capital trajectory, its direction or change over time. For our purposes, let’s call the back end the past and the front end the future, with the zero coordinate being any present (synchronic) moment of analysis.
What I’m interested in here, for its explanatory power, is the way that Pabst Blue Ribbon beer changes its position on the XY plane as we move from past to future.
So let’s think about some beer history: we know that in the first half of the twentieth century, Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR for short) was one of the first beers to be made available in cans. During World War II, those cans were made in olive drab green and shipped overseas to troops. What that resulted in was a mass, non-elite taste for PBR developed among GIs. However, one might imagine that sets of contradictory tastes evolved in the postwar period, with the phenomenon of returning GIs having been exposed to a European taste for wine coupled to the immense expansion of the middle class thanks to the GI Bill and the boom in higher education leading to a change in the cultural valuation of PBR. This change may have been first evident in the 1960s deployment of the celebratory testimony of class allegiance, “Red neck, white socks, and Pabst Blue Ribbon!” One need look only to David Allan Coe’s 1976 declaration that his long hair just couldn’t cover up his red neck to see the ultimate end of that change: PBR lost capital overall, sinking on the Y axis, and in its increasing alignment with the working class lost the cultural capital of distinction, as well, moving down and to the right in Bourdieu’s space as it moved from back to front. (There’s an obvious problem here: Bourdieu’s model of the inverse relation between culture and economy in terms of capital doesn’t seem to quite apply to American culture. This may, however, say more about elitism and American class relationships than it says about shortcomings of Bourdieu’s theoretical model.)
Ten years after David Allan Coe’s song, however, an interesting thing happened: counterculture icon Dennis Hopper was heard to spout the praises of Pabst Blue Ribbon in David Lynch’s (at the time) art-house film Blue Velvet. Hopper’s PBR quotations were sampled and recycled into songs by such 1980s and 1990s avant-gardists as Skinny Puppy and Mr. Bungle, to the point where drinking PBR — perhaps in part due to its cheapness but also because of the generational associations made by David Lynch — became an in-joke among hipsters, something to drink to be funny and witty and to display one’s ironic cultural affiliations. In other words, in between 1986 and today (i.e., as we move forward on the Z axis of the space of symbolic capital), drinking PBR has moved back to the left on the X axis, and perhaps even moved slightly upwards on the Y axis. But only, as Bill’s comment implies, for certain people. Trucker-hat-wearing hipsters drink PBR slightly differently from how my Uncle Stanley drinks it, and the difference is entirely contained within cultural and class valuation and difference — but is also, to a degree, generational; a result of changes over time. For hipsters, the act of drinking PBR is an ironically classed cultural performance. For Uncle Stanley, it’s a straightforward but still self-consciously classed act of classed cultural performance: in other words, it stands in relation to a past different from that of the hipster. Time itself — the Z axis — is, necessarily, a space of class difference.
And I think you can do this Bourdieu-style class analysis with just about anything. I mean, if we’re going to go way up on the scale, look at, say, a Joseph Drouhin Montrachet Grand Cru, with massive overall capital volume. In the first part of the twentieth century, it’s at the top of the Y axis, the best Chardonnay out of all of them, and so probably near the zero point of the X axis as well, simultaneously super-expensive and culturally distinct — but then there’s the massive explosion of artisanal wineries, and the explosion in the American acceptance of French table wines that goes along with the radical expansion of the American middle class, and the radical increase in cultural choice and distinction among wines. “Wine” as a category of distinction itself radically expands — and perhaps the Drouhin Montrachet Grand Cru loses some cultural ground as the expanding wine-drinking public says, “Look! I’ve found another vineyard that’s really quite excellent!”
Vintners in Australia and California gain ground, only to face a cultural backlash from old-school wine critics who want to maintain the existence of some sort — any sort — of elite, and so maintain their positions as arbiters of taste. Coupled to this, one sees the variation in vintages (1992 was a good year, 1991 less so), so — compared to Pabst Blue Ribbon — the Z-axis trajectory of Joseph Drouhin Montrachet Grand Cru is all over the XY map from year to year.
There are political dimensions, as well, of course, which make for even more interesting complications, as with the American political right-wing characterization of the American political left as wine-swilling elites. Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric who received a $200 million severance package, rather famously declared himself to be middle-class because he drinks beer.
So one must wonder: is it Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jack?
And is it ironic?
I’m going to ask you for your help here.
Bourdieu contends that class is structured as a space of “symbolic capital,” which itself is constructed by and in individuals out of three different types of capital: economic (meaning, in his terminology, financial), social (networks and relationships of acquaintance among people), and cultural (tastes, values, knowledge, skills, customs, practices). In Distinction, he argues that the multidimensional space of symbolic capital is structured along three axes: volume of capital, composition of capital, and trajectory of capital. He offers several diagrams (see pages 128-129, 262, 340, 343, inter alia) that map two dimensions of social space in order to help explain the class correspondences he sees in French culture. These maps are essentially Cartesian in nature, with the X axis representing composition of capital (more cultural capital and less economic capital on the left; less cultural capital and more economic capital on the right) and the Y axis representing overall volume of capital (more at the top, less at the bottom).
Figure 1
He then populates the diagrams with aspects of culture in France: Kafka, flea markets, the Firebird Suite, and frozen food in the upper left quadrant; beer, potatoes, Brigitte Bardot, and farm laborers in the lower right. (Keep in mind: the ethnographic research here was conducted long ago, and in another country.)
Figure 2
It sounds silly at first, certainly, but when you read Bourdieu’s analysis, it starts to seem quite compelling. So: I’m going to make a few more points below the fold, but my big point in this post is to ask you, reader, for your help. I’d like to perform the same sort of mapping Bourdieu does, only with American class and culture, and I hope you might suggest some aspects of American culture — with their corresponding Cartesian co-ordinates — in the comments.
If you’d like to join in the fun (or, less likely, if you’re interested in my dissertation-oriented further comments on Bourdieu and the intersection of his work with that of Raymond Williams), please, read on.
In Bourdieu’s Distinction, one way class inequality gets expressed is in the dominant classes’ distancing themselves from acknowledging the materiality of life. The judgement of distinction is a privileging of the abstract and the idealized and the rarefied and the immaterial; small portions over large portions; classical over jazz over pop. The more capital one possesses, the less one is affected by the quotidian concerns of the material world, and so one attempts to demonstrate one’s superior class position by enacting and performing that distance. The converse is also true: note the emphasis “vulgar” art — including musical forms like country, gangsta rap, and bluegrass — place on authenticity, on “keeping it real,” on the representation of the materiality of everyday lived experience. This trend, of course, is also highly visible in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, particularly in his analyses of Coleridge, Carlyle, and (very much) Matthew Arnold.
In the Industrial Revolution of Williams’s analysis, technological advance was one of the chief driving factors of economic advance, and I’m arguing that much the same is true today. Steam, railroads, telegraphs, electricity: the emergence of these technologies produced immense and immensely unequal economic growth, just as the emergence of newer technologies has done today, and while the twentieth century’s division of labor led to a staggering increase in the volume of class positions, the class positions at the top are moving further and further away from the class positions at the bottom. But the core of the argument Williams makes is that economic changes, in confluence with changes in such factors as art and democracy, produced radical change in our understandings of class and culture: this is no mere techno-economic determinism. I’m saying much the same thing, although some of the other changes in causal factors Williams might note today include things like globalization, the post-ironic aesthetic, ethnic nationalism, and the conflict between energy consumption and environmentalism. My scope is considerably more narrow: I’m simply looking at the way certain (rather than all) factors — technology, economy — are helping to drive change in our understanding of class and its relationship to a certain aspect of culture: namely, the practice and instruction of literacy.
My attorney and I went to see Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory today, and we enjoyed it immensely. Like Bill, I totally saw the Michael Jackson connection; Bill’s thoughts on the implications of Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka being “repelled by the very notion of nuclear family” are well worth a read. And like Bill, I totally loved the songs. Missi Pyle as Mrs. Beauregarde was fantastic, as was Johnny Depp, who did a fine job of displaying the misanthropic — and at times downright sadistic — tendencies evident throughout Dahl’s body of work. And the movie is simultaneously gorgeous and hallucinatory, and very, very funny.
What really interested me, though, was Dorothea Salo’s fine and productive reading of the movie as being “about labor, abuse thereof.” She’s totally, totally right, and if you don’t want to know any more about the movie, please don’t read any further: no major spoilers, but there are some minor revelations about the movie’s content.
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