Frank says to critics: class dismissed!
Crooked Timber links to Larry Bartels's critique of Thomas Frank and Frank's retort: class dismissed!
I'm reposting my own contribution on what is working class - is it income, is it self-definition? Can we rely on statistics and polling or the methods of social science to perform this phase of class analysis? A resounding no! Can we rely on Deleuzian/Hardtian celebrations of the creativity of the multitude? No again! Here it is -- straight from the hip -- this IS part of the book I'm working on:
I'll take a stab at the definition of working class from the point of view of cultural capital and its emergence in the 19th century as the "possession" of a newly dominant class of the bourgeoisie who defined themselves as superior to both the proletariat and the petit bourgeois because they had an organic that is familial relation with "high" culture. Of course this was a European innovation.
But then the socially progressive elites of the US decided as well to adopt division of culture into high and low (see Lawrence Levine on this): from Jane Addams (who thought that teaching handicrafts to workers would make them prouder of their station in life) to Frederick Law Olmsted (who wanted to teach the rabble of New York City to enjoy Central Park without spitting and gambling and hiring prostitutes -- so he actually created a new police space in the center of the city), progressives took up high culture as an instrument to educate the poor and immigrant classes, or those most explicitly exploited by massive industrialization.
This is at the root of American working class suspicion of cultural elites -- and the working class relationship to culture is not one of puritanical uplift -- either through symphony or museum attendance, or New Ageism, but rather one that is more unabashedly indulgent in the remnants of folk spectacle, even if industrialized (which is often identified as kitsch) -- so NASCAR, excessive Xmas lights, the Crystal Cathedral, professional sports are "working class" even if their participants make a lot more money that your average University professor who has more cultural capital, but less income on her W-2 form at the end of the year.
Thus, Frank's definition of working class as a mode of consumption would obtain here -- this is the stage of late capitalism that we have reached in these United States --class status is not self-defined as it defined by modes of consumption. Any strategist on the Left will be left helpless if she doesn't deal with this.
Now the ruling elite in the US has become more and more explicitly philistine in order to reach out to the discontentment of the culturally marginal -- this is perhaps the ultimate achievement of of post-modernism's overturning of high/low divisions.
I'm reposting my own contribution on what is working class - is it income, is it self-definition? Can we rely on statistics and polling or the methods of social science to perform this phase of class analysis? A resounding no! Can we rely on Deleuzian/Hardtian celebrations of the creativity of the multitude? No again! Here it is -- straight from the hip -- this IS part of the book I'm working on:
I'll take a stab at the definition of working class from the point of view of cultural capital and its emergence in the 19th century as the "possession" of a newly dominant class of the bourgeoisie who defined themselves as superior to both the proletariat and the petit bourgeois because they had an organic that is familial relation with "high" culture. Of course this was a European innovation.
But then the socially progressive elites of the US decided as well to adopt division of culture into high and low (see Lawrence Levine on this): from Jane Addams (who thought that teaching handicrafts to workers would make them prouder of their station in life) to Frederick Law Olmsted (who wanted to teach the rabble of New York City to enjoy Central Park without spitting and gambling and hiring prostitutes -- so he actually created a new police space in the center of the city), progressives took up high culture as an instrument to educate the poor and immigrant classes, or those most explicitly exploited by massive industrialization.
This is at the root of American working class suspicion of cultural elites -- and the working class relationship to culture is not one of puritanical uplift -- either through symphony or museum attendance, or New Ageism, but rather one that is more unabashedly indulgent in the remnants of folk spectacle, even if industrialized (which is often identified as kitsch) -- so NASCAR, excessive Xmas lights, the Crystal Cathedral, professional sports are "working class" even if their participants make a lot more money that your average University professor who has more cultural capital, but less income on her W-2 form at the end of the year.
Thus, Frank's definition of working class as a mode of consumption would obtain here -- this is the stage of late capitalism that we have reached in these United States --class status is not self-defined as it defined by modes of consumption. Any strategist on the Left will be left helpless if she doesn't deal with this.
Now the ruling elite in the US has become more and more explicitly philistine in order to reach out to the discontentment of the culturally marginal -- this is perhaps the ultimate achievement of of post-modernism's overturning of high/low divisions.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home