Looks like I’ll be in NYC this spring, and among fine company, judging by the rhet-comp blogosphere’s activity today. I submitted an individual CCCC proposal for the first time since 2000, and I’ve been placed into a panel titled “Capitalism, Commodification, and Consumerism,” so I’m definitely eager to see who I’ll be presenting with. And happy and grateful, as always, to have the opportunity to share what I’m working on.

My presentation’s current title is “Identity as Economic Activity: Representing Class from the Wealth of Nations to the Wealth of Networks.” I’m planning to do things differently this year: I’ll try to write it as a journal article first, and then condense it down to presentation length in order to (I hope) get some helpful feedback before sending it out.

Abstract follows, for those who might be interested.

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A few weeks ago, Bill asked in a great post about poetics, rhetoric, and the logic of affect, “Is a ‘working-class rhetoric’ even possible?” I’d like to see more from Bill in this vein, partly because I’m not entirely comfortable with the implicit parallel I (perhaps mistakenly) infer from Bill’s post between poetics versus rhetorics and working class versus middle class (that seems to be hinted at in a heart-versus-head way in Julie Lindquist’s recent College English piece, as well), but largely because I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, especially the statements that “Our culture doesn’t have a vocabulary for having non-fiction discussions about class status. We lack terms with agreed-upon meanings. Statements about class (especially working-class) status are politically divisive, perpetually contested.”

We learn from Raymond Williams that class distinctions are inherently contradictory: the working class is characterized by its activity, while the middle class is characterized by its position. Yet there is a rhetoric of the working class academic, a status-claim performed in books, articles, listservs, and conferences.

I can’t perform that status-claim. I am not a member of the working class.

In saying that, I am not suggesting such claims are wrong or misguided. I am in no way trying to perform the rationalization of economic inequality in self-indulgent praise of the inherent moral superiority of the middle class that one prominent scholar in my discipline has deemed necessary. I am not attempting to indict the admirable scholarly work in such excellent volumes as This Fine Place So Far from Home and Coming to Class. I’m just saying: I can’t claim that. I won’t claim that. And I don’t want to claim that.

Why not? I’ve still got my Class A Commercial Driver’s License. I can still drive the biggest rigs and biggest loads out there. I hauled 72 tons plenty of times, and that’s bigger than most peoples’ houses. I worked construction as a teenager and temped in my 20s. I went into the regular Army as an enlisted trucker, and came out Sergeant Edwards. With a cross wrench, I can change a tire faster than anybody you know (well, OK, except for maybe Rob) outside of NASCAR. And I wouldn’t be finishing my PhD right now if I hadn’t had the Army’s GI Bill.

But I’m not working class.

And it’s obvious, from Raymond Williams, why not. The working class is defined, synchronically, by its activity. What it does. According to such a synchronic definition, I’m a teacher and a scholar; a professional; a member of the professional class. Position is diachronic. Where one stands, culturally, is not about the now of activity but about the history of position. Claims of working status are placed in the present — as I think they should be, since studies of class are inescapably political and aimed at remedying contemporary inequalities — while positional claims are necessarily based upon a historical foundation.

In other words: I’m not a working class academic because I’m an academic. And my commitment to political change is based on that awareness of difference. For me, to claim working class status would be to endorse an inherently conservative position, a position that privileges and celebrates a cultural identity rooted in the past, rather than to pay attention to my own labor and the classroom labor of my students. And I refuse to misname my own work, because I refuse to misname the work of my students. Economic change isn’t about who we’ve been: it’s about what we do.

I am not working class. We work.

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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Karl Marx, in his early (1845-46) manuscript The German Ideology, argues that “The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production musst not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (150). Am I reading this correctly, in understanding that Marx’s argument is that economic activity produces individual subjectivity? In understanding that, essentially, how you labor determines who you are?
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My mind’s racing. I wrote on Monday about the Mondragón cooperative experiment; we talked about Mondragón today in the Rethinking Economy seminar I’m taking, and the insights came in a rush at the end. Part of the reason Mondragón is so remarkable, as I noted Monday, is its sheer scale: it demonstrates that cooperatives need not be small and timorously idealistic projects, with their practices always limited in scale, and often limited to labor-intensive rather than capital intensive processes. It demonstrates that cooperatives can compete.

The doubter in me says: so what? It’s not like that affects you or your practices. But it does.
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I think I should start keeping track of how many times I say “I’m not a Marxist.” Or even a Marxian. (Which is a word I can’t look at without thinking of Marvin.)

Because it’s really weird how hard I have to try to keep orienting my own theoretical perspective on economic issues in order to acknowledge that — although capitalism sometimes does bad things to people– we still expect ourselves to take it for granted, as an incontrovertible fact of our lives.

Democracy is the same way: it can do bad things to the minority, but we don’t want to admit it; we want to reassure ourselves that it’s great for everybody. Even the small groups of people who are ill-served by it. We seldom talk about it, but when we do we refer to it as the tyranny of the majority. In a true freewheeling radical democracy that incorporates the rules of capitalist competition, everyone looks out for their own interests, and the group with the lowest numbers loses. If enough conservatives are worried that queer Americans represent a threat to their ways of life, then conservatives vote to deprive those queer Americans of various rights: such is the tyranny of the majority. (Conservative rhetorics often invoke metaphors of the holocaust — as Terry Gross was stunned by on NPR the other night — or the civil rights movement — as John Lovas has recently pointed out — in order to represent the privileged as victims. Does your heart not bleed for the wealthy?)

What I’m trying to say is that it seems to me that the name for any critique of capitalism has become “Marxism”, and that such a label has been used quite well by those that benefit from capitalism as a smear term for the perspective of any who might speak against them. I wish there were more than one term for a critique of the injuries (and their concomitant framework) associated with capitalism.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio.

Some brief thoughts on Gibson-Graham, Wolff & Resnick’s “Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame” to their edited collection Class and Its Others before I go to bed. First, they usefully point out that “the language of class is inevitably performative — it participates in transforming economic and other social relations” (2), a poststructuralist insight which helps me in seeing how the discourse of class continually makes and re-makes its own hierarchies, perhaps even within Bourdieu’s relational space. But they also make a distinction between two different types of “discourse of class”, one being “the familiar and widespread sense of social distinction” and the other being “the more restricted economic sense first systematically expounded by Marx” (2), and then proceed to shoot at that “familiar and widespread” definition, arguing that class cannot “be seen as ordained by or founded on positions in a larger social structure or as constituting social groups (classes) unified by commonalties of power, property, consciousness,” or other factors (9). The problem is, though, that they’re setting up this “a priori social structure” (9) as a straw man, something already existing, when the fact of the matter — as already discussed above — is that it gets enacted every day.
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I’ve been a little uncomfortable about my last couple of posts. Part of the reason for my discomfort is that, on the first day of class when I’m doing the getting-to-know-you stuff with a computer lab full of first-year student writers, I usually like to give my name and identify as a feminist and a veteran. It pleases me to hope that such an introduction might give some students a moment of pause — to think that a male whose job title was at one time “Sergeant” can occupy what they might see as a self-contradictory political position by their definition of feminism. (See Alas, a blog’s excellent discussions of definitions of feminism, which I think I got to via Michelle or Amanda but I can’t find the relevant post.) Of course, I’m aware of how much easier it often is for a male academic to identify as a feminist (the student thinks, Oh, he’s cool, or at least less un-cool) than for a female academic (the student thinks, Oh, another ball-buster), and I’m also aware that I’m perpetuating all kinds of essentialisms here, but the hope is that students of the sort described at Alas, a blog might realize that feminist does not equal grim man-hating harridan.

Brief aside: I overheard one of my students several semesters ago mention that she and her roommate thought it would be cool to pose for Maxim, and really wanted to tell her how bad an idea I thought that would be. I wanted to tell her that several years down the road she’d feel less bad about having posed for Playboy than she would about having posed for Maxim: at least Playboy makes a pretense of having some kind of semi-sophisticated content. Maxim and the other “lad mags” (FHM, Stuff) seem to be based entirely upon a know-nothing aesthetic of masturbatory hooliganism.

Anyway. My concerns with feminism seem to me to have collided, to a degree, with the content of my last couple of posts. A good part of Jason’s project at Hogmalion seems to rely on a boy-oriented sense of humor (not to put it down: a lot of the humor is pretty flippin brilliant, and Jason’s a good friend), and Gibson-Graham’s stuff about rape scripts just made me really uncomfortable with the way in which it seemed they were appropriating a horribly fraught topic for the purposes of not-very-useful theoretical play. At the same time, their use of a feminist perspective on capitalism and the economy in the latter half of their book has proven really productive.
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I’ve found myself really liking a lot of the points Gibson-Graham makes: they point to the “hidden and inarticulate position” of class (48) in social analysis, and talk about the segmented working class and the “feminized labor market, with its proliferation of part-time and temporary jobs” (47). As I’ve started to get at before, they’re working against the perception (of which I’m guilty) that capitalism colonizes every aspect of society, and any class transformation must therefore undertake the always already impossible task of transforming the Leviathan of capitalism itself. In their words, according to the Marxian tradition, “society is typically theorized as a homogeneously or hegemonically capitalist formation centered on an industrial economy with class theorized as a social relation originating in that center” (57). But they point out that maybe things ain’t necessarily so.
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I finished Wolff and Resnick tonight. As I started to get at last night, they aren’t as helpful as I’d hoped they’d be. They do acknowledge that their approach differs considerably from that of others in the Marxian tradition, and their strong antiessentialist stance gives them some serious methodological rigor, but their careful definition of class processes doesn’t easily lend itself to thinking about class in the wired composition classroom. Following are a couple examples that might help to demonstrate why.
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