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Help me figure out what I mean by "social class"
Help me write my next column figure out what I mean by the phrase "social class"!
--What do people mean when they say "class"?
--What do I mean when I say "class"?
--What should I mean when I say "class"?
I do not necessarily mind that my own and other people's use of the term is vague and inconsistent and contrary, but I do think I should be more specific about the various different species that my inconsistency and contrariness suggest and my vagueness covers up.
--Mapping one way of classifying stuff (stuff?) onto another. E.g., mapping musical genre ("rock 'n' roll") onto a group of people ("teenagers" or "working-class" or, um, black people? white people? Southerners? urban dwellers? hicks?)
--Do people belong to classes, or are classes just roles they play? Or some mixture? "White person" is supposedly a role I play 24/7, whether I want to or not, but is this true? What about roles I was playing ten years ago: "technical editor"? "Support staff"? "Office temp"? Twenty years ago I'd divided punks up into two broad categories: "office-temp punks" and "bike-messenger punks" (obv. each was a synecdoche (??) (er, metaphor) for a bunch of similar ways of earning money).
--You know, power and stuff: people who pay wages and earn profits as opposed to people who are paid wages and are told what to do. But actual roles don't divide up so easily. Anyway, most people are in the latter category (the category "are told what to do"), but the Get-Tolders, being the vast majority of human beings, divide up into classes themselves.
--Etc.
--Do you know any good books or articles I should read on this subject - not just that discuss "class" but that notice that the term is problematic?
--What do people mean when they say "class"?
--What do I mean when I say "class"?
--What should I mean when I say "class"?
I do not necessarily mind that my own and other people's use of the term is vague and inconsistent and contrary, but I do think I should be more specific about the various different species that my inconsistency and contrariness suggest and my vagueness covers up.
--Mapping one way of classifying stuff (stuff?) onto another. E.g., mapping musical genre ("rock 'n' roll") onto a group of people ("teenagers" or "working-class" or, um, black people? white people? Southerners? urban dwellers? hicks?)
--Do people belong to classes, or are classes just roles they play? Or some mixture? "White person" is supposedly a role I play 24/7, whether I want to or not, but is this true? What about roles I was playing ten years ago: "technical editor"? "Support staff"? "Office temp"? Twenty years ago I'd divided punks up into two broad categories: "office-temp punks" and "bike-messenger punks" (obv. each was a synecdoche (??) (er, metaphor) for a bunch of similar ways of earning money).
--You know, power and stuff: people who pay wages and earn profits as opposed to people who are paid wages and are told what to do. But actual roles don't divide up so easily. Anyway, most people are in the latter category (the category "are told what to do"), but the Get-Tolders, being the vast majority of human beings, divide up into classes themselves.
--Etc.
--Do you know any good books or articles I should read on this subject - not just that discuss "class" but that notice that the term is problematic?
Re: empirical claim (dispute or disprove?):
Somewhat relates to a problem we had in a politics seminar back in college, where my teacher wanted to discuss institutional questions of racial definition thru history (from Columbus to Dinesh D'Souza) while most of the class wanted to talk about what sortsa hyphens they could put in front of "American" (or whatever nationality). Problem being, the cops/people on the street/institutions etc. don't necessarily see you how you see yourself, and no great political challenge will come (only) through self-definition (in fact, we discussed at great length the extent to which multi-culturalism, not a bad thing by any means, had undone or undermined or deflected institutional changes effected by the civil rights movement by suggesting equal -- but clearly distinct along racial/cultural lines -- "classes" of sorts.
I guess I'm just dancing around my general discomfort with identity politics in the face of what I think is the more pressing and interesting issue of group definition from the outside. How one is labeled, not nec. how one labels him/herself (hence my interest in the War on Lindsay, esp. as it relates to the agency of these 'slebs in perpetuating their own negative image).