koganbot | Help me figure out what I mean by "social class"

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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?

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step one is possibly use "category" instead of "class"?
(cz "class" is loaded in a marxist sense, which you will always have to be fighting?)

Hm...one question might be "what do people mean when YOU say class," because one issue that's come up for you is that there is a class where others don't (explicitly) name one. When I use The War on Lindsay, I'm talking about certain classesque characteristics that refer only to a select handful of people -- so most people talk about the handful and don't think there are "underlying assumptions" that could apply to MORE than those couplea people.

Interesting question on your last column, re: "don't unattractive girls listen to BSBs," which kinda missed your point but also kinda didn't -- it's nice to think that there's this slight resentment or, more generally, distaste for "cheerleaders," say, but it doesn't really get into the ambiguities of how these various social clusterings really work. In my experience, the pretty girls don't always all hang out together because they're pretty, in fact usually have a couple of unattractive friends in the group who share similar ideas/interests/etc.

But my point here (I think, if I have one, maybe I'm just bored!) is that "class" both is and isn't. I'm reading Bill Bryson's ridiculously simplified summary of THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING IN IT (i.e. the only summary I could possibly hope to understand), and he talks about a distinction between quantum (micro) and relativity (macro) physics that might relate to this class idea you're getting at.

That is, you run up against a seemingly unsolveable paradox when you talk about class: like an electron field, you can either see class swirling around in the abstract (the "taste" of the class: greasers, skaters, punks), or you can locate it specifically (the taste of the Frank), but you can't necessarily do both at the same time. So Frank-the-punk can't simultaneously be in the general and the specific at the same time, hence you (seem to) hit a block when you discuss our individual (visceral, personal history-based, etc.) responses versus the activity of the class.

Celeb culture kind of wants to have it both ways, both a hyper-focusing on the individual (almost to the point of taking a microscope to the ol' pores) while insisting that there is something about "these people" that makes them worth our study (and scorn): the pap wouldn't want the lens turned on THEM personally, though "normal people" can become celebs in the blink of an eye (reality TV).

Don't know if any of this makes sense, but quantum/relative theory (in its oversimplified digestible state!) just BLEW MY EFFIN' MIND in the coffee shop!!!!!

What you use as "class" I tend to think of (cos of my job) as "segment". A lot of the job of (certain types of) market research is to define a set of segments and then work out what other things might or might not map onto them - the more stuff that maps onto them, the stronger and more predictive the segmentation is.

Have been running around UConn stacks for the last hour and have discovered (1) that class is considered problematic by many people who use it, (2) there was a guy called Marx, (3) there was a guy called Weber.

my worry re marxist usage vs koganist usage is i guess that the usages are potentially incommensurable -- that if you adopt the latter you have to exclude all coherent reference to the former from the discussion ALTOGETHER, which is i think unfortunate, as widespread ideas that are wrong need to be taken to bits, while widespread ideas that are not wrong need to be taken on board (he said circumspectly)

(tho i guess you cd always just restate marxist claims in other terms and maybe it wd be good discipline to do so -- and maybe always say "economic class as marxists understand define it" when that's what you meant) (mutatis mutandis for weberians, tho i know bvgger all abt weber)

Re: do people *belong* in classes or are they roles etc. I think they are both- they are the social strata which someone feels comfortable identifying with, thus adapts their role to make themselves more like, to make sure that they absolutely belong there. I think class is a lot more transient than people make out, too, because class is basically an ideological thing in terms of how you can perceive and what you can do, so it can change as much or as little as you do.

I think, though, that class, like your family, is the involuntary upshot of various decisions possibly beyond your control, which is how it varies from, say, 'lifestyle.'

important-seeming elements of 'class', or whatever you want to call it:

how the group imagines itself
how the group imagines itself ideally
how the group imagines its antagonists and enemies

- allows for variance from reality (e.g. overinflation of some problems, ignorance of real causes of problems)
- allows for examination of 'how the group imagines...' in terms of the imaginative constructions inside the songs, and in terms of what they use the songs for
- might reflect the complexity better by having all three together?

frank, i know i neglected to say anything to you in my email earlier today, but here's one thing that struck me about my country music adventure: i swear that between the songs and the radio station presentation of them (commercials with testimonials from listeners e.g.), it felt like the music which above all today most aggressively defines its audience, directly, at almost every turn, within the songs. and i think it seemed so strong to me because it hit all three of the above elements of 'class' so hard, at the same time. i am aware you will immediately provide counterexamples. but i think a lot of them are either more indirect about defining their audience, or leave a great deal indeterminate so that it's up to the listener to decide that they count as 'an X listener', or that the music is for them, or the singer is talking to them, or about them.

another good element of koganian 'class': what you have to do to become an X (if it's up to you at all). or to stop being one.

survey of favored koganian classes:
any group term that other people can use as an insult
any racial or sexual category (which has a name)
names of certain musical genres (but not just any)
professions and job titles

Class is a word I try scrupulously to avoid -- probably due to having read so much ham-fisted (or perhaps cloth-eared would be better) quasi-Marxist lit crit. However I will use it in the following specific circs:

1) When talking about an 'intellectual' or 'artistic' class. This is a deliberate provocation, to remind analysts and critics that they have 'interests' too, which can't be identified with any of the particular 'classes' about which they are talking. i.e. the marxist critic has more in common with his right-wing opponent than with the 'working classes' he claims to speak on behalf of. This only really works when dealing with people who attribute 'cultures' to 'classes' and is part of an attempt to reclaim the element of bildung in the term culture, i.e. culture names a development relative to a prior position.

2) I refuse to accept that the idea of 'class consciousness' is useful except when describing a specific situation in which it is created. I have the same quibble about the idea of national consciousness -- i.e. I don't believe that members of groups are necessarily aware of themselves as members of certain groups, except in certain situations when they are forced to take sides, or at least align themselves in relation to a field of social conflicts. This is my long-winded and cautious way of affirming the idea that class is, in the language of cultural theory, 'relational' rather than 'essential'. (And yes, 'essential' is meaningless, since no-one interesting believes that class is anything other than relational, but this doesn't stop the term functioning in people's arguments as if it was some fundamental constituent of identity). This is why I am suspicious of social research which asks people how they identify (eg. do you feel 'more British than Scottish' or whatever) on the grounds that this feeling is brought into being in the context of the research and can't be taken to be representative... yet forms the basis for arguments like 'since devolution, more Scots identify as Scottish than they did before' (i.e. missing out: 'when confronted in an interview situation with all the attendant power relations, expectations etc. which may mould their response').

This is probably all clear in the schoolyard example: I only become a skater because the neds are threatening me and my friends all laugh at the emos, despite the fact that I quite like My Chemical Romance and fancy that chick with the eyeliner. (OK, ALL the chicks). At home I'm declassé, but as soon as I walk into school my baggy jeans locate me within the field of social conflict.

Anyway, I don't think that these are anything other than quite obvious points.

I don't think I see a necessary connection between 'class' and 'taste'. Some people I think expect to read one off from the other, and there may be correlations, but a) it would never be in the form 'members of X like Y' so much as 'a member of X might position his tastes in relation to an argument between Y and Z'; and b) I see 'taste' in modern society as a specific site of other conflicts which can't be reduced to political and / or social ones, and I see the concept of class as deriving from the attempt to confuse the political with the social. (This can be a political move -- 'arise workers, we have so and so in common' -- or an analytical one -- 'workers have so and so in common'.).

I think Mark is right that 'class' comes freighted with Marxist baggage, but I think Frank is right that its use in sociology and cultural studies has been so constant as to strip it of any necessary connections with Marxism (obviously there is a forgotten / repressed link among the sociologists, and a 'critical' tool has become a functional/methodological one -- perhaps there reservations about the term are symptomatic of their awareness of this loss, or a sense of the awkwardness of using the term in this way).

Josh talks sense.

what about using a different term of classification for
(i) the types of type we are that some have no choice in
(ii) the types of type we are that all have choice in ???

(marx eg specifically distinguished between the working class, which was an analytical category, and the proletariat, which is alert to its situation and engaged in its transformation -- ie a political category) (other marxists have been much less clear about the implications of this distinction)

plainly lots of categories and identities are transient -- but "being poor" may not be one of them, however much you want it to be

the relationship between what's voluntary and what's not is totally part of frank's project, of course: "does the music choose me? how and why?" has animated several if not all of his columns to date

so if there are class types -- economic? racial? -- which can't be changed just by yr own (individual) choice, which can only be changed at "yr" behest by "yr" participation in political activity (which if it succeeds in changing the shape of society may succeed in changing the shape of the meanings of its seemingly fixed classes/categories), hoiw does this factor into yr decisions about which identity-attractions you will pursue, and which shake off?

it's my sense that on the internet, where communities gather by elective affinity, a great deal of rage and mutual resentment is stoked by community A's assumptions about the generalised reasons behind community B's affinities (ie "we" came together as a wide-ranging bunch of freethinking friends, to explore interesting ideas; "they" band together in confused and deluded panic round the fetishised ephemera that keep them from seeing themselves as they are)

Midwest Airlines is a classless carrier. All the seats are the same size.

When I hear class I first always think of managing classrooms full of 25 to 30 hormone-addled, pop culture-distracted teenagers. Then I think of rich and poor; urban and rural (and exurban?); college educated and non-college educated; salaried professionals and hourly wage workers; people who went to Harvard or Yale and people who didn’t. I certainly don’t think first of the alt-rockers and preppies and jocks and burnouts in my classes, but perhaps they are subsidiaries in some way, although I can think of many of them who defy any overly simplistic class distinctions, like the above.

Historically, I think, first, class referred to a family or bloodline. It’s a characteristic of the rise of agriculture and city-based civilizations: nobility, clergy, warriors, peasants, etc. You were born into and died in these classes. Over the last few hundred years, thanks to Marx, it’s come down to making a more narrow distinction between the capitalists (whom control the means of production) and the proletariat (those who produce stuff). The important change here is that while still hierarchical, and essentially antagonistic, class has become more permeable in the sense that the working stiff could become a capitalist in the American dream, for instance.

Anybody who looks at it closer, as you are now doing, will find many sub-class distinctions, I’m sure. But it does seem to me that a key to the heft or usefulness of class as a social distinction is that it is not something that you can put-on or take-off like a new set of duds or a hairstyle. It’s something you’re born into, absorb from the neighborhood, pick-up from the circumstances you grow up in. It’s not fixed (and never has been, strictly speaking), of course, the son of a dockworker might become a college president. You may not die in the class you were born into anymore— but you’ll take it with you wherever you go, these habits of mind, the nagging voice, the invisible knapsack of privileges and expectations.

So there is something heavier about class, bound by education and economics, than high school freaks and geeks. Actually, despite the intense popularity contest of high school there might exist there (and in bohemia?) more options for making up who you are than anywhere else in life. I read a study once that showed how the American dream of class mobility was largely a myth. Alt-rockers and preppies might be more kind of consumer lifestyle choice than a class distinction. Perhaps pop culture is a great leveler and a ruse as well in that attaining the right tennis shoes or brand names are within almost every kid’s reach but will make little difference when it comes down to getting into and paying for a good college education.

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empirical claim (dispute or disprove?):

No matter the size of your butt...

class is the elephant in the room?