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

[koganbot]

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?

Comments

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

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.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

'their reservations' doh!

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

'relational', that's good


my baggy jeans locate me within the field of social conflict but my position keeps changing without my doing anything about it!

[koganbot]

Finally getting around to responding to this. The reason I think I need the word "class" isn't because it's constantly in use in sociology and cultural studies but because people in everyday conversation about music feel class as an issue even though they tend not to use the word or to be particularly clear about what the class issues are. Of course, if they're not using the word or identifying just what the class issues, one can argue that people don't feel a class issue, just vaguely feel social issues related to music's role as a vague social marker. But I think "class" is the word because it implies inequality - of wealth, or power, or prestige, etc. - and it implies conflict related to those inequalities. If the pretty girls have no social standing, and the record company has no power, then my friend Nathan's criticism of the New Kids and the Backstreet Boys has no point. And as I said in my livejournal post about my Hero Story, the story demands that the Hero be daring, and one doesn't get called daring by appearing to align with the strong at the expense of the weak. But if you think of Heroism as one route to prestige, and if you get to be a Hero by fighting power, then prestige and power can be at odds.