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koganbotHelp 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?
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class is the elephant in the room?
Date: 2007-07-23 08:43 am (UTC)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.
Re: class is the elephant in the room?
Date: 2007-07-23 02:25 pm (UTC)(1) Do people put on and take off a new set of duds or a hairstyle as if they were a new set of duds or a hairstyle? It seems to me that most fashion choices are variations on previous choices, and you can't make wholesale changes in them any more than you can make wholesale changes in your mannerisms or your accent. If your clothes don't match your mannerisms, people can tell.
(2) You can't be a prep or a burnout without the cooperation of other preps and burnouts. So yes you have some choices, but how far you can go with them depends on previous choices and circumstances.
(3) "Prep" and "jock" and "burnout" and "skater" have different meanings and impacts in different times and places (and maybe the words are obsolete and have been replaced by others) but my guess - and this is a guess, and I don't know if there have been any studies - is that where these are major groups in a school (preps and jocks on one side, burnouts and skaters on the other), membership in them is a better predictor of the students' future income and social role than would, say, their parents' current income and social role. But then, a majority but by no means all preps will have parents who are salaried professionals, and a majority but by no means all burnouts will have parents who are blue-collar workers.
(4) High school seems crucially important to a discussion of class and music, but why? I'd speculate that, especially in what in the U.S. are called "public schools" (and what in Britain are called "state schools"), a wider range of people are thrown together doing similar things than you get among adults on the job and in their day-to-day life, and the students pretty much have to be there and the school pretty much has to take them (obv. kids can choose to drop out or to a limited extent choose a different kind of school; and schools can expel a few students and in effect force out others, but not a huge amount of them). And teenagers haven't figured out who they are yet, so "class" (or whatever) is more up for grabs, so people think about "classes" more and give them names.
(5) Where arty-boho types are prominent in a school (in times past were called "freaks," or "punks," maybe still are) things go a bit kerblooey, because the freaks are confident and obnoxious enough to challenge the status of preps and jocks as top dogs (ha! we're better) but also to challenge the status of the burnouts as the main refusal group. Freaks can be as closed-minded and exclusive as anyone else, but their attacks on the preps and the burnouts oddly enough open the doors for preps and burnouts to jump to the freak category, since the freaks are modeling a new kind of status that people can emulate. Also, the freaks provide a motive for the preps and the burnouts to absorb freak characteristics (which is how bohemian ideas get pulled into the mainstream).
(6) A loner or a misfit who punches a time clock is classed as blue collar/working-class, but a loner or misfit in a high school is not a burnout; he's a loner or a misfit. To be a burnout he has to have burnout friends. And one can say that the preps in a high school are high status but you can't say the burnouts are at the bottom; the burnouts will have a lot of friends and esteem (as opposed to the misfits). But then, status can be very much in the eyes of the beholder. Note the difference in the words "loner" and "misfit."
Re: class is the elephant in the room?
Date: 2007-07-23 06:56 pm (UTC)(1&2) Depends on what you keep in your closet? I agree here and wouldn’t want to say high school social groups can be put on and taken off like Bowie/Madonna career moves. I just wanted to suggest “Preppies” and “burnouts” seems like a kind of social category easier to put on and take off than an ed-econ class, so maybe we don’t want to call them classes?
(3) ‘"Prep" and "jock" and "burnout" and "skater" …this is a guess…membership in them is a better predictor of the students' future income and social role than would, say, their parents' current income and social role.” My guess is that your guess is mostly American dream myth and illusory but a very interesting question, nonetheless, both in terms of what are the links between the high school social groups and the “class” home you come from and in terms of which better predicts your future class prospects. I’ll snoop around for some literature.
(4) I agree, only, again, still I’m not sure you want to call these high school groups “classes.” Maybe because I’m afraid that doing so would fuck up how “class” fits into one of my Hero Stories?
(5) The arty-boho types or freaks have never been prominent enough in either the high school I attended eons ago or the few high schools I’ve worked in over the last decade. And this seems crucial to how I misunderstand some of your ideas about this stuff but also why they fascinate me so. Your thing about the freaks seems romantic and exciting and I wish I did attend or teach at such a high school. I’d love to try to work with the freaks. Note, I don’t say I would like to be or have been a freak. It seems unfathomable to me because of some weird shame and pride thing I feel about my family and class.
(6) Maybe the burnouts are “freaks” with low self-esteem?
Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-23 02:26 pm (UTC)Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-23 07:07 pm (UTC)But I gotta go for now. Too much sittin' on my butts, not enough get up and go.
Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-23 09:28 pm (UTC)Maybe my hang-ups above were related to this uneasy feeling as well -- actually, this gets at what was going on in "Pretty Girls": we have a vague feeling something must be wrong, but often the crisis has more to do with how we've framed the situation (socially or through the language we use) than the situation itself (perhaps the situation isn't a "situation" as in problem-that-requires-solving, but is merely a situation-that-is). One benefit of using high school tags is that we get rid of (some of) the notions that class disparities must be changed or righted. More often (in the HS examples), they simply change as they change (depending on chance, stimuli from pop culture, opinion leaders, etc.) and there isn't some clear "line of action" to take to "fix" the situation. I.e., even if people tend to cluster around skater or prep or jock etc., there's no law saying that [econ bracket] must be [social role], etc. (The Marxist proletarian/bourgeois class split might be helpful in framing a discussion of institutional inequality, but I do wonder -- kind of in response to what Mark is saying above -- whether or not we need such an absolute framework to notice these problems, as if without simplification into clear-cut categories we won't notice that economic/gender/etc. disparities exist. Not rhetorical, either, I really do wonder this and I have about zero grasp of actual Marxist theory via academia 'cept in Hollywood film production.)
Might just be rephrasing some of the above points here. Where this gets a little complicated, I guess, is that there is a "law" of sorts that says "individual people group into classes of people," or more simply, "people group." (Whether or not they want to do it or have control in it is to some extent a side issue; I can wring my hands all I want about where I get grouped, but also can't deny that I'm getting group there, and also can't deny that I don't always mind being grouped, indeed often enjoy being grouped.)
No, I'm still wringing my hands. I just have this feeling that there's some kind of disconnect between the social implications of listening to the music we do as members of a "cluster" and those visceral responses that lead us to like or dislike what we do. Maybe one area that would be useful in "bridging" the insights on social class and visceral response (Metal Clusters versus Boney Joan?) is this idea of "learned taste," the process through which we teach/tell/rationalize to ourselves how to like something, and the processes through which other people facilitate this? Learning to dance, learning to ask the right questions, learning to pay attention or stop paying so much goddam attention -- in fact, I had the lattermost experience watching The Family Stone; about halfway thru the movie I realized I was literally causing myself undue agitation because I was leaning forward, analyzing constantly, "dissecting" it as if it was a Hollis Frampton film. This was totally inappropriate, and even though I still didn't really like the movie, I liked it more than I would have if I'd kept at the rigorous viewing. This varies more for me in music -- I find that I can pay lots of or little attention to Paris without it making much of a difference, but can't listen to most low-key techno outside of headphones; always end up paying a lot of attention to Ashlee when I listen to her, which can be unreasonably taxing depending on the song -- if I listen to "Pieces of Me" the way I listen to "Better Off," I drive myself nuts, in fact often end up skipping track 2 because I'm too invested in it and feel weirdly disappointed. Same experience with Aly and AJ's new alb, which I just bought and sounds GREAT in the background.
Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-24 02:33 am (UTC)Is it that the song doesn't reveal new surprises with each listen?
I may be underestimating the second album because it has more songs where only one thing seems to be going on. "Catch Me When I Fall" and "Eyes Wide Open" are powerful powerful tracks with strong singing but each song is a single mood. (But then I rarely concentrate and analyze when I listen to music, so maybe there's much more there to hear; maybe if I analyze the music rather than the words everything will come to feel richer. Not that it needs to for them to be good songs.)
As for social classes, the thing is if you define a social class by particular elements ("hourly wage workers" as opposed to "salaried professionals") then of course everyone in the class will have those elements, whereas if you take a group like the freaks, it's sort of analogous to people who show up at a party: not everyone goes for the same reason and not everyone behaves the same way. So you're a freak if you hang around other people who are considered freaks without being compelled to have particular things in common with all of them, though you might, and of course it's still useful to make generalizations about the class. Or, as I said in the Hero Story thread, it's possible for all students in a high school to decide that people aren't in social classes (as if the classes were a social habitation) but rather freaks and preps etc. are types that people cluster more or less near, act as magnets, forces, shape the social landscape without necessarily defining the people who inhabit the landscape.
Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-24 03:14 am (UTC)It's basically the words in conjunction with how smoothly the tune goes down. "Better Off" might be its opposite (in my mind, the way I hear 'em), because its breeziness almost completely belies the ambivalence that makes me listen more intently (even now that I know it very well from repeat listens). I suppose as part of an arc it's about as necessary (and, now that I think about it, serves a somewhat similar purpose as) "In Another Life" on the second album, which is similarly wanting in the lyrics department. Although the "pieces of me" is a much more striking metaphor than "another life," which just reminds me of the worst worst worst X-Files episode (non-Mulder/Scully seasons excluded) ever ("The Field Where I Died").
"PoM" is important at track two, which is also the only place to put it and the album would suffer without it for several reasons, not least because, like you said, it's the one track I associate with major airplay and her actual popularity (as opposed to the weird nether-realm of pseudo-popularity she seems stuck in now...saw a lovely post-op summer pic in some magazine and there was zero recognition). Funny that those particular Mon/Tues/Wed lyrics, when you write them out like that, are much more anxious than they sound -- but for some reason the ticking off of those days on the album itself is too clean, too "calendar montage," it's SO pleasant that the anxiety can't quite overcome the serenity. You even get the real-life unhappy ending(s) in the album -- even when you know the real-world chronology, "Surrender" is an important late track that seems to uproot with a kind of righteous anger a lot of what's come before ("I may be sweet but I'm still on the vine/ You couldn't wait, no you had to take your bite"...makes you wonder what the hell was happening before this experience), and "Undiscovered" is elegaic -- "don't walk away" is a pretty brutal way to end an album in my book, since its how I'd probably end my autobiography, too. (And between them is "Nothing New," bitter and jaded -- maybe the most telling precursor to I Am Me? Never thought about it that way before, anyway. And then "Giving It All Away," which is more interesting/weirdly pessimistic the more I think about the incongruity of that final verse with the first trite verse).
Reading Marooned (the Stranded sequel) now and I'm thinking Autobiography might be my desert island album at this point, in part because of the myriad ways I can listen to it. When I want to think, I can think, when I want to "shut off my brain" and go for a walk (or turn it back on and go for a walk) I can do that, too. And there's so much promise in it.
Will stew s'more about yer classes, which seem like a productive spot to be putting my brain energies (hm, parties and magnets both excellent metaphors, actually, not sure why I'm still being so resistant since I've been following the column itself just fine!). Return of the slight musings on 'slebs-as-class coming up this or next month (expanded on "mini-bling"), basically arguing that the result of knee-jerk class-y reactions even within pop have led to more modest signifiers of wealth in music (my examples are somewhat lacking but the idea is interesting, and Hilary and P!nk are good for a full column on this topic, anyway), to sort of mirror the weirdly apocalyptic vibe happening at the industry level these days.
Re: class is the elephant in the room? (Post Two)
Date: 2007-07-24 03:15 am (UTC)