Class in Culture

Teresa L. Ebert, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594513152
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317262282
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers." -Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices-from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion-as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.

Part 1

All That Is Cultural Is Real—All That Is Real Is Cultural

1

Getting Class Out of Culture

Class, as an explanation of social relations and the dynamics of everyday life, has more or less disappeared from contemporary social analysis, which now considers culture to be the driving force of social life and, therefore, represents society as an assemblage of cultural differences, singularities, and flows of indeterminate meanings. Class, of course, is used by many critics and theorists who readily admit that class is an important aspect of social life. However, what most of them mean by class is something innocuous, something that does not question the existing social relations dividing people into classes and determining how they live: Do they go to good schools? Do they have safe drinking water? Do they have access to health care? Do they have enough to eat? Are they happy? Most treat class divisions, which as Marx writes are among the “requirements” of capitalism, as if they were “self-evident natural laws” (Capital I, 899).

In contemporary discussions, class has come to mean such things as lifestyle, taste, accent, income, occupation, status, power, and prestige. These are all important features of social life, but they are effects of class. The cause of class divisions is the process of production through which the labor of some under capitalism is appropriated by others. Since production is the material basis of the social world, class is a material social relation, or to be even more specific, it is a relation of owning. Obviously, it is not owning just anything, but owning what produces more owning. Owning your own home does not make you an owner, but owning labor does because labor is “a commodity” that “possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value” (Marx, Capital I, 270). Owning here is a double owning: both buying the living labor of others and possessing the means of production, namely, the labor of the past. In all class societies people are reduced to what they own and, therefore, are divided into only two classes: those who purchase and therefore own the labor of others during the working day and profit from it, and the others who own only their own labor. Under capitalism, they must sell their labor for wages, which then they pay back to the owners in order to buy (depending on where in the world they live) the food, medicine, houses, cars, books, DVD’s, Xboxes, etc., that they need to live, educate, and entertain themselves so they are ready and in a fairly good physical and emotional state to go back to work for the owners. Buying and owning the labor of others makes you an owner but owning a home or car or refrigerator or Xbox—which are often mentioned as a sign that nowadays everyone is an owner and there are no classes—does not make you an owner. Using the labor of others brings you profit, owning an Xbox returns your working wages back to the owners. There is no middle between the two: the middle class is an ideological illusion used to cloud class binaries and conceal the fact that under capitalism, society is breaking up more rigidly into two classes whose opposition cannot be dissolved into the hybrid of the playful in-between-ness of the middle class.

Getting class out of culture, which is the environment of everyday life, produces the illusion that there are no classes and everyone lives freely, without any constraints. It produces the myth that “you can achieve anything you want.” Making class visible in everyday life, on the other hand, makes people aware that class is the enemy of human freedom because freedom is not simply freedom of speech or association, or freedom before the law, or even freedom from oppression. It is freedom from exploitation, freedom from subordination to the division of labor. This means freedom begins only with freedom from necessity, only after one’s needs are met: “the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it”—beyond “the realm of necessity” (Marx, Capital III, 959).

SIX WAYS OF MAKING CLASS DISAPPEAR

Class as Difference, Desire, and Affect

Human freedom, however, is no longer thought of as depending on changing the existing social relations of production and ending class. Production itself is seen as a totalizing concept (productivism) and put under suspicion not only by conservatives but also by such marxists (small “m”) as Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 406). Freedom is thus said to be obtained by working within the current system of wage-labor, along with some reforms, which are often represented as “difference.” “Our political and theoretical interest,” J. K. Gibson-Graham write, “is in creating alternative (and potentially emancipatory) economic futures in which class diversity can flourish” [The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) 52, emphasis added, xi]. The goal, in other words, is no longer classlessness but class difference and heterogeneity (“class diversity”), which is seen as a resistance to capitalism’s “class homogeneity,” especially since “the revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic” (263). In the a-revolutionary world, discursive difference suspends the “economic essence” of the social and rewrites class not in relation to production but in terms of a post-class belonging, what Derrida calls “a link of affinity”—a link of affects “suffering, and hope” but without “belonging to a class” (Specters of Marx 85). Class, as the social structure of the divisions of labor and their contradictions, is dispersed by being rewritten as the flows of affect.

Spiritualizing the social and turning class into an affect has become an epistemological epidemic in the Left North, which now speaks in quasi-religious idioms of “forgiveness,” “democracy-to-come,” and “hospitality” (Derrida, Of Hospitality). The guide to understanding the social, for example, for Gibson-Graham—whose A Postcapitalist Politics has become a manual for the generic Left in the U.S.—is “Zen master Shunryu Suzuki” who teaches that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few” (8). They advocate a new elementalism of seduction and pleasure to overcome the legacies of the Enlightenment, which is seen to be the real pathology of modernity. This new, Left spiritual-fundamentalism is a mixture of a very old “New Age” sentimentality, quasi-religious banalities, and ecstasies over the ineffable, as well as an equally dated Lacanian psychoanalysis of desire and/as lack. This is a rather strange mix because the discursive Left in the North represents itself as cutting edge and markets the purported “newness” of its post-class views as the sign of their Truth (at the same time that it announces Truth as an obsession of the dead past). Gibson-Graham, for instance, write that “the crisis of modernist class politics is a crisis of desire” (13) and then suggest that class resistance is shaped either by desire getting stuck or being liberated (13).

Affects are seen as shaping class and its material relations, but class is not recognized as conditioning affects. Consequently, affects are considered autonomous and elemental, having no history. Quoting Hannah Arendt, whose conservative views along with the reactionary thoughts of Carl Schmitt have become new sources of ideas for the U.S. Left, Gibson-Graham write, “We need to foster a ‘love of the world’” (6). Instead of being outraged at class exploitation, they propose we abandon militancy, which they seem to think of as negative energy. In its place, they call for “seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting,” as well as adopting “playfulness, enchantment and exuberance” in order to develop an interest in “unpredictability, contingency, experimentation…and the possibilities of escape” (7). “Escape” is an integral part of Left pleasure-activism in the North; because the Left gets easily bored with the task at hand—like the class whose interests it normalizes. Much like the entrepreneur—who is worried about his commodities going out of style and his profits falling, and is therefore always on the look out for new commodities to market—the Left North constantly seeks newer and newer objects of desire and joy

Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff, therefore, find Fredric Jameson’s notion of “ressentiment”—his idealist, Nietzschean term for what he calls a “primal class passion” (“Marx’s Purloined Letter” 86)—to be too unjoyful. They argue that it limits a whole range of affective and bodily intensities and also marks the worker as a victim. Instead, they offer a portrait of the worker as a hopeful laborer and, in a desiring interpretation, describe exploitation as the “affective intensity” linked to “bodily intensity” in “performing surplus labor” (Class and Its Others 14–15). Their translations of class from an objective fact of history (structure) into the subjective, temporal pains and joys of the worker (sensations) entail their tying bodily intensities to affects that differ from those “familiar emotions” attributed to the proletariat—namely anger and outrage (which actually have always energized workers in their radical actions). Instead they associate workers with new feelings of “creative excitement, pleasure, hope, surprise, pride and satisfaction, daily enjoyment” (15). Under the alibi of a joyous participation, “envisioning and acting,” which, they argue, should replace “blaming and moralizing” (15), they deploy “hope” and “daily enjoyment” to reconcile workers with their existing conditions of exploitation and teach them another lesson in joyful fatalism: immersion in the jouissance of class reconciliation. Hope is the opium of the revisionists.

Replacing class with affect has become a routine interpretive transference (Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame) by which the “corporeal” is naturalized as a site of agency and resistance against the “conceptual” and thus as the locus of energy for liberating the subject into what Lauren Berlant calls “formlessness” and “unpredictability.” She treats them as signs of the autonomy and freedom of the post-class subject who transgresses rationality and its ordering norms (“Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture” 447). The visceral, along with the corporeality of affective singularity, take the place of the abstractions of collectivity and class, which are assumed to be sites for controlling and oppressing desire. The cure for abstractions is the turn to the senses and the ecstatic, spontaneous contingencies of affects—which are not recognized as the historical outcome of class relations but are seen as marks of the sovereignty of intensities (Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”). The social is no longer seen as shaping affects, instead it is now thought that the social is actually made by the affective, by intimacy. The intimate every day (Berlant, ed., Intimacy) is a resistance to the homogeneities of abstract reason and also a celebration of the heterogeneous concrete. The social as the realm of the senses and affects, according to Berlant, is to be approached not by the rationality of the “think tank,” but through what she calls the “feel-tank”—where feelings, empathy, aura, and sentiments are attended to (“Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture” 450).

With a cynical wit, that is a feature of class reconciliation, Berlant sensualizes the economics of the alienation of labor and, “only partly as a joke,” translates it into the affects of depression, apathy, hopelessness, and exhaustion (451). Alienation of labor is converted from being the material outcome of wage labor and exploitation into an unrepresentable affect that borders on depression and can be cured only by participating in the therapeutic ironies of such gatherings as “The International Day of the Politically Depressed” (451) and wrapping oneself in T-shirts that heal alienation by irony: “Depressed?… It might be Political” (451). Berlant’s “depression” and Gibson-Graham’s ecstasies of “seducing” and “cajoling” (A Postcapitalist Politics 6) are all elements of a poetics of “affects and emotions” (1-21) that has displaced class struggle in the prosperous global North where social change is no longer perceived to be an effect of changing social structures through revolution but by a change of heart, change one’s affects and desires (Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical 133). Social change, as bell hooks puts it, is “a vision of participatory economics within capitalism that aims to challenge and change class hierarchy” (Where We Stand: Class Matters 156). It is not class but class elitism that she opposes. So in place of class struggle, she believes changing the world means one has “To love the poor among us, to acknowledge their essential goodness and humanity” because this is “a mighty challenge to class hierarchy” (164). The affective in Left economics, as we will discuss later, is turned into the logic of “immaterial labor” and is said to displace material labor in the new capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 108–115).

The implications of the post-class-Left’s desires for spiritualism and its ethical self-transformations are nowhere more clear than in Cornell West’s theory of racism. He also seeks a solution to class injustice in love and does not see capitalism as responsible for racism. His objections are, therefore, directed at “profit-hungry corporations.” For West, the problem is not capitalism and its structural class contradictions but rather the soul-less corporations that distort capitalism with their greed (lovelessness). The issue, he writes, is not “relative economic deprivation” but the “existential and psychological realities of black people” (Race Matters 19–20). The real problem is not that capitalism exploits people but that the culture of the market weakens “caring and sharing, nurturing and connecting” (Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism xvi).

Class in these discourses of the Left is the unrepresentable desire and difference (Butler, “Merely Cultural”), and class struggle, as the dynamics of social change, is supplanted by “ethical self-transformation” (Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics xxv). Ethics is one of what Trotsky calls the “philosophic gendarmes of the ruling class” (Their Morals and Ours 48), whose function is to deduce the laws of the social life from private desires and substitute the singular for the collective.

Capitalism Is Not What You Think

Dominant theories of class are theories of the death and waning of class (Pakulski and Waters, The Death of Class). These interpretations assume that capitalism has so completely changed from its early industrial phase and its production practices have been so radically transformed—especially after the collapse of Fordism in the 1950s—that class is no longer relevant to the understanding of “new” social relations. These relations are said to have been fashioned either outside production relations (Laclau, “Structure, History and the Political 202) or by new forms of labor and the centrality of consumption (along with the meanings and identities it creates), as well as by new (information) technologies (Hall, “The Meaning of New Times”). Contemporary capitalism, in yet another version of this metastory, is said to be the effect of a “mobile, flexible, computerized, immaterialized and spectral labor,” whose referent is no longer use-value (Negri, “The Specter’s Smile” 8), which Jean Baudrillard claims is a relic of the metaphysics of utility (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign 133). Negri further argues that post-industrial capitalism has moved beyond the “law of value,” which was formative in an earlier phase, and “time” is no longer a measure of value in post-industrial capitalism (“The Specter’s Smile” 8, 10; “Twenty Theses on Marx” 157; Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse 171–190).

Negri argues that the new capitalism has rendered Marxist ontology obsolete (“The Specter’s Smile” 13) and contends that Marx’s class analytics—“his ontological description of exploitation” (10)—has become extraneous to new capitalism. The transformation of capitalism is so deep in his view that even the most sophisticated contemporary theories, such as deconstruction, have become outdated in their critique of capitalism because they are situated in the same old ontology (13) and are thus “exhausted” (10). What is needed, according to Negri, is a “post-deconstructive” ontology (12) because “we are at the beginning of a new epoch” (“Twenty Theses on Marx” 154). Deconstruction and the theories based on it may have activated the singular and waged a war against totality as a resistance against capitalism, but today’s capitalism has itself become the home of heterogeneity, singularity, and difference following the “mutation of labor” (8) and the emergence of a changed “labor paradigm” (8). Capital actually needs difference because it increases its rate of profit by appealing to the unique preferences of individuals in the market. Capitalism has gone beyond itself and deconstructed deconstruction. New capitalism, and not deconstruction, is, for Negri, the promoter of difference and defender of heterogeneity against the old industrial capitalist order of mass production and homogeneous identities. Derrida, in Negri’s words, is “a prisoner of the ontology he critiques” (13).

Negri’s theory of “new” capitalism, like his theory of “empire,” is a tissue of clichés; it is based on ideas developed in capitalist think-tanks, sponsored speculations, and a deep-rooted idealism that borders on mysticism. For instance, he regards capitalism to be “a radical ‘Unheimlich’” (9)—an unrepresentable whose laws of motion are aleatory because they are grounded in immaterial labor, which defies the “law of value,” and thus are beyond the understanding of reason and also beyond the reach of deconstruction’s linguistic demystifications. His claim that capitalism has outdone deconstruction is an extension of this crypto-romantic epistemology, which regards philosophy to be autonomous from the social relations of production and thus thinks of deconstruction as an independent theory of culture and language that is now outdone by another autonomous force, namely capitalism. Capitalism and deconstruction, in other words, are represented in Negri’s theology of culture as two different autonomous developments–one economic, the other cultural. However, deconstruction is not separate from capitalism but is its cultural extension. Like all philosophies and theories, deconstruction is the cultural articulation of the material base of the society in which it is produced. Deconstruction is the cultural arm of capitalism.

By advancing singularity, heterogeneity, anti-totality, and supplementarity, for instance, deconstruction has, among other things, demolished “history” itself as an articulation of class relations. In doing so, it has constructed a cognitive environment in which the economic interests of capital are seen as natural and not the effect of a particular historical situation. Deconstruction continues to produce some of the most effective discourses to normalize capitalism and contribute to the construction of a capitalist-friendly cultural common se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Public Theorist (a preface)
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 All That Is Cultural Is Real—All That Is Real Is Cultural
• 1 Getting Class Out of Culture
• 2 Class Binaries and the Rise of Private Property
• Part 2 Tracing Class
• 3 Class Is
• 4 Abu Ghraib and Class Erotics
• 5 Class and 9/11
• 6 Eating Class
• 7 The Class Politics of “Values” and Stem-Cell Funding
• 8 Abortion Is a Class Matter
• 9 E-Education as a Class Technology
• 10 Gender after Class
• 11 The Class Logic of A Beautiful Mind
• Part 3 Class Ecstasies of the Culture of Capital
• 12 A “Potlatch of Signs”—Burning, Consuming, Wasting
• Bibliography
• Index
• List of Contributors