Doing Time

Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

Rita Felski

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814728178
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis?

In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times.

Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as "the end of sex," and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern.

1

NOTHING TO DECLARE
IDENTITY, SHAME, AND THE LOWER MIDDLE CLASS

It is a striking fact of scholarly life that talking about oneself has become a virtue. The culture of confession, once limited to self-help manuals, therapy groups, and talk shows, has gradually penetrated the walls of the academy. For critics who are disenchanted with the spread of theory or who simply want to explore different kinds of scholarly writing, autobiography can be an appealing alternative. Getting personal can take a wide variety of forms, from a terse vignette prefacing a conventional piece of scholarly writing to a full-blown striptease by an academic superstar. Often it is accompanied by an ethical imperative. I am doing this, the author implies, and you should do it too.

What authorizes the discourse of personal criticism? Why is writing about oneself deemed important or interesting? Sometimes the answer is fame. In a culture of celebrity the private life of a prominent scholar appeals to our curiosity and becomes worthy of our attention. Alternatively, the therapeutic or the political value of autobiographical criticism comes to the fore. Writing about oneself is presented, with varying degrees of intellectual sophistication, as an act of catharsis or a means to self-knowledge. It is also clearly indebted to the “politics of recognition” informing new social movements grounded in group identities.¹ Feminists, in particular, have often been at the vanguard of personal criticism, arguing that traditional forms of academic language need to be replaced by a more personal voice.

As someone who has never wanted to write about herself, I began to wonder about the reasons for this reticence. Of course, no trend is without its critics, and a number of writers, including some feminists, have expressed reservations about the value of self-disclosure as an intellectual or political strategy.² There is a sustained questioning of confession within poststructuralist theory, as well as a flourishing body of autobiographical writing informed by such theory. But neither defenders nor critics of autobiography have gone far in exploring the various social conditions that may affect the desire to speak or remain silent about the self. I want to pursue one aspect of this question by examining some of the meanings of class in relation to contemporary academic culture.

More specifically, I am interested in the lower middle class, my own social origin. Being lower-middle-class is a singularly boring identity, possessing none of the radical chic that is sometimes ascribed to working-class roots. In fact, the lower middle class has typically been an object of scorn among intellectuals, blamed for everything from exceedingly bad taste to the rise of Hitler. Yet as older forms of class polarization and class identification begin to dissolve, the lives of ever more individuals in the industrialized West are defined by occupations, lifestyles, and attitudes traditionally associated with the lower middle class.

At the same time, lower-middle-classness is not so much an identity as a nonidentity: “the one class you do not belong to, and are not proud of at all, is the lower middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower middle classes.”³ What, then, is one to make of this widespread yet indeterminate, important yet underanalyzed class stratum? In what ways is the inbetweenness of the lower middle class at odds not only with the identity politics of gender and race but also with traditional ways of thinking about class?

My response to these questions is intended to be exploratory rather than conclusive. It forgoes some of the usual approaches to class in focusing on the psychic as well as the social, semiotics as much as economics. It is interested as much in literary and cultural representations of the lower middle class as in the objective reality of this class formation. And it is fully cognizant of the paradoxes involved in a semiautobiographical reflection on the problems of writing autobiographically.

ON CLASS

There is a noticeable silence about class in much contemporary cultural theory. This is certainly true of my own field, feminism, which has been galvanized and transformed by issues of race but has yet to deal substantially with the current realities of class. While feminist critics sometimes give a cursory nod toward the importance of class differences, it is rarely acknowledged that class is a complex and contested idea, the present subject of wide-ranging intellectual and political debates.⁴

Thus the most basic questions of class—how many classes are there? how should they be defined? what are their functions?—are being rethought in social theory. Most writers agree that the traditional Marxist view of class as a polarized struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is of little use in the contemporary Western context. Not only has there been a dramatic decline in the industrial working class as a result of technological changes and shifts in the global division of labor, but also a range of new class formations has become prominent. These include a fragmented array of middle classes characterized by diverse political and cultural allegiances, along with a so-called underclass defined by long-term unemployment and poverty. Furthermore, class theorists have become increasingly interested in consumption as well as production. Clearly, work continues to play a major role in shaping social status and life chances, but class distinctions are also shaped by consumption practices and lifestyle patterns that do not bear any simple relation to the basic division between capital and labor.⁵

An obvious resource is the British tradition of cultural studies. Literary critics such as Raymond Williams and social historians such as E. P. Thompson have done much to illuminate the symbolic and cultural meanings of class. Yet class for British cultural studies has almost always meant the working class, and a historically specific form of English male working-class life that is of little help in looking at other classes or other contexts. Contemporary work in cultural studies is often cognizant of this fact, yet there is relatively little interest in exploring the current demographics of class divisions and class groupings.⁶ Instead, the task of investigating the complex historical articulations of class and culture is addressed, if at all, through a dualistic theory of the body.

The source here is usually the work of Bakhtin, frequently mediated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s influential discussion of carnival in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.⁷ However, while Stallybrass and White focus on the middle-class perception that the lower classes are little more than pure body, some cultural critics seem to endorse this perception as fact. John Fiske, for example, grounds his account of popular culture in a notion of unruly and resistive bodies. Whereas the bourgeoisie is identified with discipline, hygiene, and repression, popular pleasures, by contrast, “are experienced or expressed through the body.”⁸ This claim underpins Fiske’s analysis of “offensive bodies and carnival pleasures” as essential features of working-class or, more generally, popular culture. Lawrence Grossberg, while more conscious of the dangers of essentializing popular culture, also claims that “the popular is that which is always inscribed upon the body: tears, laughter, spine-chilling, screams, fright, erections, etc.”⁹ Such examples can easily be multiplied, and their frequency in cultural studies suggests that a form of compensation may be at work. Only too conscious of the charges of aridity and abstraction often leveled at intellectual work, cultural critics eagerly ally themselves with the image of a vital, sensual, popular body. A similar response is evident in the recent academic fascination with “white trash” as a subversive symbol of vulgarity, excess and bad taste.¹⁰

Such arguments are open to question from several perspectives. Thinking of “bourgeois ideology” as synonymous with a repression of pleasure and of the body does not much help one make sense of the historical complexities of Victorian culture. It is far from clear that such a thesis is directly relevant to late-twentieth-century consumer capitalism, which has embraced pleasure and instant gratification with a vengeance. Conversely, equating popular culture with the demands of the body ignores an important tradition of respectability in working-class life. Frugality, decency, and self-discipline, rather than enthusiasm for Dionysian orgies, have often been the core values of the poor. Such values have their own cultural distinctiveness as forms of life and cannot be understood as simply bourgeois norms imposed from above. Working-class women, in particular, often have a powerful interest and investment in respectability, as a means of distancing themselves from sexualized images of lower-class women’s bodies.¹¹

Furthermore, opposing a repressed and repressive bourgeoisie to an unruly, pleasure-driven working class leaves little room for exploring the various class fractions that fall outside this opposition. The lower middle class is one such example of a messy, contradictory amalgam of symbolic practices, structures of feeling, and forms of life. It usually includes both the traditional petite bourgeoisie of shop owners, small businesspeople, and farmers and the “new” lower middle class of salaried employees such as clerical workers, technicians, and secretaries. Such positions pay little more and often less than blue-collar industrial jobs. The lower middle class often feels itself to be culturally superior to the working class, however, while lacking the cultural capital and the earning power of the professional-managerial class. How does this contradictory positioning complicate the relations between culture and class? How helpful are the traditional accounts of the petite bourgeoisie? And what do these accounts tell us about intellectuals’ own class anxieties?

A useful place to begin is with the work of one of the most astute commentators on the complex relations between culture and class. George Orwell’s early fiction is devoted to a ruthlessly detailed portrayal of the English lower middle class of the 1930s, showing how a particular economic position is translated into the textures, practices, and emotions of everyday life. The same landscape reappears in novel after novel, enfolding and stifling its inhabitants in the death grip of mingy decency. It is a world of identical, small, semidetached houses stretching into infinity, all equipped with stucco fronts, privet hedges, green front doors, and showy nameplates. Orwell’s characters are not waving but drowning in the accumulated detritus of lower-middle-class life: stewed pears, portable radios, false teeth, lace curtains, hire-purchase furniture, teapots, manicure sets, life insurance policies. This material culture is profoundly expressive, attesting not only to economic status but also to a complex blend of moral values and structures of feeling: respectability, frugality, social aspirations. These are epitomized in the image of the drab, indestructible aspidistra displayed in every parlor window, the ubiquitous symbol of the pathos and triumphs of lower-middle-class life.

As portrayed by Orwell, the lower middle class is driven by the fear of shame, tortured by a constant struggle to keep up appearances on a low income. One manifestation of this status anxiety is a craven respect for high culture accompanied by almost complete ignorance of its content. George Bowling, the insurance salesman hero of Coming Up for Air, reminisces about a childhood spent in a household without books. His parents disapproved of his reading comics; they “thought I ought to read something ‘improving’ but didn’t know enough about books to be sure which books were ‘improving.’”¹² Culture is an empty but potent signifier, a talisman that offers the promise, however opaque, of entry into a higher world. A similar mentality creates the customers for the “fourth-rate private schools” exhaustively described in A Clergyman’s Daughter. These are parents “too poor to afford the fees of a decent school and too proud to send their children to the council schools,”¹³ eager to purchase a veneer of superior education and distinction yet profoundly suspicious of unfamiliar teaching practices.

Baffled if deferential before the mysteries of high culture the lower middle class is simultaneously barred by its ethos from participating in rowdier forms of popular pleasure. As portrayed by Orwell, it inhabits a world that is almost completely lacking in spontaneity, sensuality, or pleasure. This peculiar joylessness is most vividly embodied in his female characters: the disapproving landlady of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the repressed drudge Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, and the miserable Hilda in Coming Up for Air, “a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump” eternally brooding over gas bills, school fees, and the price of butter.¹⁴ Permanent anxiety about money and keeping up appearances conspire to create a gray, cringing mentality composed equally of conformity and bitterness. The lower middle class has completely internalized the strictures of authority; it is the ultimate example of psychic self-regulation, a class that has built the bars of its own prison:

We’re all respectable householders—that’s to say Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.… We’re all bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money. Everyon...