Hey Tom,
Thanks for responding to my message (invective ?). I think the content of
your reply represents a partial misinterpretation of what I was trying to
say, probably because I was writing in an off-the-cuff, coded style. Although
I will confess that I do have a particular axe to grind on this topic which
encourages over-the-top polemics.
>Let's get real here. Most of San Francisco is working class. The worker
>may put on a tie or a blouse and work at a keyboard (though most of San
>Francisco's employed don't, and most of those who do dress like that to
>work in SF don't actually live in SF), but the power relations, the
>security, the pay, the benefits (lack of), the possibilities, the
>aspirations, are all working class.
I don't disagree with you on this. I would be the last person to claim
that temporary clericals and coffeehouse workers and bike messengers and
ESL instructors and the like aren't members of the working-class.
>The one difference may be a lack of a
>working class identity, though the above affectations may be an attempt to
>put an old style working class appearance on a new style working class job.
>But maybe if an effort was made to show how these jobs really are a new
>urban working class, instead of pointing out how ridiculous the people who
>have these jobs are for attempting to look like they are rust-belt working
>class, there may begin to develop a true working class identity.
My opinion is that "working-class kitsch" is culture-industry driven,
as the culture industry appropriates superficial elements of stereotyped
working class "style," mixes it up, and repackages it for post-modern
consumption. I imagine that people who are attracted to it and buy into
it come from a host of class backgrounds and are headed in diverse
class directions. I think that a principal reason why it is so pronounced
is simply the usual reason that any hip trend catches on -- mass-based
(not class-based) absorption of the latest thing. This is not to say
that people are just mindless peons, or that they don't bring to their
capitalist culture-industry consumption processes their own irreducibly
personal meanings. While I might find the whole phenomenon sociologically
fascinating, I find it politically negligible. The reason why it gets my
goat is that it's just another inscrutable layer of capitalist culture
industry-mediated meanings that gets in the way of more "authentic" human
engagement, political work, aesthetic appreciation -- far more rewarding (in
my mind) activities than tweaking and playing around with already-established
culture industry meanings by dressing in a certain way, acting a certain way,
listening to certain types of music, going to certain types of bars -- all that
"identity through consumption" stuff.
>Anyway, believe me, growing up working class in Michigan in the sixties and
>early seventies never guaranteed a working class identity, either. Unless
>you think someone in a t-shirt sitting in a car with a beer after work and
>ridiculing an equally powerless individual in a suit in a car after work,
>while never looking beyond to those who really have the power and to how
>the power is used, has a working class identity.
>This from one who grew up working class in Michigan in the 60's and early
>70's and who now has a working class job (without a tie) and lives a
>working class life in San Francisco. And wears bowling shirts and owns a
>15 year old car that needs constant repairs. And is a graduate student
>with aspirations toward a life with fewer financial concerns, and is white,
>so probably would be reflexively lumped in with the above berated (though I
>may be too old).
>tom wood
>
>
>
>
John Gulick
Ph. D. Candidate
Sociology Graduate Program
University of California-Santa Cruz
(415) 643-8568
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
