I gave a presentation at Hampshire College last night (significantly assisted by Denise Stevenson as an audience member) in which I tried to argue that these are not “conservative times” (the description provided by the student who organized the event) but rather “neoliberal times.” I’m thinking along the lines of the kind of shift in discourse Bush crowed about after the 2000 campaign, in which the question of taxation shifted from a question of “whether or not” to lower taxes to “how much” to lower them. Those are the kinds of shifts we need to generate/contribute to producing if we want to have an impact on the political-economic structure.
And I think creating space for connected knowing is vital in this endeavor. I didn’t say drop separate knowing altogether, but rhetoric – it seems to me, certainly in terms of public campaigning – is most often deployed as a weapon in a separate knower kind of way. It’s designed to foreclose argument, leave no room for disagreement, assert the primacy of the rhetorician’s point-of-view. To overpower the other; its primarily self-interested – “my” POV, “my” desire, “my” vision for how things should be.
Which isn’t to say people don’t learn from this kind of engagement; obviously they do, and I include myself quite prominently. However, its not a mode that’s particularly helpful with intractable problems in which “sides” are locked in to their respective rhetorics. A shift in tactics, in communicative strategy, is the only way to break those logjams.
This was illustrated last night when a discussion about welfare came up. In the initial round the classic conservative/liberal split against/for it seemed patently evident to everyone in the room. But, because the emphasis was more on communication skills (mainly, listening) the conversation evolved to the point that we discovered the two main antagonists actually agreed that the system as it is sucks! We didn’t pursue it further, but that kind of movement isn’t possible in a short time frame (90 minutes) when separate knowing and the rules of debate and conquor prevail.

It strikes me (hard!), reading Duggan now, that in all our debates in DRP, we’ve neglected any direct focus on economics, much as we keep managing to elide “real” differences (to take up Raz’s challenge to me about how different the members of that class really are from each other) – such as racial, ethnic, and national origin. We’ve been a bit skewed to the Rhetoric element (firmly ensconced in “the center” of the course title) of the course, with less attention to the Performance. And we keep talking about Democracy …. talking …. about ….
So each professor takes their job seriously and performs it well. At least, I’ll say that about the professors I’ve got right now. Stephen is The Rhetorician and will elicit rhetoric he “can use” to keep us (rhetorically) engaged. Lisa’s gaze on class and its cultural dimensions is unwavering. Paula’s meta-theorectical view on transnationalism won’t be distracted. This is all well and good. And, here’s my honest opinion – it’s not enough.
I don’t mean that each of them isn’t “doing enough” with their respective subject matters, but that training us grad students only within the confines of each particular course topic provides us with a skill set that can pretty much only reduplicate the entire dehumanizing system of academia, hence guaranteeing our role(s) in replicating a bifurcated political economic system in which academics generate knowledge and distance ourselves from power.

One possiblity for implicit classism is the merchandise featured by sorryeverybody.com.
I wanted to check out we’renotsorry.com but their site doesn’t seem to be up today. The StumbleUpon folk had some responses to it…
And here’s an amazing forum, The Democratic Underground. This is one to add to the blogpage, methinks. (Whenever I get around to actually updating it…..which translates partially into when Ben-oh-Ben can squeeze me in!)

Editorial: G.O.P. to the Poor: Don’t Vote
October 30, 2004
With little notice or discussion, Senator Christopher Bond
of Missouri allowed a provision into a Senate
appropriations bill that could ban even nonpartisan voter
registration efforts in public housing developments all
over the country. This is an example of the unfortunate
impulse now afflicting some parts of the Republican Party:
a desire to suppress voting in poor and minority
neighborhoods. Mr. Bond’s proposal runs contrary to both
the spirit of democracy and federal law, which in recent
years has moved increasingly toward broadening ballot
access. The National Voter Registration Act – commonly
known as the Motor Voter Act – actually requires state
agencies, including those that issue welfare benefits and
drivers’ licenses, to offer voter registration materials to
the people they serve.
The proposed Senate legislation comes on top of recent
G.O.P. maneuvers in Ohio, where Republicans challenged the
registrations of more than 30,000 voters, many of them
impoverished. Federal courts have stepped in to halt such
challenges for now, but more are expected at the polls.
The same impulse to discourage voters was on display over
the last several months in New Mexico, where the Indian
Health Service of the Health and Human Services Department
suspended voter registration efforts for several months at
some medical centers and clinics serving Native Americans.
Earlier this month, the Indian Health Service issued a
memorandum effectively ending the ban, but only after
untold numbers of Native Americans had missed the
opportunity to register to vote in the coming election.
Mr. Bond’s argument – that housing built with public money
should be used only for housing, not voter registration -
makes no sense on its face. It is even more ridiculous
given the universal support for voter registration on
military bases around the world. Military voters tend to
favor Republicans, and public housing residents tend to
favor Democrats. It would be nice if everyone could agree
that both groups should be encouraged to vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/opinion/30sat3.html?ex=1100149499&ei=1&en=ff851bf838b97f06

While I understand the need for some distance, for some supposed “rationality” (As Chakrabartty argued is necessary in history), I am not willing to let go of the embodied sensibilities, and the phenomenal experiences and implications of the topics we choose to study and the methods we choose to go about such study. I think the way that I’m usually seeing (reading about) ethnography’s use in mass media studies, political economy, and cultural studies, is as evidence to support assertions of institution’s influence upon individuals, as if the institutions and their policies and practices exist a priori, within their own boundaries and autonomously of any human agency. My desire is to step back another step in the ongoing cycle of cultural reproduction, to the choices of decision-makers in these institutions which shape their impact upon the world.
So, I’m critiquing (I guess!), intellectual tendencies to study those whom we have easiest access to – general “publics” (in Habermasian or other terms), instead of the elites. Gaining access is of course the issue. I need to find people who are even trying.

So, in reading about literature and the kinds of subjectivities it instigates (Radways’ Book-of-the-Month Club, Rich’s Reader’s Digest Condensed Books) in terms of analytical, rationalizing, objectivizing ways-of-thinking (illustrated by McElya and Spigel)…I’m wondering about a form of intellectual anachronism (for lack of another way to say it) – a kind of insistence on promoting the “aesthetic distance” that disembodies, that attempts to bracket out our own subjectivity as part/parcel of our work: our interests, desires, the forms they take, the topics we select, the momentum along our own class/race/gender trajectories that is perpetuated by the ways we construct knowledge through emphasizing literature and reading as such foundational influences – even necessities of an intellectual life. My question is, is this a “backward” focus that is more relevant to certain generations? And, if so, when might one draw an historical line that maps a shift (or shifts) in “foundational influences”?

I think it has to do with bracketing. The topic or foci of the class seems to shift between the macrosocial (”classes in formation”) and the microsocial (effects on classed subjects)…but the microsocial only in terms of the assigned text? Again, I’m just trying to work this out for myself (”out loud”, as is my wont, sigh – for good or ill!). (Perhaps it is my speech production that fails to adequately “bracket out” my own subjectivity?)
Our texts have been historical, yet the power of the writing (in my view), has been the way in which the authors have represented the “outcome” of the dynamical processes which they’re analyzing. So, Steedman writes in a way that enacts the subjectivity of her formative (!) years, and Bledstein taps the roots of present-day cynicism. Interesting, isn’t it, that the class (us, a group-as-a-whole) seemed to be affectively “hooked” by Bledstein and not by Kelley? No roots of the shiftless class among us? And the reactions to Newman played out, to a small degree, a parallel (if milder) form of distancing from the objects (who used to be subjects) of stigma.
Wild thought – is there a hidden transcript even in our academic discussion – as problematizing as it is? Maybe it’s not a transcript, per se. (I’m still working my mind around this concept.) A form of dialogic repression a la Billig?
I’ve also got the reading from Stephen’s class in mind (Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus), and its push to reconceptualize the subject from a unitary self (shall I say, a “professionally-oriented vertical subjectivity”? grin) to a multiply-identitied (!) being whose own locus or center of embodied action shifts among locations.
So, while our macrosocial focus in this course is to keep our eyes on a definition of class that includes the production of surplus value and note the mechanisms (? structures? features?) of class formation, and the notion that, as Linebaugh says “the working class occupies many different locations” (home, work, jail, etc.); the readings have powerfully connected everyday struggles (the microsocial) to these macrosocial formations. I suppose I’m getting into, or coming from (?) a notion of agency (maybe this is where I keep getting in trouble?)….because it seems to me the implications of our discussion about subversion and resistance were very much at the microsocial level.
Hmm. I’m also (lightbulb!) attending to our discoursiv production, which is, I think, the mid-level between the macro and micro. This is the cultural aspect of the formation(s) and enactment(s) of class, and it doesn’t seem out-of-bounds (to me!) to consider if, how, when we’re ‘guilty’ of doing this in the course’s discourse (co-constructed and mutually-performed by all of us). So, rather than “a projection of the dishonorable” onto others; I think I was…possibly?….or intending to be?… a bit closer to “home”.

It’s a challenge not to see this attitude among sign language interpreters – including myself when I argued (just a few days ago!) against the credibilty of a principle in the proposed code of ethics stating that consumers can make “informed decisions” about “interpreting dynamics.” And of course Deaf folk or any other so-called minority language user should never simply cede control to an interpreter – but I think there is a distinction between “control” and “responsibility”, and particularly between the attempt to exert control over others, and the attempt to exercise self-responsibility and be “in charge” of one’s communicative input and output and the relationships these make possible.
While that’s a specific, “live” debate which will require discussion among interpreters and all of our “consumers” (I prefer the sociolinguistic term, interlocutors), the thing that got hammered home to me in this piece is how truly colonized I am within this ideology of conceiving of a career as “the entire coherence of an intellectually defined and goal-oriented life” (p. 111-112). Bledstein describes “the promise of becoming” (p. 113) and the valorization of character: “the internal and psychological symbol of continuity that corresponded to the sociological course a person ran in a career” (p. 112). The results of professionalization? Overwhelming “conservative” (p. 92). “The professional transformed administration into an instrument of opportunity for the middle class and an instrument of regulation for the society” (p. 122).

Smith (Paula’s class) and the debates we’re engaging in Stephen’s class, all of which boil down (in my mind) to agency ~ not just the theoretical concept of it, but grounded, real-life examples of its practice.
Scott frames an analysis of “thick” and “thin” versions of hegemony, critiquing the thick version in similar fashion to Smith’s critique of Harvey and Sassen for reifying economic and/or technological determinism. Scott’s targets are Bourdieu and Gramsci. His focus is to understand “how the process of domination generates the social evidence that apparently confirms notions of hegemony” (1990: 77). He builds his case around several concrete instances of resistance, and the simple fact of the sheer volume and persistance of resistance in multiple and varied forms ~ which, if ideological hegemony was as powerful as Bourdieu, Gramsci and others proclaim, logically shouldn’t happen.
Scott focuses on the public transcript and the ways in which subordinates operate within its terms in either strategic or practical ways, noting that from the outside we can’t determine the degree of consciousness about the appearance of conformity and docility; only the hidden, private transcript can reveal this. He presents a “third alternative” to the discursive production of apparent submission: “that subordinate groups have typically learned, in situations short of those rare all-or-nothing struggles, to clothe their resistance and defiance in ritualisms of subordination that serve both to disguise their purposes and to provide them with a ready route of retreat that may soften the consequences of a possible failure” (96).
In support, Scott provides tangible evidence that peasants and other revolutionaries typically operate within the boundaries of the (so-called) dominant ideology, using it’s own logic in attempts to subvert it to their own purposes. For instance, quoting Field, “Naive or not, the peasants professed their faith in the Tsar in forms, and only in those forms, that corresponded to their own interests” (italics in original, in Scott 1990: 98).
I’ve started the other assigned article; it’s denser. Maybe I’ll return to Bourdieu now. I wasn’t reading the interviews with this notion of public/private transcripts in mind, so that might liven it up for me a bit. Perhaps I haven’t yet been “hooked” because I didn’t have a “something” that I was looking for…?