Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class

Class, Culture and Social Change On the Trail of the Working Class

John Kirk

Class, Culture and Social Change

Also by John Kirk Twentieth Century Writing and the British Working Class

Class, Culture and Social Change On the Trail of the Working Class

John Kirk Working Lives Research Institute London Metropolitan University

© John Kirk 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54920–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54920–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kirk, John, 1957– Class, culture and social change : on the trail of the working class / John Kirk. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–54920–9 (alk. paper) 1. Working class – Great Britain. 2. Social classes – Great Britain. 3. Social change – Great Britain. I. Title. HD8391.K57 2007 305.5⬘620941—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1 Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a Post-Industrial Landscape

13

2 In Search of the Working Class: The Rise of British Cultural Studies

38

3 Abyss-mal Sites: Representation and the British Working Class

73

4 ‘Speaking for more than Itself’: Answerability and the Working-Class Text

103

5 Working through Change (i): Oral Testimony and the Language of Class

142

6 Working through Change (ii): Work-life Histories and Narratives of Class

169

Conclusion

203

Notes

209

Bibliography

219

Index

228

v

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following editors and publishers for permitting me to reprint work that previously appeared in their respective journals. Sections of Chapter 2 are taken from ‘Northern Exposure: Mapping the Remains of the Post-industrial Landscape’, which appeared in Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, 6:2 (May 2003), and I am grateful to Sage and to the editors for their kind permission to use the material. Chapter 3 was originally published as ‘Classifying Matters’ in The European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:2 (May 2007) and has been considerably reworked for the purposes of this book. My thanks go to the editors of the journal and to Sage Publications. Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 originally appeared in Sociological Research Online, 11:1 (March 2006), and I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to use the work here. This book was long in the writing, though spurred on recently by stimulating discussions with colleagues at the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University. In particular I owe a debt of thanks to Christine Wall and Tim Strangleman, and to Jane Martin at the Institute of Education. Clearly, Chapter 6 would not have seen the light of day without the co-operation and contribution of my interviewees, for which I am extremely grateful. Putting up with somebody who is writing a book is never easy, so I am grateful as ever to my partner, Alison, for her patience and support, not to mention a sharp editorial eye. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Rose and Fred Kirk, for their love and encouragement, and for their spirit and resolve.

vi

Introduction

Employing the language of class has always been a potentially controversial exercise, and this is never more so than in the British context. Indeed, as David Cannadine pointed out in his book, Class in Britain (2000), there exists a wide belief ‘that the British are obsessed with class in the way that other nations are obsessed with food or race or sex or drugs or alcohol’ (Cannadine, 2000, p. ix).1 This obsession takes contrasting trajectories, producing a range of contradictory discourses on the topic. From Marx to Margaret Thatcher, the subject of class – usually in the shape of the working class – has rested like a nightmare on the brains of the living. This may well be one good reason why invoking the idea of class invariably provokes its contrary – the notion of classlessness, or the end of class. While the rhetoric of classlessness has never quite found the resonance it has in North American mythology, there have been key moments in British culture when this proposition occupied a hegemonic role in sociological and cultural commentary, while finding a different, if still insistent, register in wider culture. The post-Second World War “age of affluence” represented the last juncture where class was seen to be an anachronism in a society and culture transformed by the introduction of the welfare state and full employment. There the workers were viewed by commentators to be moving inexorably towards the status of their middle-class counterparts and in the process inevitably erasing class divisions altogether (see Zweig, 1961; Goldthorpe and Lockwood, 1969; for commentary, see Roberts, 1989; Savage, 2001). Yet this fortuitous state was more imagined than real, often based on superficial conceptions of affluence (the acquisition of a television set or washing machine, it seemed) and were shown by the 1970s to be partial and inadequate as academic research revealed continuing levels of poverty hitherto thought erased (see, for instance, 1

2 Class, Culture and Social Change

Townsend, 1967), while some critics identified a renewed shop-floor militancy disrupting the workplace which implied that struggles around class – in this case, the economics of class – lived on (for instance, Beynon, 1973). Yet narratives predicating the “end of class” re-emerged once again during the 1980s and persist in the present. Indeed, a range of factors have displaced class in this period, and produced a more confident and strident rhetoric of classlessness in British society than hitherto heard. Here, as in earlier examples, it is the working class that is deemed to have departed the social landscape, either as a distinct cultural formation, as an economic entity defined by types of work, or as an agent of political change or action. It is possible to identify a range of reasons for this development. In part, ideas of the demise of class derive from the deep and rapid economic changes characteristic of Western capitalist societies from the turn of the 1980s. Britain, in particular, witnessed a profound shift in terms of production, where the wholesale erosion of its industrial base turned the British economy from one based largely on manufacturing towards one dependent on the service sector, thus shedding thousands of jobs in traditional industries such as coal, steel and textiles. Such economic and technological change fragmented stable class formations, particularly working-class formations, and cannot be underestimated in any discussion of class structure or formation in Britain (see, for instance, Savage, 2000). One major response to this within critical and social theory was the development of postmodern taxonomies with which to make sense of the changes and their implications, resulting in a number of social theorists identifying a new and unprecedented proliferation of social and cultural identities clamouring for recognition, thus reducing the importance of class, if not eclipsing it altogether (for commentary, see Munt, 2000; Day, 2001; Milner, 1999, 2002; Kirk, 2003). Thus writers on postmodernism, adopting poststructuralist theory’s insistence on the fluidity and fragmentation of ontological boundaries in this new dispensation, have challenged and in large part rejected traditional methods of viewing class.2 This has led to a shift from a broad acceptance of class as central to the sources of change, conflict or cohesion within society, to a new emphasis on identity politics and new social movements as political conduits for action, and thus a move from the politics of redistribution to that of recognition (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Young, 1990; Butler, 1998. For a critique, see Meiksins Wood, 1986; Harvey, 1993; Fraser, 1995; Eagleton, 1996). Academics and politicians deride notions of class as they seek a “Third Way” (Blair, 1996; Giddens, 1998), a politics that might be seen to transcend class and nation to embrace a globalised consumer culture where all that is solid melts

Introduction 3

into air, and “traditional” identities give way to a proliferation of selffashioned subjectivities. Thus ideas of consumption have come to occupy a primary focus of attention in cultural analysis and are projected, it seems, onto all aspects of social life: from health to education, politics to personal relationships. This has been reflected in the intellectual marketplace, too, where studies of consumerism abound and the consumer has emerged since the 1980s as a potential political subversive in her/his own right. Amongst all this activity, the dialectical counterpart of the consumer – what was once called the producer – has all but disappeared. Thus any significant interest in the concept and experience of class declines and we are faced with an insistence on a kind of classlessness seen to be paradigmatic of the new postmodern consumerist milieu, and this classlessness is then constitutive of a new take on individualism, argued for by writers like Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992), and which I will discuss later on. Simon J. Charlesworth, in A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (2000), suggests that while ‘class as a topic has sunk to the bottom of the hierarchy of intellectual objects’, and while ‘universities celebrate ethnic diversity’, they fail to recognise ‘forms of discrimination that have shaped the nature of their own space, to say nothing of the inequalities upon which British nation-hood stands’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 14). These shifts of emphasis with regard to the significance of class in society quite quickly established themselves as the new “common sense”, so much so that one recent commentator can say that ‘having once been the fundamental source and subject of conflict in the political culture of capitalism, class inequality is now the problem that dare not speak its name’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 224). In recent times, however, class has begun to make something of a comeback, occasionally in the most unlikely quarters. Plainly class has always been the stuff of popular culture, and the function of representations has kept notions of class alive while it was simultaneously being denied. In an earlier book, Twentieth Century Writing and the British Working Class (2003), I was interested in representations of workingclass life primarily within the field of British fiction, as well as the broader discursive realm that is popular culture. Around that time other work embedded both within the academic field and beyond it had begun to re-open issues around the continued relevance of class in British society after a considerable period of neglect.3 Many of the ideas and lines of argument developed here are shaped by and alongside important themes explored by those writers concerned with re-figuring, rehabilitating and restating the significance of class for academic study.

4 Class, Culture and Social Change

But it is not only in the academic sphere that class has begun to be the subject of some debate. In mainstream publications, and in particular some of the more “well-meaning” broadsheet newspapers, the working class are no longer spoken about in the past tense quite so easily. There has indeed developed a kind of lament – almost a type of “guilttripping” – directed at the perceived neglect of working-class histories, cultures, aspirations or needs. Two books stand out in this context: Ferdinand Mount’s, Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain (2004), and The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (2004), by Michael Collins, which was followed up by a documentary by Collins for Channel 4 called The Working Class. Both books are essentially concerned with mapping the cultural decline and political abandonment of the working class. Of the two, Collins’s book courts greater controversy, as the “white” in the title might indicate. His insistence there is that the political parties and the elite culture care little for and even disdain the white working class, enamoured as they have become by multiculturalism. Now it is the white working class – in the guise of Chavs, for instance – who can be mocked and derided and be coded as all that is wrong with a culture and society in which – and here’s the paradox – they have the least influence and power of all.4 In Mount’s book, the former adviser to Margaret Thatcher goes in search of a working class that Thatcher’s economic policies did much to kill off in the 1980s, and concludes that ‘what I do not think many people have yet woken up to is that the working class has been subjected to a sustained programme of social contempt and institutional erosion which has persisted through many governments and several political fashions’ (Mount, 2004, p. 273). It is a startling admission from an acolyte of a Prime Minister who once described striking coal miners as the ‘enemy within’. This is echoed elsewhere, with the 2006 Edinburgh Television Festival debating whether studio television bosses had fastened onto the white working class as the only group left that it was acceptable to ridicule openly (Observer, 27 August 2006). Examples given came from the BBC comedies, Little Britain and The Royle Family, as well as Channel 4’s Shameless. Other media representations that use as their material the working class include a host of reality TV programmes which either pathologise the working class or construct working-class people as objects of ridicule.5 Social policy interventions can be added to this new concern with class and its neglect, such as the recently published Young Foundation’s, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (2006), which seems to suggest the profound disenfranchisement and disillusionment of the white working class in areas of high immigration.6

Introduction 5

The refusal of class to disappear is a recurring conundrum, then. One strong claim as to why class still remains relevant can be found in Andrew Sayer’s The Moral Significance of Class (2005), where he insists that ‘class matters to us not only because of differences in material wealth and economic security, but also because it affects our access to things, relationships, experiences and practices which we have reason to value, and hence of chances of living a fulfilling life’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 1). Class here is more than the unequal distribution of wealth, though it remains that too. The ramifications of class inequality and difference cut into subjective experiences and bury themselves deep, and this in turn has profound implications for how people see themselves, others and the world. This is a very important and fresh take on class, and one this book will be interested in pursuing in the context of working-class experience and its articulation. For Sayer, class differences ‘influence people’s commitments and their valuation and pursuit of goods, their ethical dispositions and their treatment of others’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 2); and so class, in this perspective, is a social relation constituted dialogically and relationally, cast within the shadow of structures and processes which create and reinforce inequalities. The emergence from within these contexts of subjective responses to class experiences and conditions reflect sentiments that matter profoundly to people. Indeed, they are what people ‘care about, and which make a difference to their well-being, indeed they are crucial to their identity or self-hood’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 2). Sayer’s arguments in The Moral Significance of Class (2005), which I will address in more detail later in the book, are important in a number of respects and make a powerful contribution to re-opening new debates around the importance of class. He establishes a compelling framework for thinking class as not merely an objective position within relations of production – whereby, in relation to working or “lower” classes, not only exploitation occurs, but material deprivations exist – but also as a category, or formation, through which deeply moral and ethical questions are lived and experienced on a daily basis – experiences imbued with class assumptions and ascriptions and thus ones that must be seriously acknowledged and engaged. Sayer’s insistence that class should be taken seriously is based on an engagement with the range of exploitative practices which characterise class relations and practices, moving beyond what might be regarded as narrower – or perhaps more restricting – preoccupations premised on economic exploitation alone. Thus his analytical framework is informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and in this he has much in common with other recent British scholars on class who lean

6 Class, Culture and Social Change

heavily on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework: Simon Charlesworth (2000) and Beverley Skeggs (1997, 2004), to name significant examples. Utilising Bourdieu’s approach for understanding the effects of class means considering not just the outcomes of economic inequality, but the way other forms of capital – cultural, social, linguistic and symbolic capital – all operate in variable ways to reproduce class divisions. This leads, for Sayer, inevitably into questions of morality. At the heart of his book, then, lie central categories and arguments turning upon notions of deference and shame, dignity and respect, and Sayer describes how these sentiments are produced by, and help produce, class difference. Class is essential to understanding this particular ethical disposition – a disposition embedded in the very habitus of the social class formations he is concerned with. Class inequalities in terms of wealth and power persist – indeed, are intensifying – but these are further compounded by the way people are forced to negotiate their subjective responses to class positioning, so that ‘to understand the subjective experience of class we need to consider the emotional and evaluative aspects of the relations of self to self and self to other’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 22). Through Bourdieu’s categories, class is approached at both a sociological level and at the level of what Sayer calls ‘lay understandings’ – ‘everyday understandings of the social world’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 74), ones shaped to a very significant degree by class position, so that class then is seen as ‘lying not on a single axis, but on several, each relating to different forms of capital’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 77). This is an important move in as much as it gives respect to what people think and feel in class terms, while at the same time not simply accepting these responses as the single “answer” or best possible reasoning of what class is about. People’s lay understanding of class may not be right, but nor might strictly sociological (or abstract) accounts of class tell the whole story either, and one of the functions of Sayer’s approach is to enable us to think about the ways in which class is lived and embodied ‘on the pulse’ (Kuhn, 1995, p. 101). * * * It is possible to identify two influential models for investigating class in the humanities and social science subjects. This distinguishes between approaches concerned with class structures and thus with the development of statistical analysis for marking out complex problems of stratification and mobility; and, on the other hand, the approach which focuses on the importance of class formation and consciousness, and framing these analyses within pertinent historical contexts through

Introduction 7

an examination of cultural forms or ethnographic data (on this see Savage, 2000; also Rampton, 2006). This study falls within the latter framework. While, for instance, it accepts Bourdieu’s proposition that class in an objective sense is represented by ‘the set of agents who are placed in homogeneous conditions of existence imposing homogeneous conditionings and producing homogeneous systems of dispositions capable of generating similar practices’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 1), it also insists on the historical mutability of (working) class formations and experiences, the centrality of subjective responses and articulations (by class subjects and about class subjectivities), as well as the often neglected importance of the necessary intersection between class and other forms of social identity. Such an emphasis draws us in the direction of E.P. Thompson’s well-known definition of class as ‘a social and cultural formation’, one which cannot be ‘defined abstractly … but only in terms of relationship with other classes’ (Thompson, 1978, pp. 85–86). This “dialogic” relation is essential for comprehending class, but it must be able, too, to take in the dimension of time – ‘that is, action and reaction, change and conflict’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 85). So, Thompson insists, when speaking of ‘a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same categories of interest, social experiences, traditions and value-systems, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 85). Thompson refers to social movements and forces here: shaping this conception is a view of social classes as crucial to historical change in a classically Marxist sense, though such a view has become unfashionable of late and still remains so. Yet there are still relevant insights here for thinking class at other, perhaps more micro, levels. He goes on: In size and strength these groups are always on the ascendant or the wane, their consciousness of class identity is incandescent or scarcely visible, their institutions are aggressive or merely kept up out of habit; while in between there are those amorphous, ever-changing social groups among whom the line of class is constantly drawn and re-drawn with respect to their polarisation this way or that, and which fitfully become conscious of interests and identity of their own. (Thompson, 1978, p. 86).7 While at one level class exists independently of what people think about it and thus finds an objective status within a set of social relations, or relations of production, there is additionally the meaning Thompson

8 Class, Culture and Social Change

seeks to ascribe to class: that of making, with the central stress on agency, which brings class formations to life to find articulation in institutions and traditions, some of which survive, some of which fall by the wayside. The life of these formations will be complex and, as Thompson indicates, may ebb and flow owing to historical circumstance, to conditions of hegemony and relations of power and as a result of new and emergent structures of feeling which are forced to engage with historical change and by doing so inevitably shape it. Their expressions may be “institutional” and thus political in a strong sense, or they may be at the level of everyday interactions. This is what I would call, following Skeggs (1997) and Sayer (2005), more “mundane” communication, suggesting that ‘everyday negotiations of the mundane matter … are formative … and these mundane experiences are a product of systematic inequality. They are not free-floating experiences. They are profoundly located in structural organisation’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 167). It is through “mundane” communication that the hidden injuries, and sometimes victories, of class are disclosed. Raymond Williams would encode such formulations in the concept of structures of feeling. Structure of feeling, as an informing conceptual tool, runs throughout this book, and can be regarded in many ways as standing in here for Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, and it helps us to make sense of working-class experience and position. For Williams, the idea of culture is that of ‘a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ways of life’ (Williams, 1977, p. 19). Regarding culture precisely as a process places a necessary focus on agency. In this construction, the idea of structure of feeling, as a way of seeing and experiencing, emerges as a shifting and changing state. It is quite possible to detect and examine structures of feeling in the wider society and forms of expression, as well as in areas of cultural production, often the main focus of Williams’s analyses. Structure of feeling constitutes a site where a specific sensibility can be encountered, and this idea of sensibility takes us close to what Bourdieu means by habitus. I would argue that there are interesting cross-overs, but also significant differences, between the two theorists, but that the notion of structures of feeling enables us to think about identity and action as a more fluid process than that suggested by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Structures of feeling are dialogic, constitutive of lived experience and in many significant respects – to reference again, Thompson – relational. They are in part the product, to use Valentin Volosinov’s argument, of ‘inner speech’, which renders consciousness as constitutive of one’s own voice in dialogic interaction with myriad others, reflecting Volosinov’s view

Introduction 9

‘that there is no such thing as experience outside of its embodiment in signs’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 85). Structures of feeling are products of socio-historic contexts of change and continuity, conflict and struggle, and this point is underlined by the categories Williams ascribes to different, changing and evolving structures of feeling: these categories he labels dominant, residual and emergent. So structures of feeling might allude to the dominant world-view of a period, or what Williams calls its ‘official consciousness’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). Residual and emergent structures of feeling imply alternative or oppositional positions within a culture, the product of a practical consciousness at levels of variance with the dominant and linked often – though not inevitably – to class formations. These are forms of consciousness not necessarily fully shaped but ‘in solution’ (Williams, 1977, p. 134): that is, emergent. Here, the notion of hegemony is key in Williams’s formulations, and I will give these concerns much wider consideration later on, particularly in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, where I consider what I call working-class self-expression. Finally, we should note that such expressions are never free of hegemonic contexts anyway – they will be shaped in significant ways also by those myriad narratives of and about class which may be intrinsic or extrinsic to a class formation. Skeggs denotes such inscriptions as ‘classifications’ which are in turn ‘performative’ and which ‘bring the perspective of the classifier into effect in two ways: first, to confirm the perspective of the classifier and, second, to capture the classified within discourse’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 18). That does not mean, however, that such classifications, imposed by the actions of more powerful classifiers, will go unchallenged. Such classifications must merge with the flow of practical consciousness and this flags up again the importance of experience in contesting hegemonic modes. Mapping contemporary and historical ways in which class has been spoken, defined and experienced in a range of ways and forms in British culture is this book’s core aim, then, with the intention of complementing and extending those recent studies which have endeavoured to reignite the debate around class, and around working-class identity in particular. It pursues this course by combining a range of methodological approaches – empirical, theoretical and historical – which will in turn provide an account of change and continuity in understandings of working-class subjectivity. There is another purpose, too. Throughout this book, I have drawn extensively on Raymond Williams’s work. Williams’s writing on class, culture and social change, I would argue, still provides us with key insights for making sense of the way class is present in a range of cultural forms, institutional locations and traditions.

10 Class, Culture and Social Change

In Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (2002), Andrew Milner posits that one of Williams’s main achievements was the unmasking – begun in Culture and Society (1958) – of the ‘class content of the English literary tradition’ (Milner, 2002, p. 60), exposing the class assumptions and exclusions on which such traditions are built. The impact of Culture and Society, and later books such as The Long Revolution (1961), powerfully influenced the trajectory of Cultural Studies in Britain and elsewhere, with a focus on the fundamental importance of class – so much so that Stuart Hall, when head of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, could insist that ‘in modern societies the most fundamental groups are social classes’ (quoted in Milner, 2002, p. 113). This statement was made more or less on the cusp of Thatcherism in Britain, at a time when the School was producing its work on class and sub-cultures. But this emphasis was quite quickly to change. Through this, and the decisive shift away from class analysis, Williams’s work began to appear irrelevant, and though Williams can be rightly criticised for his relative silence on the topics of gender and “race” (though national identity was always a concern for Williams, as a Welshman occupying the “border country”), Williams remains as important as ever for finding ways of understanding and talking about the significance of class. I will now outline the contents of subsequent chapters.

Chapter outlines Chapter 1 considers notions of class as it has been articulated in the context of a particular, if difficult to define, geographical location – the North of England. Part of this analysis addresses what is meant by the North, and its almost iconic status as the home of the industrial revolution and so of the working class. Myth and reality clash in this discursive matrix, which is the product in part of a ‘southern English construction’ which presents the North ‘as an almost alien, usually inferior place’ (Taylor, 2001, p. 136). At the same time, the association of industry with the North of England provided the region with a particular dynamic of its own. De-industrialisation shattered this picture. Statistics confirm the effects of de-industrialisation in the area during the 1980s. Over the period from 1979 to 1986 the number of people in employment in the North fell by 1.1 million, while in the south, conversely, numbers rose by 356,000 (Russell, 2004, p. 29). Mining, textiles, steel and shipbuilding disappeared as central industries employing thousands. Thus the chapter takes a broad historical sweep, moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the present to examine ideas of the North and

Introduction 11

how these have helped produce images and notions of the working class in a whole range of writing, and I place significant emphasis on ethnography and social investigation. Chapter 2 focuses on the trajectory taken in the development of British Cultural Studies and its relation to class analysis. It also examines in more detail the importance of Raymond Williams’s early work and his continuing relevance to the study of class, culture and social change. Central to this chapter, then, will be a critique of cultural studies as a discipline, exploring trajectories taken in the field since its development in the post-war period. In this earlier moment its focus fell upon class formation and consciousness in particular. By the 1980s this had altered significantly. Indeed, much of the scholarly emphasis in this field over the past twenty years or so has been on anything but class; thus we witness a radical decentring of social class ‘by an increasing preoccupation with the cultural effects of other kinds of cultural difference – gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality’ (Milner, 2002, p. 2). This chapter explores the ramifications of this for understandings of class. As well as placing Williams’s work within, and outside, this general trajectory taken by British Cultural Studies, the chapter will offer a critique of some of Stuart Hall’s key interventions which have helped shape and define the field of contemporary British Cultural Studies. Chapter 3 is concerned with representations of the British working class, that is with what one recent critic has referred to as the discursive making, or symbolic construction, of class (Skeggs, 2004). Inscribing class in culture produces an economy of value whereby some groups are perceived to be more worthy (worth more) than others. Thus mapping how class representations – in popular culture, literary fiction, cultural commentary – help fix and reinforce class privilege and subordination is crucial to understanding class struggles. This important insight is drawn from Beverley Skeggs’s Class, Self, Culture (2004), a key contribution to the renewal of class analysis. She suggests that class ‘is dynamic, produced through conflict and fought out at the level of the symbolic’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 5). The level of the symbolic is the realm of language and the discursive, of writing and representation, and so this chapter takes up some of Skeggs’s core propositions to examine how working-class subjectivity is depicted, displaced and denied, in various modes of writing from the nineteenth century to the present. The focus in Chapter 4 will be on aspects of British working-class writing, dealing with questions of working-class self-representation in a range of forms and considering how we might theorise such cultural practice as it has evolved, or taken shape, historically. The chapter

12 Class, Culture and Social Change

explores how working-class people have articulated their own experiences using the medium of fiction and autobiography, but the chapter differs significantly from earlier ones that have tended to show how others, outside working-class formations, have represented workingclass life. One main area of analysis will be the work produced within the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers as an alternative institutional site through which ideas of class are explored and through which the very concept of the ‘literary’ might be challenged, and the uses of autobiography for depicting working-class identity through time and in space may be analysed. The final two chapters explore the uses of oral history.8 The central focus here is the theme of work, an obvious imperative in working-class lives, but one – as has been evident in some of the dominant emphases in British Cultural Studies, for instance – that has suffered neglect. The chapters explore a range of relevant and associated thematic concerns around work and identity. Here the book draws on recent writing on working-class subjectivities by writers like Andrew Sayer, and attempts to develop more fully the implications of Volosinov’s understanding of language as central to making sense of class consciousness.

1 Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a Post-Industrial Landscape

There is that notorious moment in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1988) when the writer-explorer, departing by train the dank confines of a struggling English northern town, witnesses, and recounts, the striking image of a young working-class woman, ‘kneeling on stones, poking a stick up a leaden waste-pipe’. As he watches from the carriage he observes ‘the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen’; a look which, for Orwell, seems to capture the existential horror of inter-war working-class life, mirrored in the lines on her face, the wretchedness of her task, the stark confines of her world (Orwell, 1988/1937, p. 17). Caught there in the sympathetic middle-class gaze, the nameless woman is meant somehow to be emblematic of the crisis inflicted upon the working class as a whole, trapped in conditions which it cannot change or control. Written some fifty-odd years later, Simon J. Charlesworth’s A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience explores a similarly stricken industrial landscape in broadly the same geographical locale: the North of England. The ethnographic urge is equally evident; surprisingly, so too are some of the central thematic concerns found in Orwell’s book. The refrain is not unfamiliar: in the former industrial areas of England – and Charlesworth’s choice of geographical locale is particularly resonant: Rotherham, a town in South Yorkshire, an area once home to coal and steel – the culture of the working class, and its economic and social standing, lies in ruins and Charlesworth examines the upshot of this. Like Orwell’s story, this one speaks of decline, poverty and abandonment; unlike Orwell, the narrative documents something new, which time and economic restructuring has made manifest: a deep existential gulf between those reared in a solidly industrial past and those for whom 13

14 Class, Culture and Social Change

this culture now stands as some sort of folk-lore, contrary to their existence in a present dominated instead by selfishness, violence and what the writer perceives as an ‘arid individualism’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 2). Such observations reflect the importance of time, in the sense of historical process, with regard to working-class life and its representation, but also the significance of space and place. Hence, the central thrust of this chapter, as the title suggests, lies in exploring recent representations of the post-industrialised North, a space resonant with notions of class.

Northern Sights: Mapping the Terrain Ideas of the North in British culture lean towards the iconic. They come with a resonance rooted in the industrial revolution in particular; a specific quality of experience that feeds into understandings of the people and communities produced by such transformations over time, and all this is bound up in some significant senses with the very lie of the land: the distinctive look and shape of the landscape itself, whether through images of mills, docks, pit heads, the rolling hills of the Dales countryside or the rugged rib of terrain that is the Pennines and through to the grey and sometimes foreboding north-east coastline. Though it might be possible to map what we think of as the geographical co-ordinates of the North, this process is complicated even if superficially more exact. This is because maps, like words in a dictionary, will always aspire to abridge, pin down, de-limit, what exists in reality, in the context of everyday life, and thus are in effect only starting points in a debate about what a place, a region, a territory, or even a nation, and its people, really are. While exploring what is taken to denote the North of England, it must be acknowledged also that in a wider British context the North extends well beyond the border of Cumbria and Northumberland and into the heart of Scotland itself and its own northern regions. Scotland, as an entity, has its very own north and south, its own history of development and transition, its own urban myths and rural idylls, though all that too is bound up with the entity south of its border. But even in the narrower geographical context of England there remains the dispute about, if not where the Northern border ends, then exactly where the southern one begins. Geographers may strive to be exact, but accuracy means little when the North of the popular imagination stakes a claim. Here the North emerges as more the product of representation than reality, fixed in consciousness by a whole range of discursive practices. Thus in popular idiom, the North might begin “north of the Watford gap,” which lies a considerable way south into Northamptonshire. In slightly more precise

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terms, perhaps, it starts somewhere on the northern reaches of Nottinghamshire, Robin Hood country around Edwinstone, or the Eastwood birthplace of D.H. Lawrence, whose novels traced that border country of what might be seen as the industrial Midlands and the North; and then there is the city of Nottingham itself, the location of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with its central character, Arthur Seaton, the new post-War working-class hero, with his mixture of northern grit, shop-floor belligerence and newly acquired affluence on display in equal measure. As Dave Russell has pointed out in his Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (2004), ‘most people outside the North and many within it have come to know the region not through personal experience but via the versions they encounter in the field of culture’ (Russell, 2004, p. 4). This observation is vital here, as I examine in this chapter representations of the industrial north, because it is primarily, it seems, upon this terrain that discourses of the North have consolidated over time producing ‘limited and limiting images of the region as harsh, industrial, grimy and the particular province of the working class’ (Russell, 2004, p. 5). Establishing the borders of a region, then, may never be easy, as place is somewhere lived in emotive, shifting and experiential terms, though these experiences need not be fully direct ones. Such structures of feeling are part of a complex experience and find articulation in cultural forms and expression – they depend on some material reality while, at the same time, they help constitute such understandings of it. They are shared experiences helping shape an imagined (and real) community; they are deeply personal meanings which require affirmation or rejection, or careful negotiation over time. Despite Russell’s critical view that understandings of the North around iconic images of industry remain ‘limited and limiting’, they are none the less enduring ones, and based to a significant extent on the actual conditions of existence for many thousands from the region and do not just belong to sets, or regimes, of representation. Yet these representations remain crucial to understanding and I propose here to trace briefly some key writers responsible for fixing ideas of the North in popular consciousness. I will then turn to one recent significant treatment, from the field of academic study, of the postindustrial northern landscape, which offers a devastating account of contemporary working-class life. The ‘literary north’ has often been defined, as I imply above, ‘so as to embrace, among other areas, D.H. Lawrence’s north Nottinghamshire, Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham and Arnold Bennett’s Potteries’ (Russell, 2004, p. 81), stretching out geographically notions of the North, an

16 Class, Culture and Social Change

extension which I would argue is partly warranted. Indeed, ‘writers from adjacent regions can be so easily claimed for the North, and especially those authors associated with the industrial working class and/or despoiled industrial landscapes. Notions of the North as essentially industrial and proletarian clearly run deep’ (Russell, 2004, p. 81).1 Such notions, of course, are primarily the product of the industrial revolution, which began in the early nineteenth century, and which made cities such as Manchester hubs of a new world; and it was in these cities that the paradoxical nature of rapid socio-economic change was most evident. Early commentators, travelling to the industrialising North, were both shocked and amazed by what they saw. The French liberal de Tocqueville wrote of Manchester: ‘Civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage’ (quoted in Hobsbawm, 1969, p. 86). Around the same time Dickens wrote Hard Times, a novel which used the Lancashire mill town of Preston as a model for his dark and satanic Coketown; while Elizabeth Gaskell, seeking to explore the social ramifications of the new relations of production and associated class conflict and division, named one novel North and South (1856), invoking two worlds that could only be symbolically connected and united in her narrative through fortuitous marriage. Disraeli’s image was starker still, encoding the notion of England in a quite explicit sense as two distinct nations in Sybil (1845). Though coded in geographical terms – the divisions of north–south, the notion of two nations – expressed also here were deeper anxieties around the likelihood of class conflict and social upheaval, and I will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 3 (see also Williams, 1958; Jameson, 1981; Day 2001). By the turn of the twentieth century Britain’s transformation to an industrial society was complete, and the north–south divide almost a part of the nation’s common sense notions of itself. It constituted important understandings in popular culture, formed the terrain on which key aspects of the nation’s politics were fought, and became the site of exploration for writers and artists alike seeking either the exotic or the authentic (Russell, 2004). The son of a miner, D.H. Lawrence, in both his novels and essays, endeavoured to mark out an idea of the North and its working-class culture. That north is more accurately the Midlands, though Lawrence is thought of as a northern writer. In ‘Nottingham and the Mining Country’, he argued that ‘the real tragedy of England … is the tragedy of ugliness … the man-made England is so vile’ (Lawrence, 1936, p. 137). The England he often speaks about is situated on that border country referred to earlier, that liminal space which helps complicate so many definitions of the North.

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He defines this landscape in his epic novel, The Rainbow (1915), where we see amid the countryside the growing presence of the pit and pit village carving up the rural peace of Wiggiston: Wiggiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of eleven houses on the edge of healthy, half-agricultural country. Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure ugliness … The place has the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers hanging around in gangs and groups, or pressing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous, amorphous sterility of the whole, suggested death rather than life. (Lawrence, 1915, p. 291) The short, terse sentences almost deny the possibility of representation, while the similes and the metaphorical slippages here load the description to the very limits of endurance. If nothing else, the mine constitutes an unnatural phenomenon sprung from the earth, a gross intrusion, disrupting and desolating the landscape. To Ursula, a local teacher, the miners appear ‘unutterably sad’, and Tom Brangwen’s remark that the workers ‘believe that they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place’ (Lawrence, 1915, p. 292) hammers home Lawrence’s basic critique. This is the life-denying nature of industrialism, an image of the working-class North destined to repeat itself in a range of representations in the years ahead. Thus: The pit owns everyman. The women have what is left. What’s left of this man, or what’s left of that – it doesn’t matter altogether. The pit takes all that really matters. (Lawrence, 1915, p. 293) And Ursula, looking on, ‘sat black-souled and very bitter … The pit was the great mistress … with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless squalid mass of the town laying aside … The pit was the main show, the raison d’etre of it all’ (Lawrence, 1915, p. 293). Here the ‘main show’ connotes a kind of masquerade; an “unreality,” or “in-authenticity,” of form imposed upon the real life of the body and soul and to which these things are subordinated – ‘human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery’ (Lawrence, 1915, p. 294). In such writing, Lawrence is concerned with the aesthetics of environment, the connections of community, the nature of work, or labour. He is

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interested in how historical change marks social space, and shapes relationships and lives therein. But Lawrence can offer, too, in the very same essay quoted earlier, a conflicting perspective. So, in “Nottingham and the Mining Country”, we see that life was a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot. The dialect was broad Derbyshire, and always ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. The people lived almost entirely by instinct … Under the butty system, the miners worked underground as a sort of intimate community, they knew each other practically naked, and with curious, close intimacy, and the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit ‘stall’, and the continual presence of danger, made the physical, instinctive and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. The physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit … They did not know what they had lost till they lost it. And I think it is the same with the young colliers of today. (Lawrence, 1936, p. 139) This is a structure of feeling that stands at odds with the language used to describe the fictional village of Wiggiston in The Rainbow, and one derived powerfully from his own upbringing and experiences. These men are not wholly ‘mechanised’ by the pit because they can negotiate the border, it seems, between the natural and mechanical, the urban and the rural, the metaphysical and the material. The miner was ‘happy’, ‘fulfilled’. He engages with his environment in a complexity of spirit generated by the contradictions of his condition: his location within a specific time and space, embedded within a set of dynamics shaping the historical construction of cultural identity and economic position. The topographies of place and community outlined here are significant and powerful representations of a way of life, though ones overwhelmingly inflected with the co-ordinates of gender and class. In the process it achieves something which will become typical in a range of representations – marking the North as a masculinised space. When modern industries emerged in the interwar years in different locales to the North, the traditional industries of coal, steel, textiles and ship building were seen, if not in the throes of terminal decline, then at least experiencing levels of upheaval and unemployment which numerous social investigators and novelists regarded as their task to document and depict. The inter-war depression years resulted in massive disruption

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to industry and employment. In the early years of the 1930s, 34.5 per cent of coalminers, 43.8 per cent of pig-iron workers, 43.2 per cent of cotton operatives and 62 per cent of ship builders and ship-repairers were out of work, with the North hit by far the worst (Hobsbawm, 1969, p. 209). As new sunrise industries opened in the south around light engineering, electrical products and chemicals, contrasting iconographies of class began to emerge. George Orwell’s image of the desolate working-class woman in her backyard in Wigan is complemented by the workless cloth-capped male locked-out beyond the factory gates or pit head, and these representations come into sharp relief set against the “new” workers in the south, described by J.B. Priestley as ‘factory girls looking like actresses’ (Priestley, 1979/1934, p. 401). Throughout the inter-war years the North experienced mass unemployment and high levels of poverty, and these conditions were exposed not only in the writing of social investigators like Orwell, or in the work of Mass Observation, but in the fiction of working-class novelists like Walter Greenwood and Ellen Wilkinson and in films such as The Stars Look Down (1939) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). The place of heavy industry – particularly coal mining – in such discursive constructs further accentuated scenes of heroic last stands against exploitation, bravery and fearlessness in the face of terrifying working conditions and the sense of community and comradeship in adversity. Orwell, as is well known, marvelled at the strength and physical capacity of the coal miners he encountered in his journey to the North, those lines ‘of halfnaked kneeling men’, their physiques honed to perfection through the daily grind so that ‘there was not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere’ as they hewed ‘huge shovels … with tremendous force and speed’ (Orwell, 1937, p. 21). The “beauty” that Orwell discerns here, is a beauty amid deprivation and one almost integral to it – deprivation a requirement for these people to attain any honour at all to the outside eye. It is a beauty ‘often discovered by middle-class observers journeying there [the North] and finding, much to their relief, that the workers they encountered were peaceful members of elaborate, richly-textured communities’ (Waters, 1991, p. 131). The ‘pastoralisation of the industrial North in the 1930s was widespread’ (Waters, 1991, p. 131), and it constituted a means whereby the region is rendered devoid of any threatening type of political agency, and this was in some ways comforting during a period of perceived class division and political polarisation. Waters explores Lowry’s paintings of industrial Lancashire within this context as safe urban pastorals, and we might argue that such images of the urban and industrial Northern landscape persist after the war and

20 Class, Culture and Social Change

are, in many respects, encoded in the television soap opera Coronation Street (Granada, 1960). While the actual working environment was never a central concern of this soap (or any other following on from it for that matter), the community remains central – and in Coronation Street the communal landscape is one of cobbled streets and terraced houses, a fictionalised depiction of Salford, Manchester, and one not so far removed from Walter Greenwood’s classic depression novel Love on the Dole (1929), though “modernised” somewhat in recent times. Conversely, at around the same time Coronation Street made its first appearance, a “new” working-class culture was in the process of being celebrated through the notion of the “age of affluence.” So, while Coronation Street articulated a working-class identity that referenced the inter-war landscape and a residual structure of feeling (see Dyer, 1981),2 affluence theorists pointed to a newly emergent structure of feeling among the working class as a product of post-War welfarism and full employment. Yet mass communications and commercialism characterising the post-war cultural terrain were soon seen by some influential commentators to have eroded a traditional working-class community in which that earlier “beauty” was deemed to lie, and this was the gist of Raymond Hoggart’s thesis in The Uses of Literacy (1957). It was explored in other ways too in fiction and film, but this time affluence is celebrated rather than lamented and an obvious example of such representations is Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) made into a film in 1961 by Karel Reisz. According to Raphael Samuel (1994) such films formed part of the ‘New Wave’ of British cinema which attempted to explore a workingclass aesthetic. But they remained in large part the product of a ‘crossclass romance’ encounter, as the middle-class artist, film-maker and writer once more engaged with their working-class counter-part. The difference here, however, lay in a new thematic twist, a development not based on the concerns of work or worklessness but harnessed instead to ‘the pleasure principle’ (Samuel, 1994, p. 164). Here it is workers at play that attracts the outside eye, and Samuel too points to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) as a prime example of this ideological tendency, with Arthur Seaton, the hedonistic central character hell-bent on a good time, and therefore embodying such structures of feeling. This embodiment of working-class energy found expression in other things (northern) working class (the Mersey sound, the utopian housing developments emerging in northern cities like Newcastle, the new Yorkshire Prime Minister, Harold Wilson), yet at the same time shifting in tandem with the siren voices calling for, or at least pointing to, a new

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condition of classlessness (Samuel, 1994; also Day, 2001; Kirk, 2003). I will return to some of these contradictory concerns in later chapters. What becomes of central importance in later understandings of the North and its working-class landscapes – and which brings me to more recent times – is a development absent in the range of representations exploring “life up North” prior to the turbulent moment of the Thatcherite 1980s. Samuel suggests that as deindustrialisation began its destructive effects in huge swathes of the region, cutting into and transforming working-class lives and working-class communities, a new iconography of class unfolds. I have written about this in more detail elsewhere (see Kirk, 2003, 2006). Indeed, economic restructuring impacted profoundly in the North, with the decimation of many of those traditional industries and ways of life long the fascination of novelists, film-makers and social investigators alike. The fall-out of this kind of economic reconstruction has radical implications geographically. Doreen Massey, witnessing the polarisation of poverty, asserts that ‘the growing social inequality in Thatcherite Britain is not just reflected in, but is moulded by, its unequal geography’ (Massey, 1988, p. 31). As London, and the South East, less badly hit by the harsh economic recession of the early eighties (though painful recipients of another recession in the nineties), came to represent Thatcher’s much lauded “economic miracle”, overnight images of the working-class man seemed to lose all resonance with the “flat-cap”, or with the perceived economic and industrial strength embodied in recalcitrant trade unionism. Instead a new myth, or icon, came into being: that of the upwardly mobile, southern-based and distinctly consumerist Essex-man. If this is, in some small way, part of the re-making (or perhaps, re-branding) of the English working class, it is also another eloquent sign of the growing north–south divide. The most powerful articulation of these developments captured in the field of popular culture came at the moment of its greatest impact. Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, a BBC drama series first televised in the autumn of 1982, and repeated in the winter of 1983, revealed the ravages of deindustrialisation in Liverpool through the stories of five working-class men and their families facing up to the impact of industrial collapse. Here in the heart of the North, the iconic ground of popular culture, of industry and empire, Bleasdale revealed workingclass life in disintegration. Bleasdale’s story is almost unremittingly tragic, leavened only by black humour and occasional moments of farce, rendering just bearable the dominant naturalistic representation of dispossession and despair the drama defines. For each of the “Boys” in the

22 Class, Culture and Social Change

five episodes life becomes almost existentially absurd as the familiar structures of (paid) work and community life crumble, and Bleasdale exposes the men as victims of the wider forces reshaping economy and society at the height of Thatcherism – the North transformed from industrial might to economic inertia. The final episode drives home the bleakness of the situation. The episode divides stylistically into two halves. It moves from the melodrama of George Malone’s slow and painful death from cancer, to the comic grotesque and the surreal encounters presented later in The Green Man pub. George is the ageing trade unionist activist who stands at the hub of the disintegrating community, and his death is then emblematic of the end of a historic formation and structure of feeling undergoing severe attack by the Thatcherite Right in the 1980s – those labourist traditions of Party and unions defending the working class. In the final scene following George’s funeral, the pub is the site of working-class people drinking freely. The banter is outrageous and banal, absurd and frightening. As the long-suffering manager of the pub tells Chrissie and Loggo, two central characters from the series: ‘Let’s face facts, boys, it’s bedlam in here.’ Thus comic grotesque becomes the only mode adequate to depict the stark disruption of routine and daily life. The pub’s manager tells Chrissie: Just take a look around we all had something to give. I mean, Gnasher, over there … He never Gnashed until Tate and Lyle laid him off. And Ronny over there was a waiter at the Adelphi. The last thing he did was rob the uniform when he left, had no time for the friggin’ whistling then … Shake-hands he was a bouncer in town. At least two of those kids had apprenticeships. Everyone was either respectable or a villain. The argument dramatized here is that work constitutes a crucial sense of identity within the working-class community. Without work, at least in the context of working-class masculinity as in this case, anomie occurs, and the void is filled by reckless and excessive consumption. Here, then, the collective subjectivity of the working class comes under question. Unemployment, Bleasdale wants to suggest, decentres their sense of identity: ‘They had good reason to get pissed. Now they get pissed ‘cos they wish they were dead’, the bar manager concludes before donning his hat and coat and escaping the mayhem. The scene acts as a metaphor for larger and more profound changes, as the life of the community finally unravels, leading to the baleful acceptance of their fate at the

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hands of economic forces penetrating the Northern industrial heartlands from without, and the loss of agency and hope is compounded by a distinct absence in the drama of a political discourse or collective response with which to resist. As the economic base of the North entered meltdown, the currency of its culture and ways of life were called into question too. The very qualities which had recommended it [the North] to the ‘new wave’ writers and film-makers now served as a talisman of narrowness. The rich associational life, such as that of the workingmen’s club, was seen not as supportive but as excluding, a way in which the natives could keep newcomers and strangers at bay … The solidarities of the workplace were reconceptualised as a species of male bonding, a licence for the subjugation of women; while the smokestack industries which had been the pride of the North now appeared, retrospectively, as ecological nightmares. In another set of dialectical inversions, the modernizations of the 1960s were stigmatized as planning disasters, imprisoning the local population in no-go estates and tower blocks. (Samuel, 1994, p. 160) Such sentiments can be found as early as 1982. Social investigator and writer Jeremy Seabrook ventured North to document economic change and its social effects for his book, Unemployment (1982). There he attempted to define the experiences of working people coping with economic recession and the return of the material and existential conditions Orwell was referring to more than forty years earlier. Concentrating primarily on the crumbling industrial districts – in ship building towns like Sunderland and the mill town of Bolton – Seabrook compiled interviews and observations into a bleak narrative bearing witness to mounting sadness, confusion and pain. Seabrook’s purpose is to draw a comparison between the experiences of unemployment in the 1930s, and how the British working class cope with its return in the 1980s. His verdict is that they don’t cope very well. But, Seabrook argues, there are good historic reasons for this and it is not simply to do with the pressures of poverty and penury. Though victims of Thatcher’s economic experiment, the working class had also fallen foul of themselves; their own gullibility and the complicity of their leaders who were meant to represent their interests. This is an historical condition which stems, he says, from a compromise with and the embrace of post-War consumer capitalism and its concomitant value system. The working class, once ‘excluded from the benefits of capitalist production’, are now in ‘a state of captive

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dependence upon them’ (Seabrook, 1982, p. 3). Old solidarities have been eroded, communal values decayed, and we hear echoes of Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), in Seabrook’s contention that working-class life now involves little more, culturally, than the ‘strident hymning of commodities’ (Seabrook, 1982, p. 16). This outside eye sees no beauty anywhere in its surroundings, and representations of the working class, in work or not, operate around a theme of loss and deprivation: a repeated motif in terms of working-class life, and here representing an impoverishment of the class that runs far deeper, and which is far more debilitating in its consequences, than straightforward material hardship. This theme will recur again as we see later on. This leads Seabrook to conclude sweepingly that this new condition of the working class is not going to lead to socialism. Socialism could have been an organic expression of the way in which people lived and worked together; why it failed to emerge is a subject of almost infinite conjecture and debate. But one thing is sure: we shan’t build socialism out of those values now, out of that endurance and frugality, out of that pride and solidarity. The moment has passed. (Seabrook, 1982, pp. 222–223) Seabrook moves from a treatise on unemployment to a broader moral and political judgment predicated, in the final instance, on some idealised notion of the working class prior to the Second World War. He asserts that poverty bred resilience and the capacity to cope, and a communal spirit which harboured the potential to make a different type of society. It is that dignity amid deprivation again, yet what this overlooks, as feminists have pointed out, is that these solidarities and communalities, derived from hardships, were often bought at a far greater price to working-class women than to their men.3 The demise of northern working-class culture, as mapped in some of these representations, marked that transition period towards the postindustrial landscapes where shopping malls came to occupy the sites of former steel mills.4 As traditional industries closed down – those of steel, coal, textiles, for instance – and working-class communities folded under the strains, the material world and cultural life of the British working class was seen by commentators, as Samuel suggested, to be increasingly obsolete, extinct and, within only a few short years, the object only of heritage spectacles and exercises in nostalgia.5 Going in search of this “lost” world, Royce Turner’s book brings us close to the current moment. The title of Turner’s Coal Was

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Our Life (2000) is almost self-explanatory. Echoing the title of the classic 1950s study Coal is our Life (1956) by Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, with its anthropological focus on Featherstone, West Yorkshire, outlining the cultural, social and economic presence of coal mining there and in the region, Turner’s book sets out to show the opposite – to reveal how mining now impinges only as a distant, painful or poignant, memory. In exploring the ex-coalfield areas of Yorkshire, he describes a territory transformed by the social and economic change. The coalfield areas of South and West Yorkshire suffered – and continue to endure – significant hardships, and Turner uses this locality to examine the ramifications of such changes for the lives of working-class people and their communities. Dominant as key themes are loss and dislocation. Early on, Turner tells us: ‘in 1983, British coal had 191 pits, employing 207,600. By 2000, 17 pits remained, with a total employment of 8,500’ (Turner, 2000, p. 4). Economic obliteration incurs a cultural and social cost. A sense of certainty, Turner contends, has eroded to be replaced first by despair, then by a sense of benign resignation, as the flexible economy of “post-industrialism” renders working-class life in these areas precarious, and in certain significant senses, empty. Mapping these changes the book accommodates a by now familiar Then/Now structure as the narrative’s guiding thread, contrasting the thriving economy and culture of full employment, with the post-1980s decimation and decline. One effect of the narrative is to register in the reader the astonishing degree to which the world of the pit village now constitutes a kind of folk memory. As our ancestors once worked the land for subsistence, to a younger generation of the working class, their forefathers used to cut coal, build ships or forge steel. Little more than two decades have passed since the British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, even less in relation to the wave of pit closures in the early 1990s, yet such work cultures and ways of life seem far away, of another time. Profound changes and fractures emerge out of this, both in the material landscape itself and people’s lived experiences, articulating structures of feeling centred on a response to loss: ‘Billy’s days as a miner were long gone. But he still clung to them. They conveyed a legitimacy. They were a testament to the days when he could make a worthwhile contribution to the economy, to society’ (Turner, 2000, p. 25). Locals remember how ‘we used to play on the road. It was beautiful. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Now it’s gone to rack and ruin’ (Turner, 2000, p. 53). Turner’s view of mining life – and it is made concrete in the words of his interviewees, especially the older generation – acknowledges the dangers of the work, the conservatism of aspects of the culture, while at the same time disclosing its strengths: for

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its people a sense of identity, an acceptance of mutuality, a recognition of one’s place within the wider civic and economic order. Change has largely corroded all this: thus voices repeatedly stress the negative aspects of social and economic decline and what it has taken away: ‘There was a lot of comradeship … everyone was together … if you cut one they all bled. The boss cut one, and it was a problem for us all’ (Turner, 2000, p. 28). This is a structure of feeling bred through generations; one, Turner insists, not even residual but wholly eclipsed. This is a new Northern working landscape emptied of traditional production. So men are “retired” in their early fifties, bereft of “occupation”; women labour valiantly to keep local youth away from crime and drugs, to maintain some sense of community cohesion against what is often shown as insuperable odds. Alternative work is characterised by insecurity and exploitation, with unions a distant memory. New industries deliver to their workers little more than £120 a week, and the work is repetitive, skills quota minimal. Dole and the black economy represent the only other option. Drugs remain an insidious substitute for a life, as a local community constable explains: ‘Heroin is quite good for boredom … What do you stand to lose? Nothing. There’s no job to lose’ (Turner, 2000, p. 212). Hence the robust moral economy of this section of the post-War working class is seen to be yielding to the existential anomie and alienation of a fin de siecle underclass struggling to survive. All this is recorded without embellishment, apart from acerbic authorial asides. Yet this same irony curiously disables the reader from responding to the narrative in anything much beyond weary or bitter resignation. We are deep in a trough here: Turner tracks through ex-pit villages finding dismay and disintegration. This condition sharply contrasts with the heyday of pit, pubs and working-men’s clubs, powerful unions, collective and individual pride. Days when almost every aspect of a person’s life represented a by-product of the work they did. Thus the pit village was defined by its industry, in all senses of the word, a dynamic place of production and consumption, contrasting starkly with an inertness now powerfully evident – and this is an observation we shall come up against later. Turner captures the tragedy of this in the testimony of one man: “Am 56. ‘Ave not worked since Grimethorpe pit shut in ’93.” Turner tells us: ‘That he was not working was the first thing he said to me. Not working, so alien to a man who had worked all his life, so alien to a community brought up on the idea of going to work’ (Turner, 2000, p. 24). This man’s sense of self-worth has remained linked concretely to the job he did, the withholding of which has a material,

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emotional and existential impact on him, despite the lapse of considerable time since redundancy. This importance in finding value and identity from work is something I will return to in the final chapter. These are significant observations. The experiences recorded are not only those of men, though clearly observations such as these articulate in some important sense a crisis linked to ideas of working-class masculinity and social role, as well as our understanding of work itself. Such structures of feeling find resonance in a number of films about the North emerging at roughly the same moment as Turner’s book: not least Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000). Both compellingly mordant and overwhelmingly pessimistic, Coal Was Our Life takes the reader to a terminus point, and from there the view is one of an eroding physical and emotional landscape, with scant hope of renewal. The blurb on the book’s cover insists that the chronicle documents decline, but also survival – ‘a refusal to surrender’. This dialectic stalls: things are almost unremittingly grim (as life “up North” was always meant to be). Yet making sense of contemporary working-class experience is impossible without this form of “revisiting”, and it is to another example of “revisiting” this chapter now turns.

Recent ethnography in the aftermath ‘This book, and, more importantly, the archive of transcription that it emerges from … is an attempt to set down a living record, a testimony to the … extinction of a kind of people’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 1). Out of those developments described above emerges Simon Charlesworth’s A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (2000). The ‘kind of people’ Charlesworth foregrounds here – representing a culture once deeply embedded in the writer’s native industrial cultures of South Yorkshire – embody all that deindustrialisation has rendered in terms of loss. Charlesworth is not content merely to record and assess this change in some traditional sociological or ethnographic sense: his narrative claims to illuminate the very ontological conditions of contemporary workingclassness itself, and to do this the writer draws heavily on Bourdieu’s sociology and the phenomenological writing of Merleau-Ponty. The setting, then, may be resolutely and recognisably North, but the experience is claimed as universal, constituting a working-class state of being that is the product above all else of the decline of industry and manual labour and what Charlesworth sees as associative communal and socialising structures, resulting in ‘swathes’ of the young working class ending up ‘cut off from the relations in which an older generation learnt its

28 Class, Culture and Social Change

values … and where joblessness and lack of housing force too many to a life that defies the rhythms of a working area and create endless petty irritations [and] where the sources of value [in work, for instance] that characterised that older generation become meaningless and anachronistic’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 82). The northern working class, in this narrative, are victims of new social relations of production and reproduction which render them powerless. They are trapped within a decaying social landscape, vulnerable to cheap labour practices, work flexibility, poverty wages. This exclusion from mainstream society, means that their ‘being-in-the-world’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 12) is constituted by a hopeless anger which, Charlesworth argues, can be interpreted and articulated for them only by others: ‘working class people require intermediaries in the realm of culture to relay their condition: that is people committed to expressing their condition through the instruments offered by the field of cultural production’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 13). Charlesworth’s own working class background offers a perspective, a position, he suggests, to do this, and it is consonant with Gramsci’s understanding of the organic intellectual. But it is one which begs the obvious question: what exactly is this particular expression, or mediation, of the working-class condition telling us about contemporary working-class experience in the North? How is it related to earlier efforts to depict working-class life, from within the ethnographic tradition, and within other fields of enquiry and regimes of representation? If Orwell tramped up to the North in the 1930s to map and decry poverty conditions, Charlesworth traverses the terrain from within to map out late-twentieth-century deprivation. Both aims are similar, if their methods of analysis differ. Yet the terrain, the vernacular landscape of the late capitalist period, is marked by a crucial absence that cannot be replaced and which we glimpsed above: the ways of working and living that that earlier industrial period threw up have now vanished leaving behind a social and existential terrain where the people of Rotherham move ‘wearing clothes already out of date, the dirt in skin and cloth, faces prematurely aged, the look of ill-health and the dispositions of absurd bodies between hyper-sensitivity and an absolute hardness’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 48). Thus an older, industrial culture lies moribund, while the new is mute and estranged, and a once familiar narrative trajectory – school, the local pit or steel works, a home and family – disintegrates to leave behind a sense of incoherence. As this narrative unfolds, a key strand of Charlesworth’s argument revolves ineluctably around the idea of a working community as the space of social identity and action. It is work, he argues, which finally gives meaning to

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working-class lives. Work provides the essential narrative drive onto which meaning can be ascribed. Consequently, for Charlesworth the working community is not merely a material reality, but a collectivist imaginary, where the sense of purpose and endeavour is openly shared; individualist consumption – which has now in so many ways seemingly eclipsed work as a social/personal act constitutive of self – represents by contrast an atomised experience of illusory self-fulfilment. Post-industrial forms of labour alienate and atomise the working class in even harsher and more profound ways than did former industrial work regimes. In turn, Charlesworth argues, people resort to a distracted absorption in the world of mass consumerism, where mutual respect and recognition – structures of feeling produced through the processes and self-discipline of meaningful work – are replaced by the individualistic performance and the display of commodity desire. Yet this view renders a working-class identity difficult to locate at all, so that class identity is seen as expressed through fetishised consumption, rather than collective labour. Value rests in what you display, not what you make. Class consciousness yields instead to endless self-fashioning. Charlesworth notes how young children seem to wander around a long distance from their parents, who seem caught up looking in shop windows … And these kids brought up on shopping-trips to McDonald’s, a new generation of would-be consumers, whose desires, however impoverished they are and in whatever locality, will be those of multi-national companies who market products at them and entice them into consuming their dreams from an ever younger age, touching and shaping their most intimate tastes, shaping their feelings, ensuring that, whatever occurs politically, this generation of children … will more than likely want more. (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 56) This is consumption at the lower end of the market with concomitant stigmas attached.6 This northern landscape with figures is made up of deadend streets, where lives are mapped out in advance and are filled with the distracting banalities of mass commercial culture. The lives lived, the writer implies, are accepted unquestioningly, demonstrating a ‘doxic relation to the world … a pre-reflexive conformism that emanates from one’s sense of possibilities being the internalisation of the opportunities inscribed in one’s position’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 107). Charlesworth’s project is to get at what he dubs ‘the pre-discursive’; some kind of primordial ground of being, one prior to cognition and profoundly affective, shaping existence – an embeddedness in space and time which circumscribes being-in-the-world, and is ultimately linked to the wider ‘realities of

30 Class, Culture and Social Change

domination which infuse space and subjects as part of the fabric of both’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 20). Yet here lies potentially a flaw in Charlesworth’s analysis; and it lies in the notion of the ‘pre-discursive’, a condition which seems to deny the working-class subjects the ability to reflect on or refuse their conditions of existence, a significant point to which I will return. This seemingly fixed position in a pre-constituted space condemns those within to the inherent meaning of the physical and social world they inhabit. Here echoes Edward Soja’s concept of ‘engaging spatialisations’. This relates to the geopolitics of social space – ‘the long-hidden instrumentality of human geographies’ (Soja, 1988, p. 24) – reproducing class power and inequalities. The flight of capital to more profitable locations around the globe produces the forgotten spaces of an older industrial culture. “Creative destruction” means ‘each geographical space in the world is being realigned in relation to new global realities’ (Massey, 1992, p. 5), entailing ‘a disorientating and disrupting impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 284). Historic process re-figures social space, and in turn transforms those iconic northern landscapes. So profound is the change for Charlesworth that daily life itself becomes characterised by a sense of immobility, or stillness, predicated on some kind of existential impasse which Charlesworth’s working-class subjects are forced to endure. When they speak, they speak of “closure”: one local man says ‘Yer used to gu [go] t’ w’k [work] an’ yer could see who thi’ [the] exploiter wo’ an’ ah [how] much thi [they] wo [were] mekkin’ [making] aht’ a [out of] yer but nahr [now], well, Ah [I] just sit ‘ere … Ah dun’t know wit’s gone on in the world. It’s fuckin’ difficult to talk abaht’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 59). Oral testimony represents a key component of analysis here, and it is in their responses (and silences) that the people of Rotherham disclose the tragic structure of feeling of the dispossessed. Thus asked to describe the area, we hear: ‘It’s depressin’ … What can yer see? Terraced ‘ouses, rubbish everywhe’er, dogs barkin’, but it’s hard to put yer finger on why yer feel like that abaht [about] it … it’s not in ahr [how] it looks, it’s, like, in the way the people are [Pauses] Anyway it’s not to du wi us environment. What thi’v done to us, is dun, thi’s no way back … Class in’t in the environment, it’s in the attitudes to everythin’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 117). Being-in-the-world here is to be physically absorbed into a social space characterised by lack, deprivation, loss. Though there is some sense of better times in the past – ‘thi’s no way back.’ – the man’s words do suggest what I have already referred to as some kind of terminus point. The linguistic productions reveal the bleakness of life: ‘Yer just feel like yer

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left aht [out] … It’s shit really, but yer can’t moan’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 147). In bearing witness, the writer sets up an opposition between “then” and “now”: in it we witness a rich, productive industrial culture eclipsed by history, which leaves in its wake the useless consolations of commodity desire.

Re-viewing the landscape with figures Though A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience stands in a long tradition of discourse depicting the North, to fully appreciate the book’s aims it is necessary to place it in another critical context, too, a context shaped by the “end of the working class” debate in academic and political discourse. On the surface, Charlesworth’s text bucks the trend, insisting on the determining effects of class structures and experiences in shaping identity. Yet it fits paradoxically within this general discursive matrix, too. At once insisting on the presence of the working class, the book performs the function of confirming that class in some crucial, positive sense – in fact, political sense, which is really the crux of it – can no longer matter. It can no longer matter because the nature of class experience as Charlesworth interprets it is a degraded one, one in need of transcendence, though that overcoming – at least in the manner advocated, for instance, by Marx and later Marxists, or even by the social democrats of the welfare state – he makes clear, is not available. Here is a class, much like Orwell’s subjects in The Road to Wigan Pier, without the ability to alter their conditions of existence, trapped in an environment so intimate to their being-in-the-world that escape is foreclosed, and the arguments for the relevance of class as a cultural identity or political entity are diminished by this. Not visions of the pastoral, as Waters accused the inter-war social investigators of perpetuating, but pathological images of despair and self-destruction instead. And having written this, I am reminded of another, canonical, text on British working-class life in the North published some years ago and referred to in my earlier discussion. The narrative effects and ideological implications I have described, not only echo Orwell’s analysis but could also easily be ascribed to Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). That book made strong claims for the cultural significance of northern working-class cultures, whilst proceeding to map their seeming disappearance too. The thrust of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is by now very familiar. Key changes in post-War British society operated to alter fundamentally aspects of working-class culture. The moral economy of pre-war workingclass culture, the solidarity and collective care of these communities, was becoming increasingly undermined by relative affluence and the

32 Class, Culture and Social Change

mass culture of the fifties ‘candy-floss world’. This view was not limited to Hoggart’s own perspective; it developed through the 1950s as something of a hegemonic construction in political circles and was a position articulated by leading commentators and politicians. The Uses of Literacy became a powerful contribution to this debate around classlessness, reflecting and defining the parameters of the argument and made all the more influential by the fact of the writer’s own background: the text’s authenticity confirmed by the author’s working-class origins in that deeply iconic space of working-class culture, the Industrial North. Hoggart’s landscape, at once rich in both depth and texture, is one perceived to be in danger of cultural impoverishment. His “figures” once “present” in the making and sharing of a culture, now stand vulnerable to being “made-over” by the mass consumer products masquerading as culture. A glance at the book’s contents page illuminates the writer’s concerns and the overall ideological stance. The book is divided into two sections with respective headings – Part One: An Older Order; Part two: Yielding Place to New. The “order” Hoggart explores in the first section describes the pre-war working class – A Landscape with Figures – and their cultural practices, personal relations and popular beliefs. The world of the 1930s is signified by a deep sense of community feeling, the fabric of which is woven by the people themselves. Hence sub-headings like: ‘The Full Rich Life’, ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. Part Two denotes a different structure of feeling in dominance; this section is signposted with: ‘Unbending the Springs of Action’, ‘Invitation to a Candy-Floss World’, ‘The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shiny Packets’. Here Hoggart discovers a communal way of life in the process of cultural colonisation: though more economically secure, as beneficiaries of the emerging welfare state, the working class now stands in danger of losing their self-made cultural resources: ‘mass entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as “anti-life”. They are full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions … they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 345). Thus the 1950s sees the shift towards ‘the creation of mass culture … the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 345). Potentially, two victims come into view: the working class and its selfidentity, and “High” culture, threatened by its mass produced, easily consumed and increasingly popular Other. Just how vulnerable to this incursion the working class was becoming, Hoggart is unsure. There is

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evidence of resistance: ‘people do not have to sing or listen to these songs, and many do not: and those who do, often make the songs better than they really are’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 231). And yet: ‘The strongest argument against modern mass entertainments is not that they debase taste – debasement can be alive and active – but that they over-excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill it’ (Hoggart, 1957, pp. 196–197). The Frankfurt School arguments are, of course, not far away here. The position on mass culture outlined, for instance, by Adorno in the late 1940s, in his analysis of popular music, stresses many of these themes: the emphasis on “standardisation”, “repetition” and audience “passivity”; the inevitable false consciousness. Hoggart oscillates between suggesting a wholesale incorporation of the working class to this new cultural dispensation, and an insistence that it still possesses the moral values and rigour to withstand it (or at least engage with it on its own terms). Here lies the crux of the argument and the portents, in the end, are not good: ‘The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, to see a five-million-dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity: he is a portent’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 250). The anxieties outlined in The Uses of Literacy – positions and perceptions much criticised in the intervening years – emerge once again some forty-odd years down the line as powerfully informing sentiments in Charlesworth’s accounts. This is so despite Charlesworth’s acknowledgement and critique of Hoggart’s views on northern working class life (interestingly, only Hoggart’s: little else is said of those others who have come after Hoggart to explore aspects of change in working-class life), and his profoundly different theoretical trajectory. Yet Hoggart’s central thesis on cultural impoverishment is reiterated, with the important proviso that Charlesworth illuminates what has become in recent years an increasing economic immiseration for sections of the working class in the once vibrant industrial northern heartlands. Economic disintegration is a dark presence and northern blight: Charlesworth documents individuals who appear existentially marooned, culturally impoverished and permanently poor. Where they live – the once “dynamic” North, home of heavy industry and working-class machismo – is seen as a terminus-place, the end of the line. This “landscape with figures” is reduced to a ghost town. Hence, and in common with Hoggart’s thesis, a past/present structure shapes the accounts of these communities. This time, however, Hoggart’s period of cultural deficit – the late fifties and, arguably, applicable in his own terms to the 1960s and 1970s – represents the golden years for Charlesworth, before the onslaught of Thatcherism and capital flight in the 1980s and 1990s. If Hoggart’s story was influenced

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by one northern landscape marked by a newly emerging affluence – the industrial Leeds of his upbringing – Charlesworth’s North, into which he claims to be fully immersed as a participant, represents a world largely disconnected from some previous collective history. This confirms somewhat what Raymond Williams once suggested, that the organic community, if it ever existed, was always some time in the past. Moreover, the range of similarities goes further. Charlesworth insists on his origins from within the working class. Much like Hoggart he writes with that past as a close present, a reference point and a token, it seems, of credibility: denoting a similar emphasis towards authenticity which Hoggart’s origins undoubtedly lent to his treatise. The assertion that coming from the working class will produce a more sensitive analysis of its culture and experiences is not, in fact, a view I find problematic.7 There is much to be said in defence of the position; it is particularly important for working-class academics to speak out at a time when issues of class are continually mis-represented or simply mystified. However, Charlesworth’s narrative goes beyond this: in no small way, he claims his study to be the definitive account, one based on an ethnographic approach reinforced by a phenomenological understanding of working-class life which purports to expose the very existential roots of that life itself. Yet, what comes across, overwhelmingly, is a sense that these are cultures of deprivation, where little can flourish, that “traditional” values of solidarity, mutuality and respect are moribund, that the individuals who inhabit these negative spaces are constitutionally incapable of “improvement”. Echoing Hoggart’s strictures, Charlesworth sees ‘the inadequacies of these people’s ability to found a world of meaning and association beyond the stale practices and forms of commoditydriven pleasure’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 290). But in what sense “stale”, and how, when it comes down to it, do we evaluate the use-value of the pleasures derived from consumption? Pointing to the perceived demise or transformation of once sustaining working-class institutions or organisations – emblems of what Raymond Williams once described as ‘the basic collective idea’ (Williams, 1958, p. 326) – no anchoring points remain, and the disarticulation of meaningful existence is the dominating structure of feeling. The sense of no longer holding a coherent narrative of one’s being-in-the-world, of not possessing the symbolic freight or the cultural capital to compete or to participate in social life, renders these working-class people mute, lacking ‘the personal resources to establish modes of personal relation that allows for the constitution of a realm of value beyond the instrumentality of a realm of personal space

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that is increasingly being colonised by the commodity form and by an endless need to consume’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 281). Commodity desire replaces common identity: the “barbarians” no longer a portent, but a reality. We can turn to Raymond Williams again here, as I will be doing throughout this book. Evident in Charlesworth’s text is an element of the formula outlined by Williams in his early review of The Uses of Literacy. Here he identified the overriding assumption of ‘enlightened minority, degraded mass’ (Williams, 1958, p. 84). Noting this, Williams wondered if, in the end, it was a problem of form, and a similar question arises here in terms of chosen methodology for exploring working-class life. A broadly ethnographic approach is welcome as a way of going beyond the usual poststructuralist fetishisation of the text or radical reading. The developed framework further facilitates articulation: for the writer-scholar, intent on illuminating working-class life, and for those represented, whose thoughts and feelings remain inhibited without it. To challenge and contest dominant stereotypes of working-class life derived from the ‘spectatorial premise’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 132) is central to Charlesworth’s thesis. The suggestion here is that it is the middle-class gaze which fixes the working class as object for study or surveillance; and this gaze, by its very nature, can only be partial and subjective, and hence the writer’s effort to redress the balance. This flags up the importance of representation, and I will be returning to this issue in Chapters 3 and 4. As stated earlier, Charlesworth’s qualifications for undertaking this, and a central and important strand to the book itself, is his own declared position as part of the working class; he is operating as an “insider”, able to make more intelligible to his readership the world he describes in ways less available to those from “outside”. Rotherham is his home town; the people and places delineated are part of his own upbringing. He belongs. He is, however, conscious of the pitfalls of intimate involvement and how this might influence his account of working-class life. Thus his emphasis on the necessity for scholarly reflexivity, a solution to tendencies in some modes of ethnographic research which remains blind to its own positioning and structured point of view, reinforcing the epistemic violence inherent in the relationship of observer-observed. But how successfully can this be achieved? Insisting on reflexivity facilitates a useful mode of self-critique/surveillance, bringing into question the very practices of knowing itself. There is no neutral terrain from which to view and assess the surrounding landscape. The significant use of transcription suggests that Charlesworth seeks to give some sense of

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priority to the voices of the people, owners of their own experience, thus endeavouring to allow their thoughts, feelings and perceptions to be known. Yet, in the end, and quite evidently, selection occurs. It must. Which utterances are used will be at the researcher’s discretion. The selected material is then made to represent authenticating evidence and support for the wider argument and thesis. This, too, is not insurmountably problematic. Yet, curiously, the total of transcribed record, as a whole, does not amount to a great deal, as a proportion of the book. The bulk of the narrative is authorial, constituting a framework which, in literary terms, represents omniscient narration. Through this framing, the working-class subjects are set in place, located, within a distinct hierarchy of discourse: the mediated prole, the articulate and mediating insider/outsider. The structure remains amazingly intact throughout: no contradictions emerge between the “characters’” testimonies and the writer’s developing and developed argument; no gaps or aporias evident between the lives lived and the lives analysed; no fractures show through on the surface of the image unfolded. There is a kind of monologism about the whole process, where the speakers confirm the ways of seeing of the outside eye, and where the outside eye becomes the primary definer of working-class experience. And if sometimes we feel we are left with a vision of the “abyss” here, that nineteenth-century literary construction of the truly fearful social space of the “unknown” Other, which constituted a wider anxiety that was projected towards the disenchanted poor and abject, we should not be surprised. This is not an uncommon mode of writing about workingclass environments, as we will witness later on. Indeed, it was there beneath the surface, for instance, in Orwell’s effective denial of workingclass agency in The Road to Wigan Pier, it is present in what is constituted as an increasingly corrupted communal space – despoiled by incursion from “outside” – in Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. Current underclass discourse reinstates this anxiety almost intact. Even sympathetic writing on class reproduces ambivalent structures of feeling, differing chiefly only in a response which is characterised not by anxiety, fear or disdain, but by an anguished resignation at the perceived apathy of the people observed or through a philanthropic desire to bring relief or succour. It’s there in Charlesworth, despite the commitment. In this context, then, we are forced to ask whether such writing in fact tells us more about those upwardly mobile class exiles – the likes of Hoggart, or the Cambridge University man, Charlesworth (or in Orwell’s case, through a kind of downwards-mobility) – than it does about the working class they invoke. Existentially, they can be seen to represent Sartre’s ‘objective

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traitor’ who, as Fredric Jameson has put it in a different context, ‘is forever suspended between the classes, yet unable to disengage from class realities and functions, and from class guilt’ ( Jameson, 1991, p. 38). Estranged from their origins, existing within and without the class into which their educational attainment has pitched them, they disclose an inevitable ambivalence towards their subjects, which in turn propels their discourse from expressions of anger and sympathy, to outbursts of disdain and disgust.

Conclusion This chapter has set out to explore the significance of place in the formation of working-class experience and in its representation in a range of forms. Cultural production has historically helped fashion ideas of the North as a site bound up with a particular culture and structure of feeling inflected definitively through class (and often gender). Decisive socio-economic change in the past twenty-five years has done much to re-orientate such forms and their articulation. The devastating impact of such change on northern towns and cities endures, as Charlesworth’s analysis in particular suggests. For Charlesworth, the effects on workingclass life and culture appear wholly negative, it seems, and his analysis asks us to take seriously the ramifications of this, a demand made all the more relevant at a moment when the importance or significance of class – as I outlined in the introduction – is ignored or denied. Charlesworth comments that ‘for anyone writing about the working class, then, there are tremendous problems, because the notion itself is at stake in the struggle of professional groups who are themselves invested in the production of opinion about the social world’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 163). Another recent critique has suggested that the sidelining of such issues as the political economy of class, and the subsequent ‘hymning of commodity desire’, should lead disciplines like Cultural Studies to change its name to consumer studies (see Cevasco, 2000, pp. 433–438).8 And Beverley Skeggs has noted, in her Self, Class, Culture (2004), that ‘class, directly articulated, and as an object of analysis, has largely disappeared’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 46). Within this critical context, setting off ‘on the trail of the working class’, as the rest of this book sets out to do in a range of ways, means accepting the view that ‘the struggle over the correct representation of the social world is itself a stake in the struggle between the classes’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 163).

2 In Search of the Working Class: The Rise of British Cultural Studies

It is impossible to consider the status of class in contemporary Cultural Studies without examining its past attachments and alignments. This is because many of the themes dominating programmes of research within Cultural Studies today in part represent a reaction and response to the dominant concerns that shaped its inception, ones that in turn developed or were rejected through the discipline’s gradual institutionalisation within academia. This chapter, then, as the title suggests, investigates the relationship between British Cultural Studies and the British working class. It is well documented that British Cultural Studies emerged some time around the end of the 1950s, growing out of the work of three key writers and thinkers – Richard Hoggart (1957), Raymond Williams (1958, 1961) and E.P. Thompson (1963).1 The moment of the welfare state and the post-war settlement seemed to hold the hope of widespread affluence alongside cultural transformation, sweeping away grinding pre-war poverty and mass unemployment, and replacing it with a brave new world of plenty managed and sustained by the enlightened interventionist strategies of a benevolent state. For the sacrifices made by working-class soldiers and civilians alike there was to be no return to the Depression years of the 1930s, and as post-War austerity measures were eased, by the end of the 1950s it seemed possible for the Prime Minister of the time to judge that the people had never had it so good. The period of the late 1950s and 1960s acquired the epithet of the age of affluence. I discuss this in some detail in the next chapter, exploring responses within the field of sociology to the perceived disappearance of class within what commentators of all stripes began to regard as a developing cultural and economic egalitarianism. And it is this sense of a 38

In Search of the Working Class 39

“disappearing” working class that fuelled and helped shape later concerns with class in Cultural Studies. In the previous chapter, I outlined one significant contribution to the emerging debate, Richard Hoggart’s immensely influential The Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart’s engagement with a traditional working-class culture that was, as he saw it, in decline, constituted a powerful argument which had the radical effect of legitimising such cultural formations and their expressions as appropriate for serious scholarly consideration. Applying the tools of Leavisite literary criticism to popular forms opened the ground for a new understanding of what might and might not count as culture, expanding not only the notion of culture as artefacts, but as whole ways of life.2 A year following its publication, however, came an equally powerful contribution to the debate around culture and class and this was Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958). Concerned primarily with cultural responses to the emerging industrial society and capitalist social relations of the nineteenth century, and mapping such responses up to roughly the moment of his writing, Williams only turns his attention in a real and sustained way to the question of working-class consciousness and formation in the closing chapter of the book. Suspicious of the ‘massification of culture’ arguments gaining ground at the time on both Left and Right of the political spectrum, Williams typically insisted on greater specificity and complexity in understanding current social and cultural change. This led him, in Culture and Society, towards a rejection of the notion of ‘the masses’ as a way of understanding the post-War settlement, which still disclosed within its socio-economic structures and identities profound class differences in terms of power and position. Rejecting the reification of working-class subjectivity – a tendency clearly evident in Hoggart’s wistful nostalgia and, I would argue, Charlesworth’s blanket pessimism in the previous discussion in Chapter 1 – Williams instead constructs a view of class and its articulation as the product of history, and as such, subject to transformations which are shaped by economic and cultural forces through which individuals and, inevitably, groups (classes) have to make something of what makes them. Thus the formations that emerge and take shape are constituted by both change and continuity, and such traces and evidence of past and present remain amenable to understanding and analysis through Williams’s celebrated concept of structure of feeling. Cultural practice and political formation in the end constitute for Williams the more fertile area of class cultures. He is explicit about the compromised nature of working-class cultural expression itself: ‘The working

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class, because of its position, has not, since the Industrial Revolution, produced a culture in the narrow sense’ (Williams, 1958, p. 313). Culture, here, in the sense of the aesthetic products of a particular time, is for Williams of a minimal significance. But seen from a different perspective, the landscape alters: ‘the culture which it has produced, and which it is important to recognise, is the collective democratic institution, whether in the trade unions, the co-operative movement, or a political party’ (Williams, 1958, p. 313). This is a view which regards culture more broadly than mere artefacts; a definition of culture and its products as part of a ‘whole way of life’, embedded in experiences and practices, formalised in institutions, instanced in experiential dispositions and actions and evidenced through structures of feeling. The working-class formations which Williams surveyed from the prospect of the 1950s – formations which the working class had contributed to and shaped in fundamental ways – were part of a process of democratic change and expansion, and signified a deeper cultural and political enfranchisement to be enshrined in the development of the welfare state which, despite glaring shortcomings (to be more fully understood only later), had elevated significantly the living standards of the British working class. Extending his analysis to – what was increasingly being seen with, sometimes, fear and loathing – mass commercial culture, Williams rejected the hypnotic or deadening effects some commentators ascribed to the newly burgeoning culture industries, suggesting, perhaps with a little too much sangfroid in retrospect, the essentially neutral nature of such expansion within the field. This was because he remained convinced at this time that the essentials of working-class culture – those achievements referred to above – formed the necessary bedrock. These achievements, both political and cultural in the broadest sense, had informed and patterned the social democratic – for some, socialistic – advances of the post-War, in the form of state institutions primarily collective in nature and public in terms of ownership – though, again, shortcomings would soon become visible. At the same time, Williams disclosed in these formulations little inclination to romanticise the working class with images or representations of a heroic proletariat, a response still residual with some on the Left. Democratising political and cultural institutions involved wider enfranchisement in all its forms; and state ownership of core industries put people before profits. Such changes, for Williams, enabled the promise of a ‘common culture’ – again, culture used here in its broadest sense – that would finally enable the many not the few. This culture would be imbued with an emergent structure of feeling derived from a working-class habitus and gradually embedded institutionally. Thus: ‘when we speak of a

In Search of the Working Class 41

working class idea we do not mean that all working people possess it, or even approve of it. We mean, rather, that this is the essential idea embodied in the organisations and institutions which that class creates’ (Williams, 1958, p. 326). There is a resolute, if qualified, optimism here. Williams held to the view, at this juncture, that the ethic of solidarity he characterised as a dominant structure of feeling – not necessarily a homogeneous one, needs be noted – within the working class and the labour movement would finally come to hegemonic status within the new society itself. For Williams, the generalising of such a set of values and norms represented the cultivation of community, and in the end of a culture in common: though in the process of this those very values would undergo significant re-fashioning themselves. Nevertheless, this culture in common is not the product of the elite, and this is the radical difference between Williams and such writers on the topic as F.R. Leavis or T.S. Eliot. Williams insists that ‘a good community, a living culture, will … not only make room for but actively encourage all and any who can contribute to the advancement of consciousness which is the common need’ (Williams, 1958, p. 334). Refusing to close off possibilities in advance, he highlights ‘the need to consider every attachment, every value, with our whole attention; for we do not know the future, we may never be certain what may enrich it’ (Williams, 1958, p. 334). Thus the culture emerging in the period Williams is writing remains replete with possibilities, ready to be re-made and re-defined by the active participation of all its members. This will not constitute a corporate culture, but one derived from complexity and difference, though one predicated too on common, benevolent outcomes for all. Thus it remains a priority to ‘ensure the means of life, and the means of community’ (Williams, 1958, p. 335), and this may require careful planning. But ‘what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say. The idea of culture rests on a metaphor: the tending of natural growth. And indeed, it is on growth, as metaphor and as fact, that the ultimate emphasis must be placed’ (Williams, 1958, p. 335). Not a culture made by the few, then, but the many; finally achievable once the ‘means of life’ have been assured. And it is in this view, as Terry Eagleton points out, that ‘Williams’s notion of a common culture is thus inseparable from radical socialist change’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 119). Williams would take up some of these ideas again in The Long Revolution (1961), more rigorously still exploring the notion of culture, whether it is perceived as ‘lived’, ‘recorded’ or ‘selective’. Culture comes to disclose in this formulation three inter-related dimensions: the anthropological, the aesthetic and – in the narrowest sense of the

42 Class, Culture and Social Change

term – the ideological. In a sense Williams is still fighting against elitist culture here. A ‘selective tradition’ is the culture of the canon, outside the every day and lived, and recorded and held for posterity as tokens of taste and distinction accessible only to the trained elite. Maintaining the binary structure of high/low culture, the purpose of a selective tradition signified for Williams an understanding that class struggle stood at the very heart of the cultural, as well as within the more traditional realms of the political and economic institutions, where struggle for power typically manifested itself. The book is very much of its time, and this is reflected in the discursive forms and practices on which Williams focuses analytical attention: the history of mass education, the popular press, the realist novel and the reading public. With the patchy extension of wider public participation into many of these areas – and in the face of conservative criticism of such extension, and the deleterious effects on the benighted masses of commercialised culture – a historical perspective illuminates the ‘constructedness’ of cultural traditions, thus de-naturing them, at the same time as registering the growing importance of the cultural sphere in this specific juncture for the development of capitalist economies. If Williams is less certain here that working-class political formations can survive diminution within an increasingly corporatist state – leading to a homogeneity of political positions not dissimilar to that pertaining in the present juncture – his concern still lies with the need within these various institutions of communication for inclusion and participation. Thus he insists that ‘if man is essentially a learning, creating and communicating being the only social organisation adequate to his nature is a participating democracy, in which all of us … learn, communicate and control’ (Williams, 1961, p. 118). Taking his argument further into the realm of mass and popular culture than in his previous major work, he addresses the institutional and mechanical processes of the production of such material and its ideological status. For Williams, this expansion of culture simply forms part of the long revolution towards a more democratic society, so he remains removed from conservative blanket critiques of its degraded nature. While he accepts the presence through growing and diversifying commercial outlets of what he labels ‘bad art’ (Williams, 1961, p. 364), he remained more circumspect in writing off the audience for such products. He sees not so much the decline of standards, but the need for access to modes of discrimination – in short, learning. He claims that ‘the aspiration to extend the active process of learning’ was a necessary good in itself and should be ‘removed from simple, instrumentalist/utilitarian motives’ (Williams, 1961, p. 11).

In Search of the Working Class 43

In this way, society should provide ‘the skills of literary and other advanced communication to all people rather than limited groups’ (Williams, 1961, p. 11). Thus modes of discrimination become not simply the property of elites, but tools of empowerment for working people themselves. This constitutes a means of cultural redistribution, vital for a genuine, fully participating social order, in which wide and full involvement is available, representing a crucial means in the development of Williams’s conception of a properly common culture. Williams’s propositions here are not very far removed from those arguments made in recent times around the need for lifelong learning and the requirement for a wider demographic inclusion in institutions of higher and further education, even if much of this recent talk is couched in crudely instrumentalist terms.3 And for Williams, at the particular historic moment in which he was writing, this is no idealistic endeavour but one based on the material changes wrought by an emergent and increasingly buoyant consumer capitalism. Constituting discerning citizens through education and learning empowers, and this represents quite simply another step towards democratic participation in the long revolution. Assailed by the products of consumer society, Williams perceives the working-class subject remaining autonomous enough, potentially, to sort the wheat from the chaff. And what is accepted, rejected, indeed created in the process of engagement, must be acknowledged on its own terms, the result of both lived experience and informed analysis. So for the fruits of the long revolution to mature evenly, neither elitist disdain for popular sentiments or commercialised culture, nor a more benign paternalism which seeks to “civilise” the lower orders through an uncritical exposure to the best that has been thought and said, will do. Williams remained highly critical of this way of seeing “the masses”; indeed, it can be argued that the kind of paternalist welfarism he criticised can be easily transmuted into a pathological disdain when those “chosen” to be brought into the bourgeois fold reject or ignore the cultural treasures on offer. As Francis Mulhern puts it: ‘paternalism always knows in advance what “the masses” really need. Commerce always knows in advance what paternalism fears, that what the customer actually wants is something else’ (Mulhern, 2000, p. 73). But if paternalist concern can switch to a pathological disdain of the lower orders, the working class, and its perceived capitulation to Hoggart’s ‘candy-floss world’, then those commercial imperatives and practices manipulating the sphere of the cultural, providing products for the working class which are not necessarily – by any means – of the working class, can metamorphose, in the hands of later observers,

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commentators and academics, into the means of uncritical populist celebration. We can see Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), along with Richard Hoggart’s seminal The Uses of Literacy (1957), as interventions in a debate centred on class and culture at a historic moment when accepted understandings of both these categories seemed radically under question. On one view, the working class had disappeared down the road of affluence only to become the barbarian at the gate, threatening by its careless rush to commercialism, or its mindless embrace of it, to trample under foot the very privileged culture that might have saved it in the first place. Hoggart’s lament for an older, northern working-class culture led to a nostalgia which turned out, in the end, to be curiously enabling – what I have called elsewhere, an example of ‘nostalgic memory’ (Kirk, 2003), which in itself and by its dialectical nature, pitches remembering as an act of recovery of the past for understanding the crucial co-ordinates of the present. In Culture and Society, following closely on the back of Hoggart’s publication, culture moves well beyond treasured artefacts to a way of life – a developing understanding which sees the potential for the creativity of the many through their own productive forces, and a rejection of ‘dominative modes’ (Williams, 1958, p. 335) of understanding, for a conception of culture as process that is common but differentiated, both the same and different, ineluctably shared and conflicted: a thing to be achieved even though ‘any governing body will seek to implant the “right” ideas in the minds of those it governs, but there is no government in exile. The minds of men are shaped by their whole experience, and the most skilful transmission of material which this experience does not confirm will fail to communicate’ (Williams, 1958, p. 313). Williams’s central concept of experience insists on agency undermining any dominative modes imparted by the new communicative forces of production. This view of agency was articulated with greater fluency still in E.P. Thompson’s 1963 publication The Making of the English Working Class, the exemplar study which placed agency central to the formation of class and culture. This would be powerfully reflected some years later in the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the leadership of Stuart Hall.

Re-finding the working class The trajectory of British Cultural Studies fixed its attention – certainly under Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) – on the

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notion that ‘culture is ordinary’, a key conception taken, of course, from Williams himself. Therefore, as the discipline developed so did an increasing interest in all the products of popular culture – the culture, if not of the masses, then for them. If in the work of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson, Cultural Studies began, it would at the CCCS be developed and sustained, indeed consecrated, before being finally exported by disciples on a global scale enroute to its thorough institutionalisation within the academy. Williams’s work was important in legitimating the move in Cultural Studies towards a serious study of popular culture and the experiences of the working class, as indeed was that of his contemporaries, Hoggart and Thompson. Whereas Hoggart’s intellectual grounding remained within a kind of Leavisite liberal humanism which, if not disdaining it outright, still remained sceptical of and distanced from mass culture, Williams’s work had manoeuvred beyond this position, recognising that a properly political commitment to working-class aspirations, practices and formations involved an engagement with the whole way of life of the working class and that included popular culture in its manifold forms. He followed The Long Revolution with two books, both concerned with the mass media: Communications (1962), and Television, Technology and Form (1974), studies taken up as much with intervening in cultural policy – the politics of culture in the very strict and material sense – as with any form of ideological or semiotic analysis of texts, thus reflecting his continued preoccupation with the means of making and finally sustaining a common culture, or culture in common. In the 1970s the Birmingham School produced some of the key texts defining the concerns of the discipline, taking theoretical trajectories and developing thematic emphases often very different to Williams’s preoccupations, while at the same time acknowledging his influence.4 Four studies produced by the Centre during this period up to the 1980s stand out: Stuart Hall and Tim Jefferson edited Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976); Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (1977), by Paul Willis; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) and David Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (1980). In part, this was a re-finding of the working class with a vengeance, even if a central focus of much of the work was a fascination with the signifying effects and the cultural expression of youth sub-cultures. Resistance through Rituals (1976) laid down markers for those later studies referenced above. The aim of the book was to ‘explain’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 9) youth cultures, and their increased visibility upon the cultural landscape of Britain. Taking culture

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to pertain to a ‘whole way of life of a group or class’, meant analysing ‘the meanings, values and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of belief, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 10). For the writers, the cultural field bears all the marks of unequal power relations that exist within the capitalist mode of production itself, and here they are very close to Bourdieu’s arguments around cultural capital and class, implying the value hierarchies erected in the cultural sphere help to sustain class inequalities.5 Thus within the social a relationship of domination and subordination pertains, whereby the dominant culture ‘represents itself as the culture’, an ideological sleight of hand fixing a particular perspective, a way of seeing, as the norm (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 12). Yet, this was not the whole story. Taking up Williams’s insight that ‘no mode of production, and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy or human intention’ (Williams, 1977, p. 125), the writers insist on struggle – at various levels of articulation – as the inevitable outcome. The ideological closure strived for by the power bloc is never complete. This is because there remains always, ‘though in varying degrees, practical consciousness, in specific relationships, specific skills, specific perceptions, that is unquestionably social and that a specifically dominant social order neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognise’ (Williams, 1977, p. 125). Gramsci’s notion of hegemony will then be key in making sense of this, allowing the writers to acknowledge determining structures while celebrating agency of the subordinated in resistant acts which they identify – and so meaning is made and struggled over between a dominant culture and its subaltern others. Within this relationship between what is seen as the dominant and the subordinate – class formations, it seems – sub-cultures can be identified, and these positions locate the dissidence implied by the writers, and so it is these interventions which occupy the writers’ attention.6 The configuration of sub-cultures – ‘smaller, localised and differentiated structures’ – still retains an organic relationship to their ‘parent cultures’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 13). Analytically, sub-cultures must be understood in relation to those parent cultures, but related, too, to the dominant culture itself as the dominant constitutes ‘the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 13). Youth sub-cultures will be seen to have their own specific, focal concerns, but they ‘still exist within, and co-exist with, the more inclusive culture of the class from which they spring’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 14).

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While examining some of the phenomenological aspects of these youth sub-cultures – questions of style and deportment – the writers insist too on a dialectical relation between ‘market forces [commodities produced and, more importantly in this context, perhaps, consumed] and deeper social, economic and cultural roots’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 16) which lie at the heart of these social identities. The crux of the argument rests with the group’s relation to the expanding marketplace and the growth of ‘leisure industries’, aimed at the ‘teenage consumer’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 18). This hinged around the widespread acceptance of the co-relation between the newly acquired affluence for the working class and the expression of such affluence through the eager embrace of consumer goods as tokens of these achievements. Identifying here the theme of embourgeoisement, the writers go on – much in the vein of Williams’s earlier studies – to challenge the idea that so-called affluence, combined with the political settlement and consensus within the mainstream polity around welfare state objectives, produced ‘new social types, new social arrangement and values’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 21), and, as an inevitable corollary, a classless society. So Resistance through Rituals re-instates the presence of class – in particular the working class – though not as a political force with a potential to intervene and change the course society takes, but as a cultural presence symbolically articulating its refusal of dominant value systems through the alienated or alternative actions of its youth sub-cultures. Moreover, widespread affluence was a myth: significant shifts and changes had taken place in the working-class habitus, transitions in the structure of feeling of the class were evident, but in the final assessment ‘what comes through most strongly is the stubborn refusal of class – that tired, “wornout” category – to disappear as a major dimension and dynamic of the social structure’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 25). The contradictions surrounding the ideology of affluence need not be discussed in detail here (see Kirk, 2003; see also Hill, 1986; Hitchcock, 1989). As the writers here argue, the changes were far more complex than hegemonic interpretations allowed. Class did not disappear – and the relative prosperity and security offered to the working class did not signal a simple capitulation to bourgeois norms and values, only realignments and re-arrangements within the class formation itself around generational dynamics (and we might well insist, now, gender and race). Youth culture, and its associated sub-cultural forms – products of marketing and affluence, indeed, but not simple expressions of it – signalled modes of class identity that were, in a sense, both “positive” and “negative” in character. Positive in the sense that such articulations

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represented a refusal of the dominant ways of seeing; negative by virtue of the fact that such actions could be read as a rejection, too, of the class from which sub-cultures originated. There is a real analytical richness and thematic boldness to Resistance through Rituals. Moving from Teds to Rastas, drawing in problematics of class, gender and race, and combining culturalist arguments around agency with the increasingly dominant structuralist paradigms which privilege ideology – mediated by Gramsci’s concept of hegemony here – working-class sub-cultures are seen as heroically adapting the traditions of resistance developed in the ‘parent culture’ to the new social context of welfare modernisation which had witnessed the demise of community through high-rise development and installed bureaucracy as a mode of controlling and containing any utopian hopes of the working class. Style becomes a key category within studies of youth sub-cultures, and the performance of style is enacted through the raw materials provided, by and large, through the culture industries. The practices that emerge do so in a dialectic with the institutions and formations and experiences of the parent culture and those pertaining to the dominant culture – this is linked also to forms of control which entail modes of coercion (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 53). But the writers claim ‘that what makes a style’, is not merely the possession of objects which denote it, ‘but the activity of stylisation’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 54) itself. Appropriating, and thereby reaccentuating – to use Bakhtin’s term – the consumer goods made available through the marketplace, sub-cultures are seen to transform and subvert these objects ‘from their given meaning and use, to other meanings and uses’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 54). This is a line of argument which presages some later work in the field, by such writers as John Fiske, and I will return to this later. Style emerges, as it is operationalised, to embody – quite literally – expressions of collective identity, symbolic acts of resistance to the dominant within the field of culture. Yet the symbolic act harbours a tragic outcome. The spaces won can only be lived at the level of ideology, and key here is Althusser’s notion of ideology as imaginary in relation to real conditions of existence.7 This in the end marginalises ideas of agency and intention so that it appears that ‘working-class youth live within an ideological structure which works behind their backs, and which they challenge only symbolically’ (Beezer, 1992, p. 102), leaving such actions empty of any political, institutional effect. Despite this negative view, the book overall gave serious consideration to these emergent identities, a level of attention absent in the scare stories within the mainstream media around delinquency and the loss of

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respect (another renewed ideological construct to re-emerge in the present moment). In doing this, the study conferred a kind of curious dignity on their subjects, taking seriously those tokens of everyday existence such as dress and comportment that were more often than not regarded as merely ephemeral. This was certainly the case within the realm of a more traditionalist leftist, indeed Marxist, discourse embedded in economistic readings of the social. But Resistance through Rituals might be regarded as moving too much in the opposite direction, privileging the site of culture as the location of resistance, or symbolic struggle, where other areas of working-class political agency had failed or had been fatally incorporated into the dominant. Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids get WorkingClass Jobs (1977) came later and offered a compelling account of schooling and the working class, following closely on the back of Resistance through Rituals. Willis’s intention was to ‘look at young, non-academic disaffected males and their adaptation to work as a crucial and privileged moment in the continuous regeneration of working-class cultural forms in relation to the most essential structure of society – its working relations’ (Willis, 1977, p. 2). As the sub-title of the book states, Willis’s aim is to understand just how it is that working-class kids get working-class jobs, focusing on the cultural and economic modes of reproduction that make this possible. Here the focus is less on sub-cultural “style” – exemplified most clearly in Dick Hebdige’s (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which I will consider later – and more on the determinants of a social class base out of which a particular class habitus shapes the trajectory of the lives lived. What emerges, as Beverley Skeggs notes, is a story replete with irony (Skeggs, 1992, p. 181), indeed, a vital ingredient of tragedy itself, signifying a structure of feeling which seems to lie at the heart of some readings of resistance. It seems the lads are their own worst enemies in the end; the strategies they employ in the school environment as modes of struggle against what they see as the “con” that is education simply ensure their fate as fodder for factories in the not too distant years to come. So at the outset, Willis argues ‘that it is their own culture which most effectively prepares some working class lads for the manual giving of their labour power. We may say that there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism’ (Willis, 1977, p. 3). Here resistance is a curious kind of hubris. The boys’ struggle in the face of school discipline and their refusal to accept any co-relation between academic “success” and an upward career trajectory – or regarding it, even, as a passage to any type of meaningful work – is characterised

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by both a profound insight and a debilitating blindness, which at the same time is both heroic and hopeless. Having ‘penetrated’ the facade of the education system, the ‘tragedy is that these forms of “penetration” are limited, distorted and turned back on themselves, often unintentionally’ (Willis, 1977, p. 3). If one line of sub-cultural theory is shaped by a structuralist emphasis on ideological determination derived from the ideas of Althusser, Willis’s account implies something of the opposite. Yet if this “micro-culture” of the “insubordinate” working class has seen through the ideological interpellations of the schooling system and make mockery of it, in an almost carnivalesque fashion, thereby celebrating a form of agency, this action only fixes them more firmly in the relations of production they resist in the first place and that are inevitably coming their way in the form of the workshop or factory floor. Everything from their rejection of school exams to their uncompromising masculinity guarantees social reproduction. There is a strong echo of Bourdieu in such formulations – in attempting to make something out of what makes them, the lads only reproduce the habitus of which they are a part and which, seemingly, is part of the problem – a position not dissimilar to the argument by Charlesworth discussed in Chapter 1. But there is a very important difference distinguishing Learning to Labour from many of the studies emerging from the CCCS in this period. This difference lies in the emphasis on, and in the centrality of, work and the prospect of working lives, as an eventuality which radically shapes the lads’ responses to their world. In Resistance through Rituals, it sometimes appears that sub-cultures – though a product of the ‘parent culture’ – merely constitute a symbolic rebellion against the social order, a mode of compensation for the loss or lack of a way of life. Willis’s lads’ cultural response is once again embedded in the parent culture but given a sharper focus around the central feature of working-class life, that of work (the reason for one of the book’s deficits, too: this very focus marginalises working-class women), and thus a very productive dialectic between the cultural and the economic is established. Against their future trajectory from school to shop-floor, thus in the shadow of the workplace, the lads attempt one heroic last stand to define themselves, their autonomy and agency, but it is doomed to failure from the start. Perhaps the most “flamboyant” offering of the emerging sub-cultural analyses lies in Dick Hebdige’s attempt at seeing sub-cultures as the essence of “style”, or perhaps “style” as the essence of sub-cultures. This is, of course, a reference to his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Here, Hebdige seeks to ‘build a grammar’, with which to ‘decode the hidden messages inscribed on the glossy surfaces of style’ (Hebdige,

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1979, p. 18). Offering an account that combines the semiotics of Roland Barthes with writings of Jean Genet and William Burroughs, the text examines sub-cultural formations as ostensibly set apart as reggae and punk, attempting to uncover the hidden meanings of sub-cultural style, meanings often unannounced to the “makers” themselves. Hebdige marks out the importance of style early on: It was during this strange apocalyptic summer [of 1976] that punk made its sensational debut in the music press. In London … a new style was being generated combining elements drawn from a whole range of heterogeneous youth styles. In fact punk claimed a dubious parentage … [and] not surprisingly, the resulting mix was somewhat unstable: all these elements constantly threatened to separate and return to their original sources. Glam rock contributed narcissism, nihilism and gender confusion. American punk offered a minimalist aesthetic. (Hebdige, 1979, p. 25) Such an enactment of bricolage could hardly be overlooked by the cultural theorist whose own analysis would stylistically combine a range of sources with which to explain the nature of his subject. If Hebdige records concerns over the gap between the writer/analyst and his subject, he endeavours to symbolically close this potentially debilitating distance by emulating – albeit through a different set of discursive forms and elements, in the process of writing – their very stylistic conceit, that mixing of seemingly diverse traditions, in a textual practice designed to undermine traditional approaches and mark a new trajectory. In adopting such a method the authority by which the academic comments on the Other might be diminished, energising the sober nostrums of academic certainty with the scandalous marrying together of high culture and low, the voice of the streets and of radical, dissident writers with the words of the lecture hall and mainstream sociology. For Hebdige, the central point behind sub-cultures lies in their ‘communication of significant difference’, and it is this response which characterises all ‘spectacular subcultures … It is this superordinate term under which all other significations are marshalled, the message through which all other messages speak’ (Hebdige, 1979, p. 102). This semiotic resistance to the dominant culture and its mores is subversion at the practical level, putting marginalised groups (reggae and punk) into symbolic solidarity through the fusing of musical styles and “radicalised” structures of feeling. Positive developments emerge from this – the fusion of reggae and punk formed a strong element of the Rock against Racism movement in the 1970s, which did much to counter the rise of National Front fascist politics, until Thatcherism came on the scene

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and stole some of the extreme Right’s clothes, in a bricolage moment of its own. Yet this, to some degree, flags up the very weaknesses of sub-culture politics, or the politics of sub-cultures. Sub-cultures can only be regarded as symptomatic of societal crisis at some level, rather than solutions to it. If we are to accept punks and other sub-cultures of the late 1970s as emergent formations contradicting dominant value systems, we have to ask what are the outcomes? Nothing very much of lasting substance, even according to Hebdige’s own analysis. The logic of sub-cultural subversion is a circular one: it tends to move around the co-ordinates of incorporation/resistance/incorporation – a kind of eternal return of the same, suggesting the Romantic dissident on the outside rejecting the forces of the state or of dominant culture. The final appropriation of punk style into the commodity form exemplifies this, with pictures of rebellious youth on the postcard stand at Piccadilly Circus alongside the Royal Family, and McClaren and Westwood swept up as Thatcherite icons of entrepreneurialism. Much the same can be said for forms of middle-class dissidence too – the sixties’ student rebellions that witnessed some of those very same individuals then raging against the state now, in the present day, eager state functionaries. Nevertheless, none of this can be defined as subversion, even if, in earlier times, it may have given the establishment the odd sleepless night. For the CCCS group, the politics of such aesthetics constituted a political possibility and a substitute for the working-class and its institutions, now seen as politically supine. Other critics have seen a lamentable lack of a substantive ethnographic focus in these studies on class and sub-cultures. Exempting Willis’s Learning to Labour, Graham Murdoch argues that Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, for instance, is marred in its take on these formations and their meanings, a consequence of the writer’s almost total detachment ‘from the situational dynamics being analysed and from the self-understanding of the participants’ (Murdock, 1996, p. 60). Thus, for Murdoch, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style discloses a certain elegance of exposition, ‘but as an account of how working-class youth sub-cultures actually developed and what they meant to their supporters, it contains a number of errors and misunderstandings that better ethnography could have avoided’ (Murdock, 1996, p. 60). If some of the arguments around sub-cultures focused on the perceived resistance of the working class – or elements within the class – to dominant forms and practices, this can be seen in part as a response to functionalist sociological accounts of passivity and incorporation, often found in studies on the media, and in the desire to offer an examination

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of the phenomenon of “youth” which did not, as many mainstream studies did, mark such behaviours as simply delinquent. Hence a move later within CCCS to a powerful and productive focus on reception studies, such as Morley’s in The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, which was soon to be complemented by studies of soap opera and the significance to popular audiences of mainstream film and television genres. In analyses such as these, Stuart Hall’s celebrated ‘encoding/decoding’ model for reading television discourse – first articulated at the Council of Europe Colloquy at the Leicester Centre for Mass Communication Research in 1973 (Sparks, 1996, p. 86) – provided a key mode for understanding the reception of media texts, enabling ethnographic studies of audiences for the mass media. Here, the point of reception is central in the decoding processes of television viewing, and Hall’s essay insisted on the necessarily ‘polysemic’ nature of the connotative aspects of the text. In this semiotically inspired work, Hall seems to suggest that institutionally shaped discourses – indeed, dominative modes – articulate preferred readings, which might be “accepted” or “rejected” by the viewing audience, a response based, in part, on the audience’s own lived experience. For Sparks, such a reading of television bracketed out ‘the problem of the social processes of television production’, and in so doing showed ‘no attempt to demonstrate how the dominant ideological encoding of television discourse might be related to the structure of society’ (Sparks, 1996, p. 87). This results from an acceptance of the Althusserian view of the superstructure’s relative autonomy from the economic base – a position taken to its ultimate lengths, as we will see, in the development in the 1980s of a number of post-Marxist positions. Even so, it became plain to some researchers within the School at this period that further significant gaps existed in such early studies. If race found, finally, some articulation in Hebdige’s study, then gender remained clearly marginalised and under-theorised in accounts. This was to be picked up by Angela McRobbie, in the first instance.8 As can quite quickly be noted in the texts highlighted in this discussion, the absent presence is women. The sub-cultures analysed are masculine subcultures, and thus youth is synonymous with men. Beverley Skeggs (1992) suggests that Paul Willis, for instance, in Learning to Labour, overlooks the strong strain of sexism (and racism) the ‘lads’ disclose in their conversations with the researcher. Part of this “regressive” masculinity implies a strategy of “coping” – a means of overcoming what they understand at some significant level to be their essential powerlessness, though – as Skeggs points out – this represents a mode of exercising power too (Skeggs, 1992, p. 191). She goes on to highlight how representing the

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‘lads’ as ‘dignified in their degradation’ (not uncommon, as we have seen already, in depiction of working-class subjectivity, and sometimes even essential to its production), perpetuates ‘not only the close relationship between education and the labour market, thereby excluding the family, but also reproduces and legitimates the equation that youth equals the lads’ (Skeggs, 1992, p. 191). But this ‘dignity in degradation’ in part defines the paradox of the tragic condition which keeps the lads in their place – a blindness to their ‘real conditions of existence’. Embodied in these tragic figures we find, on the postmodern cusp, heroic sub-cultures orphaned from the embrace of their parent class and culture striving in vain to seize some element of control.

Postmodern Cultural Studies and the eclipse of class Curiously, on entering the 1980s, in a different type of embrace altogether – that of Thatcherism – studies of sub-cultures transmute into the promise of new social movements, and at the same time analytic focus falls onto the transgressive figure of the consumer as the maker of meanings in his or her own right. With the death for good of the working class, announced across the political spectrum, agency was sought elsewhere – in Cultural Studies anywhere and everywhere, it turned out. Thatcherism produced profound political fractures, and within these fissures any sense of that imagined community Williams called a common culture had no grounding. This trajectory, then, has to be understood within the broader context of the radical socio-economic changes in the 1980s and the emerging debates around postmodernism which flowed from this. Indeed, Hall’s influence here on the trajectory of British Cultural Studies cannot be overestimated. We have already flagged up the significance of Hall’s leadership at the CCCS. As the 1980s unfolded, and Thatcherism was perceived to have established a hegemonic grip on British society, Hall’s theoretical work became increasingly bound up with developing an analysis which would make sense of the success at the ballot box of this neo-liberal, right-wing agenda. We suggested earlier that the wave of de-industrialisation characterising the Thatcherite refashioning of the national economy meant a definitive reshaping of established class formations, particularly those of the working class in the former industrial heartlands. The effects on the trade union and labour movement, and the Labour Party itself, proved profound. If these developments operated to ensure Thatcherism’s continued electoral success, instituting for some a north–south divide which split working-class support for a

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Left alternative to Thatcherism (see Nairn, 1981; Jessop et al., 1988), Hall was more concerned with the operations of discourse and ideological interpellation in sustaining a neo-liberal government. His central concern was to theorise Thatcherism and New Times. Hall constructed much of his theoretical framework to explore these questions through Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Althusser’s take on ideology developed throughout the 1970s, though much later in the decade and in subsequent work it seems he moves to embrace more definitively the ideas of Foucault and other post-structuralists.9 The theoretical implications of this are significant, in as much as they signal Hall’s continuing move away from what he describes as Williams’s culturalist stance and towards a new paradigm derived from structuralist, and later post-structuralist, concepts. The success of Thatcherism in attaining hegemony even among sections of the working class – in whose material interests Thatcherism was hardly directly concerned – seemed to offer to Hall a prime example of the success of ideological interpellation. The uniqueness of Thatcherite Conservatism lay in its capacity ‘to construct around itself an active popular consent’ (Hall and Jacques, 1983, pp. 22–23), and the Gramscian analysis is evident in this formulation. This is a consent structured around the discursive and ideological mobilisations by which Thatcherism contrived to articulate itself across class lines, succeeding in stitching up the contradictory strands of its discourse: ‘the resonant themes of organic Toryism, nation, family, duty, authority, standards, patriarchalism, with the aggressive themes of a revived neo-liberalism, self-respect, competitive individualism, anti-statism’ (Hall, 1988a, p. 157). From this Hall developed the theory of “Authoritarian Populism” to describe and analyse the perceived ideological and political hegemony of Thatcherism as the 1980s unfolded. Hall’s aim here was to go beyond what he saw as class reductionist accounts of Thatcher’s aims and strategies, stressing that Thatcherism should be seen as a decisive and important break with post-War social democracy. In achieving political hegemony, Hall noted, Thatcherism cut across divides and conflicting interests, including class interests, by deploying, amongst other things, ‘the discourse of “nation” and “people” against “class” and “unions”’ (Hall, 1988a, p. 120). Disarticulating the political and economic is the primary aim here, and this would be a common refrain in the development of much post-Marxist argument in the period. Thus, for Laclau and Mouffe, ideological discourse finally breaks free of any type of class determinations and here the ground opens up for what we might call a Fiskean approach

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to Cultural Studies. In their attempts to develop a new politics for “New Times”, Laclau and Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) adumbrate a deconstructivist approach to political subjectivity and action. A central conclusion of this project insisted that ‘it is not the case that the field of the economy is a self-regulated space subject to endogenous laws; nor does there exist a constitutive principle for social agents which can be fixed in an ultimate class core; nor are class positions the necessary location of historical interests’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 85). The constitution of the subject through discourse is instead the contingent condition of ideological interpellation, and this renders redundant Althusser’s determination of the economic – even if in only the final instance. Thus, the very unity and homogeneity of class subjects has split into a set of precariously integrated positions which, once the thesis of the neutral character of the productive forces is abandoned, cannot be referred to any necessary point of future unification. The logic of hegemony, as a logic of articulation and contingency, has come to determine the very identity of the hegemonic subjects. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 85) Writing at the close of the 1980s, with the hegemony of the Thatcherite project on the wane, Hall attempted to draw some conclusions on ‘the social, economic, political and cultural changes of a deep kind now taking place in western capitalist societies’ (in Hall and Jacques, 1989). The “New Times” agenda which Hall had done so much to initiate throughout the 1980s in the journal Marxism Today, was a term, he suggests, best regarded as a working metaphor for encapsulating these changes; profound shifts variously denoted in related terms such as the post-industrial, post-Fordism, postmodernism, the revolution of the subject. In this article, it appears to be the latter term which Hall finds most significant as an outcome of New Times. This is because New Times creates new subjectivities. Hall, as suggested earlier, sees this development most clearly in what he terms the end of old collective solidarities and block identities. Thus the ‘self is more fragmented’, composed indeed ‘of multiple selves or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit’, and in this sense, the subject ‘is differently placed or positioned by different discourses and practices’ (Hall, 1989, p. 120). Embracing, here, the politics of discourse elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, Hall argues that the postmodern moment of New Times is marked more than anything else by the complete disjuncture and

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non-correspondence between the economic and political, thus throwing common understandings on the socialist left into disarray. Yet Hall is wary of stating just how deep the epochal change he identifies really is: hesitant of seeing modernity as the increasingly residual Other of an emergent and progressively more dominant postmodernity; uncertain as to just how far past the post post-Fordism is in relation to its Fordist counterpart. This hesitancy thus undermines many of the sweeping claims in the 1989 article concerning the depth of change shaping New Times, in the same way as his analysis of Thatcherism’s unchallengeable hegemony in British politics remained weakened by a consistent absence of concrete, or empirical, evidence or research to support the view (see Milner, 1999, for commentary on this). Hall remains a little more certain about the cultural turn, or dimension, and its significance – what many commentators come to define as the moment of postmodernism. Constituting the over-hyped buzzword of the 1980s, the term was utilised in a whole range of practices as a mode of understanding – and of either celebrating or lamenting – the shifts taking place in social life in Western industrial economies: indeed, some of the very transformations Hall highlights. It is possible to identify the early emergence of postmodernism, however, in the 1960s – indeed Fredric Jameson, one of the main theorists of the postmodern condition, makes this very point in his argument that the rise of a new artistic avant-garde in the 1960s was in part driven by a rejection of formerly radical artistic production in the shape of the early-twentieth-century modernists, who had become thoroughly incorporated – canonised – within the mainstream of society, now rendered a crucial component of what Williams would call a ‘selective tradition’, with any radical edge ascribed to it therefore being blunted. Jameson argues that ‘this is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the rise of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare of the brains of the living”, as Marx once said in a different context’ (Jameson, 1984, p. 86). What was once shocking and scandalous in the works of James Joyce or Picasso or Virginia Woolf had become the staples of university lecture theatres, art galleries and museums, now hegemonically constituted and incorporated and part of the mainstream, forming a dominant aesthetic of high culture, thus its dissident stance wholly eclipsed. That transition from cultural renegades to icons of elite culture was, however, inscribed in the very artistic practices from the beginning – in the work of Woolf or Eliot, say, there resonated a preoccupation with high art cultures and a barely disguised disdain

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for the popular forms and for the lower classes, as I will show later. This represented for one critic ‘the great divide’ (Huyssen, 1988), one consciously breached by the aims of such postmodernist artists as Warhol and the expansion of American and British pop art in the 1960s (see Storey, 2001). A feature of this emergent cultural formation was an acceptance (some would say an uncritical one) of contemporary commercial culture, and a willingness, even an insistence, on making mass culture and its products into art, thus disturbing the binary high/low. Characteristic of the relativist thrust of much postmodernist discourse, value is seen to lie with the one valuing rather than within the object of valuation itself. There is a radical edge to this. Where once the ‘selective tradition’ stood as some unchallenged and unchallengeable exemplar of artistic achievement within a particular canon formation – literature, for instance – this position seemed no longer tenable. Thus Huyssen can argue that ‘pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture’ (Huyssen, 1988, p. 188). This, in particular, would see the flowering of American counter-culture, precisely as Jameson has suggested. Whether this suggested an elite, or dominant, culture in crisis, or an alternative, vernacular, culture in embryo, the debate around postmodernism – or the postmodern condition – would, in the 1980s, nevertheless explode, fuelled by the interventions of three key theorists: Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson himself. Lyotard’s contribution to debates around postmodernism is difficult to underestimate. His contention was that postmodernism signified a crisis of knowledge in Western societies – a moment in which an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ renders questionable the epistemological frameworks derived from the enlightenment and substantiated through an accumulation of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the enlightenment had brought into question religious doctrine, the emergence of postmodernism and its proponents would reject the perceived pretensions of enlightenment rationality, scientificity and its claims to truth. Both Marxism and Liberalism – as supposedly universalistic systems of thought – became bound up in this crisis, as both systems – as Lyotard would have it – are characterised by a claim to authority, whether in the Hegelian notion of the rational unfolding of truth through ideas or the Marxist conception of freedom through revolution and the class struggle (Lyotard, 1984).

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It is quite self-evident what impact such claims might have on understanding the status and importance of class as a means of engaging with the course of social change and historical process. For a generation of Western academics and thinkers concerned with such issues, a radical reorientation occurs. In the field of Cultural Studies postmodernism becomes the new paradigm for understanding social and cultural difference and a means of rejecting master-narratives. Indeed, in the British context, the study of sub-cultures and their spectacular effects provided some of the ground for these new orientations. And as the 1980s unfolded, and de-industrialisation eroded the parent working-class cultures out of which sub-cultures emerged and to which they could be confidently referenced, the emerging ‘society of the spectacle’ shaped the academic landscape within crucial strands of cultural theory. In this landscape – according to the increasingly influential ideas of Jean Baudrillard – the distinction between representation and reality collapses in a fully mediated hyperreal world of simulation, where such entities as the working class no longer obtain any referential effect. In late, multinational capitalism, the foundations for a politics of liberation collapse as there are no more foundations, only representations; no way of ascertaining the truth of a given situation (oppression, say) only truth effects. Baudrillard defines these developments as a shift from a society concerned with the production of things to a society characterised by the production of signs (Baudrillard, 1988). Developing the notion of the ‘simulacrum’ Baudrillard extends further his analysis of cultural production – the hyperrreal then becomes a copy without an original, a ‘generation of models of a real without origins or reality’ (1988, p. 2). It no longer seems to make sense to ask, as rock band Queen’s front man Freddie Mercury once did (probably ironically), “is this the real life, is this just fantasy”, as this implies a stab at ideology critique, a process which strives to expose the reality beneath its appearance, an approach now considered hopelessly archaic. Soap opera characters become real to people in the supermarket check-out, who then berate them for being bad, or dishonourable individuals, not merely actors playing a part, convincingly or not. The 1991 Gulf War, Baudrillard contends, only happened on TV, therefore, in some significant sense, did not “happen” at all, in as much as our access to it was thoroughly mediated by images, some of which were not images of the war itself, but library footage of weaponry in action, used to demonstrate the hardware’s effectiveness (see Norris, 1995, for a critique of this view). Without some access to the ‘truth’ of a situation; without the ability to discriminate between ‘what’s real and what’s make-believe’; and without the

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capacity to judge what is conducive to the good life – to what Williams called a common culture and betterment – there seemed little point in continuing the old discussions around social change, particularly in terms of class struggle. Hall’s sense of an end of collective solidarities mirrors these views, and he suggests that this development is compounded by the cultural shift in New Times towards a greater emphasis on consumption, commodification and the consumer. Thus in his discussion, “The Meaning of New Times” (1989), he sees ‘the proliferation of models and styles, the increased product differentiation, which characterises “post-Fordist” production’, reflected in the ‘wider processes of cultural diversity and differentiation, related to the multiplication of social worlds and social “logics” typical of modern life in the west’ (Hall, 1989, p. 118, 129). These multiplications are ones produced by a new consumerist ethic, a process facilitating, it seems, new subjectivities which can be at the same time individual and collective, pleasurable and political. This mode of politics, though, is a marketised and commodified one – for New Times writers this is no bad thing – but as Mike Rustin points out, this acceptance of ‘consumption and individualism [represent] instances of the tacit accommodation to the values of resurgent capitalism’ (Rustin, 1989, p. 313); that resurgence was harnessed and mobilised by the radical Right of the Conservative Party under Thatcher. So while Hall identifies in these processes of market expansion ‘the opening up of the individual’ and ‘the democratisation of culture’ (Hall, 1989, p. 128) – a dialectics of hope, we might say – there is no sense in his argument, as we found in Williams’s discussion of the earlier period of capitalist expansion into the cultural sphere, of a desire to engage or discriminate. This represents the overall relativist stance of the postmodern position. An anything goes scenario emerges, which is empowering in a superficial way: but without generating capacities that enable the subject to discriminate (that is, to properly, effectively, make choices), empowerment is illusory. So these understandings of the postmodern moment, and their expression in many New Times arguments, became instrumental in providing some of the theoretical grounding in shifting concerns with class to a preoccupation with new social movements and identity politics, an ideology fundamentally embedded in a rejection of class and its masternarrative status in favour of the micro-narratives constituting the politics of the margins. The overarching context is decisive here: the rapid wave of de-industrialisation set in train in the early 1980s in both Britain and the United States of America, that seemed to herald the demise of traditional working-class politics, opening a shift in Western economies like

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Britain’s, from manufacturing production to a predominantly service sector, white collar work. This led commentators on both the Left and the Right towards initiating a heightened focus on consumerism, because it became increasingly evident to some in the field that the arena of consumption now far more powerfully occupied people’s everyday lives than the area of paid labour. These changes were felt strongly within the field of Cultural Studies, a discipline, right from its inception, concerned with the “popular” – popular concerns, even popular pleasures (it’s there in Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy), embedded in popular cultures. As the discipline broadened its focus and became institutionally established within the academy, it inevitably began to evolve in ways earlier practitioners could not have foreseen. An eagerness to examine that vast range of cultural forms that an expanding mass media and commercial culture brought forth – in the process developing a range of conceptual tools and theoretical frameworks for understanding both production and consumption, audience patterns and institutional frames, questions of subjectivity and issues of power – led to an increasingly textualist Cultural Studies as the dominative mode, more concerned with resistant reading rather than revolutionary change. This was one way of investigating the possible emergence of new political subjectivities beyond class. It was also a way of celebrating, in an often unconsidered and uncritical fashion, the implications of a new consumer society and its various manifestations within the realm of popular culture (see McGuigan, 1992; for a riposte, McRobbie, 1994). I will now consider the implications of this trajectory by focusing on one particular approach to this mode of doing “new” Cultural Studies in “New Times.”

Politics or populism? John Fiske’s work has often been singled out as representative of an uncritical rush towards a populist trajectory in Cultural Studies. This populist stance is encoded in notions of “the people”. “The people” represent a political subjectivity devoid of any ideological determinations identifiable in advance of its appearance. Thus Fiske focuses on “popular” readings and, as Sparks indicates, ‘his account of the category of “the people” who actually produced such readings is that “it does not exist in any objective reality”’ (Sparks, 1996, p. 94). This type of ontological fluidity rejects class determinations of any significant kind, a shift well beyond the earlier emphases of sub-cultural Cultural Studies and one reflected in Hebdige’s new position outlined in 1988. There he insists

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that, within the context of postmodernity, it is necessary to redefine the theoretical ground and thus to ‘concentrate on the problematic of affect which involves a break with those forms of (interpretive, functionalist (post)structuralist) cultural critique which are bound into the problematic of meaning. It involves a shift away from the analysis of the putative relations between cultural practices and social formations’ – a move away from social determination to the free play of signifying practices (Hebdige, 1988, p. 223). Fiske’s influence in contemporary Cultural Studies reflects, according to O’Kane (2001) a broader reformist tendency in radical political discourse, both inside and outside the academy, which is the product of ‘the increasing sinecure of neoliberalism in the western world, the decline of statism and the return – with a vengeance – of individualism and the ideology of “freedom”’ (O’Kane, 2001, p. 296). Fiske’s culturalism, and his take on cultural identity, is, in many respects, the antithesis of the one pursued in A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience discussed in Chapter 1. Put in simple terms, the Fiske method would see Charlesworth’s arguments as both economic reductionist and essentialist. As O’Kane indicates, Fiske’s work rejects the concept of structure for an all-the-way down indeterminism, a position distinguishing postmodernist/postructuralist positions, and this approach makes it possible to write class out of the equation altogether in some very key and significant ways. Once where class was central to Cultural Studies, now it becomes less than marginal. O’Kane maps out what he sees as some of the reasons for this, reasons that are close to my own: the demise of Marxism, the rise of post-structuralism, the systemic changes in capitalism itself, with the emphasis on consumption, and the postulation of a new post-industrial dispensation. Fiske’s response is to re-evaluate and, in turn, over-valuate the cultural sphere, sidelining issues of political economy, while refusing any cultural specificity to working-class formations. O’Kane suggests that ‘the most telling symptom of Fiske’s compromise is the limited notion of resistance, an individualised one which privileges culture while masking the social formation’s residual realities: class, capitalism’s new complexities of consumption, and the status of actually-existing “democracy” as a political-economic construction’ (O’Kane, 2001, pp. 297–298). Fiske’s approach stands accused of a limited consumerist stance which plays into, and is comfortably accommodated by, capitalism’s over-riding imperatives. Fiske claims that, ‘the culture of everyday life is best described through metaphors of struggle or antagonism: strategies opposed to tactics, the bourgeoisie by the proletariat; hegemony met by resistance, ideology counted or evaded; top-down power opposed by

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bottom-up power, social discipline faced with disorder’ (Fiske, 1990, p. 47). He marks out a distinction between mass and popular culture in this way: ‘Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass culture’ (Fiske, 1990, pp. 176–177). Critical here of the Frankfurt School-style culture industries approach, he goes on echoing Raymond Williams’s wellknown formulation and riposte to contemporary notions of the “masses” in his Culture and Society, to claim that, ‘There is no mass culture, there are only alarmist and pessimistic theories of mass culture that, at their best, can shed light only on the industrial and ideological imperatives of the power bloc, but none at all on the cultural processes by which people cope with them and either reject them or turn them into popular culture’ (Fiske, 1990, pp. 176–177). The disingenuousness of the allusion to Williams’s take on the masses and mass culture is clear if we understand that informing Williams’s critique of the commercialisation of culture was a grounded insistence of a necessary march towards a (mass) discriminatory consciousness in relation to cultural production and consumption, an imperative rejecting both elitist disdain and populist celebration, a position I have already referred to in the context of his early critique of Hoggart and one to which I will return later on. On the other hand, it appears that the market, for Fiske, stands as “enabler” and facilitator in a curious and uncritical kind of way; it brings about ‘market-induced freedoms’ (O’Kane, 2001, p. 301), which, in effect, readily disguise concerns around class inequalities and injustice – the ones mapped out by Charlesworth, for instance – through an emphasis on an individual and unconstrained consumerist stance. These individuals constitute what Fiske abstracts as “the people”, resisting, in various forms and through a myriad of practices, the power bloc. The binary opposite of the homogenising drive of the dominant (and the “forbidden” homogeneous thrust of Marxist class analysis/struggle), these groups form a counter-hegemony to whom Fiske ascribes agency, and where ‘each disenfranchised cipher [has] an equal go’, but, as O’Kane critically adds, in a ‘power bloc saturated by a mostly stable capitalism’ (O’Kane, 2001, p. 301). This predisposition to romanticise the lower orders can be seen to represent an extension of earlier studies of sub-cultures in Britain in the 1970s, as I have suggested already. Thus it is for Fiske ‘guerrilla tactics’, which operate most effectively on the postmodern cultural terrain, evading and subverting, demonstrating acts of belligerent defiance,

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which in turn constitute the micro-agency of resistant forces directed at the dominant (Fiske, 1989, pp. 8–9). Expression for such acts is even found in the manipulative embrace of the ultimate consumerist space, the shopping mall. Here commodities come with messages attached, which can be seen to ‘invade and take over our most personal lives’ (Fiske, 1989, p. 18), but are nevertheless vulnerable to an appropriative strategy which rearticulates and liberates them (and their consumers) from the dominant meanings attached to them. Thus, ‘consumption is not necessarily evidence of the desire for ownership of commodities for its own sake … but is rather the symptom of the need for control, for cultural autonomy and for security’, and represents ‘tactical victories that maintain the morale of the subordinate, and may well produce real gains in their cultural and social experience’ (Fiske, 1989, p. 32). Identifying the resistance of the dominated becomes the academic imperative, flagging-up ‘a general academic drift away from the “grand narrative” toward the particular, away from the text to the reading, away from the speech system to the utterance, away from ideology and hegemony to the everyday practices of the subordinate’ (Fiske, 1989, p. 32). And, of course, echoed in this pronouncement is the shift away from structures that might be argued to be determining, and a move towards the endlessly overdetermined and fundamentally fluid space of the postmodern. Fiske rejects structural determination for a cultural pluralism which makes creative consumers of us all; within this realm no-one is victim but each experience represents a kind of self-authorising pleasure through appropriating what the appropriators provide us with through market mechanisms. Yet, there is a profound discrepancy between the world perceived by Fiskeian Cultural Studies and the social realities of many. Thus the claim that, while capitalism has its problems with regard to wealth distribution, ‘it is not totally inhumane in its exploitation of the weak’ (quoted in O’Kane, 2001, p. 302), constitutes a risible position which symptomatically ignores levels of poverty, alienation and unhappiness we have explored in parts of Chapter 1, and a startling blindness to the effects of capital accumulation on the nations of the so-called Third World, or Newly Industrialised Countries, not to mention the terrifying policy of destruction now inaugurated in the name of anti-terrorism. These are problems to do chiefly with the material and economic, and as such largely subordinate in Fiske’s frames of reference, because for Fiske, and other “vulgar” culturalist approaches, individuals are essentially free from the constraints of capitalism (which is the only feasible systemic option we have at any rate), footloose on the flexible terrain of postmodern consumer culture.

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‘The limit of consumerism’ may, of course, be a condition with which Fiske (and the rest of us) are content. This is partly the gist of McRobbie’s guarded defence of this new type of Cultural Studies. Arguing against critics like McGuigan (1992), and the populist tag he ascribes to work like Fiske’s, for instance, she suggests that, any simple attack on the New Times inflected Cultural Studies ‘indicates just how mistaken it is for critics to dismiss the necessity of the pleasures which happen to come to us in the commodity form, as a cultural lifeline’ (in Hall and Jacques, 1996, p. 259). But this is a position which, like Fiske’s, disregards the poor and vulnerable, who dwell on subsistence levels and are unable to play the game to the extent that celebrants of consumerism insinuate. Fiske’s postmodern life-world reveals the resistances of discrete individuals, capable of breaching any systemic determinations by turning the tools (commodities) of capitalist culture back upon itself, so that a kind of utopia is born with every “subversive” act of consumption. There are, thus, no real limits to the world. O’Kane, summarising Fiske’s arguments, suggests that the whole trajectory of this approach as a major analytical component of Cultural Studies leads to the inevitable rejection of class. This is indeed the postmodern position in a nutshell. By sundering connections (however mediated) between the cultural and its material base, class power and process remains un-located; emerging from this is a ‘defective critique of capitalism which keeps within the system’ and ‘masks symptomatic economic and political realities … whose analysis and articulation would reveal the extent to which a mythical individualising of consumption and activity is sustained by lack and deprivation’ (O’Kane, 2001, p. 318). Conversely, the postmodern terrain we saw mapped by Charlesworth, in the previous chapter, was marked by a working-class experience and culture severely curtailed by material and symbolic borders and boundaries. We have already seen that Raymond Williams rejected mass culture as the culture of the working class, arguing that it was not produced by them, but for them, and in certain respects this emphasis in Williams grounds Fiske’s perspectives on mass culture/popular culture. Abstentionist on questions of value, Fiske esteems mass culture for its openness to appropriation by ‘the people’, who make it into popular culture, thus fusing it with a different ethic and purpose. But where Williams and Fiske diverge is in two areas: first, Williams always insisted on the necessity to ditch capitalism as a mode of production inherently exploitative and beyond significant ameliorative reform; and, second, he consistently flagged up the centrality of class for understanding social change, political formation and cultural identity. His work rigorously

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avoided the romanticisation/pathologisation binary we find in much writing about class. Instead the “long revolution” was, for him, a different and difficult process, fundamentally to do with learning, in some significant sense – a process stalled and sustained in uneven proportions. If Fiskean-style Cultural Studies is seen as capitulating to the dubious delights of the consumer market place, where identity might be constantly refashioned anew, then the imperatives of the new identity politics within political, sociological and Cultural Studies discourse, powerfully influenced by post-structuralist arguments, emphasise a similar contingency, fluidity and difference. Williams’s notion of a common culture sits uneasily with this formulation, to say the least. In Britain, the shift towards identity politics was evidenced through a greater focus on the cultural politics of gender, race and sexuality; in the case of Stuart Hall’s work in particular, a shift of emphasis occurred which pressed on issues of national identity in the context of multiculturalism. This led to a whole new stress on the notion of diaspora as a central concept for understanding contemporary social formations in the (post) colonial developed world.

Diaspora studies and the return of the repressed Andrew Milner suggests that in the later 1990s, ‘diasporic issues of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, hybridity and globalisation came to occupy pride of place in [Stuart] Hall’s work’ (Milner, 2002, p. 118). This is undeniably the case, though part of a wider trend from the late 1980s which took up this sense of ontological fluidity, which the concept of hybridity came to signify for instance in the work of Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994). For Hall, and other commentators such as Paul Gilroy (1987), the emergence of globalisation, along with an intense concern with multiculturalism, transnationalism and mass migrations meant an intensified focus on the topic of national identity and how, in times of ever increasing “border crossings”, notions of some kind of homogeneous “Britishness” could or could not be sustained. Such a preoccupation was evident in Hall’s earlier interest in the ideological address of Thatcherism, and its focus around the nation and purported national characteristics of “Britishness” (generally coded as “Englishness”), crucial discursive components of the New Right ideology for constituting the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state. In Hall’s view, as I argued earlier, such rhetoric enabled an “exclusivist” discourse that elided class difference and power relations, stabilising a hegemonic bloc of support for the Thatcherite project. Hall, writing much later and subsequent to the

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high point (as he perceives it) of Thatcherite hegemony, sums up his understanding of nationalism in the post-nationalist state in the following way: There is no question, then, that the relative decline of the centralised nation-states, with their incorporating cultures and national identities, implanted and secured by strong cultural institutions, which claimed to be able to subsume all differences and diversity into their imagined unity, opens up profound fissures and ambivalences within the discourse of the nation-state. (Hall, 1992, p. 355) Hall insists that this development is not as recent as it at first seems – a sense of hybridity had always characterised the constitution of the nation; representing a fundamental type of difference, it is the work of ideology variously to elide. Seeking some kind of essence within the complexity that is national or cultural identity is to seek a chimera or to sustain a myth. Yet, in recent times, this quest for origins – perhaps more benignly in newly forming nation-states and, more precariously, in nation-states that are coming apart and reconstituting themselves in fundamentalist modes based on types of ethnic or religious absolutisms – re-emerges as a response to a rapidly globalising, newly (post)modern dispensation. Hall’s concern with diaspora is strictly opposed to Williams’s aim to explore the notion of a common culture. In his 1992 article, ‘Culture, Community, Nation’, Hall questions the very basis for Williams’s concept in a radically altered, multicultural Britain. To do this he calls into question Williams’s elaborations on national identity and citizenship found in Towards 2000 (1983). It appears very clear in this discussion that Hall is intent on establishing studies of culture as studies of diaspora – identity as difference is the key theoretical motif, with notions of hybridity at its heart. This is characteristic of much of Hall’s work on culture and identity from the late 1980s onwards – the pursuit of the politics of difference – and such a trajectory typifies much important work in contemporary Cultural Studies, too, although recognising difference in many cases involves de-recognising (or eliding) differences of class (see the Introduction to Kirk, 2003, for a more detailed discussion of this tendency, but also Charlesworth, 2000 and Coole, 1996). Thus Hall asserts that, ‘the capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century’ (Hall, 1992, p. 361). So, within this construction, community is an eternally suspended thing, as it is viewed as dangerously ‘unitary, homogeneous’ (361), in a way that

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can only yield unproductive closures. In Hall’s analysis, those groups constituting the ‘new diasporas’ that make up the ‘late modern experience’ (Hall, 1992, p. 361) – those politically and culturally subordinated within the nation-state – remain fundamentally separate, even estranged, from what might be perceived as the dominant culture. Yet this formulation comes to us in radically reductive terms, implying as it does that the dominant culture is unproblematically homogeneous in the first place. By their very nature, hegemonic struggles mean that dominant cultures are inevitably made up of subjectivities from traditionally powerful classes, who appeal to (or, rather, interpellate) those from subordinated groups, fashioning a power bloc which cuts through the boundaries of race, gender, class and sexuality, as Hall has argued himself elsewhere. The key question, here, is what it is exactly that hegemony is holding in place and of what are the hegemonic forces constituted; more significantly still, perhaps, is the issue of what might counterhegemonic forces be striving to bring into being in its stead. To essentialise difference, as Hall is seemingly doing in this essay, represents as much a form of closure as would be the insistence on some core “sameness”. Thus we are told that these new diasporas ‘will never be unified culturally’, because they are ‘inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures’ (Hall, 1992, p. 361). The obvious riposte here is why must they only be unified culturally – why this fetishisation of the cultural as the only site where politics might take place? And if these histories are interlocking – in different terms, dialogic – then what binds them together, in a history of difference and sameness, requires a more stricter elaboration than the assertion that identity is irrevocably an ‘open, complex, unfinished game – always under construction’ (Hall, 1992, p. 362). The multiplicity of difference marks the diaspora experience as one of an alienated consciousness – neither one place nor the other – and it is this condition that is celebrated in the term diasporic hybridity, a stark contrast to Williams’s notion of rooted settlement, or common culture. The concepts of diasporic hybridity and rooted settlement then stand alongside each other, as Andrew Milner notes, as two terms that are implicitly coded racially, ‘as, respectively, black and white’ (Milner, 2001, p. 121). For Hall, the perpetual construction characteristic of these new cultural identities is built on ‘the specific discourses which not only formed them but enable them to produce themselves anew and differently’ (Hall, 1992, p. 362). This represents a paradigm shift not only in how we might understand cultural identity, but also in how we “do” Cultural Studies. Writing in his essay, “New Ethnicities” (1996), Hall had suggested that his sense of

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ethnicity was one not ‘doomed to survive, as Englishness was, only by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other ethnicities. This precisely is the politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity’ (Hall, 1996, p. 447). But it is also a politics of difference and diversity quite amenable to the reactionary politics of the British National Party – and such fascists grouping across Europe have embraced it since. Moreover, while Hall claims his ethnicity to be inclusive in its difference, to be present without absences, there do exist very clear displacements and “forgettings” in this construction, and these revolve primarily around the question of class. So, embedded in this diasporic structure of feeling lie the seeds of a collective experience, yet it is one seen as curiously free of any type of exploitative relation outside the one taken to exist (and which, historically, did of course exist, if the context Hall is referencing is that of slavery, imperialism and de-colonisation) with the only implicitly acknowledged “host” culture. But this is where class becomes important once again. At its most straightforward, what class signifies above all is an exploitative relation between people. This relation is constitutive of a specific mode of production and that implicates the social formation in its totality. Diasporic hybridity cannot stand outside class relations as a mode of cultural identity. Thus the meaning of difference, to make any real sense, has to be seen from within this context, with class, if not at its centre, then integral nonetheless to relations between groups in a whole range of fields, across time and through space. As one critic has argued: Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations constituting an overall social organisation which both implicates and cuts through racialisation/ethnicisation and gender … [A] radical political economy [class] perspective emphasising exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of … diversity [and difference] beyond questions of conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity … or of ethical imperatives with respect to the “other”. (Bannerji, in Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McClaren, 2003, p. 159) Hall’s identity politics appears to endorse a fetishisation of difference which elides domination, particularly in terms of class, effectively disguising or wholly subordinating relations of exploitation. Such an uncritical and universal insistence on difference can begin to repeat, or resemble, what Williams once referred to as ‘the dominative mode’ shaping understanding of society. A new kind of one, to be sure,

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compared to the largely white, middle-class version Williams was deconstructing back then, but one, nonetheless, based on similar strategies of closure in the name of “New Times”. If this is the route new Cultural Studies is to take – the oscillation between celebrating consumerism and celebrating self – then it is not a particularly productive one.

Conclusion In Towards 2000 (1983), Williams argues that ‘it is by working and living together, with some real place and common interests to identify with, and as free as may be from external ideological definitions, whether divisive or universalist, that real social identities are formed’ (Williams, 1983, p. 193). Such an outcome is, of course, as much bedevilled by pitfalls as well as possibilities. But it is a sentiment echoed by Edward Said, too, coming from a writer all too aware of hegemonic powers’ strategies of “Othering”, and of what hybridity involves in the modern world of transnational flows and neo-colonial power. Despite this, he asserts that there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on … separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival is about the connections between things … It is more rewarding – and more difficult – to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us”. But this also means not trying to rule over others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). (Said, 1993, xi) Hall’s position in his 1992 essay seems to argue just for the type of ‘separation’ Said criticises, even if he appears to be predicating it on objective circumstance nobody can seemingly dispute nor overcome – broadly speaking, globalisation. But what seems to emerge here is a new dominative mode which closes down dialogue and fails to seek necessary alignments. Such a dominative mode constitutes perhaps the strongest strand of British and American Cultural Studies since around the mid-1980s, and it has led to ways of viewing individuals and groups as essentially different and separate – as Said suggests – or it has resulted in understanding subjectivity and agency through processes of radical reading and deconstruction, processes so often removed from the realities of lived experience itself.

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Andrew Milner suggests that Williams’s work ‘was organised around a continuing political project, that of a radical democratic, popular socialism, in which the idea of a common culture, truly made in common, might finally be realised’ (Milner, 2002, p. 103). For Milner, this objective revolved around a number of key categories: ‘the centrality of culture, as both textual artefact and lived experience; the fundamental importance of serious intellectual work; and the persistent significance of class and community’ (Milner, 2002, p. 104). The latter category in particular, however, would prove increasingly at odds with the trajectory taken within later Cultural Studies, and was perhaps breaking down as early as the sub-cultural period in British Cultural Studies. While Cultural Studies has been institutionalised and internationalised, it has also made necessary adjustments in the development of the field to account for those ways of being that its earliest concerns with class and culture did not appear to accommodate at all, and this was a crucial and essential process. But now may be a judicious moment to return to some of those older questions set by Williams around the notion of community and within the continuing, though clearly altered, imperatives of classmarked social relations of power and exploitation. Eagleton, quoting Francis Mulhern’s formulation, is useful here. Mulhern suggests that communities are ‘not places but practices of collective identification whose variable order largely defines the culture of any social formation’ (in Eagleton, 2000, p. 80). He goes on: ‘They can be as much universal as local, and to limit the notion to the latter is to fetishize it. One can speak of “abstract communities”, or see the nation as a “community of known strangers”. The relations between culture and politics are similarly variable, depending on the context. There should be no Enlightenment assumption that politics always has the edge over culture, or – with so much culturalist thought – that it is simply enough to invert this order of priorities’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 80). The shift of emphasis in the west from production to consumption has had profound ramification for notions of class and projects of selfrealisation and citizenship, which Cultural Studies in the thrall of mass culture and its products often fails abjectly to address. Disengaging with understandings of class as a means of exploitation, site of inequality and as a political project of potential social transformation means disarticulating critique of the very processes producing such effects. In the present juncture the dangers of identity politics are all too obvious, and it is in this context that we need to return perhaps to ideas of community, and a sense of common culture, or a culture in common, which

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Williams advocated. But not an exclusive, hegemonic mode imposed from above, nor one based simply on the recognition of difference. Instead ‘a good community, a living culture, will … not only make room for but actively encourage all and any who can contribute to the advance in consciousness which is the common need … We need to consider every attachment, every value, with our whole attention; for we do not know the future, we may never be certain of what may enrich it’ (Williams, 1958, p. 335). And, finally, ‘with that basic [class] inequality isolated we could … let through the more interesting discussion of human differences, between real people and real communities living in their valuably various ways’ (Williams, 1961, p. 63). This open-ended process embraces both difference and sameness and embodies complex acts of alignment, affiliation and solidarity around fundamental and core concerns on which the very future of human society might depend.

3 Abyss-mal Sites: Representation and the British Working Class

In her Self, Class, Culture (2004), Beverley Skeggs argues that class formation is a dynamic process ‘produced through conflict and fought out at the level of the symbolic’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 5). Seen this way, class is constituted in large measure through the power of representations (see also Kirk, 2003). The gist of Skeggs’s argument is that the inscribing of class in culture and the symbolic accrues value – those able to profit are generally those better placed to invest in and control such processes, hence inequality marks the variable sites of class construction. There are some considerable affinities here with Andrew Sayer’s understanding of the moral dimensions of class which I touched on previously in my introduction. Skeggs pursues a more strictly historical trajectory to form her discussion, however, which argues for the making of class through a range of discursive practices and representational strategies. This is viewed as a process of production and positioning, and it is within dominant strategies of projection and appropriation, through relations of representation and exchange, that class is fixed over time and in space. So while class remains an economic positioning – she recognises class relations as involving an objective position within relations of production – the concepts of exploitation, investment and value are extended and reoriented to enable a consideration of class identity as a cultural, ideological and historical articulation, with its current manifestations euphemistically employed to both disguise and reinforce class privilege and subordination. By examining a range of sites which articulate class relations, Skeggs endeavours to ‘explore class struggle made through culture in which value is continually contested’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 187). This chapter takes up some of Skeggs’s core themes to examine the “cultural exploitation” of the British working class. I will argue in this chapter that this exploitation – explored here through the production of 73

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images of the working class chiefly in English fiction – operates at particular historic moments both to depict and displace the troublesome relations of class when the very presence of the “lower orders” seemingly loomed large.

Locating the self and class in the nineteenth century Skeggs concentrates on the making of class subjectivity through categories of self and personhood, processes which in her argument are rigorously historicised.1 To establish an identity involves locating a constitutive Other, and in this dialectical process the self is regarded ‘as a part of a system of inscription, exchange, perspective and value-laden attribution … shaped by the dominant symbolic’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 9), so that personhood is ‘always historically and spatially located, especially via national spaces’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 20). Moreover, we might add, it is made manifest by and through a set of conventions, and the available languages whereby a culture works to articulate itself. These languages are not separate from wider social processes, though. Skeggs explores how the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and the dominance of exchange relations come to be a primary mode of instituting class relations, one which demands exploitation as a key process in such a transaction. Paradoxically, exploitation is then disguised in much bourgeois discourse by the requirement to universalise exchange as part of the ideological work of an emergent bourgeoisie intent on transcending class ‘by assuming the essential equality of all in the market place’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 29), a space that is perceived as some neutral site for both the individual’s commercial activity and a public space to display his (usually his) moral probity and status value. Both self and class can be seen to be produced through exchange relationships in this way, in turn normalising market imperatives and rationalising the subject of consumption, providing a new concept of self, shaped by notions of interest and value. The bourgeois ideal is established in terms of what Skeggs calls ‘personhood’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 46), while those outside the representation (the working class and women; not forgetting colonised peoples) constitute the irrational Other, associated more with the excessive or ugly body of dubious value rather than the rational and calculating Mind. Skeggs provides textual evidence of these tendencies, drawing on a range of discourses which disclose strategies of codification and classification, which work to establish modes of knowledge – ideologies embedded in such nineteenth-century concepts as the ‘social body’ which, according to Skeggs, operate alongside exchange to circumscribe, discriminate and fix (Skeggs, 2004, p. 36).

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This can be identified in symbolic production as diverse as the nineteenth-century novel to formalised economic or political tracts, where conceptions of class gel not only along economic lines, but in cultural and ideological terms also – the moral economy of class then is made transparent. In a range of codifications, the degenerate working class constitute the cankered part of the social body, or body politic, that must be labelled and scrutinised and, if need be, tightly controlled. As Skeggs notes, ‘these definitions and valuations of classes also produced a particular version of the self’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 39). The middle-class self becomes characterised as rational and reflexive; the working-class self as primitive and impulsive – ideological positions giving rise at the time to reform initiatives, among other, less liberal, measures.2 Skeggs points to how domestic servants were ‘depicted by the racialised imagery of degradation – of contagion, promiscuity and savagery’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 37); and how the working class were perceived in general by social commentators as a race apart, employing the discourses of the ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ to fix such difference. What is notable here is the strongly gendered (and “raced”) nature of these representations, so that working-class women emblematise all that was degenerate and potentially threatening in the consolidating capitalist social order and middle-class hegemony. This tendency to fix and discriminate, operating through race, gender and class co-ordinates, can be seen alongside other approaches designed to civilise the lower orders. Such publications as Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self-Help (1859), which produced a particular version of entrepreneurial self to which the “respectable” working class and others might subscribe, was one modelled on the middle-class ideal. This is a strong argument, and I want to take it further by examining the role played by that emergent cultural form the novel in shaping perceptions for the middle class of both self and other. To do this is to implicate literature as ideology. Indeed class has always been in some significant senses at the heart of what we call literature in the Western world. Evidence of this is the attention given to class conflict in what has come to be seen as key fiction of the nineteenth century (see Williams, 1958; Lovell, 1987; Day, 2001). Entering the twentieth century, literary modernism’s increasing preoccupation with style has been seen by some critics as a way of rejecting and distancing itself from the “vulgar” trappings of a burgeoning mass culture and lower class tastes (Huyssens, 1988; Carey, 1992). And more broadly, we might want to highlight literature’s specific ideological function in the field of education as a token of taste and distinction, and signifier for the more privileged of an access to the type of cultural capital that facilitates

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social reproduction. Returning to Skeggs’s argument, it is possible to suggest that the nineteenth-century realist novel performed the very function she outlines in terms of symbolic production, becoming a kind of moral lodestone for the bourgeoisie, helping to shape responses to social problems which might only be resolved through the ideological work the realist text undertook in explaining the increasingly “unknowable community” created by the industrial revolution.3 The intensifying social polarisation of nineteenth-century England initially found contrasting literary responses. An idealisation of the pre-industrial past found articulation in Romanticism, where the gulf between Nature and Culture is writ large, thus defining itself, according to Gary Day, ‘against the principles of laissez-faire capitalism’ (Day, 2001, p. 118). Yet this was not a response to class, but more a reaction to industrialism, representing the dying throes of a pre-capitalist, agrarian society. The features of class are merely emergent at this early stage; the ‘empty self’ of exchange and commodification is yet to replace the ‘full self’ of status and position (Day, 2001, p. 109). The rift between fact and value, reality and representation, has yet to be established. The sameness of commodity culture has not usurped social difference predicated on rank and “place”. Classic nineteenth-century fiction – building on the literary heritage of writers like Jane Austen and Walter Scott – would articulate the growing tensions between class fears, social progress and liberal reform in far more direct ways, and these feelings were often inscribed on the very body of the proletarian protagonists through discourses associated with morality and temperance. This can be witnessed in such classics as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, published in the revolutionary year of 1848, a time of peoples’ revolts against tyranny on the Continent and the year of publication in Britain of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Gaskell’s novel is an interesting exception to some of the more ideologically coded moralising tracts outlined in Skeggs’s book that fixed working-class subjectivity as degraded and debased. Indeed, Gaskell constructs in the novel largely sympathetic portrayals of workingclass life, its intimacies and hardships. Where the novel turns against her working-class protagonists – whilst remaining critical of the “uncaring” middle-class mill owners – comes at the very moment they attempt to articulate and instate an alternative political economy and moral and ideological code of conduct through the demands of Chartism. Thus John Barton, the Chartist organiser, slips from conscientious worker and father to drunken murderer. Gaskell’s sympathies did not extend to supporting trade unions or radical working-class politics. After Barton’s

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abortive trip to London with the Chartist petition, we hear: The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil. The people rise up to life; they irritate us; they terrify us, and we become their enemies. Then in the sorrowful moment of our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with mute reproach. Why have we made them what they are; a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness. (Gaskell, 1848/1981, p. 199) Of course, one might argue that there was a shortage of material means too. Yet, here, in an allegorical aside, Frankenstein’s monster (Gaskell makes the error of mistaking the maker for his monster) stands in for the workers, and the argument then is clearly against working-class political autonomy, encoded in a refusal of class struggle embodied in Chartism itself. Barton goes on to commit murder, the culminating act of class antagonism that puts him beyond the pale as far as Gaskell (and surely her readership) is concerned, thus inscribing him, and such actions under the mark of depravity – essentially in-human, hence Gaskell’s references to the workers as a Frankenstein monster out of control. Thus, John Barton’s transformation from caring family man and mill worker to murderer is radically overdetermined. The death of his wife, his lack of work, the failure of the Charter, the employers’ intransigence, all bear irresistibly upon him as the novel unfolds. In contrast to the novel’s earlier representations of working-class life as a community, to some degree self-organising and co-operative in spirit, the narrative turns to darker images of the workers’ representatives. Trade union activity is represented as a sinister cult movement, whose actions are potentially anarchic or evil: And so with words, or looks that told more than words, they built up a deadly plan. Deeper and darker grew the import of their speeches, as they stood hoarsely muttering their meaning out, and glaring, with eyes that told the terrors their own thoughts were to them, upon their neighbours. Their clenched fists, their set teeth, their livid looks, all told the suffering which their minds were voluntarily undergoing in the contemplation of crime, and in familiarising themselves in its details. (Gaskell, 1848/1981, p. 223) The workers are shown metonymically with violent gestures ‘clenched fists’, ‘set teeth’, ‘glaring eyes’, contemplating their actions. They become

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the monster of Gaskell’s imagination – the terrifying “Other”. And if their resolve should waver, there is on hand a ‘gentleman from London’ (Gaskell, 1848/1981, p. 192) with beer and money: Then the ‘gentleman from London’ … entered. He looked selfconscious, so far from earnest, among a group of eager, fierce, absorbed men, among whom he now stood. He might have been a disgraced medical student of the Bob Sawyer class, or an unsuccessful actor, or a flashy shopman. The impression he would have given you would have been unfavourable, and yet there was much about him that could only be characterised as doubtful. (Gaskell, 1848/1981, p. 193) Charles Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), published a little while later, finds the industrial working class a troublesome sight. In the novel, the workers’ district is described as an ‘unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage’ (Dickens, 1854/1985, p. 65), and here colonial rhetoric intrudes to bring together both “race” and class, implying an ontological equivalence between the “depraved” body of the savage, and the “degraded” body of the workers. And the stark uniformity of working-class existence in Coketown reveals the workers either as victims, working within ‘the Titan shadow of the steam engines’ (Dickens, 1854/1985, p. 106), or as wielders of their own form of power, which ostracises one of their fellows. The power in question is that of the trade unions, and Dickens evinces that familiar dislike for this type of workingclass organisation, depicted in Gaskell’s narrative earlier. The factory operative, in the shape of Stephen Blackpool, is supposedly a voice of the working class whilst at the same time a marginal figure. He is sent into the “wilderness” (sent to Coventry by his fellow workers) and Dickens renders him a martyr to his cause. It is a strategy meant to evoke sympathy; designed to encourage, within the bourgeoisie, a more humane response to the conditions of the factory workers. Blackpool becomes a tragic figure in the same way as John Barton. Thus the workers are depicted as either violent and disreputable, or child-like and good. Peter Keating argues that Dickens’s representations of the industrial and the urban working class diverged significantly. Dickens regarded the industrial working class as a potential threat to order, whereas the urban poor are essentially passive, ‘lacking any kind of mass identity possessed by their industrial counterparts’ (Keating, 1971, p. 226). But only in part is this the case. The urban poor carry the threat of “contamination”. In Bleak House (1853), for instance, menace is figured in the pestilence bred in the ‘ruinous place’ of Tom-All-Alone’s; while in Dombey and Son (1848)

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Mrs Brown and Alice represent the degraded body of the poor. Fragments of the lumpen proletariat, marginalised from the main forces of production, they emerge through images of the grotesque. When bourgeois Florence falls temporarily into the hands of Mrs Brown her very identity, her self, is threatened: by removing her own clothing and donning the rags of the poor, she becomes symbolically one of them. The scene enacts a kind of psychic drama in relation to social identity, which corresponds to arguments put forward earlier by Skeggs and echoing Stallybrass and White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), where they claim that the cultural imaginary of the Victorian middle class was plagued by fear of the Other, which might manifest itself as the prostitute, the slum dweller, the working class. To exclude these subjectivities, the Victorian bourgeoisie shaped discursive hierarchies which enabled them to “think themselves” as social subjects through the structural oppositions of high/low, classical/grotesque. Excluding the “low”, or at best attempting to acquire knowledge of them, resulted in a ‘mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 5). Dickens’s marginal characters play upon this fear of the Other, drawing unconsciously on those very anxieties that Stallybrass and White detect. Even so, the incident involving Mrs Brown and Florence is also potentially scandalous to the middle-class readership; suggesting that social status or social class might depend in the end only upon a change of clothes. Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot articulate analogous structures of feeling for depicting the working class in their novels.4 The workers are easily led by outside agitators, or reveal an overly active class consciousness of their own. Their proximity to polite, middle-class society is either too close and contaminating, or too distant and alien. They endure their labour with stoic dignity or pride, or shirk from it at the first available instant. And so, I would suggest, these literary representations reinforce Skeggs’s point. Voicing class fears – or simply class disdain – by making visible the working-class subject helps demarcate difference. The site/sight of the Other, particularly at times of social unrest, becomes the proletarian or the poor, the wretched in their slums, the prostitute in the back alley. The middle-class gaze, then, might penetrate the city slums and factory towns not only in the reports of social reformers, but through the pages of the “engaged” novel. Separated by geographical space and social position, the representations of the working class by middle-class novelists, social reformers, social policy legislators and journalists alike

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all emerge under the sign of excess: The bourgeois subject continuously defined and redefined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as the ‘low’, as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalised under the sign of negation and disgust. (Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 76) The fear of contamination was not only psychic or social, but articulated profound political dimensions, too. The centripetal forces which attempted to channel the energies of an emergent modernity had also to channel the potentially oppositional powers of a developing working class for fear that men like John Barton might have no investment in bourgeois progress at all. But the working class continued developing its own political and cultural formations at the same time. This is a significant point that Skeggs, in her analysis of nineteenth-century discourses on class, tends to gloss over. By doing so she misses an important counter-hegemonic formation striving to represent working-class subjectivity in opposition to those dominant discourses and institutional practices shaping and controlling understandings of class. In the space of two generations, Chartism, the first mass political movement of the British working class, had come to fruition. Chartism, encoding a collective expression of working-class resistance and struggle, disclosed its own symptomatic silences, certainly around the issue of gender, effectively sidelining a whole portion of the working class – namely women – from its own discourse. However, influential Chartists understood perfectly well the significance of culture in the class struggle, staking a claim to literature as a vehicle for proletarian consciousness, composing novels, pamphlets, poems and short stories which placed working-class protagonists at the centre of the narratives (Haywood, 1997). This was needed to counter representations of the working class such as those previously described – the stereotyping of the proletarian, or figuring class inequality in fundamentally moral rather than economic or political terms. Chartist writers adopted instead what Haywood has described as a ‘materialist aesthetic’, constituting a political critique of the inequities of capitalism itself (Haywood, 1997, p. 9). I will discuss the idea of a ‘materialist aesthetic’, and its association with working-class cultural production, in the next chapter. This countered bourgeois writers’ attribution of a moral deficit on the part of the working class, where perceived individual failing substitutes

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for class structure.5 In this mode, class can to be encoded in terms of individual types and linked more to ideas of status (thus displacing class, a powerful strategy employed to disguise class realities), so that workingclass subjectivity might find representation in such typology as the “rough” and the “respectable”, the “deserving” and “undeserving”, a terminology finding renewed vigour much later – as we shall see – in the quite different conditions of postmodern Britain. As Skeggs notes, this tendency to define class through culture ‘dislocates it from the economic and firmly locates it within the moral, in which representation and visuality become central mechanisms for knowing and identifying the working class’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 40).

From classes to masses: Modernism and modernity Entering the twentieth century the logic of commodity exchange begins to saturate all aspects of social life. Thus it is that the abstraction of exchange reduces difference to sameness, quality to quantity. And as it is the commodity form which occludes the social relations that brought it into existence, so in turn it works to disguise the existence of class. Thus the rise of a mass society, mass culture, the very notion of the masses, comes to substitute, we might say, for the structural imperatives of class as a major focus of attention with regard to social formations. At the same time, the idea of citizenship, consolidating itself within political discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century, helps compound this.6 Skeggs notes, following Day (2001), that notions of citizenship were formulated in opposition to class, so that – in return for political rights – the working class were ‘expected to labour for the improvement of the race, the economy and the extension of the empire’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 40). Here, then, class is subsumed under notions of both the masses and the nation, and in this way consideration of inequality and conflict can be effectively banished through invoking common interests grounded in consumption or national identity. But references to the rise of the masses, or mass culture, or modernity – categories variously used by detractors and supporters alike – still constituted displaced ways of talking about class. If class finds powerful articulation in key nineteenth-century fiction, as I have shown, it is less obviously present in the rise of later modernist writing of the early twentieth century. Discussions of modernist fiction have turned often on issues of form. This points to a break with the heritage of the realist novel in relation to a developing and increasingly dominant aesthetic, a new concern with style. Thus T.S. Eliot organised

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his views on modernism around an emphasis on formal strategies and aesthetic modes. He identifies Joyce’s recourse to myth as a structural device in Ulysses (1921) as exemplifying modernist technique. In a wellknown comment he notes that myth becomes a way ‘of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (quoted in Moretti, 1983, p. 212). For Eliot the work of art expresses a timeless, organic unity, and as Astradur Eyesteinsson (1990) has suggested, modernism is then viewed in an almost classical mode and comes to constitute ‘a kind of aesthetic heroism, which in the face of the chaos of the modern world (a very much “fallen” world) sees art as the only dependable reality and as an ordering principle of a quasi-religious kind’ (Eyesteinsson, 1990, p. 9). In this sense, paradoxically, modernism offers a closer engagement with the “real”, than might the realist novel itself. Yet this can only be achieved through the form’s famous defamiliarisation effect; or, as Adorno argued, summed up neatly by Eyesteinsson, modernist writing, ‘through its autonomous, formal constructions, places us at a distance from society, making it strange, whereby we come to see its reverse, but true mirror image, its negativity’ (Eyesteinsson, 1990, p. 43). So it is that Eliot’s formulations on modernist writing, regarded in this light, can be seen to revolve not only around questions of aesthetics, but on a view of history itself. George Lukacs famously saw this notion of estrangement as signalling a retreat from history. Champion of nineteenth-century realism, Lukacs attacked the subjectivism and psychologism of the modernist text and its refusal or failure to depict, in the rich totalities of literary realism, the unfolding historic process (1972). Lukacs regarded modernism as a decadent, anti-humanist art form. But as I suggest above with reference to Eliot, modernism’s purported refusal of history constitutes a response – an attempted riposte – to history itself. Terry Eagleton suggests as much, addressing what he sees as the relationship of high modernism to the mass commodity culture installing itself in Britain and Europe after the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that ‘modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degrade it into an exchangeable object’ (Eagleton, 1986, p. 133). But in doing this it merely displays the other side of the commodity form – fetishism: ‘The autonomous, self-regarding, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification part of the problem’ (Eagleton, 1986, p. 133). One response to mass culture and the

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commodity form lies in the subjectivism and abstraction of modernist art and literature: at one level, a heroic resistance to the commodified spectacle of the market-place, simultaneously an expression of the very abstract relations and reification it attempted to dispel. Gary Day (2001) sees other ways of looking at modernism which focus on the constitutive relationship of class. First he suggests, following Raymond Williams (1989), that we should consider the writers’ class backgrounds as key in the generation of this particular cultural formation and class fractional structure of feeling in Britain. So he argues that it is necessary to ‘consider how economically privileged artists, such as the Bloomsbury group, chose to differentiate themselves from the masses and from certain sections of the middle class in cultural terms’ (Day, 2001, p. 154). Second, Day suggests, quoting Marx, that we situate some aspects of modernism within the context of exchange whose extension is an example of how the bourgeoisie ‘creates a world after their own image’ (Day, 2001, p. 154). This links with Eagleton’s argument – and in this scenario modernism’s resistance to the commodity form condemns it to the historical forces it seeks to deny. The very forces and processes of capitalism determine and shape responses towards it. And this connects us to a third way of understanding the thematic and formal concerns of modernist writing, and one I am primarily concerned with in the context of this chapter and in the light of those arguments presented by Skeggs. This is in the way in which aspects of modernism engage with that increasingly visible presence in twentieth-century culture and society: the masses, their emergent institutions and their political demands. If the commodity form occludes the social relations that brought it into existence, so in turn it disguises the existence of class. If such a proposition holds good then it is possible to place some key trends within modernism as responses to the condition we can call “massification”. Thus the rise of a mass society and mass culture replaces – as descriptive categories which carry value – class codes, displacing the notion of class as a direct focus of attention for many writers and commentators. Though not articulated in a fully representational sense, as in the realist or naturalist mode, class is nonetheless crucial as a means of understanding key aspects of the modernist aesthetic. This echoes John Carey’s view. He suggests that key modernist writers take their cue from Nietzsche. Nietzsche famously believed that ‘everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master’ resulting in the ‘tyranny of the least and dumbing’, which ends in socialism – ‘a hopeless, sour affair which negates life’ (Carey, 1992, p. 4). Carey suggests that ‘the principle around which modernist literature

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and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses’ (Carey, 1992, p. 21), a strategy which, as Eliot’s remarks confirm here, enabled a segregation away from the ‘complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass’ (cited in Carey, 1992, p. 7; see also Huyssen, 1988). In this lies a particular response to the experience of the modern world, an aesthetic strategy representing a rejection of the present: what Peter Nicholls describes as a definable structure of feeling in revolt against ‘a modernity increasingly degraded by the imitative forms of mass politics and consumer culture’ (Nicholls, 1995, p. 255). The high modernist texts discussed here articulate a deep suspicion and in some cases contempt for popular culture and the modern world against which it defines itself – the modernist trope of impersonality and distance can be seen as a symptom of this – a culture which finds its greatest articulations in the ever growing urban milieu. This response is bound up with attitudes to the lower orders and the masses. But there is another level of experience, too, which shapes the consciousness of this formation. This is the presence of empire. To address the realities of colonial conquest, Edward Said suggests, writers like Conrad and Forster ‘take narrative from the triumphalist experience of imperialism into the extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive irony, whose formal patterns we have come to recognise as the hallmarks of modernist culture’ (Said, 1993, p. 227). This is a response to the movements of masses, at home and abroad, the “made visible” of Otherness. Jameson offers a similar understanding. Suggesting that realism was the product of the experiences of early industrial capitalism, modernism in turn represents the dialectical counter-part to the advances of modernity, the typifying aesthetic of monopoly capitalism in its imperialist phase. Thus Jameson argues that the ‘epistemological doubt’ and fragmentation, or what Said calls the ‘extremes of self-consciousness’ of modernist texts, mark a response to ‘a classical imperialist system beyond the confines of the various national experiences’, instigating the drama of representation which figures knowledge of the world as radically unstable and fraught (1991, p. 42). If the truth of experience always lies elsewhere – in the colonial enclaves of empire, say – reification shapes experience. And, as suggested earlier, a similar structure lies at the heart of the commodity. Fetishism occludes the labour of the workers and surplus value constitutes the repressed source of all wealth through exploitation and the wage system. For the bourgeoisie this is a truth that must also be suppressed. Yet the visibility of this source in the metropolis itself represents a quite different threat to that linked to colonial domination, requiring as it does the inevitable

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daily engagement with the masses. Thus it is that the modernist style and thematic preoccupations constitute both a distancing and an encounter with its domestic Other. It is this particular ‘ideology of the aesthetic’ that I am concerned with at this moment, and it is a very British variant despite the fact that the writers I refer to here were not, in terms of origins of birth, British at all. Modernism is seen as the art of the city. London, Paris, Dublin and St. Petersburg – the litany is well known.7 As a form, it produced a representational strategy fissured by the anxieties and tensions that the processes of rapid industrialisation, modernisation and massification restlessly generate and promote, so that modernist themes are strung out somewhere between the banal and the profound, the fleeting or the timeless, and the conflicting experiences of delight and danger. Thus the concerns of modernist writing ‘come from a series of experiences of metropolitan capitalism that both heightens the distance between subjective meanings and the collective consciousness and provides the context in which social distance breeds despair and cynicism’ (Fowler, 1997, p. 142). Edward Said (1993) has pointed to Joseph Conrad’s writing as a modernist experiment saturated with the anxieties of empire and a moment’s consideration of Heart of Darkness (1899/1973) confirms this. But the opening of the novel, set on the Thames, unfolds within the region of London’s East End, a location already documented by social explorers as the abyss, a place of darkness in itself where the urban poor and under-employed congregate and gather. We see in Conrad’s opening vista on the dock side the Director of Companies staring out to sea, but we are told that ‘his work was not there’, but in the ‘brooding gloom’ behind him – the tight warren of streets constituting ‘the monstrous town’ (Conrad, 1899/1973, p. 135). This ‘brooding gloom’ is partly a proleptic device on Conrad’s part, merely foreshadowing the atrocities which unfold later in the story within the “darkness” of the African jungle. But Conrad’s references to these ‘dark places’ invokes the title of a piece of social investigation into the London poor published only a few years earlier. This was William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). There Booth had asked, ‘may we not find a parallel at our own doors and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horror to those which Stanley had found existing in the great equatorial forest?’ (1890, p. 26). Once again “race” and class are entwined onto the backdrop of empire by Conrad’s reference to the title of Booth’s work, the necessity to “civilise” savages a domestic issue as well as one to occupy colonialists.

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This notion of the brooding underside of an outwardly, or ostensibly, civilised world constitutes a central theme in Conrad’s later work A Secret Agent (1907). On one level, this novel stands as a massive, wholesale, debunking act on the prospects for revolutionary action (see Eagleton, 1976). Seen through Conrad’s relentless satirical gaze, the anarchists form a motley crew of misfits and failed émigrés. The perfect anarchist, The Professor, wired to his explosives, stands forever on the brink of an oblivion which is always deferred. The London world in which he circulates, ‘unsuspected and deadly’, a ‘pest in the street full of men’ (Conrad, 1963/1907, p. 34), emerges out of the gloom as simultaneously both concrete and abstract – “knowable” in no real sense of the word, yet densely there in its stifling and amorphous presence. This ‘epistemological doubt’ – to use Jameson’s phrase – places The Secret Agent within the confines of modernist writing and its concerns. Here is a world rationalised and policed by the apparatuses of the state, yet frighteningly ungovernable. London, at once the seat of empire from which colonial conquest is undertaken, is porous too, permeable to foreign influence, the presence of the Other, the revolutionaries, or, in Conrad’s description in his letters, a world standing prey to ‘the pressure of infernal doctrines born of the continental backslums’ (in Eagleton, 1976, p. 133). Thus the anarchists might, given the appropriate circumstances, wake the urban proletariat from its Edwardian slumbers, though Vladimir’s central point with regard to the planned atrocity is that the bomb might have the alternative effect of blasting a complacent bourgeoisie into an awareness of some hidden threat to its own political and social hegemony. The threat of social instability is accentuated by the novel’s setting: the fog-drenched and narrow streets of the capital where any sense of the “totality” of life becomes impossible to inscribe. But this threat is a damp squib too. The brooding scenarios Conrad presents to us remain devoid of genuine foreboding. Irony here constitutes the major trope – it is within irony’s scope to inflate the gap between reality and its representation, instating a cynical distancing that can be, in an ideological sense, either disabling or liberating. It is the aesthetics of distancing, as Jameson has suggested in relation to Conrad’s style and to modernism more generally, that ‘constitute[s] an ideological expression of capitalism, of the latter’s reification of everyday life’ ( Jameson, 1991, p. 236). Thus style becomes symptom: the ‘knowable community’ barely a silhouette, monopoly capitalism casting a shroud over the social relations it brings into being. Consequently, the simple-minded Stevie steps in for the largely invisible proletariat – the book was published only two years after the failed

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revolution in Russia in 1905, it should be remembered – duped by Verloc into an act which, the narrative has us believe, is profoundly beyond his gentle and essentially passive nature. Representing protagonists from the proletariat as essentially docile until led astray by influences from “outside” is a recurring trope in much nineteenth-century fiction, as we have seen. It represents a conservative fantasy, the opposite side of the coin to the “mob”, or images of the “surging masses” intent on rebellion. When out of the London fog a figure of the working class does emerge, in the shape of the cab-man taking Mrs Verloc’s mother away from the family home, we see a ‘bloated and sodden face … red eyes glistening with moisture. His big lips had a violent tint. They remained closed. With the dirty back of his whip-hand he rubbed the stubble sprouting from his enormous chin’ (Conrad, 1963/1907, p. 158). Thus the lower orders lurch between the infantile and monstrous, decency and threat, innocence and worldliness, and this becomes inscribed on the very body of the proletarian himself. This “abyss-mal” site, part of those dark corners of the earth navigated by the London cabbie ferrying his fare, is also a sight pushed to the margins of the narrative and the bourgeois consciousness. E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1956/1911) evokes the abyss too, and uses London as the symbolic space of modernity to do this. The narrative reveals the archetypal petty bourgeois, Leonard Bast, striving to occupy (and for Forster thereby “contaminate”) the affluent and cultured world of the aristocratic Schlegels. Forster is quite explicit about Bast’s social position and the novel’s thematic concerns, and so he tells us that ‘we are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. The story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend they are gentlefolk’ (Forster, 1956/1911, pp. 47–48). There may be a hint of irony here, though Forster is clear enough about the potential perils of class location: ‘The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more’ (Forster, 1956/1911, p. 58). To be counted no more meant being part of that quarter of the population living in poverty at the time. Forster’s earlier comment is useful for us in that it highlights the concept of representation, in both an aesthetic and political sense. His remark suggests that the poor be seen only as statistics (therefore reified) or, in the art of the poet, be figured as metaphors and thus vehicles through which to speak of other things, no doubt more spiritually rewarding. In the novel, then, Bast occupies the liminal space between “Them” and “Us;” the urban proletarian, or aspiring petty

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bourgeois, both present and absent in the narrative. What Forster calls ‘the odour of the abyss’ (Forster, 1956/1911, p. 124) is a constant threat; whilst his lament for a disappearing England – under the twin pressures of mass commercial culture and industrialisation – constitutes a quest for a symbolic reconciliation between the classes, enabling the liberal humanist value system which saturates the novel to survive. In a curious way the narrative’s trajectory inverts the very processes of modernity itself – modernisation conquers space through time, Forster’s narrative is compelled to reject time (history) through space. Thus Howards End becomes the timeless idyll, a kind of Eden before the Fall, where his liberal imagination can re-invent “old” England where troublesome class might be erased altogether from the plot, or at least tolerated in a liberal and paternalistic guise. Yet the urban sprawl provides the modernist with sites of unavoidable encounter with the Other. In this particular way of seeing, the urban becomes the modern wasteland. In T.S. Eliot’s Preludes (1916) it is as a degraded place characterised by the sour smells which camouflage stale sexual intimacies occurring in a ‘thousand furnished rooms’. This, then, is mere masquerade, an appalling pretence of what the truth of human existence is about. Peter Nicholls exposes this perspective in the representation of love between the lower orders in “The Fire Sermon”, found in The Waste Land (1922). There, Tiresias, though blind, is still forced to witness the sterile sexual exchange between the typist and the young man carbuncular. It is a mechanical, loveless encounter, one routine among the many others partaken of almost without thought in the course of every day life. The poem describes the young man, his ‘Exploring hands encounter no defence … And makes a welcome of indifference’ (Eliot, 1936, p. 241/243); and with the sexual act complete he slips, or rather ‘gropes’, away ‘finding the stairs unlit’ (III, 248). Thus, he heads off, appropriately, into the darkness of the ‘unreal city’, and the typist is left with her half-formed thought: ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’ (III, 252). Following on immediately from the line quoted above is the reference to Goldsmith’s lines – ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’ – accentuating the woman’s insignificance by, as Nicholls states, ‘equating eighteenth-century melancholy (which “sooths the heart instead of corroding it”) with the contemporary world’s more blatant reduction of passion to mechanism’ (Nicholls, 1995, p. 257). Nicholls argues, ‘even though Eliot has not described her, we know that the typist cannot be “lovely” and that she has no moral fineness to compromise; more importantly we “know” this because it is strongly implied that no typist would have these qualities in the first place’ (Nicholls, 1995, p. 257).

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Andreas Huyssen suggests that ‘the realities of modern life and the ominous expansion of mass culture throughout the social realm are always already inscribed into the articulations of aesthetic modernism. Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project’ (Huyssen, 1988, p. 47). Moreover the connotations of a debased mass culture as essentially feminine (thus doubly degraded) seem to be fully confirmed by Eliot’s encodings, suggesting the association of woman and mass culture and the identification of ‘woman with the masses as political threat’ (Huyssen, 1988, p. 50). This structure of feeling, evident in “high” modernist fiction produces a knowledge of the social (a way of seeing) inseparable from concerns of class, gender and of history itself.

Affluence and the aftermath The idea of a mass consumer culture reaches fruition in the post Second World War period in Western societies. This is a formative moment, historically, and in Self, Class, Culture, Skeggs’s analysis moves to cover this, showing how its legacies are played out in the contemporary, postmodern, moment, in which class as an analytical category, or definable structure of feeling, becomes rejected across a range of disciplines and domains. What Skeggs detects as emergent here is a whole series of discourses, within recent cultural, political, legal and sociological theory, which work explicitly to erase class from the agenda. I discussed this in the previous chapter in relation to developments in Cultural Studies around this period, and Skeggs takes it further. Class – particularly, we might say, the working class – becomes the absent presence. This constitutes what Raymond Williams would define as a newly emergent structure of feeling (Williams, 1977), though one not shorn, ironically enough, of its own class affiliations. For Skeggs, those theorising the end of class in the 1980s and 1990s, do so from their largely unspoken class locations as part of a metropolitan elite and here, to some significant extent, she echoes some of Charlesworth’s arguments. They do this by embracing and instituting a new and pervasive ideology of the individual, one predicated on the postmodern dispensation which sees the fragmentation of the social and thus of class (especially, working class) formations, and the rise of consumer society. Skeggs is rightly critical of this, and I will return to her argument here in a moment. Yet, as I have argued already, notions of the end of class have been a recurring feature in British social theory and cultural commentary for decades, its articulation often marked by periods of rapid economic,

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technological or political change. The ideology of a consumer society is premised on individual choice, even though the logic and rationale of such choice in practice has to be organised collectively, as a mass experience and structure of feeling. As I showed in the previous chapter, the period in Britain from the late 1950s and into the 1960s, witnessed a whole new stress on consumerism, mobility and individualism as a dominant structure of feeling heralding the “end” of the working class. The language, or rhetoric, of class took a significant new turn away from a focus on political contestation and economic inequality, and any sense of the working class as a political reality with the potential to transform society yielded instead to a stress on cultural and political consensus, which witnessed the very subjectivity of class subordinated to the mass-marketed sense of class as “style”, an identity fixed on co-ordinates provided by the cultural logic of consumption. Gary Day (2001) picks up on this point, too, correctly pointing out that, for instance, ‘the art of the 1950s and 1960s focused more on the working class than the middle class’, though this particular attention was ‘directed to working-class culture, thereby eclipsing its political and economic relations with the middle class’ (Day, 2001, p. 180). Studies began to take the working class as their object of concern, but in the context of decline or demise: an emergent narrative orientation documenting the waning of working-class community, deprecating the dubious pleasures of popular culture, or celebrating the rise of affluence. Richard Hoggart’s seminal text of the period, The Uses of Literacy (1957), somehow manages to do all three of these things at once. It is Hoggart’s contention there that the moral economy of pre-war workingclass culture, the solidarity and collective care of these communities, was becoming increasingly undermined by relative affluence and the mass culture of the ‘candy-floss world’ of the 1950s. Such an intervention, with its primary focus on working-class culture, worked to confirm both the existence and disappearance of class, as I suggested in Chapter 2. But more strictly sociological treatises pursued a similar thread. Mike Savage (2000), in a recent article surveying writing on class from the period, suggests that in such work we see a ‘critical turning point in the elaboration of the idea that individualized identities were gaining prominence and that these spelled the erosion of class loyalties’ (Savage, 2000, pp. 23–24). Major sociological work on class emerges, he argues, reflecting a fundamental change in the social, economic and cultural condition of Britain, and in this perspective traditional class identities couched in terms of solidarity, yield to an instrumentalist or individualistic ethos: an “I’m alright, Jack” structure of feeling. Embourgeoisment, or affluence, and

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political de-alignment become the dominant themes in sociological discussion around working-class identity. Hoggart’s take on working-class collectivism must be seen in this context, too. His work was couched in terms of the decline of working-class values and ways of living dominant in the inter-war years, prior to mass commercialisation and the development of what he bemoans as ‘the candy-floss world’. This became at the time a very powerful and influential argument. As we saw in the previous chapter, Raymond Williams countered a year later with the publication of Culture and Society (1958). Savage suggests that both these writers’ views on working-class culture (and the work of sociologists like Goldthorpe, in his famous study of the affluent worker, whom Savage identifies in this cluster) derive not necessarily from some objective analysis of the situation but from an underlying political project or perspective – so that in this scenario, the working class become mere containers for the political hopes of some on the Left nostalgic for revolution. Skeggs condones this point, suggesting that in this context class works not only to shape academic debate, but almost to frame an academic identity, whilst in turn fixing a particular image of working-class formations (Savage, 2000, p. 41). To support his argument Savage quotes Williams from Culture and Society (1958). There, Williams speaks of working-class culture as consisting of the ‘basic collectivist idea’, as we have seen, suggesting further that ‘working-class culture, in the stage through which it has been passing, is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual’ (Williams, 1958, p. 327). I have already discussed some of these points at some length, but they are worth reiterating in relation to Savage’s argument. What Williams sees as the basic collective idea – the dominant structure of feeling characteristic of working-class culture – is contrasted with middle-class individualism. In trying to counter notions of working-class individualism widespread at the time Williams was writing, Savage sees Williams turning towards its contrary – a position Savage regards as equally “mythical” as the newly emerging ethos of individualism. But Williams isn’t arguing here so much about the working class embodying these sentiments in some complete and uncomplicated form, but about how the institutions of the working class enshrine them. In his argument conflict exists through a clash of values at a number of social levels – and for Williams, the possibility of spreading the ‘collective idea’ throughout society is still a very real one, and the most likely route to establishing a participating democracy on a more egalitarian scale – what he calls a ‘common culture’. His formulations do

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not necessarily derive from an unspoken political interest or concealed agenda, using the working class as some kind of cipher for a radical critique or future utopianism, as Savage argues is the case with those cultural commentators turning to, or insisting upon, some workingclass collectivity as a sign for (a future) socialism. Williams’s views on working-class culture and identity derive essentially from his assessment of two factors: the altered post-War dispensation, through which ideas of classlessness were becoming a new common sense; and, more importantly, his own lived experience brought up in a rural working-class community, within certain, clear labourist traditions. So his stress on the importance of community and of crucial institutional frames – institutions that defend collectivist values – did not in the process necessarily demote the importance of individual identities. Indeed this is implied in Williams’s own assertion in Culture and Society, that ‘there is no such thing as masses, only ways of seeing people as masses’ (Williams, 1958, p. 333). Here Williams was interrogating the rhetoric of mass, as it had emerged in all its forms – indeed, evident in the sensibilities disclosed above, associated with modernist texts. He considered that it now represented, in terms of its social and cultural significance, a familiar elitist disdain for popular habits, and constituted a replacement word, or signifier, for the older word “mob”, and hence his challenge to the very tendency Savage accuses him of exhibiting. Williams makes a key point here, though his comparison demands scrutiny. The rhetoric of the mob – found in discussions of the “lower orders” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – had a much greater political resonance than Williams’s use ascribes to it in his formulation. The term signified the dominant class’s political anxieties in the face of a recalcitrant lower order often seeking socio-economic redress; as David Cannadine observes, eighteenth-century society was frequently encoded in dichotomous terms, so that perspectives emerged which acknowledged the possibility (and the reality) that ‘“the mob”, “the crowd”, or “the people” might take to the streets to protest against what were regarded as unacceptable abuses of power by those in authority’ (Cannadine, 2000, p. 49; see also Thompson, 1995). Conversely the term mass, or masses, often carries none of this strictly political freight, but instead was being developed and connected more definitively to the notion of passive, often docile, certainly anodyne, consumerism. Here stands a crucial difference in the way of figuring the working class, or lower orders, which, in turn, potentially extinguishes its political relevance. Some celebrated these movements as a sign of a new apolitical, classless dispensation and others mourned the loss of a particular, more traditional, working-class

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culture. Williams attempted to cut a path between both positions, fundamentally questioning the rhetoric of classlessness underlying both alternative views. In this same article Savage puts forward the notion of rugged individualism as a means of deconstructing the twin notions of individualism/ instrumentalism and collectivism/solidarity which he perceives as a false, yet pervasive, dualism within sociological and Cultural Studies discourse. This formulation, it must be said, is not an antidote or answer to the problem of a developing class consciousness in the working class, though it could be read as one. The complexity and contradictions inherent in working-class identity cannot be captured in a single concept. What is very interesting is the idea that workers used the notion of individuality and independence to articulate a sense of dignity, autonomy and pride and, in some cases, class awareness and association, something completely missed by theorists or proponents of individualism.8 Savage invokes an example of working-class fiction from the period to which he refers, namely Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and the novel’s main protagonist, factory worker Arthur Seaton. This was one of many novels of the time to explore in detail the altering conditions of working-class life: others included John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) and Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960). Each of these novels focused on the male working-class figure, newly affluent and on the make. Seen in this light, it might appear that these novels in fact confirm, even celebrate, the ideology of affluence, or individualism, just referred to. Savage’s example of Sillitoe’s fictional character, Arthur Seaton, is telling though. Arthur revels in his difference from others, and this is expressed both through his skill at the lathe and his sexual prowess in the bedroom. That this foregrounds Arthur’s individualism does not, however, cancel out any sense of a collective consciousness or structure of feeling. Nor does the focus on these individual characteristics deny the significance of the workplace and economic class relations. Arthur’s identity is articulated through the narrative’s ‘inner-voice discourse’ – encoded in Arthur’s “silent” ruminations – which signifies a class consciousness and perspective couched very much in the language of “us” and “them”. Thus the dualism Savage highlights collapses in the character of Arthur, and consciousness emerges as neither one thing or the other – neither collective identification nor self-centred individualism. Nor does the narrative subordinate the significance of work to pleasure – Hoggart’s “candy-floss world”. Arthur’s job at the lathe remains absolutely central to him – work is not denoted in some simple instrumentalist

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sense, but as a mode of identity, a means of livelihood and a way of living. This is encapsulated in a key moment from the text: Arthur reached his capstan lathe and took off his jacket. … He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a gentle thump. Looking around, it did not seem, despite the infernal noise of hurrying machinery, that anyone was working with particular speed. He smiled to himself and picked up a glittering steel cylinder from the top box of a pile beside him, and fixed it into the spindle. He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan, drew back the capstan, and swung back the turret onto its broadest drill. Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat onto both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap in front of the moveable brass pipe, pressed the button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror. (Sillitoe, 1958, pp. 25–26) Arthur takes pride in his work, if at times articulating an angry alienation from it. Even so, the image here of his limited control over the process of production is a complex and convincing one, leading one critic to suggest that ‘Arthur does not live in spite of his work, he lives through it’ (Hitchcock, 1989, p. 66). It is an image that gets beyond the easy stereotype of the “alienated worker”, or the consumer-oriented prole of much affluence rhetoric, and underlines, in a far richer way than some of the sociological or cultural commentaries of the time, how the workplace – as a necessity, but also a mode of identity-formation – powerfully shapes working-class lives. It could be argued that it is novels such as these which provide a greater insight into how the newly affluent post-War working class engage the dialectic of work/leisure, factory/ football pitch.

The return of the individual and the demise of class The return of mass unemployment to Britain in the 1980s destroyed much of the working-class culture on which some of the anxieties around working-class subjectivity were predicated. One response, as I argued earlier, was a wider probing of the significance of class: a more thoroughgoing questioning than hitherto seen, leading to a changing focus away from class towards new social movements. As a general shift towards postmodern frames of reference emerged, the material realities of class, embodied in the modes of work and association, and the

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subjective sense of class identity, expressed in the consciousness of class and attendant “structures of feeling”, came to be seen as belonging to a different, earlier period in socio-economic history. The rhetoric of classlessness embedded in the 1950s and 1960s, based around the notion of affluence, capitulates to a widespread rejection of the language of class as a way of understanding social experience and of formulating political strategy. The consolidation of a radical individualism as a hegemonic ideology characterized the rise of neo-liberalism, particularly in Britain and America, under the auspices of Thatcher and Reagan. From 1980 onwards, the New Right dominated the political terrain, articulating subjectivity definitively in terms of consumption rather than production, a deep shift designed in part as a way of eroding class consciousness or identification based on co-ordinates of work-based identity and community. Instead, a combination of de-industrialisation and Thatcherite neo-liberalist economics is seen as producing a consumer utopia where individuals might co-exist on some purported axis of equivalence. The old language of class has no purchase on this terrain. Thus it turns out that resistance will only be found on the margins, where the new social movements might come to constitute a counterhegemonic formation. But the ‘militant-particularisms’ of identity politics – the new social movements – allow scant space to class. These identities are seen as grounding themselves in cultural terms, and are themselves based on modes of exclusion and inclusion, so that some cultures can be seen as more “facilitating”, more “progressive”, than others. A renewed emphasis in the 1980s on questions of identity drew into sharp focus issues of nationality and of citizenship. Increasingly, an orientation towards identity politics established itself as the new “common sense” in political and social theory – Hall’s notion of ‘new ethnicities’, discussed in the previous chapter – with a stress on the need to extend entitlements beyond ‘economic, political and social rights … to the cultural, with the assumption that in some way we may speak of the cultural rights of citizenship’ (McGuigan, 1996, p. 138). The developing tendency to celebrate “difference” will have contradictory results though, when applied to understandings of class, and associated issues around economic and political inequality and exploitation (when these conditions are even taken into consideration at all).9 Thus in this later juncture called the postmodern, the whole issue of class gradually becomes, in the words of one commentator, the ‘forgotten identity of identity politics’ (Medhurst, 2000, p. 23). There was some attempt to counteract this in the work of women scholars from the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Carolyn

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Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) explored powerfully the interrelationship of class and gender. Other studies by Walkerdine (1991), Skeggs (1997) and Kuhn (1995) sought to place working-class subjectivity back on the academic agenda at the precise moment its very existence was once again being brought into question. Examining the rise of identity politics, Skeggs suggests that in arguments around cultural identity – and despite a general stress of relativism – not all cultures are regarded as equal. Indeed, some cultures just can’t cut it, are in key ways fundamentally regressive, and these cultures come increasingly to be coded as those aligned to the working class, or the residual working class (Skeggs, 2004, p. 138). Thus the stress on culture, on cultural identity, leads to forms of segregation and a kind of apartheid. In this context, Skeggs notes the interesting shift in recent times regarding the image of the male industrial worker to whom Savage was referring earlier. She contends that the fascination of sub-cultural theorists and cultural commentators in the 1960s and 1970s with the white working-class male has declined, though this fascination was always double-edged (Skeggs, 2004, p. 97). Out of this interest came an image of ‘the heroic hard physical worker, a repository of everything the middle class did and did not want to be, but also potentially racist, fascist, authoritarian, undisciplined and ignorant’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 98). We might add, in the current context of post-industrialisation in the West, this figure is now viewed simply as in the way, redundant, superfluous to requirements. Sally Munt argues, in this context, that with the wave of de-industrialisation ‘the working class have become feminised and, like the female body, working-class people have come to be discursively associated with “waste”, typified by the profligate spender and the feminised couch-potato’ (Munt, 2000, p. 8). Such stereotypes, she argues, not only damage the ascribed groups, but expose ‘the internalized disgust [it]evokes in the rhetorician’ (Munt, 2000, p. 9). Equally pervasive is what Skeggs defines as the new individualism, embraced across a range of academic disciplines and articulated in the wider field of popular culture. The ideology of individualism has become naturalised, linked to a sense of a newly formed social terrain marked by mobility. This ideology of mobility is found in the work of key sociologists like Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991) through ideas of reflexivity, which denotes the self-authoring of the subject free, the argument seems to suggest, from any wider structural constraints. This emerges from the two theorists’ belief in the decline of class identities in postmodern society. But performing a social identity requires the requisite resources which are unevenly distributed along

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lines of class, as well as race and gender. Not everyone has privileged access to the ‘new individuality’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 56), Skeggs insists. Partly these arguments turn on the notion of the ‘optimising individual’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 62) with the capacity to invest in him/herself and thus profit in the socio-economic marketplace which, in turn, suggests a neutral, level, terrain on which everyone has the opportunity to prosper. Using one’s economic and cultural assets in this way, one can be seen to avoid exploitation and in the process become a ‘subject of value’ for oneself (Skeggs, 2004, p. 71). But if we do not accept the idea of this level terrain on which such arguments must rest, then it becomes selfevident that the poor have no chance of becoming subjects of value because they remain deprived of ‘access to the resources required to produce themselves as such’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 71). And for Skeggs this means that the concept of exploitation – here broadened to signify the use of cultural power as well as economic – still holds good and structures the social in fundamental ways. Thus Paul DuGay’s notion of the ‘enterprising self’ (1992) suggests this very type of self-fashioning, yet only assumes, according to Skeggs, ‘a level playing field, in which access to assets are available to all’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 73). Moreover, it might be argued that this notion of the enterprising self – a rather fancy term for “getting on” – reworks a familiar notion from the seventies with regard to work, but without its critical aspect: Willis’s concept of ‘learning to labour’ (1977). In Skeggs’s view, this stress on the individual is seen as having intensified into a kind of compulsory individualism. Here class and class analysis belong to an essentialist mode of thinking inadequate for new times; an identity ascribed rather than acquired. But it is possible to read this position entirely in class terms. Located in the intellectual elite, these arguments, constituting important resources informing current identity politics and its rejection of class, nevertheless remain grounded materially in class interests. Such theories are articulated and disseminated by a professional, well-educated middle class – mostly intellectuals and academics, across both gender and ethnicity – in whose interests they are developed. They are ‘middle-class movements’ (Milner, 1999, p. 54), thus disinclined to contest the class-divided nature of a latecapitalist society in which they are handsomely rewarded. Such recognition and participation generally occurs through processes of market commodification and consumption, and so the ‘new individualism’ in large part is driven by a consumerist ethic. When we make ourselves, we make choices; self-fashioning is re-packaging or re-branding; value and investment in self implies marketable goods in exchange with varied

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equivalents. Skeggs suggests, correctly, that the theories of both Beck and Giddens do little more than ‘reproduce the consumer market rhetoric that not only promotes individualism as necessary, but also makes it a moral prerogative’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 57). Such approaches leave the working class – particularly those designated as the underclass – in a particular predicament, seen to be holding no assets at all, whether cultural, symbolic or economic. In this context, then, it is often the white working class who have ‘been used as symbols of a generalised “backwardness”, a constitutive limit, necessary to figure the middle classes as positioned at the “vanguard of the modern” and in a moral category referring to liberal, cosmopolitan, work and consumption-based lifestyles and values’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 150). The working class are back where they belong then – in and of the “abyss”. What are some of the ways this process occurs in our times? In a wide range of forms and discourses, representation is key. Making visual the working class for consumption has a long historical pedigree, as we have already shown. Today, television provides a wide window into the working-class world. Many of these programmes focus on notions of personality, or what Skeggs calls personhood. (Skeggs, 2004, pp. 120–121). This once again reflects a displacement of class, class issues and class categories into a concentration on personal relations and personality traits: personal relations that are in no way, for instance, tempered or determined or shaped by the imperatives of working lives – public selves are effectively and consistently subordinated to the private self of consumption and self-fashioning. What seems to dominate in many of these stories is the development and representation of the charismatic or aberrant or abject individual (or sometimes family). This tendency to individualise and pathologise class, if not quite in this way, has always been present, though. Through such processes – and we identified this earlier, in the narratives of nineteenth-century fiction – class is figured culturally and morally. But where working-class subjectivity is concerned, invariably it’s bad culture, in some sense lacking, and commentaries on this emerge in moralising and judgemental terms – evident in current drama, drama/documentary or reality TV. The rhetoric of social exclusion and, more specifically, the notion of the underclass, plays a key role. Underclass discourse can take in a range of groups – in reactionary guise these groups include long-term welfare recipients, single mothers and even certain ethnic groups. Underclass discourse is pernicious in the way it both denies and speaks class simultaneously. And this serves a purpose for the middle class. That purpose

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for Skeggs is to establish a distance – a kind of ‘spatial apartheid’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 180) – the necessary space through which middle-class value, virtue and worth is expressed in opposition to lower class indulgence and moral negligence.10 Skeggs insists on the importance of representations in all this. Entering the public imaginary, underclass discourses can be found in a range of forms: programmes such as “factual” documentaries on television, often utilising CCTV footage, ‘unleash a chain of signifiers in which an underclass is not only represented, but also shaped by disparate discourses of familiar disorder and dysfunction, dangerous masculinities and dependent, fecund and excessive femininities, of anti-social behaviour, and moral and ecological decay’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 87). Arguably, it is in this context that Zygmunt Bauman, in Work, Consumption and the New Poor (1998), can talk about a dynamic he labels adiaphorisation (Bauman, 1998, pp. 78–79). This concept implies a process through which the privileged lose any moral obligation or sense of responsibility towards the poor and deprived, thus ceasing to identify with them in any meaningful way, thereby helping to guarantee that such conditions persist. Segments of the working class become the Other, and the new enemy within: incapable of, or resistant to, work; amoral and excessive in their public and private behaviours; an unsightly sore on the anatomy of society. This structure of feeling is reinforced and disseminated in a range of ways – Skeggs has pointed to “factual” television and the recent phenomenon of “Chavs”, but we could also highlight, in a British context – and as I mentioned in my introduction – such television drama/comedies as The Royle Family and Shameless shown on the BBC 2 and Channel 4, respectively. It could easily be argued that both series show the working-class poor and unemployed (those generally labelled underclass) revelling in their conditions of existence, thus perpetuating them, and confirming in these very acts the prejudices of those who despise them in the first place. For adiaphorisation to exist for Bauman such spectacles need to be produced, as do the mobilisation of periodic “charity-fests”, which, Bauman suggests, have a particular function here (Bauman, 1998, p. 80). He sees these public displays as strategies in which the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie willingly engage, using them as a way of dealing with the remnants of moral impulse or obligation – residual feelings that threaten to seep in still. The power bloc thus effectively addresses those impulses in this way, securing hegemony. This represents another

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example of how class manifests itself through symbolic modes of exploitation – in this case moral, cultural and, in the end, as it reinforces relationships of inequality, economic.

Conclusion Where does this leave the working class – more particularly, where does it leave the politics of class? Slavoj Zizek (2004), discussing class in the United States, makes an important point and one relevant to this discussion. Examining the rise of Republican populism in the United States and the rejection by large sections of the working class of the liberal left and their espoused politics of multiculturalism, Zizek sees a contradiction between the political goals of feminists, anti-racists and other new social movements generally (largely supported by liberals and Democrats) and the objectives of class struggle, often defined by these same liberals as “old” politics, beyond the terms of an irreversible globalisation agenda and the much vaunted “modernisation” process. Zizek claims that ‘although feminism can be articulated with class struggle for emancipation of the lower classes … it can (and certainly does) function as an ideological tool of the upper middle classes used to assert their superiority over the supposedly patriarchal and intolerant lower classes’ (Zizek, 2004, p. 20). Moreover, he suggests that the essential aim of new social movements is to ‘translate antagonism into difference’, seeking ‘peaceful co-existence’ in the name of a cultural plurality. However, class struggle works with a different logic, he argues, which strives ‘to aggravate class differences into class antagonisms’ (Zizek, 2004, p. 20). Therefore, to ‘set up a series of equivalences between race, gender and class is to obscure the peculiar logic of class struggle, which aims at overcoming, subduing, even annihilating the other – if not its physical being, then at least its socio-political role and function’ (Zizek, 2004, p. 20). The upshot of this is that it becomes difficult for identity politics to accommodate class, which leads to its marginalisation. This de-recognition of class, and class struggle, has the effect of debilitating the working class, both in terms of the politics of cultural recognition and questions of political and economic justice – in truth, more salient to concerns of class than cultural questions, though it could be argued that the two cannot, or should not, indeed need not, be separated. It is in this contradiction – within the paradoxes of identity politics, or the politics of the selffashioning subject, or the prosthetic self – that the working class loses its voice; or, more damaging still, becomes a signifier to bolster the cultural prestige of other, more powerful, groupings: those who can shape their

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identity in opposition to the necessary and constituting Other, so that ‘the cultural fundamentalism and the abject agency attributed to the working-class in the UK, Europe and US … renders it “the enemy within”’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 180). There is a double bind looming here, too. How do working-class groups, whose exploitation now goes beyond the extraction of surplus value at the point of production (it always did, in fact) and filters into a range of other exploitative modes within the realm of culture and the cultural – the making of the middle-class self through constructing a downmarket Other – challenge this condition? Skeggs refers briefly in her analysis to working-class modes of resistance, but provides scant details of such practices in action. Indeed she suggests that contesting the rhetorical devices which negatively construct working-class subjectivity, which are pervasive as her account makes clear, will achieve little beyond confirming the process itself (Skeggs, 2004, p. 181). Indeed, this reflects a tendency within the book as a whole to depict the working class not so much as subjects, but as subjected – perennial prey to those middle-class strategies of representation and appropriation. Besides, the working class has little access to the institutional sites that reproduce these representations and practices in the first place, and in the economy of a discursive hierarchy shaped elsewhere, would be given very little legitimacy anyway – in terms of value – if its voice could be heard. It may well be that class struggle is fought through culture, but it may also be the case that it is a site on which the working class cannot effectively compete. I address this problematic in the next chapter. All the same, Skeggs ends by insisting on the need to ‘reinvigorate class analysis’ and to develop an understanding that goes beyond the economic to an awareness of the ‘consequences of cultural struggle’ and its implication in processes of ‘appropriation, exploitation and governance’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 186). Raymond Williams rightly asserted that there was ‘no getting beyond class politics’, and that the issues raised by new social movements would inevitably lead ‘into the central systems of the industrial-capitalist mode of production and … its system of classes’ (Williams, 1983, pp. 178–179). Indeed, it is the site of the economic where the working class is, or should be, most visible – at its strongest and most vulnerable, simultaneously. This accounts for the tendency within middle-class discourse on class, going as far back as the nineteenth century, to discount or displace or simply mystify economic relations, not to mention employing strategies to weaken and to attack workingclass institutions – those necessary institutional sites flagged up long ago by Williams in Culture and Society (1958): spaces through which

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working-class identities might be voiced and celebrated. This relates to the question of recognition and worth and it is an important one, and how such recognition might find channels of articulation more important still. Without creating, sustaining and strengthening such working-class institutions (trade unions, political parties, community groups, cultural forms), which empower working-class people as they go about their everyday lives, the hidden, and not so hidden, injuries of class will go on.

4 ‘Speaking for more than Itself’: Answerability and the Working-Class Text

Beverley Skeggs’s focus on the ‘symbolic’ construction of class – that is on the effects and implications of a range of discursive forms which articulate class subjectivities and in the process of so doing bring that subjectivity into being – provides us with key insights into understanding class relations. While we may want to insist on class as an objective relation to the means of production, this does not tell us the whole story about how class is lived in society. How class gets talked about, depicted and discussed – in short, represented – is also a central area of concern for those studying as well as living class, and it is the production of class through the ‘multiplicity of writing’ (Williams, 1977) in society that constitutes another important arena of class struggle or the site of the construction of class differences. Representations of working-class life come to us through a range of forms, particularly within the field of popular culture, and in this chapter I will concentrate on writing in particular as a site where working-class subjectivity is delineated. But here I will be concerned with examining working-class self-expression and some responses to it: in other words, I will be exploring cultural formations and institutions which help constitute working-class writing, examining key characteristics of such writing in terms of themes and form, and within the broader contexts of its production and consumption. In Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting (1997), Ian Haywood makes the argument ‘that the most productive context for enjoying and interpreting working-class fiction is within a labour movement and political tradition’, by which he means that long historic process which involves ‘the collective struggle for equal representation 103

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in the political, social and literary spheres’ (Haywood, 1997, p. 3). Haywood’s focus falls on British working-class writing, and primarily the novel, but his premise can be applied equally to other national contexts and formations.1 His reasoning is clear: the politics of class receive cultural expression in writing, and class factors have a real influence, then, on aesthetic strategies and choices and in turn the overriding thematic concerns of such work. As a result, working-class writers, historically, have appropriated – in specific cases transformed – the conventions of novel writing, in order to articulate the demands and experiences of working-class subjectivity and working-class life. Haywood believes that such writing discloses what he calls a ‘materialist aesthetic’, which constitutes a political critique of the inequities of capitalism itself.2 This tendency is a formative one and it echoes in the notion of answerability which I use in the title of this chapter. Answerability resembles Raymond Williams’s (1977) notion of alignment which, according to Zandy (2004), ‘allows us to penetrate some of the dynamics of relationships within working-class texts as they affect readers’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 86), so that, in Peter Hitchcock’s terms, answerability, as a constitutive feature of working-class writing, stands as ‘a form of social responsibility that allows workers to “speak” to one another across a range of discourses, discourses of memory, of experience, of alienation, of solidarity’ (in Zandy, 2004, p. 86). Though this tells us something about the nature of working-class writing, there are still other important questions to be clarified in terms of working-class cultural production. As Janet Zandy states: ‘[w]hile it is true that there is a long literary history of depictions of the working classes, it is also true that we cannot assume that representations of workers automatically constitute working-class writing’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 84). Characterising the working-class novel, or working-class writing more broadly conceived – that is, to take in working-class expression across a range of forms and genres – has always been a problematic exercise, raising a number of issues not only about working-class writing itself, but about writing generally: issues which can be only partly resolved here by asking a few pertinent questions. At a most straightforward level, do we name working-class writing as work produced specifically by the working class, is it material about the working class, or does it cover expression addressed to the working class, and what is at stake in highlighting these differences of emphasis? Clearly, there are forms within the realm of popular culture which openly address working-class audiences, and these would include television soap opera and (perhaps less exclusively) romance fiction, as well as some of the material discussed at the close of

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the previous chapter. Ostensibly, working-class experience is the stuff of soap opera and has been since the form’s inception. This might render the form a type of working-class writing, but then we would have to take into account the production process of soaps and ask whether this is writing by, or simply about, the working class. Soap opera production is the work of many hands, many of them belonging to middle-class professionals.3 Which raises the question as to whether it is possible to write “truthfully” about working-class experience if one is a middle-class person. The answer here is – with some qualifications – yes. Recall the earlier discussion of Gaskell’s classic nineteenth-century novel, Mary Barton (1848). Sympathy for the working class is prevalent throughout that novel, though there are limit points to which this sympathetic attachment will hold. The real issue we should tackle in this context is one of address. In other words, who is the implied reader? Considering literacy levels in mid-nineteenth-century England, not many working-class people could have read Gaskell had they desired to do so. Her readership would be the newly emergent middle class. This in turn inevitably shapes narrative orientation and raises questions about the social relations of reading and writing, and I will return to this later. So we can argue that a middle-class writer can acutely capture key aspects of working-class life – Marx, after all, spent a good deal of his time unveiling the underlying determinants of working-class existence: those things that ‘worked behind people’s backs’ – though it remains unlikely that he would have described himself as a working-class writer. So how might we identify the working-class writer – or how might they identify themselves.

What makes a text working class?4 It is possible to make the case that once the working-class novel gets published, the working-class writer is rendered “embourgeoised”. The act or process of publication – the accrued cultural and symbolic capital and perhaps even material reward – elevates the working-class writer into the middle-class world of letters, where she/he stands alongside the literati, perhaps being reviewed in the “serious” press and read by an audience, or public, culturally, materially (and probably ideologically) removed from the writer’s own base. One consequence of this might be the subtle appropriation of potentially radical utterances, in turn defusing them; the manoeuvring and pigeon-holing of contrary voices into an unruly ghetto within the broadly tolerant and understanding literary

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community who then marshal such work as appropriate to the wider field. The novel in question might find its way on to university reading lists: it may perhaps become a candidate for the Booker, or some such literary prize. It may even be in line to win it, and if such is the case this can lead to some revealing moments and a telling commentary concerning the literary establishment’s attitude to the working-class text. Such a moment came with James Kelman’s nomination for his 1994 novel, how late it was, how late. Shortlisted to win, it exposed among sections of the panel of judges and the cultural establishment less than tolerant liberal sympathies for the working-class novel and its concerns. One judge, the Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatened to walk out, regarding the novel as ‘unreadable’. Another critic, Simon Jenkins, went further in his protest. Using his own access to The Times – or, rather his cultural and symbolic capital – he despaired over the Booker judgement, raging at the ‘literary barrenness’ of the novel and at the act of ‘literary vandalism’ involved in handing the award to Kelman ( Jenkins, 1994, p. 20).5 What “law” precisely had Kelman’s writing infringed to so appal a representative of the cultural establishment and its institutions? Kelman’s subject is working-class life. He has stated that ‘the stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people. I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community’ (Kelman, 1992, p. 81). Above all, then, and to quote Williams from the title of this chapter, Kelman’s writing can be seen to be ‘speaking for more than itself’. And it is through language of class and community that Kelman challenges the class basis of literature, and its assumptions. From his first published novel, The Busconductor Hines (1984), through numerous short story collections, to his most recent novel, You have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), Kelman has been concerned to explore the lives of the urban (Scots) working class in their own words. how late it was, how late (1994) is no exception. The novel describes, mostly through interior monologue and stream of consciousness, the world from the standpoint of Sammy Samuels, who we might see as a “typical” Kelman proletarian protagonist. Sammy has endured periods of unemployment and stretches inside and is currently on the dole. After a beating from the police, Sammy ends up blind, and the narrative is then given over to an exploration of how he deals with his encounters with the medical profession, the police and other state bureaucracies, and with navigating the city itself – a city which is rendered an increasingly alien place to him. The working-class subject’s existential dilemma here – and this

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is a common Kelman theme – thus comes to symbolize a class position of dispossession and disinheritance in a city now refashioned, deindustrialised and made strange to those dwelling within, now anchored to the margins. This is figured early in the narrative in a telling encounter Sammy has with, possibly, tourists or, as Sammy imagines, likely foreign representatives of the business community with investment opportunities in mind. Maybe they were tourists, they might have been tourists; strangers to the city for some big fucking business event. And here they were courtesy of the town council promotions office being guided around by some beautiful female publicity officer with the smart tailored suit and scarlet lips with this wee quiet smile, seeing him there, but obliged not to hide things … it was probably part of the deal otherwise they werenay gony invest their hardwon fortunes. (Kelman, 1994, p. 4) Sammy is badly hung-over here, though not yet blind. But this encounter with the powerful begins Sammy’s journey into the Kafkaesque world of faceless bureaucracy and officialdom, where life hinges permanently somewhere between tragedy and farce and individual freedom is subordinated to the functioning apparatus of societal control. Thus the faces gazing at Sammy are transformed, in his imagination, to those of the ‘soldjers’ who will soon beat him up and leave him blind. This hegemonic image – the faces of “officialdom” – symbolises the terrain through which Sammy must navigate. The thoughts and experiences of Sammy are conveyed in the novel through a stream of consciousness technique in a typically modernist mode; of more significance, however, is Kelman’s craft of working the narrative so as to erode the gap between the voice of the narrator and that of his central character, so that no hierarchy of language is established which orders the value to be put on the characters’ language in relation to any other mode of speech or writing within the text. The text is designed visually to resist the moment of arrest in which the reader switches between the narrative voice of the text and the represented speech of a character, and what this does is to create a linguistic equality between speech and narration which allows the narrator to adopt the speech idioms of his characters, or the characters to think or speak in ‘Standard English’, with equal status. (Craig, 1999, p. 101)

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This is in part exactly what “arrests” Jenkins. What Jenkins objects to in his assessment of Kelman’s writing is not merely the character of Sammy – he describes the narrative as ‘the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk’ – but more precisely the very language Sammy/Kelman employs. He has a particular aversion to the word “fuck”, stating that ‘Mr Kelman is totally obsessed with the word. He sometimes writes it over and over again when he cannot think of anything else to fill a line’ ( Jenkins, 1994, p. 21). That Kelman did indeed go on to win the Booker that year, despite such resistance to his work, may indicate the open, liberal nature of such institutions, after all. But the tension so evident here about whether or not working-class voices should be heard in the literary field is plain to see and volubly aired in the pages of the newspaper. In that article on Kelman Jenkins slips into the idiom of class war to make his stand: ‘I too believe in the right to culture and language, which in my case is what he calls “colonial” Standard English. I believe something more. If it comes to war my English will win as long as Mr Kelman and the Booker judges are in the enemy camp’ (Jenkins, 1994, p. 22). The ‘illiterate savage’ of Jenkins’s imagination threatening the purity of English literature (and presumably the English language) is beyond the pale, as it were. Kelman – as a Scot – would no doubt find the language of colonialism (the reference to ‘savage’) intriguing here, particularly as it is bound up with class in significant and not uncommon ways. And whether the respectable pages of The Times would have accommodated such a critique of writing from other idioms or cultures – black or Asian cultures, for instance – is another pertinent question. But for Cairns Craig, such writing ‘stands alongside much of the writing in Britain by others using folk idiom as an assertion of separate cultural identity (West Indian writers in particular), and in utilising a modernised folk culture as their medium …’ (Craig, 1996, p. 200). And Kelman sums this up by highlighting the signifying potential of class idioms in particular, almost as a direct riposte to Jenkins, though not written as such: ‘where beauty in language is recognised as the property of a particular class, then naturally truth is assumed to be the property of that class also’ (Kelman, 1992, pp. 81–82). The conditions of hegemony are quite clearly formulated in this analysis, thus rendering Kelman’s own work as counter-hegemonic in the strictest sense. For Kelman, then, being a writer and being working class sits easily; it does not comprise upward mobility, or embourgeoisment, or abandonment of roots or affiliations. Nor does it involve some kind of compromise – an act of self-censorship through compliance with an established set of norms which mark out what constitutes the “literary”.

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It means, instead, a commitment, a complex solidarity – both to the craft and to the subject matter out of which such a craft emerges and to which it is then conferred. Raymond Williams terms this as ‘alignment’. As Zandy states, referencing Williams, ‘recognition of these alignments, located as they are in a matrix of social relationships, creates (rather than thwarts) artistic openings’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 85). And she quotes Williams again, who argues that such alignment can liberate writing, to produce ‘the sound of that voice, which in speaking as itself, is speaking, necessarily, for more than itself’ (in Zandy, 2004, p. 85). Here, specific structures of feeling might be identified, ones which revolve around the notion of class, community, solidarity. This seems to be precisely Kelman’s position, so that the condemnation of Neuberger and Jenkins of his work constitutes not merely a judgement on Kelman, but an attitude towards a particular class formation and identity, too. This clearly has some connection to Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and the reproduction of class. There is also a powerful connection with the argument Bourdieu makes of the legitimating (or de-legitimating) role of the critic (or set of critics) who render some writing literature, providing it with the appropriate aura (usually to enable the writer to sell) denied to others, who are thus then never to enter the magical realm of letters so as to attain the required symbolic capital of the literary or artistic field (see Fowler, 1997). What both critics of Kelman aspire to do is de-value – in a quite strict sense, render worthless – the working-class writer’s capacity and right to speak for and with the community from which he or she originates and, in Kelman’s case, still belongs. This leads us on to other considerations beyond that of the writer’s potential upward mobility or elevation into some spurious literary elite and this is something Kelman’s work addresses, too, within its very form. The dominant aesthetic ideology of what has developed essentially as a middle-class art form lies in its stress on individualism, and this is embodied in the genre of the realist novel. Thus the predominant emphasis in bourgeois writing on the individual consciousness could be regarded as being of little use for expressing, or articulating, the collectivity of class, so that taking on the conventions of the bourgeois novel precludes class expression by individualising experience, thus silencing the imperatives of class. Yet, this dilemma has been faced up to and worked upon by working-class writers throughout literary history with varying degrees of success and failure. From the nineteenth-century Chartist scribes to Robert Tressell at the turn of the twentieth century, to Walter Greenwood and Lewis Grassic Gibbon in the 1930s; on to the more recent work of Alan Sillitoe, Pat Barker and James Kelman himself,

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working-class writers have taken the conventions of the novel (usually the realist novel, it must be said) and transformed them through a preoccupation with what Haywood terms a ‘materialist aesthetic’.6 One obvious strategy involved here is the placing of ‘the working-class hero at the centre of the story’, though the character is bound inextricably to a wider community and solidarity. A further and perhaps more significant tendency is to open up ‘realism to social and political analysis, using the story to mobilise the reader’ (Haywood, 1997, p. 9), a mode which echoes the more pedagogic strictures of Brechtian epic theatre. Writing becomes a socially symbolic act, in this context, and Williams’s notion of structure of feeling helps us understand writing’s entanglement with historical change and also flags up the significance of intention in the writing process itself. Writers seek forms through which to articulate the vital, and lived, experiences or attitudes of a group or of a society in a particular historical period, defining a particular quality of social experience. Perhaps these strategies and concerns then help us to identify the (“genuine”) working-class writer. Raymond Williams’s observation that literature, or writing, constitutes a dynamic social practice, one that intervenes in history as well as reflecting it, echoes the notion of a ‘materialist aesthetic’, though Williams was not referring specifically to just working-class writing here. Yet this notion rests on the idea of intervention, where subaltern voices work at the margins of cultural production, representing counter-hegemonic practices which nevertheless will remain vulnerable to incorporation, assimilation or disregard. However, their purpose is to redress an imbalance and falsity of cultural representations; challenge received ideas and stereotyped images. On this point, Kelman argues that traditionally ‘the working class in English Literature … were confined to the margins, kept in their place. … You only ever saw them or heard them. You never got into their mind. You did find them in the narrative but from without, seldom from within’ (Kelman, 1992, p. 81). He contends that it is not necessarily the absence of the working-class character from fiction that counts; the workingclass figures emerge but in a range of forms which deny their full humanity. Indeed, as I have suggested, representations of working-class life abound within mainstream literature and popular culture generally, but they need to be viewed, as Kelman argues, warily. According to Williams, the set of conventions that organise dominant narratives and influence ways of seeing might entail that all other persons may be conventionally presented as instrumental (servants, drivers, waiters), as merely environmental (other people in

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the street), or indeed as essentially absent (not seen, not relevant). Any such presentation depends on the acceptance of its convention, but it is always more than a ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’ decision. (Williams, 1977, p. 175) These assumptions have a social and broadly political dimension which is often decisive. Contemporary writers like Kelman attempt to contest the perceived inadequacy and the ideological status of such dominant representations, and in so doing contest the forms and conventions that place class within a particular regime of representation (the heroic proletariat, the assimilated and conciliated worker, the “mind-less” prole) derived from a range of discursive contexts and positions. So, writing from the margins, then, means that working class literature is not only a grouping of novels, poems, plays, autobiographies, et cetera, that can be catalogued, commodified and ultimately fetishised as one more literary canon; it is also a name we can give to a literary/social/critical practice that is informed by a consciousness of the social and historical importance of class antagonisms. (Syson, 1993, p. 89) Syson’s quote once more underlines what might be at stake in articulating working-class experience in literature. While it is perfectly true that the classic realist novels – the work, for instance, of Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot in the nineteenth century – explored in considerable detail issues of class conflict and difference, more often than not the modes of representation and thematic emphases explored and employed by these writers to establish narrative resolutions in the end denied the existence of class, or at the very least its importance. In their own way, then, the nineteenthcentury novels were fulfilling a broadly political function, producing ideological resolutions for a middle class negotiating anxieties more often than not bound up with wider class relations. This is something argued in the previous chapter, and needs no more discussion here. But when Syson reflects that a key element of the critical practice of workingclass writing is awareness of the ‘historical importance of class antagonisms’, such an observation could be applied also to the cultural production of middle-class writers and intellectuals, even though that awareness is based on an attempted denial of its formative influence.

Dialogics and the politics of language How such antagonisms become articulated in narrative is the crucial issue here, involving questions of form and content. We have already

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touched on these issues in relation to the importance of ‘voice’ in Kelman’s use of language to foreground class concerns and structures of feeling. Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volosinov’s work, as Peter Hitchcock has made clear (1989, 1991), can be illuminating on this topic. For the two writers, the dialogic structures of communication foreground dispute by disclosing a view of language as the site of class antagonism and difference. Peter Hitchcock suggests, in The Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993), that one of the achievements of Bakhtin’s and Volosinov’s ideas on language and literature is to make ‘the utterance and “utterance context” the focus of translinguistics and thereby return history to the centre of analysis of linguistic systems’ (Hitchcock, 1993, p. 3). Here we have a dialectics of the utterance: linguistic conflict as the product of social relations and social interaction changing over time and in space. Dialogics celebrates speech diversity, relating this to the social formation and the concept of heteroglossia, which represents the competing of different socio-ideological groups within a given historical-cultural context, and this is inevitably bound up with power and status. Volosinov argued that ‘each social group/class stands in a different relation to the abstract system of speech community in which it finds itself’, but it is how the sign is accentuated which counts. Hence, ‘the ruling class strives to lend the ideological sign a supraclass, external character, to extinguish or exhaust the struggle of class relations that obtains within it, to make it the expression of only one, solid and immutable view’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 80); whereas Bakhtin (1981, 1984) formulates a dialogic encounter between high/low forms of language – a social dialectics of contention and negotiation characterising communicative interaction. Here, the evolution of linguistic and cultural forms is tied to changes in social relations and structures of feeling (see Dentith, 1995, p. 39, for further discussion). This is a key insight. It links us to the changing conceptions, conceptualisations and articulations of class narratives over time. Historical forces are understood here to be formative in acting upon discourse and culture, events being shaped by and shaping social experience and consciousness in turn. The importance of social relations in this understanding relates to the essentially dialogic nature of communicative action as it is embedded in cultural formations and wider social contexts. This does not constitute some open-ended, pluralistic state of affairs as suggested by various commentators on dialogics, but an interactional space wherein the utterance is marked by social position and location and this can be measured in often conflictual or contradictory terms. People’s awareness of class – meaning, that is, the effects of class – operates at a range of levels, particularly at the level termed by

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Williams as practical consciousness (1977). And practical consciousness – discursive through and through – is explicable, too, through Volosinov’s account of inner speech. This is discussed at much greater length in Chapter 5, but it is enough to say here that inner speech is not viewed purely psychologistically as the operation of an individualised unconscious, but articulated dialogically within the orbit of other voices saturating the social relations of a given society and culture. Using these conceptions, we can then speak of the articulation of class subjectivities through language, and how conflictual world-views intersect in the sign. Thus dialogism is not simply pluralism, for as Hitchcock (1993) points out the sign ‘constitutes a struggle over semiotic and social authority’ (Hitchcock, 1993, p. 5), and this insight enables us to understand what is at stake in Jenkins’s intervention against Kelman’s novel and his work more generally. There is a constitutive antagonism embedded in the concept of dialogism, as speakers do not occupy places on some notional axis of equivalence. Therefore Hitchcock (1993) can state that ‘the utterance is riddled with the consciousness and political unconscious of the speaker, the social overdetermination therein, expected or misperceived audience response … the immediate social context in which the utterance is (re)produced’ (Hitchcock, 1993, p. 7). Thus language, intention and ideology are inextricable in such conceptions. Intention is not only some individual act of speaking or creating because it always embodies a directed-ness towards objects and addressees (and an assumed response from them), yet always in a linguistic environment occupied by the intentions of others. A unifying and centralising language will naturalise meaning in the act of hegemonic appropriation or definition, and Bakhtin and Volosinov see languages and discourses as the property of certain groups and classes. This is why language is material and political to its core: both constituting and constitutive. In this process language can be seen as essential in both constructing and re-presenting the social world. Thus utterance and context are crucial. Opposed pressures keep language mobile and can transform it. This is the struggle for hegemony in the verbal-ideological world, where Hitchcock’s ‘oppressed’ necessarily engage with forces intent on silencing and mis-representing subordinate or dissident voices. Thus the multiaccentuality of the sign, embodying meaning and thus value, underlines its ideological form as it becomes embrocated in the arena of class struggle. As Hitchcock insists, ‘dialogics does not make for harmony, according to Bakhtin, but for dissonance [and] to track the sociality of language is to analyse social struggle’ (Hitchcock, 1993, p. 5). Refracting the social through the sign constitutes

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‘a mediation of social conflict at any one moment in history’ (Hitchcock, 1993, p. 5). Social conflict, or in Syson’s terms, class antagonism, shapes workingclass writing not only through a particular thematic emphasis within the story, concerns which might be seen to motivate plot and constitute character action, but will lie, at a deeper level, within the formal structures of the texts themselves: this is a condition of ideological struggle which is bound up with the dialogics of the word. Such social conflict, characteristic of class societies, is not, nevertheless, invariable in its intensity and scope. Indeed the condition of hegemony, as discussed in Chapter 2, ensures that class conflict is always mediated by ideological interventions (and, when circumstances dictate, something more forceful). Yet there are particular historical contexts crucial to an understanding of cultural production – whether identified as bourgeois or working class – contexts which bring the subject of class (so often suppressed in “mainstream” literary production) from the margins to the centre. These can be moments of pronounced class struggle when, as Zandy puts it, writers ‘take sides’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 92). I have discussed this at greater length elsewhere (Kirk, 2003), and will draw out here too some further implications for understanding working-class writing and representation in this context. There are obvious and well-documented moments in British social history during which social antagonism seemed writ large. In the twentieth century, the 1926 General Strike represents one of those moments, not that this rupture produced a vast amount of workingclass writing at the time. A more prolonged period of societal conflict and crisis is that of the 1930s. Though perhaps never a moment of crisis in the sense we can ascribe to the General Strike, it was nonetheless a historical juncture in which conflicting political positions came to the fore, symbolically constituting a sense of class struggle and antagonism if not inaugurating it in any radically concrete form. Yet during this period, and because of the enduring economic crisis, much of the iconography of class – whether in fiction, ethnography or political discourse – came to be inscribed in antagonistic or dichotomous terms. The period witnessed a renewed interest in working-class life, exemplified in the preoccupations of projects like Mass Observation, and the rise of “documentarism” in the work of John Grierson, Tom Harrison and Humphrey Jennings, focused intensely on the lives of working people – middle-class cultural production clearly aligned with and sympathetic to working-class concerns. Alongside this saw the emergence of more specifically proletarian, or working-class, writing in the work of Walter

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Greenwood, John Sommerfield, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Ellen Wilkinson among others. According to one critic, ‘the Depression was at once the fuse that fired and the cement that bound these writers together. The spectre of unemployment and industrial conflict haunts the pages of their work; it lurks behind all the recurrent images of poverty, the fruitless search for work, life on the dole, the Means Test, the hunger marches, the strike’ (Lopez-Ortega, 1982, p. 122).7 But beyond this, too, the writing can quite clearly be regarded as interventionist. The significance of much of this work lies in the positioning of the working class as the subjects rather than the objects of history, often seen as a collective force – and this reflects Haywood’s view on some central features of the working-class text (see also, Zandy, 2004, pp. 90–92). That accounted for, there remains, nevertheless, a number of subject positions for the working-class reader to occupy in these narratives, and these range from the radical to the conservative, which can be seen to conflict with or conform to the dominant ideologies – or, in Williams’s terms, the ‘official consciousness’ (Williams, 1977, p. 145) – of a period. Hitchcock makes a similar point: reiterating our earlier discussion of Bakhtin and Volosinov, Hitchcock identifies what he calls ‘governing characteristics’ shaping working-class expression. ‘The first and most important of these is the language employed … Here working-class subjectivity is conveyed in language appropriate to that world view’; yet, he goes on to add, this does not imply a homogenous perspective. It is that a ‘heterogeneity of working-class concerns [and ideological positions, to be more precise] and ways of expressing them are given voice across a range of cultural producers’ (Hitchcock, 1989, p. 33). This is by no means an anomaly, or in any sense incongruous: working-class identity both adapts to and diverges from what might be understood as established understanding of class and of the social more broadly conceived, so that working-class experience is inevitably bound up within a wider ideological framework which strives to render it “knowable”, transparent and, more often than not, contained. So while the central thematics of working-class writing will often be constants – or variations within a theme – across a range of writing and historical periods, and the level of articulation in terms of the language of class will invariably refract (in Bakhtinian terms) lived experience, “solutions” to the problematics explored in the text may vary in kind. What appears at certain historical moments of radical change or crisis, where new work emerges linked to movements or formations, relates to Williams’s concept of structure of feeling. The 1930’s proletarian fiction provides insights into some of these arguments.

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Working-class writing in the 1930s Much has been written about this formation in recent times (Fox, 1994; Fordham, 2001; Klaus and Knight, 2000; Kirk, 2003). While I do not want to examine the writing in detail here, it is worth noting an aspect of this cultural production often overlooked, certainly in earlier assessments of the work, and that is its formal range and multiplicity.8 Yet, previous criticism, going back to George Orwell, in fact, responded negatively to much of this work. Orwell made a number of assertions about ‘proletarian literature’. Initially, two comments are of interest: ‘Proletarian literature is mainly a literature of revolt. It can’t help being so’; and, ‘So long as the bourgeoisie are the dominant class, literature must be bourgeois’ (Orwell, 1970, p. 52). In this 1940 radio interview, Orwell slides between admiration for the new perspective which proletarian writing had added to prose literature, and a sense that this new “voice” is limited in its final effect. Despite the belief in the 1930s that bourgeois culture was in decline, the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie still shepherds the working-class writer to the margins: ‘He is simply the black sheep of the bourgeois family’ (Orwell, 1970, p. 58). Moreover, Orwell believes that English society is becoming classless, and therefore the workingclass writer will have nothing more to write about. Proletarian literature’s oppositional role is seen favourably, but is a passing and brief phenomenon in a society about to shed the concerns of class. Nevertheless, he suggests that the overall effect of proletarian literature had been healthy and democratic. He applauds the ‘vitalising effect of getting working-class experience and working-class values on paper’ (Orwell, 1970, p. 58), and he picks out Lionel Brittan’s Hunger and Love (1931) as an ‘outstanding book … representative of proletarian literature. It is about a young proletarian who wishes he wasn’t a young proletarian. It simply goes on and on about the intolerable conditions of workingclass life, the fact that the roof leaks and the sink smells and all the rest of it’ (Orwell, 1970, p. 58). According to Orwell, this naturalism with its solidly proletarian content typifies the themes and concerns of all proletarian or working-class writing. I think they [proletarian writers] have made two kinds of contribution. One is that they to some extent provided new subject matter, which has also led other writers who are not of the working class to look at things which were under their noses, but not noticed before. The other is that they have introduced a note of what you might call crudeness and vitality. They have been a sort of voice in the gallery preventing people from becoming too toney and too civilised. (Orwell, 1970, p. 60)

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Thus proletarian writing can be seen as a device for keeping in check those overblown pinko-poets Orwell disliked so much, those ‘nancy-boys of the left’. If we skip a few generations, Samuel Hynes in his The Auden Generation (1976) asserts that ‘to write about the literary existence of a generation is to accept a necessary restriction of subject: you will be writing almost entirely about the middle class members of a generation … virtually no writing of literary importance came out of the working class during this decade’ (Hynes, 1976, p. 34). Again questions of value predominate: for Orwell, the value of working-class writing derives from its usefulness as “sociology”, or “ethnography”. For Hynes even this is dismissed. Roy Johnson’s “The Proletarian Novel” (1975), is more concerned with aesthetics in his assessment. Johnson is resolutely critical of most workingclass writing of the 1930s. With the exception of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, he laments the ‘over-naturalistic accounts of life in the mining communities’ ( Johnson, 1975, p. 72), picking out Walter Brierley’s Means Test Man (1935) for particular criticism. Johnson is content to mobilise some ahistorical notion of aesthetics – not dissimilar in sentiment to Lukacs’s rejection of the modernist aesthetic – a quality of exposition which the working-class writer cannot fulfil. In other words, he is objecting to Haywood’s defining characteristic of the working-class novel – the materialist aesthetic. So while both Orwell and Johnson narrow the range and scope of working-class writing from the period in terms of form and thematic content, Samuel Hynes seemingly writes it off altogether. His argument here mirrors the one made by F.R. Leavis around the same time Orwell was writing. In an article written for Scrutiny in June 1940, surveying the literary scene of the previous 10 years, Leavis concluded that it had been ‘a very barren decade’ (Leavis, 1940, p. 71). The thirties had failed to produce anything to match the genius of T.S. Eliot or Lawrence, instead bequeathing a literature marred by ‘political distraction’, which proved ‘very bad for creative work’ (Leavis, 1940, p. 71). The article evinces a familiar and insistent division between politics and art. The judgement, of course, is in part a literary one, although why a novel cannot be both creative and political is something left unexplained. Leavis’s remarks concerning the literature of the 1930s, and its barely coded reference to what are important aspects of some working-class writing of the period, reveals a set of assumptions about writing itself. While it was certainly not the case that every published work by a working-class writer represented a classic, such judgements outlined earlier still echo – as Jenkins’s response to Kelman indicates – in debates about working-class fiction. Working-class novelists at the time could

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find influence from a range of sources: clearly, mining novels signalled the influence of Lawrence, with a strong naturalistic emphasis referencing Zola’s Germinal in particular. More “classic realist” prose harks back to the nineteenth-century industrial novels of Gaskell and Dickens; while such writing as Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) reworked and politicised the romance novel (see Haywood, 1999). And in the fiction of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Hanley, as John Fordham has indicated (2001), the modernist influence is clearly in evidence and is reworked to signify working-class experience in crucial ways.9 To illuminate some of the issues at stake here, it might be appropriate to examine briefly some key problematics of the working-class text from this period. I will look at the writing of Lewis Jones and Walter Greenwood. The purpose here is not to provide extensive analysis of what are well-known working-class texts (at least within the forums concerned with these things), but to foreground central thematic and stylistic features as well as consider the wider conditions of production of such work. Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) relate a workingclass history spanning some four decades up to the Spanish Civil War of 1938. In the foreword to Cwmardy, Jones tells us that ‘All the events described, though not placed in chronological order, have occurred, and each of them marks a milestone in the lives and struggles of the South Wales miners’. Jones’s documentary realism is concerned with the realities of class, and with political struggle, though he is not content to simply record “things as they really are”. As Graham Holderness has shown, the work strives to present ‘a powerful image of a possible future society, rather than an accurate record of a society that was’ (Holderness, 1984, p. 29). In further introductory remarks to the novel, Jones insists on the collective nature of the writing project: The work is really collective, in the sense that my fellow workers had to fight the battles I try to picture, and also in the sense that I have shamefully exploited many comrades for incidents, anecdotes, typing, correcting and the multifarious details connected with writing. We found many difficulties confronting us, not the least of which was the fact that, book or no book, the mass struggle must go on and all of us have to play our part. The novel, then, was written ‘during odd moments, stolen from mass meetings, committees, demonstrations, marches and other activities’. Thus it emerges organically from the everyday events of a mining

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community, attempting, in a very direct sense, to ‘speak for more than itself’. Jones denies a single authorship, instead insisting on the multiplicity of voices which constitute the work – a considerable divergence from the image of the writer as individual genius, master or mistress of their own creation. Jones’s strategy in both novels is to present the community’s struggle against outside forces, and in the process map a kind of history from below. This is a conflict of representation and, more pertinently, a conflict of language, too. So, for instance, in We Live (1939), the enquiry held following a pit disaster presents the miner Big Jim in contest with the English lawyer whose evasive rhetoric is designed to trap Jim into pinning the blame for the explosion on a work-mate. ‘If you don’t think the lamp was responsible for the explosion, can you, as a practical man and experienced miner, advance any theory as to the probable cause?’ A puzzled frown puckered Jim’s forehead. He shook his head slowly, then asked, ‘Scuse me, ‘on’t you? But will you please tell me what you do mean by the last part of your words? You see,’ he added, apologetically’ I be not much of an English-speaking man and some of your words do come strange to my ears.’ ( Jones, 1939, p. 104) Contempt for the English upper-classes signifies an identity in opposition defined by both region and class, and this characterises both of these novels. The privileged language of officialdom is rejected by the voice of the people and Big Jim represents a plain proletarian sense of decency and basic democracy, articulated in a distinctive idiolect that symbolises community itself. The Other’s voice is ‘strange to my ears’, both intelligible and discrepant at the same time, and in this way Big Jim’s address contests the authority embodied in this representative of the ruling class, denoting his solidarity with fellow workers. The “body” of the miner, as represented by Jones, is a dialectical image which articulates both the dignity of labour and the deep marks of capitalist exploitation. And it bears an interesting contrast with Orwell’s “monumentalised” figures in The Road to Wigan Pier (1988/1937), something discussed in Chapter 1. In Cwmardy, Len, the central character and young militant, reacts angrily to Big Jim’s physical decline: Look at yourself. You have been working in the pit for over thirty years … Yet where are you now? The body you are so proud of is breaking up before our eyes … Cattle are not treated like us. (Jones, 1937, p. 130)

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Later we hear that ‘excessive work [was] beginning to take its toll of [Big Jim’s] strength’ (Jones, 1937, p. 61). Finally we see the destroyed bodies following a pit explosion: ‘The sole human occupant was gently lifted out … others removed the misshapen, brattice-covered lumps dumped in the bottom of the bucket like red cement’ (Jones, 1937, p. 84). George Orwell’s vision of “noble” and stoical labour is effectively demystified here within what Haywood has called a materialist aesthetic, as Jones records the terrible dangers the miners faced. Fifty die in one accident, all unnecessarily. Jones’s strategy for depicting working-class life in his novels and for providing “solutions” to the problems explored, is to construct not an individual hero and trace his/her trajectory through the story – the bourgeois subject of “classic realism”, say – but to foreground agency as both individual and collective expression, and this is symbolised through the political awakening of the mining community and their struggle for life through resistance to exploitation. And this is achieved, as Hitchcock insists above, through the significance of the language employed, so that ‘here working-class subjectivity is conveyed in language appropriate to that world view’ (Hitchcock, 1989, p. 33), so that the utterance itself inscribes the social relations of which it is a part. Language is a key feature in the following extract from Love on the Dole (1987/1933). Zandy also sees this tendency as typifying working-class writing, with the inclusion of ‘idioms, dialects, syntax’ which denote the ‘tones of working-class speech’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 90). A central thematic concern dominates, too; one so often absent in bourgeois fiction, and that is the centrality of work. Walter Greenwood’s “depression novel” set in Salford, Manchester, tells the story of young Harry Hardcastle’s search for work during a period of economic slump. Greenwood seeks to explore the existential misery which poverty breeds, revealing the withering of hope produced by conditions seemingly beyond people’s control. These themes and conditions would pre-occupy much working-class writing and representation of this period. In the closed environment of Hanky Park (the novel’s setting) work is an absent presence – it exploits the men when the economic cycle is good, and abandons them completely when it takes a downturn. Yet for Harry, graduating to the status of manhood, entering the factory is all he could ever hope for. Ted grunted: ‘Washer name?’ ‘Harry Hardcastle, sir.’

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‘Six o’clock t’morrer mornin’ … . Machine shop, think on’. He cocked a glance at Harry’s clothes: ‘An’ see y’ come in a pair of overalls. This ain’t bloody school.’ Harry blushed: ‘Yes, sir,’ he mumbled, meekly. ‘All right. Muck off … . Don’t hang around here. Hey! Here, tek these here papers. Get y’r owld man t’ fill ‘em up. An’ y’ bloody clockin’-on number’s’, glancing at the chart: ‘2510. Clock number fourteen. Clock on o’ the mornin’ an’ clock off o’ the night.’ Confused with excitement, Harry made himself scarce. What luck! He really was engaged. And in so short a space of time! What would the boys have to say to this? He gazed at the papers in his hand. There was the magic word ‘indentures!’ And they’d given him a number, 2510. There was the hallmark of his engagement. Better make a note of it. He wrote it on a corner of the indenture. He went outside the gates thrilled, spirits soaring, paused and turned to survey the great place, enthralled as a child in a Christmas toy shop. A hissing plume of steam vapour from the side of one of the tall chimneys; from the great works came a rumbling and a confused muffled banging; air throbbed. A new day’s toil had begun. (Greenwood, 1987, p. 35) Love on the Dole can be identified more clearly as a kind of bildungsroman, and Harry, the central character, has to make the transition from his youthful innocence to manhood through harsh experience.10 In contrast to Jones’s work – or the modernism of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Hanley – Greenwood’s writing sits more securely in the nineteenthcentury tradition: particularly the social conscience novels of writers like Elizabeth Gaskell. For all that, there is a critique of these modes and their ideological address. Increasingly for Harry, his ability to achieve his identity as a working-class man is shown to be radically unstable, and the narrative irony in the above passage – he is only a number, after all: 2510, clock number fourteen – underlines this. He is dispensable: thus, a combination of economic crisis, and the company’s practice of laying off young workers as soon as they complete their apprenticeship and demand higher wages, will soon leave him condemned to joblessness and the Means Test. Maintaining his dignity and self-respect in the face of this forms the core of the novel and constitutes a powerful critique both of the system itself and of the ideology of bourgeois individualism, which chooses to “forget” the powerful determining factors of the economic in shaping subaltern structures of feeling.

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This very brief discussion touches on aspects of both form and content, and it would be possible to explore other novels from this period which articulate similar thematic concerns and employ analogous formal strategies which highlight the centrality of language in constituting working-class identity.11 Yet as much as the actual production and consumption of this work requires examination, of equal importance is the question of distribution – indeed, these notions can be thought through more effectively by examining Raymond Williams’s discussion of cultural formations, and his attendant concerns with the role of institutions and traditions. The emergence of new writing in any single period, Williams argues, can be linked to the rise of cultural formations, which constitute a complex set of responses to wider socio-historic conditions. By formations, Williams means ‘those effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual and artistic life, which have significant and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture’ (Williams, 1977, p. 117). In this context two other key words from Williams’s theoretical framework are of significance in assessing literary production: these are the place of institutions and the role of tradition. Williams remarks that the hegemonic or dominant culture ‘is always an active process’, which organises and places often diverse (alternative or oppositional) meanings within an incorporative relationship to itself, and this comment corresponds to Williams’s understanding, and restating, of the notion of tradition. Traditions are not natural, organic entities, but constructs. In this light, ‘tradition is … always more than an inert historicised segment: indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What we have to see is … a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’ (Williams, 1977, p. 115). Establishing traditions is an institutional process, the past and its artefacts made and remade in and for the present. One example, relevant to this discussion, is the formation of the canon of English Literature, under the guidance of F.R. Leavis and the Scrunity group, leading to the hegemony of Cambridge English, and the privileging of a set of texts representing The Great Tradition. But as Williams argues, the making of tradition, which then is made to stand as representative of a culture both past and present, entails drastic selection, so that, ‘theoretically a period is recorded; in practice, this record is absorbed into a selective tradition; and both are different from the culture as lived’ (Williams, 1961, p. 66). Such

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selection is a continuum, sustained by subsequent like-minded generations, but is inevitably built on incorporation and exclusion, and here the process of selection as an evaluative act is key: ‘from the whole body of activities, certain things are selected for value and emphasis’ (Williams, 1961, p. 67). What does this mean? In the case of Leavis and the Great Tradition it means shaping a criteria for what constitutes literature, to which chosen texts must subscribe, thus a hierarchy is imposed which in turn ignores, or refuses to acknowledge, that value does not necessarily inhere within the text, but is something which is ascribed to it. But Leavis does not speak here merely for himself, but from within a wider discursive and institutional context, and cultural formation. This is manifest in his role as both arbiter of literary taste and study (as a leading Cambridge don and initiator of a “school” of literary criticism) and protector of ‘minority culture’ perceived to be under threat from the very masses (and the mass commercial culture to which they were aligned) proletarian fiction strove to place firmly on the page. Traditions, institutions and formations are tightly allied in this process (in this instance, one of exclusion rather than incorporation). Traditions are maintained in this way and the literary canon can be seen to keep its integrity through acts of excision, whereby institutional practices initiate processes which determine that a ‘selected range of meanings, values, and practices, which in the very closeness of their association with necessary learning, constitute the real foundations of the hegemonic’ (Williams, 1977, p. 117). But these processes and attempted closures are not free of tensions and contradictions and thus hegemony is by no means easily assured. What is interesting regarding the 1930s, however, is the appearance of alternative institutions and formations to challenge the hegemony of the dominant in the name of socio-political change. How these operated in relation to working-class writing, and to working-class culture in general, is profoundly important. If dominant literary institutions privileged a type of writing which accorded in complex ways with wider ideological positions, then to promote and support writing and writers who contested such stances – or at the very least were striving to be heard within hegemonic contexts – entailed the necessity for alternative institutions. And it was the case that out of the social and political antagonisms of the 1930s in Britain and Europe, Marxists and others on the Left saw literature – and the cultural field more widely – as a tool in the formation of a revolutionary socialist consciousness: a way of changing hearts

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and minds. Middle-class intellectuals, reacting to both national and international developments, sought to ally themselves with workers and the trade union and labour movement, and this political alliance would help form the Popular Front. What we see here is the development of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, and this has been well documented (Clarke et al., 1979; Goversmith, 1980; Croft, 1990). I have already referred to the work of Mass Observation and documentarism in the exploration of workingclass issues. Middle-class intellectuals and artists, orientated politically around a broadly social democratic consensus, and operating from institutional bases within the dominant culture, developed a range of cultural work often in conscious alignment with the needs and aspirations of the working class (for a good account of this see, Highmore, 2002). As a cultural formation, those individuals involved had much in common with a contemporary formation Williams analyses – the Bloomsbury Group. This formation, whose members included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, constitute a dissident fraction of the dominant bourgeoisie; a dissidence built on a critique of the dominant order over a range of issues. These issues included ‘its militarism … its repressive colonialism’, and importantly in our context, its stewardship of an incompetent and ‘unmanaged capitalism’; as well as standing against it ‘for its sexual inequalities; for its rigidities of manners; for its hypocrisies; for its indifference to the arts’ (Williams, 1981, p. 80). Unified in this way, through a set of agreed values and personal relations and friendships, articulating a distinctive structure of feeling, enabled a liberal tolerance towards the working-class and others, manifested primarily as paternalism. Thus Williams identifies the group, within a set of developed typologies, as one responding discursively to ‘crises within both patronage and the market, in a period of intense and general conflict’ (Williams, 1981, p. 72). At the same time, radical publishers like Gollancz and organisations such as the Left Book Club and the journal Left Review, furthered the aims of working-class expression. Consequently, much of the writing published by Left Review and other sympathetic publishers provided the working class with a voice within the wider culture, enabling an emergent cultural formation of worker writers to play a part in ‘the democratisation of the social order, as part of the process of general liberation and human enrichment to which the arts, if they were allowed, could contribute’ (Williams, 1981, p. 72). That contribution was substantial, playing its own part in the increasing clamour for an end to poverty and unemployment after the sacrifices of war.

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Contemporary working-class production In mainstream fiction, working-class literary expression remains, as I have argued elsewhere (Kirk, 2003), writing from the margins. There are moments, though – as with the 1930s – when its presence is more keenly felt. Peter Hitchcock (1989), in his work on Alan Sillitoe, highlights the importance of social and cultural context in elevating a number of working-class writers from the late 1950s and 1960s into what came close to literary stardom. While focusing on Alan Sillitoe, he points to the work of David Storey and John Braine, too. This period, of course, was defined as the Age of Affluence, the new post-War dispensation producing the welfare state and full employment and thus solving the problem of class as it was articulated in the 1930s. This is in fact the period of the re-making of the working class in Britain. Ian Haywood (1997) suggests that the affluence, or “embourgeoisment”, thesis became a key thematic concern of working-class writing in the fifties and sixties, alongside the ‘novel of flight’, such as Raymond Williams’s Border Country (1961), and the narrative of resistance, embodied in many of the characters in Sillitoe’s writing, from Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) to the social “deviant” Smith, in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959). As the working-class militancy of the 1970s gave way to the Thatcherite reaction of the eighties, the “market” once again became the arbiter of all things, and another “re-making” of the working class got under way – a re-making that, for some, would see the un-making of the British working class and the very demise of class identity and class politics itself. As might be expected, a good deal of working-class writing from the eighties encodes a deep pessimism as a response to the defeats of Thatcherism and the perceived disintegration of working-class communities. I highlighted in Chapter 1, Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 television drama Boys from the Blackstuff, which stands as a paradigm case of this structure of feeling. Yet other work was equally significant in re-stating class in different ways. This “re-visiting” offered a challenging new perspective on the working class and is reflected in the emergence of fiction by women writers like Pat Barker, Livi Michael, Agnes Owens, and the early novel of Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). This is important writing in terms of both form and content. Barker’s 1980s novels on working-class life in the north-east of England, mobilise the trope of “memory” as a device to unearth female experiences long suppressed under the stereotype of northern culture as male dominated; while Michael utilises similar formal approaches to speak of urban

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poverty for a so-called underclass of single mothers on dank and dismal estates (see Kirk, 2003). What Haywood coins the ‘feminisation of working-class fiction’ (Haywood, 1997, p. 151) constitutes a crucial advance in the working-class novel; this has been accompanied by a new wave of working-class writing from Scotland, a region particularly hit in the Thatcher years. I have already foregrounded the work of Kelman: other novelists from this formation include Jeff Torrington, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway and Irvine Welsh. Class remains an overriding factor in this work, whether articulated as a residual structure of feeling or as a sense of identity characterised by continuity and change. These works represent what I have called elsewhere post-industrial fiction (Kirk, 2006). Though we can regard these writers as comprising a “loosely” associated cultural formation, it is harder to see them as challenging existing institutions through which literature emerges: instead such work strives to enter those spaces as alternative voices to those in dominance. Yet one development in the area of working-class writing did attempt a more thoroughgoing challenge to the literary establishment. I will turn to that now.

The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers We can return here to some of Williams’s arguments around the categories of formations and institutions. Two factors characterise cultural formations, according to Williams. These are their internal organisation and their external relations. Internal organisation can be based on formal membership (such as guilds); on some collective public manifestation (a manifesto, perhaps); or some conscious association or group membership, and I have already outlined an example of this earlier with Williams’s analysis of the Bloomsbury group. The cultural formation of working-class writers of the 1930s represented a much “looser” association, though many were embedded in the alternative and oppositional institutional sites through which their work emerged, and this helps constitute them as a cultural formation in their own right. The second key feature of cultural formations rests on the type of external relations identifiable within a given group and these revolve around the following aspects: specialisation, whereby work of a given style is promoted; the existence of alternative cultural formations, where relations of production fall outside existing and dominant ones; and oppositional formations, whose guiding characteristics involve an active opposition to established institutions (Williams, 1981, pp. 57–86). The Federation of Worker

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Writers & Community Publishers (FWWCP, or the Fed, as it is known), falls between categories two and three in terms of external relations, and is closest to category three in terms of internal organisation. The Fed has been in existence for some thirty years, facilitating working-class cultural production. Such local publishing projects enable local people to write and record their own experiences, in a context outside mainstream commercial publishing – organisations and their institutional support systems which, as we have already seen, might not recognise the legitimacy of this type of writing at all. As I suggested before, the process adopted in the Fed operates in such a way so as to alter the social relations of production and distribution. The writer is more keenly aware of, and always in touch with, his or her audience, more conscious of writing not simply for him/herself, but for, and within, a wider community. Relations with outside, and mainstream, institutions and commentators remained strained, though. Recognition for such writing was not forthcoming from the Arts Council at the early stages of the Fed’s inception, with a central criticism questioning the literary value of such work (Morley and Worpole, 1982, pp. 131–132; also Woodin, 2005, pp. 562–563). Thus the Arts Council denied funding to the Fed, considering the writing of no ‘literary merit’ (Woodin, 2005, p. 563). Unable to define what the term ‘literary merit’ meant, the Arts Council merely reinforced existing cultural prejudices and assumptions, asserting that the meanings and values generated and explored in Fed writing were superficial or of little worth. The relations of production and distribution of this work required, then, exactly the forms of alternative and oppositional institutional organisation referred to by Williams. As Woodin notes, ‘workshops and groups were based on the assumption that marginalized people needed organization at every stage of the writing process: to write, publish, distribute and read each other’s work’ (Woodin, 2005, p. 564). This enabled, in the widest sense, writing to be produced. In The Republic of Letters (1982), Morley and Worpole recognise that talent exists within the communities, but a context and a framework was required in which it might flourish. Consequently, they ask: ‘what chance is there that you will find anyone to whom you can show your work in the expectation that it will be read, understood, supported, answered, propagated and built into culture, without being in some measure stolen from you and from the world that has given rise to it? That is the challenge. This network of groups is part of the response’ (quoted in Woodin, 2005, p. 564). In an Introduction to the FWWCP’s anthology of working class writing, Once I Was A Washing Machine, published in 1989, Ken Worpole describes

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the collection as survival stories from ‘Unknown England’, stories which speak class through poetry and through fragments of autobiography, and bring class into contact with issues of race and gender – articulating the practical consciousness and lived experiences of the people from a range of communities. Here writers articulate their understandings of daily life, their hopes, fears, pride and shame. The register of much of the poetry in the anthology delivers a directness, a kind of degree zero poetics, which in turn largely rejects such conventions as metaphor, allusion and symbolism, aiming for a type of materialist aesthetic Haywood has argued for. Poetry has been made available to the working class through a variety of popular forms, dating as far back as Chartist ballads and beyond. Its present day popular manifestation would be in the lyrics of pop, or rock, or rap music. Perhaps more relevant is the oral tradition of storytelling in working-class culture and this finds some resonance in Federation poetry. A poetry written to be spoken and shared, which is the case in Federation writing groups, provides different opportunities and intentions to poetry written to be read silently by a single individual or discussed merely within the confines of the seminar room. This process helps demystify the very nature of poetry itself, and facilitate the appropriation of the form by those who may have felt alienated from it through its common association with “high” culture. Here I will explore some of this poetry. I signed on again the other day Wednesday The first time since I worked my brain in college This will keep me until a job I say Will it heckers like. No National Insurance they say Apply to everywhere they say But today’s Friday That pie in the fridge with the six cuppa soups And one egg, half a loaf of bread And my rent will last another week Didn’t you know that I eat bird seed to keep alive Tweet tweet. (“Tweet Tweet”, p. 4) This produces a way of seeing dominated by the harsh reality of having to do without: without work, without food, without money. Despite its

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directness, paradoxically the poem gains its impact through documenting what is absent by showing what is there: the one egg, half a loaf, six cuppa soups. A sense is established of those wider conditions of survival for the workless, a vivid picture of everyday existence through the metonymic placing of a few vital commodities. The final two lines challenge the reader to see this, in an address reverting here to the power of the pronoun “you”, reflecting a relationship already expressed in the “I/They” dialogical structure of the poem. This is not a plea for charity, however, and the ironic tone is significant. Ironic humour, or satire, is a distinctive tone of proletarian class consciousness.12 Irony can provide a distance, a gap, in which other, suppressed levels of meaning can come into play. It has the advantage of dialogising a specific context, acting as a destabilising discourse with which to undermine official articulations. Irony can be used to subvert unequal power relations or dominant assumptions. Here the irony is understated, but an incongruity is clear. ‘Didn’t you know I eat bird seed to keep alive/Tweet tweet.’ Domestic birds are generally caged. This is the poem’s dominant structure of feeling. Exploring experiences of unemployment and dispossession, historically dominant themes in working-class writing, reflect an utterance context embedded in the 1980s. These experiences are formulated in terms which suggest both a wider understanding of the condition and, in this second extract, a wider sense of social relations expressing a more complex seeing. I am angry, I am unwanted, I am dangerous, And you don’t care. I would like to change the system, and you would not. I am the surplus pool of labour. (‘Meat Sandwich’, p. 31) One poem is dedicated to the Jarrow Marchers of 1936; a procession of unemployed workers who marched from Jarrow in the north-east of England to London to protest against mass unemployment: They have cut us deep, ripped the ground from beneath our feet; left us drunk in subways in a maze of limousines and lorries passing through houses on their way

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to banks and dreams that, mostly, we can’t afford. (‘Burning Issues, p. 5) Once again there is established a type of ‘Them and Us’ sociology which draws the reader’s attention to those who ‘have robbed us / and are robbing us still’ (5). The key oppositions are those between houses/banks, lorries/limousines, the ‘reality’ and certainty of ‘ground’ and the illusory nature of the ‘dreams’ which take its place. The present social and political context forces the writer both to recover and to commemorate the past – the Jarrow Marchers of the 1930s protesting against unemployment – as the poem recoils from ‘crises / they say we must pay for / for good / and for profits / for them’ (5). The structure evident in this writing of Us/Them, We/You is crucial in class terms. Volosinov (1973), discussing verbal interaction and orientation, described this structure in terms of what he called the ‘I-experience’ and ‘we-experience’, where the self is understood only in relation to others, in acts of both identification and dis-identification. Thus, language, or the ‘word … is the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee’, so that ‘I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 87). But the utterance, or speech-act, takes its shape and its intelligibility within specific contexts and historical and social situations – here that of 1980s de-industrialisation processes and community dislocation already discussed. Yet, the structure of the utterance thrusts towards Volosinov’s more inclusive we-experience, a structure of feeling at ‘the very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131) here, articulating within the crisis what Volosinov calls a ‘united collective’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 87). This facilitates an utterance marked ‘predominantly by overtones of active and self-confident protest with no basis for humble and submissive intonation’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 87). It is a ‘united collective’ under profound stress, and thus we witness the recovering of history as memory which, in the terms of Walter Benjamin, only ‘flashes up at a moment of danger’ (Benjamin, 1969, p. 225). Black voices occupy much of the writing in the anthology, those from the Windrush generation and those after, and thus an interestingly complex narrative emerges in which race and class intersect. I am a West Indian from the Island of Jamaica … HERE I AM NOW

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Sitting here writing about Birmingham. I first came here in 1955 I did not like the place … HERE I AM NOW I thought the houses were factories but after a few weeks I got to like it Then I say I will not stay longer than one year … BUT HERE I AM NOW A mother of three children and two grandchildren … AND HERE I AM NOW. (‘Here I am Now’, p. 144) The writer describes the passage from one culture to another. She documents initial confusion, but ends by claiming citizenship. This transition isn’t easy, as other poems confirm: ‘Times are hard / The tag of our colour make it harder’ (‘Black’, p. 154). There is clearly a sense of pride articulated in ‘HERE I AM NOW’, a feistiness in the upper-case assertion of identity, and an indication, in the reference to factories, of the necessary labour needed to sustain that identity. Other writing defines a clearer anger. Whiteness Whatever that may be tried to impose its supremacy, on an African child born in the mild, though hostile climes of post war England … Womanhood whatever that may be, yet another struggle for liberty, I’ve seen through the lies and learned to DESPISE, the hostile climes of post-war England. (‘Whiteness’, p. 148) Though born in England the writer identifies herself as an ‘African child’. The important oppositions are black/white, male/female, Africa/ England. The poet speaks, at an existential level, of exile, of a consciousness of diverse oppressions and that identity is part of a process of learning about herself as a black person and as a woman, and about those

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other identities which are equally a product of history: I’m not proud of our Colonial past. Great Britain, the Empire what a farce But whatever I do can’t put wrongs to right so all I can say is, sometimes, I’m ashamed of being white. (‘Trying to Explain’, p. 153) This represents another way of seeing skin colour – whiteness –as signifying a history of Eurocentric practice and ideological assumptions. It is also a way of viewing the self as a product of the politics of culture and of history; powerful determinants which can, nevertheless, be contested. Tracing inequality and injustice as it manifests itself in day-to-day life remains a priority in much of the work, though. Not for them the hallowed halls of learning, Not for them the passport to better things. And if not this then, the chill-like welcome of factory gates, and the irresistible embrace of clockcard monotony. (‘Turning the Tide’, pp. 22–25) Time is taken up by the labour process, the ‘clockcard monotony’ of the factory floor, and references to those closed doors of learning and the alienation of life-consuming work for the profit of others, remind us of the difficulties for the working-class writer of even putting pen to paper (productively occupying that ‘room of one’s own’.) But even the

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inevitability of exploited labour can be taken away. As history brings with it new challenges, the poem ends, So, now their pockets are empty, Whole streets, once lively, Are now deaf and dumb. And four million are crying the tears of the losers. The battle’s beginning The system’s undone. (‘Turning the Tide’, pp. 22–25) Self-evidently the theme of class is a powerful presence in the work so far discussed. It is shot through too with concerns of race and gender, as the narratives interrogate the borderline between public and private worlds: between ‘fact’ and fiction, ‘I’ and ‘We’ and ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, dialogically encoding, and recoding, those common sense assumptions about surviving in hard times, about national and cultural identity, about class belonging and community. Revealing insights into both social change and personal desire, working-class experience is refracted through the dialogics of race and gender, and it is this which marks out the writing as significantly different from a good deal of earlier working-class writing and representation from the 1930s and from the 1960s (on this further, see Kirk, 2003).

Announcing the self: Class and autobiography Recently in the humanities and some key areas of the social sciences there has been a distinct and productive turn to the study of autobiography. This has been particularly evident and fruitful in studies within feminism. Here, in the closing pages of this chapter, I intend to consider the relationship between autobiography and the working class. There is something particular about autobiography, and it lies in the form’s insistence on presence and, perhaps more importantly, its association with the key concept of experience. The autobiographical form is one often favoured by writers from the Fed, and the use of autobiography by working-class people has some lineage. Writing on nineteenth-century working-class autobiography, David Vincent (1981) argues that the genre provides an invaluable insight into working-class life, and he suggests that few other forms of source material bring the historian or social scientist closer to ‘the crucial area of class consciousness’ (Vincent, 1981, p. 10) and its articulation in a mode that

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stresses by its very nature the importance of experience. Such writing during this significant period emanated from a double desire, and came to be inscribed within available literary forms and conventions, traditions which worked to influence the nature of the stories told but which was, in turn, shaped by them. The first impulse emerged through ‘the specialised genre of spiritual autobiographies which developed during the religious and spiritual crisis of the Civil War period and continued as a recognisable literary form throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century’ (Vincent, 1981, p. 15). Though concerned to some degree with the spiritual life of the individual, these works held in common the desire to articulate both the strong moral values informing the individual’s life, and to convey a didactic purpose – in striving to know themselves, they struggled also to articulate to their fellows the true nature of the society in which they all lived. Through this emergent tendency, Vincent sees working-class autobiography finally breaking clear of the tradition which had nurtured it (Vincent, 1980, p. 18). What comes to characterise the writing as it develops, then, is an understanding of the ‘relationship between self and society as a continual dialectical process rather than one of ultimate transcendence’ (Vincent, 1980, p. 19) – that sense of transcendence identifiable as a structure of feeling dominant in the spiritual life-histories out of which such writing came. The second tradition, or influence, Vincent highlights is that of working-class oral reminiscence. The strongly anecdotal nature of some of the writing Vincent explores in his lengthy study underlines this, reflecting as it does the oral tradition of passing stories on from generation to generation. Objectifying experience through the medium of writing, however, has the potential advantage of reaching a much wider audience and of recording experience for posterity. And the growing inadequacy of oral transmission was beginning to dawn on a number of working-class storytellers who might have ordinarily relied on the spoken word. Social change, on a scale hitherto not experienced, generated this recognition and response. As urbanisation and industrialisation broke up rural communities, the role of the storyteller became increasingly difficult to fulfil in its traditional sense.13 A culture in eclipse threatened a particular outcome: that the culture of the past might be cut off from the present called for the adoption of a cultural form that would keep working people’s history alive and thus give meaning to lives lived. Increasingly, those men at the heart of popular radicalism in the early nineteenth century came to realise the importance of the written word in the class struggle (Vincent, 1981, p. 29). Vincent underlines

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this, quoting the leading Chartist William Lovett’s justification for putting his life experience into words: ‘so that the working classes of a future day may know something of the early struggles of some of those who contended for the political rights they may then be enjoying’ (in Vincent, 1981, p. 29). Vincent’s study reveals the importance of the autobiographical impulse for the working men – and it does seem to be mostly men – who recorded their lives for posterity and in doing so illuminated key aspects of working-class lives in the period between 1790 and 1850. Illuminating, documenting or revealing lives lived on the margins, or in between the lines of the dominant discourses and representations of a culture, has become one prominent way of thinking about the purpose, or role, of the autobiographical. Such a perspective has a clear political dimension, invoking the notion of allowing the subaltern to speak to power, thereby resisting the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson, 1963, p. 11). But there is an alternative perspective on this, too – and it is one encapsulated in the idea, put forward by Carolyn Steedman, of the autobiographical injunction (Steedman, 2000, p. 28). This formulation implies that writing the self in this context is not about affirming presence, nor recovering hidden voices and identities forgotten or ignored by a historical narrative inscribed and policed by the dominant culture, but is instead a symbolic mode of subordination whereby the weak are compelled to go on record – and to be recorded by others, in the case of those living in the era prior to mass literacy to which Steedman is referring here – for purposes of surveillance and control. The use of autobiography takes on in this formulation a different sense: it comes not as a form of self-expression, even celebration, but as a means of subjection. The self is divulged to authority figures who then appropriate the testimony in a process orientated around the imperatives of social control, categorisation and domination. The plebeian, the subaltern and the female, from the seventeenth century onwards, acquire selfhood in such contexts, Steedman tells us, not through their own words but through the interpretations and applications powerful others subsequently place on them (Steedman, 2000, p. 31). This injunction to speak, then, emerges as a double-edged sword.14 The question arises: when the subordinate finally speaks exactly who is listening and what is the nature of the response? Working-class autobiography is positioned within this overall cultural context in a particular light. Thus the writers of the working class will be seen to be speaking, in the words of Sidonie Smith, from ‘a negative

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position in culture’ (quoted in Swindells, 1995, p. 5). What has been perceived later on as a democratisation of autobiography is linked, Swindells suggests, to a renewed interest in ‘memory-work’ (Swindells, 1995, p. 13), and therefore a swell of interest in life-histories, and this is supported by the success of oral history both within the academy and outside. Swindells sees this, in part, as a response to those forms of autobiography associated with mapping the lives of the elite, and this view ameliorates Steedman’s argument somewhat. So it is possible to regard Fed autobiographies as attempting to redress, or challenge, such cultural bias towards elite narratives. Chris Waters (2000), examining worker writing from the Fed, focuses his attention on autobiography. Whilst acknowledging that working-class autobiography now constitutes a tradition some two centuries old, he argues that the stories ‘told in the 1970s and after differed radically from those told by nineteenth-century worker-writers in terms of their emphasis, content, style, and, more crucially, in terms of their condition of production’ (Waters, 2000, p. 179). I take him to mean by the ‘conditions of production’ those structures and processes which enable the working-class narrative to emerge – conditions I discussed above in terms of institutions and formations. For Waters, the increased interest in contemporary workingclass autobiography is linked to rapid post-War social change and the perceived decline of traditional working-class communities, and these concerns make up the ‘emphasis, content and style’ of the work. There are some parallels here with the early rise of Cultural Studies – in the work of Williams, Hoggart and Thompson, but so too with later subCultural Studies – as well as the social, or people’s, history movement evolving at the time with its focus on history from below. To record what is in the process of becoming lost seemed the overriding imperative, Waters argues, of those within the Fed at the time. Waters contrasts earlier working-class narratives with much later ones – and while the themes of personal advancement and political ambition marked much Victorian working-class autobiography, ‘it is virtually absent in such writing from the postwar period’ (Waters, 2000, p. 183). Much in the Hoggartian frame, the loss of working-class community and the diminution of a specific structure of feeling (one never as homogeneous as Hoggart, or others, would have us believe) dominates the narratives, presenting a then/now structure, with the past cut off from the welfare state present (Waters, 2000, p. 186). What Waters seems to be getting at is the absence, in the later work, of any political intent, or utopian vision, grounded in the advancement both of the self and of the class, something he identified as typifying major nineteenth century work.

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Replacing this, he argues, is a nostalgia on the part of those writing their lives for the types of communities and relationships fractured and lost by post-War reconstruction. During a period of acute socio-economic restructuring, it is hardly surprising to encounter narratives of loss, however. What may be being lamented here is not the fact of change per se, but evidence that such change – in the hands of others, and beyond the control of those affected most by it – produces instead alienation from the very processes themselves and thus nostalgia here stands as critique. The absence of politics that Waters perceives in contemporary working-class autobiography is not mirrored in the poetry of the period just discussed – class narratives, as well as the politics of gender and race find articulation, and this structure of feeling is embedded in themes that are resonant both of the public world and of personal desire, hopes and fears. Tim Strangleman has studied railway workers’ autobiographies from the post-War period, noting how they invariably posit identity and the self not as characterised by some individualistic process of career building, but as a collective social practice deeply embedded in class, community and occupational structures of feeling. What they reveal is the nature of ‘being and becoming in working-class life’, revealing a complex totality encompassing ‘work and social and cultural life’ (Strangleman, 2005, pp. 142–143). Speaking of working lives primarily, these autobiographies also register a range of issues to do with pride, dignity and recognition, what Strangleman calls a ‘moral order’ (Strangleman, 2005, p. 146), which convey in themselves those political expressions Waters fails to register in his accounts. Nor is this structure of feeling missing from some working-class autobiographical writing from the 1980s. To highlight this I will end with an examination of some autobiographical accounts of working-class experience springing from the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike. The strike, of course, was the major industrial struggle of the twentieth century, with miners, their families and the communities holding out for almost a year in the face of often savage state repression and acute material hardship.15 Shortly into the dispute the Sunday Times ran an editorial on 20 July 1984, claiming that the action evinced a ‘criminal and insurrectionary flavour’. The paper concluded: ‘There is a war on. There has always been such a war for the hearts and minds of the British people, at least since 1969’ (20 July 1984). The concluding remarks have a clear reference to Thatcher’s notorious comment on the miners as the new “enemy within”. Raphael Samuel highlighted the contradictory nature of the Miners’ Strike (1986). Though it was the most bitter and protracted in recent

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history, Samuel suggests it is worth recalling ‘the essentially defensive nature of the miners’ action, and the essential modesty of their claims to defend a settled way of life, not to embark on the struggle for power’ (Samuel, 1986, p. xii). Paradoxically, Samuel points out, the strike demonstrated a certain conservatism about the miners’ stance, as they ‘defend[ed] those “old fashioned” values, “Victorian Values” which, in other spheres, the Prime Minister [Thatcher] has made it her platform to defend: the dignity of work, the sanctity of the family, “roots”’ (Samuel, 1986, p. 15). Although the strike was not a struggle for power, it soon became clear that it was a struggle against power – that of the state, capital, and its repressive apparatuses, not to mention an unremittingly hostile media. A significant development during the 1984–1985 strike was the emergence of women’s support groups in the pit communities. This movement, though in some respects “conservative” – “support” does imply a subordinate role to the real fighters, the men – nevertheless helped to transform the lives of many women, opening up vital spaces within the public sphere that had hitherto been closed to them. The published extracts from Iris Preston’s diary in Samuel’s The Enemy Within confirm this view; and the record given in Norma Dolby’s Diary: An Account of the Great Miners’ Strike (1986) further documents the growing political awareness of one ‘ordinary’ housewife increasingly involved in the politics of the strike. Of course we had changed. No one could go through what we did and not change. It’s nothing that you can see with the eye, but changes are there alright, perhaps even we do not know the full extent of what it did to us yet. All I know is that I am now more aware of what is going on around me, and at the moment I do not like what I see. (Dolby, 1987, p. 80) Both Iris Preston’s and Norma Dolby’s texts are presented in diary form. The pieces are best thought of as autobiographical fragments, though; scenes taken from a life in full flow, where any sense of normality has been interrupted for these two women living in the heart of the mining communities. The diary form gives the accounts an immediacy perhaps absent from the reflective model of autobiography as accepted, where “looking back” is the dominant trope. But these accounts are not devoid of reflection: indeed, they involve a complex interweaving of thought and feeling in an attempt to make sense of events. Autobiography, Philip Dodd argues in Modern Selves (1986), ‘stresses experience and

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offers a form which sees experience as knowledge and political resistance’ (Dodd, 1986, p. 8). This view fits well with the accounts examined here, so that we can concur with Vincent when he suggests that autobiography enables the writer to “become”, through a process of self-validation articulating the ‘complexity of the lifelong interactions between the self and the outside world’ (Vincent, 1981, p. 6). This touches, also, on a concept I will explore in the next chapter – an act of “self-constitution” called “composure”. The two fragments turn on a powerful opposition: the necessary transition from a kind of innocence to experience. Thus Preston tells us: ‘I was afraid to face reality. … The more I listened to my sons [both miners] the more I realised what little I know, and now must educate myself’ (Preston in Samuel, 1986, p. 107). Both accounts document how the women cope during the dispute, and how a political consciousness emerges, which finally conflates the public and private worlds they inhabit to produce a more complex seeing and understanding, involving an active critique and rejection of the prevailing social order in its present form. It would not be difficult to contrast diary extracts of the strike with those “official” versions emanating from mainstream sources. The two women return again and again to the “policing” of the strike by the state: I left them and set off back home … police, lots of them. I stopped and asked a young man what had happened. ‘Nowt this is like it is now around here.’ ‘Are you a miner?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you on strike?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good lad, what’s your name?’ But before he could give it to me there was a sickening ‘thud’ and four police officers surrounded him and beat him with truncheons. I am crying as I write this, his screams will stay with me for ever. All I could shout was ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Leave him alone.’ It is 1984 and I work in the courts of law and the incident doesn’t gel with my job. (Preston in Samuel, 1986, p. 103) My stomach was really churning over afterwards. When the lads started moving away to go back home the police dived into the crowd, pulled two young lads out, and roughed them up on the way to the police van. I just could not believe my eyes. The cameras had been filming but they suddenly switched off when this was happening … This is what they call British justice. (Dolby, 1987, p. 47)

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Respect for law and order is gradually eroded. The word ‘justice’ is used consistently throughout the two women’s accounts. They express a deep and abiding disillusionment with the institutions of the state, recognising that these institutions might in fact be class-based and even corrupt. These experiences are then inscribed in an emerging political discourse involving what I have alluded to as a shift from a “simple” to a “complex” seeing – what Williams would define as emergent structures of feeling ‘in solution’ (1977, p. 129). Visiting Ireland with a ‘Women against Pit Closures’ group, Iris Preston comes to see that ‘The Irish are still now experiencing what we are only recently experiencing. The police state and poverty, and riot squads’ (Preston in Samuel, 1986, p. 10). The actions of groups like ‘Women against Pit Closures’ were instrumental in broadening both the base support of the strike and its relevance beyond the pit communities themselves. If Thatcher chose to see the miners and their families as the “enemy within”, parasites threatening the body politic, the strike itself can be seen as securing some re-articulations of its own. The strike action and alliances made with it enunciated quite different conceptions of what should constitute a national interest, or what community might be about. Dolby, in her writing, enfolds the discourse of equality within the concept of justice: Justice, such a little word that means so very much to all of us the working class of Britain, regardless of colour or creed. Such terrible things are happening in our country today which should never be allowed to happen. Only we can put a stop to it. The voice of the people has got to be heard, loud and clear. We have been pushed around long enough. It is time we all stood up for our rights. Justice has to be done. (Dolby, 1987, p. 118) Ken Worpole (1985) suggests that a more diverse sense of community began to emerge during the Miners’ Strike. This would involve a new sense of belonging, reaccentuating notions of responsibility, respect and obligations (or loyalties, something often sadly lacking in the dispute) to others. Worpole argues that the strike ‘more than any other social groundswell since the war, produced a new sense of “community” that for the first time was not exclusively centred on men and work, but integrated whole new constituencies of the peace and ecology movements, some of the churches and civic bodies, feminism, black and gay politics too’ (Worpole, 1985, p. 153). Indeed, what is taking place here is something like a common culture based on a respect for difference but grounded in complex solidarities.

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Conclusion One crucial function of working-class writing is to bear witness. And this act need not be one only ascribed to or restricted to the work of fiction or autobiography. As Simon Charlesworth’s own intervention showed in Chapter 1, working-class writing – with its remit to bear witness – can be conceived of across a broad discursive field. In ‘speaking for more than itself’, the cultural work of working-class writing performs acts of reclamation, commemoration and innovation – and in doing so can transform both the form and content of established narrative conventions and codes. The complex alignments and solidarities that working-class writing so often speaks of and instates entails in the process of production ‘the stitching of beauty onto the ordinary, the joining of use and aesthetic value, and the enlargement of circumstances for creative expression’ (Zandy, 2004, p. 65).

5 Working through Change (i): Oral Testimony and the Language of Class

The previous chapter addressed the status, contexts and concerns of working-class writing – examining the role of autobiography and notions of the literary, as well as the importance of institutional frames and formations in the making of a working-class text. It was suggested there that these conditions were inevitably operating within hegemonic frameworks: that of a literary/cultural establishment and its modes of inclusion and exclusion which help form, as well as reflect, the wider values and beliefs of society more broadly conceived. Dominant literary institutions and their representatives shape ideas of the literary, and this is inevitably reinforced through related institutional sites or fields within higher education and the metropolitan broadsheet press and other media concerned with “culture”. Though in recent times it appears that some relaxation of the notion of “what is literature” may have emerged, the exchange mapped out in the previous chapter between Jenkins and Kelman suggests a tension at best, a “business as usual” situation at worst. This chapter takes a more empirical slant in investigating working-class subjectivity by examining oral testimony of working people. It explores themes of class, gender and community, generational and societal change, and it does so by exploring the uses and usefulness of oral history as method. It is primarily an exploratory and speculative chapter in this sense, seeking to understand working-class identity as it is articulated in what some might still see as the key area of working-class life: the imperatives of work and the changing structures and cultures of the work place. Drawing on empirical findings – in the shape of extracts from work-life histories – I try to illuminate the intersection of the 142

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economic, the political and the cultural as it is articulated within the context of working selves and how this bears down on people’s sense of classed identity within both the private and public sphere.1

Language and Identity: ‘no two generations speak the same language’ Hegemony has played a considerable theoretical role throughout most of this book. In more recent times the concept has lost some of its analytical thrust and this is in part to do with the sway and flow of academic fashion. Thus arguments around postmodernism and postmodernity have sidelined debates around ideology and hegemony (Storey, 2001, p. 191). This has seen understandings of the cultural and the political (or cultural politics) as focused on difference (which can elide domination), and on the meaning of pleasure or the apparent free-flow of meaning-making on the part of “consumers” who it seems do not encounter relations of domination (or to use Williams’s definition, ‘the setting of limits’ (Williams, 1977, p. 87) at all. This is something I discussed in some detail in Chapter 2 as one current preoccupation, or ideological strand, in contemporary Cultural Studies. There is a strong sense too, in some of the sociological arguments about individualisation, as I suggest in Chapter 3, that subjectivity is simply fashioned on spec by actors removed from any structural constraints or limits – free of hegemonic processes which shape a prevailing context in which individuals and groups act. Hegemony, for Raymond Williams, is a condition of practical consciousness (though not a fully determining effect on practical consciousness) so that ‘the whole process of living – not only … political and economic activity’, is shaped by hegemonic forces, to such an extent that ‘the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense’ (Williams, 1977, p. 109). Hegemony represents ‘a whole body of practices and expectations’ (Williams, 1977, p. 109), and is more than simple indoctrination or manipulation. It affects ‘our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meaning and values’ (Williams, 1977, p. 109). This is a sense of hegemony – as the setting of limits – that appears wholly absent in Charlesworth’s understanding of working-class subjectivity as discussed in Chapter 1. What is missed there but articulated in Williams, is the “messiness” of lived experience, in which practical consciousness

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engages with hegemonic acts or forms, so that ‘practical consciousness is always more than a handling of fixed forms … There is a frequent tension between received interpretation and practical experience’, and here a tension emerges as ‘unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency: the moment of conscious comparison not yet come, often not even coming’ (Williams, 1977, p. 130). But the potential remains, so that alternative, or oppositional, perceptions may hold within them different ways of seeing. A focus on language has, with the cultural turn, been central for understanding identity and for conceptualising categories of culture more broadly. Post-structuralist approaches to discourse and subjectivity evidence this. I have stressed throughout the book the importance of discursive strategies for making sense of class, though not necessarily within a post-structuralist framework. The work of Anthony Giddens reflects, too, a pronounced focus on the discursive. In The Constitution of Society (1984), for instance, Giddens suggests that identity formation can be explored through a distinction between practical consciousness and discursive consciousness. Such a dichotomy posits identity at two different levels. Practical consciousness implies the everyday, lived experience of going about things, a process barely reflected upon, or “spoken”. Discursive consciousness implies something different; a stage whereby the subject makes discursive a sense of self through a more fully articulated level of intentionality or articulation. This suggests a perception, on the part of the subject, which discloses a fuller understanding of his/her conditions of existence and that, in some strong sense, appears as the product of, for instance, an emergent or developed political consciousness. Indeed, Giddens’s formulation appears to echo Gramsci’s view of the organic intellectual within the social formation, and can also be considered, in some contexts, as a counter-hegemonic force. On one level, this is a realistic understanding of a political process. Yet, lying within Giddens’s conception seems to rest an assumption that in the range of articulations, or actions, that constitute practical consciousness identity is not, in some significant sense, being staged at all. This seems to place unnecessary limits on people’s understandings in everyday life and how meaning is shaped and shared within wider historical contexts and cultural forms. To subordinate practical consciousness to ‘all the things which actors know tacitly about how to “go on” in social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression’ (Giddens, 1984, p. xxiii) – as Giddens does – seems to elide, or miss, a crucial element of practical consciousness and its relation to what Raymond Williams, following the Russian linguist Valentin Volosinov, calls inner

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speech, a position which renders the dichotomy practical/discursive, I would suggest, somewhat redundant. I will return to this point in more detail a little further on. Below I want to develop the ideas related to language and consciousness developed by Bakhtin, Volosinov and Williams. This idea of ‘inner speech’ foregrounds language, and, in particular, language in use within given and shaping socio-economic and cultural conditions; and ‘inner speech’ helps us to think about how we approach the material in the work-life histories under discussion in this chapter. Key thematic emphases and concerns that stand out in such narratives are embedded at a fundamental level in modes of address and language use within intersubjective cultural and historical situations. This is another way of paraphrasing Raymond Williams’s assertion that ‘a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world’ (1977, p. 21). Williams’s discussion of language in Marxism and Literature (1977) embeds it in the idea of practical consciousness, stressing the importance of experience, and again following the work of Volosinov. Williams states that signs are ‘living evidence of a continuing social process, into which individuals are born and within which they are shaped, but to which they then actively contribute, in a continuing process. This is at once their socialisation and their individuation’ (Williams, 1977, p. 37). Language is not something outside the social, used merely as a descriptive tool, but a constitutive part of it, and this is an active and altering condition. ‘What we have’, according to this understanding, ‘is a grasping of reality through language, which as practical consciousness is saturated by and saturates all social activity, including productive activity’ (Williams, 1977, p. 37). Signs as part of some abstract system in a Saussurean sense, or indeed more straightforwardly as they appear in a dictionary, do not properly signify – it is only when they are put to use that they carry semantic weight. The intersubjective nature of human communication informs this conception, though that communication must be seen as located in a specific time, place, and culture and within a set of specific social relations – what Volosinov would call the wider utterance context, and this places the utterance firmly back into history. In this view, language, as a means of communication and production, represents a site of conflict through which a flow of identities, values, beliefs and meanings become established, silenced or affirmed. Another way of thinking about this notion of flow is to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term heteroglossia, or what he also refers to as ‘multispeechedness’. Simon Dentith describes this notion as reflecting ‘the languages of social groups and

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classes, of professional groups, of generations, the different languages for different occasions that speakers adopt even within these broad distinctions’ (Dentith, 1995, p. 35). This implies the necessarily multivoiced nature of the social, and can be seen to be operating against what Bakhtin calls ‘centripetal forces’ intent on unifying language and thus understandings of the world. In this view, meaning always comes to us already marked or inscribed with the social relations characterising the social. Dentith states that these ‘dynamic forces are not simply linguistic ones; they are produced by historical forces that are external to language but which act partly in language’ (Dentith, 1995, p. 35). For Bakhtin this conception is embodied in the very notion of the dialogic, where words, discourses, carry in them more than a single voice, a single meaning or ideological orientation. Bakhtin contrasts this “natural” tendency within language, or discourse broadly speaking, with what he calls monologic structures and inscriptions which strive to fix certain normative meanings, and this strategy is characteristic of powerful groups or classes intent on asserting a particular way of seeing and thus maintaining ideological control (see Bakhtin, 1981). This clearly relates to Williams’s view that ‘language … is always a definition of human beings in the world’ (Williams, 1977, p. 21), and, further, to his understanding of hegemony. It is also powerfully linked to E.P. Thompson’s conception of class – as ‘a social and cultural formation’, which cannot be ‘defined abstractly … but only in terms of relationship with other classes’ (Thompson, 1978, pp. 295–296) – though with a more intense focus on language than that given in Thompson’s account. Understanding language as a site of competing voices, as this theory of heteroglossia implies, asks us to regard narrative, or discourse – in this case, the work-life testimonies examined in the next chapter, and which we might call, following Volosinov, speech-genres – as replete with ‘evaluative accents’ (Volosinov, 1973, pp. 80–81). Elsewhere, Bakhtin and Medvedev (1985) refer to this notion of the evaluative accent embedded in utterance as ‘the theory of social evaluation’, a theory developed through an analysis of Dostoevsky’s writing, though it can be equally insightful beyond the confines of the literary text. ‘The theory of social evaluation’, Bakhtin and Medvedev argue, ‘applies to every utterance as a historical speech performance, not just poetic work’, constituting a performative act which is shaped by and helps shape the historic moment (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985, p. 126). If social division and power relations are expressed in the utterance then such relations can be detected through accentuation – what Bakhtin refers to as the ‘dialogic angling of the word’, which implies an orientation, a tone, and a

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manner; in the end, a point of view – which accompany social evaluation. Not only a site of dispute, the utterance inevitably carries traces which invoke emotions and relations of solidarity and identification, too. Within the ‘logic of social evaluation’ can exist a deep moral economy (Thompson, 1995) revolving around co-ordinates of self and other, individual and community, the personal and the public. This is so because social evaluation derives from deeper expressions and experiences of a class habitus, or structure of feeling, and thus is ideological through and through. Thus ‘evaluation is social; it organises discourse’, so that ‘even the inner utterance (inner speech) is social; it is oriented towards some possible audience, towards a possible answer, and it is only in the process of such an orientation that it is able to take shape and form’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985, p. 126). This not only shapes the utterance content, ‘it also organises the form by which the event is communicated: the arrangement of the material [words] into digressions, returns, repetitions, etc., is permeated with the single logic of social evaluation’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985, p. 127). These comments also reference another conceptual term developed by Bakhtin, that of ‘answerability’. This is a moment of encounter between speakers and listeners, writers and readers, with a range of mutual and/or conflicting alignments where truth might be seen to speak to power. Some of the central thematic concerns, as well as overall ideological thrust, of working-class writing – as I discussed in the previous chapter – reflect this tendency. This means an attention to language as practical consciousness. In turn, this foregrounds the potential value of oral testimony as method, and opens up the interviews for some detailed study of wider thematic concerns embedded there through an exploration of structures of feeling. This does not constitute a limited formalist approach to the properties of language alone but – as the elaboration on social evaluation above suggests – an attempt to get at the shaping contexts of the utterance itself, acknowledging that language always carries with it the marks of history and culture. This proposition complements the view of the oral historian Robert Grele, who argues that it is possible to detect wider social forces operating within oral testimony. He asserts that a respondent speaks through the interviewer to a larger community, to its history, its social relationships and to his/her own socio-historical consciousness, and this formulation points to the very idea of dialogics as constitutive of culture. Grele suggests that in order to connect with these levels of meaning – these ‘hidden levels of discourse’ – we need to adopt a method of reading defined as ‘symptomatic’ (Grele, 1998, p. 45). For Grele, this enables

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analysis not only to address seemingly explicit statements and comments, elaborated views and emotions, but comprehend more repressed meaning that finds articulation only ambiguously through silences, evasions and displacements – or as Bakhtin defined it above in terms of digressions, repetitions, hesitations. This can illuminate understandings of class experiences and formations, and the variable articulations of dissent, dissidence and dispute, as well as incorporation and consensus. Such tendencies can be found within the overall semantic thrust of a narrative representing for some critics ‘counter-narratives’, where dominant ideas, for instance, are seen to be – either explicitly or implicitly – contested and denied legitimacy. A challenge emerges, as contrasting and contesting structures of feeling come to the surface.

Narrative structure and the making of meaning “Stories” – narratives – take a particular form and a range of factors can determine this. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the stories people tell will be stories that in some significant sense matter to them, even though the interview process itself, with its pre-arranged questions and artificial context, can and does fashion responses. Nevertheless, one thing the interview scenario cannot fully shape is the actual language respondents use, nor the capacity of respondents, where they see fit, to set their own agenda. I will return to this later when examining the interviews themselves. For thinking about narrative structure further, Alistair Thompson, in his Anzac Memories, puts forward the concept of composure. This idea helps us to understand both the private and the public nature of the work-life histories under consideration, and draws us towards pertinent themes around memory, mourning and nostalgia, around loss, hope and change. Composure is the term Thompson adopts to describe the process of remembering. The term has perhaps wider uses too, beyond a narrow association only with memory or reminiscence. The idea of composure implies notions of the self as an ongoing project, thus composure stands as a metaphor for how people see their own lives and give them shape and meaning to themselves and for, or in response to, others. This implies that the concept of composure represents more than an act shaped by recollection, or memory. Composing the self is not only a way of imagining, or re-imagining, the past, but of making sense of the present and situating oneself within it. Thompson argues that to compose or construct memory is invariably to ‘use the public language and meanings of our culture’ (Thompson, 1998, p. 300). This idea brings together two aspects with regard to identity construction and its

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articulation. First, ‘we compose memories [or ourselves] which help us to feel relatively comfortable with our lives, which gives us a feeling of composure’ (Thompson, 1998, p. 301). This may involve repressing painful memories, or re-orientating them to fit better the present understanding of one’s life and where one stands. It may even involve confronting those painful memories and “managing” them – which gives this concept a psychoanalytical twist. It may entail, too, the art of forgetting, only this forgetting constitutes, for an analyst, those fruitful silences or evasions referred to earlier. Second, Thompson tells us, ‘we seek composure’, and through this ‘an alignment of our past, present and future lives’ (Thompson, 1998, p. 301). But the key theoretical connection and the link between these two senses of the term, ‘is that the apparently private process of composing safe memories is in fact very public. Our memories are risky and painful if they do not conform to the public norms of versions of the past’ (Thompson, 1998, p. 301). If there is some “performative” dimension to this – constructing the self, as it were – then it is carried out in the shadow of external pressures and limits. The sting in the tale revolves around some understanding of cultural hegemony, then. We are, in this view, always composing ourselves in an intersubjective – that is, dialogic – relationship with what are perceived to be dominant narrative modes, legitimated by mainstream culture. This implies a set of codes and conventions already available for speaking about significant aspects of experience, in particular modes, in particular contexts, in particular times. The properties that constitute speech genres are always constitutive of wider social processes of which they are invariably a part and which they help to shape – in Williams’s terms, language is both constituting and constitutive (Williams, 1977).2 In Thompson’s formulations, there is an inevitable tension between what might be viewed as hegemonic ways of seeing and structures of feeling that are, in Williams’s terminology, either residual, alternative or oppositional. The subject, in the very process of composing the self, is using the range of conventions and forms available within the culture for ordering experience. We might want to recognise this desire for a sense of structure as a necessary human function or need, as is the desire to render one’s life meaningful, and in this context the notion of a career, or (paid) work, narrative may emerge as an important organising motif. Thus what is it to be a worker, in a particular occupation, within a set of social relations, at a given historical time? Moreover, in the act of composure – as suggested above – lies possible challenges to dominant structures of feeling, hegemonic processes of societal incorporation into prevailing norms. What is important for Thompson, though, is that

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composure is never fully achieved, so that the work of composure does not produce in very many instances some neat narrative closure, a coherent and predictable pattern signified by a beginning-middle-end.3 Thompson suggests an open-endedness, an un-finishedness, characterises the memory-texts, or self-inscriptions, he analyses – so instead we will always come across tension and contradiction. This is borne out by Bourdieu’s comments on methodology in his The Weight of the World (1999). There he talks about the necessarily multi-layeredness which marks the responses of his interviewees; and, referencing novelists like Joyce and Faulkner, Bourdieu suggests that interpretation should always recognise the intersection of points of view and their shifting nature (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 3), and see within the discourses themselves the presence of what Bakhtin calls words ‘with a sideways glance’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 206), words orientated to some other and that remain powerfully constitutive of the narrative of self. People respond to what is said, but also to what is known (or known to have been said); thus the utterance is always a reply, marked by the words of others as well as the speaker’s own needs – the desire, perhaps, to say what hasn’t been said, an indication of a ‘hidden internal polemics’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 208) shaped by socio-historic forces. Thus we will encounter a semantic ambivalence within utterances, a situation which, I suggest, can be indicative of structures of feeling in solution – sometimes indeed in dissolution. In such moments, older narrative frames become seemingly obsolete and new ones are born. Thompson’s notion of composure turns out to be useful in a number of respects. The concept enables us to think about the different ways men and women speak about and give shape to their working lives and work identities or selves, and how these identities are inevitably bound up with the personal and private selves. Through this, it seems possible to construct some kind of framework to get at some of the important differences of response. From some preliminary readings of project interviews, it is possible to suggest the following: Men: 1. Early lives and entry to the workplace. 2. Some kind of turning point – this could range from simple luck to enabling structures. 3. Consolidation: making one’s way, established personally and publicly, leading to developing hopes, fears and aspirations; modes of endeavour at work to concretise the self as working subject.

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4. Change – this may revolve around a number of things from increased alienation to modified acceptance, to relative success. Structural change too and this relates to broader socio-economic issues. So unemployment may be a feature. 5. Retirement and work-life summary. Clearly, this framework does not suggest a simple uniformity of experience, a homogeneous structure of feeling, or range of understanding, characterising a career, or work, narrative – not for all the respondents within a particular sector, nor outside it. Significant differences could exist, not only between generations of men and between men in the same generational cohort (and this stands for women’s experiences, too), but evident in relation to different occupations and geographical regions, and around key categories of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. But important continuities and similarities stand out too. If we seek a model for understanding women workers’ narratives, it is possible to identify similarities existing alongside fundamental differences. Women: 1. Early stages: entry into the workplace. 2. Some kind of turning point, but one very different to the experience of men, an event – usually marriage and children – which radically interrupts their working lives, usually for very long periods. 3. Return – the choices made, voluntary or not. The necessity to juggle and reconcile public and private selves. 4. Change: as children move on, different possibilities open up (or close down). 5. Retirement and the work-life summary. I would not want to ascribe such ‘ideal-type’ models to our understanding too rigidly, perhaps in some circumstances not at all. At the same time, reading the oral testimonies of men and women of the later generation, their stories, time and again, take on this kind of trajectory. This approach can provide deep insights on generational change and gender construction and patterns. Work patterns dissolve, or are re-structured, and this has profound effects on people’s sense of their working selves. Richard Sennett has written eloquently on this topic, particularly in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998). Continuities exist, but may survive under tension, almost under erasure, in a radically altered socio-economic context. Thus it becomes possible to detect new structures of feeling, bound up with and powerfully

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linked to an experience of a post-Thatcherite dispensation which scrambles in profound ways many workers’ earlier expectations, or hopes, constitutive of a particular type of career, or work, narrative. Indeed, with contemporary workers, such hopes may be barely articulated at all. Composure points us also in this direction of form, and thus it becomes possible also to consider oral testimonies’ deep ideological structures. Allesandro Portelli has mapped out something along these very lines where he describes oral narratives of working lives under the categories of institutional, collective and personal. Characterising narratives in this way highlights ideological orientations based on socio-historical conditions and contexts, and a range of gender and generational experiences. Thus a narrative characterised as institutional is shaped by a prevailing set of experiences around union involvement, party political action and ideological struggle. Collective narratives place a greater emphasis on neighbourhood, the workplace and on the significance of community in shaping self. There might be a focus on ‘rituals and collective participation’. Personal narratives focus on the family and on the home, the life-cycle of births, marriages, jobs, children, and deaths; and personal involvement with the two levels (Portelli, 1997, p. 70). The work practices and culture of late capitalism enable us to add another category to this one, the notion of the entrepreneurial narrative. Here a strong neo-liberal sense of self-fashioning emerges as the dominant structure of feeling. In a number of significant respects this confirms Skeggs’s idea of enforced, or compulsory, individualism (Skeggs, 2004, p. 168) as a pre-requisite feature of contemporary capitalist culture.4 The informing dynamic of these structural components will revolve in significant ways around class, gender and generational pressures and limits. They will also have implications in terms of ethnicity – and the notion of composure here may disclose quite different trajectories and concerns so that it may be necessary to explore what I call a diaspora structure of feeling and its implications for understanding cultural identity.5 Thus dialogics, the wider utterance context and the importance of narrative structure combine in this analysis of oral testimony, to explore practical consciousness made discursive. All this emerges, in a significant sense, through the term I have taken from Raymond Williams: structures of feeling. I have leaned throughout this book on this concept as a central analytic tool. A real advantage in appropriating the concept in the context of this chapter lies in its capacity, in an analytical sense, to combine the two cognitive processes of thought and feeling as a means of making sense of self, and this is a considerable advantage when considering the key concept of experience.

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Structure of feeling and class habitus In The Moral Significance of Class (2005) Andrew Sayer takes as his focus the subjective dimensions of class experience. In the introduction I pointed out the importance of Sayer’s assertion that ‘class matters to us … not only because of differences in material wealth and economic security, but also because it affects our access to things, relationships, experiences and practices, which we have reason to value, and hence our chances of living a fulfilling life’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 1). Sayer highlights key categories which bear down on class experience – such themes as deference and shame, dignity and respect, and how these sentiments are withheld from or ascribed to others in a culture and society shaped by class inequality and difference. These sentiments and emotions contain strong moral dimensions, and matter in a range of implicit and explicit ways in how people make sense of, and respond to, the world. Sayer’s argument around the moral significance of class employs Bourdieu’s celebrated notion of habitus throughout, much in common with two other significant books referred to so far: Charlesworth’s A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (2000) and Skeggs’s Class, Self, Culture (2004). However, Sayer sets out to modify the term. Here I want to consider the use of Bourdieu in this context and in relation to the similar, but in significant ways, different ideas Williams employs for making sense of working-class consciousness, a number of which have been explored already throughout this book, though here they will be employed to explore a different context. According to Sayer, Bourdieu argues that action is interpreted through the concept of habitus. The internalised structure of the habitus acts as a classifying mechanism for making sense of the world – embedded dispositions generating in the subject an almost spontaneous response to the world they inhabit: a kind of ‘feel for the game’, or a ‘design for life’. The dispositions constituting the habitus, when activated, work to reproduce the social structures which shaped them in the first place, thus reflecting for Sayer the ‘habitat in which they were formed’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 24). And they are relational so that, in dialogical fashion, the dispositions are always oriented towards some other(s). The notion of subconscious, bodily learning which makes up the habitus, and which attunes individuals to the circumstances of their existence, undercuts a sense of resistance in Bourdieu’s take on subjectivity, it has been argued. The embodied dispositions which constitute the habitus, and which regulate behaviour as part of the processes of socialisation and adaptation to the way things are, has led Bourdieu’s

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concept to be aligned with notions of compliance and acceptance. This is seen to imply a pessimistic conception of human subjectivity, ‘a model of a perfectly malleable human, a model which makes it impossible to understand how anyone could react against and resist at least some parts of their habitat’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 31). I would argue that this conception of subjectivity informs Simon Charlesworth’s pessimistic understanding of class identity, and depending, as he does, on Bourdieu’s theoretical armoury to explicate his findings, this should come as no surprise. Yet while the habitus is a map for negotiating familiar terrain, it is not necessarily the key for understanding the self as a unitary entity for, as Bourdieu states, there can be contradictory entities making up the habitus though these too will be internalised. For Sayer, this ‘model of development is one of subconscious bodily learning through repetition and practice’; but Sayer’s main point is to insist on a process beyond, or accompanying, this, one which Bourdieu’s own formulations critically downplay. This is the degree to which the habitus is also constituted through a level of rational, conscious monitoring based on ethical considerations. In this view, ‘embodiment and rationality are not as opposed as generally assumed’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 28). The reflexive element characteristic of individuals’ actions stands as a key component of the habitus, a feature that Bourdieu under-valued and one that Sayer wants to rescue. Placing a sharper emphasis on conscious reflection, on how individuals continually interpret and understand various discourses – those which constitute the habitus, and those at variance with it – means that ‘embodiment and rationality’ are not estranged (Sayer, 2005, p. 28). Thus, in different terms, thought and feeling do not stand in some kind of binary opposition, so that feeling can constitute a mode of cognition, of evaluative understanding – help constitute, in fact, a process Bakhtin and Volosinov described as the ‘logic of social evaluation’ discussed in previous pages. Sayer explains this by pointing out that feelings of pride, shame, fear or envy may well be embodied ones in the sense Bourdieu implies, but they are also a means of understanding and engaging with the world. As sentiments, though, they may be unevenly distributed: one’s share of shame, pride, envy or fear will always be shaped in profound ways by unequal social relations, in terms of the distribution of various capitals. Moreover, Sayer insists, emotions are evaluative responses which derive from a range of causes and effects. They can be culturally, or discursively, constructed only in so far as they exist in some meaningful sense in the first place (Sayer, 2005, p. 38). In this way, culture does not go all the way down – it does not fully determine, but mediates. In this light, habitus

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has a necessary moral dimension: ‘ethical dispositions develop through socialisation and are not reducible to expressions of mere interest, nor are the norms with which they are associated reducible to mere conventions’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 51). Indeed, ‘they have a normative force deriving from their implications in well-being’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 51). This can lead to a whole range of moral and ethical imperatives and attitudes, and on to what we can call the individual’s take up, acceptance and adherence to commitments and to the desire for recognition. Much of this, I want to argue, can be captured, too, in the concept of structure of feeling, something I will move on to discuss more fully than hitherto. Generally, critics have employed the concept of structure of feeling in the analysis of literary texts, and I have done so myself throughout this book. Indeed, in much of Williams’s own work it is used in this way, but it has a broader use for making sense of cultural forms and formations and as social theory. Indeed, the concept holds a central place in Williams’s work with regard to the notion of ‘knowable community’ – the idea of community being vital in a range of important ways to Williams’s writing. And though the term structure of feeling may suggest a certain theoretical incompatibility or ambiguity with respect to cultural and social analysis, the concept does combine the two cognitive processes of thought and feeling which Sayer had accused Bourdieu of neglecting in the development of his notion of habitus. Structure of feeling can be seen as part of Williams’s critique of key aspects of post-structuralism, thus the concept is grounded in a notion of experience and presence that runs contrary to the anti-humanism of much post-structuralist, and indeed some structuralist, thought (see Middleton, 1989, p. 34). Thus, ‘the concept of experience [Williams] would … accept as in part an ideological illusion, but what he wants to retrieve is a recognition of the life processes, the praxis, that precedes analysis’ (Middleton, 1989, p. 35). Ideology, for Williams, does contain – in the sense of shape or limit – experience; but there still occurs the life-process, involving an effort after meaning, in the telling of stories in the widest sense of this term. This broader sense takes us to the idea of the cultural itself. The idea of culture, as stated in the introduction, lies in an acceptance of it as ‘a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ways of life’ (Williams, 1977, p. 19). Regarding it precisely as a process – and here the idea of structure of feeling as a way of seeing and experiencing emerges as a fluid and changing state: what Williams calls ‘in solution’ – places a strong focus on agency. One area of agency is the act of writing, as I discussed in the previous chapter. So it is that literature and writing produce a structure of feeling, which is open to critical analysis, and is

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privileged as a site where a specific sensibility can be encountered. This idea of sensibility takes us close to what Bourdieu means by habitus, and there are interesting crossovers, but also significant differences, between the two theorists. Williams sees fixed forms – accepted ways of going about things: a dominant ideology or indeed the habitus – locked in tension within the complexity of practical experience (Williams, 1977, p. 130). But this practical experience does not constitute the spontaneous orientation to the world inferred by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Using this construct, Williams states that he is ‘talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships; not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity’ (Williams, 1977, p. 132). This quote takes us very near to Sayer’s discussions around the cognitive dimension of emotion. “Feeling” exists within a framework, or structure, articulated as social and personal, the result of intersubjective social relations and processes, and in this sense there is something resolutely dialogic bound up with the concept of structure of feeling. Often this is a condition of pre-emergence, however. As practical consciousness, it differs from official consciousness in that it is ‘being lived, and not only what is thought is being lived’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). Williams denotes this as ‘a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become a fully articulate and defined exchange’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). Williams suggests that the best method for thinking this concept is through the literary term ‘style’, echoing both Bakhtin and Volosinov and their concept of register. While not actually a speech-genre in specifically Bakhtinian terms, the importance of language (which plainly constitutes speech-genres) in our understanding of structure of feeling remains crucial. If no two generations speak the same language the differences can be defined in terms of new, emerging articulations, characterised by ‘additions, deletions and modifications’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131), and yet, in the notion of ‘style’, something more general might be seen to have occurred within the very forms and grammar of experience itself. And what becomes important to identify, in a range of social/cultural forms – from buildings and fashion, to drama and literary production (Williams, 1977, p. 131) – ‘is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation of a period’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). What can be witnessed is a kind of pattern within the

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overall complex; a pattern of experience denoted by levels of continuity and change. Art and literature can bear witness to this, so that the process of writing becomes something more than the author’s individual expression, or “vision” – so ‘speaking for more than itself’ – as it necessarily engages with wider historical structures or events or formations with which artistic endeavour is always bound up. In this context, feeling suggests process and unfinished-ness – articulation finds uneasy expression through certain images and ideas that for Williams hover at the very ‘edge of semantic availability’ (Williams, 1977, p. 132). This tension offers to the critic the source of an often quite privileged insight on history. In particularly acute ways, then, actors struggle to articulate shared meanings and feelings at the level of lived experience, speaking a structure of feeling through various modes of address in possible dispute, or dissonance, with dominant ways of seeing. This is not necessarily to suggest an unproblematic and homogeneous structure of feeling in some simple way related to class, for instance. The notion of dialogism precludes this in any case. Other crucial co-ordinates intersect with any understanding of structure of feeling, most profoundly, perhaps, those of gender and generation. Moreover, no single, or general, structure of feeling will be evident; this difference Williams places within a framework of the dominant, emergent and residual. Williams suggests that structure of feeling represents a cultural hypothesis derived ‘from attempts to understand elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence’ (Williams, 1977, p. 133). We noted this in Chapter 4 and our discussion of formations. Art and literature are indeed unique sources for examining structure of feeling, but this does not require us to restrict its uses to these areas. Artistic practice, Williams seems to argue at this point, escapes the contaminating effects of ideology and this is the real source and special nature of the aesthetic itself. This is an intriguing position, though largely an untenable one. Cultural production is bound up with ideological production. Yet what Williams is perhaps really getting at here, alongside critics like Pierre Macherey (1978) and Terry Eagleton (1976), is that the special nature of literature rests with its propensity to rework ideology, present it at one remove, in the process revealing an ideological matrix within an emergent structure of feeling well before it can become a formalised entity, a fixed form, within the social itself. Thus structure of feeling in this context can be ‘specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often

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among the very first indications that such a new structure of feeling is forming’ (Williams, 1977, p. 133). Williams’s own well-known example is of the English novelists of the 1840s, and I have examined such premisses in Chapter 3. This specific formation of writers – with no obvious connections between them – is seen to adopt or adapt identifiable conventions to express a structure of feeling focused on the exploration of community, which represents the writers’ responses to radical social change. In the throes of the Industrial Revolution, it became evident that ‘class relations, including class conflict, [constituted] the conscious material of fiction’, even if this dynamic is addressed ‘precisely so it can be reconciled or evaded’ (Williams, 1981, p. 163). But it is within this evasion, and the modes through which the ambiguity occurs that the tension emerges. If the dominant ideology of the early Victorian period ascribed personal failing to poverty, debt and illegitimacy, the formation of writers which included Gaskell and Dickens exposed these conditions as deriving from a source that was instead social and economic, ‘producing an alternative position, relating such exposure to the nature of the social order’, a perspective that was only later more generally formed (Williams, 1977, p. 134). Then it offered the explanation or critique at a ‘reduced tension: the social explanation fully admitted’ (Williams, 1977, p. 134).6 We can claim that as a mode of cultural analysis structure of feeling provides evidence about the vital, and lived, experiences or attitudes of a group or of a society in a particular period, defining a particular quality of social action, within uneven processes of historical change. Any opposition to the period’s official consciousness is experienced as a ‘kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material’; and the term ‘feeling’ is appropriated to make a distinction from ideology as “world view” (the ideology of a particular class, say), because Williams is keen to identify meanings and values that are actually lived and felt, ‘and the relation between these and formal or systematic beliefs’ (Williams, 1977, p. 132). Here, our sense of structure of feeling moves beyond the specificities of the literary text to an analysis of the wider culture, and cultural formations more generally. The dialogic relationship observable in the previous quote – which implies a Bakhtinian struggle over meaning itself, couched in an ideological mode in which ways of seeing are allied with hegemonic power relations constantly striving to renew, or reinforce themselves – allows us to think about structure of feeling in relation to the social and historical and, more pertinently perhaps, to notions of community and class.

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Indeed, as a key word in Williams’s oeuvre, community stands out. The relationship between self and Other takes shape within community: here the subject acquires knowledge of herself/himself within a wider, and often determining (or ‘limiting’, to use Williams’s word for defining ideological processes) social context. Thus it is that structure of feeling becomes a mediating term to define the continuing interaction between the individual and the social, standing as ‘socio-historical description and development … integral to [Williams’s] understanding of community’; stressing at the same time the ‘process of communication by which interaction becomes possible’ (Eldridge and Eldridge, 1994, p. 140). The concept embodies a structure of past, present and future which can in turn lead the subject ‘towards a new way of seeing and/or feeling, resulting in the familiar appearing strange or the strange becoming familiar’ (Williams, 1977, p. 141). Through such processes social change occurs; it is shaped by actors as it in turn shapes them. Structures of feeling – historically specific and socio-culturally formed – become embedded in discourse, in discursive practices, or, to use Volosinovian terms, within the forms and conventions that shape speech-genres, which are then amenable to analysis. Tracing these forms and understandings leads us inevitably to wider concerns that bear upon social, historical and cultural co-ordinates as well as lived experience. Class, gender, generation, status and community are all categories, experiences and formations, playing a vital role in these complex responses, vital themes relevant to cultural identities and, in the more narrow context of this chapter, working lives. I will pursue this further here and in more detail in the following chapter. Williams’s observation that ‘no two generations speak the same language’ foregrounds those very categories of gender, class, generation. This is obviously echoed in Williams’s own direct reference to generations. Clearly the idea of generations strongly implies history, and historical process, experienced by groups who, in some real sense do not speak experience in quite the same way. Yet how we think of generations is important, here.7 Rather than considering different generations in some chronological sense or order, we need instead to see how generations interact over time with each other – or, more starkly, how and why different generations appear adrift, cut off completely. This is really a way of thinking about generations not so much as an “age gap”, but as intelligible instead through a wider understanding of the historical contexts through which they lived, as well as recognising the importance of sociological variables around gender, race and class and their

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intersectionality. Vincent points to the idea that generations ‘are historical and collective phenomena’, and that they may hold conflicting interests, so that they must be necessarily characterised as ‘simultaneously social and cultural’ in terms of social location and identity (Vincent, 2005, pp. 587–588). In this context, how individuals think and feel about work, self and their relation to wider structures and historical processes like class, can be explored through the two concepts I have been discussing throughout in relation to Williams’s thought: that of practical consciousness and the idea of structure of feeling. The thematic emphases and concerns that I intend to explore here are embedded at a fundamental level in modes of address and discursive structures. ‘Signification’, for Williams, ‘is the social creation of meanings through the use of formal signs … and is a practical material activity; it is, indeed, a means of production’, which leads to the ‘grasping of reality through language … as practical consciousness’ (Williams, 1977, pp. 37, 38). Hegemonic relations of domination and subordination saturate practical consciousness, and thus ‘the whole process of living’ operates to fix and harness meaning by ‘setting the limits of simple experience and common sense’ (Williams, 1977, p. 110). Yet such received forms – an official consciousness as opposed to practical consciousness, as Williams would have it – as Ben Rampton points out, ‘mingle in incomplete, confused and often inarticulate ways with our experience of everyday life’ (Rampton, 2006, p. 129). That is with practical consciousness, which is ‘always more than a handling of fixed forms … There is frequent tension between the received interpretation and practical experience’ (Williams, 1977, p. 130), offering understandings, and thematic and ideological modes, often in tension with dominant, and dominative, modes’ (Williams, 1977, p. 136). Now is an appropriate time to elaborate on some of those themes derived from oral testimonies, and consider how these concerns interact with conceptions of class, culture and self.

Themes around work identity and class subjectivities As these testimonies start to reveal the changes and continuities within a working life – or between different working lives – they will also illuminate the wider socio-historical conditions that Grele alluded to earlier, and which make it possible to stake some claims about the meaning of work and how this is bound up with our broader discussions of class, and working-class identity. So within the central and guiding thematic proposition which shaped the project’s core concerns from which this material

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emerges – that is the demise of the importance of work in consumer society, a development which some ascribe to the end of class identifications, which is my primary concern here, and in the following chapter – key themes and motifs will materialise and I will elaborate on the importance of some of these and draw on Andrew Sayer’s work on class to illuminate such matters. Loss and change: community and class Central to some of the oral testimonies, in relation to older workers in particular, is the theme of nostalgia, and encoded within this concept emerges a whole range of meanings around the notions of loss and mourning, and these things powerfully impact on our understanding of composure in the oral testimony. Writing on oral history as memory texts, Alessandro Portelli tells us that what is important about memory is that it is not passive, not a mere ‘depository of facts’, but should be regarded as an ‘active process in the creation of meanings’ (Portelli, 1998, p. 52). This insight reminds us that people don’t simply recall in some spontaneous fashion the contents of a life lived but are shaping and composing remembrance, reviewing it, constructing it in the light of subsequent experience; experience lived at the level of self but always in some sense articulated in the midst of the wider collective which involves relationships of all kinds. Moreover, impersonal social and cultural forces intent on inscribing the past indelibly with their mark shadow such accounts. Thus memory in some deeply profound way is dialogic. It is structured in and through discourses which remain social and historical, and its recounting always takes place in the presence of some Other. James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s Social Memory (1992) explores in detail some of these perceptions on memory. Concerned with how memory shapes the past, how it is both a force in history and is constituted by history itself, the writers see memory as the product of social groups, and though memory is seen conventionally as an individual property, it is more often than not experienced collectively and its articulation expresses this condition. Following Maurice Holbwachs, they suggest that all memory is structured by group identities – ‘that one remembers one’s childhood as part of a family, one’s neighbourhood as part of a local community, one’s working life as part of a factory or office community and/or a political party or trade union … and these memories are essentially group memories’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. ix). Thus the centrality of memory to identity, for understanding the self, for engaging with others and the world, shapes understanding in complex and often contradictory ways. The act of remembering discloses both a personal and social character, but its articulation takes the form of narrative, moulded by the

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conventions and styles of a culture that are in the end social and historical, and this defines the act of memory as collective, too. The social relations and cultural contexts in which individuals operate make memory and its articulation what it is; and language itself as vehicle of memory – whether written down or spoken – involves communication within heteroglossia, signifying collective histories of conflict and recognition. The authors argue, in relation to class memory, that ‘memories have their own specific grammars, and can (must) be analysed as narratives; but they also have functions, and can (must) be analysed in a functionalist manner, as guides, whether uniform or contradictory, to social identity’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 88). Though individuals will select the memories they wish to “commemorate”, as constitutive of the self, these memories quite often emerge from a collectively “held” stock of recollections that reach beyond self, and beyond immediate family, to neighbourhood, community and nation. Thus, a key component of memory texts – one which provides them with their various ideological ballast – comes most fully to the surface in the moments of “sharing”. In the case, here, of oral history accounts, it is possible to see within this tendency to share through articulation the significance of memory as something beyond that which is accrued to the individual. In most societies – even in the most literate – ‘shared memory, whatever its sources, tends to be communicated above all in the arena of the oral, through anecdote and gossip, with narrative patterns that can owe as much to oral as to literate traditions’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 97). Indeed, within the oral reminiscence, it might be possible to witness the articulation of a practical consciousness which counters the fixed forms of an official consciousness that finds expression in certain written, or other representational, modes. This provides a productive link once again to the notion of structures of feeling. Fentress and Wickham explore class memories as a set of narrative modes that exist with specific historical and cultural contexts, and which are also shaped by dimensions of place and space. From relatively homogeneous peasant communities, through to industrial landscapes, the writers explore grids of memory which are necessarily created by a shared repertoire of forms which are both personal and collective, myth and reality at the same time. Within the context of industrial cultures, the writers consider working-class memory. A greater complexity typifies such memory narratives compared to peasant communities. Place may hold less resonance in popular memory, though they point to examples such as former coalfield areas where conceptions of place/space and social identity are manifestly intertwined. But such

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identities may take as their starting point the experience of work, thus already community memory is skewed perhaps to a more masculinist trajectory – in pit villages the men, mostly, went out to work, while wives tended the home. While there will be vital commonalities in terms of social memory and collective experience – key co-ordinates and understandings – the differences may be of equal significance. There are some views that a cyclical memory characterises many workers’ consciousnesses, and this is governed by practices such as child raising, the annual holiday, the factory routine, which points to an almost pre-industrial conception of time. A linear, progressive narrative of time, as befitting a “proper” historical consciousness, only remained the preserve of workers’ leaders who then projected this structure of feeling on to the working class as a whole (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 121–122). Portelli touched on such tendencies earlier, in the discussion of deep forms of oral testimony. And this may relate in some respects to Giddens’s notion, outlined right at the beginning of this chapter, of a practical and discursive consciousness, and in turn helps reinforce my critique of that formulation. Fentress and Wickham are equally critical of the “complete” and “incomplete” historical or social consciousness – the binary structure outlined above. They suggest that it is misguided to conclude that a non-linear consciousness is the norm with regard to working-class culture, because there is ‘no impermeable membrane between the non-militant and militant in most working-class societies’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 123). Workers and their families participate en masse in strikes, and in mining communities in particular these events form part of a longer, often linear, historical narrative of struggle against employers and the state. Such events impinge on the community as a whole, militant and non-militant alike. Social identity and historical consciousness can lie deep – they ‘have to be sought out before it can be asserted that they do not exist; and that the absence of such a consciousness may be, rather than innate to a working-class society, a pointer to its defeat’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 124). In this context, memory is as much about forgetting as it is about reminiscence and recall. But beyond the boundaries of areas like the coalfields – and within them, too – the complexity of working-class communities and culture remain profound, and with the recent wave of de-industrialisation those complexities have widened, becoming often more difficult and fraught – something made quite plain in Chapter 1. Despite such changes and shifts, Fentress and Wickham argue that one point emerges very clearly. They insist that ‘the way memories of the past are generated and understood by given social groups is a direct guide to how they understand

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their position in the present; that one can, in fact, barely separate social memory from an analysis of the social at all, and that, conversely, any analysis of social identity and consciousness, could become an analysis of perceptions of the past’ (Fentress and Wickham, p. 126). Moreover, we should not regard the notion of nostalgia, often linked to memory, in some patronising and derogatory sense. As I have suggested elsewhere, nostalgia is complex and can contain a range of responses to change which, in turn, can provide subjects with a vital resource for managing and understanding change and even contesting it (Kirk, 2003). Nostalgic memory is not “error” or false consciousness (this is not to say it can’t be those things), but represents what Raphael Samuel described as ‘an active shaping force’ for making sense, so that ‘it is dynamic … dialectically related to historical thought, rather than being some negative other to it’ (Samuel, 1994, pp. ix–x). Recognition and respect Andrew Sayer acknowledges the twin ethical imperatives of recognition and respect as central to understanding class structures of feeling, or habitus (in his terms, drawing on Bourdieu). In doing so he undertakes an illuminating critique on the current vogue for the politics of recognition within academia and beyond. Such politics have in recent times taken up the dominant position with some on the left, certainly within the academy. In this politics, economic justice, or re-distribution, is sidelined in favour of cultural recognition, where the subaltern is finally allowed to “speak”, and where oppressed identities predicated on formations of race, gender and sexuality might acquire greater acceptance. Respect for cultural difference is based on an assertion that seems to regard the principle of recognition as a fundamental right and human need. That such positions can have the anomalous effect of legitimising racist ideas – white and black cultures are different and therefore should remain separate, can give great succour to fascist groupings or tendencies – highlights one of the weak links of this mode of understanding which predominantly informs current identity politics, as I suggested in Chapter 2. Nevertheless its hegemonic status is generally accepted. When we consider the position in relation to class, it is, as Sayer suggests, of some use but also problematic. Though the economics of class, in terms of a range of capitals as described by Bourdieu, remains central to understandings of inequality and access to power, class politics is, and has always been, strongly driven also by moral concerns and a sense of injustice. Thus alongside the concern with inequality and re-distribution, understandings of class must also take cognisance of the desire for recognition, which emerges as a

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central pre-occupation in terms of ‘the micro- and macro-politics of class’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 53). Historically, the struggle for recognition has powerfully shaped class politics, whether this struggle has been fought through the workplace environment or the communal space in which class is lived. At a very straightforward level, the battle to secure the vote for working men and women – fought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – constitutes a call for recognition aimed towards those intent on concentrating power and influence to themselves. Indeed, this is what we might call, in contemporary idiom, struggles over notions of citizenship. Trade unions function not only to ensure the full fruits of labour, in terms of material reward, go to workers, but that workers receive their full entitlement of recognition and respect for the essential contribution they make to the wealth and well-being of the nation. Axel Honneth makes a very similar point, showing how the ‘labour movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ built into political and economic demands the ‘aim of gaining recognition for people’s own traditions and ways of life, within the ambit of capitalist values’ (Honneth, 2001, p. 53). There are processes occurring here – the act of demanding recognition implies, or foregrounds, the dialogic relations which constitute the social and which can be, and are seen to be within a range of contexts, articulated in antagonistic terms. Recognition suggests de- or mis-recognition: the othering which also constitutes notions of the self. Relations of domination emerge from this, as well as relations based on solidarity. There are appropriate cultural forms through which recognition can be demanded – indeed, the picket line might be one of these. Other forms through which recognition can be explored and announced can be through the representations, arguments and perspectives found in working-class writing or in worker autobiographies, for instance, where the writer might seek both recognition and affirmation of a life well, or nobly, lived. I have already explored some of these points in Chapter 4, and will not dwell on them here. For Sayer, the importance of recognition lies in his understanding of ‘symbolic domination’ and how this is compounded by economic inequality so that the desire for recognition need not contradict, nor stand in opposition to, the politics of redistribution. The two things interact, sometimes closely bound together in subjects’ articulations, sometimes separated out. Indeed, when people seek recognition for the work that they do, this recognition, as suggested above, is not always demanded in terms of monetary reward alone. Moreover, in some occupations, the desire for recognition and respect may be the primary motivation for those involved in the work.

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Commitments The idea of commitment rests largely on the metaphor of investment. But the rhetoric here of economic self-interest – what Sayer calls ‘rational calculation’ – is not the full picture as the concept of investment can also suggest a deep emotional commitment to something that means more than utilitarian or material reward. Thus ‘the concept of commitments is superior to that of investments … because it implies a stronger and more serious attachment, one that has an emotional dimension and involves objects, practices, others and relationships which we care about’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 40). Commitments clearly vary, both in intensity and kind. A commitment to a particular political ideology or position will carry greater intensity than a commitment to a brand of soap powder, even though advertisers will hope not. For Sayer, commitments become the very stuff of character: without them, he posits, ‘we are likely to feel rootless or lost’; and ‘losing or being prevented from pursuing commitments we have already formed lead to something akin to bereavement, since through our commitment to x, x has captured something of us’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 41). This is self-evident in personal relationships, but also with regard to the public sphere, and how we earn or acquire our sense of identity and moral worth there. Forming commitments is what life amounts to in the end, so that ‘the most important struggles of the social field concern those over commitments’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 127). But the commitments we can make will be dependent on the types of resources at our disposal, resources that will be unevenly distributed. This takes us back to notions of the habitus – the cultural capital of middleclass parents will enable a more comprehensive commitment to their child’s education than the cultural (or economic, for that matter) capital of a working-class parent. This does not mean that the working-class parent will not be committed to their child’s education, only that they will find it much more difficult to fulfil that commitment without the pre-requisite social, economic and cultural capital that will enable them to ‘play the game’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 131). This can have profound ramifications, not only for the child’s progress through education and for his/her future quality of life, but for the working-class parent’s sense of self-worth, too, in that ‘working-class people may feel unable to attempt to enter those places [“superior” educational institutions] not only because they will experience prejudice but because they feel that indeed they might not be worthy of them’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 132). We can take the idea of commitment further too, examining other aspects of the social field. An obvious location in which the need and

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desire to commit oneself to something lies in the world of work, and it is not uncommon in this sphere for people to perform “beyond the call of duty”. This links to our discussion of recognition: work and identity are bound up with issues of fairness, respect, dignity and recognition. Sayer makes a very similar point, suggesting that any range of conflicts or affiliations in the workplace constitute powerful and sometimes overwhelming experiences for workers; so much so that ‘mixtures of ambition, struggle for self-esteem and emotional commitment … can have a huge impact on workers’ lives – at the extreme, prompting them to leave secure jobs and uproot their lives’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 42). Work, while a necessity, can be and very often is one of those practices that people care about. But if current debates concerning the demise of work hold good, then an important means of valuing oneself, others and the wider world has been radically eclipsed. At the same time, if work is, or has become, degrading or alienating in its very nature (for some commentators – most notably Marx – capitalist social relations always already ensured this anyway), how can such commitments form and for what would one be asking recognition? Some of the ramifications of such outcomes for the individuals concerned can be heard in the voices of workers in Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World (1999). Found in some of those narratives documented by Bourdieu and his team are not only articulations of pain and loss, but confusion, anger and despair: responses in part to this very loss or lack of recognition and to the end or impossibility of commitment. A society that did not inspire modes of commitment in its citizens, or offer means of acquiring meaningful recognition, might be seen to be running the risk of collapse. Hegemonic modes based on consent would have to be replaced by ones driven by coercion if the dominant were to maintain its power and privilege. Those critics who favour the end of work position, for instance, point to the transition in the West from societies of production to societies of consumption (or spectacle). Thus, through re-orientating the individual’s sense of self to consumerism, where work is out of the frame and where value and self-respect can be differently acquired, work no longer constitutes the sphere of commitment and vehicle for recognition it once did. This is a very powerful and influential argument, and it runs through Skeggs’s analysis of class identity in Chapter 3. As an aside, however, it is important to recognise (as Skeggs clearly does) that consumption, like everything else, is shaped by class in terms of accessibility to resources, status demarcation, quality and symbolic value, and to assume that those at the bottom end of the market fail to register the degraded nature of the

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products which they may not – or no longer – make but consume is of course to partake in a form of class contempt. Redundant knowledge/loss of “place” This formulation, in a number of respects, encapsulates how capitalism, and the technological advancement of its productive forces, operates. This is, of course, one major thrust of Richard Sennett’s arguments in The Culture of the New Capitalism (2005), and The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998). Sennett’s work documents how the expectations of and demands on workers in late multi-national capitalism differ markedly from earlier ones. These changes impact on workers’ sense of their own self worth in profound ways. The things workers once valued deeply, Sennett argues, and which were constitutive of identity as a worker (filtering into a status position beyond, within community or neighbourhood, for instance), no longer have currency in a climate where change, innovation, flexibility lead inexorably and increasingly to workers’ sense of their own uselessness – what we might call the condition of “knowledge insecurity” and “ontological doubt”, which is driven by and ensures the continual threat of redundancy.8 Redundancy here is not only the event of being laid off at the factory, office or warehouse, and thus rendered jobless. It suggests a deeper or more damaging condition embedding a sense of worthlessness. Thus, respect, recognition and dignity become qualities harder to achieve, or to aspire to, or to earn. How, then, is this bound up with any understanding of work and social and cultural identity, and how do we read attitudes to class in these complicated exchanges and processes? I will now move on to Chapter 6 to address this.

6 Working through Change (ii): Work-life Histories and Narratives of Class

This chapter explores how practical consciousness is made discursive, perhaps through ‘unease, a stress, a displacement’, through which emerge ‘hidden internal polemics’ – a range of ‘evaluative accents’ which constitute variable levels of class positioning and represent some of the formative dimensions of working-class identity and consciousness. I will be focusing on railway workers primarily, considering the notion of a career, or work, narrative and how articulations of class at the point of production are also expressions of structures of feeling derived from wider cultural and historical formations and contexts. Understanding dialogics here is really about understanding historical process, and the work of those writers discussed in Chapter 5 provides a critical framework for doing this. Early in the research process I interviewed D. D is aged 60, a track worker based in the north of England, and a life-long union activist, who has worked on the railways since he was a boy of 14. We met on a late Friday afternoon in his small office track side. A man of medium height, now overweight a little, but of sturdy build – the result of a lifetime of heavy, physical work. We were alone and D was happy to have the interview taped, but insisted on anonymity. He made two cups of coffee. D talked long and fluently about his working life, which he seemed to recognise was coming towards an end, slightly prematurely, and not with his full consent (pressures for early retirement). Sitting behind a busy desk, he made some space for the recorder by pushing papers to one side, then we hooked up the microphones. Both in front of D, on his desk, and behind him, on a separate desk, sat computers, the screens blank. The walls were adorned with track charts, unfathomable to the untrained eye, rosters and notices, the whole thing lit up starkly by bare fluorescents. It was the end of the working week and we were unlikely to be disturbed 169

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by anyone, he assured me. It was the time of the week, he said, when he went over the events of the past five days, signing off completed work, making checks and getting things in order – an end of week ritual. D started by talking about his entry into the occupation as engine cleaner, aged 14, on ‘the first rung on the ladder’. He explained the early days on steam trains, in the engine shop, with six, seven other local lads just starting off. He spoke of being made a fireman at 18, a job he kept until he turned 21, when he made a decisive move to Permanent Way – that is track maintenance. What appears initially as a steady linear progression in D’s story undergoes its first rupture, or break, whereby the demise of steam prompts D to rethink the prospects of holding onto a job on the footplate. This is both a turning point and moment of attempted consolidation (see tables on pp. 150–151). The choice made was not simply an instrumental, or practical one, as a way to secure future employment – “I knew steam was going and the engine sheds were going to shut” – but in a broad sense “cultural” too. The demise of steam ended the two-man footplate team; the arrival of diesel did mean a second man sitting up front with the driver, but D could see a time when that would be ended, too. Asked if he’d preferred steam, D replies: “Yeah, because you and your driver, you left the shed together and you came back together. So whatever you did, you did together.” At one level this may just be a symptom of an experience that could be coded in the term ‘the romance of steam’, and this is a sensibility not only evident in some older railway workers, but within the wider culture.1 But it runs deeper than this, too, and is linked to the social relations of work, a type of habitus, or structure of feeling, whereby a worker’s individuality – D often talks about significant individuals he worked with; “characters”, as he called them – finds a collective expression through the camaraderie and culture of work. As his narrative unfolds it begins to take the deep forms described by Portelli, though it develops in hybrid mode: both as an institutional narrative and a collective one. Institutional in the sense that D’s working life is embedded in class politics – he is a dedicated union man: “my father was a labour man, and I mentioned it to him when I went home to say that they wanted me to join the union, he said, oh you should always, because they protect you.” The ‘hidden, internal polemic’ here, in the shape of a class politics, foregrounds the generational link which suggests a structure of feeling passed down in the family group. This will lead on to D’s own deeper involvement in union matters: “A company councillor, which is the second grade, you know the second stage representative, also I’m a first stage representative which is a local rep, and also I’m a branch secretary.” There is a clear

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tone of pride as D describes these achievements, in the light of leaving school “barely able to read and write at all”. But the testimony also bears the marks of Portelli’s collective narrative, with the importance of the workplace and neighbourhood bound up with articulations of self, and I will explore this shortly. Mid-way through the interview D tells me that in all his 43 years of working on the tracks he’s barely put in a basic working week, always taken overtime to bump up his hours. I ask him why. D.

Well it’s the positions I’m in and making myself available. Not grabbing in the sense, but rather than handing it over to somebody else, I’ll do it, you know, and I’ve had different changes in my career and I like to think I’m a leader rather than a follower and I like to know that if I’m going to do something new, I want to know all about it before I actually take the task on, so I know exactly where I am and which way, am I going forward or backwards? And what I found throughout there is … that as we’ve moved from the old days, because if you remember, the old days back in the sixties, nobody had anything to prove, because you had your lowest grades, and then you had your supervisors and managers. They probably live on the same row. You know what I mean, they probably live in the same terraced houses, and all they had was a cold water tap and a toilet outside in the yard. And that was quite common, and where we move to the modern day now is that people you know, have got material wealth rather than working and friendship wealth. It’s different completely now.

Reference here in the opening lines to “positions I’m in”, is an acknowledgement of responsibilities – not “grabbing” (money-grabbing), but a commitment to his work, and a desire to take the initiative (“leader rather than a follower”). As noted, commitments are obligations that can run deep: they can be characterised as deeply emotive and cognitive at the same time, absorbing individuals’ everyday lives. They can be pursued solipsistically, or as part of a wider set of alignments. D underlines his commitment to the job, and to his sense of himself as a “good” worker. There reverberates, too, an underlying desire for recognition of this commitment. D says “I like to think I’m a leader” (italics mine), and within that qualification there are few better examples of what Bakhtin calls ‘words with a sideways glance’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 208), where the phrase “I like to think” does not simply denote a quiet modesty, but an acknowledgement of the presence of some Other whose

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opinion on this may coincide or conflict, and in so doing refuse to value and confirm the commitment D shows to his work and, by extension, his class politics. In the extract, D begins by referring to work then he folds this perception into a much wider context of experience, producing a commentary on a ‘whole way of life’. It’s a picture we might be familiar with, and I will return to this shortly. I then ask him: JK

Do you think it’s more kind of individualistic then?

D Yeah, it’s like, very similar at work now, it’s like having your next door neighbour and not even knowing what their name is … You knew everybody and I mean for instance, you knew every night when they went to the pub and what chippie they went to and you knew everything. I’ve got a gang of lads what work for me now, and they all live in the same village and they’re all virtually related you know, but that has gone within this industry. Where before it was like pay the rent and you’d got your tins for your gas, your electric, sort of thing and then holiday money put to one side. Then you had your wakes didn’t you, you know like everybody went away in the same town at the same time. That’s spoilt a lot of relationships now, and what it is is that that’s come into the workplace because now they’ve done away with the wakes, people just take holidays on their own and what it is now with some of them, is who can go the farthest in the world now. In some respects, we could argue, work for D is – or has been experienced as – an extension of the family, or perhaps more accurately, of community. This flags up quite clearly one of Portelli’s taxonomies discussed earlier – the collective work-life narrative as a deep form, characterised by a greater emphasis on neighbourhood, the workplace and on the significance of community in shaping self. There might be a focus on ‘rituals and collective participation ‘ (Portelli, 1997, p. 70). These relationships are the ties that bind, and they are deeply embedded in a working-class experience where everyday existence produced an intimate culture of proximity, a structure of feeling where work/leisure, the public/private dialogically interact. So he talks of neighbourhood: everyone knowing everyone else, using the same pubs and chip shops; moreover, “you had your wakes [holidays] didn’t you, you know like everybody went away in the same town at the same time”. He mourns the demise, saying it’s “spoilt a lot of relationships now, and what it is is that that’s come into the workplace”. The loss is related to the workplace, too. D’s work as a railwayman was once an occupation – like many of the older, staple, industrial occupations – which absorbed into its

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structures most of the working men (usually men, it must be noted, though not exclusively) in a given locality. Yet, it cannot be reduced to one side of the argument or another for D; there is a dialectic producing a structure of feeling which helps constitute a sense of identity for both men and women of D’s generation and it finds expression within and beyond the workplace and into community. The narrative is grounded in recollections of earlier times and so we might detect a sense of nostalgia here too, thus reflecting the theme of loss – though if it is nostalgia, I would argue that it stands as nostalgia as critique.2 As D makes discursive a practical consciousness, a structure of feeling reflects the social, historical and cultural contexts in which D’s generation has lived and through which they have been shaped while also shaping these very contexts in turn. Conjuncturally, that would be the period of the 1960s and 1970s, the period of consolidation in D’s working life (and perhaps his family life too, with children growing up, entering school, etc.). That resonant phrase earlier about “working and friendship wealth” sums up the importance of the loss that D seems concerned to explicate between that moment and the present. This economic metaphor is illuminating: it denotes value – a kind of moral economy, in fact, through which he conducts his life both at the workplace and beyond. This response, too, expresses a dialogic structure around notions of then/now rather than them/us, though that emerges later on. To some, this might read a bit like an extract from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and we do know that this slightly rose-tinted version of working-class experience has shortcomings and might hide a multitude of sins (see Steedman, 1986). Yet the dissolution of working-class culture that centres Hoggart’s narrative is not a sentiment felt in D’s testimony. Admittedly, Hoggart is referring more to developments in the immediate post-War era (particularly the 1950s), and stresses the powerful impact of mass commercial culture on working-class life. D speaks of a period some twenty years later, though whatever reconstitution of working-class culture that has taken place is not seen in the negative prospects of Hoggart. That D builds his analysis on a dialectic between the workplace and the community (Hoggart ignores the workplace and class politics altogether) may have some significant bearing on this. For D, Hoggart’s fragmentation seems to emerge later, in the crisis years of the mid-1980s (and here we have echoes of Charlesworth’s analysis back in Chapter 1). Here, an interruption occurs in the narrative trajectory – his own, and the wider collective as he perceives it – and thus the story’s composure is rendered unstable, in both senses given by Alistair Thompson earlier. This is seen in the speaker’s desire to organise (or order) a narrative in a certain way to instil a measure of reassurance,

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but also in the way D desires to ‘seek composure’, and through this ‘an alignment of our past, present and future lives’ (Thompson, 1998, p. 301). There appears a decisive break, producing that tension and ambivalence in the narrative, as it is forced to engage with the official versions (the official consciousness) of the period, the moment of rapidly altering socio-economic circumstances under the sign of Thatcherism, where familiar structures, formations and alignments start breaking up. That we are in the presence of a residual structure of feeling does not render it the sentimental reminiscences of an older generation. The resonance it holds for D lies not in the desire to return to a type of certainty or simplicity (the good old days), but in something deeper than that. We could perhaps define it as the loss of a social collectivity that is not only signified by the fragmentation of community, but in the struggle for solidarity at work, which is a part of his narrative around unionism. And this has deep implications for working-class identity (at least for someone of D’s gender and generation). In D’s narrative, work and outside work are indissoluble, and the markers of a particular class habitus are everywhere. Now, for D, speaking of contemporary times, it’s about “who can go farthest in the world”, and there is a very interesting ambiguity attached to that phrase that goes beyond references to holiday destinations. Therefore expressed, too, throughout this narrative, we might want to argue, is a critique of a perceived individualism characteristic of the neo-liberal dispensation that contributes to the transformation of the workplace, so that his every word conveys not only the powerful feeling of alienation D increasingly carries with him, but, as Volosinov would point out, the logic of social evaluation. These are a set of norms, or normative judgements, pertaining to what matters to D: about what is of value and what is not. To some degree this involves articulating what Sayer terms a ‘definition of what is good’; constituting narratives about ‘who people want to be, what they want and can expect to make of their lives, part of which … is a struggle to form and pursue commitments and to get access to the means for doing so’, so ‘in the process, they are simultaneously struggles to establish self-worth’ (Sayer, 2005, pp. 133–134). Later on I ask him specifically about those changes in the railway industry. JK And what about the change in the railway industry when it was privatised? Did that affect work relations? D Oh yeah, it killed it. It actually killed it, because what I was saying to you before is, where it’s dead man’s shoes, you knew who was going to get the next job, because they’re quite rightly entitled to

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it, you know, but unfortunately, as we moved on, we got like, for instance, track charge men, what … was called gangers in the old days, and they could actually get the job and they can’t read and write. But the track knowledge was beyond reproach, what they had in their head was … it was just that they couldn’t put in on paper, but there wasn’t that requirement for them to do [so] in them days, now there is. So you’re looking at your academic qualities before your actual experience and it’s quite common now to appoint somebody and not know what they’re doing. And the men know that. D’s opposition here between academic knowledge and practical knowledge further suggests his alienation, his loss of power and autonomy at the workplace. Under privatisation the rules of the game have changed and this impacts on D’s position, too. Under British Rail, workers injured on the job were found other duties, maybe lighter duties – they were allowed to continue at work, they were, as D put it at one point, “treated humanely”. D lost the use of an eye at work, but could still supervise the track, could still bring his full experience to bear, so long as another worker accompanied him. But he sees the changes he describes here as ways of edging him out, disenfranchising him, rendering his knowledge redundant; and not only his: a particular generational experience may be in the process of being articulated here.3 He goes on: D

No because they changed the rules to say that I can’t do that [go on the track], now the only thing that I needed safety-wise is that I needed a competent person with me. You can’t be on your own, if you’re doing a job with a lot of men and machines and things like that … Now that I’ve got a mobile phone I talk to the signalman by the mobile phone, and I have people doing things for me, which is nothing extra, not costing any more money … but what I do is get one of the lads to jump in the van and he comes round with me, as I’m not allowed to go on the track on my own. Because they’ve changed the rules now, they’ve took all that off me. What it is, because they’ve more or less made me impotent in the gang do you know what I mean, so what I did is, I’ve moved on, I’m like the greasing supervisor now, which is lubricators. So I’m in charge of all that, I do all the planning and managing. I manage that.

D’s career or work narrative has begun to stall, and this begins to bear down upon his very sense of self. But he is looking at how to move on,

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stay with it. D is no quitter. As he says, he is managing, not so much in the sense of being in charge but as a quest for control: reaching out for control as his position in the workplace becomes increasingly marginalized. In the past, his disability meant nothing – he had the knowledge, the experience and that counted – but under privatisation of the railways, and new management structures and ideology, that’s changed, he insists. What emerges in D’s account is a sense of the loss of a ‘knowable community’ (Williams, 1958), and this feeling is evident, too, in earlier comments on the lived experience of working-class neighbourhoods. In this process the loss is intense – the metaphor he uses to signify this is impotence with all the gender connotations that it signifies. It could be argued that a working-class masculinity, associated with a type of work, comes into crisis here too. While the references to ‘they’ (pronouns are very important), throughout his narrative signify his uphill task – agency, in this context, is in the end in the hands of others. In Williams’s taxonomies of residual, dominant, emergent, D expresses a residual structure of feeling founded on a sense of loss, and this sense of loss is revealing because it flags up a post-Thatcherite dispensation now dominant in many workplaces, particularly felt in former nationalised industries, and affecting in important ways working-class affiliations. It is both an individual and collective experience of loss that workers across a variety of industries have tried to recuperate in a range of ways.4 This impacts on questions of commitment, recognition and alignment. Commenting on the importance of commitments in this light, Sayer suggests that their significance is profound in relation ‘to others and to causes and practices, and the disappointment and loss of sense of self that follows from the inability to carry these through’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 133). Interestingly, Sayer goes on to comment on the view held in some philosophical fields that ‘lasting commitments and relationships [are] central to the development of character’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 133). This point has significant implications for discussions of D’s sense of self, and for broader conceptions of character as well. Character, something to which D refers often, is not a value developed in individualistic isolation through projects of self-fashioning, say, but is a set of qualities which emerge through dialogic encounters with others in key contexts and situations that set limits and offer possibilities for the furtherance of the self and community.5 A sense of disempowerment represents one crucial effect of the changes described, and yet this disempowerment need not be in the end fully disabling, as recuperative strategies come into play. We have a residual structure of feeling articulated in D’s testimony – but residual does not imply archaic6 and can indeed constitute acts of resistance in

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themselves to the dominant order as they contain deeply ideological, and therefore, evaluative accents, defining consciousness and shaping action. Despite all the pressures and limits set for D he still pursues his commitment to class politics, and to properly ordering the workplace – for the workers’ benefit – as he sees it. This is reflected in the question I ask towards the end: JK But the younger lads aren’t that interested in getting involved in the union? D

No, there’s been nobody really come through. So, when I go in, in six years, if I’m still here in six years, there’s nobody to replace me, at my level if you understand what I mean, it’s going to be somebody brand new and will have to learn from scratch. We get the odd lad who comes forward who will be a local rep, or a health and safety rep, but that’s all we get. We encourage them, without frightening them off; we sort of take them under the arm and you know … What I do is rather than shove them in the limelight, I say to them that the first meeting that you have, when you’re writing for a meeting, say you want me to accompany you. So as a second stage representative, I go with him. And I’ll show him how it’s done … What I’m trying to do now at the moment, is get them invited to come on our second stage meetings, as observers to see what happens when they pass it on but in the present climate, we don’t want them in because it’s a bit rough going.

We witness a type of nurturing role here, one important to D. Indeed, we could see such behaviour, following Savage (2000), as deriving in part from the nature of manual labour historically within a British context. Pointing out the importance of apprenticeships as key institutional processes ‘by which boys became both men and skilled workers and thereby members of the working class’, meant forcing ‘young men to recognise that they might have to fight for their own future once they had completed their term’ (Savage, 2001, p. 128), and in many senses this need to fight one’s corner is something D’s fostering of young, prospective union representatives seeks to encourage. He sees it as his purpose to protect the younger worker from the intricacies of workplace politics and organisation while, at the same time, realising the necessity to expose her/him to these very processes. This is the continuity of formation, alignment and tradition that has shaped D’s own work-life experience and class consciousness, and which he strives to maintain and to keep alive and pass on.

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The ‘logic of social evaluation’ and its implications for working-class identity One thing our discussion has highlighted so far is how work-life histories of a certain generational group might be constructed around what I call nostalgic memory, or nostalgia as critique. The construction of memorytexts is a large part of what oral testimony is about, reminding us that in most societies – even in the most literate – ‘shared memory, whatever its sources, tends to be communicated above all in the arena of the oral’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, p. 97). Within oral reminiscence, it might be possible to witness the articulation of a practical consciousness, which encounters (or counters) the fixed forms (hegemonic modes) that find expression in the notion of official consciousness and which return us back to the importance of structures of feeling. The term memorytext referred to above is taken from Annette Kuhn’s writing on memory and class. A central premise Kuhn’s Family Secrets (1995) rests on is the view that any recourse to the past represents, in almost all cases, a response to feelings profoundly experienced in the present.7 Such expressions might be seen as treading ‘a fine line between cultural criticism and cultural production’ (Kuhn, 1995, p. 3). Her own work on memory and class has to do ‘with the ways memory shapes the stories we tell, in the present about the past – especially stories about our own lives’. [And] ‘with what makes us remember: the prompts, the pretexts of memory: the reminders of the past that remain in the present’ (Kuhn, 1995, p. 3). Thus, the past is never passive, a page read. So it is – and we witness it with D – that personal narratives of what is, in a whole range of respects, a collective experience and identity, have an important part to play in understanding what have been called elsewhere the hidden injuries of class.8 A clear link exists to the notion of a moral economy of class feeling and experience, one articulated through the particular narrative orientation a testimony takes. Volosinov refers to the ‘theory of social evaluation’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 87), seeing the utterance as a historical speech performance, thus constituting an act shaped by and shaping the historic moment. When D talks of BR acting humanely, there is a whole set of evaluative claims being made there – the notion of ‘social evaluation’ being enacted through the very words he deploys and accentuates. If social division and power relations are expressed in the utterance then these relations can be detected through such accentuation – a ‘dialogic angling of the word’ indicative of practical consciousness oriented towards hegemonic modes, productive of a double-voiced discourse that

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enunciates a ‘hidden internal polemics’ which we have discussed. The hidden polemics in D’s case are in large part with the “They” of his narrative discourse – not all that hidden either, as it might be in other cases. They are intent on removing his competencies – his skills, his knowledge, his identity, in the end – and thus eroding his sense of self as a worker in the process. It is no surprise that we will encounter a semantic ambivalence within such utterances, a condition which, I suggest, can be indicative of what Raymond Williams calls structures of feeling in solution – sometimes indeed in dissolution. In such moments older narrative frames of understanding become seemingly obsolete and new ones are born. I will turn to another interviewee now, again from the railway industry. J’s testimony is pitched in similar terms to D’s in a number of important respects, though there exist significant differences. The similarities are evident, despite J being a woman and being only 50, ten years younger than D. She describes her job, in a very sardonic tone and with a raised eyebrow, as that of “train manager” (the new term for ticket collector/guard), a job description, she implies, which does as much to conceal the nature of the work as shed light on it. Like D, she too is “born and bred” in the locality. I start by asking her about her very first full-time job, which she took at the age of 15. She disliked the job, in a large retail store, intensely. JK

Why did you take it?

J

I had no choice. I had to go to work when I was 15, so I was told there’s a job there, take it, because you didn’t get Social Security like you get now. My actual ambition, I wanted to be a nurse. That’s what I done in school in my work experience and it was what I wanted more than anything. And even at the tender age of 13 then, when you would be spoken to that when you were 14 you would then start looking at careers, I knew what I wanted … But unfortunately that meant going from school to college and in 1970 it was you need to bring home money and you’re just a girl anyway. You weren’t allowed ambitions from a working class background unless you had, if you were maybe one or two children in the family and you had ambitious parents, you were deemed extremely lucky. I was given no choice because my next younger brother was ambitious like me but was a male so he would be the one who would, if college was available, he would be the one that would go.

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Clearly gender plays a vital place here in how any career/work-narrative is shaped, in its formative moments, by the class habitus into which J was born. Though the imperatives of gender will cut across this class narrative, it is the pressures of class that seem primarily to shape the early trajectory J’s working life takes, however, as with the majority of working-class people of this generation. Hence, the need for family income means that college is not an option; this is compounded by the presence of male siblings who will take priority should the option at some point become a realistic one for the family. “Ambition” is something, she suggests, that does not come easy to the working-class family: there is a setting of limits, and these limits revolve around the material needs of the unit, which must come first. There is another aspect to this too, to do with the notion of expectations, which link, in turn, to ideas and feelings of self-worth. That college is not an option may well be the result of material need, but it is also a response to limits imposed by artificial boundaries which infer certain innate attributes/talents to one social class and not to another, reproducing the very cultural capital and socio-economic privilege which helps fix class structures in the first place (see Sayer, 2005, pp. 129–132). Earlier, I suggested a working framework for trying to conceptualise the trajectory of men’s and women’s working lives. Thus, I spoke of some type of turning point early on in the narrative for both men and women. In the case of working women (we are talking paid work here, of course), it can often turn out to be a very different type of turning point to male experience, taking them out of the world of (paid) work altogether. Such an event – usually marriage followed swiftly by children – radically interrupts their working lives, usually for very long periods. At the same time, the option of not going out into the workplace is illusory: making ends meet, when one wage isn’t enough, takes precedent. J took a series of part-time jobs, which “kept food on the table, paid the rent, and helped towards nappies because at that time … if he [her husband] was in work there was money, if he was out of work there wasn’t”. Later, after finding a child-minder, she found clerical work: “I got him [her son] child minded for £5 a week and I got £17 a week working in the post office, but I’d gone from part-time to full-time then. And then unfortunately again circumstances changed, so we had to move and I had to hand my notice in.” J’s marriage was shaky from early on, and after the arrival of a second child, she separated from her husband and found herself on social security, something she seemed to experience as a kind of personal failing. It was possible to work part-time, earn up to a certain amount and still claim necessary benefits. Here, her

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life takes on a particularly hectic hue: J

I said [to the social security advisor] because there’s a parttime position and, if I can do this for 12 months I’ll have a reference to take to a full-time employer, ‘cos that’s the other big thing was they won’t take you without a reference. So they said yes you can do that. So I took the children to school in the morning, went cleaning till 11, then finished there – that was for £4 a week, did that three mornings a week, and the job was as a dinner lady so I went working as a dinner lady and then when my children finished school I was able to take them home, and then on a Thursday and Friday teatime and Saturday evening I worked in a chip shop, and altogether I earned £13, I think it was £13.20 or something a week.

JK It doesn’t seem much for all that effort. Was it? J

Well it was what you had to do. It’s like I read about some of these people who said they did this and they did that. They had influence, they were all families with money, they were middleclass. I was not. And it’s very difficult to say to somebody, I’m intelligent enough and capable enough to work in your employ and will give 100 per cent, when your CV consists of married, two children age blah and blah, they’re [employers] doing the maths and thinking “really”. Qualifications nil. So there you go. That is how it was then. And I did that for a long while.

The dialogics of class and gender mark most of J’s testimony. The narrative she tells is one of struggle with adversity. It is an epistemology of survival, a lesson on how to make ends meet through the binding together of part-time labour around the requirement of child raising. But it constitutes, too, a quest for self-respect, and this is combined with the desire to have that self-respect – earned through work and the limited economic autonomy that it brings – recognised by others. The markers of class resentment are clear enough – an anger with “they” who take their privileges so lightly. This returns us to the idea of the dialogic. Discussing verbal interaction and orientation, Volosinov states that the ‘word … is the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee’; so that ‘I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 84). But the utterance, or speech-act, takes its shape and its intelligibility within specific contexts and historical and cultural situations. Here, J defines

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herself in opposition to those she identifies as middle class. Through the interview situation, she addresses them (and me, as a “privileged” observer) as she speaks for herself and others in her situation. More significantly, in J’s case, this facilitates an utterance marked ‘predominantly by overtones of active and self-confident protest with no basis for humble and submissive intonation’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 89), and this is a structure of feeling we have encountered before, in the working-class writing explored in Chapter 4. Finally, she finds something more stable and more regular, working for British Rail. Here she follows in her father’s footsteps and those of her younger brother. Employment on the railway is often characterised by this family tradition, for instance in former railway towns like Crewe or Swindon. J started as a night cleaner, working the carriages – “ten o’clock at night, finished six o’clock in the morning, six nights a week, one night off”. It was a big decision to take the job, but in the end a collective one: J

And … well it was ’88 then when I saw the advert. And the only thing was it, it’s carriage cleaning nights so I spoke to both my children who were then teenagers and I said if I get this it’s £125 a week and this’ll be a way of us, you know, coming together and they said Mum go for it and I said well, you know, I’m going to be out all through the night and it was a big responsibility to say you’re going to be on your own and they were like look, we’re not babies.

It is notable, compared to D’s testimony, to what degree J’s story speaks about family (in more ways than one, as we will see), thus highlighting the centrality of gender here. Her job as cleaner has, of course, gender associations, too (“women’s work” – though J moves on to become a train guard/ticket collector). And yet to attempt to separate gender and class would be to do a serious disservice to J’s experience, which is inflected throughout with the significance of class. I ask her to say a little more about her time as a carriage cleaner. JK Okay, then, you’re working nights as a carriage cleaner. J

Yep. Very demeaning job, a job that had to be done but again people I work with: ooh wow, various ages, varying descriptions, a lot of the characters. It was a good old-fashioned get in, get stuck in, get the job done, what has to be done, don’t upset the bosses, and then let’s have a cup of tea. Job well done, job finished.

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Her work mates on this job ranged across gender, generation and ethnic groupings, and though some tensions were evident, she insisted that people mostly “got on and got on with the job”. The idea of character emerges again as an essential quality, and this reminds us of some of Sennett’s arguments in his The Corrosion of Character (1998). Character is ‘the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 10). He goes on: ‘Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end … character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 10). Both D and J appear to talk about character within this framework. Dialogically, the qualities which make up character are mutually confirming and reciprocal: in relation to workplace affiliation and identification expressed here, character is also about what “gets you by” in working conditions which might be seen to rob people of dignity and thus of character, or at least, of individuality. Character has a powerful class inflection, then, which might be seen to cross the boundaries of race and gender in the way it places a value on the capacity to outdo conditions of life that degrade and in so doing to claw back both individual and collective control. Recall D’s commitment to “nurture” young union activists for the future; here the notion of character is linked to that of commitment – to the job, the workplace, one’s comrades or colleagues, and to a type of behaviour thus deemed worthy of respect and recognition. So I follow this up by asking J about the importance of work and her feelings of working on the railways. J The thing people may not understand, why do people stay 47 years in a job; 30 odd years in a job. You’ll never see that in these youngsters’ lifetime. They’ll never see it. They live in a disposable world. We joined a company, a railway company; British Rail became your family. They were an extension of your family; you hurt one, you hurt them all. And it’s still in the old, middle and older end today. If something happens to one of your colleagues in London, Edinburgh will know within the hour. And we will all be … there are disasters on the railway. A true railway person takes that home with them. A railway person dies; it’s a dreadful thing, dreadful thing for anyone to die, but that’s like a very tiny member of your family’s gone. You’ve never met them but they

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do the same job as you; they turn up with the same home life problems as you. So if it happens to one, it, it has a ripple effect and hurts everybody. And it’s the same in every grade. This is a complex response. At one level it could be seen as an example of ideological interpellation – swallowing the BR management line that we’re just one big, happy family. No conflict there. In this instance, the family metaphor is quite explicit and J often resorts to it in her account – family is important, both at the personal level and in this more metaphorical construction. The metaphor of a disposable world flags up that end of a sense of permanence that Sennett explores in the context of the new, flexible capitalism. There is thus a perceived generational gulf in experience – echoes of Williams’s assertion that ‘no two generations speak the same language’ – in J’s assessment, one that powerfully impacts on the world of work and relations between workers. We might be more firmly, here, in the grip of nostalgia again, seeking some lost golden age. When I ask her a further question she is more interested in emphasising her earlier point. JK Is it still the same today as it was when you first started? J

Why have people stayed all their life? Why have people stayed for 50 years? Why did they say, like I did, I’m going to do this children for one year to get us on our feet, then I’ll move on; and in 2006 I’m still on it? Because it’s a community. I joined it. It’s an extension of your family. We might have got … you get your shirkers as well as your workers in any industry, but even the shirkers, when that train left the depot it sparkled. I am … in this day and age, as a previous carriage cleaner, if we’d sent trains out the way they look today we would have been sacked. Not negotiable. We had a shift production manager who would wear a pair of white gloves, walk up and down your train put his hand underneath the toilet bowl, bring it out, let there be a spot on there, clean it again. Because when it went out it was pristine … Because, regardless of public opinion, from the top to the bottom everyone cared … Now they get on, do a quick sweep, a bit of a wipe of the windows, stick it through a mechanical wash, that’s clean? Can I, can you see the difference between the two?

Clearly the notion of ‘evaluative accents’, or the logic of social evaluation underpins J’s statements, in this recounting of lived experience. The dialogics of this piece remind us of Volosinov’s contention that discourse is always shaped within a wider utterance context that is

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potentially conflictual and that the sign takes shape through its relation with other signs in use. So when J uses the phrase ‘regardless of public opinion’, she is contesting another myth of BR – not the one we have implied above (the ideal employer) – but the one representing BR as shabby and unreliable and ripe for selling off, for privatisation. And when she speaks of privatisation, she speaks in the shadow cast by the word of some Other – in this case those narratives promoting privatisation as the key to solving the problem of the railways. This emerges once again in very straightforward linguistic uses such as pronouns – them and us or we and you – it’s articulated in more complex senses through metaphor: that of the family, and all that that implies. And it is interesting, too, how she throws the onus back on me to respond – the dialogics of the interview situation are not lost on J. She endeavours to get me to see something from her own and, by extension, her colleagues’ point of view; is indeed striving to challenge, even change any possible alternative take on events that I might hold. The use of the family as metaphor is partly a cognitive device, but also one grounded in an emotional response to change and to continuity within the workplace community, and it resonates with that structure of feeling expressed in some key parts of D’s testimony. So at one level it helps J to understand structures and her place in them; at another, it consolidates and affirms affinities and solidarities bound up with the categories and conditions linked to notions of gender and work, class and community, and connected political alignments and formations. Volosinov’s (1973) stress that sign is the arena of class struggle, and that class does not coincide with the sign community, that is ‘with the community which is the totality of the same set of signs for ideological communication’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 23), suggests it is vital to detect, or expose, the differently oriented accents as they intersect in every ideological sign – producing what Volosinov describes as the sign’s ‘multiaccentuality’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 23). Existence is thus refracted through the sign, not simply reflected. Practical consciousness, as inner speech, articulates – makes discursive – lived experience as struggles over the nature of meaning and thus of experience itself. So that seeing the word as ‘a social sign before its function as a medium of consciousness can be understood’ (Volosinov, 1973, pp. 14–15), is central. The sign constitutes a struggle between classes (and can denote intra-class tensions, too, as B’s testimony seen later will imply) lived at variable levels and in a range of historico-cultural contexts. Thus, ‘in order for any item, from whatever domain of reality it may come, to enter the social purview of the group and elicit ideological and semiotic reaction, it must be associated with the vital socio-economic prerequisites of the particular group’s existence;

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it must somehow … make contact with the bases of the group’s material life’ (Volosinov, 1973, p. 22). In J’s testimony, the structure of feeling in dominance revolves around a notion of loss also, suggesting, perhaps, its residual character – but embedded within that response is a range of interconnected concerns which I have already pointed up as crucial to people’s sense of self-worth both within the workplace and beyond, and these are to do with pride, respect, commitment and recognition. This lies within the very nature of the utterance used to address change and continuity in a working life – thus reflecting Volosinov’s understanding of the utterance reflecting the altering evaluative purview of the actor. Thus, new aspects of existence, once they are drawn into the sphere of social interest, once they make contact with … human emotion, do not co-exist peacefully with other elements of existence previously drawn in, but engage them in struggle, re-evaluate them, and bring about a change in their position within the unity of the evaluative purview. This dialectical generative process is reflected in the generation of semantic properties in language. A new significance emanates from an old one, and does so with its help, but this happens so that the new significance can enter into contradiction with the old one and restructure it. (Volosinov, 1973, p. 106) This is another way of talking about emerging structures of feeling. Traditionally, railway occupations offered workers a degree of autonomy from management impositions (Savage, 2000; Strangleman, 2004). In the earlier days of steam this was particularly so, out of which emerged ‘strong traditions and customs associated with self-help and mutual improvement’, so that it might prove ‘difficult to separate training and socialisation’ (Strangleman, 2004, pp. 28–29). Out of this a specific workplace culture might be seen to shape consciousness of self and Other in complex ways. The class consciousness, or consciousness of class, articulated in the extracts analysed above, coalesce with gender and generation (as well as notions of community), a coalescence which in no sense eclipses the significance of class. We might ask whether such structures of feeling survive in younger railway workers, given the changes in the railway industry in recent times and the purported demise of class as shaping identity. Is it the case that no two generations speak the same language? I suggested earlier that one way of thinking about generational experience was not through such notions as an “age gap”, but by considering the historical contexts through which generations live. Particular

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historical contexts mark generational experience in significant ways, helping shape formations and alignments as actors engage with the world. We could see D’s testimony as reflecting the rise and decline of trade union strength (as well as notions of the “working-class community”) in the 1960s and 1970s, and his involvement in this politics rendering his position as that of an ‘organic intellectual’ of the working class.9 The notion of habitus is pertinent here in terms of socialisation processes; but these particular, and identifiable structures of feeling articulate the cultural and social values, the political orientations or traditions, evaluative accents and purview, through which a group (defined as a generation, but also a class) will live. It will be uneven, as generational formations are complex in themselves, both in inter- and intraclass terms, so that the claim that no two generations will speak the same language is designed to denote structures of feeling as intricate: emergent, residual or newly dominant, shaping and shaped by prevailing conditions. Speaking to younger railway workers disclosed both breaks and continuities with older generations. The massive restructuring – in terms of organisation and culture – which rail privatisation wrought was profound, especially for those workers, such as D and J who began their working lives when British Railways was a nationalised industry.10 In The Weight of the World (1999), Bourdieu and his colleagues explore similar generational changes affecting assembly line workers in French car plants that had undergone deep structural changes, and they examined the impact of this on class consciousness. There Bourdieu et al. talk about the younger workers’ disconnection from their older colleagues, which is in part expressed through a kind of depoliticisation, particularly in relation to the ‘culture of opposition’ developed and fostered from the 1970s by older workers within the workplace (Bourdieu et al., 1999, pp. 263–264). Younger workers felt more vulnerable in the workplace, however, their entry into work in an era of shutdowns, difficult and protracted, and so the desire to hold on to the job (and associated security) vital and overwhelmingly pressing to them. Thus, the ‘veterans molded in the activist culture “felt” that they could transmit none of their “political” knowledge or experience to this group and discovered that the chain of generations of workers at the plant had been broken’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999, p. 264). Clearly, such a position is echoed directly in parts of D’s testimony. And the notion of ‘workers in transit’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999, p. 265) reverberates in J’s assertion that the younger generation are the product of a more “disposable world” and that staying on the job matters less to them, or may not be a viable choice at all. Older train drivers

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(not even that old: men in their 40s), refer to the younger drivers coming through as “boil in the bag” drivers. The expression refers to cheap, instant food available in supermarkets: but the metaphor works here to signify their disdain at company practices which have reduced the time a man or woman needs in training before being let out of the depot in charge of the unit alone. This reflects a devaluing of the work itself, and by extension the worker. Yet, as we see in the following extract, there emerges a similar response to these processes from younger workers themselves that reflect enduring co-ordinates linked to class experience, which suggests that it is simplistic to see this situation in simple “age difference” terms. A is 29, and describes his job on the railways as a conductor/guard. He joined the railways at 22, after leaving school and working in supermarkets for five years. He applied to the railways and after the interview was glad to get what he called a “proper job”. Within a couple of years he became an active trade unionist. This was in part the result of a run-in with management that followed an incident at work during which a passenger assaulted him. Management was unsympathetic regarding the time he took off ill as part of his recuperation. JK You put yourself forward because of this earlier event? A

Yeah, as a direct result of that. So it’s from that moment: a telephone call from the Station Manager, trying to intimidate me and I wasn’t having any of that. I’m on the attack and I’ve been on the attack ever since.

JK Right, so that was a turning point, a key turning point. A

That was a turning point. I mean … I mean I was quite happy to tread water at the time, just doing my job, doing my own … thing and, you know, quite happy. So I mean, you know, I was thinking that with the passage of time on, on the Railway, if I could get somewhere I’d be blessed. But at that time I was still cementing my position as far as I was concerned. Two years in, just being an experienced conductor … I never got derogatory, uh, comments about my work … But that thing, that’s it. I’m not being intimidated by a manager. And, um, that’s what really kicked it all off.

JK Do you see a potential kind of conflict between management and the workforce, then? A

There is conflict. When management turns into intimidation, bullying, not rewarding the effort put in, that sort of thing, I get

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very annoyed about that and, um, that really … that’s the thing which really gets my … gets my back up. And seeing people trying to devalue the job. A works out of a depot that is strongly unionised – he tells me, “the, the coverage and the, um, representation afforded at X Station is second to none. It’s a very, very, very strong, strong station” – and it is these institutional structures which initially enable him to resist coercion. In this testimony, A has switched his objection from that of not wishing to be personally intimidated by aggressive management, to being affronted by management’s efforts to “devalue the job”. The shift represents a response that is more general in orientation and holds ramifications beyond the individual. But it is also a moral assertion that turns upon the right to respect and dignity at work, and recognition of the work performed. Evident within the shift from the particular to the general is that notion of a “we-experience” defined by Volosinov, an utterance marked by ‘overtones of active and self-confident protest’, and we’ve seen this before. The desire for respect reflects a need for some level of autonomy from unbridled authority, or domination from others. It is a “them” and “us” binary structure. I came across such intonations elsewhere. Thus a driver, S, (aged 52), speaking of his feelings for his work, states: S

Well when you get, when you’ve had full day and you go somewhere and you’ve achieved it and nothing’s gone wrong and you’ve got back and you feel like you’ve done something, achieved something and everybody’s happy. And sometimes a passenger will come and say thank you driver, you feel good.

There is a form of working-class pride operating here, in the notion of a job well done. Sayer (2005) suggests that the rationale for working-class pride lies in the occupancy of a kind of moral high ground which is the ‘consequence of their lack of any undeserved advantage’, and that ‘their merits … cannot be attributed to the accident of birth and inheritance but have been achieved in more difficult circumstances than those enjoyed by the better off’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 181). Working your way up, from cleaning lad to train driver, leads to a sense of self that is an achievement based on staying the course. Similar understandings can be seen to operate in another response from a train driver, P (aged 42). Notions of respect, and pride in work, come into tension here with technological changes he has little control over; thus he feels a growing alienation from work itself.

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P

Because I’ve been there a while and, you know, it’s … there’s still a little bit of respect there but it’s very thin now. Drivers, oh, I’m sure we’ve lost a lot of respect, um, the management now, they seem to be trying to take train driving away from you, um, more and more with the technologies coming onto the unit, they can more or less drive their bloody selves now. You’re just there, I think, to carry the can if anything goes wrong and they can pinpoint you for it.

What these extracts seem to indicate is a requirement to feel valued, and a sense that that valuation is withheld or distorted. Skeggs (2004) distinguishes between use-value and exchange-value in terms of the ‘subject of value’, in the processes of the constitution of the self (Skeggs, 2004, p. 186). Reworking Marx’s taxonomies, she places them within the context of subjectivity, defining exchange-value as that corresponding to the ‘enlightened but self-interested middle-class self’ (Skeggs, 2004, p.186). In this context, the notion of use-value signifies qualities that cannot necessarily be exchanged, such as authenticity and integrity, and these seem to be the very qualities valued by our respondents above. In P’s case he feels “they” (note the significance of the pronoun) are intent on “trying to take train driving away from you”, and the resonance of the metaphor references Marx’s understanding of alienated labour, whereby here a combination of technological surveillance and intervention function to rob the worker of any sensuous contact with the product of his/her labour (and in the process, we might add, with both the cultural/knowledge value and the social/status value he/she might have accrued to himself/herself). P If somebody had been on 19 years and … and, er, 11 months, and another driver had been on 20 years, that month difference, he automatically got the job whereas now it goes on, um, like I said, whether your face fits, they’ve another name for it. Suitability, that’s what it is. JK Suitability? P

So if you get on well with your manager, you’ll do all right.

While we may wish to acknowledge the shortcomings of the practice of seniority to which P refers, the central point lies elsewhere. Discursively the differences ‘between two social groups arise from important socioeconomic premises of their existences, [so that] the intonation of one and the same word will differ profoundly between groups … one and the

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same word will occupy a completely different hierarchical place in the utterance as a concrete social act’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985, p. 131). Surely this operates in this case, effectively confirming language as a site of class dispute. The term “suitability” carries a different ideological orientation with management than it does with workers, and thus is articulated through differing and conflicting evaluative accents, encoding the logic of social evaluation embedded in practical consciousness concerned with conceptions of justice, of “what is right”. The disdain with which P spat out to me the word “suitability” embodied within it a microscopic insight to the conflictual relations of class articulated at the point of production.

The narrative of class transition Finally, and briefly, I will look at an example drawn from the teaching profession. This is not necessarily a typical response from the cohort of teacher interviews, but all the more interesting for that. This particular case explores a slightly different emphasis in terms of working-class identity. I use the piece as a way of offering some insight on the nature of class and notions of class mobility – or, as I prefer to call it, the complex process of class transition. Another writer long ago worried over this problematic at a personal level when he argued that ‘almost every working-class boy who has gone through the process of further education … finds himself chafing against his environment during his adolescence. He is at the friction point of two cultures’ (Hoggart, 1957, p. 292). But what does it mean to be ‘at the friction point of two cultures’, and how is this liminal space negotiated from a class perspective? What occurs when – through what gets called educational mobility, say – a person is decamped out of the class into which she or he was born? Examining the class transition narrative is revealing, and further exposes how arguments claiming the death of class remain fundamentally flawed. There is a long established trope characterising representations of working-class life, one that articulates the theme of escape. It is a potent one, for instance, in much working-class writing and representation, and in theorising about working-class culture, as witnessed in some of the discussions in this book. It has a powerful resonance in some of the founding texts of British Cultural Studies, such as Richard Hoggart’s work in particular, as well as the work of Raymond Williams and, if more obliquely, it lies in Bourdieu’s commitment to class analysis. Its presence is stark in the films and novels of working-class life from the late fifties

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and sixties; and the wave of British proletarian writing in the 1930s, touched on briefly in Chapter 4, encoded the narrative of escape in terms of emancipation from a purely negative material existence: exploitation, deprivation, shame. It constitutes a pervasive theme, then, in writing about the working class, and in coming to understand one’s own experiences as a working-class person. But what is this border crossing meant to signify and how is it experienced? Sayer (2005), referring to Bourdieu’s definition of class, points out that the various capitals Bourdieu identifies (cultural, economic, symbolic) denote that class difference need not be marked by clearly defined boundaries and can be seen, at least in part, as forming continua of sorts (Sayer, 2005, p. 80). Nevertheless, what is evident in the demarcations of variable capitals is a ‘dialectic of competition, distinction and differentiation which is central to symbolic domination’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 80). Thus ‘economically, members of different occupations such as accountants and teachers are only indirectly dependent through the division of labour, but symbolically they not only have different amounts of economic, cultural and educational capital but actively distinguish their own valuations of these and other goods from those of other groups’ (Sayer, 2005, pp. 80–81). These are, for Bourdieu, crucial ways in which class is constituted – a “soft” domination which nevertheless instates hegemonic relationships between groups by the setting of limits or placing of pressures, to use Williams’s formulation of ideological control and social reproduction. The process of class transition requires the acquisition of appropriate cultural or economic capital, those goods which will facilitate one’s elevation to a different, higher, class position. Yet for those seeking such a course this can become a process laden with practical, material and psychological hurdles. One reason for this might be that ‘through … processes of competition, objective classes as Bourdieu defined them, differentiate themselves from others’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 81), and as this differentiation is in part formative of class identity and status it is a differentiation that comes with a set of practices that might be alien to, or be withheld from, those desiring to acquire them. This seems central to understanding some of the dilemmas of class transition. I want to consider some of these arguments by examining extracts from an interview with B. Now in his early 30s B is a secondary school teacher of English in a northern English school. However, B did not take what might be seen as a traditional route into teaching; from a workingclass background, he entered university much later as a mature student. He was only two years into his job when I spoke to him. I was interested to know what he did before becoming a teacher.

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JK Okay, you came into teaching late on. So can you say a few things about what you did before you became a teacher? B

Before I became a teacher I generally worked as an admin office assistant. I worked for the local Job Centre as a civil servant dealing with admin, dealing with, um, job applications, benefits and various other Social Security benefits for clients. I’d done that for about three or four years. Before that I did a lot of manual labour, building sites, uh, working in factories, um, delivery driver, various kind of jobs like that for, for agencies as well as fulltime employment, employment for different companies.

JK Right, what was it like? How did you find this … the work? B

I found it laborious, I found it boring, I found it underpaid. I felt overworked, I felt mentally abused by colleagues in higher positions than myself who didn’t have the skills that I’m aware of now that I didn’t have at the time. I felt that I was mistreated – and that’s … at the time I didn’t understand it but now I understand how I was treated because of the education I’ve put myself through, because of the reflection I’ve done over the years. The teaching’s taught me that.

B reflects upon his early work experiences on leaving school; fairly typical ones comprising those of a young working-class man with few qualifications, stepping into the job market. His reflections are overwhelmingly negative. The desire here is for something more fulfilling, which his class location denies. That location is one specific to a type of working-class space stigmatised in recent times: the council estate. JK Can you just say a little bit then about your background, where you’re from? B

Where am I from? I’m from, to be quite frank, I’m from a Northern council estate, X, which is a very rough council estate. That’s where I was brought up. My family were Irish. Um, they come from very poor Irish background roots. I was brought up, very poor background. Parents didn’t have any ambition, very caring parents, loving parents. But they didn’t have any, any ambition, any foresight to, to look forward or … not just for them, but for the children as well. They came from a background that was … well, they … that’s how they’d learnt … And my father was a builder, mother was a housewife. Um, she didn’t really work and my father was earning quite a lot of money but

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he still … He had enough money actually to move off and go and buy a decent house and live in a decent area but, because of the values that he’d been brought up with, he still chose to live on a council estate and sort of, in many ways, lived like destitute when he really had the money to do something. Um, the place where I was brought up, it was rough; drugs and drink I was involved in because of where I was brought up. Um, not anything serious, just, you know, a joint here and there and things like that. Um, and basically, to move on from that, how I got off there, when I was 19 … 16, I left home, just bummed about really, travelled a little bit. And for me personally, how I changed and got out of that value system, was to … I remember one day going to Y College on an opening day. I was about 19. And I walked in and I remember seeing someone there who was interested in the same course which was, um, an art and design, an ‘A’ Level art and design course. Um, and I was talking to him about it and I’d never really spoke to anybody, even though I was 19, from outside where I used to live. It was kind of isolated and you sort of, you went through your own tribe, if you like, of people on that estate and that’s how it was. But I knew in my mind when I was young that this is not right but I didn’t have the direction, I didn’t know which direction to take. And I didn’t have the parents to back me up and say this is what you need to do. Um, so I remember talking to this person; I went on this course, this art and design course and there sort of my life changed … The course really was parallel to, to … I was really more interested in meeting the people on the course; I did the course, I enrolled because I wanted to be with these people and from that I can remember what … clearly, going up to a house in Y, which was like, like, I don’t know, a homeless person going and living in a mansion … So, yeah, so, so that’s how I sort of got out of that. Emerging here seems to be a narrative of rescue, one which sits alongside the working-class narrative of escape.11 Being drawn into the orbit of the petty bourgeoisie provides him with a glimpse of life less marked by the pressures of economic necessity. Recalling the notion of social evaluation, which ‘organises the form by which the event [utterance] is communicated: the arrangement of the material [words] into digressions, returns, repetitions, etc’, it is possible to identify this complex in this hesitant exchange. These tensions are built around conflicting experiences of

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class – of being both inside and outside the class of origin. Embedded in the logic of social evaluation is a sense of one’s self-worth, and this can be detected through expressive intonation, affecting the very form of utterance. The language used here to order experience is marked by a class anxiety to which I will return. JK Is that, is that a class sort of scenario, then? B

Yes, it was a class scenario, yeah. It was, um, basically I’d been lower class, working class, had one set of values. I chose to go and look at a college course, um, under great duress. I was very confused about the whole thing. I remember going and I met people from different classes, um, and it changed me and it had a positive impact on me. I wasn’t cynical about it; I was very open-minded. I wasn’t stereotyping, I wasn’t judgemental. Uh, and I just wanted to get to know these people and I enjoyed being in their company and I learnt a lot from them. And that continued right until this day and it will probably will for the rest of my life. Um, so yeah, it was class.

This brief foray into the territory of another social class, through a college course initially, appears at first as a moment of epiphany. The mobility desired here is both social and geographical. Finding himself in what Diane Reay has called a ‘negative emplacement’ (2000), where space is circumscribed and deemed Other within dominant understandings (and increasingly his own), the desire is for escape. Of course, this is a way of speaking working-class identity negatively – not, it has to be stressed, denying it outright. Class is located spatially in this conception, through the council estate, and the stigma attached to such locations in dominant culture. I go on to ask him how he dealt with this growing awareness; this gulf opening between himself and his family and friends. B

Yeah, the thing I found real hard was when I was mixing with these people I found myself distancing myself from … I know this sounds, maybe sounds bad for my parents, but I … it didn’t. It’s just that I was going through a learning process and, and I used to … the more I was with these people, the more I didn’t want to be at home. And it sort of was the catalyst for me leaving home, you know. I thought I don’t want to be here. I love my mum and dad, they’re fantastic, but they were different; they have a different ideology to me. I’ve moved on now and I want, I want this

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life. I want to move on from that, understand who they are and things like that. I wasn’t being arrogant in anyway whatsoever, maybe a little bit of ignorance there, I don’t know, but I just … I wanted my life to be different. I didn’t want to end up like John Smith – that’s a fictional name I’m making up – stuck on the council estate at 45 year old, stuck with five kids that he can’t provide for, can’t, can’t give them any sort of future. I didn’t want to be like that, you know, and that’s how I saw – it’s stereotyping, yeah – that’s how I saw that what life … that’s all that life could produce for me on there. Um, but I did find it hard going through the transition between classes a very difficult thing to do and I’m still in contact today with old friends. Ironically I only bumped into two the other day; I took mum to the shop and they all just stare. I nipped over in my lunch hour because she’s a pensioner. I bumped into two of them and in fact … and then I can still remember the feeling of being different and I was trying, how you doing and things like that. And I found myself, to be honest, almost being false, you know what I mean? I became self-conscious. It’s quite bizarre but it wasn’t preconceived or anything, it just happened. Because I was trying to react to these old emotions that I’d had from years and years, 20 years ago, with these people that I knew who were still … I could feel the emotions from them, do you know what I mean? And I found it difficult so there was … I sort of went through this sort of … I were getting a bit pretentious, I suppose, trying to bring myself to this level, do you know what I mean? So, yeah, it was difficult, the transition between classes. What Sayer (2005) describes as an ‘ambivalence and unease’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 200) characteristic of people’s understandings and experiences of class, reverberates throughout B’s testimony. This is so because class is a highly charged topic through ‘its associations of injustice and moral evaluation’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 200). B rejects his class position, but does not deny the injustice associated with it, nor is he entirely unaware of the moral evaluations he makes here: “it’s stereotyping, yeah”. Still partly inside the class habitus, through family connection, he resists blanket dismissal. Bumping into old friends prompts a reaction of guilt, almost, in that he might have been “a bit pretentious” in ever considering ‘class flight’ in the first place. A fear that he was disclosing middle-class pretensions in a sense exposes his newly acquired cultural and symbolic capital to a searching critique. Thus he performs being working

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class – “being false”, “becoming self-conscious” – an action which, as we see below, doesn’t quite come off. JK Did you ever think you’d be a teacher? B No. It … I … the two lads I was on about who I bumped into the other day, the first thing they said to me was – can I be frank what they said in this recording? JK Yes, yeah. B What a fat bastard you are. Because I’ve put a lot of weight on since I last saw them; it’s 10 or 15 years. And they couldn’t believe I was a teacher. They couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know how to react to it. Conceptions of class and gender align here in a quite painful fashion – class mobility having “softened” the boy who had gone away to seek better things on a higher social scale, and this is embodied almost literally in the excess flesh he now carries, robbing B of a type of “muscular masculinity” so often associated with the male working class, and which is often worn as a token of pride (though it needs be said, a “muscular masculinity” does not denote a violent masculinity, as is so often assumed in middle-class circles). But this blunt reaction may also be regarded as a way of putting B in his place. Class transition seen from those “left behind” might be regarded as a form of betrayal, or “playing out of your league”. To those one hopes to come alongside on the social scale, however, it might be seen as presumption, or even a threat, as redistributing the necessary capital required to occupy such a position threatens it with devaluation. This can result in equally discomforting encounters. B tells me about his first post on graduating from teacher training. B In the previous school I’d been there about two weeks and I was given 60 books to mark. I’d never done marking before; I didn’t know what the National Curriculum levels were. I had the books and I went home and marked them and they wanted them back in four days, 60 books I’d never marked. Now I’ve been in teaching a few years now and it takes me, even now, four days to mark one set of books, two hours a night. So imagine being a, you know, three weeks into teaching. So I was given these books and I marked them and I was up every night until three, four in the morning and at work at six, seven in the morning, marking.

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And I’d made some grammatical errors, you know, they looked at them. And I had one or two grammatical errors. I’d put stupid things but because of sleep deprivation I’d just completely … and the pressure they’d put me under unnecessarily. And this is what they said to me. They took me up to a room, the professional mentor and the subject mentor. It was … when there was a concern they were there. And they sat me down and they said, right, we’ve had a look at this and we can’t … this is unacceptable. And they said, you know, drama – do you fancy doing just drama instead of English? That, that’s what they said so they made me feel crap. They made me feel absolutely like that. I remember sitting there and I felt like saying fuck off. I’m sorry, I really did. Uh, and I sat there and I felt like, I felt like crying and they made me feel worthless and I couldn’t believe … Eventually I said no, I want to do English, you know. I said I can’t believe you’re saying, you know. In my heart I was saying this, in my mind, but I didn’t want to say it because they were, to me they were like people I should be looking up to and learning from. So that’s the kind of thing they did. At one level this may be seen as a “typical” initiation into the hectic world of a teacher. At another, it is a “test” which he perceives he’s failed. It recalls Sennett and Cobb’s comment on class fears and anxieties. It takes the following form of a ‘fear of being summoned before some hidden bar of judgement and being found inadequate [and] infects the lives of people who are coping perfectly well from day to day: it is a matter of hidden weight, a hidden anxiety, in the quality of experience; a matter of feeling inadequately in control’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1992, pp. 33–34). This is a structure of feeling lived at a range of levels as it informs and shapes working-class experience. It cannot be pathologised as individual failing, intellectual deficit or character lack (though his so-called mentors imply this). Such feelings are the product of class relations. Here, B is forced to play out the drama of return. In terms of the concept of composure, elaborated by Alistair Thompson and discussed above, B’s narrative of flight – one carefully constructed and recounted in the course of the testimony – is knocked off course. The sense of worth acquired in the struggle to “escape” dissolves in a moment as he is judged by his superiors and found lacking – “That, that’s what they said so they made me feel crap. They made me feel absolutely like that. I remember sitting there and I felt like saying fuck off. I’m sorry, I really did. Uh, and I sat there and I felt like, I felt like

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crying and they made me feel worthless and I couldn’t believe it.” It is as though he has been found out; his pretensions confirmed, his desire for “better things” dashed. For those pursuing the narrative of flight, the shadow of the council estate is never far away. * * * I will close this chapter with some comments on what I call loosely here the “testimonial” approach to making sense of working-class utterances and experience, and the researcher’s place within this complex. In Chapter 1, as we saw, Simon Charlesworth made his own case for the significance of oral testimony. Mapping the transformations of northern working-class life, the writer – in the mode of Orwell, and many others since then – insisted on the need to bear witness, but also, unlike many other commentators, to capture working-class experience through the words of his interviewees. But there he questioned the efficacy of any simple question and answer approach. This mode, he suggests, yields little, and it does so because it fails to account for his respondents’ lack of linguistic competence and this deficiency is premised on dispossession and domination: the symbolic violence of the class inequalities embedded in the existential landscape the writer traverses. As a sense of one’s inadequacy silences, the interviewer must insinuate himself/herself on a more intimate level, essentially, of trust. Consequently, Charlesworth tells us: ‘It is because I am a working class person that I am able to occupy space in the appropriate manner so that I am absorbed invisibly into context through which the understanding exhibited in background practices is disclosed and, with it, the world so constituted’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 132). This corresponds to Bourdieu’s notions of habitus; the writer’s disposition towards the world he encounters signifies that he is “one of them”, organically tied to its ways. In this scenario, the ethnographer stands as equal to his/her object of study, constituted and constituting in a mutual process. Charlesworth describes this as, ‘a kind of engaged, committed interaction in which one helps the other to articulate pieces that have contributed to the totality of their experience, the conclusions that life has brought to them’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 144). The relationship, then, becomes both intimate and Other, and Charlesworth would finally insist on some axis of equivalence. But is this necessarily the case? Eroding the anthropological distance – the space between, so clearly evident, for instance, in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, constituting what I called “outside eye” – remains fraught with possible pitfalls. It may be in this

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case that the encounter merely reinforces for the people interviewed a kind of dependency, with the academic acting as midwife, bringing to light as yet unarticulated experience. This sense perhaps emerges from the implications of the method, or at least the assumption within the method. What we have is a kind of “deficit model”, which implies that the ‘practical consciousness’ (Williams, 1977, p. 124), or ways of seeing, of the interviewees can only be made discursive and given legitimacy by the academic observer; can, indeed, only come into focus through the guiding lens of the outside eye. Embedded in a ‘pre-discursive’ world, life for the working class is expressed through a mode of comportment and style of speech ‘that is a kind of originating expression emerging from the amorphous silence that envelops the dispossessed in so much of their experience’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 172). This is speech replete with the raw emotion of immediate perception, yet curiously empty and without meaning. Finding both a way of writing and a way of listening becomes paramount. A mode that will capture, among the pain and distress on the emptied northern working-class streets he maps, the ‘vibrancy of a world so directly encountered’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 175), and how this materialises in all its ignominy, tragedy and stoical humour, a structure of feeling which seeks once again that hidden dignity within deprivation, something which discloses, for the writer, ‘a kind of valiance, a sort of honour, a dignity in the face of the experience of position that working class life is’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 219). At the same time, Charlesworth appears to have an acutely ambivalent relationship with this northern working-class vernacular, regarding the working-class people he speaks with as ‘linguistically dispossessed’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 138), and ‘perceptually deprived’, thus being robbed of true ‘self-realisation’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 284). This leads to empty conversation, a culture of poverty, where talk revolves merely around food, drink, shopping and sex (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 279). Deprived by poor education of the cultural capital common to the middle class, a communicative deficit emerges ‘which stigmatises working class people in relation to dominant markets and ensures a fractured experience of the social, an experience of degradation and not grace’ (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 283). Bourdieu, writing about method, is more circumspect when it comes to the encounter between interviewer and interviewee. He argues that there exist inevitable levels of ‘intrusion’ which characterise the interview situation (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 608). It is the investigator who imposes the rules and sets the game in flow. At some level the very construction of a

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set of questions that facilitates enquiry invariably, in an important sense, shapes the narratives of respondents, pre-determines kinds of response, no matter how the material is subsequently employed. In the formulation of interview question we impose a structure: we start at the beginning and work through to some sense of an ending. Yet the process of recollection, of composure, characterising the interviewee’s response, is more complicated than that – as I have tried to argue above. Moreover, as interviewers, we do not stand outside the dialogic relations constitutive of the social. Indeed, the interview scenario itself represents a microcosm of the nature of the dialogic, as Bakhtin and Volosinov understand it. This discursive exchange, or speech genre, is not free of both potential and very real power dynamics, and thus ethical issues lie at the heart of things. Bourdieu has another term for monologism present in linguistic exchange and discursive practice and this he calls symbolic violence, and in The Weight of the World he addresses the potential for such violence in the interview relationship. There he suggests the need for reflexivity; indeed a ‘reflex reflexivity based on a craft, on a sociological “feel” or “eye”, which allows one to perceive and monitor on the spot, as the interview is actually taking place, the effects of the social structure within which it is occurring’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 608). He underlines this by insisting on what he calls ‘active and methodical listening’ on the interviewer’s part (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 609). He seems to be suggesting that such a mode of reflexivity deflects the danger of epistemic violence in the interviewer-interviewed/observer-observed relationship, and this is an ethical position as well as a recognition that such strategies are bound up with epistemological issues, too, in the sense of exploring and unearthing some of the essential truths of a person’s life. ‘Reflexivity’ may provoke thought about the relationship between the researcher and his/her object of study, thus compelling us to reflect on the processes of “knowing” itself. But there’s also a need for a ‘forgetfulness of self ’ which ‘aims at a true conversion of the way we look at other people in the ordinary circumstances of life’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 614; italics in original). This receptiveness of the self towards the Other emphasises the dialogic structure of the interview process, one in which new knowledge is produced, understandings explored, feelings and emotions unearthed or examined, so that ‘understanding and explaining are one’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 613). The nature of this production is characterised by a sense of reciprocity – to do this, the interviewer offers a commitment to bring to the interview a careful understanding of the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the utterance context of the respondent,

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as well as a necessary reflexivity on the more immediate circumstances of the exchange itself, and the uneven relations potentially immanent in that. The real strength of employing the ideas of Bakhtin, Volosinov and Williams for making sense of oral testimony is the capacity of their ideas to enable us – just as Bourdieu states – to ‘look at [and listen to] other people in the ordinary circumstances of life’, as they make discursive a practical consciousness to articulate lived experience in all its contradiction and complexity. To do this, the researcher negotiates his/her position within the dialogic encounter, a negotiation that requires a complex act of solidarity with the interviewee; in the cases here, those working people whose lives, in many different ways, disclose disappointment and retreat, pride and humility, and often hard-won accomplishments.

Conclusion

Centrally, this book has been concerned with what we might call the “absent-presence” of the British working class, and how that contradictory and paradoxical condition finds articulation in a range of cultural practices over a broad historical span, from the nineteenth century to the present. It has addressed and drawn attention to the significance of historical and cultural contexts for making sense of the variable claims on working-class identity and formation and it has flagged up the importance of place and space for understanding notions of class and community. A focus on working-class expression – the language of class – in the form of oral history testimony has provided a way of mapping the lived experience of class; at the same time the book points to the area of representation, or to follow Skeggs, the symbolic, as a site/sight where working-class subjectivity might be foregrounded as abject, or lacking, or is discursively displaced altogether in an act of denial, or as a form of ideological closure. But this needs to be seen too in the light of workingclass self-expression, articulated in a range of cultural forms other than oral testimony, and these include the novel, poetry and autobiography, constituting counter-hegemonic processes often seen to be speaking from the margins. Thus I have shown some of the significant ways that ideas about the working class have circulated in British culture. What is crucial for understanding working-class identity is the way it is shaped from without – the discursive construction of the working-class self by more powerful others cannot be underestimated, and this is a point made powerfully by Skeggs (2004). Therefore, class struggle is alive and well, fought out ‘in the circuits of symbolic distribution’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 173), where notions of class are made and re-made, with very real material effects on people’s lives. One principle consequence of constituting the “degraded” 203

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working-class subject is to reinforce modes of dis-identification with the idea of being working class. Skeggs argues throughout her book that strategies of representation are performative, bringing the Other to light, and she goes on to insist that ‘a great deal of energy goes into inscribing, depicting, categorising and degrading the working-classes as enemy’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 180). Yet this does not go unchallenged, as I have attempted to show, especially in Chapter 4. Nor should it go unchallenged within the academic sphere, where working-class scholars (or scholars from working-class backgrounds who maintain necessarily complex solidarities with those formations) must engage directly with such processes and reveal their class-bound nature. Indeed, this is the major strength of Simon Charlesworth’s (2000, 2004) contribution to recent debates, as well as those other writers discussed here.1 This notion of class dis-identification marks a number of contemporary discussions on the working class (Skeggs, 1997; Reay, 2000; Savage, 2001). Inequalities are perceived to exist, yet clear class identities have not materialised from these conditions. One critic argues that ‘Britain is not a deeply class conscious society, where class is seen as embodying membership of collective groups’ (Savage, 2000, p. 40), so that ‘the structural importance of class to people’s lives appears not to be recognised by the people themselves. Culturally, class does not appear to be a selfconscious principle of social identity. Structurally, it appears to be highly pertinent’ (Savage, 2000, p. xii). If structural inequalities persist, why are they not seen in class terms? For Savage this is because people shape their responses to enquiries about social class in ways that flag up a selfidentity ‘linked to a claim of “ordinariness” or “normality”’ and this ‘profoundly undermines the salience of class’. There is a reluctance to name themselves as, say, working class. Yet, he points to the paradoxical double movement invoked here which, in the end, speaks class, ‘since ordinariness only means something if contrasted with non-ordinary – the snobs for instance’ (Savage, 2000, p. 115). But there seems to be a tendency in Savage’s argument to expect some fully formed collective consciousness of class, and its absence then confirms his analysis. This then conforms to his argument that class identities may still exist, but in an individualised form (Savage, 2000, p. 154). Savage, as I suggested in Chapter 3, rejected the narrating of class as a collective identity within cultural and sociological discourse; tendencies he witnesses in the writings of cultural theorists and sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s (we can add the sub-culturalists of the 1970s to this list, too). While it might be unduly “romantic” on the part of some commentators to speak of working-class collectivism, or of working-class

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community – and, perhaps, a symptom, too, of a nostalgic structure of feeling inattentive to the historical division within working-class formations – class nevertheless exists collectively in an objective sense and is therefore potentially available for political mobilisation and for cultural expression. Although trade unions have been significantly weakened over the past twenty years, they remain effective vehicles for articulating working-class demands and interests – and it is such vital institutional sites where working-class people as individuals find collective alignments to engage with issues which affect their everyday lives. It remains the case that active trade unionism can still provide working people with a radical epistemology with which to make sense of their place in society, and even try to change society itself. Nevertheless, the subjective feelings associated with class – as argued eloquently by Andrew Sayer – are not necessarily individualistic ones, either. These feelings are the product of social relations, and they constitute ways in which class is powerfully internalised or embodied. This is also complicated, and often reinforced, in the way both gender and “race” intersect with class positionings, so that working-class women, for instance, can in some discourses be used to signify the very depths to which working-class life can sink, as I have argued elsewhere (2003). Indeed the “Chav Xmas Story” referred to in my introduction is an example of this. Sayer (2005) argues, in this context, that ‘class produces not only different access to goods held to be desirable for all’, but also forms of ‘incomplete or distorted recognition’, which leads to ‘deformations of character which becomes part of the habitus’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 210). This is the effect of both representational strategies and lived experience. Within structures of feeling – those ‘meanings and values that are actually lived and felt’ – evaluative accents dialogically shape understandings of self and other, produce alignments and commitments to ways of being, acceptance or rejection of dominant meanings made and established within hegemonic structures and processes. This is about living class, and it is also about the way working-class people find resources to handle such experiences, and this may involve – and historically, has involved – the telling of stories, and the construction of narratives, to counter hegemonic discourses, as I argued in Chapter 4. Structures of feeling denote lived experience, historical continuities and cultural values; they are productive of alignments and solidarities which celebrate the past and present and open out to what may appear as newly emergent, or, ‘in solution’.2 To disavow a class identity, as Savage suggests his respondents do, is of course the result of class processes, and Savage understands this

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well enough. Nor should such disavowals surprise us. Representations of working-class subjectivity in the media, and in New Labour political rhetoric, define attributes of working-classness as overwhelmingly negative. The Royle Family and Little Britain; the ASBO wielding yob; the welfare dependent single mother; the cigarette smoking, junk food eating northern slob (the North, as I suggest in Chapter 1, has always been a synonym for working class of a particular kind); the feckless parents requiring classes on how to raise their children. Being “ordinary” or “normal” is a way of avoiding such classifications with a working-class identity marked by its association with excess. At the same time, as Skeggs notes, there may be operating here a reaction to pretentiousness. Antipretentiousness constitutes a critique of middle-class posturing by the working class, working particularly through humour. But “ordinariness” is a way of not being linked to the middle class, either, and thus eluding any type of engagement with the realities of class hierarchies (Skeggs, 2004, p. 116). None of this, however, explains why, in a MORI poll in 2002, 66 per cent of people surveyed claimed to feel ‘working-class and proud of it’ (quoted in Skeggs, 2004, p. 116). The emergence of a “strong”, political, class consciousness will invariably be context specific (the Countryside Alliance is an example of a collective class consciousness in action, responding to a threat to their “interests”), but in a more general, everyday sense, class consciousness is variable; it may be, as Thompson (1978) argued, either ‘incandescent or scarcely visible’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 87). Often, as outlined in Chapters 5 and 6, class consciousness, or class awareness, springs out of “mundane” communication with the self (inner-voice discourse, to reference Volosinov), or is objectified in different forms and contexts in communication with others. In Chapters 5 and 6, I attempted to develop an understanding of class consciousness through modes of address and understanding, which articulate experience within interactionist contexts of self and other, whereby the language of class emerges often through ethical and moral dimensions of existence linked to notions of dignity, respect and recognition, and the primary context there was the realm of working life. In the realm of paid work, struggle can take many forms. It may be struggle for power outright, seizing the means of production. The rhetoric of class struggle then is one which refracts social reality in the name of fundamental political and economic change. This represents the macro-politics of class alluded to in the introduction in the quote from E.P. Thompson. This finds, or can find, institutional articulation, through political parties and movements. In Chapter 6, however, listening to interviewees, we note class within

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the fabric of everyday interaction and experience, embedded in more “mundane” communication, the product of practical consciousness – but this practical consciousness is not without profound political accents. Ben Rampton (2006) explores this, too, in an excellent study on schooling and class. Concerned with the ‘stylisation of social class’ in the classroom, Rampton develops a sophisticated analytical framework which combines sociolinguistics and cultural theory to examine the interaction of teenage school children in their everyday lives, and how these interactions articulate – in “mundane” communication, if you like – an awareness, and even (to some degree) a critique, of social class. Drawing on both Williams and Bakhtin/Volosinov (as well as the work of Skeggs and others), Rampton asks what the school children’s stylisation of both ‘posh’ and ‘cockney’ in their exchanges tells us about the level, or presence, of class consciousness as an aspect of their lives. This is, of course, in the context of wider arguments about the demise of class awareness; a demise, it is suggested, particularly evident in young working-class people. Thus, Rampton quotes Reay’s view that ‘new generations of the white working classes lack access to the broader collectivist cultures that many of their parents and grandparents grew up in. Any sense of heritage is denied them in the bleak 1990s discursive landscape. It is a terrain in which to be working class is increasingly to be “not good enough”, and there are no longer politicising scripts of class oppression to counter the prevalence of views that it is all their own fault’ (in Rampton, 2006, p. 126). Yet, what emerges in Rampton’s analysis is the extraordinary level of class awareness disclosed in the everyday actions of the kids in school, marked, dialogically, in the (evaluative) accents of class through which they designate, or define, self and other. This relates us back to the notion of social evaluation: what might be termed the meaningfulness of meaning, in which accents, or accentuation, because of their social origins, remain dialogic in character, oriented towards some other, as the product of wider social relations. This in itself radically undercuts notions of individualism, if the individual is shaped only in relation to others. So that, following extensive “micro” analysis of the interactions, Rampton can suggest that ‘adolescent stylisations repeatedly foregrounded social class as a frame relevant to the flux of experience, and when these occasions are taken together, it would be very hard indeed to ignore the complex influence of a polarising cultural binary that has been long and intimately linked to class systems both in Britain and elsewhere’ (Rampton, 2006, p. 222). The importance of “re-thinking”, or “re-visiting”, class is vital and is now getting underway.3 If, as one commentator argues, the re-invention

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of the language of class should acknowledge the ‘primacy of class analysis over the various types of identity politics manifest in gender, race and sexuality’, because ‘class provides an account of the origin of inequality from which other forms of oppression arise’ (Day, 2001, p. 18), then, accepting this view or not, it constitutes a proposition which needs proving rather than being simply stated, and much work needs to go into this, as it does into exploring the way class intersects with those other positions in shaping cultural identity. It might be that any renewed rhetoric of class has to re-find, or restate, its political impetus and its emancipatory promise if in the end it is to re-ignite at all.

Notes

Introduction 1. The comment, of course, articulates class as primarily a cultural category, and thus performs the task of disguising the realities of class as much as it illuminates them. Displacing class as an economic category, a fundamental structural feature of a capitalist society, might be seen as a way of de-politicising the question, rendering it safe by reducing it to talk about accents, attitudes, tastes and behaviours. This is an emphasis the English, in particular, are more than comfortable with. I will discuss some of these “displacements” throughout the book. 2. A powerful critique of class analysis came also from a resurgent feminism. More significantly, though, and going against this tide, were the contributions of female scholars who insisted on the continued relevance of class, and its necessary intersection with gender. This was begun in 1986 with Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, an early intervention in the ‘end of class’ debate. Other works include Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (1991); Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995); and Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (1997). 3. I will be referring to some of this work throughout: some key texts include Beverley Skeggs, (1997, 2004); Diane Reay (1997, 2000); Andrew Milner (1999, 2002); Gary Day (2001); Sally Munt (ed., 2000); Ben Rampton (2006). 4. Where succeeding Prime Ministers – most recently, Thatcher, Major and Blair – had hoped to see off the topic of class, still it rears its head, even at the most unpropitious moment: indeed at moments of supposed goodwill to all men and women. Thus, on the eve of Christmas 2005, I received the following by email attachment (I was one of many names on a long list). Described as the “Chav Xmas Story”, this followed: There’s this bird called Mary, yeah? She’s a virgin (wossat then?). She’s not married or nuffink, but she’s got this boyfriend, Joe, innit? He does joinery an’ that. Mary lives with him in a crib dahn Nazaref. One day Mary meets this bloke Gabriel. She’s like “Oo ya looking at?” Gabriel just goes ‘You got one up the duff, you have.” Mary’s totally gobsmacked. She give it to him large “Stop dissin’ me yeah? I ain’t no Kappa-slapper. I never bin wiv no one!” So Mary goes and sees her cousin Liz, who’s six months gone herself. Liz is largin’ it. She’s filled with spirits, Bacardi Breezers an’ that. She’s like “Orright, Mary, I can feel me bay-bee in me tummy and I reckon I’m well blessed. Think of all the extra benefits an’ that we are gonna get.” Mary goes “Yeah, s’pose you’re right”. Mary an’ Joe ain’t got no money so they have to ponse a donkey, an’ go dahn Bethlehem on that. They get to this pub an’ Mary wants to stop, yeah? To have her bay-bee an’ that. But there ain’t no room at the inn, innit? So Mary an’ Joe break an’ enter into this garridge, only it’s filled wiv animals. Cahs an’ sheep an’ that. Then these three geezers 209

210 Notes

5.

6.

7.

8.

turn up, looking proper bling, wiv crowns on their heads. They’re like “Respect, bay-bee Jesus”, an’ say they’re wise men from the East End. Joe goes: “If you’re so wise, wotchoo doin’ wiv this Frankenstein an’ myrrh? Why dincha just bring gold, Adidas and Burberry?” It’s all about to kick off when Gabriel turns up again an’ sez he’s got another message from this Lord geezer. He’s like “The police is comin an’ they’re killin all the baybees. You better nash off to Egypt.” Joes goes “You must be monged if you think I’m goin’ dahn Egypt on a minging donkey.” Gabriel sez “Suit yerself, pal. But it’s your look out if you stay.” So they go dahn Egypt til they’ve stopped killin the first-born an’ it’s safe an’ that. Then Joe and Mary and Jesus go back to Nazaref, an’ Jesus turns water into Stella. There are perhaps few better examples of the intersection of class and gender than this one. Steph Lawler (2000) has argued that working-class people are ‘Othered and pathologised within middle-class culture’ and that ‘workingclass women stand in a specific relationship to this pathologisation’. Thus often working-class women are Madonna or whore, a familiar binary – so that ‘these women are constituted as exotic and repulsive Others when observed from a middle-class perspective’ (2000, p. 123). The “chav” teenager, Vicki, depicted in BBC television’s comedy Little Britain, who is willing to swap her baby for a Westlife CD, provides a good example. Similarly, as Skeggs points out (2004), The Royle Family represents the working class as ‘immobile’, unthreatening and almost bovine in their appearance. I will discuss this further in Chapter 3. For comment and debate in the press on this and other “anxieties” concerning working-class “disenfranchisement” see ‘Class division now is worse than the 1950s’, The Observer, January, 2005; and Madeline Bunting’s piece in The Guardian, ‘Ignored, angry and anxious: the world of the white working class’, 13 February 2006. In his discussion of these approaches to class, Savage (2001) takes Thompson to task for failing to recognise that the cultural aspects he studied with regard to class consciousness or formation could not, when more closely examined, be reduced to class as the sole determinant. Savage argues that ‘gender, ethnicity, age, national identity … all seemed equally, or more, salient’ (30). This observation then, in some significant sense, crucially undermines class analysis for Savage, though why it should do so quite so comprehensively is difficult to say. Surely it has generally been recognised that class is not always present (or possible) in some “pure” form, but is intertwined with other identities and movements related to nationalism, race, gender or sexuality, as well as being articulated and struggled over in the field of representation. Besides, Savage’s comment works the other way with regard to identity politics and any focus on the importance of gender, race and sexuality that ignores the powerful determining factor of class. As bell hooks (2000) asserts, in the context of class in America, ‘race and gender can be used as screens to deflect away from the harsh realities of class politics’, and she criticises this tendency, arguing that ‘the neat binary categories of white and black and male and female are not there when it comes to class’ (6). The material drawn upon here is from the project ‘Does Work Still Shape Social Identity and Action’. ESRC/RES 148–25–0038

Notes 211

1 Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a Post-Industrial Landscape 1. The popularity of former Lancashire steeplejack turned industrial historian and televison presenter, Fred Dibnah, I would argue goes some way to reinforcing this, too. For instance, see the series, Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone, shown on BBC2, Autumn, 2006. The series plays in well with the heritagisation of history – though I would argue that Dibnah’s excursion into the industrial past is less reification than commemoration. See Raphael Samuel (1994) on the positive aspects of history as heritage in his Theatres of Memory Vol. 1. 2. For further elaboration on this, and a discussion of the powerful gender inflection associated with such representations, see Terry Lovell, ‘Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism’, in Higson (ed.), (1986). 3. This is a central critique of Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Women: A Story of Two Lives (1986), where she attacks the work of Richard Hoggart and Jeremy Seabrook, two influential writers on working-class life and culture in the post-war period in Britain, often – certainly in Hoggart’s case – with a particular focus on the North. See especially, The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Seabrook’s Working-Class Childhood (1982). In this context see also Beatrix Campbell’s criticisms in Wigan Pier Revisited (1984). 4. For instance, the building of Britain’s first giant mall, Meadowhall, in Sheffield, was on the former location of the huge Hadfield’s steelworks closed in 1984. 5. Peter Fannery’s drama series Our Friends in the North was broadcast by the BBC in 1996. It touches on many of the issues of place and class raised here, but requires a complete chapter of its own to do it full justice. 6. In Work, Consumption and the New Poor (1998), Zygmunt Bauman argues that ‘a steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly structured working career is no longer an available option’ (27). Citizenship is, then, not linked to work-based senses of self, say, but to the acts of consumption. If it becomes a duty of the citizen, as citizen, to consume in this new dispensation, then those excluded from such processes – such as those individuals documented by Charlesworth – will be, according to Bauman’s analysis, marginalized and dismissed, as the choices they make in consuming goods will be, because of their material deprivations, defined as bad choices, and thus rendering them “bad” citizens (1998, p. 71). 7. My own upbringing was working class: the son of a factory worker and hospital domestic, raised in a small terraced house, two up/two down, in an industrial city in the English Midlands. I followed both my father and older brother into the factory (textiles), and work in a range of other areas of industry following that, before returning to education at a relatively late stage. This does, of course, shape many of my responses to class, and working-class life in the contemporary moment. 8. Most recently an article by Maria Elisa Cevasco, ‘Whatever Happened to Cultural Studies: Notes from the Periphery’, in Textual Practice 14 (3), 2000, 433–438. But also see the range of excellent essays in Sally Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (2000). I refer to other key texts which articulate such positions throughout the book.

212 Notes

2 In Search of the Working Class: The Rise of British Cultural Studies 1. This is what we can term the “traditional” history of British Cultural Studies. It has been contested, not least by those key figures within the formation itself. Thus Raymond Williams (1989) argued that the origins of Cultural Studies were not embedded in key texts like his own Culture and Society (1958), but in the adult education classes of the 1940s and 1950s, in which he and other scholars were active for the Workers’ Educational Association in Northern Ireland (WEA). For a fuller discussion of the “traditional” view, see Moyra Haslett, Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories (2000). 2. Haslett (2000) makes the point, too, referencing Christine Geraghty, that it is possible to regard ‘earlier antecedents, such as Humphrey Jenning’s documentary Spare Time (1939)’ as precursors to Cultural Studies proper, where ‘workingclass communities are observed through the integration of industry and culture’ (159). 3. Speaking prior to the 2004 General Election, education policy was economic policy, according to the “New” Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. 4. So, for instance, Stuart Hall acknowledged that Williams’s work was in significant ways formative, despite the gradual shift away from his methods and towards more postmodern, certainly post-structuralist, paradigms. See, Hall, Morley and Chen (1996). 5. The best known work of Bourdieu’s to explicate this view is Distinction (1984). 6. Rosalind Coward’s 1977 review of Resistance through Rituals challenged this purported fusion – one mediated by Gramsci’s notion of hegemony – of structuralism and culturalism. There she pointed out that the two paradigms could not be reconciled, as culturalism stressed the essentially class-based nature of sub-cultural action and thus simply rehearsed the old base/superstructure argument she deemed outmoded. 7. This formulation belongs to Louis Althusser’s immensely influential reworking of the concept of ideology in his famous essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Essays on Ideology, London, NLB/Verso, 1984. 8. McRobbie (1978, also 1980) pointed to the absence in both Willis and Hebdige of any serious discussion of girls in relation to sub-cultural resistance. She identifies oppositional patterns in girls’ attitudes to schooling, though such resistance, for McRobbie, only confirms their subordination (thus echoing here my critique of Willis). The Birmingham collective’s Policing the Crisis (1979) and The Empire Writes Back (1982) did much to redress the neglect of race in studies of sub-cultures and in the evolving interests of Cultural Studies more generally. 9. See for instance his chapters in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997).

3 Abyss-mal Sites: Representation and the British Working Class 1. Elsewhere Skeggs has talked about the importance of appearance in terms of recognition and the understanding of the self in the context of class. She

Notes 213

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

argues that ‘some groups are denied access to economic and social resources because they are not recognised as being worthy recipients’ (Skeggs, 2000, p. 129), and in the process of this “de-recognise” themselves. This is a mode of symbolic violence which constitutes and reinforces class identities and dispositions to the extent that such judgements (of value and of taste) become internalised by the denigrated groups themselves, a point also made by Sayer (Sayer, 2005, p. 67). This ‘visible mechanism of evaluative classification’ is how bodies become classed or gendered (Skeggs, 2000). Again, the example of the “Chav Xmas Story” exemplifies this. Skeggs cites Foucault in this context: ‘The middle-class thus defined itself as different from the aristocracy and the working-classes who spent, sexually and economically, without moderation …. It differed by virtue of its sexual restraint, its monogamy and its economic restraint or thrift’ (in Skeggs, 2004, p. 37). On this see, for example, Frederic Jameson’s (1981, p. 186) argument that the nineteenth century novel represented an important cultural form for the bourgeoisie, offering ideological solutions, or resolutions, for the middle class and their anxieties. This is echoed also in Raymond Williams’s assertion that in the 1840s, and the revolutionary year of 1848 in particular, ‘class relations, including class conflict, [became] the conscious material of fiction’, even if this dynamic is addressed ‘precisely so it can be reconciled or evaded’ (1981, p. 163). See, for example, Brontë’s Shirley (1847), or Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866). Terry Eagleton, referencing Shirley, has pointed out that the novel’s attitude ‘to the working class weavers wavers accordingly between panicky contempt and paternalistic condescension’ (1986, p. 49). The realist novel, as Jameson indicated (1981), provided a moral and ideological framework through which a middle-class readership could make sense of the world. The emergence of literary naturalism towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, produced a new rhetoric and a new stock of images to represent urban life and the British working class: less sentimental and moralistic, yet marked by an essentialism which rendered working-class subjectivity “degraded” by environmental factors, or factors linked to negative hereditary features of working-class life (see Eagleton and Pierce (1979); and for an interesting analysis of the rhetoric of images at the end of the nineteenth century associated with class, gender and nation, see G. Davis (1988)). Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz identify what they call a ‘sharp historical discontinuity from the preceding Victorian period’; which would lead to a profound crisis of the state between 1910 and 1926 – what they term ‘a crisis of liberalism’ (95). This is the period of the rise of mass production and consumption in new and hitherto unexploited forms – in short, modernity itself. At the same time, ‘the main agencies for mass political representation … appeared between 1880 and 1920’, releasing the ‘major political forces of our own period’ (95). As Hall and Schwarz remind us, this leads to a new “collectivist” state which took diverse forms, creating social movements which take up the notions of social rights and mass democracy and push for vital new forms of industrial and political representation, constituting an often radical challenge to hitherto established notions of democracy. At the same time, this new emphasis on citizenship comes with a price. It is predicated upon moral

214 Notes

7. 8. 9.

10.

attributes – respectability, responsibility; “deserving”, “undeserving” – individualising class and dislocating it from economic factors. This is a constitutive part of Marshall Berman’s powerful and influential exploration of modernism in All that is Solid Melts into Air. It seems to be a notion, too, restricted only to working-class men in the workplace, leaving women aside altogether. For an acute critique of the absence of economics in the understanding of class, see David Harvey’s ‘Class Relations, social justice and the politics of difference’, in Keith, M. and Pile, S. (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity (London, Routledge,1993). Particularly notable, of course, in discourse centred on the so-called underclass, which leads Chris Haylett (2001) to claim that, ‘visions of the underclass have become part of the personal, public and political imagination of British culture in the 1990s’ (72), serving, it needs to be said, as a political device to divide the working class.

4 ‘Speaking for more than Itself’: Answerability and the Working-Class Text 1. For a discussion of working-class writing in the United States see for instance, Janet Zandy (2000) Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writing; also Hands: Physical Labour, Class, and Cultural Work (2004). An excellent collection of essays on the study of working-class writing, and working-class culture more generally is John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon’s (2005) New Working-Class Studies. 2. He uses the term to describe a type of narrative which places the workingclass subject, and working-class concerns, at the centre of the text, opening up the genre to social and political analysis, with the aim of mobilising the reader towards a more active response to the inequities and struggles which the story describes. 3. A recent article by Lorna Martin explores British television and the working class. See The Observer, 27 August 2006. 4. See also Janet Zandy (2004), pp. 90–92. 5. For further commentary on this see, Geoff Gilbert, “Can Fiction Swear? James Kelman and the Booker Prize”, in Rob Mengham (1999). 6. I have already highlighted Sillitoe’s work in Chapter 3. See also Pat Barker, Union Street (London, Virago, 1984); The Century’s Daughter (London, Virago, 1986); Barry Hines, The Heart of It (London, Michael Joseph, 1994) and Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1993), to name but a few. 7. In his survey of socialist fiction in the 1930s, H. Gustav Klaus listed something like 70 publications mostly by working-class writers, despite the inevitable problem of time, education and outlets these writers faced. See H. Gustav Klaus, ‘Socialist Fiction in the 1930s’, in J. Lucas (ed.), The 1930s (Brighton, Harvester, 1978), p. 36. 8. Ibid. 9. Ken Worpole’s Dockers and Detectives (1983) further underlines the range of working-class writing extant at this period. Discussing what he calls working

Notes 215

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

class Expressionism in the 1930s he argues that ‘For the many people brought up in single industry communities, with strong local traditions, there were as many for whom class was experienced as the dislocation of generations, the rootlessness of city life, a succession of casual jobs and the constant search for employment often involving moving from town to town’ (79). In this writing working class life is seen differently from that of some realist novelists (see also, Fordham (2001)). Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (1993) categorises working-class writing in the following modes: proletarian fictional autobiography, proletarian bildungsroman, proletarian social novel and collective novel (83). And the most obvious and celebrated example in the British context is Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s proletarian epic, A Scots Quair. On this see Simon Dentith, ‘Tone of Voice in Industrial Writing in the 1930s’, in H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (eds) (2000). Walter Benjamin (1969) makes some interesting points on this score. In his essay ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin writes about the devaluing of experience and the erosion of tradition in the modern world. In documenting the decline of the ‘storyteller,’ his discussion identifies two generic traditions of storytelling. He writes: ‘If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman’ (84). Benjamin argues: ‘Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers’ (84). What seems important to Benjamin, in his discussion of the “tale,” is that it will always describe a common historical experience. The storyteller is of the people and thus relates the collective life of the people in a mode of address – a narrative orientation – dialogically angled towards the people themselves, and this lies with an attention not only to thematic content but to the deployment of language itself. Again, there might be no better example here than Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. See Beverley Skeggs (2004) on this, too, where she argues that contemporary ‘injunctions’, in the form of television confessional programmes, perform precisely the same function for postmodern times. For greater detail of the strike see, Huw Beynon (ed.) (1985), Digging Deeper; Andrew Richards (1996), Miners on Strike: Class, Solidarity and Division in Britain. For a powerful fictional depiction of the events see David Peace (2003), GB1984.

5 Working through Change (i): Oral Testimony and the Language of Class 1. This Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, Does Work Still Shape Social Identities and Action (ESRC RES 148-25-0038), examines the significance of work to identity formation in contemporary British society. This work was carried out with colleagues: Tim Strangleman, Christine Wall, Jane Martin and Steve Jefferys. Here I have drawn upon some of my own interim findings.

216 Notes 2. There is a further dimension to this, too. In the terms developed by Bourdieu through the concepts of linguistic capital and, more broadly, cultural capital, these practices of articulation are invariably bound up with issues of power (1993). They are socially distributed and validated within a culture which is marked by an inequality of access to such cultural capital as well as an established hierarchy of what exactly such capital amounts to – and thus the capacity to tell stories and have them heard finds authorisation through institutional sites, established formations and power relations – and this proposition, of course, informed arguments in Chapter 4 – which determine the right to speak, how to speak, who can speak and whether a discourse is regarded as legitimate or not. Thus it is incumbent upon anyone who considers themselves to be working with groups marginalized at a number of different and coinciding levels to make space for the narratives of those who do not usually get heard and to listen carefully to what they have to say, best described as an act of complex solidarity between speaker and listener. 3. Indeed, it can be argued that working-class lives are not really like this anyway – they lack the seemingly assured teleology of many middle-class career narratives. This has been particularly the case in recent times: the economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s leaving many working-class people redundant and adrift. 4. Skeggs (2004) notes, referring to the work of Strathern (1992) that these ‘forms of control are manifested in inner-directed technologies of the self, which in consumerism are expressed as technologies of choice’ (56). The sense of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ is linked to notions of both individuality and choice in the production of the self, and this middle-class imperative of the ‘self-managing individual can be seen clearly in the rhetoric of identity politics’ (57). 5. I have attempted to do this in relation to autobiography. See Kirk, 2003, chapter 5, and 2006. 6. My arguments in Chapter 3, where I analyse representations of the workingclass in the novels of writers like Dickens and Gaskell, are clearly more critical than Williams appears to be at this stage. 7. See John A. Vincent on some of these issues, where he suggests that ‘a greater emphasis on contextual fluidity of generational identities rather than a single structure of sequential generations can help link an empirically based political economy of generational inequality with a cultural sociology of generation’ (580). In, ‘Understanding Generations: Political Economy and Culture in an Ageing Population’, The British Journal of Sociology, 56; 4 (2005) 579–599. 8. In the Corrosion of Character, Sennett starts off by telling the story of a father and son. Enrico, the working-class father, a janitor, and Rico, his son, a man on the road to upward mobility, working as an executive and earning an executive’s salary. Though a janitor all his life, Enrico had, for Sennett, nevertheless ‘achieved a measure of social honour’ (17). Enrico had ‘carved out a clear story for himself … his life thus made sense to him as a linear narrative. … The janitor felt that he had become the author of his life, and though he was a man low on the social scale, this narrative provided him with a sense of self-respect’ (16). But this was a time of a more “stable” capitalism. Rico, his achieving son, had to deal with “flexible” capitalism. Despite material rewards, this career narrative was fraught with anxiety and troubled introspection, fuelled by the ever-present fear of “downsizing”, so that in the

Notes 217 end Rico ‘feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his inner, emotional life adrift’ (20). While Enrico stood tall in the light of a working life nobly lived, his son was “hollowed out” by the more destructive nature of a modern system which no longer values such qualities as “time served”.

6 Working through Change (ii): Work-life Histories and Narratives of Class 1. One such space where this structure of feeling is explored is in railway workers’ autobiographies. There exists a huge number of these, as Tim Strangleman (2005) has shown in his article ‘Class Memory: Autobiography and the Art of Forgetting’. 2. I have argued elsewhere (2003) that nostalgia, or what I call ‘nostalgic memory’ represents a symbolic act of recovery: of neglected experience, forgotten voices, silenced groups. 3. We see this repeatedly in our research: men (and women) of a certain age, and within the three sectors we are examining, “forced” to retire before their time, and an accompanying bitterness, even distress, accompanies this. 4. See Janet Zandy (2004) for a discussion of this in a North American context. 5. Volosinov (1973) has put this in slightly different terms: ‘the personality of the speaker … turns out wholly a product of social relations’ (90). Replace personality with character and we have broadly the same thing. 6. See Williams on these categories in Marxism and Literature (1977), pp. 128–135. 7. See particularly the Introduction in Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995). 8. This refers to Sennett and Cobb’s, The Hidden Injuries of Class (1992). 9. On this see Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1971). There he argues that if a mode of production constitutes a set of relations which will, in turn, throw up cultural and intellectual formations representative of given groups or classes, then we need to consider the organic intellectuals of the working class. That the notion of a working-class intellectual has been, and continues to be, regarded in some circles as an oxymoron, is countered by Gramsci in his assertion that ‘all men [and women] are philosophers’ (323). 10. For a wide and illuminating discussion of these changes see Tim Strangleman, Work Identity at the End of the Line: Privatisation and Culture Change in the UK Rail Industry (London, Palgrave, 2004). 11. Diane Reay’s paper, delivered at a Working-Class Studies seminar at London Metropolitan University on 20 October 2005 makes a very similar point.

Conclusion 1. Although I was critical in my opening chapter of Charlesworth’s emphasis on the importance of his working-class background, this did not constitute a criticism of the intervention nor the purpose behind it. I would welcome the importance of positionality asserted by Charlesworth, bound, in a sense, to a working-class habitus, or structure of feeling. My criticism was aimed at the overriding tendency in Charlesworth’s analysis towards disallowing the

218 Notes working-class voices space to speak for themselves rather than simply speak for them. 2. That is not to say that the notion of structures of feeling cannot be read as a way of understanding (in Jameson’s terms, cognitive mapping) that can also be exclusionary and insular, as well as enabling and productive. 3. In the United States of America, working-class studies has emerged over the past decade as an exciting focus of study on university campuses, where university teachers and researchers, attempting to think through class, are in the process establishing connections with the wider working-class community and its institutions and representatives. See the discussions, for instance, in John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (eds), New Working-Class Studies (New York, Cornell University Press, 2005).

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Index abyss 36, 98 adiaphorisation 99 Adorno, T. 35 Age of Affluence 1, 38 agency 8, 36, 50, 155 Althusser, L. 48, 50, 55, 56 Authoritarian Populism 35 autobiography 12, 131–40 Bakhtin, M. 48, 112, 113, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 156, 171, 191 and answerability 103–4 and dialogics 112–14, 146, 178 and mutlispeechness 145 Barker, P. 125 Barthes, R. 51 Baudrillard, J. 59–60 Bauman, Z. 99–100, 211 n Work, Consumption and the New Poor 99–100, 211 n Beck, U. 3, 96 Beezer, A. 48 Benjamin, W. 130, 215 n Berman, M. 214 n Beynon, H. 2 Bhabha, H. 66 Billy Elliot 27 Blair, T. 2 Bleasdale, A. 21, 22, 125 Boys from the Blackstuff 21–3, 125 Bloomsbury Group 124 Booth, W. 85 In Darkest England and the Way Out 85 Bourdieu, P. 5, 6, 7, 8, 27, 46, 50, 109, 150, 153, 164, 167, 187, 192, 200–2, 216 n and capitals 46, 119, 164, 192 and habitus 8, 50, 153–4 The Weight of the World 150, 167, 187, 200 Brassed Off 27

British Rail 175, 178, 182, 184, 185 Bronte, C. 79 Bunting, M. 210 n Burroughs, W. 51 Butler, J. 2 Cannadine, D. 1, 92 Class in Britain 1 Carey, J. 83 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 10, 44 Cevasco, M. 37, 211 n Character 183 Charlesworth, S. 3, 6, 13, 14, 27–37, 50, 62, 63, 64, 141, 153, 154, 199, 200, 204 A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience 3, 27, 31, 62, 156, 199 Chartism 80–1 Chavs 4, 99, 209–19 n Class and consciousness 29, 39, 177, 186, 187 and deference 6 and dignity 6, 183 and displacing 79–81, 209 n and experience 5–6, 155–60 and language 106–114 and memory 161–4 and pride 189 and race and gender 18, 75, 85, 152, 180–86 and recognition 29, 100, 153–4, 164–5, 181–3 and respect 6, 29, 153–4, 164–5, 181–3 and transition 191–99 definition of 7–9 see also working class classlessness 2, 21, 32, 95 Coal Was Our Life 25 Cobb, J. 198 228

Index 229 Collins, M. 4 The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class 4 commitments 166–7, 171–2, 173, 183 Communist Manifesto 76 Conrad, J. 85–7 Heart of Darkness 85–6 The Secret Agent 86–7 consumer 3, 29, 60 consumerism 3, 29, 60, 61, 90 consumption 3, 29, 34 Coronation Street 20 Coward, R. 212 n Craig, C. 107–8 Cultural Studies 37, 38, 45, 54 and British 11, 12, 36–44 and sub-cultures 44–54 and populism 61–6 Day, G. 9, 16, 21, 76, 81, 83, 90, 208 de-industrialisation 10, 21, 27, 95 Dentith, S. 112, 145, 146, 215 n diaspora 66–70 Dibnah, F. 211 n Dickens, C. 16, 78, 79 Hard Times 16, 78 Bleak House 78 Dombey and Son 78 Disraeli, B. 16 Sybil 16 Dolby, N. 138–40 Norma Dolby’s Diaries 138–40 Dyer, R. 20 Eagleton, T. 2, 41, 71, 82, 86, 157, 213 n Eagleton and Pierce 213 n Eastwood 15 Edinburgh Television Festival 4 Edwinstowe 15 Eldridge, J. and Eldridge, L. 159 Eliot, G. 79 Eliot, T.S. 41, 81, 82, 84, 88 Preludes 88 The Waste Land 88 encoding-decoding 53 Englishness 66 Eyesteinsson, A. 82

Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (Fed) 12, 126–33 Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. 161–4, 173 Social Memory 161 Fiske, J. 61, 62–4, 65 Fordham, J. 118 Forster, E. M. 87–8 Howards End 87 Foucault, M. 55, 213 n Fowler, B. 109 Frankfurt School 33 Fraser, N. 2 Gaskell, E. 16, 76–8, 105 North and South 16 Mary Barton 76–8, 105 General Strike 114 Genet, J. 51 Giddens, A. 2, 3, 96, 144 Gilroy, P. 66 Goldthorpe and Lockwood 1 Gramsci, A. 28, 46, 55 and hegemony 46, 55, 68 and organic intellectual 28, 187, 217 n Greenwood, W. 19, 120–1 Love on the Dole 120–1 Grele, R. 147 Grierson, J. 114 Hall, S. 11, 44, 45–9, 53, 54, 55–7, 60, 66–71, 212 n, 213 n and diaspora 66–71 and sub-cultures 45–9 and Thatcherism 55–7 Harrison, T. 114 Harvey, D. 30 Haslett, M. 212 n Haylett, C. 214 n Haywood, I. 80, 83, 115, 118, 125, 129, 160 Working-Class Fiction 103 Hebdige, D. 45, 49, 50, 53 Subculture: The Meaning of Style 45, 49, 50, 51, 61–2

230 Index Hitchcock, P. 104, 112, 113, 115, 120, 125 The Dialogics of the Oppressed 112 Hobsbawm, E. 16, 19 Hoggart, R. 20, 24, 31–4, 36, 39, 44, 45, 90, 173, 191 Holderness, G. 118 The Uses of Literacy 20, 24, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 44, 61, 90, 173 hooks, b. 210 n Huyssen, A. 58, 89 hybridity 67 diasporic hybridity 68, 69 Hynes, S. 117 Identity 11, 22, 26 identity politics 66–70, 95, 100 ideology of affluence 47 and literature 75–6 individualism 90–8 Industrial Midlands 15, 16 Jacques, M. 55, 56 Jameson, F. 16, 37, 57, 58, 84, 86 Jefferson, T. 45–8 Resistance through Rituals 45 Jenkins, S. 106, 108, 111 Jennings, H. 114 Jessop, B. 55 Johnson, R. 117 Jones, L. 118–20 Cwmardy 118–20 We Live 118–20 Joyce, J. 82 Ulysses 82 Keating, P. 78 Kelman, J. 106–9, 110, 111, 113 How late it was, how late 106 The Bus Conductor Hines 106 You have to be Careful in the Land of the Free 106 Kirk, J. 2, 3, 21, 44, 47, 73, 125, 126, 164 Twentieth Century Writing and the British Working Class 3 Klaus, H. Gustav 214 n

Kuhn, A. 6, 178 Family Secrets 178 Labour Party 54 Laclau and Mouffe 55–6 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 55 Lawler, S. 210 n Lawrence, D. H. 15, 16–18, 32 “Nottingham and the Mining Community” 16 The Rainbow 17 Leavis, F. R. 41, 117, 122–3 Linkon, Sherry Lee 218 n Little Britain 4 Lopez, Ortega, J. 115 Lovell, T. 211 n Lovett, W. 135 Lowry, L. S. 19 and the North 19–20 Lukacs, G. 82 Lyotard, J. F. 58, 59 Macherey, Pierre 157 Manchester 16 Marx, K. 36, 105, 164, 190 Marxism 58 Marxism Today 57 Marxist 7, 31, 49 masculinity 22, 76 and manual labour 173–6 Mass Observations 19, 114, 124 Massey, Doreen 21, 30 McGuigan, J. 61, 95 McRobbie, A. 53, 61, 65, 212 n Medhurst, A. 95 Medvedev, P. 146, 147 Meiksins-Wood, E. 2 Merleau-Ponty, M. 27 Michael, L. 125–6 middle class 35, 75, 182 Milner, A. 2, 10, 11, 57, 61, 65, 68, 71, 97 Re-Imagining Cultural Studies 11 Miners’ Strike 137–40 mining 25–7 modernism 83–94 and the masses 83–94 Moretti, F. 82

Index 231 Morley, D. 45, 53, 123 The Nationwide Audience 45, 53 Mount, F. 4 Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain 4 Mulhern, F. 43, 71 Munt, S. 2, 96 Murdock, G. 56 “New Ethnicities” 68 New Times 55–7, 60–1 Nicholls, P. 84, 88, 89 North 10, 14–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31, 37 ideas of 13–27 north–south divide 16 of England 10, 13 of the Watford Gap 14 Northamptonshire 14 nostalgia 24, 44, 164, 173, 176 nostalgic memory 44, 164, 176 Nottingham 14 O’Kane, J. 62, 63, 64, 65 oral history 11, 142–68 and uses of composure 148–50, 152, 173–4, 198 and form 152 Orwell, G. 13, 19, 23, 28, 31, 36, 116–17, 119, 199 The Road to Wigan Pier 13, 31, 36, 119, 199 Owens, Agnes 125 Portelli, A. 152, 161, 170, 171, 172 post-industrial 14, 24, 29, 126 post-industrialism 25 post-Marxist 53 postmodernism 57–9, 143 Potteries 15 Preston, I. 138–40 Rampton, B. 7, 180, 207 Reay, D. 195, 217 n Reisz, K. 20 representation 11, 35, 73–102 of the industrial North 13–37 see also working class

Russell, D. 10, 15, 16 Northern England and the National Imagination 10 Russo, J. 218 n Rustin, M. 60 Said, E. 70, 84, 85 Samuel, R. 20–3, 24, 137–8, 164 Satre, J. P. 36 Savage, M. 1, 2, 7, 9, 90–3, 177, 186, 204, 205–6, 210 n Sayer, A. 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 73, 153–5, 164–8, 174, 176, 180, 189, 192, 196, 212 n The Moral Significance of Class 5, 153 Scotland 14 Seabrook, J. 23–4, Unemployment 23–4 Sennett, R. 151, 168, 183, 216–17 n The Corrosion of Character 151, 168, 183 Shameless 4, 99 Sillitoe, A. 15, 93–4 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 15, 20, 93–4 Skeggs, B. 6, 8, 9, 11, 37, 49, 53–4, 73–5, 76, 79, 81, 89, 96–102, 103, 152, 164, 203–4, 206, 212–13 n, 216 n Self, Class, Culture 11, 37, 73, 89 Smiles, S. 75 Self-Help 75 Smith, S. 135 Soja E. 30 Sparks, C. 53, 61 Stallybrass, P. 79, 80 Steedman, C. 96, 135, 211 n Landscape for a Good Woman 96 Storey, J. 58, 143 Strangleman, T. 137, 186, 217 n structure of feeling 8, 15, 18, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39, 40, 41, 84, 89, 110, 112, 125, 137, 147, 151, 152–160, 164, 170, 173, 176, 179, 182, 186, 117, 205 see also residual, emergent, dominant 152–160, 175

232 Index Taylor, P. 10 Thatcher, M. 4, 60 Thatcherism 10, 22, 33, 51, 54, 55–7 The Full Monty 27 The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict 4 The Royle Family 4, 99 The Third way 2 Thompson, A. 148–50, 173–4, 198 Anzac Memories 148 Thompson, E.P. 7–8, 44, 45, 92, 135, 146, 147, 208 The Making of the English Working Class 44 Turner, R. 24–7 Coal Was Our Life 24, 27

Underclass 36, 98 Unemployment 22–3, 24 Upward mobility 98 Vincent, D. 133–5, 139 Vincent, J. 160, 216 n Volosinov, V. 8, 9, 12, 112, 113, 131, 145, 174, 178, 181–2, 184–6, 217 n also logic of social evaluation 146–7, 174, 178, 194 and evaluative accent 146 and inner-speech 8, 113, 144, 145, 156 and utterance context 145 Waters, C. 19, 31, 136–7 welfare state 40 White, A. 79, 80 Wilkinson, E. 19, 115 Williams, R. 8–9, 11, 16, 34, 35, 39–45, 46, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64–5, 66, 70–72, 83, 91–3, 101–2, 103, 104, 107, 110, 113, 115, 131, 143–6, 149–60, 176, 179, 192, 200, 202, 207, 213 n Border Country 125 and common culture 40, 41, 43, 66, 71, 72 Communications 45 and culture 8, 40–4 Culture and Society 10, 39, 44, 63, 91–3

and formations 123–4, 126, 127 and hegemony 143–4 and institutions 122 and knowable community 138, 176 Marxism and Literature 145 and official consciousness 115, 155–60 and practical consciousness 9, 46, 113, 144–5, 155, 160–1 and selective tradition 58, 122 Television, Technology and Form 45 Towards 2000 67, 70 see also structure of feeling Willis, P. 45, 49–50, 53 Learning to Labour 45, 49, 50, 51, 53 Winterson, J. 125 Oranges are not the only Fruit 125 Woodin, T. 127 work 22 and community 28, 161–4 and identity 22, 161–7 working class academics 34 community 20, 21, 22, 161–4, 171–3, 176, 183 culture 23, 31–2, 37, 49–50, 155–6 dis-identification 204–6 end of 31 experience 27–37 formations 40 individualism 91–4 and loss 24, 161–4, 184–6 novelists 19 representations 74–102, 103 sub-cultures 45–54, 59 writing 103–41 see also class Worpole, K. 127, 140, 214 n Dockers and Detectives 214–15 n The Republic of Letters 127 Young, I. 1, 2 Young Foundation

4

Zandy, J. 104, 109, 114, 115, 141, 214 n Zizek. S 100–1 Zweig, F. 1