At the root of much culture wars talk is an opposition to the overthrow of the high culture/low culture distinction - you know you’re on this terrain when columnists start raving about teh evil postmodernist Maoist teachers privileging comics over Chaucer or equating Big Brother and Shakespeare. In fact, the disruption of the notion of high culture has very little to do with postmodernism (you won’t find Derrida discussing Marvel comics - he was too busy writing about Mallarmé), but that’s a tale for another time. But, in order to get around the fact that a respect for pop culture was in origin a democratic impulse, and opera or symbolist poetry a pastime of status elites, the culture warriors have to claim that the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ. In their downtime, perhaps, they’ve been watching The Simpsons, as some new research suggests.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s classic Distinction (and he was no postmodernist either - the basis of his study being survey research). But it’s interesting to reflect that the bourgeois taste he was writing about is as much a thing of the past as the working class culture celebrated by some of the original doyens of cultural studies such as Raymond Williams. That should come as no surprise to culture warriors, who under other circumstances, would be celebrating the death of class.
The Independent reports that Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe from Oxford have released the results of a cross-national survey of cultural taste:
“We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume ‘high’ culture while shunning more ‘popular’ cultural forms,” the two Oxford academics said, when their results were published yesterday. “There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis.”
I’m going to try to get hold of the study itself (which I’m suspecting is an attempt to test Bourdieu’s findings some decades on) before commenting further, but I think it does point very strongly to a conclusion that the terms in which the debates around the politics of culture and cultural politics are conducted are totally disconnected from (post)modern reality. I think it also points to the deep incoherence of the culture wars argument. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were no “luvvies”?
Oh dear
The army of ‘cafe latte unwooded chradonnay political correct bisexual lefties” is just that. However Gerard Henderson et al DO exist. Damn.
as for me
leftie..tick
bisexual..tick
latte..ewwwwwwwww
unwooded chardonnay… EWWWWWWWWWWW..
and I love simpsons, futurama and even South Park!
mm not ‘is just that’ meant ‘does not exist’.
how the hell did I do that.
But, in order to get around the fact that a respect for pop culture was in origin a democratic impulse, and opera or symbolist poetry a pastime of status elites, the culture warriors have to claim that the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ.
Through the 18th and 19th century, opera was very much a popular pastime, and would therefore seem to reflect (accepting your argument for the moment) the democratic impulse. At the birth of opera by Monteverdi and the Camerata, the model used was ancient Athenian theatre, which - of course - was also a popular, democratic artform.
Opera gradually became seen as an elite artform in the 20th century, but this was a gradual change, as reflected by the popularity of stars such as Caruso, or on-screen singers such as Mario Lanza, or, indeed, the American musical in its heyday.
Apart from the debate on Aboriginal Studies, the pointless ‘History Wars” and the right wing complaints about public intellectuals like Philip Adams,and the occasional piece of rubbish in the Australian I haven’t followed this debate too closely. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a straw man created by the Quadrant circle to prop up Howard’s determined subversion of academics, history, the ABC, etc in his attempt to create a right wing cultural elite in his own image.So far as history is concerned its a pointless nuisance distracting from the real business of history - the study of the recorded past. Its not the left’s fault that the Libaral Party in the past did not have as strong a sense of the importance of creating a political mythology as the Labor Party had and has. And its the task of the historian, whether academic or popular to bust that mythology and come up with a semblance of what most likely happened. The culture wars are a political construct, designed for political purposes, ie propaganda. Political parties have always behaved this way - the Athenian version of history, Whig history, etc.Perhaps if Howard had bothered to take notice of Croce’s dictum that all history is contemporary history, he might have realised the futility of what he was trying to do. But then again, he’s probably never heard of him, and he wouldn’t have been sympathetic to someone who had fought Fascism anyway. But accuracy in any intellectual, or for that matter, political argument was never one of Howard’s strong points.
TimT, you make a good point - as with other institutions, “elite bourgeois culture” and “the Canon”, are artefacts of a finite period in recent history rather than eternal verities.
It does look like they’re trying to track down Bourdieu’s ‘Knowledge Class’. The disjunction between wealth and status has always been very British, although it may be changing now (Britain has home renovation shows and rich plumbers too).
Mark quotes:
That rather proves the right wing Culture Warrior’s point. If only cultural elites did stick to high-culture, rather than mucking in with the prole low-culture in a gruesomely chummy way then we would all be alot better off.
The cultural elite occupy the commanding heights of the cultural economy. But they waste a good part of everyones time and money on expensive displays of nonsense. Rather than acting as taxidermists of nearly extinct cultural forms, which is what we tax-payers are paying them to do.
This is because real cultural elitism requires years of intensive study, knowledge of musical notation, latin tags, foreign languages. All of which is too hard. Much easier just to wank on about Madonna.
In any case these surveys of cultural activity quoted by Mark are a waste of time. A category mistake because they miss the point of the cultural elite tag.
The phrase “cultural elite” is a anthropological, not epistemological. Cultural elites are not especially intelligent or knowledgeable about any forms of culture, whether high-, low- or no-brow.
No one takes much notice of post-modernist art any more. It is understood that it is an offensive joke designed to drum up business amongst the ill-educated yobs with too much money and not enough class who seem to frequent advertising agencies. Very non-U.
Rather cultural preference is now used as an elite status-markers to indicate possible personal, professional or political networking opportunities. Such as frequent name dropping of nauseating French post-modernist charlatans at over-rated cafes. A well-versed art in the Rive Gauche precinct and now even Brisbane, I here.
These cultural appurtenances are all ideological hood ornament used to decorate ones platform in the endless status-war between the upper- and lower-middle class: the inner-city apartmented, childless, uni-attending black-clads versus the outer-suburban McMansioned, child-ful, TAFE-attending red-necks.
I will not bother quoting cultural elitist mating calls chapter and verse. No doubt we are all too famiilar with the writings of the Deveney’s and Hutchinsons of this world to stomach another dose.
Mark “fails to include” the key quote which proves my point, that I have been banging on about for about 900 years:
And one can utilise the “cultural elite” classification to predict a large variety of political opinions. As has been done by the competent sociologists down at People and Place . The relationship between New Left cultural elites and Old Left cultural populus is of critical importance in the alignment of political forces on the Left. Betts exposes the ideological tension on the Left:
In the early noughties I predicted that the ALP would lurch to the Cultural Right in order to stem the flow of lower-class votes to the LN/P. Sure enough they did, with Rudd now embracing martial law in indigenous communities. The ultimate cultural conservative “me-too”.
Mark’s cultural criticism would have more credibility if he made some empirical predictions based on underlying theory, which later got confirmed.
To reference another cultural movement, Jack: Less is more.
In keeping with the theme of the thread: lol pwnd!
Jack Strocchi wrote:
Gee I’m glad I don’t live in that country Jack. It sounds hideous. I assume you’re ranting about that country known as “Straya” I hear a lot about on the TV, where Shane Warne lives.
10 David Rubie Jan 4th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Yeah, Warnie. A familiar face at MoCA openings.
Of course cultural elites exist! It’s just that it’s hard to define them.
Actually, no, no it doesn’t. If you’d read Mitford at all on “U and non-U” (what?), or your Bourdieu on how ‘taste’ is created and transmitted.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a Carlton Draught®, a brand I drink solely because of their use of Carl Orff’s ecclesiastica-in-advertising. Self-referentialism? It better sell some bloo-dy beer.
Jack, it’s well known that Warnie’s Mum is German. What is less well known is that from an early age she instilled in him a love of Wagner. In his autobigraphy he tells ther story of rushing from cricket practice to catch the VSO’s performance of Tristan and Isolde.
This immersion in high culture had a lasting effect. Warnie used to hum The Ride of the Valkyries to himself as he ran in to bowl.
Ive found Warnie much more interesting since learning he’s half German.
I salute Spiros for reading his book.
I gather that puts you about one book ahead of Warnie already.
Oh, and who can forget the English poet laureate’s most famous contribution to *their* high culture? (I’m not kidding):
George Formby, take yer ‘at orff.
I don’t believe Mark has correctly summarised the point of the “culture warriors”. He seems to think that Kevin Donnelly et al are saying:
1. Cultural elites all worship traditional high culture.
2. Boys and girls, it is fit and proper for you to follow what the cultural elites do.
3. Therefore, study Homer, not Homer Simpson.
I think rather that the “culture warriors” are simply asserting that traditional lit is intrinsically more worthy of study than pop culture, and yet pop culture has supplanted and displaced traditional lit in our schools.
The latter is the interesting point. One hears many claims by anecdote, but has anyone seen an empirical study on what is actually being taught in our english classes, and how it has changed over recent decades?
Mark
Derrida was a poststructuralist, but not a postmodernist, sweetie.
I hope this helps.
[Psst, JG, this thread was tailor-made for the word “luvvie”, and I hope you will take full advantage of the opportunity!]
Mark
Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were no “luvvies�?
Indeed! Damn Howard and his anti-revolver laws!
Paulus
I most certainly will not! If y’all think y’all can just push my buttons, use and abuse me wily-nilly for sport, y’all have another thing coming.
In a spasm of solidarity with both my proletarian roots and my modern-day Luvviesphere, I henceforth will refuse to use the Luvvie on this thread! 
Mark
While otherwise thanking you for this for-too-long suppressed vital debate, I must inform you that your understanding of what the Culture Wars actually are about is somewhat, er, idiosyncratic?
I’m well aware, John. But the culture warriors either aren’t or find it more useful to construct a monstrous horde of postmodernists. Btw, I think “post-structuralism” itself (which is not a term in use in French scholarship) is a fairly useless category that lumps too much in the same basket.
Alas, wrong on both counts, JG.
Göring never actually made the quote about revolvers and Kultur—it’s apocryphal—and Howard’s post-Port Arthur gun laws apply only to weapons which have semi-, full-automatic or pump-action capacity.
Having said that, seeing you and Jack Strocchi on the same thread, the most powerful handjobs in the world, the question I’ve got to ask myself is do I feel lucky? Well, do I?
Strocchi vs. Greenfield would out-stoush Alien vs. Predator. Make my day.
Paul Burns
While we have had overwhelmingly civil and productive discussions about history/iography over the past few weeks, I must correct you on one vital misunderstanding under which you labour. The History Wars were without question started by the Far Left, and have now taken on the significance of religion for the poor dears such as the truly loopy Curthoys Crazies.
Having said that, seeing you and Jack Strocchi on the same thread, the most powerful handjobs in the world, the question I’ve got to ask myself is do I feel lucky? Well, do I?
Strocchi vs. Greenfield would out-stoush Alien vs. Predator. Make my day.
That is the funniest shit I have read here for weeks. he he he he.
Must say this is a nice cultural development - a pub deciding to get rid of its pokies.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/peturbed-publican-punts-his-pokies/2008/01/04/1198950053971.html
Next time I’m up Brissie way I’ll have to make sure I go and have a drink or two, just to show my support.
Yes, great comment, Mr Hogan.
Poor Greensleaves, the more he tries to impress, the less he succeeds; while the more Strocchit writes the the less he makes sense.
“Strocchi vs. Greenfield”
It would be like Steven Segall v. Jean Claude van Damme.
The universe will implode!
I think you’ve misunderstood me, Gaz and Adrian. I wasn’t trying to be abusive; I’d be genuinely fascinated by an exchange of views between the two. May God and the locomotives of history save me, I’m truly a slave to stoush.
Well, this could be an object lesson for JG in his attempts to improve his writing and argumentative practice for uni. Summarise Jack Strocchi’s argument succinctly.
Mark
Much as I adore the presence of Herr Strocchi, the assignment you have set me is FAR too advanced for me1
JG,
Well, how come I wasn’t in the trenches?
JG, I acknowledge Australian historians of all ideologies engaged in debates about feminist studies, Aboriginal history, womens’ history, class history, environmental history, Labor history, various aspects of economic history, immigration history etc., but for the most part these debates were civilised, if sometimes heated debates.(Try discussing Bligh, MacArthur and the Rum Rebellion with the differing sides and see how heated it can get, or various aspects of the Botany Bay Debate - which, by the way, the convicts appear to have won.)It wasn’t a war. It was passionate historical debate. And if you can’t get passionate about history, you shouldn’t be studying it. There were and are similar kinds of debate going on re 18c English history and American Colonial and Revolutionary History, but it was never a war, by any stretch of the imagination. The Quadrant Circle and JWH turned it into a “War”, which, by the way, most of us dismiss as irrelevant, albeit we lament the damage it has done to public perceptions of the history profession - false perceptions I might add.
Actually Kevin Donnelly is most definitely an advocate for the lower orders, NOT the elite.
Paul Burns
You were not in the trenches because you did not defect to the enemy postits. This is why you and I can productive discussions about history.
Actually, JG, the fact that you’re now talking about the history wars goes to the confusion about what “culture” consists of in these interrelated domains. Historiographical controversies are in fact only tangentially related to questions about the canon or subsidies for art or whatever.
…except perhaps in some sort of Arnoldian sense.
That’s why Strocchi’s comment would in fact repay a careful reading to identify all the conflations and elisions that he needs to make (consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know) in order to keep his ideas minimally connected. As with a lot of conservative arguments, the culture wars talk is far more emotive than rational, and it withers under logical examination.
Mark
You are correct that we can usefully separate the Culture/History Wars. I was merely being polite and responding to Paul Burns’ earlier conflation. But you are presenting only one vanguard in the Culture Wars, not the Wars themselves; the establishment of CultiStudies in the universities and Critical Literacy in the schools.
JG,
One or two of my right wing tutors would severely disagree with you, especially when it came to my undergraduate views about R.G. Menzies.I really blotted my copybook there. (since slightly amended, but only slightly amended, by more intensive postgraduate study, and then only for his first Prime Ministership.)
By the way, what’s a postit?
Point. As they’d have said on the Western Front, when you’re in a hole, keep digging it longer.
As for the so-called Australian ‘History Wars’, as Anthony Smith said about broadcasters’ battles, the critical discussions aren’t between historian and audience, but historian and Government.
With a change there, we should expect it to get All Quiet all of a sudden.
John, the establishment of cultural studies in Universities and critical literacy in schools are actually also only tangentially related no matter what Kevin Donnelly thinks.
PB
Postit is my convenient abbreviation ofr postmodernist/structuralist
Tend to agree with Paul Burns - the ‘culture wars’ debate was a bit of a straw man in the Howard era.
Personally, in an Australia where I can’t even reliably put enough food on the table for three days out of every fortnight, I don’t give a stuff about these so-called wars.
Mark
I think I have made it pretty clear I do not pay any attention to Kevin Donnelly, Gerard Henderson, Robert Manne, Hugh McKay,Phillip Adams, Piers Ackerman, etc. They make me want to hurl my cookies. Having lived in the UK and the US and experienced Cultural Warriors - of all hues - at their finest, returning to Oz (which I nevertheless love) was like returning to The Land That Time Forget: an epithet my friends have sent around the world!
They make one ashamed to be Australian, because they are so DUMB and cannot write. WTF are they STILL doing holding onto all that valuable media real estate?
I read the first few Donnelly effusions, after which I thought “OK. I got that. Nothing more to see here. Move on.” I find his conflation of marxist/feminist/green/psotit/blah to be extremely unhelpful. When I did the old-fashioned pre-postit 2 year NSW HSC Modern History syllabus in the 1980s, we learnt all about Marx, socialism, trade-unions, Tolpuddle martyrs, suffragettes, colonialism as a cause of WW1, economic tensions between agricultural/slave capital and industrial capital as cause of US civil war. I even have friends who went to Cranbrook, who had very sophisticated explicitly Marxist approaches to these topics.
In English I read “Cry the Beloved Country,” “Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith,” “Coonardoo,” “Things Fall Apart,” blah, blah, blah.
So to be told by Donnelly that left-wing history and literarture are new to schools is just (thankfully) bullshit. OTOH I equally loathe the Cultural Literacy crowd who think we were all saps sodden with false consciousness before they put fricking Clueless on the HSC syllabus.
Mark
While I think Herr Strocchi is a very, very cluey bloke, he can obviously type extremely quickly, and my little ADD-addled head can only give the occasional missive the attention it deserves.
That’s been done, JG. First as tragedy by Mark Davis, then by Ryan Heath, as farce.
clarence girl
Aaaaaarrrrrgghhhhhhhhhhhh….Repeat After Me! Howard was a PARTICIPANT in the Culture Wars, not The Wars themselves. Howard is now gone - good riddance to bad rubbish - but do you think that will make one iota of difference to what I read in academic journals from History to Psychology this year? Not on your nellie!
silworm
I think on this particular issue you will find more than a few willing to temporarily abandon their pacifism and contribute to the cavalry.
I suppose I was asking for it, with my provocation about “luvvies”, but very little of this has anything much to do with the subject of the actual post.
No, Sunshine, it’s only you.
“very little of this has anything much to do with the subject of the actual post.”
And unfortuntately far too much to do with John Greenfield, who has the unhappy ability to turn any discussion around to his favourite topic - himself.
Only because other people talk about him, adrian.
One would not expect to find the survey findings from Bourdieu’s Distinction conducted in 1960/70s French society replicated today in Australia. They did, however, assist in establishing a problematic around the interests and capital involved in cultural differentiation. The process was always dynamic with various social groups ( not necessarily whole ‘classes’ ) enjoying a capacity to appropriate different cultural forms and styles in a way that distinguished them - cultural capital converted into symbolic capital. Part of this involved developing and asserting “new” readings of - and interest in - popular cultural forms.
Of course since then one of the many key changes has been the emergence of the forms of representation and communication enabled through web 2.0, intensifying the capacity (of some) for cultural representation.
Interesting question Mark!
John Frow, Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison applied Bourdieu’s methods to their own study of Australian taste & judgement in ‘Accounting for Taste’ (1999). From what I remember, Bourdieu ‘found’ that the French education system was a machine for reproducing cultural capital: effectively reproducing the French class system through training in the skills of cultural taste, like how to appreciate impressionist painting.
What Frow et al found was that the Australian education system was less a machine for the creation of cultural capital than it was for social capital - who you know is more important that what you know (That’s how I understand the distinction between the two).
I’m not suggesting that Frow and his colleagues drew the right conclusions from what also might have been a flawed methodology, nor that the conditions at the time of their surveys have not changed. But, what’s interesting, to me at least, is that if social capital, rather than cultural capital, is more at stake in the Australian Education system’s pedagogies of taste, then those skirmishes in the culture (& history) wars that were focussed through panics about postmodern curricula could be seen as contests over social capital. I’m inclined to believe that what Kevin Donnelly, Keith Windschuttle and various other public intellectuals intend is the re-forming of social capital through an education system that is governed for the economic elite.
Off thread but Malcolm Knox’s novel ‘Jamaica’ bears out this thesis: the sort of taste that an expansive education in Sydney (at least) produces is for elite sporting contests and knowledge of the finer distinctions of class at the top-end of town.
Make expansive - expensive in the last sentence.
Mark, if not for debating the dominance of cultural elites from the right or the dominance of the religious right from the left, what would bloggers do with themselves?
Read some Dickens, apparently.
I don’t know, Matt, talk about something interesting? I’ve always pointed out that there is no “dominance of the religious right” in Australia, much as some lefties might like to think so.
Indeed, Barbara, as I noted with regard to the dissolution of the classical bourgeois ethos. It would be interesting to know if France were one of the “six other countries” included in the survey - but I agree with you about the way Bourdieu framed some very important questions.
Ag, also been a while since I looked at Frow et al, but one only has to think of the self-reproducing elites found in some sectors of professions such as the law and how their status and careers are founded on a GPS and a sandstone education to think they’re on to something. I also suspect that their study provides further evidence that all this tosh about “luvvies” in Australia has never reflected anything real. Second rate appropriation of American themes - the cultural cringe writ large in the op/ed columns and their fellow travellers in the blogosphere.
Hogan, I tend to think that Goering actually did say “When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver”. This would have been a borrowed expression however, as he would have picked up the gist of this anti-intellectual jibe from a play he attended with is comrades. The saying is a notion designed to suck up to rednecks, like the term “egghead” in the US and “intellectual” in Australia as in “Are you some sort of intellectual, mate ,are ya?”
Goering would have most probably picked up the phrase from a play Schlageter by a Nazi suck-up writer Hanns Johst, which was written on the Nazis’ accession to power in 1933 and performed on Adolf’s birthday. The phrase “Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning!” (Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning!) would have borught down the house in an auditorium full of Nazis and I can envisage Hermann slapping his fat thigh on hearing this one.
Newsreel from 1945 of Goering giving himself up to a US officer in Bavaria shows him clearly handing over his personal sidearm, which was a revolver.
This leads me to believe that it is quite plausible that he used the phrase on occasions, particularly as Rudolf Hess also used the phrase except for vhe last bit: “Wenn ich “Kultur” höre, nehme ich meine Pistole”.
But the real question is, Hogan, is JG subtly identifying himself with the sentiments of the audience at the premiere of Shlageter on April 30, 1933?
Mark, this post and the article it linked to were interesting in their own right. However, I still fail to see what relevance they have to any Australian “culture war”, real or imaginary.
The key finding was: “Class, as opposed to status, does not seem to have much effect on cultural tastes. … Doctor Chan said: “Our work shows it’s education and social status, not social class that predict cultural consumption in the UK.”
Fine. But of little relevance to Australia, where class is much less distinct than in the UK. You know, toffs vs oiks/chavs, Eton, Oxbridge, BBC English, etc — we have nothing like that here. (In fact, I think class is non-existent in Oz, but that’s probably a debate for another day.)
The “culture warriors” are not saying that “the kids in the aspirational burbs are being unfairly deprived of the great heritage of Western Civ” for some class-based reason, rather that it’s due to recent changes in educational fashion that marginalise the traditional canon. The article does nothing to gainsay that thesis.
Paulus, I’d disagree with you fundamentally that class is absent in Australia. It doesn’t need distinctions such as titles or “received pronunciation” and in any case both are falling into desuetude in England without any lessening of class influences on life chances, or in terms of social stratification generally.
As to the relevance, I’m trying to point out two things:
(1) The ideal of the “cultured” person to which apparently everyone in our wonderfully democratic society has a right to aspire to does not in fact exist (anymore);
(2) The culture wars talk is and has to be incoherent. On one hand, “luvvies” conspire to keep culture to themselves while dishing out pap to the masses, while on the other truly cultured gentlefolk like all our friends the op/edders are on the side of the people.
As to status and class, since the study’s been co-authored by Goldthorpe, he’s no doubt got a Weberian take on both. But actually the argument doesn’t change much if you substitute Weberian class for Marxist status.
Paulus “…of little relevance to Australia, where class is much less distinct than in the UK. You know, toffs vs oiks/chavs, Eton, Oxbridge, BBC English, etc — we have nothing like that here. (In fact, I think class is non-existent in Oz, but that’s probably a debate for another day.)”
This is hysterical. Lessee…
The clipped speech of the urban well-heeled versus the stereotypic rural drawl.
Geelong Grammar versus Armpit-of-the-Universe High.
Group-of-8 Uni versus Dawkins or no Uni.
Multiple generations of Beazleys, Creans, Downers in politics.
“Aspirationals” who think that the 20-foot high front porch and wall-sized plasma screen show that they have made it, versus a Directoriate born of the already-rich, who seem to have no jobs other that to sit part-time on the boards of multiple companies and be paid several thousand per hour for it (if you don’t believe me, buy some shares, get the annual report, and check out the directors’ bios. When did these folks ever not be a senior exec or director?)
The late Kerry Packer paying $32 in personal income tax one year, and blowing multiple millions of somebody’s money on the tables in Vegas the next.
Yeah, sure, we don’t have class in Oz!
Those with normal jobs and normal levels of investments/savings, who worry how to pay off that few k on the credit card and associate with other people who have normal jobs and finances, live in a different universe from the old-money and lucky-few-entrepreneur types who mingle with senior professionals and apparatchiks, and never ever have to worry where the next few tens of k are coming from.
This is a nepotistic society (but aren’t they all?) in which your parents, their connections and yours, and the combined purchasing and negotiating power of your immediate tribe are nearly everything, and anything else really is a battle.
But education/culture/values correlate only broadly with wealth/status/power. The culture wars were always a smokescreen to divert attention from the real business of reducing mobility and opportunity. And phony-egalitarian levellers-down on the nominal Left are just as guilty of that as the totalitarian/feudal nominal Right.
Well argued!
AndyC’s on to something here but he can afford to be a little more nuanced.
Take the clientele of a major Public School, for example.
Fifty years ago virtually all the fathers of pupils at such a school were either bosses running their own concerns or members of the learned professions — lawyers, doctors, engineers.
Today a much smaller proportion of them are what we might call capitalists. Many more of them are senior management for public, often multinational, companies. In other words, they are members of the salariat. Often well paid, but salary earners nevertheless.
Moreover, today a large percentage of the clients of that major Public School (maybe 10% to 15%) are children of South East Asian refugees. These refugees often landed in Australia with nothing more than the clothes they wore. These people see this major Public School as a means to upward economic mobility. Their dreams of of the learned professions. And being tractable children, disproportionately that is where many find themselves at the end of their secondary schooling.
This major Public School now has a clientele that contains fewer ex-students among its parents than at any time since its foundation, meaning that the hereditary element of attendance at this school is less prominent now than at any time in the past.
Thus, the old stereotypes of Mr Fat, the local exploiter of labour, or the major grazier do not reflect the current reality of class in Australia. Very few Australians can be significant capitalists any more. We live in a branch-office economy dominated by multinationals. The landed gentry have almost disappeared. But on the other side the learned professions are more open to diverse entrants than ever they were.
Katz: your post, and particularly the last para, are absolutely spot on!
AndyC: I went to the oldest Anglican private school in Adelaide. One of my classmates was the son of the Anglican Archbishop. Others were rough-as-guts farmers’ sons.
Some could speak ‘posh’. Others had a vocabulary largely consisting of 4-letter words.
Some became professionals or businessmen; some joined the public service or academia; one (I kid you not) became a deck hand on a fishing boat. Some are now unemployed.
How can anyone make out of that melange any conclusions as to class?
Is it just a case of speaking ‘nice’? Or a function of income? Or wealth? Or what exactly? If you were devising a test or statistical analysis that related class to other variables, how would you define precisely what class a particular person belonged to?
Remember that class, as one would have observed it in 1920s Britain, involved much more than income or wealth. If you were a member of the upper class, you might have gambled away the entire family fortune in Monte Carlo, and be now broke, but people would still treat you as upper class regardless. There is no equivalent of that in modern Australia.
And if you think that the right has some evil secret agenda of, and I quote, “reducing mobility and opportunity”, go see a psychologist to get that paranoia treated.
Andyc
Word.
Paulus,
I like English Marxist EP Thompson’s notion that class is less an inherited or institutional substance - it’s a relationship. For Bourdieu social relationships are not just structured by income and wealth (economic capital), but also by symbolic, cultural and social capital.
Whether we are still talking about class differences if we are no longer talking about differences in wealth and income doesn’t alter the force of something like class differentials operating in Australian society.
But still, Ag, for the concept of “class” to be meaningful to a social scientist, it has to be capable of definition.
Imagine if you were a research officer and the Prof came in and said, “I’m doing an analysis on how class correlates with educational achievement. I have here data from the ABS on 10,000 individuals. Their educational level is easy to classify. Now, I want you to work out how many different classes there are in modern Australia, and specify the cut-off point between each class.”
How would you begin? How would anyone be able to make sense of a diverse and fluid mix of “income and wealth (economic capital), [plus] symbolic, cultural and social capital”?
Basically, “class” is now simply too vague to be meaningful.
There is class division in Australia, but I doubt it can any longer be categorised as working class, bourgeoisie, ruling class. The only Marxist category that is easily recognisable nowadays id the lumpenproletariat, or as the Americans call it, the underclass. If one wants to categorise people by class, probably income or geography are the only reliable indicators. Where you really get into trouble is when you try to fit culture into this. There are plenty of middle class homes where there aren’t any books, and plenty of working class homes where there are heaps. And I’d argue books are a good indication of culture.But then maybe not. The most successful bestsellers, apart from novels by Bryce Courtenay, are cook books and books by and about cricketers, according to recent surveys. Even crime novels are pretty low down the list. Its probably impossible nowadays to categorise some-one’s class by the football code they follow or club they belong to, (Manly excepted.)But it was possible to do so, probably as recent as the 1950s. Given the difficulty of tracing cultural interests to a particular class, its probable you could argue that if there are cultural elites, they’re everybody’s cultural elites, in which case, logically, they’re not elites.
It’s been done, Paulus, and many times, in empirical studies. There are a number of ways you can do it - you can look at self-identification, which tells you one thing, income/wealth, which tells you another, and relations to the means of production (ie business owner, professional, employee) etc, which tells you yet another. And no doubt other axes which would tell you something else. There are a number of very large studies done in Australia using not just ABS but a range of other data (eg HILDA), and large scale surveys (some longitudinal). A research officer would know this - and a second year social science methods student should be able to answer the question.
I should also mention that there are a number of studies I’m aware of which operationalise Bourdieu’s categories using Australian data.
Paul - actually you can get some meaningful data on social inequality by using standard Marxist categories - I should look up one study done on Australian women which is fairly illuminating actually. I hasten to add that you don’t need to accept Marxism as a politics in order to see this, before the sceptics jump in. The degree to which class cultures exist or collective class identification in a sense that meaningfully affects behaviour and attitudes - which is something I allude to in the post - is much less than it once was. As Ag was suggesting though, the born to rule mob know who they are, and what makes them different.
Well okay, Mark, I’ll take your word for it. The thing that still puzzles me about “class”, though, is the lack of definitive signifiers that are obvious to an onlooker.
Where exactly would you place the Geelong Grammar old boy who self-identifies with the upper class, has a mid-level income, and whose relationship with the means of production is an employee? The answer, I suppose, is: depends on what definition you’re using.
In the old days — at least as far as I can gather from historical movies and novels! — you could quickly and easily place someone into their class position upon meeting them. Not so now, evidently.
In any sufficiently complex society, strata are pretty much always going to exist; but that’s not really the same thing as “class.” Class is a kind of slippery notion, especially when you’re comparing different societies, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be talked about at all, just that one should try to chew slowly and take very small bites.
It might be helpful to keep in mind that class isn’t a monolithic construct, it’s subject to a lot of variables. Two important ones, I’d say, are the degrees to which various class boundaries are permeable or impermeable (is there a fence? if so, how high? and is it electrified?), and the odds or probability that a given individual of given capabilities can move across these barriers, and with what level of ease. The example that Katz gives of the children of Asian refugees attending elite schools in one generation is interesting because it shows that certain barriers are indeed permeable (which doesn’t prove they don’t exist), but that individuals with different qualities will have different levels of success.
A perceptive person could probably give pretty good odds on any given individual’s chances for class mobility in a given social setting, just by talking to that individual for a good half an hour or so and knowing what the likely obstacles might be. Also keep in mind that plenty of people are relatively content with who and where they are in life, and that this too has a bearing on the formation of strata, independent of the notion of class.
Perhaps the novels and movies are simplifying a bit, Paulus! If you read Trollope, for instance, or Dickens (I’m reading Bleak House at the moment), you can see a constant anxiety about and need to reinforce class distinctions - even from those who were the most class-y and distinguished. There was arguably more class mobility in 19th century Britain than there is now - though a lot of it was downwards or slightly upwards rather than big leaps (which are extremely rare in any age). But you just need to think of the way in which the children of the industrial revolutionaries were raised as little ladies and gentlemen, and of the fact that (if I recall correctly) the Guinness clan got ennobled in three different lines. The whole way the British aristocracy functioned was to absorb moneyed individuals and incorporate them within its fold - and Churchill’s dad wasn’t the only aristo looking across the Atlantic in the late 19th century for an American heiress - within a few generations, it shouldn’t matter much if you were the fourteenth Earl Arundel or the second Viscount Northcliffe. I use the latter example because the phrase “press Barons” was originally meant literally.
As to your example, that’s why the concept of status is useful as a supplement to that of class. But on that point, I’d also endorse a lot of what A Plate of Shrimp has to say.
“depends on what definition you’re using”
Which doesn’t detract value from class analysis, but rather adds to it. Remember that class is most useful in aiding insight to social interactions - it helps you see who is exploiting who for a particular frame of reference. People being exploited at one level will be the ones doing the exploiting at another after all.
This is worthy of consideration.
Certainly there are many examples of interlocking directorates at the top end of town. These are the chaps and chapettes who have standing in the business community and their status extends out into the broader community of leafy suburbs, discreetly luxurious resorts, the right clubs and perhaps a charity or two.
But these chaps and chapettes are the non-executive directors on company boards. There is no doubt that membership of the right boards provides cache, enhances influence, and perhaps aids a little insider trading to keep the best fruit on the well-polished sideboard.
However, in terms of actual remuneration, usually it is the executive board members — the CEO, the CFO, the production manager — who make the big money. And they are employees. And until they retire they are hardly ever on more than one board because they are working 90 hours a week keeping their own company afloat.
Let’s go to the other side of AndyC’s divide.
Often the aspirationals that AndyC mentions are self-employed tradies who have transformed a good business sense into a profitable business. These chaps tend not to be employers in the traditional sense. Instead, they do their work with and through an interlocking network of sub-contractors. Sometimes they are the lead contractor. At other times they are lower down the food chain. This is a changeable and dynamic world. The whole system is based on buoyant economic conditions. Sometimes they are price setters, at other times they are scrambling for work at whatever price they can get. But the key to their success is the low cost-structure of the business. If they aren’t working they aren’t earning. But on the other hand, if business turns bad their overheads are quite manageable.
These two worlds don’t intersect at many points, except when the director chappie is having a major reno done on his house, or when the non-executive directors are asleep at the wheel while the CFO drives a company off the road, taking a large part of the aspirational’s private superannuation account with it.
Paulus
I am a born and bred Sydeny Westie who went to the most rough as guts public schools, and even I can tell a Saint’s boy, after he has uttered only one sentence.
I consider myself working class,what else can I be if Telstra Bills worry me,I hoe out prickles and work in a potato shed and help sometimes around the cattle,for a owner who once lumped wheat on his back,and till this day admits failures in education!?What else can I be if I am so angry with Labor for seeing it con people for decades now,whilst the Libs exploit..the only way forward is applying my own intelligence to matters and thus engage in production in matters other than doing..doing immediately!?What else am I if not working class to now understand my parents dilemma in bringing up six kids,and all by my Father s acceptance of a Jack Lang statement ..that Australia needed workers for the future.No matter what I may end up like at the end of my life I cannot be anything ,but working class.And to me that title endears,no matter what,including the fact,I am well and truly pensioned off.I say this, go to operas, read widely and do not underestimate those who consider themselves working class to be disappointed at Warne as some sort of cultural indicator.The working class in our history havent majored in power,academia, every business ,military public service.We do not conform,if we exist..we lead and you will listen and comprehend.