summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2004-12-02 02:15 am
summercomfort) wrote2004-12-02 02:15 am
paper brainstorming
Hmm...
I'm surprisingly having a deal of problem with this ickle 5-pager for my European Class/Culture class. Maybe it's because I really liked my midterm (in which I talked about how in the initial formation of class, there is a culture attached to it, so from then on class consciousness becomes a sort of class culture, of say, skilled workers, or educated, or men, or whatever), and I want to do better, write better, think better.
So these past few weeks we've been mostly talking about the bourgeois as a class, about theatre (Brecht), and now, about distinction (Bordieu, the thing about education capital and social origin). So naturally I want to write something about the pursuit of status, or something. It's one thing to appear to be in a class, and another thing to be in a class, and a third thing to think of yourself as being in a class. Perceptions of class is so bound up in everything else, man.
So yeah, the theatre. Why do people want to be something else?
When people typically go to the opera, they dress up, and change their behavior. It's a show of status, of rising in culture and sophistication. Of course, that, for the middle class, may be education-based. Autodidact. (Bourdieu).
Entrenchment does happen over the generations. Social origins are important. Bordieu says that if my parents invested in culture, I would absorb/be attuned to lots of that, which is much more effective than something education based.
But this brings in the family dynamic. What if I don't *want* to be like my parents? Utter rejection? Or what if my family wants that? Steinberg is the one who I think was talking about bourgeois repression as a family unit. Hedonism are supposedly repressed.
But in America at least, consumerism, hedonism is rampant. The middle class is not exactly about self-denial. Money is spent on status (or is it just pure desire?). So in fact we are like the salaried masses: people who are willing to splurge on the appearance of middle class and scrimp on other things just so that we can be cool and cultured just like everyone else. Bordieu talks about people knowing classical music (education) vs. knowing composers (taste).
In Ranciere's article, did people want to be something else? It seemed to show that the early non-opera theatre was embraced by the working class, and rid of many of the bourgeois cultural dominance. People used art to define themselves and their lives. It was only when art became commodified in the gramophone and film that this changed. The gramophone sold culture that was immutable, other, and desired. Is this when class as a collective reality became individual/family conceptions? The working class became bourgeois-ized. Little family units, highly gradiated distinctions, trying to put a better face forward. Going to the theatre became more of an act, a symbol of taste.
How does theatre, then, enter the habitus?
The interactions between the economic-based and culture-based social heirarchies through the bourgeoisie-- the family as the vehicle of economic repression and cultural expansion, the bourgeois-ization of the workers into family units and the loss of class collective morality, the theatre as a status playground of habitus. Seeking distinction through ... mediocrity? "getting what everyone else has".
For the bourg, economics is easy: be on the right side of the means of production, be on the right part of the wage chart. But what about culture? Technology has made distinctions clearer and emulation harder. Hard to create own culture. Middle class culture becomes one of change and climbing. What do people do to "stay in the middle class"? Both econ and cultural is exercised and passed on within the family: the self-negating frugality and the self-indulgent culture. Spend money to distinctify? or spend money to "belong"? There's lots of readings/evidence on music. True class is no longer valid for bourg, only cultural class. Distinction between Bourg vs. Middle class?
What does the bourg class offer? Cultured but non-pretentious? So does class still matter? Well, a workingclass still matters. But everyone's becoming middle class now. It's the biggest class by self-labelling. Have always been so ambiguous, though. Fine gradations. In terms of culture, though, they are still the consumers of commodified culture. <-- that is the bourg, the class.
Need to economically afford social capital.
In other news, Isaac arrived yesterday morning, and has been cheerfully helpful around the house, cooling tempers, giving the house and a few of us a friendly shakedown. The living room no longer looks like a flea breeding ground, the fridge has shed a few moldy pounds, the kitchen counter is once again visible, and the height average has been increased to 5'7"-ish. Alexis did well on the Chinese oral today (proud!), and has a ginormous Phonetics final tomorrow that she's been studying for. And Cat has remained so productively helpful even in her downtime in the kitchen and whatnot (except when she's wallpapering, but everyone needs their image fixes.)
I think one of the attractions of the night is its silence. I can hear myself think. I am also at once closer to the world and closer to myself. :) Of course, in another hour or so, my brain will be dead, but I'm still in the golden zone.
Alexis re-found that "what if you're an anime character" meme, and it churned out:
Jono- wispy pink hair, t-shirt + jeans, hard working yaoi boy
Cat- magical girl, rainbow eyes, short pink hair, dressed in drag, bloodthirsty
I'm sorry, but those two are almost too perfect.
And Neil is allergic to wheat. huh.
I want to draw detailed pointless pictures of great earnestness and dubitous quality.
I'm surprisingly having a deal of problem with this ickle 5-pager for my European Class/Culture class. Maybe it's because I really liked my midterm (in which I talked about how in the initial formation of class, there is a culture attached to it, so from then on class consciousness becomes a sort of class culture, of say, skilled workers, or educated, or men, or whatever), and I want to do better, write better, think better.
So these past few weeks we've been mostly talking about the bourgeois as a class, about theatre (Brecht), and now, about distinction (Bordieu, the thing about education capital and social origin). So naturally I want to write something about the pursuit of status, or something. It's one thing to appear to be in a class, and another thing to be in a class, and a third thing to think of yourself as being in a class. Perceptions of class is so bound up in everything else, man.
So yeah, the theatre. Why do people want to be something else?
When people typically go to the opera, they dress up, and change their behavior. It's a show of status, of rising in culture and sophistication. Of course, that, for the middle class, may be education-based. Autodidact. (Bourdieu).
Entrenchment does happen over the generations. Social origins are important. Bordieu says that if my parents invested in culture, I would absorb/be attuned to lots of that, which is much more effective than something education based.
But this brings in the family dynamic. What if I don't *want* to be like my parents? Utter rejection? Or what if my family wants that? Steinberg is the one who I think was talking about bourgeois repression as a family unit. Hedonism are supposedly repressed.
But in America at least, consumerism, hedonism is rampant. The middle class is not exactly about self-denial. Money is spent on status (or is it just pure desire?). So in fact we are like the salaried masses: people who are willing to splurge on the appearance of middle class and scrimp on other things just so that we can be cool and cultured just like everyone else. Bordieu talks about people knowing classical music (education) vs. knowing composers (taste).
In Ranciere's article, did people want to be something else? It seemed to show that the early non-opera theatre was embraced by the working class, and rid of many of the bourgeois cultural dominance. People used art to define themselves and their lives. It was only when art became commodified in the gramophone and film that this changed. The gramophone sold culture that was immutable, other, and desired. Is this when class as a collective reality became individual/family conceptions? The working class became bourgeois-ized. Little family units, highly gradiated distinctions, trying to put a better face forward. Going to the theatre became more of an act, a symbol of taste.
How does theatre, then, enter the habitus?
The interactions between the economic-based and culture-based social heirarchies through the bourgeoisie-- the family as the vehicle of economic repression and cultural expansion, the bourgeois-ization of the workers into family units and the loss of class collective morality, the theatre as a status playground of habitus. Seeking distinction through ... mediocrity? "getting what everyone else has".
For the bourg, economics is easy: be on the right side of the means of production, be on the right part of the wage chart. But what about culture? Technology has made distinctions clearer and emulation harder. Hard to create own culture. Middle class culture becomes one of change and climbing. What do people do to "stay in the middle class"? Both econ and cultural is exercised and passed on within the family: the self-negating frugality and the self-indulgent culture. Spend money to distinctify? or spend money to "belong"? There's lots of readings/evidence on music. True class is no longer valid for bourg, only cultural class. Distinction between Bourg vs. Middle class?
What does the bourg class offer? Cultured but non-pretentious? So does class still matter? Well, a workingclass still matters. But everyone's becoming middle class now. It's the biggest class by self-labelling. Have always been so ambiguous, though. Fine gradations. In terms of culture, though, they are still the consumers of commodified culture. <-- that is the bourg, the class.
Need to economically afford social capital.
In other news, Isaac arrived yesterday morning, and has been cheerfully helpful around the house, cooling tempers, giving the house and a few of us a friendly shakedown. The living room no longer looks like a flea breeding ground, the fridge has shed a few moldy pounds, the kitchen counter is once again visible, and the height average has been increased to 5'7"-ish. Alexis did well on the Chinese oral today (proud!), and has a ginormous Phonetics final tomorrow that she's been studying for. And Cat has remained so productively helpful even in her downtime in the kitchen and whatnot (except when she's wallpapering, but everyone needs their image fixes.)
I think one of the attractions of the night is its silence. I can hear myself think. I am also at once closer to the world and closer to myself. :) Of course, in another hour or so, my brain will be dead, but I'm still in the golden zone.
Alexis re-found that "what if you're an anime character" meme, and it churned out:
Jono- wispy pink hair, t-shirt + jeans, hard working yaoi boy
Cat- magical girl, rainbow eyes, short pink hair, dressed in drag, bloodthirsty
I'm sorry, but those two are almost too perfect.
And Neil is allergic to wheat. huh.
I want to draw detailed pointless pictures of great earnestness and dubitous quality.