Is being poor a culture, or just a number?

[imomus]

I found this article by Walter Benn Michaels (he's an English prof at the University of Illinois) in the current London Review of Books very interesting, because it sums up concisely and eloquently some basic reservations I've tried to express myself about identity politics, about equality of opportunity (rather than outcome), and about the PC culture of respect. It also challenges some of my arguments about poverty, arguments I haven't resolved yet. Is poverty a culture of value in itself, or is it just a lack of money? Are there different poverties around the world, or just one?

Walter Benn Michaels is basically recapping, in the article, the arguments in his book The Trouble with Diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality. I want to sum up some of what I thought were his best points in a sort of PowerPoint presentation:

1. Someone called Gregory Marton makes a good general summary on the Amazon page: "This book is aimed at drawing distinctions between subjective matters of identity and objective matters of income and beliefs. Each identity is as good as any other, but being poor is worse than being rich. Michaels accuses the left of having lost its focus on objective equality, to the point of glorifying poverty."

2. After reading the article, I summarised it myself in an email to Lynsey Hanley: "Walter Benn Michaels valuably distinguishes between race and class, and says that one requires us to discriminate, the other requires that we don't. Race, in other words, leads to a discourse of culture, identity and diversity (the anthropological discourse), whereas class leads to a discourse of equality and therefore of the eradication of material differences. The only problem is, I'm not sure that class isn't also culture. What do you think? Is being working class just a lack of money, opportunity, etc, or is it a culture? Or both (a culture based on lack of money, opportunity, etc)?"

3. Gregory Marton again: "Treating poverty as a matter of identity is, according to Michaels, a pernicious strategy for willfully ignoring the problem that increasingly many people are increasingly poor, and have less and less opportunity to move out of poverty. Moreover, by fighting battles of identity -- WalMart and Wall Street women each making some percent less than the men -- we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make. He does not argue against fighting injustices of identity so much as argue for prioritizing and looking at the problems in perspective. The book draws sharp distinctions between the kinds of arguments that make sense for identities and those that make sense for wealth and ideology."

4. A blog report on Michaels' book: "Nobody claims "poor" as an identity... You can claim any number of racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identities when job hunting, but you can never simply state that you're poor, really poor."

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5. Diversity is good when it's cultural, bad when it's economic. In the C-Span video above, Michaels puts it like this: "We don't want to just appreciate diversity, we also want -- where it's appropriate -- to minimize diversity. Because after all diversity with regards to money is just a word for inequality; some people have more, some people have less."

6. From the LRB article: "My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity."

7. Celebrating diversity is now our way of accepting inequality. There are left neoliberals as well as right neoliberals: "Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it. The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt."



8. The rise in inequality has -- suspiciously -- gone hand-in-hand with the fall in prejudice: "Increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism."



9. "Even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality... a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics."

10. "The supposed left has turned into something like the human resource department of the right, concerned to make sure that women of the upper middle class have the same privileges as the men." Or as Alan Wolfe put it in an otherwise scathing review in Slate, it's "as if the ideal society were one in which both rich black kids and rich white kids could attend the same elite college".

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11. From Michaels' LRB review: "In a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU, the ambition to eliminate racial disparities rather than income inequality itself functions as a form of legitimation rather than as a critique. Those writing in this collection understand the ‘re-emergence of class’ not as a function of the increasing injustice of class (when Thatcher took office, the GINI score was 0.25; now it’s 0.36, the highest the UK has ever recorded) but as a function of the increasing injustice of ‘classism’. What outrages them, in other words, is not the fact of class difference but the ‘scorn’ and ‘contempt’ with which the lower class is treated."

12. "What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’." But "it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by [low-paying] jobs."

13. This seems to me to relate both to yesterday's Richard Hoggart quotes about juke-box boys in milk bars -- Hoggart seemed to propose working-classness as a choice between two cultures, a benign traditional English one and a glitzy imported meretricious American one -- and to the entry the other day about Progress versus diversity. Presumably -- since his argument is entirely posited on the separability of economic progress arguments from cultural diversity arguments -- Michaels would really hate my idea of "diversity-as-progress"; that "diversity do the work of progress by allowing many different systems to co-exist". Because, of course, allowing different systems to co-exist means allowing different levels of income to co-exist.

14. It's interesting that Michaels' 2006 book The Shape of the Signifier makes the case for re-instating the ideology of the author's intentions at a time when questions of identity have become the primary concern; it "anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe." You may remember that my justification of diversity-as-progress specifically invoked the Intentional Fallacy -- the idea that it's wrong to pay too much attention to a writer's intentions (or, on a broader level, a politician's). Human fallibility, I argued on Tuesday, makes diversity the best guarantor of progress. It's Friday.

Comments

class: still the dirty little word in america

[(Anonymous)]

if you help the poor, you're called a saint; if you ask why they're poor, you're called a communist.

and finally, hopefully someone (or sire momus) can add a link to the "homelessness chic" entry from a while back. pertinent to this stuff, i'd say. in the case of that entry, it was: aestheticize their (the poor's) style, but don't ask why they're poor.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The famous Chinese Zen master Tengetsu of the T'ang dynasty once said "Poverty is your treasure". Not only is he extolling the Buddhist virtue of non-attachment but he's hinting at the benefits of learning to adapt to and accept life at its most challenging.

One thing I've never seen eye-to-eye with you on is your unwavering belief that people shall and should gauge their intrinsic value by comparing their lives to the lives of others. Your belief that contentment in life basically boils down to keeping up with the Joneses. I understand that this belief of yours stems from your Marxist coloured perception of the world, and yet ironically there's something inescapably bourgeois about it all -- that materialism is happiness. "I'm not equal enough, I'm not happy" is just another version of "I'm not rich enough, I'm not happy".

[lazy-leoboiko.livejournal.com]

The controversy seems to me from the fact that there’s poverty, and then there’s poverty. Surely starvation and malnutrition obliterate all thinking about «culture».

Let’s put this in another way: is poverty desirable? Obviously no one wants starvation-poverty. But, in fact, some people do eschew money to a lesser degree — think of simple life movements, of religious communities, downshifting, the old beats and hippies, the art people who voluntarily stay away from class-changing jobs. I don’t think anyone would have trouble in letting voluntary poverty be called cultural diversity. The trouble is, of course, that most poor people — even SUV-poor, not food-poor — would like to be rich.

[(Anonymous)]

I think Michaels' valid point is that perhaps we've let our campaigning for diversity get in the way of our campaigning for equality. However, I don't agree with the implication that the two are somehow at odds.

Seeing as we're not gettng an equal society overnight, I don't see how it's an obstacle to any cause to accept and respect (and admire? adopt?) the culture of the low classes. I do believe there are certain valuable things to be learnt from the low class, which have perhaps stemmed from their economic conditions but which could be adapted to new, better conditions. Besides the unattachment mentioned above, a culture of saving would be a good antidote to the extreme consumist societies. Not to mention the romantic "working class hero" idea which has been lost to extreme formalism in elite art.

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

"we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make"

Which gets to a question that seems to come up often in discussions about "social justice": should everyone make the same amount of money regardless of what they do? It's easy to say yes and then promptly feel all warm and fuzzy about yourself, as often seems to happen in discussions about "social justice." But should you say yes? Should, for instance, a hipster bartender in some hipster bar earn as much as a school janitor or a trash collector?

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

"In a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU..."

With the exception of Poland, Lithuania and Portugal, according to this map (http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/04/income-inequality-in-europe.html).

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The definition of "working class" in Britain certainly seems cultural, and loosely if at all correlated to wealth. (A multi-millionaire owner of a chain of building firms or a university professor could claim to be "working class", by virtue of having grown up in the East End/Salford/the Gorbals/wherever, coming from a family that followed a football team for generations, eating pies and mash before it became acceptable for the middle classes, &c.). Class in Britain (or at least in England) is a somewhat vestigial system of signifiers which used to indicate one's wealth, level of education and breeding, but now are less significant in this respect. Of course, a lot of these traditional working-class signifiers became valuable tokens of "authenticity" to be consumed by affluent "white" people (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), while the British working classes (or, some would say, the underclass) looked to stereotypes of (largely Black and Hispanic) American proletarian culture (the gold chains, the wholesale appropriation of "gangsta" archetypes).

Or, to paraphrase a Cat And Girl (http://www.catandgirl.com) comic from some years ago, class is about how much money your grandparents had.

how timely...

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

GA Cohen obit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/10/ga-cohen-obituary

Let them eat books!

[(Anonymous)]

Doesn't it boil down to education? Read somewhere that inequality in education is terrible and getting ever worse in GB.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the promo spot for the American Federation of Wastrel Hipsters in Hipster Glasses Who Work Part-Time as Tofu Floggers in Inappropriately Located Vegan Restaurants would look like.

[(Anonymous)]

That's not a belief, it's a basic fact of human life. People (at least un-enlightened non-Buddhists) are unhappy when their neighbors have more than they do. This has been proven to occur across different cultures and income levels. But you're right; it's both bourgeois (the abnormal person's word for 'normal') and inescapable.

Re: how timely...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

a good case can be made for saying that unequal distribution destroys, rather than enhances, freedom, and that liberty actually requires equality, and therefore redistribution

Why do I only hear about this guy when he dies? It's a media conspiracy!

Educationalism and lazism

[(Anonymous)]

A Devil's advocate writes: factors involved in diversity (race, class) are fixed whereas the factors involved in equality (study, choose a lucrative career, work at it) are fluid. Of course society spends more time on the former. Regarding the latter it can only offer the opportunity. It can't force people to study law, or make the best decisions in their business.

To bring equality into the same arena as diversity is to say that stupidity and sloth are now -isms like racism and sexism. So companies can't apply educationalism when they hire, nor can they tick people off for lazism!

Re: Educationalism and lazism

[imomus.livejournal.com]

the factors involved in equality (study, choose a lucrative career, work at it) are fluid

Well, firstly, you put class and race together on the "diversity" side, which Michaels absolutely doesn't do -- he thinks class is determined by money (or lack of it). But secondly I doubt he or anyone leftish would ever agree that equality / inequality is determined voluntarily, via hard work or laziness. That's an optimistically meritocratic view (which is maybe why you called it devil's advocacy!). All studies show that social mobility in societies like the US and the UK is falling, and that your class status is determined, above all, by the class status of your parents. No matter how hard they work, or how lazy they are (George W. Bush), the majority of people will retain the class status of their parents. Equality of opportunity is a mirage.

[(Anonymous)]

What about the exemplary effect of diversity? Sure, letting a few women or ethnic minority people join the corporate or academic elite is not going to change the fact that there's an elite. But people's possibilities are also circumscribed by what they think their possibilities are. If it no longer looks weird to be both black and a professor or board member, then that may have a knock-on effect on how people perceive their possibilities.

I'd be interested to know your position on race- or gender-based positive discrimination.

Re: Educationalism and lazism

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

"All studies show that social mobility in societies like the US and the UK is falling, and that your class status is determined, above all, by the class status of your parents."

But surely it can't be as simple as that. If it were, then wouldn't the mere class status of one's parents have always determined one's own class status? You suggest that hasn't always been the case when you say, "social mobility . . . is falling"; that is, there was a time when it wasn't falling, when it was climbing instead. If that's true, it can't be merely and magically the class status of one's parents that utterly determines one's own. There must be more "historically specific" (to use a bit of jargon) reasons for it. What are they?

"No matter how hard they work, or how lazy they are (George W. Bush), the majority of people will retain the class status of their parents. Equality of opportunity is a mirage."

Don't you mean something along the lines of "equality of opportunity is often a mirage," given that you've also said things are that way for the "majority" of people, i.e., not all of them?

Without pedantry, all civilization would've collapsed a long time ago.

Re: Educationalism and lazism

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There must be more "historically specific" (to use a bit of jargon) reasons for it. What are they?

Thirty years of neoliberalism in the US and the UK. Equality was rising until about 1980.

Don't you mean something along the lines of "equality of opportunity is often a mirage," given that you've also said things are that way for the "majority" of people, i.e., not all of them?

The thing about equality of opportunity is that it justifies inequality as long as a minority of people can change their status. These lucky (or hardworking) few are supposed to prove to the mass that it's possible. But of course it's not possible for the mass as a mass without policies that promote widespread economic equality, ie without socialism. Equality of opportunity is like saying "We can all be rich because I won the lottery!"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not in favour of advancing certain categories of people "just to make up the numbers" (ie the Gorilla Girls and their quota-based art protests) regardless of ability.

I am in favour of Prof Macfarlane's description of justice systems which take off their blindfolds and judge according to context, circumstances, size, means, and social role (I think this is called "rohannon" law).

I agree with Michaels that positive discrimination is a cosmetic sticking plaster and in fact just ends up legitimising the class inequalities we have. You're right to talk about it in terms of an "exemplary effect" and people "thinking" there are possibilities, and what it "looks like". Obama being president makes it "look like" black people in general and en masse in America can do anything; they can't. Again, a mirage, unless you work on making all outcomes more equal.

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

interesting stuff.

"When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity."

So it's about alibis and excuses - only they don't feel like alibis and excuses because it's 'cultural' -and I suppose he would define 'culture' as something neo-liberals do habitually and semi-unconsciously rather than conspiratorially.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, if anyone can tell me what "famous book" Prof Macfarlane is talking about at 37.42 of this video -- it sounds like he spells out "LOHANON and TIV", and it's about judicial systems based on reconciliation -- I'd be very grateful. I can't find anything googling, and it's not in Prof Macfarlane's notes.

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[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

That Stump record cover always makes me think of this, from Marvell's Upon Appleton House:

But now the Salmon-Fishers moist
Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in Shoes,
Have shod their Heads in their Canoos.
How Tortoise like, but not so slow,
These rational Amphibii go?
Let's in: for the dark Hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but my point was that "thinking there are possibilities" is necessary (but of course in no way sufficient) for "there are possibilities". Possibilities have to be conceived before they can be realised, and that's where diversity within elites helps.

Also, there's the fact that elites are not just status groups, they also drive policy. Surely there's a link between the fact that Scandinavian parliaments have far a higher percentage of women, and the fact that things women are concerned about (like sharing the cost of childcare) are more taken account of.

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

Could it be something to do with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bohannan

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

That is, could it be something to do with this?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bohannan