Reflections on Working-Class Space,Being,and Experience

Abstract

This piece responds to Kirk's piece in 2003. Cultural studies substitutes discussions of cultural representations for attempts to evidence the nature of the contemporary experience of class. Social distances inscribed in the academic career have the effect of obscuring processes constitutive of the lives of working people. The absence of working class people in the university means they are uniquely suited to this kind of colonizing reduction to tokenised, symbolic totem. It is not surprising that one sees "working class studies" emerging as an object of study and that those " representing" the "working class" have become institutionally powerful, organized within arts, humanities, and social science faculties at a time when we have a government whose claim to concern must be reduced to rhetorics that it pays university departments to produce. As an unemployed man, my differential involvement in being working class means I look elsewhere for categories to understand what I hear around me, everyday, and the difference in my categories and those of Kirk, arises from the difference in our form of involvement in the everyday phenomena that we deploy categories to signify.