The Melancholia of Class

[shakahislop]

I'm reading this book at the moment

 

[WashYourHands]

 

[WashYourHands]

 

[shakahislop]

i'd be really surprised if she (cynthia cruz) who wrote it isn't somewhat a fan of mark k punk. not least because she quotes him right at the start. but also in terms of the writing style, because the whole book is making a point about the experience of class, by way of talking about a load of films and musicians that have had similar experiences of being working class people who have had to deal with the middle class world

 

[shakahislop]

in fact i seem to remember that at some point k punk was writing about the idea of a 'wounds of class' project. this book seems right along those lines

 

[shakahislop]

here is a copy and paste of a bit of text that is probably the main point of the book:

“After leaving our working-class origins, even if we do return, the initial rupture of having left leaves a fissure, a wound that cannot be healed”

and she talks about, among others, ian curtis, sparklehorse, cat power, jason molina, amy winehouse as examples of people to whom this has happened. but the best bits are probably the parts where she talks about this happening to her, which is presumably partly where the animus for a book like this comes from

 

[woops]

jason molina

i've seen this guy in the day didn't realise he was famous now

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Just read the free bit on Google books.

 

[shakahislop]

she quite heavily implies, or outright says, that the reason why most of these people killed themselves or got killed by drugs and alcohol (or in the case of cat power, started making shit music) is that they could never resolve the experience of starting off life being poor and then moving into the middle class world that is required to have a career in music, and being in one way or another negated by it.

it's a pattern that seems kind of convincing. i would add tricky (not that he ended up dying, but reading his book he did go pretty comprehensively off the rails) and mark lanegan to this list. more speculatively, benga, but it's a bit harder to say and to be honest it feels a bit weird even writing something like that in public.

 

[shakahislop]

her writing style reminds me of mark k punk as well. in that it's generally easy enough to read, but does throw out some ideas that at first seem totally counter-intuitive and take a bit repetition to be convinced. and even then, it kind of goes into the 'that's an interesting way to see things' category in my head, rather than 'this person is definitely right' category.

 

[shakahislop]

about what its like to be poor 'under' neoliberalism (this is very much the kind of book that talks about neoliberalism a lot):

"Faced with the realization that one has no “space,” one option is to create another, alternative space, within which to live. One obvious means of doing so is through the use of alcohol and drugs, which create, depending on the type, either a psychic expansion or a dimming down of the mind. In either case, alcohol and drugs can create an interior space within which one can think, daydream, or otherwise escape the incessant desires of the outside world.”

 

[woops]

i would read this book but i would not buy it

 

[mixed_biscuits]

big fish in a small pond to the opposite, but at least the small fish already in the bigger pond are used to their environs

 

[shakahislop]

"As she writes in “Literature and Justice,” “Ever since I have come to know myself, the social problem has been more important to me than any other issue: in Recife the black shanty towns were the first truth I encountered.” This contradiction, that of living as a member of the middle class while identifying with her precarious childhood, resulted in alienation, in melancholia. When she moved to Rio, she left the place that had formed her. This loss resulted in a wound, in a void that could not be filled in with anything.”

That's about a Brazilian writer called Clarice Lispector, who married a diplomat. As I get through the book it seems pretty convincing, at least that this is a fairly common but infrequently acknowledged experience.

 

[WashYourHands]

about what its like to be poor 'under' neoliberalism (this is very much the kind of book that talks about neoliberalism a lot):

"Faced with the realization that one has no “space,” one option is to create another, alternative space, within which to live. One obvious means of doing so is through the use of alcohol and drugs, which create, depending on the type, either a psychic expansion or a dimming down of the mind. In either case, alcohol and drugs can create an interior space within which one can think, daydream, or otherwise escape the incessant desires of the outside world.”

Working within addiction and having been an addict, the single greatest contributing factor across demographics isn’t class - psychological trauma is

There are exceptions. US opiate surge as profit driven marketing is the beacon globally and you might be one of the few on the board to have a handle on heroin production in Afghanistan

Fame and enabling environments are complex and the former you won’t see outside the Priory, but a mind developed in a foster care system (in and out of homes with cyclical abuse) will seek to escape the inner world of turmoil because the “outside world” doesn’t want to know. You’re not dimming down the mind, you’re swaddling it in a temporary shield that in itself creates greater need and ongoing drug interventions (for lack of better language)

The kind of client profile the majority of addicts have makes Amy Winehouse a sticky individual subject, the fact remains that no-one really gives two fucks about the rest out there, certainly not in this country. They’re a liability to be written off and it’s only getting worse due to Covid

 

[WashYourHands]

You can expect higher levels of trauma through deprivation but abuse cuts across all classes, from top tier public schools to schemies ie our entire client base

You don’t have to be poor to be groomed by manipulative cunts, that and the destructive power of shame are merciless engines. Ignorance is bliss and this island has long been drunk from said well

Tuppence contribution, Shaka

 

[woops]

Not apparent in Waterstones plenty of copy's of neon scream's though

 

[shakahislop]

You can expect higher levels of trauma through deprivation but abuse cuts across all classes, from top tier public schools to schemies ie our entire client base

You don’t have to be poor to be groomed by manipulative cunts, that and the destructive power of shame are merciless engines. Ignorance is bliss and this island has long been drunk from said well

Tuppence contribution, Shaka

I am probably misrepresenting her argument a bit with these random bits of copy and paste. i think what she is saying, among other things, and to put it in my terms instead of hers, is that there is something about this cross-class trajectory that she has experienced herself, and which the artists she writes about have also experienced, which leads to a particular set of emotions and ways of experiencing the world. and then she says that for some complicated reasons that she describes using concepts that i don't understand well or which do not resonate with me, such as the 'death drive', this leads sometimes to a kind of self-negation which is sometimes expressed through drugs and alcohol, or in the case of amy winehouse anorexia.

quite similar to k punk again in that she isn't at all interested in dealing with anything empirical with regards to addiction, mental health and so on. the appeal is more that she's describing a particular set of experiences and making links between things in quite a creative way, but a way which isn't just creative but which also rings true. which is also like k punk.

 

[shakahislop]

there's also an interesting thread in the book about how the middle class world (she is american and talking about america mostly) hardly accepts that working class people exist, and to some extend can't understand them. and then that on those rare occasions when people do make that class jump, they find themselves a bit incomprehensible to their new mileau.

i've often wondered that myself, in terms of behaviours, attitudes, what kinds of things are considered virtuous and which are considered unacceptable, that kind of thing, in the middle-class world, how a lot of people i know from that world have genuine trouble understanding deviations from them as diversity (or acceptable difference) rather than as something 'bad', even if their heart is in the right place.

 

[sus]

she quite heavily implies, or outright says, that the reason why most of these people killed themselves or got killed by drugs and alcohol (or in the case of cat power, started making shit music) is that they could never resolve the experience of starting off life being poor and then moving into the middle class world that is required to have a career in music, and being in one way or another negated by it.

it's a pattern that seems kind of convincing. i would add tricky (not that he ended up dying, but reading his book he did go pretty comprehensively off the rails) and mark lanegan to this list. more speculatively, benga, but it's a bit harder to say and to be honest it feels a bit weird even writing something like that in public.

Not sure what the book's argument is, but a thought crossed my mind that each class has built-in cultural technologies for staying the course of moderation within its financial reach. Maybe middle class most of all. Stability. @linebaugh has also talked before about this a bit with drink. Maybe it's a uniquely American thing. But the American middle classes don't drink much.

When you grow up poor with no money and then come into money, there's a whole set of temptations that were never on the table which are suddenly on the table. Probably true of middle class folks coming into loads of money too. Though maybe they have a more temperance-based value system.