The Melancholia of Class

sus

sus

Moderator
e.g. middle class finances are built around building and maintaining savings

Kids are famous for coming out of poverty into professional sports and then spending their entire paycheck on luxury signaling items. Like half of NFL players are broke by 35 or something just absolutely crazy, given how much they're making. Some of that's crabs in buckets stuff but why would you build up cultural technologies for storing wealth when no one you know has wealth worth storing. Also, the lower classes are probably just more fractured culturally so they don't have as strong of transmission on these fronts.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
shakahislop said:
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.
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re: middle class denying working class. May have been true pre-2016 but Trump stuff has changed this. Middle & upper-class America spends a lotta cognitive bandwidth these days on the working class

But what you say about diversity vs good/bad I think is spot on
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
suspended said:
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.
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yeah 100%. am thinking among other things of seeing northern english working class security contractors sitting at dubai airport terminal 2 with their ten quid beers at ten in the morning, a couple of pints deep, nice tan from their holiday on an island somewhere, two hundred quid sunglasses, expensive haircuts, expensive tattoos, looking miserable and drunk by themselves, haggard, waiting for their flight to Basra, making a load of money and ultimately class jumping at a great cost.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
suspended said:
e.g. middle class finances are built around building and maintaining savings

Kids are famous for coming out of poverty into professional sports and then spending their entire paycheck on luxury signaling items. Like half of NFL players are broke by 35 or something just absolutely crazy, given how much they're making. Some of that's crabs in buckets stuff but why would you build up cultural technologies for storing wealth when no one you know has wealth worth storing. Also, the lower classes are probably just more fractured culturally so they don't have as strong of transmission on these fronts.
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tricky is a great example of that, that i'm a bit obsessed with. his book has these bits where he hires private jets to fly to miami from nyc for the weekend, and then just doesn't turn up. but he grew up in a world of genuine gangsters from the sounds of it. and now is totally broke, hence i guess writing the book, and he's totally open about doing tours and festival shows in like 2015 that he hates and has to do just for money, because he's totally broke now.

the wiley book is a bit like that too, just absolutely ludicrous levels of spending, getting a taxi from london to manchester to meet beyoncé and jay z and then deciding halfway up that he doesn't want to do it and turning back.

partly individual personalities obviously but like i bet thom yorke and the radiohead guys never had these kinds of problems. the coldplay guys probably just asked their dads what to do with the money from their first album. etc.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
shakahislop said:
tricky is a great example of that, that i'm a bit obsessed with. his book has these bits where he hires private jets to fly to miami from nyc for the weekend, and then just doesn't turn up. but he grew up in a world of genuine gangsters from the sounds of it. and now is totally broke, hence i guess writing the book, and he's totally open about doing tours and festival shows in like 2015 that he hates and has to do just for money, because he's totally broke now.

the wiley book is a bit like that too, just absolutely ludicrous levels of spending, getting a taxi from london to manchester to meet beyoncé and jay z and then deciding halfway up that he doesn't want to do it and turning back.

partly individual personalities obviously but like i bet thom yorke and the radiohead guys never had these kinds of problems. the coldplay guys probably just asked their dads what to do with the money from their first album. etc.
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Yeah you can show up at an LA party, enormous house, enormous yard, just obscene, you ask what the host does, "oh back in the late 80s they had co-writing credits on a one-hit wonder band." In other words, you don't need that much seed money—a couple mil tops—in order to live comfortably the rest of your life, if you're smart about how you invest it. But what's wild is how much "smart" here is cultural and not individual, I think is the point.
 
V

version

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
the wiley book is a bit like that too, just absolutely ludicrous levels of spending, getting a taxi from london to manchester to meet beyoncé and jay z and then deciding halfway up that he doesn't want to do it and turning back.
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Think it was Danny Weed who said Wiley would buy people stuff all the time. They'd go shopping and he'd tell everyone to pick out what they want and buy them all new shoes and whatnot.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
"Lispector is aware of her audience’s inability to see. Specifically, their inability to see the working class and the poor. She is aware of the existential shock that occurs when the middle class are forced to see the reality of their class and its effect on others.”

i've seen this a bit among friends as well, in NYC for example, trying to tell my fancy friends that maybe they should go down from their walk-up to collect their food from the delivery guy rather than having him walk up, that it's pissing with rain and maybe they should wait a bit before ordered their food on the app, it's amazing that these basically very nice people who will tell you a lot about feminism, mysogyny and will go out on BLM, with all the theory and everything, find it hard to realize that it's a person delivering their food. i mean they know it obviously, that it is a person, but they don't really get that it's a person with the same wants and desires as them.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
suspended said:
re: middle class denying working class. May have been true pre-2016 but Trump stuff has changed this. Middle & upper-class America spends a lotta cognitive bandwidth these days on the working class

But what you say about diversity vs good/bad I think is spot on
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The vehement and visceral reaction to the ascent of essentially working class Trump and his MAGA following shows how important it is to the ever more insecure middle class that there is at least one social stratum beneath them (Trump threatened to upend the working/middle class social hierarchy - what a fall from grace that would be!)
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Ash got some grief from “grown up” pundits who hate her anyway when Wiley went off the deep end with the anti-semitisk.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
The habit of young professionals getting all their meals delivered is way too decadent for me, dinner comes out to $20 once you pay tip and tax and delivery fee, really insane.

OTOH, if nobody called them, they wouldn't have jobs, so
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
suspended said:
The habit of young professionals getting all their meals delivered is way too decadent for me, dinner comes out to $20 once you pay tip and tax and delivery fee, really insane.

OTOH, if nobody called them, they wouldn't have jobs, so
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more like $30 i find in nyc, and it's often not that nice. but, importantly, it avoids anyone having to cook or really to do any of the host-type activities. all of that stuff is a pain in the arse in nyc apartments. but one thing leads to another doesn't it, it is an insane way to live as you say. there's something that sucks about the actual process as well, the navigation through menus on a phone, the period while you're waiting for someone to turn up and the worst bit, some guy shoving the bag into your hand without a word and then turning round and rushing onto the next job.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
That's what so good about capitalism. If you are on 20 grand a year you can go up to 40 grand and not a lot might change if you live in a city, you will just have a few more takeaways and chalice coffees
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
mixed_biscuits said:
The vehement and visceral reaction to the ascent of essentially working class Trump and his MAGA following shows how important it is to the ever more insecure middle class that there is at least one social stratum beneath them (Trump threatened to upend the working/middle class social hierarchy - what a fall from grace that would be!)
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one of the things i always liked about growing up in england was that, at least for me, i always thought that the hierarchy was inverted when you were a teenager (and longer that that to be honest), where, not that i knew the terminology or had any idea of class politics, basically everything that is coded as being 'middle-class' was the least cool thing in the world, and everything that was coded as 'working-class' was cool.

i try to keep up that practice but the world's against me on that one
 
V

version

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
i've seen this a bit among friends as well, in NYC for example, trying to tell my fancy friends that maybe they should go down from their walk-up to collect their food from the delivery guy rather than having him walk up, that it's pissing with rain and maybe they should wait a bit before ordered their food on the app, it's amazing that these basically very nice people who will tell you a lot about feminism, mysogyny and will go out on BLM, with all the theory and everything, find it hard to realize that it's a person delivering their food. i mean they know it obviously, that it is a person, but they don't really get that it's a person with the same wants and desires as them.
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Distance seems crucial to keeping the machine running. The customer's insulated from the process and only interacts with it via palatable intermediaries, intermediaries which are swiftly being automated as an app provides less friction than a human being.

I doubt it's designed specifically with this in mind, but it's clearly an integral part of the thing, whether it's conscious or just naturally arises out of necessity, e.g. most people having no direct line into the slaughterhouses their meat comes from.
 
V

version

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
one of the things i always liked about growing up in england was that, at least for me, i always thought that the hierarchy was inverted when you were a teenager (and longer that that to be honest), where, not that i knew the terminology or had any idea of class politics, basically everything that is coded as being 'middle-class' was the least cool thing in the world, and everything that was coded as 'working-class' was cool.
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Is coolness enough to outweigh the privileges of the middle-class though?
 
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