First prescription for convalescence

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Let's imagine you have been soldiering away all day avoiding ill people, lest you catch some airborne contaminant that stalks your city, but at night you forgot your struggle and left your bedroom window open - open to the infected air from the restless in the street. In no time at all you join them.

In the quest for better physical health you might make changes to your daily eating and exercise routines, blahblah to people about gym membership.  You might decide to go to the toilet more routinely.  You might not, but you might.  Mental health is a little harder.  Well, actually, you can do pretty well just listening to your body, but this notwithstanding, what kind of prescriptions can be had?  I'm going to discuss opinion a litttle, as opinion is everywhere and therefore what is bad in it is always 'at large'.


Generally it is understood that opinions are slimy beasts, that intellectually they are not enough and we should not be satisfied with them, and that ultimately even very passionately held opinions probably do not matter.  Models for living within one's opinion might be TV talking-heads style programming, radio call-ins concerning topics of the day, personal discussions with others in social situations or on the 'net.  Opinion is usually contrasted with knowledge, but I will not be concerned with making such a distinction.  Instead I am concerned only with avoiding something that is very 'catching' (and which I have caught in the past and likely you have caught it too).

If you look at the way opinions are expressed you can sometimes tell what implied commitments exist, and you can begin to get a feel for unstated ideas.  But there are commitments that are not at all wise, but ones that are almost universally reinforced.  My prescription will be an adjustment in how opinions are expressed.  This should, however, make expressing opinions much more difficult because opinions are usually given freely, in whatever form they happen to roll off of the tongue, and if an expressive problem exists then this is pretty serious for the world of opinion.  There is, therefore, a downside and a cost to this prescription - it's a little like a diet that doesn't quite give you enough energy.  Some may say this is a good thing, allowing the mind to focus on other matters, or to help slow down opinion so that it may be assessed more clearly.  I really don't care to deal with that, however.  Efficiency isn't a problem when it's what you're doing that's in question.

The prescription is really simple; stop saying 'we' when expressing opinions.  It is also to stop using the phrase 'as a society' and 'as a country' (perhaps also 'as a community').  Now, I don't care to criticise the use of 'we' as a polite way of saying 'you', such as in articles or journals ('Working through the message systematically in this way, we come to the conclusion that everybody must be killed'), even when this can amount to a mere opinion.  I care about the use of 'we' to include oneself in the body politic.  Too often people offer opinions by beginning  'I think we as a society...', when it is completely unclear whether society will have them.  Likewise, people helpfully offer political opinions beginning 'what I think we should do is just...', when what has just been done by everyone else was likely the reason they began to speak in the first place!

Jokes aside, I could interrogate a use of 'we' by asking whether the individual is really worthy.  I might ask whether the 'individual' has the kind of voice that a 'society' could possibly listen to.  I might also ask how many individuals, should 'society' be the sum of all these individuals, the speaker imagines could possibly be interested in listening to what is, to others, the fleeting rant of an equally fleeting person.

However, my prescription is not about the limits of communication nor the egotism of the speaker.  Usually the speaker is worthy, but that is, for me at least, for far-flung and unpractical reasons, and which never enter the logic of communication.  Instead, whenever I hear 'as a country we have done well so far by blahblahblah but we need to ensure blahblahblah', I can only insist that the speaker pick their friends more carefully.

Why say this?  Here are some reasons.

In terms of class (why not if it's useful) you could be obeying a general rule to not ally yourself with the ruling classes unnecessarily (and which really means not at all!).  Instead of ruling yourself in, 'just in case', what about ruling yourself out, 'just in case'?  Don't simply fantasize about whether you can have the credit for your lovely opinion from the people from whom you seek validation.  For what if your opinion flowers into something unthinkably good, something radical and earth-shaking, that knocks your bosses out of their boots?  Even if not, you certainly will want your thinking to be easily put in the service of the people, should something traditionally political happen.  I'm sure there's something very characterful about ruling yourself out for no very specific hard reason, however, and is not so much an indicator of dysfunction (as is usually taken by the reactionaries) but (like this blog post and blog generally) a way of committing to convalescence.

Alas, it is hard to think in this way, because people think they are weak.  'Weakness makes me weak!' they bleat! (I've been reading too much Zarathustra.  Time for a lie down).


Using 'we' doesn't guarantee that you speak on behalf of a majority working class either (or 'just in case' you do - that's dangerous!)- it includes you in the 'collective' preeminent sense of identity that is dictated by the ruling class.  It grants only grants your opinion a servile ceiling, a commitment to reconciliation with the status quo.   I guess that's may sound a little strict to take at face value but, meh. You might argue that the media, even if it is skewed by power, still represents real people, and valorises some working class experiences etc etc. so that you're still including the working class tension with 'we', but in my opinion this tension isn't at all biting. The sense of identity that is granted in the body politic is today of a people understood through the lens of the aspirational ideal - a false work ethic that is easy by now even for children to see through. Anyway, that is for another time.


On my side of things it can be said in a quite blase way that the whole world is in political turmoil, with persistant as well as new wars, conflicts and uprisings.  So many examples speak of the ability of the ruling classes to betray us and burn us in our beds.  Now, If I consistently side against the ruling classes habitually, I may be able to break fidelity in some fashion at some point in the future.  I would advise to be as habitually anti-ruling class in as many ways as possible.  It might seem uncomfortable but it's certainly honest come what may, and this prescription is a fairly easy way to start, and not least because once you fall in with the idea you'll begin to see the 'problem' everywhere you hear opinions.  The main problem with living in an ideological world is that you give legitimacy to it automatically, without any special effort.  One way to deal with that is to look for ways to disrupt your everyday doings in this regard, and I think dropping the collective noun in these troubled and complicated times is a decent idea.  After all, you're not really responsible for going to war, are you?  One idea to investigate is whether your democracy is good enough to represent public opinion in foreign policy, through due process and the daily operation of that democracy.  It isn't, so there.

V

Some rough thoughts on class

Today the happy condition is to be middle-class.  What characterises the middle-class?  Likely some or all of these-



1) Money to sustain status-buying (i.e. of cars, houses).
2) Professional or management jobs, but also white-collar work in general.
3) High-brow culture consuption, such as art, theatre, and clever fiction.
4) Other traditional qualities, such as a wide (and arguably unnecessary use of) vocabulary, and saying 'grarse' instead of 'grass'.
5) Generally conservative economic beliefs and behaviour.
6) A sense of ownership of society.
7) Business culture is seen as basically efficient as it is socially progressive.  It is also often held to be directly culturally desirable (in particular by the swooning aspirational working-class)
8) A deep faith in the power of conversation and debate, particularly in the culture of 'meetings' and official phraseologies.  For instance, any 'decision' is almost sacred and worth slobbering over in a meeting, which must always have suggestions that are 'going-forward' (not usually hyphenated) or are at least 'forward-looking'.  presumably shoes are 'walking-solutions', and etc.
9) A background of the same qualities or the money and taste to acquire the continuance of these qualities to their children.  So at least a step in time greater than the term 'working-class rich'.

As is well known, the upper classes depend on the reverance of the middle classes today, and are either propped up or brought down into the middle-classes as the market will allow.

Apparently 70% of British people consider themselves to be middle-class.  I may or may not have seen this figure on a recent Melvyn Bragg documentary for the BBC, which also left me with extra reasons to write some thoughts up.  Bragg had a working-class background as a child, and for decades he has been a cultural commentator with a delicate palate and a contemplative but welcoming demenour.  He has a posh accent, sharp fingernails and a distinguished hair-do, and is pretty much the definitive middle-class male.  He presents radio and television as his occupation, and of course only presentes the most ponderously upper-middle-class material such as fine art and literature.

Bragg ends his three-part series on class saying that the cultural activities of the middle classes is what defines society today, and that the old industrial working class either bought their homes and became middle-class thanks to Thatcher and John Major, or got 'left behind' and became the underclass that is decried today as antisocial and feckless.  And by the way, although Bragg seems to disapprove of these demonisations (he calls it class chauvanism or similar, and also interviews the author of the book 'Chav' for a similar perspective), he never gets around to giving a positive perspective on the working-class, such as a thoughtful definition - he seems happy that people call themselves (or want to call themselves) middle-class, and he leaves it at that.  If you're working class, but get riled up at the misuse of apostrophes, then maybe you're an ok guy.  So if you've acquired some tasteful spending habits (such as Hamlet tickets) and have an aspirational comportment (comportment! middle-class language use anyone?), then you can probably be permitted to wear a red jumpsuit aboard the starship Society.

So what of the working class?  You'll have understood by now that I don't care much for being 'aspirational' and don't agree with the conclusions of Melvyn Bragg's programme.  What are my options for trying to think a working-class?

1) Isn't the cultural lifestyles of the middle-class something produced - an ideology - like the Marxists have alway said?  Bragg doesn't go there, and nor would most people in fact.  The idea that the middle-class isn't a floating island city, such as one might see in a Japanese manga, but a teetering tower of cards, isn't very good for the constant deferring that aspirationalism (that a word?) requires.  And sure, yes, ideology has its own life and its own aims at its own produced level (just as we do as products outselves), and therefore it avoids all harsh reductions to economy (so saying that middle-class culture is basically an ideological illusion is not the end of the discussion), but taking away the eating of the cake from the having of it is still very important. 

On this view the working-class are in touch with reality, and the other classes are not, middle-class ideology being at degrees remove from such a working-in-reality undertaken by the working-class.  This observation can range from saying that what is real is what you can make with your hands (maybe in agricultural life or something like that, say, for the Maoists), to saying that reality is the ability to really feel your (emotional, environmental) situation, which the corrupt conceptualisations of the middle-class, for exampe, will have always already betrayed (and perhaps the existentialists call to 'be authentic' fits somewhere here).  So there's these sorts of things.  There's also the idea that the middle-class has become working-class without noticing, due to the power of the market, and this is really very interesting from a traditional point of view and begins by criticising various delusions - very possible to find that the working-class are now called Rosemary, and etc.


2) I can still ask - Is the new underclass the real working class?  That is certainly possible, but it may take more than a few Lenins to drag anything revolutionary out of them.  Apparently there has been one so far and in very different circumstances.  This notwithstanding, however, the goals of the old industrial working-class families are pretty much up for grabs if you think about it, even if it seems impossible to put into any kind of practice.  There are huge problems, however.  It is said that the violent nature of this underclass is and has been a projection of the higher classes who love terrifying stories about monstrous working-class oiks - since Victorian times and beyond.  Yet this also means there has been a social role to fill, and this has been filled really saddeningly well.  I don't actually understand how the underclass is separable from the middle-class in this regard, they're symbiotic to some important extent.  In the olden days of Communism there was a term, the 'Lumpenproletariat', which is that section of the proletariat that is irredeemable for revolutionary purposes, and who betray their class and become conscripted by the middle-class ideology.  All too eerily familiar if you ask me.

But then, what really characterises this 'underclass' - lumpenproletariat or not?  Is it some or all of:

1) Violence (physical and emotional).  Criminality and disaffection.  'Hooliganism' and 'Yobbishness'.
2) 'Childish sense of entitlement' and 'shamelessness'.
3) Harsh tones and prejudice against all that is high-brow.
4) Low income, usually manual work (not usually lower white collar positions, but struggling to have manual work).
5) Racist, sexist, homophobic.
6) National Lottery; Football; ITV; The Sun newspaper.
7) Lives in council-owned accommodation; bedsits; housing associations.
8) No inheritance; background is the opposite of helpful; incapable of good parenting.

Well, I'll stop there.  You can see if you compare the lists that it doesn't look like much good can come from the second, whilst the first is at least debatable.  Seems like the underclass deserve their monicker.  Of course, the authors of books that demonstrate how the underclass has been culturally created by the middle-class media would probably say 'just stop making them seem like monsters and they'll be better', as if they would suddenly recover from some illness.  If the effects are temporary, yes, sure, but why should they be temporary?  Because they are ideological in nature and not 'really real'?  Well my feeling is that hate is real enough for most and is especially real when the alternative is as underdeveloped as is the case here. 

I seem to be drawn more to the idea of the 'scab', and the betrayer of one's own class, than to the middle-class idea of 'the monster that lurks out of its animalistic nature'.  All the time I've spent in the company of the underclass convinces me that this is an entirely engineered culture (and whoever says the construction of a people has to be for their overall betterment needs something of a lesson on the history of Empire), and that it isn't the 'savage' that needs to worry me but the 'scab' that betrays even my very existence.  The middle-class is, after all, the class of representation, and the underclass serve to offer up former the qualities of the working-class for representation at every turn.  The problem of the scab is that these representations always serve to demonstrate the baseness of the historical working-class and therefore justify the middle-class monopoly of culture.

So there's the possibility of a constructive working-class arising from the depths of the current 'underclass', or even just the completion of violence (aimed at the middle-class rather than their fellow working-class), that could possibly be hoped for.  Otherwise there's the problem of the scab, and the concomitant problem of who on earth it is that is truly working-class that can still oppose the scab class.

3) As the Philosophers say, the working-class is not a people but a movement.

This is likely the most promising and least negative way of characterising the working-class, a way of trying to affirm all the historically positive powers of the industrial working-class people (i.e. the people that embodied the movement for a while) and all the freedoms that they won, whilst maintaining the effectiveness of that power and the efficacy of those freedoms even when the industrial movements were eventually defeated.  Some say this is romanticising pointlessly and takes the working-class away from areas of struggle, which is impossible (and it is therefore contradictory and wrong).  Others say that there is no need for an overwhlemingly positive (i.e. constructive and active) formulation, since negative means can yield positive results, and that today anger and uprising is in order.  I have some sympathy for the latter, but less for the former.  It seems in a way that the mere notion of something 'constructive' and 'creative' is just the appropriation of the idea of a movement by the mere movement of middle-class language.  If I get a job I'm being constructive.  If I languish on the dole I'm lacking any positive contribution.  Positive/negative, and creative/destructive (or creative/unoriginal) as oppositions, therefore, aren't doing any work whatsoever while they remain mired in their unhelpful economical and political conventions.

And then there's another weird shopping list including:

1) The internet.
2) Robots. 

I'll write about those another time, but they're really interesting.

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Oh and why am I writing all this down and making this blog?  It is to identify areas for study or explication, but also so that I can identify presuppositions, principles and maxims that can serve as guides to future thinking, in the aim of just trying to be as consistent as possible and to avoid the problems of poor health!  The right thing to do is just to feel your way and go as far as possible, and that's really the whole premise behind the blog.  I'll therefore be groping through these pages idenifying enemies and whatever weapons can be brought to bear against them.  If this helps you too so be it, but really I don't see why it should at this stage.  Still, nice weather.

Comments if you got 'em.

V

'Valeo' means 'I am strong' or 'I am well'

"He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how" - Nietzsche

This weblog will enable me to wait, in larger intervals.