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Joe Scanlan | Classism: An Introduction
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They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. [1]
Art has a long tradition of Classism. By Classism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Classism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches popular culture – and this applies whether the person is a cultural critic, sociologist, historian, or economist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is a Classist and what he or she does is Classism. Compared with Cultural Studies or Area Studies, it is true that the term Classism is distasteful to specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of 19th and early 20th century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with ‘pop culture’ as their main focus, with the cultural critic in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Classism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the political economy of culture.
Related to this academic tradition is a more general meaning for Classism. Classism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘popular culture’ and (most of the time) ‘fine art’. Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists and museum curators, have accepted the basic distinction between pop culture and art as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions and political accounts concerning pop culture, its people, customs, destinies, and so on. Classism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Jack Kerouac, Dante and Karl Marx. My workshop at the Summer Academy in Bern deals with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a ‘field’ as this.
Historically and culturally there is a qualitative difference between the art world’s involvement with popular culture and the involvement of ordinary consumers. To speak of Classism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a detached, ruling class cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of America and Madison Avenue, cinema and Hollywood, consumer products, fashion and a long tradition of taste makers, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable pop culture experts, a pop culture professorate, a complex array of pop culture ideas (glamour, gender, camp, sensuality, ‘dumbness’), many popular subcultures, philosophies and wisdoms domesticated for local use – the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Classism derives from a particular closeness experienced between the ruling class and popular culture. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength and performance of the ruling class, comes the array of consequences and strategies I call Classism.
In brief, because of Classism, pop culture was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. Here I come to the third meaning of Classism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late 19th century as a very roughly
defined starting point, Classism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with pop culture – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Classism as a sophisticated style for dominating and restructuring popular culture. Moreover, so authoritative a position does Classism have that I believe no one involved in making art can do so without taking into account the limitations on thought and action imposed by Classism, or taking into account how art gains in strength and identity by setting itself off against pop culture as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.
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