| man, the question of "bourgeois" as an operative category is a tough one that's nagged at me before -- tho it's nice to have recourse to b/c it's a good-time pejorative, right? (i.e. there's nothing so satisfying as denouncing something as bourgeois in a sweeping Stalinist gesture.) but it's useful on another hand b/c, at least for my own purposes, it forces me to think abt my own situatedness & interrogate my own practices, decisions, investments in cultural politics, etc. without vertical categories for conceptualizing _lived_ class difference the danger of allowing the economic to slip away becomes far too great -- at least for me. & spatializing class difference (by neighborhood, region, nation or continent) just don't work. maybe there are other ways of thinking class, but if we approach the standard (Marxist) categories as provisional & attend to their historicity -- if we use them carefully to respond to specific questions & recognize their limits -- i think they might still be useful. at the very least, however inadequate they might be, the usual categories (prole, lumpenprole, bourgeois, etc) are for better or worse the most useful categories out there for grappling w/ the economic within the frame of a cultural politics. but maybe there's something better out there ... ? & Braudel's notion of the longue duree might help here too -- to think economic & cultural tendencies outside the frame of decades or centuries ... ??? ........richard owens 810 richmond ave buffalo NY 14222-1167 damn the caesars, the journal damn the caesars, the blog --- On Sun, 9/27/09, David Latane <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
|