I think there’s a spectrum of individuality and independence in America. The more wealth you obtain, the more individual and independent you are. The government is supposed to ensure “a level playing field” from which all people can race toward independent wealth and freedom from official institutions. Of course, let’s set aside the problematic nature of this “race” to begin with, and acknowledge that what most people see as “a level playing field” is a kind of absurd world constructed of their own self-interests, biases, etc.

The non-upper classes spend most of their time shouting back and forth at one another (between constituent demographic groups) about how to construct this playing field, while the playing field is always already being constructed, behind curtains, to favor those with real access to the echelons of power (the upper classes).

But also, about some being “more equal than others.” That’s essentially what the Supreme Court decided with the Citizens United case re: campaign finance. They summarily determined that money is pure speech. So really, it’s become codified that the more money you have, the more you matter in American society. It’s the stupidest, yet most predictably and typically American, conception of speech I’ve ever heard.

About jokes, I’m glad to see your shared interest in that point, though I don’t know if I know how to develop it further. Anthropologists used to write about “joking relations,” a form of social relations in which joking was normative (often as a form of obligatory tension-management), but I have yet to see an analysis of joking relationships in academia. Eli, I’m kind of wondering: do you think the cases of bad, coercively harmonizing jokes that you describe are really very similar to Abbott’s joke that I discuss here? My sense is that Abbott is making some basically taboo, but accurate, observations, and that only a façade of humor makes his discourse tolerable for his fellow faculty. I think his joke isn’t so much forced harmony as a defense mechanism against his own conscience. Which only goes to show that jokes can serve very different social functions in one and the same world.

Dustin, can you clarify what you’re skeptical about when it comes to class divisions among the faculty? I can’t tell if you’re skeptical about their existence, about how to analyze them, about their potential for social transformation, or what… Of course the danger in “grad student” politics is precisely what you say it is. On the other hand, I think grad student politics does have potential to go beyond pure material self-interest. It can create new collectives where there were none; it can shift the balance of power slightly in campus policy-making; it can try to aid other (far more exploited) labor groups on campus. It can help delegitimate some of the worst academic delusions, even: the song and dance about how grad students are “apprentices” to a magical and eternal faculty “guild,” and hence aren’t really doing work deserving of decent pay, comes to mind…

And just to take a stab at your other question, my sense is that Abbott’s saying that faculty might be more willing to make economic sacrifices for their ideas or moral commitments — whatever those are — if they took stock of their actual class privilege. In a nutshell, I guess the newfound virtue of self-sacrifice is the imagined “benefit” that Abbott projects onto his fantasy scene of newly enlightened privilege (which, again, seems to be only tolerable as fantasy).

What I found most interesting about your post here is your noting how Abbott’s class analysis arose only within the framing of humor. I’d be interested to hear more of your reflections and observations on the use of humor in academia (do you have some other blog posts on this?). In my interactions with faculty and administrators at my university, I’ve often observed their use of attempts at humor during potentially tense discussions involving people across the power spectrum. I’ve often felt disgusted at their half-ass jokes and moreso when their jokes have their intended effect of eliciting laughter from faculty and grad students. The joke-laughter collective performance seems to be a way to collect all of the actors present into a temporary association in harmony with each other, and thus to neutralize any potential antagonisms that would divide those present (e.g., exploited faculty and students vs. capital accumulating faculty and administrators (where many faculty would have to grapple with an internal conflict between their subscriptions to both of these positions)). Based on this analysis of humor as a weapon in class warfare, I think that we (i.e., we who are members of the facebook group ‘destroy academic capitalism’) should take more seriously our use of and subjection to humorous performances. Why not practice a collective refusal to laugh at administrators’ and capitalist faculty members’ jokes? (Of course there are tactical considerations here: e.g., sometimes we need to wear masks in order to work the bureaucracy.) Further, why not develop our own jokes that come from and promote anti-capitalist perspectives (and only laugh at those jokes)?

As for the thinking about the senior faculty members as an “upper class,” or thinking about the professoriat as the site of class divisions, I’m a little skeptical–if only because many of the people who manage to stick around to be the undercompensated underclass at places like the University of Chicago manage to do so largely on account of resources derived from family. (This one reason is why I find it hard to get psyched on political action around the slot “graduate student,” which to me seems by the very terms of its articulation to be limited to bourgeois quality-of-life issues).

I think that it’s probably much easier for poor people to regard themselves falsely as members of the middle class than it is for rich people to do the same thing. And this is probably the reason why, in high society, there’s a stigma attached to talking about money. Because if you talk about money, the suspension of disbelief in one’s own immense wealth becomes impossible to sustain.

As far as the poor are concerned, I think they–like elderly people–don’t really exist in the public or political imagination. Or rather, they only exist when we’re talking about a limited set of issues. For example, the only things elderly people really get a voice on are Social Security and Medicare. They’re full citizens with full votes just like anybody else, but if we’re not talking about one of those two issues, they might as well not exist. I think that poor people only exist when we’re talking about various welfare-based programs, and usually the tone is something like “We need to get rid of those programs because poor people are just mooching off society.” Poor people only exist–in the public imagination–inasmuch as they constitute a group to be actively disparaged and ignored. And we disparage/ignore them primarily because they remind us that not everybody is middle class. They break the illusion, and for that they earn our most intense scorn.

I think that in American culture, with wealth, you earn a sort of individualism. Like, that’s the icing on the cake. You’ve lent proof to the great American institution of the individual, and your reward is to be known far and wide by name. On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t obtain a lot of personal wealth is a loser and a nobody, and will remain lumped in with the individuated mass.

It does make me wonder, though, whether there is some disparity in American understandings of “the rich” vs. “the poor.” Do you think, speaking in terms of overall cultural norms, that there’s no such thing as “lower class” in the same way that (you argue) there’s no such thing as “upper class”? Seems to me that Americans have many, mostly derogatory, ways of defining and describing the lower class — often in terms of skin color, in terms of location (the ghetto, the hood), in terms of non-wage-labor economic activity (welfare queens or panhandlers), etc. Of course, poor people tend to be publicly portrayed less as a normal “class” of people in American society than as a group of deviants or problems, so it’s unclear whether these rhetorics of stigma really amount to a class category.

One other point of classificatory disparity comes to mind: rich people tend to be publicly represented as individuals (hence many Americans can name many particular rich people: Donald Trump, Bill Gates, etc, etc), whereas poor people tend to be publicly represented as a de-individualized mass. Reactionary representations of “the rabble” seem to have a long history, from what I’ve seen…