Intuition and Rupture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaina Lemon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States

Interaction frames—the conventions that tell us to look at the stage, to focus in the passport booth—serve as technologies for intuition. Frames work this way because they are both imaginary and material at the same time as they fix or nudge, as Bateson remarked, our ideologies and practices for reading signs at all. Broken frames serve just as well or better. In fact, it is people’s capacity to break frames or layer competing ones that sets many questions for intuition in motion. Artists and then social theorists have called this process estrangement. But we cannot rest with mapping frames like intersecting circles, we need still to probe the tropes by which people differently recognize a frame—or anything—as broken or fragmented. The bits of ruin interpreted as signs of working-class evil in the United States, for instance, were badges of ingenuity and survival in post-WWII Russia. This chapter explores the local and geopolitical forces that torque perceptions and readings of conflict and rupture and that enchant dreams of wholeness. Contact does not become an issue for intuition to solve until some space of rupture or distance is made meaningful (or even imagined). Meanwhile, theatrical and psychic training in flexible framing separates phatic experts from the rest.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The Other America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The Right

Widely stereotyped as anti-immigrant, against civil-rights, or supporters of Trump and the right, can the white working class of the United States really be reduced to a singular group with similar views? This book begins with an overview of how the term “white working class” became weaponized and used as a vessel to describe people who were seen to be “deplorable.” The national narrative appears to credit (or blame) white working-class mobilization across the country for the success of Donald Trump in the 2016 US elections. Those who take this position see the white working class as being problematic in different ways: grounded in norms and behaviors that seem out of step with mainstream society; at odds with the reality of increased ethnic diversity across the country and especially in cities; blaming others for their economic plight; and disengaged from politics. Challenging populist views about the white working class in the United States, the book showcases what they really think about the defining issues in today's America—from race, identity, and change to the crucial on-the-ground debates occurring at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. As the 2020 presidential elections draw near, this is an invaluable insight into the complex views on 2016 election candidates, race, identity and cross-racial connections.

The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Jamal Wakim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Leftist Parties

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

Karl Marx's Vision of America: A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch

1980 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-503
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
New Era ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Made In

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

Labor in the Time of Trump

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
The Right ◽  
Underlying Processes

This book critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions in the United States and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The book shows that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. The chapters examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

Government by the Privileged

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carnes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Service Industry ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Labor Service

This chapter opens the discussion on why working-class Americans—people employed in manual labor, service industry, or clerical jobs—almost never go on to hold political office in the United States. It suggests that the economic gulf between politicians and the people they represent—a so-called government by the privileged or white-collar government—has serious consequences for the American democratic process. Although journalists and scholars have always had hunches about what keeps working-class Americans out of office, to date there has been almost no actual research on why the United States is governed by the privileged or what reformers might do about it. This book tries to change that. It argues that workers are less likely to hold office not because they are unqualified or because voters prefer more affluent candidates, but because workers are simply less likely to run for public office in the first place.

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