It seemed almost incidental that he was African. So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years that he preferred an identification with mankind to an identification with a particular environment. And yet, as an African, he seemed to have made one of the most perfect statements: “I am just anyone.” It was as though his soul was jigsaw; one more piece being put into place.
—Bessie Head, A Question of Power
In David Lodge’s Nice Work, we are made privy to the moment where the socially conscious intellectual suddenly, fleetingly becomes aware of the international division of labor and of her place in it as a beneficiary of the system. Lodge’s heroine, a Marxist feminist scholar, acknowledges economic globalization but worries:
What to do with the thought was another question. It was difficult to decide whether the system that produced the kettle was a miracle of ingenuity and cooperation or a colossal waste of resources, human and natural. Would we all be better off boiling our water in a pot hung over an open fire? Or was it the facility to do such things at the touch of a button that freed men, and more particularly women, from servile labor and made it possible for them to become literary critics.
From her elevated position—an airplane seat, in fact—Lodge’s critic acquires the literal and metaphoric distance to take in and represent the unrepresentable totality—the gendered international division of labor. Distance, removal, and disconnection appear to be the necessary preconditions for knowledge and analysis. By sleight of hand, the subdivisions of (in this case English/national) industry serve as a metonym for the general system of political economy. Whether economic globalization is ultimately good or bad for society remains an unresolved issue. Just as the thought becomes too ponderous to bear, she drops it. By the end of the novel, as we see, an all-too-tidy compromise needs to be hammered out between the interests of capital and labor (including knowledge workers), one that is reminiscent, in a way, of the condition of England novels of the 1840s. In this moment of Lodge’s semiparodic, seminostalgic send up of the British working-class novel as a genre, the international division of labor viewed from a distance appears as simultaneously global
and social—socialized labor.
2Considered as a heuristic device, the contrast between the aerial view vouchsafed to Lodge’s literary critic and the ground-level insight afforded to Mulk Raj Anand’s semiliterate coolie might also be seen as illustrating an abiding paradox of our information age. Do technological advances facilitate real connection and communication between particular working-class struggles, or do they merely enable the more efficient extraction of surplus value? Lodge’s scenario from
Nice Work might easily be updated and recast for the social media age, perhaps, with the U.S. liberal feminist literary critic, this time, pausing to consider the world opened up by the iPhone held in her hand, far removed from the struggles of Foxconn workers agitating for a reduction of hours in their working day—far removed, also, from the general nationalist furor surrounding the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to the low-wage global South.
3On the one hand, the rhetoric of outsourcing continues to fragment working-class coalitional politics. The language of comparative advantage and social dumping continues to be wielded by agenda-driven factory management and trade unionists alike, attesting to the fact that we live in a paradoxical communication age of “incommunicable” social movements.
4 Fatal fires in Bangladeshi garment factories supplying cheap goods to U.S. retailers focus the global Northern consumer’s attention on the disposable labor of the periphery, but only for the briefest moment, tied to the strike there or (for the duration of the media cycle covering it) the consequent boycott campaign here.
5 Meanwhile, the construction of the U.S. worker as a casualty of offshore manufacturing also pushes further into shadow the illegal immigrant worker whose cheap labor displaces the “American” laborer from within the bounds of the nation-state.
On the other hand, the case might be made, as it has been, that it is no longer possible to conceive of national working-class struggles in isolation. The creative communication stratagems of disparate fronts of the global Occupy movement as well as messages of hope and encouragement exchanged via social media between Arab Spring revolutionaries and striking Wisconsin teachers’ union members exemplify a new shape and ideological grounding for a collective social subject. Theorists of OWS (Occupy Wall Street), for example, describe emergent paradoxical meanings of social connectivity and of being-in-common that arise from the tensions and textures of “assembly movements” considered transnationally.
6 If the sublime vision of globalization experienced by Lodge’s (parodied) intellectual is a feeling of connection based in disconnection, Occupy movements somehow cathect the impossible commonality of shared class struggles
despite geographic discontinuities and the radical particularity of the discretely different functional locations occupied.
But confronting the dilemma of global-social class relationships in just these terms still leaves undisturbed an elusive, shape-shifting keyword that remains a structural and structuring problem for “Languages of Class” as well as for working-class studies in general:
social, a vital, though blurry, concept for working-class writing, too often banalized, sloganized, or reduced to idealized conventions.
7 Even as Raymond Williams tracks the changing semiotics of the social, noting shifts in meaning from the value-neutral descriptive “of society” to the positively valued term pertaining to mutual cooperation from which “socialism” later derives, his last word of assessment trails off asymptotically, acknowledging “the still active sense of the social” (
Keywords, 295). In Marx’s lexicon, we find his meaning shifts from a humanist sense pertaining to association and interdependency to the posthumanist humanist
abstract sense relating to the variable calculus of labor power, the abstract average of social labor, and the production of the possibility of mediation itself, the value form. In the peculiar Marxian sense, socialization also involves the process of abstraction: you have to abstract to be able to see different labor as a homogeneous
social substance. Or to phrase the problem in a different way, to rationally imagine socialized labor, then—I’ll let the contradiction stand—in fact requires us to think in abstract terms: labor power (as commodity), not theories of the subject (of the worker, for example), is the basis for theories of socialism. But this rationale, which is the predication for socialism, should not be confused with a description of globalization, the breaking down of barriers to the free movement of capital.
8The concluding reflections of this epilogue present a supplement to the argument of the book. If class can only be understood in terms of its interrelationships, what constitutes the meaning of the social in the context of the mutual entailments and lived compromises of classes considered in a transnational frame?
The sense of the social in one established tradition of working-class writing—critical or celebratory ethnographies of working-class attitudes and culture—is writ large and clear, albeit in disappearing ink. This structure of feeling of the social—expressed as mutual cooperation that is categorically opposed to individualism and competitiveness—becomes sanctified as a lost ethos, the special provenance of a dying working-class culture. In Hoggart’s classic Uses of Literacy, he speaks of a “moral capital” lost to future generations cut off from these earlier social ties and community-based modes of organization: “Among working-class people, then, how much of a decent local, personal and communal way of life remains. It remains in speech, in forms of culture (the Working-Men’s Clubs, the styles of singing, the brass bands, the older types of magazine, the close group games like darts and dominoes), and in attitudes as they are expressed in everyday life” (265).
In the well-worn idiom of such an established subgenre of working-class cultural studies—we might even see Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
Rethinking Working-Class History and Aihwa Ong’s groundbreaking
Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline as aligned critical variations—the social is described as bonded by proximity, neighborliness, a spirit of community, duty-bound commitments, and local cultural struggles.
9 The preoccupation is with the immediate, proximate working-class other. But in today’s era of global assembly lines, business process outsourcing, and the geographical dispersion of work, such frames of reference for meaning-making seem at an impasse with the ethical challenge at hand for working-class writing and labor organization. The very spatial
and temporal divisions of labor are now unsettled by the expanded use of subcontracting. Ethnographies of Indian call-center workers, providing back office support and financial services across time zones, require us to rethink the language of
Languages of Class and
Uses of Literacy.
10 Or at the very least, the resonant titles, if not the representative historical frames of reference, of these old standard-bearers in Anglophone working-class studies might need to be rethought in light of the contemporary situation of English-speaking, American-accent trained workers pulling night shifts in India, in order to facilitate the smooth operation of the seamless business day in the United States. Viewed from the vantage point of displaced higher paid workers in the global North, these are globalization’s purported winners. What ethics of mutual cooperation are imaginable across such material and ideological divides? Beginning with the decline of the American farm and the destruction of a way of life rooted in community, voluntarism, and self-reliance, Arlie Hochschild’s
Outsourced Self seeks to narrate the psychic cost to the (US) working-class subject as a result of the turn to the (global) service market to replace improvised social arrangements.
11As the preceding chapters have put forward, bringing “the social” into view is arguably more of a difficult proposition than representing the global (or even world literature) as “a perspective and cultural awareness.”
12 Building on Raymond Williams’s theses on literature, a central preoccupation of this book, my own, has been the question of how to apprehend the social as “all that is present and moving.”
13 If the conjunction between world literature and distance is a given, working-class writing presumes a different relationship between the social and the personal. Its forms and figures challenge us to redraw the lines demarcating nearness from distance. A mere perspective adjustment will not suffice. Extending and elaborating upon Williams’s premise, the burden of this book has been to ask what structure of feeling (if not ideology) of the working classes is imaginable across the international division of labor—across rural and industrial fronts? Which instruments, strategies, and techne manifest the social as articulations of presence?
Consider, for example, Therese Agnew’s remarkable trompe-l’œil. Her
Portrait of a Textile Worker (2005) is a 98-by-no-inch monument to the garment factory worker of the global South—the unseen, anonymous agent of economic globalization.
14 Making use of the rhetoric and sentiment of the global anti-sweatshop movement, here the artist plays with perspective to “familiarize” the Northern consumer with the unthinkable abstraction of the international division of labor. From a distance, we get a partial view, from the waist up, of a woman clothed in a sari. Prominent in the foreground is the ubiquitous Juki-brand sewing machine. The face with downcast eyes appears completely absorbed in the task at hand. There she is—performing her signature docility and dexterity. Up close, the image disintegrates into a cacophony of proper names. Made up of thirty thousand brand name labels, as Agnew explains it on her personal website, “from 20 feet away, the composition is a representational image of a remote place. As you move in closer, the illusionistic devices dissolve into labels as intimately familiar as your own clothes…. The repetition of thousands of other people cutting their labels is retained in the piece. It amplifies the presence of the woman we finally see.” The artist envisions her collaborative composition as an experiment in socialized labor.
Although it runs counter to the divisive rhetoric of outsourcing, and is offered up as representational reparation to the undervalued labor of the South Asian garment factory worker, Agnew’s explanation nevertheless comes off as a paradoxical gesture. Making visible the unseen garment factory worker is predicated on substituting and overwriting her labor with the “labor” of socially conscious consumers. Artistic labor, or the work of art, is substituted as a proxy for the labor of factory workers. “It amplifies the presence of the woman we finally see” is the artist’s statement. Her ethical objective—circumscribed within metropolitan feminism—is to call attention to a secret history of commodity fetishism. The use of the word “amplify” reveals the desire to restore voice agency to the Third World worker in this “postindustrial” age. We are familiar with the arguments that caution against confusing the two different senses—aesthetic and political—of representation. But we also recognize this as a principled, if ideologically compromised, intervention—an effort to reveal the hidden global assembly line as both apart from us and a part of us. Agnew’s collaborative text seeks to make visible the invisible diacritics of socialized labor. Her efforts, though, are restricted by her mode of address and a structure of feeling: the devalued labor of the Third World worker is brought into the foreground through an appeal to liberal guilt.
15The lines between nearness and distance, global and social, self and other are deconstructed in a different way in the abstract vision of labor power figured by Bessie Head. Head dramatizes both sides of the precarious equation of globalization—internationalism and schizophrenia. In A Question of Power, in a personal transcoding of “the social,” Elizabeth’s debilitating mental breakdown is figured as both a symptom and an allegory of globalization:
It seemed as though her head simply filled out into a large horizon. It gave her a strange feeling of things being there right inside her and yet projected at the same time at a distance away from her. (22)
Globalization is unthinkably big. Class, especially in the context of the international division of labor, is ungraspably abstract, and the rules of political economy are invisible to a close-up view. In Head’s multigenre novel, however, we find all distance is collapsed. All barriers to exchange are laid low. Voices in the head and information overload become metaphors for globalization. Her “mad” protagonist then experiences globalization as a structure of feeling. On the one hand, at a point where the personal is inseparable from the social (prior to becoming entrenched as ideology or even acquiring a fixed shape), globalization becomes a painful part of Elizabeth’s interiority. On the other, the motif of self-estrangement repeats itself across different levels of meaning in the narrative. Estrangement from self and country also enables a counterintuitive sense of inhabiting the world—a social ethics of universality. Alienation is also the necessary precondition and predication for an other-centered world vision.
Consider this key dialogue that takes place between two agricultural cooperative workers—one a South African stateless refugee living in Botswana, and the other a Danish developmental studies project volunteer. Here the reader is thrown into the space of the future anterior. Amidst the changing dynamics of class struggle, in imagining the ethical repair work of the longue durée, the novel’s protagonist (the refugee and a victim of apartheid) makes herself eccentric to her own untenable historical predicament, in order to grasp the implications of the economic contest comparatively, not competitively: “I imagine a situation in some future life … I imagine my face contorted with greed and hatred. I imagine myself willfully grabbing things that are not mine. And in the darkness of the soul, you will one day walk up to me and remind me of my nobility” (85). Head’s counterfactual staging of the international division of labor deliberately recasts immediate, proximate, real historical race and class power relations with a view to imagining an ethics of historical materialism. Her protagonist’s statement describes an uncomfortable subject position—a moment of willful disfiguring and multiple voicing, thinking ahead to excluded constituencies not yet born. It is a cautionary narrative aimed at moral victors and victims alike. My book, like Head’s, considers working-class literature in a comparative frame. Or to put it another way, it charts the place in between the ideological divide separating Agnew’s portrait of the international division of labor and Head’s aspirational vision of the social—between description and ethics.
Although it is tempting, then, to close this book by making the usual claims that authors make for material that has been deemed obscure by one or more parts of the mainstream, or that has been overlooked, devalued, or subject to disuse, I will not do so. The formal innovations and improvisational strategies of working-class writing
have been overlooked in the passage from realism, to modernism, to postmodernism. In a moment in the humanities devoted to all things global, transnational, traveling, migrant, border-crossing, itinerant, stateless, ephemeral, and
world literary, working-class writing has gone
relatively unnoticed, except within certain guises and abbreviated contexts. But working-class writing is hardly new. It should not now be deemed the repressed subaltern untheorized of postcolonial studies, or, indeed the
Lemuria, so to speak, of world literature. This book, then, is not a recovery project—in any simple sense. Rather, it proposes that a simultaneously broader and deeper study of working-class writing compels new ways of thinking about literature, ethics, and the social imagination.