Social class and
the psyche
Helen Lucey and Diane Reay
Helen Lucey and Diane Reay look at the role of
the unconscious in the formation of class
subjectivities.
Despite living in cool, ‘classless’ Britain, where the denial of class is pervasive,
our work as teachers and educational researchers tells us something quite
different. The situations and stories of the children and parents that we speak
to attest to the fact that social class in Britain is not only etched into our culture,
it is also deeply etched into our psyches. It is important not only to keep social
class on the political agenda, but also to change the terms in which class is
understood. We want to move away from (though not entirely abandon) the
objective, rational understandings of social class which have dominated sociology
and politics, to pay attention to the social and psychic practices through which
ordinary people live, survive and cope. To do this we will present some narratives
from our research into children’s relationships to the places and spaces they
lived in. The narratives are from working-class and middle-class children, aged
between 9 and 11.
When ‘class’ is spoken about there is a tendency to regard only the working
classes (and more recently, the ‘underclass’) as interesting. Interesting politically,
because it is the working class who have had to hold the promise of revolution
for the radical left - and the burden of failure when the revolution never came
about. Interesting too, because there is so much about ‘them’ that needs to be
explained to the middle-class onlooker, political or academic. This is why, in
almost every field of social science research, it is overwhelmingly the working
classes who have been the object of that classifying gaze. Middle-class
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subjectivity, and the day-to-day practices which construct that subjectivity, is
so heavily cloaked in convictions of ‘normality’ (this is a magic cloak, like Harry
Potter’s, it makes the wearer instantly invisible) that it can be difficult to imagine
that it might be ‘defensive’ at all.
However, it has been only the conscious aspects of social class - and in
particular, the ‘consciousness’ of the working classes - which have generally been
deemed worthy of investigation, while the idea that class processes might entail
powerful unconscious forces remains largely unexplored.
e have used ideas from psychoanalysis in order to develop a way of
understanding the ‘emotive intimacies’ of class, the ‘psycho-social’
aspects of class processes.1 There are many strands and variations
of thought which go to make up the body of work called ‘psychoanalysis’; and
needless to say, this makes for much contestation inside and outside the
discipline, something which we cannot go into here. What we will do is outline
some of the key psychoanalytical concepts which have informed our work,
and which we took as our starting points. Some of these derive from Freud
while others have been developed by those whose subsequent developments
came to be known as ‘object relations theory’, in particular Klein, Winnicott,
Bion and Erikson.
In dethroning the centrality of a rational, conscious self, Freud allowed for
the notion that there are hidden aspects of human mental and emotional life
which are at play at the level of the unconscious. This seriously challenges the
idea of the rational, calculating subject, one whose actions are solely determined
by conscious will, agency or intent (or by the lack of these things, as is so often
said of working-class families). For, while unconscious processes tend to remain
hidden, their influence is profound and far-reaching; they intertwine with more
conscious processes not only at the level of the individual, but in the very
structures of collective human life: their influence is felt in material and
ideological institutions such as the state, education, family and work; and in
the organisation of biological processes such as motherhood, and the lived
experiences of class, race, gender. Importantly for us, psychoanalytic insights
have allowed for a way of addressing the irrational, the ambiguous and the
W
1. D. Reay, ‘“Class Acts”: Educational Involvement and Psycho-Sociological Class
Processes’, Feminism and Psychology, 9 (1) 1999.
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Social class and the psyche
inconsistent in our stories, that which cannot be made sense of, either in our
own minds or in existing political and academic accounts.
One popular view of psychoanalysis is that it is based on, and encourages, a
level of individualism which rules out its usefulness for socialist political projects
- this is perhaps a dominant view at this time. Certainly, one of the problems it
poses for us is its tendency to marginalise the materiality of people’s lives. As
Valerie Walkerdine points out, ‘psychodynamic forces: the wishes, drives,
emotions, defences, are produced in conflicting relations, in a context in which
materiality, domination and oppression are central, not peripheral’.2 And yet
one of the important features of object relations theory for us is the stress it
gives to the relational, dynamic nature of defences - that they are never onesided, but always dependent on the participation of another. This has given us
a way of looking at and making more visible the defensive organisation of the
middle classes, for, as Walkerdine also argues, ‘class domination does not just
touch the working class ... [it] is central to the fantasy structures and defences
of the bourgeoisie’.
In our research we wanted to explore the individual and social processes
through which urban children, aged 9-11 years, constructed landscapes of safety
and danger, and to look at the ways in which this impacted on their growing
subjectivities. We wanted to see what the use of psychoanalytic ideas might
usefully tell us about the lived experiences not only of urban working-class
children but also middle-class children, who are so often excluded from
discussions of social class.
he majority of the children who took part in the research were from
working-class families, and most of them lived in local authority and
housing association properties. Many lived on large ‘medium-rise’ estates
- built in the 1970s, but, in the words of one boy, ‘falling apart’ in the 1990s.
However, because of the housing history of the area (which was inextricably
caught up in the recent history of the urban professional middle classes),
there was a significant minority in the schools where the research was based
of children whose parents were educated, professionals; and they also took
part in the research.
T
2. V. Walkerdine, ‘Subject to change without notice’, in S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds),
Mapping The Subject, Routledge 1995.
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Living on large estates
Doreen Massey’s ‘geography of rejection’ has particular potency in relation to
the children living on the ‘sink’ council estates; it is central to their psychic self
constructions, and the ways in which they continuously struggle to hold at bay
the connotations of deviance, deficit and failure which are embedded in
prevailing discursive constructions of the urban poor. The places these children
live in present them with a dilemma: the ‘sort of people’ who live in ‘our sort of
place’ are pathologised in both the national and local media. Press cuttings from
the local newspaper referred to the estates as ‘hotbeds of crime’, ‘drug ridden’
and ‘full of problem families’. As a consequence the children were often caught
up in dominant imaginary constructions of the urban poor at the same time as
they tried to convey their own different, locally constructed realities.
My area is very mean because of gangs. It has lots of dangerous places. I don’t
like where I live because people ruin things and the playground isn’t safe.
There are lots of people who swear and write on the walls but most of all I
don’t like the scorpion gang.
(Micka, Polish refugee)
My flats are very dirty because older kids smoke, break glass, write on the
walls and wee in places. I don’t like my flats because it’s always smelly and
dirty. The older boys broke the lift by weeing in there and bugging it. They
break the doorbells as well.
(Claire, mixed race, working-class)
In analyses of the racialisation of urban space the concepts of ‘boundaries’ and
‘barriers’ enter strongly. But the construction of boundaries and horizons which
operate in space and time must also be understood as taking place on an
emotional, psychic level, through conscious and unconscious processes. Object
relations theorists have paid much attention to ideas around boundaries,
particularly in relation to children. Through defensive mechanisms of projection,
introjection and splitting, the individual may unconsciously separate off material
(and here we mean difficult feelings, experience and knowledge) which is
unacceptably anxiety-provoking, such as hate, envy and destructiveness. By
ejecting these feelings from ourselves and projecting them onto someone or
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Social class and the psyche
A child’s drawing from the research
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something else, we are able to deny that they are inside us and instead assert
that they belong to someone else, somewhere else. In this way, extremely
powerful, though unconscious, boundaries can be set up and maintained,
boundaries which separate the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’: ‘the stereotypical
representations of others … inform social practices of exclusion and inclusion
but … at the same time, define the self’.3
et such defensive strategies, in which everywhere outside the haven of
the home can come to be seen as threatening, exact a heavy cost in
terms of the everyday practices of a ten-year-old. Andrew (white workingclass) is one of the most gregarious and popular children in his class, yet in the
context of Rickets Grove estate where he lives, the outgoing aspects of his
personality retreat behind the fearful defence of ‘keeping to yourself’:
Y
Andrew My estate’s very tatty and rough. Sometimes it’s a bit disgusting.
There’s this man who decomposed in his flat so it’s not very nice. No-one
knew, so he was dead for two weeks. And there was a person who wrote that
horrible mad stuff in the condolences to Diana, he lives on our estate … And
there’s lots of drunk people around the flats and there’s lots of drug dealing,
but we just keep to ourselves and our old neighbours - they got robbed a few
times but we never did. We just keep to ourselves.
Diane So do you think you are typical of the people who live on your estate?
Andrew We don’t really mix in. We keep to ourselves, and there’s lots of
people on the estate like that.
Diane So you think there’s lots of people like you keeping to themselves?
Andrew Lots of people, because you don’t want to get involved with anyone.
Diane Why not?
Andrew Because it’s dangerous.
As Phil Cohen points out, keeping to yourself is also a recipe for keeping others
out, and the exclusionary aspects of such strategies in terms of race and ethnicity
are evident.4 However, black and mixed-race children and mothers also spoke,
3. D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, Routledge 1995.
4. P. Cohen, Home Rules: Reflections on Racism and Nationalism in Everyday Life,
University of East London 1994.
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Social class and the psyche
to varying degrees, about the need to ‘keep to ourselves’. One link between
these black and white mothers was their desire for their children to do well at
school and become professionals. Unlike the middle-class families, for whom
educational success is the familial norm and therefore integral to the
reproduction of their classed subjectivity, the working-class children and
parents are trying to make their way on much more unfamiliar terrain. For
these families, the wish to dissociate themselves from the ‘rougher’ elements
on the estate is also connected to their desires and strategies for class mobility;
a generational process of transformation must be achieved and sustained not
only on a structural level, through physical distance (moving off the estate),
but also via the kind of psychic distancing and differentiation effected by the
production and organisation of such defence mechanisms as ‘keeping to
yourself’ and ‘not getting involved’.
evertheless, for black and ethnic minority children, as well as some
white children, ‘keeping to ourselves’ is heavily imbued with racial,
rather than class, distinctions. Both Carly and Andrew talked
articulately about racism on their estates (Rickets Grove and Devon Road),
and both cited Asian and Polish gypsy families as the recipients. Both are
troubled by the racism:
N
The grown ups will shout out of their window … ‘Stop speaking like that and
go back to your own country’. But the kids, yeah, they say racist things, and
the Indians or Asian people say ‘Be quiet and leave us alone’. Then that’s
what the Asian kids were saying, ‘Leave my mum alone’ and things like that.
And then the kids say, ‘No, we won’t leave your mum alone, just go back to
your own country’, and stuff like that, and then there’s fights between the
white and the Asian kids, but I keep out of it and my mum keeps out of it.
(Carly, white, working-class)
‘Keeping out of it’ is one attempt at building ‘psycho-spatial’ defences, but, as
we have said, most defensive strategies do not come ‘free’. Children like Carly
routinely witness the abuse and humiliation of adults by children (and other
adults) on their estates. In some cases these adults can be safely relegated to
the far-distant out-posts of ‘otherness’, as with alcoholics, paedophiles and mad
people. The line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ may be clearly and firmly drawn so
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that all that is bad about the world or ourselves can be split off and projected
onto the other side of that line. But the children’s experiences of people and
their sense of the world is rarely so straightforward: fears and fantasies of the
‘other’ can be cross-cut by powerful conscious and unconscious identifications.
The Asian and Eastern European adults in Carly’s comments are multiply
positioned: as alien interlopers who have no legitimate right to live on the estate
and, just as significantly, as parents. Indeed, these may be the parents of her
classmates and school friends. In the way that she recalls their children saying
‘Leave my mum alone’, Carly reveals a more subliminal, but intensely painful
recognition of the powerlessness of a mother and the impossible task of the
child who must defend her. Of course, these mothers are also very different to
hers; her mother is white and English is her first language. Yet, among the black
and white working-class children living on the estates, the vulnerability of
parents, particularly mothers, emerged frequently in the telling of both ‘actual’
events and in fantasy based ‘stories’- more than it did with either the middleclass children or the working-class children living in surrounding areas.
Being in the middle
All the children devised tactics to preserve a sense of themselves as decent and
respectable, which was why so many claimed to be middle-class, sometimes in
spite of living in households where all the adults were both uncredentialled and
unemployed. Kelly, living in a lone parent unemployed household on Rickets
Grove, was typical of many of the children in defining herself as middle-class
because:
being middle-class is not like being rich rich rich ... like you’ve got things you
can afford and you can live, but some people don’t have proper clothes or
anything like that.
There is an irony in that these working-class children are calling themselves
middle-class at an historical juncture in Britain when more and more of the
population are claiming to be working-class. However, we suggest that the
children’s motivations, in claiming a class status that differs from their objective
class position, are very different from those of the 27 per cent of social classes
A and B who, in an ICM poll, considered themselves to be working-class. For
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Social class and the psyche
these children middle-classness is primarily about what it excludes (poverty)
rather than what it includes. So, as Kelly’s quote demonstrates, they grapple
with a conceptualisation of ‘the poor’ which seems infinitely reducible to a
constituency which stops short of their own experience. It is increasingly difficult
in the current pervasive culture of individualism and self sufficiency to be both
decent and poor. As Daniel rationalises, ‘course I’m middle-class. I’m not poor,
no way man. I’m not a dosser’.
ut, as we asserted in our introduction, defensive strategies are not the
sole province of the working classes; defensive middle-class strategies,
and the specificity of middle-class readings of space and place, can be
glimpsed in Simon’s text below. Simon, a year 6 pupil at Overbury school, was
one of two middle-class children in a discussion group which also included three
working-class children:
B
Diane What do you like about the local area Simon?
Simon Not much, not much at all.
Andrew There’s the theatre in the Strand, you like that.
Simon But that’s not local is it ... The local area is congested. It makes it very
crowded in the morning and noisy and things.
Mia No it isn’t, your house is quiet. Your street is very quiet.
Simon Once you get down my street it is. Once you get down my street it’s
quiet, but ... and it is polluted. When you get to the main road it’s very
polluted.
Lennox But you don’t live on a main road. Your road isn’t polluted. It’s all
quiet and posh.
This short piece of interaction is infused with class symbolism and a degree of
class envy and antagonism. Andrew’s first comment is a veiled reference to
Simon’s social positioning, and to his possession of a very different kind of cultural
capital from that possessed by the working-class children - none of the three
working-class children in the group had ever been to the theatre, apart from a
school visit the previous year. The working-class children go on to dispute
Simon’s reading of the local area not because it doesn’t reflect their experiences
of the locality - it does. Rather, he is not articulating his own more privileged
relationship to local spaces and places, and they all interject to modify his version
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so that it reveals rather than elides his privilege.
Rationality as a potent defence
One striking difference between the middle-class and working-class children is
their relationship to travel, both local independent travel and global travel with
their families. The middle-class children’s relationships to the geography of the
local area, but also to the wider city and even the world, were configured
variously through discourses of ‘freedom’, ‘mastery’ and ‘rationality’.
The following extract is taken from a discussion and mapping exercise on
‘journeys’ with five white middle-class children aged between 9 and 11 years,
from Roslyn school. Here we can see the diversity contained in the journeys to
school of these middle-class girls and boys, a diversity which reveals significant
distinctions amongst the urban professional middle classes:
Adam I just walk to school.
Dylan But you cross roads.
Adam I cross roads.
Dylan Yeah, that’s dangerous isn’t it?
Maria But if going out and crossing roads was dangerous then nobody would
do it.
Gina I go from Holloway and I go by myself.
Arthur I just go in the car with my nanny.
Dylan My mum would never let me walk to school on my own. She thinks I’m
not safe enough ... She thinks that I take risks.
Maria People call it a sign of maturity, but different kids have different
maturity and they can cross the road.
It’s interesting that in the above narrative, so heavily imbued with parental advice
on road-safety, the problem is not only located in dangerous roads, but also in
dangerous children - in particular risk-taking, immature children. However, the
problem of busy roads is open to resolution by the intervention of a developmental
maturity and with it rationality. Because this model links the idea of rationality
with agency it does present the possibility of control and mastery (at least in the
future if not now) over one aspect of a dangerous environment.
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Social class and the psyche
Contrast the middle-class children’s discussion of independent travel with
that of a group of black and white working-class boys from the same class:
David I go everywhere, Wood Green, Holloway, Chapel.
Helen And you go with your mum or dad?
David My mum, my nan, my sister and her best friend.
Kofi I’ll go by myself if I want.
Helen Where do you go Kofi?
Kofi Go to Camden by myself, or town, on the bus. My mum’s life I can.
David What, with all them druggies down there?
Helen Kofi, when you travel around on your own, do you feel safe?
Kofi Yeah.
John You can never be safe, even if you go out with your parents you are still
not safe because someone could still jump at you with a gun or a knife […]
Tom No, it’s never safe because all it takes is for you to pass an alleyway and
someone jump out and grab you and take you in.
Kofi Especially in Camden Town, them people in Camden Town they take
drugs.
Peter And they can push you into trains and take you away to somewhere you
don’t know.
This extract is just one example of the speed with which discussion of
independent travel is apt to trigger ‘stranger danger’ for the working-class
children. In this discussion lack of control over the environment (that your
environment could be penetrated at any moment by a violent stranger) floods
the conversation, literally drowning at that moment the possibility of a
developmental progression towards increased independence in public spaces.
Rather than a more rational response to dangerous features of the environment,
and the notion of a powerful agency which comes from maturity, there is no
safety in growing up. In this imagined scenario not even parents can offer
protection and instead appear as vulnerable, unable to protect the children in
the face of such violent others.
Middle-class Adam gives a common-sense rationale for why tube travel is
less desirable for children than bus travel, as opposed to working-class Anna
who says ‘because the underground’s full of perverts’. Importantly, in describing
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why he feels better about travelling by bus he also invokes an adult, the bus
driver, who can be turned to and does have the power to provide protection:
Helen How do you feel about travelling on the tube?
Adam It’s different to travelling on the bus.
Helen How is it different?
Adam You go underground and it’s very crowded [...] You are actually
underground. And you have less contact with the drivers, you know, there is
a person there who is driving the bus who you can go up to.
White middle-class Richard, whose mother is German and whose grandparents
are missionaries, has few worries about bus or tube travel, and consistently
communicates a sense of control and confidence in relation to space and place,
including tube travel:
‘I like travelling around the tube and I’ve nearly finished all the lines now. I’ve
done all the Piccadilly, the Victoria, the Bakerloo and the Northern and I’m
doing the Circle now.’ Richard’s desire to ‘finish’ all the tube lines in London
resonates on several different levels, not least with some children’s tendencies
and drive towards ‘collecting and completing’ projects, tendencies that are
encouraged and exploited by companies which target children as consumers note the current Pokemon craze. His approach is also redolent of that of white
male explorers of the past and has almost a colonial air.5 He is laying claim to
territory, charting and appropriating the unknown. He is engaged in a process
of making distant horizons accessible: ‘I’ve been to four other countries, France,
Germany, Italy and Brazil. I was only a baby when I went to Brazil but my
grandparents are missionaries there so I count it as one of my family’s countries.’
hile the middle-class children initially present themselves as
possessing an easy and assured confidence in relation to their
exploration of geographical horizons, we would be mistaken to
accept this self-presentation entirely at face value. As we have argued in earlier
work, bourgeois child-rearing practices are premised on ideas about the
W
5. G. Pratt (in ‘Spatial Metaphors and Speaking Positions’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 10 1992) understands postcolonial textual representations of land and
space as ‘a history of imperial meaning-making’.
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Social class and the psyche
production of the ‘rational subject’, whereby middle-class children are required
to make intellectual responses to emotional situations. 6 In this way ‘rationality’
becomes a potent defence; a way in which irrational emotions, including fear,
envy and anger, can be ‘mastered’ and made safe. On the surface these kinds
of family practices, which we see in relation to middle-class children’s
independent travel, are designed to encourage the development of a confident,
self-sufficient subject who can explore the world with maximum safety. Within
this model (which draws on and represents a version of Enlightenment man),
rationality becomes both the means and the ends to the production of an
autonomous, self-regulating citizen who is able to exert control over every
aspect of life. However, following Freud and his discovery of the unconscious,
we would like to cast doubt on the power of reason and rationality in their
project to ‘master’ and ‘make safe’.
or middle-class parents, the imperative to reproduce in their children their
privileged class position and success in the world is profound. It is in the
context of their social class reproduction that the middle-class children
must prove themselves to be self-regulating; this is a process that begins in the
early years, and one which is integral to, and inextricable from, the processes
through which the required level of educational success is achieved. However,
we wish to argue that the routine nature of that success, and the apparent ‘ease’
with which middle-class children like Maria, Gina and Richard consistently
perform well above the average for their year, may mask deep fears around failure,
fears which are ‘driven underground’ because they so threaten the very bases
on which their subjectivities are founded.
If only it were as simple as ‘out of sight out of mind’! We want to stress that
it is precisely this level of terror about failure that lies behind the numerous
strategies which middle-class parents have for ensuring educational advantage
for their children, strategies such as insisting that the primary school curriculum
prepare children for selective entrance exams, employing private tutors and
buying properties within catchment areas of high-achieving secondary schools.
Tactics like these, although deriving in part from individual emotional processes,
have a sphere of action that goes way beyond the individual: they have, for
F
6. V. Walkerdine and H. Lucey, Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and
Socialising Daughters, Virago1989.
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instance, had a significant impact in many localities on the educational market
place, serving to deepen already existing social divisions in schooling.7 They are
also sufficiently widespread to constitute ‘class action’, although this kind of
class action is not about transformation, but about reproduction.8 Middle-class
children like the ones in our study are learning an important lesson about failure
- that it is intolerable, unwanted and belongs somewhere else.
he different orientations towards independent mobility for the middleclass children must also be looked at with a wide lens in order to be able
to see that their strategies for negotiating space and place as children
are intimately connected with their future adult subjectivities. These are the
children who will most likely be the next generation of supervisors, managers,
directors. Some of them may even become politicians and policy-makers. They
may not have to enforce the law, but they are much more likely than the workingclass children to have a hand in making it. Above all, and despite the terrible
fears that they might not be good enough, they have to ‘know’ and they have
to be ‘in charge’. And as this hyper-rational story goes, to be ‘in charge’ of others
you must be ‘in control’ of yourself.
We are certainly not saying that such responses are abnormal or unhealthy.
But we are suggesting that, given the centrality in the construction of bourgeois
subjectivities of intellectual mastery, the authority and status of knowledge and
the maintenance of a rational order, there are internal ‘outer limits’ and danger
zones, which are located precisely at the edges of reason, which must be
assiduously defended against:
T
Cos you know there are things out there which are scary, you read about them
in the newspapers every day, but I think that they’re not so ... to me they’re
not so scary if they’re ‘out there’. They’re not really to do with you (Maria).
Articulacy, knowledge and rationality are brought together to build strong
psychic defences against their opposites. Richard’s exploration of his
environment appears to be expressive of a fearless confidence which seems
beyond the working-class children; they seem more obviously caught up in
7. See S. Gewirtz, S. Ball and R. Bowe, Markets, Choice And Equity in Education, Open
University Press 1995.
8. See D. Reay, Class Work, UCL Press 1998.
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Social class and the psyche
narratives of danger. But perhaps his need to know and to ‘master’ that
environment is also born out of much more anxious feelings; an anxiety that is
not immediately apparent in such a rational resolution to ‘ungovernable fears’.
Just below the surface is a mass and a mess of anxieties which holds the fragile
yet enormous edifice of practices in place; practices which shore up the fiction
of the easy certainty of the maintenance of a ruling professional elite.
Bringing back the abject
It is usual in work which uses ideas from psychoanalysis to prioritise an
interpretation of ‘projection’ as wanting to literally eject those feelings which
are unbearable onto the ‘other’. But what is often less highlighted is the extent
to which, while we may desperately want to banish these troublesome aspects
of our own psyches, we are also deeply attached to them. Perhaps it is the case
that, although middle-class subjectivity is premised on rationality, irrationality,
while projected onto others, must be kept close at hand. Stallybrass and White
argue that
there is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the
constitution of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those
Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It
is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically
central.9
Perhaps, as Walkerdine states, ‘un-splitting’ things, integrating them,
considering them to be part of each other, would ‘muddy the political water
too much’. Focusing on psychic practices does not mean an abandonment of
a collective left-wing project committed to social change. It does however
mean a commitment to engage with and understand more effectively the kinds
of defences and resistances which operate to maintain social stasis. Certainly
a project of psychic integration as part of a political project would mean
considering, taking in even, aspects of the self (envy, greed, empathy, fear)
which up until now have needed to be expelled in order to sustain political
allegiance. It is this kind of splitting which is central to the maintenance of
9. P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Methuen 1986.
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the rational order of society in which different classes come to internalise
their ‘rightful’ place.
ur argument then is not simply that more attention should be paid to
social class, nor that the terms in which social class is understood be
extended to include the psychic conditions of class. Rather, that the
more defensive aspects of middle-class practices which so effectively protect
the authority of bourgeois versions of rationality need to be exposed. For it is
this authority which holds the unequal social order in place. The psychic, social
and discursive practices through which middle-class subjectivities are formed
have hidden costs, both on an individual level and at the level of the social.
This, we would argue, is an issue that desperately needs to be addressed in any
political project of social transformation.
O
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