Abstract

In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. (With the notable exception of the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, it's a shift toward the populist nationalism of the far right that's apparent in many countries today: the UK, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, the US, and Brazil.) But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay; however, he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.

At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his nonconforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a 'lack of respect for the rules' of bourgeois liberal humanist 'decorum that reigns in university circles' and that insists 'people follow established norms regarding "intellectual debate" when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle.' Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to 'rethink' the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous et al. to produce a theory 'in which something is at stake': a theory that speaks about 'class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality' and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as 'a Kendrick Lamar concert'.

With the 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory,' I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorize by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that–for all his emphasis on rebelling 'in and through' the technologies of knowledge production– continue to govern the antihumanist theoretical tradition Eribon and his collaborators are associated with. Included in these conventions are culturally normative ideas of the human subject, the proprietorial author, the codex print book, critical reflection, linear thought, the long-form argument, self-expression, originality, creativity, fixity, and copyright. I will argue that even the current landfill of theoretical literature on the posthuman and the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism that is padded with nonhuman stuffing–technologies, objects, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, and geological formations–to make it appear different. Can we not do better than this?

Keywords: class, culture, environment, climate crisis, Anthropocene, liberalism, humanism, posthuman, inhuman

I have no social class, marginalized as I am. The upper class considers me a weird monster, the middle-class worries I might unsettle them, the lower class never comes to me.

Clarice Lispector.

Since it undermines the idea of the self-identical human subject, that theoretical tradition is often described as antihumanist, or as even posthumanist in some of its more recent manifestations. By contrast, English literary culture (and I'm saying English rather than British literary culture here quite deliberately) is predominantly humanist and liberal, seeing education in general, and the reading and writing of literature, in particular, are a means of freeing the mind of a rational human

One explanation given for this difference in conceptual approaches is that, historically, writers in England have been more closely associated with the ruling elite: with public schools, Oxbridge colleges, and the tradition of the gentleman as amateur scholar. It's an association that contrasts sharply with the cafes, streets, and factory shop floors of the more political French intellectual. Suspicious as much of English culture is of radical and abstract ideas, epitomized by the emphasis in France on the universal values of freedom, justice, and liberty since at least the revolution of 1879 (England, unlike France and Mexico, has never had a revolution), "the intellectual" is often viewed negatively: as someone who is arrogant, pretentious, and full of self-importance. Paradoxically, to be viewed approvingly as intellectual by the English, it's better not to be too intellectual at all. So authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and Mary Beard are considered acceptable and taken seriously, as they can write clearly in "plain English" and communicate with a wider public, even attain the holy grail of a popular readership. Theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Catherine Malabou are not, as their philosophy and use of language are

This constant policing of the parameters of acceptability explains why the literary novel in England today is so unashamedly humanist. Scottish journalist Stuart Kelly even goes so far as to compare it unfavorably to the "posthuman novel" that is the TV series Westworld. (I'm drawing on newspaper commentary here to show that mainstream culture in the UK is not entirely dominated by uncritical liberal humanist thought.) For Kelly, the modern literary novel and its understanding of life are "outdated," still constrained by its eighteenth century origins. Nowhere is this more evident than with its "unquestioned foundations," based as they are on the idea of the autonomous human subject as protagonist, someone who has an "intact self," "cogent agency," and "memories they trust—and can trust—and desires they understand [7]." In Whatever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici characterizes the novel of the Julian Barnes/Martin Amis generation as the product of a nonmodernistic literary culture that is determinedly realist, preferring sentimental humanism and readability to the kind of ground-breaking experimentation he associates with previous eras of the European novel [8]. That may be, but the cure for English culture's addiction to the worldview of prosperous, middle-class white men—or fear of revolution, the underclass, and the other, depending on how you look at it—is not simply more modernism. As Isabel Waidner emphasizes in their anthology of innovative writing (Waidner's preferred pronouns are they/them/their), even experimental literature in England is predominantly white, bourgeois, and patriarchal, very much to the exclusion of (non-Oxbridge) BAME, LGBTQIAP+, working-class, and other nonconforming identities [9]. Nor is this particularly surprising. After all, 7% of the UK population attend private schools (that's over 600,000 pupils, double the number of the 1970s), and approximately 1% graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. Yet it was reported in 2018 that "of the poets and novelists included in Who's Who … half went to private schools, and 44% went to Oxbridge [10]." One result of this systematic bias is that nonwhite British authors published fewer than 100 titles in 2016 [11]. I began by referring to social realms that contain a lack of possibilities that are even imaginable, let alone achievable. It's worth noting in this context that of the 9115 children's books published in the UK in 2017, only 4% featured BAME

individual whose identity is more or less fixed and secure.

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

held as being too complex for most "real" people to understand.

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