1. Culture

During the summer of 2018, I attended an event to mark the publication in English of two French volumes: Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon [1] and History of Violence by Édouard Louis [2]. In Eribon's powerful memoir, the Parisian sociologist travels home for the first time in 30 years following the death of his father [3]. There, he tries to account for the shift in politics of his working-class family while he has been away, from supporting the communist party to voting for the National Front. (It's a shift toward the populist nationalism of the far right that's apparent in many countries today—the UK, the USA, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Brazil—the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico being a notable exception to this seemingly global trend.) Returning to Reims was a significant influence on Louis, inspiring him to write his best-selling first novel,The End of Eddy, which he dedicated to Eribon [4]. Like the latter's memoir, History of Violence and The End of Eddy both in their different ways tell the story of how the author having grown up gay and poor in the north of France, was eventually able to escape his working-class environment through study and education.

As is customary on these occasions, the authors read from their books and discussed their work and lives, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. During this latter part of the evening, they spoke about the transition they had made from the social realm of the working class to that of the middle class, with its very different gestures, knowledge, and manners of speech. Recognizing they now had a foot in both camps, each said the process of reinventing themselves had nonetheless left them feeling they truly belonged to neither. Arriving in Paris at the age of 20, for instance, Eribon found it much easier to come out of the sexual closet and assert his homosexuality to his new cosmopolitan friends than to come out of the class closet.

Both authors also described how, as a consequence, they were unsure for whom they were actually writing. They may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up in a working-class environment in Returning to Reims and History of Violence: the profound racism, sexism, and homophobia they found there; the violent modes of domination and subjectivation; the social impoverishment; the lack of possibilities that are imaginable, to say nothing of those that are actually realizable. However, they were aware a few people from that social class were ever likely to read their books, so can hardly say they were writing for them.

What really captured my attention, though, was the moment Eribon and Louis stressed that what they were trying to do with their writing is "reinvent theory": to produce a theory in which "something is at stake." (Together with Eribon's partner, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, they have described this elsewhere as a theory that speaks about "class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality [5]" and yet has the potential to generate the excitement of "a Kendrick Lamar concert [6].") Eribon is, of course, the author of a well-known biography of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Nevertheless, this statement struck me, partly because I'm interested in theory; but mainly because it's difficult to imagine many English literary writers of similar stature engaging with the kind of radical thought Foucault and his contemporaries are associated with, let alone expressing a desire to reinvent it.

#### Anti-Bourgeois Theory DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90099

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

Technology, Science and Culture - A Global Vision, Volume II

During the summer of 2018, I attended an event to mark the publication in English of two French volumes: Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon [1] and History of Violence by Édouard Louis [2]. In Eribon's powerful memoir, the Parisian sociologist travels home for the first time in 30 years following the death of his father [3]. There, he tries to account for the shift in politics of his working-class family while he has been away, from supporting the communist party to voting for the National Front. (It's a shift toward the populist nationalism of the far right that's apparent in many countries today—the UK, the USA, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Brazil—the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico being a notable exception to this seemingly global trend.) Returning to Reims was a significant influence on Louis, inspiring him to write his best-selling first novel,The End of Eddy, which he dedicated to Eribon [4]. Like the latter's memoir, History of Violence and The End of Eddy both in their different ways tell the story of how the author having grown up gay and poor in the north of France, was eventually able to escape

As is customary on these occasions, the authors read from their books and discussed their work and lives, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. During this latter part of the evening, they spoke about the transition they had made from the social realm of the working class to that of the middle class, with its very different gestures, knowledge, and manners of speech. Recognizing they now had a foot in both camps, each said the process of reinventing themselves had nonetheless left them feeling they truly belonged to neither. Arriving in Paris at the age of 20, for instance, Eribon found it much easier to come out of the sexual closet and assert his homosexuality to his new cosmopolitan friends than to come out of

Both authors also described how, as a consequence, they were unsure for whom they were actually writing. They may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up in a working-class environment in Returning to Reims and History of Violence: the profound racism, sexism, and homophobia they found there; the violent modes of domination and subjectivation; the social impoverishment; the lack of possibilities that are imaginable, to say nothing of those that are actually realizable. However, they were aware a few people from that social class were ever likely to

What really captured my attention, though, was the moment Eribon and Louis stressed that what they were trying to do with their writing is "reinvent theory": to produce a theory in which "something is at stake." (Together with Eribon's partner, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, they have described this elsewhere as a theory that speaks about "class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality [5]" and yet has the potential to generate the excitement of "a Kendrick Lamar concert [6].") Eribon is, of course, the author of a well-known biography of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Nevertheless, this statement struck me, partly because I'm interested in theory; but mainly because it's difficult to imagine many English literary writers of similar stature engaging with the kind of radical thought Foucault and his contemporaries are associated with, let alone expressing a desire to reinvent it.

his working-class environment through study and education.

read their books, so can hardly say they were writing for them.

Clarice Lispector.

to me.

1. Culture

the class closet.

58

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 individual whose identity is more or less fixed and secure.

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

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

characters. Just 1% had a BAME lead character, 96% having no BAME characters whatsoever [12]. Not is it only literary culture that's affected by what Eribon describes as the "terrible injustice" of the "unequal distribution of prospects and possibilities" (p. 52). Comparable statistics can be provided for the arts, drama, music, business, politics, the law, medicine, the military, the civil service, the media, and journalism. 54% of the UK's "top" news journalists were educated in private schools, for example; while of the 81% who attended university, more than a half were educated at Oxbridge, with a third attending just one institution, Oxford [13]. Moreover, 94% of all the journalists in the UK are white and as few as 0.2% black [14].

Waterloo. Like Eribon and Louis, I want to promote heterodoxy and critical thought; and I want to do so to the extent of daring to break even with the conventions of theory and what it's currently considered to be. For this tradition of critical thought has its own blind spots that lead it to accept certain assumptions as common sense as well. Many of these blind spots relate to how neoliberalism and its technical systems (e.g., social media such as Twitter and YouTube, professional social networks such as Academia.edu, online research portals and disciplinary repositories such as Elsevier's PURE and SSRN) have found ways to incorporate those theorists McKenzie Wark calls "general intellect" in her book of the same name, who are today typically employed as academics as opposed to the public intellectuals of the past such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir [17]. My point is not that contemporary intellectual laborers are merely constituent elements of the general intellect or "social brain," who's only purpose "is to keep commodification going and profits flowing." I do not deny that such commercially oriented theorists are, as Wark says, also trying to "find ways to write and think and even act in and against this very system of commodification that has now found ways to incorporate even them." My argument is that their efforts to do so contain a number of blind spots—or, perhaps better, datum points—which limit their "ability to grasp the general situation [18]." This is especially the case as far as the bourgeois liberal humanist categories and frameworks with which they continue to operate are concerned. For them, too, datum points such as the unique human author, originality, creativity, immutability, and copyright are in practice held as self-evidently providing the basis for well-mannered debate. Far from theory enabling individuals and groups to think differently about what they are and what they do, the taking-for-granted of such categories and frameworks leads many intellectual laborers today to likewise work

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

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

in favor of orthodoxy and the perpetuation of the established order.

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This is why I'm interested in experimenting with ways of working I'm aware a lot of people might find counter-initiative and difficult to grasp—and perhaps even to take seriously. I'm exploring what forms our work as theorists can take if, in its performance, it does not simply go along with the pressure the neoliberal university places on us to deliver more ever quicker, and the accompanying spread of managerial technologies of measurement and commodification such as rankings, citation indexes, and other metrics. But I'm also exploring what forms our work can take if it likewise avoids falling into the trap of trying to counter the politics of the accelerated academy and its technological systems by resorting to a form of liberal humanism by default—evident in demands to "slow down" and go back even, or "assertion of the intrinsic value/unquantifiable character of scholarship [19]."

This last part is tricky. There's actually no easy way for us to avoid adhering to liberal humanist ways of being and doing as authors and academics—no matter how posthuman the content of our theory may be. This is because there's a strong link between our copyright laws and the production of liberal humanist subjectivity and agency. (As Mark Rose shows: "Copyright is not a transcendent moral idea, but a specifically modern formation [of property rights] produced by printing technology, marketplace economics and the classical liberal culture of possessive individualism") [20]. This link, in turn, means there are no nonliberal and nonhumanist alternatives to publishing and sharing our work on a copyright all rights reserved basis that are legally and professionally recognized. And this is so even with regard to those instances in which a writer identifies as having a fluid, nonbinary identity that is neither male nor female, and adopts personal pronouns such as they/them/their. In large part, this lack of alternatives is due to the fact that, although the UK, USA, and Europe have different requirements for copyrightability, in all of them, copyright is dependent on the figure of the singular human author. From this standpoint, our current copyright laws have a threefold function: (1) they protect

In a modest bid to counter such inequality of opportunity and stalling of social mobility, the BBC Radio 6 presenter, Cerys Matthews, has said she wants to program less music on her show by artists who've been given a leg up by virtue of attending public school and more music by people from all walks of life, including women and those with a working-class upbringing [15]. Which makes me wonder: if we do want to foster culture in England that's not so liberal and humanist and antiintellectual and if we do want to develop an understanding of life, agency, and subjectivity that is more complex—or at least not quite so outdated and elitist should we adopt a similar stance? Instead of setting up prizes like the Goldsmiths in order to reward literature that is daring and inventive, should we publish (and perhaps read and cite) fewer texts by people who went to public school or Oxbridge and more by writers from other backgrounds? [16].
