‘Getting over it?’ Reflections on the melancholia of reclassified identities

Abstract

Recently I gave a presentation on class, success and subjectivity. One response was that I should ‘Get over it’. This comment informs the following discussion exploring some contradictory views about speaking personally in relation to class experience. There is a continual need to review the feminist mantra of the ‘personal is political’. Does revisiting ‘wounds’ suggest the regressive tendencies of class ‘identity politics’? Or is there something else at stake? How do and how can we speak? To the extent that academic positions also inscribe complex class and gender positions what do we make of these competing injunctions to speak or be silent? Who can grant us authority and approval to speak and what might it mean to leave ‘identity, or a ‘wounded’ identity behind? Can exploring the tensions and difficulties of speaking class revivify an understanding of habitus? This paper opens up these questions using Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to argue for the im/possibility of ‘getting over’ class.

Acknowledgements

The author greatly appreciates the generous engagement with an earlier version of this paper from Helen Lucey and Jocey Quinn. She is also grateful to the audience at the Gender and Education Conference in Cardiff, 2005 for their questions and to the reviewer’s comments, which forced her to further clarify some unintended ambiguities (muddier thinking?) in the initial submission.

Notes

1. In which hierarchies of oppression are re‐established by various ‘identity’ positions wishing to secure the most oppressed place by virtue of personal claims based on class, gender ‘race’ and so on.

2. ‘Revenge, Nietzsche maintains, is a reaction, a substitute for the capacity to act, producing identity as both bound to the history that produced it, and as a reproach to the present, which embodies that history’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 182).

3. Melancholia according to its semiological definition was clearly rooted in Galenic nosology and it faintly echoed the inclusion of factors such as colour and heat in classical diagnoses (as for example such as that of) Avicenna as ‘a melancholic aposteme caused by black bile that is burned by choleric matter or contains burned choleric matter’; see http://muse.jhu. edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v072/72.4demaitre.html. It is the root of melancholia in anger that is interesting.

4. The habitus—embodied habitus, internalised as second nature and so forgotten as history—is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 56).

5. The following is a helpful account of Bourdieu’s key concepts and I cite it here to cast light on the discussion. ‘Now, Bourdieu admits that habitus can be transformed, allowing agents to challenge the dominant structures of a field, but transformation requires a reflexive critique, or critique turned upon oneself. Reflexive critique sees through the purportedly atemporal and universal validity of the procedural, evaluative, and interpretative categories which govern an agent’s field and allows the agent to discover the true nature of these categories as “symbolic capital”. As symbolic capital, a field’s categories of understanding are tools of dominance suited to certain historical situations and tailored to the needs and abilities of agents from certain social spaces, these being the social spaces that produce agents who will dominate within that field. It is the recognition of symbolic capital within their field, and of how much of it they possess that allows agents to stop cooperating in their own domination and in the domination of others’. It might be these texts instantiate a dramatisation of ‘seeing through’ a refusal of misrecognition—but not the refusal to give up the acquired symbolic capital dominator tool. Now that ‘giving up’ would seem even more problematic (http://sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/56/10/1255).

6. The most recent public example being the famous email exchanges between the barrister and his secretary. This is the story of a lawyer in the city who reprimanded his secretary for failing to settle a £4 dry‐cleaning bill, after she accidentally spilled ketchup on his trousers. She sent back an email outlining the disparity in their salaries and accounting for her delay—she had been nursing her sick mother, who had subsequently died entailing her in funeral arrangements. The email was copied around the firm and then around the City of London.

7. Melancholia can and should also be considered complexly as a creative space. I will take this up in other work.