Robert Monk
Final Examination: Social Inequality
1.
Architectural Elitism in Liberal Academia
From the surface up, Kohlberg Hall is about making discontinuities explicit and
revealing continuity where traditional architecture creates distinction. Discontinuity in
structure and continuity in space. First-floor pillars appear to consist of disjointed
surfaces ‹ reigned-in schwastigas instead of clean, rectangular joints. Interior
flag-stones stretch seemlessly into exterior, divided only by glass; most of the
outward-looking windows face on a courtyard which is itself largely an enclosed
space, but which is also the home of more enclosure: the 'ruins', which break draw the
entire surroundings of Kohlberg ‹ interior and exterior ‹ into history, and into the
specific time when its 'outside' courtyard was an 'inside' annex. But a good deal of
what happens in Kohlberg does not happen 'from the surface up'. The distinction
between the basement and the other floors is greater in Kohlberg than in any other
building on campus. For all its taunting of traditional oppositions, it participates and
even fortifies one of the most important ones: academic vs. manual work, along with
all its attendant social distinctions.
Have you ever been down in the basement? Did it ever occur to you to go
there? Why/ not? Kohlberg's maintenance apparatus is reminiscent of a
techno-distopia in which invisible slave-machines emerge from the mysterious cracks
of society to do their duty and then disappear again. It would not surprise me to learn
that part of its funding included an endowment to make it and its maintenance a
self-sufficient unit, independent of the wider social network on campus. Kohlberg's
flagstone floors, apart from breaking down obvious distinctions above-ground, require
giant steam washers that are brought up from the tunnels in the basement early in the
morning when few are watching.
That basement is probably nearly a fifth of the floor-space in that so-called
three-story building. You probably haven't been there. The reason it probably has
never even occurred to you to go is reflected in what you would find if you did: the
absence of naming. This basement is a vacuum of identity. Linguistically speaking, it
may as well not exist. I still do not know what to call it or how to conceive its function. It
doesn't even have an aesthetic grounding. There is no architectural embellishment:
cinder-block walls, polished cement floor, perhaps two dozen conspicuously blank,
locked doors. Are these all offices? Could Kohlberg really require such an army of
custodians? What is behind these doors? Like some fortuitous post-structuralist, the
only reason I'm asking is that I saw the final stages of Kohlberg's construction from the
inside, I saw the materials of the upper levels moving back and forth between
themselves and this unknown basement. If I'd missed all that, I probably would have
missed the basement. My guess is that half the class of '00 will graduate without ever
thinking of Kohlberg basement, two-thirds never having been there. That place is
separate from our space, Kohlberg tells us. What happens there has nothing to do
with us (even while we're taking Social Inequality two ceilings up).
The basement's ceiling is not a ceiling, but a network of pipes and wires
snaking off to carry goods to the upper reaches and return with waste. The halls are
not halls but more work-space. Pressure-relief hoses dampen the walls and floor in a
couple places. A mop-sink is placed randomly on the wall of one passage. Here,
deconstructed distinction means not pleasant light and beautiful wood- and
stone-work, it means the imanence of work and the absence of decoration.
Wally Seccombe's essay "The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism"
describes a social masking of labor-capital relations that finds corporate
institutionalization in the maintenance of Kohlberg. Seccombe gives a Marxist
analysis of the function of the housewife in capitalist societies, showing that her
isolation from the wage-system, along with the self-reproducing socialization-effects of
the domestic environment, has given rise to women's inferior position in the social
hierarchy. Increasingly as women abandon their former role of cleaner-organizers,
that task has been taken up by a growing service-sector in the labor markets of
industrial nations.
The workers may have changed, but the nature and the concomitant status of
the work remains the same: low. Application of Seccombe's analysis to service
workers in Kohlberg and other college buildings raises some radical challenges to the
way things are done around here. Seccombe analysis seems to call for a
reorganization of both the assignment of tasks and the status assigned to the tasks
themselves. Seccombe concludes by lamenting the left-debilitating effects that
women's isolation from the public sphere has had on politics. These kinds of
arguments may hit closer to home these twenty years later ‹ they do not leave us with
the smug sense of being beyond all that ‹ but their application to segregation of class
and work-type in Kohlberg and at academic institutions in general is no less legitimate,
which is to say, perfectly so.
Certainly, the injustice of the situation does not strike us as very immediate. An
application of Seccombe in Kohlberg would make the proposition that
building-maintenance personel should be brought into the academic/political
discourse that they largely make possible in a way similar to the politicization of future
housewives he advocates at the end of his essay. My intuitive response (middle-class
habitus?) to such a proposition is to seize on the concept of merit. Housewives are the
intellectual equals of their wage-laboring husbands, and that is why it is unfair that
their contribution to the production and reproduction of labor-power should be given
inferior status in the social hierarchy. Cleaners are intellectually inferior. Their
position reflects their merit. Or so the largely unconscious argument goes.
Yet there are relatively few of us on campus who would consciously admit to
such a position. If we believe what we say in class discussions, if we agree with
Bernstein, Bourdieu, Gould, Kozol, Labov, Marx and/or Williams, we believe the
opposite: that the so-called intellectual inferiority of people who didn't make it to
Swarthmore is due precisely to the kind of distinction and imposition of inferior status
reinforced in a building like Kohlberg (and, only slightly less thoroughly, all over
campuses all over the US). Such an extention of Seccombe seems to call for a radical
reworking of liberal academic institutions like Swarthmore, something along the lines
of the apprentice-ship system you described in connection with Richard Rollins' vision,
which I never read.
Apart from such a radical position, the aesthetic impact of a trip to the basement
can yield an interesting analysis of the status of academics via Bourdieu. What makes
our academic tasks more deserving of a cheerful environment than the
cleaning/ordering tasks that make it all possible? How would the legitimacy of our
discussions change if we walked down the moist-walled corridors of the basement to a
drab, windowless classroom next to the boiler? What I'm getting at is the question of
how the simple existence of a relatively (to the basement, to most houses or
apartments, to the community-center in Chester) pleasant space for our work gives that
work a high degree of legitimacy in our mind. What is it that places the culture of
higher learning so much above that of, say, labor organizations? Why doesn't Al
Bloom tell people who want to donate rediculously lavish buildings to be a little more
frugal and build meeting-halls for local labor-organizations?
Kohlberg goes beyond being simply pleasant, however. It drips with the
middle/upper class taste that goes so naturally with an institution whose purpose is to
generate cultural capital. Take the lounge chairs. The big stuffed ones actually
manage to be comfortable despite their
radical-appearance-for-the-sake-of-radical-appearance (no doubt their comfort comes
at an outrageous cost, whose savings might have gone to tuition-assistance). The
classroom chairs are also comfortable, and look like they might even be a good
investment because of their longevity. But the tables, wooden-armed chairs, and
bizarre, uncomfortable stools in the coffee-lounge are designed to appeal to the tastes
of a class raised to appreciate an anti-functional aesthetic (Veblen's conspicuous
consumption: also an explanation for why Bloom doesn't try to tell a guy like Kohlberg
to spend with more social responsibility).
More than any other building on campus, Kohlberg was designed with an
integrated cleaning and maintenance aparatus, yet the people who operate it are less
integrated into the academic community than in any other building. This is the result of
a concealment of both the need for and the fulfilment of maintenance functions and the
emphasis on an aesthetic aimed at culturally-invested middle/upper class patrons.
Kohlberg works to prevent student interaction with the people who maintain
Swarthmore's physical plant. Even at competitive prices, despite shorter lines, and
despite the relative nearness of the Kohlberg coffee-bar, the workmen from the Trotter
renovation choose Tarble for their coffee-breaks. I wonder why?
3.
Contested Discourses: the Economies of Capital in the Battle for
Control of Classification
Sanchez-Eppler's analysis of "Bodily Bonds: The intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism
and Abolition" is a case-study in the contests Bourdieu discusses in the final chapters
of his book Distinction. According to Bourdieu, "What is at stake in the struggles about
the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory shcemes and systems
which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their
mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which puts
things in a different light"(p. 479). Political rhetoric derives its power from its creative
use of classificatory schemes. It reorients dominant symbolic systems in a way that
alters the exchange-rate system of the three forms of capital: cultural, social, and
economic. Sanchez-Eppler shows us how dominant symbolic systems can inscribe
themselves on the body (in this particular instance, women's bodies) by defining its
meaning, i.e., the positions the body is allowed to take within the social world and the
ways it is appropriated in the interpretation of specific groups' discourse.
In Sanchez-Eppler's nineteenth century, women's reproductive function was
raised to the exclusion of their ability to speak politically. The act of speaking in public
was likened to a malady in which women's social contribution was coming ‹ horribly
‹ from the wrong orifice.
As S.-Eppler describes them, the discourses of feminism and abolition do what
Bourdieu describes, that is, make an evocative utterance "which puts things [existing
categories, such as types of bodies] in a different light [ a new orientation to society]."
Not only did they transform the symbolic meaning of body by making it their own
rhetorical focus, but they opposed its actual social functions ‹ slave vs. housewife ‹
to mutually deconstruct each other. Here, S.-Eppler cites Margaret Fuller: "Those who
think the physical circumstances of women would make a part in the affairs of national
government unsuitable are by no means those who think it impossible for Negresses
to endure field work even during pregnancy." (Sanchez-Eppler, pp. 30, 32)
This utterance begins with the premise that the primary relation of Northern
white women's bodies to Southern black women's bodies is sameness, but its power
did not derive from this proposition, which would not have moved people on a very
broad scale. Using this un-spoken communion of white and black bodies, it
juxtaposes two incompatible classifications (physically weak, morally strong white
housewife and physically strong morally non-existent black slave) and forces them into
one another's company, where they can no longer exist.
A good response to the quote from Bourdieu we began with is "what does a
struggle about the meaning of the social world look like?" Do people ever articulate
beliefs about 'the meaning of the social world'? S.-Eppler's answer, and Bourdieu's
answer is that these struggles take place in pieces, and often are not even constituted
as struggles over social meaning (i.e.: as political). Bourdieu puts it this way:
The elementary action s of bodily gymnastics, especially the specifically sexual, biologically
pre-constructed aspect of it, charged with social meanings and values, function as the most basic
of metaphors, capable of evoking a whole relationship to the world. [Distinction, p. 474]
S.-Eppler's essay offers an example of how this meaning is contested in pieces. Her
quote from Fuller changes the meanings simultaneiously of black women's bodies at
work in the fields and white women's bodies incarcerated in the domestic world into an
atrocious violation of established classificatory schemes that demands reformation. As
S.-Eppler points out, its weakness is that it claims a disjuncture between reality and
the social classification of the era without critiquing that classification. At the same
time, though, the necessary response to revealed disjuncture involves an adjustment
of classificatory schemes as well as social practices. An evocative utterance spurs
changes both in the social practices it evokes and the social meanings it manipulates.