Page 71 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

6 Imagining, performing and identifying:
class, identity and culture

In the previous two chapters, I have extended the analysis of the spectacle/
performance paradigm in a number of ways. Drawing on theories of perform-
ing and belonging, I have sought to consider how attachments are produced in
space and time. The media are important to these processes in the ways that
I have foregrounded. In this chapter, I want to take this approach further
through examination of contemporary work on class, culture and identity. In
the first instance, this may seem like an unusual move to make, as class has
tended to be thought of as redundant in the development of many of the
accounts and theories of cultural and social change that I have considered in
this book so far. However, as I have argued earlier, the relative divorce between
sociology and media/cultural studies has acted as a block to better understand-
ing of these processes. I argue, following a number of recent authors, that this is
problematic. There are several reasons why this is so. First, as has been shown,
forms of social inequality and social division that are broadly class related are
still pertinent to society today. Class in this sense is alive if not something that
we should see as ‘well’. However, an understanding of class that is divorced
from the arguments that I have advanced so far is itself weakened. Second, as I
will show, there have been several moves in class analysis, that have the poten-
tial significantly to contribute to the theorization of culture and ordinary life
as outlined so far. These theorizations have also added much to the theoriza-
tion of the concept of identity. There is a danger that work in cultural theory,
cultural studies and media studies on performance and audiences does not pay
this work sufficient attention as class is somehow seen to be an ‘old-fashioned’
idea. It will be shown that the parameters of class analysis are indeed changing
(and being changed) in a number of important ways, which contribute to the
development of the approach to cultural change and ordinary life that I am
proposing in this book. In particular then, I read this work on class through
the lens of the arguments so far and for what these approaches tell us about
the changing nature of the social and cultural imagination, how identities are
performed (or are not performed) and how this relates to the ideas of audiencing
and belonging that form the core of this book.
I will develop my analysis through several stages. I begin by setting
out the argument for a renewed class analysis. This will lead me to a more