Page 79 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

70 Cultural change and ordinary life

inscription works, Skeggs argues that she is able to see ‘the way that value
is transferred onto bodies and read off them and the mechanisms by which
it is retained, accumulated, lost or appropriated’ (p.13). This involves a
wider understanding of the idea of exchange in the context of the sort of
consideration of Bourdieu outlined earlier.
Skeggs develops an extended analysis of how concepts like exchange and
market have developed historically. The detail of this discussion is outwith the
specific concerns of this book. However, it is important to note that her analy-
sis shows first that such terms are not ‘neutral’, that is they are not free from
social context and social content, but moreover they are performative in the
sense already considered earlier in this book. That is they bring into existence
that which they name through the act (performance) of speaking (for an audi-
ence). Moreover, in Skeggs’ analysis such processes are those that mark class,
even if class is not directly named. ‘When we come across the terms economic,
social body, exchange, market, self, interest, rational action, abstract space,
etc., we need to think about how they articulate a specific relationship to class.
Such terms may appear to have nothing to do with class, but they constitute it
nonetheless, primarily through their reiteration of value on a daily basis’
(Skeggs 2004: 44). Having therefore set out some of the key aspects of Skeggs’
analysis, in a fairly brisk fashion, I now turn to the most important part of her
analysis for my approach, which is the discussion of identity and self.
In broad terms, Skeggs seeks to show how some theories that emphasize
the power of a mobile self or the ability to remake the self, tend to lack ‘a
theory of positioning, a way of understanding how birth into categorizations,
known and recognized through inscription, representations, discourse and
narrative, but also institutionalized and surveilled, sets limits on the potential
for exchange (whether it be through the labour theory of value, renting, asset
accrual, or conversion of cultural capital)’ (2004: 77). Thus, the mobility of the
self is more limited for some people than others. Again, there are many dimen-
sions to this discussion that could be explored, but I focus on the idea that the
contemporary self is prosthetic.
Skeggs develops this argument from previous ideas that the self has been
aestheticized. Thus, identity, especially for middle-class people, is produced
through the expansion of a range of cultural forms engaged with (see further
Chapter 8) and through the development of the self as an artistic pursuit
through style and so on. Skeggs suggests that such views are based on the idea
that self ‘accrues’ culture, thus having similarities to the view discussed in
Chapter 9 of the extended self, produced through enthusiasm. However, as
in that discussion, Skeggs argues that the idea of the prosthetic self is different
in that it entails play with new forms and ideas (they can be taken on and taken
off) and that such theories are ‘predicated upon a critique of how certain per-
spectives become legitimated’ (p. 137). This idea of prosthetic extension is
therefore useful in thinking the idea of the self further.
Skeggs derives this idea from the work of Lury (1998) in particular. The
argument is that the:
[T]rying on, or attachment of and detachment of cultural resources
(which she defines as either perceptual or mechanical) makes this