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Bourge-what? So?

21:19 / 10.05.06

I had the fact that i'm what could be considered bourgeois pointed out to me today. My initial reaction was the feeling of indignation and revolt usually reserved for being called... well anything bad.

But i thought about it.

Why is it bad?

Why are the middle classes so slandered?

Is it just some sort of self-disgust?

Why are the people who spring into mind when i hear the word (Marx and Sartre) pretty bourgeouis themselves?

Is it just me, or does the whole thing stink?

21:22 / 10.05.06

They do have a discreet charm.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

21:30 / 10.05.06

Are the bourgeois really a middle class anymore?

After the overthrow of the aristocrats the bourgeois became the power holders, with the proletariat beneath them.

According to wikipedia (font of knowledge) the original critics of the bourgeois were the artisans, who accused them of what sounds like anti-bohemianism. The idea that you don't need to create or add to the culture to make money from it seemed to be one of the largest complaints.

I am no expert on the subject and am sure there are others on this board who can talk about this better then I can, especially as far as modern interpretations go.

21:52 / 10.05.06

Is it just some sort of self-disgust?

Basically, yeah.

08:43 / 11.05.06

Why are the middle classes so slandered?

It's a hangover from the days when people really thought it was possible to overthrow the ruling class, in part through a revolution in consciousness which entailed liberating your brane from bourgeois ideology, so that you would be able to imagine and live out real, sustainable, livable alternatives to the existing socio-economic system. There's some beautiful passages in Melvin Burgess's Junk which simultaneously parody these ideas and make their real utopian beauty apparent. So being called 'bourgeois' was part of the process of criticism and self-criticism, allowing you to see where you were simply ventriloquizing the dominant ideology. This only works where you and the person calling you bourgeois are genuinely committed to a process of consciousness-raising, however. (That's why the people who badmouth the bourgeoisie are bourgeois themselves, as well: well, that and the fact that you have to have a fair bit of money, education and leisure to be able to write Das Kapital or put on Huit Clos, and most people with money, education and leisure are members of the bourgeoisie.)

These days, and outside that context of commitment, it's basically a style thing, and means you're putting down someone's consumer choices (cf id's thread in Headshop on marketing to radicals). Calling someone bourgeois has pretty much become like telling a man he can't wear a pink shirt because it's 'too gay'.

09:57 / 11.05.06

I know my place.

All Acting Regiment

10:05 / 11.05.06

Following on from Deva I'd say the idea of attacking the bourgeoisie is one that works best when used against yourself, as a model for self-criticism.

The idea of "belonging to the bourgoisie" as a limiting mental state holds water. I think there's defintely a kind of crushing banality that can afflict your (my) life- like say if you get into dressing up as star trek characters or something- and indeed a sort of faux-intellectualism such as you might find in people who write Bridget Jones's Diary or The DaVinci Code, or, you know, find such and such a book or idea jolly interesting and very nice for chatting about but, crucially, won't ever actually change anything in their life nor do anything that puts themselves in danger of change.

The problem is that it's 100% easier to spot this in other people than it is to see it in yourself- all the examples above are things I don't do but I'm sure as hell that I'm probably doing the equivalent and not acheiving full potential.

10:34 / 11.05.06

The term "bourgeois" itself is probably not particularly useful any more, since it carries too many unhelful associations. As for why the middle classes are so slandered, you again run into trouble about what you mean - I go for a socio-economic use of class, myself, which has problems but I still think is broadly useful. But a criticism of the way society is organised to benefit those who are economically comfortable (and by "comfortable", I am not referring to millionaires), say, is pretty valid. I work in education, where I think these issues are pretty transparent...though the resistance to them within education can be rather surprising.

13:28 / 11.05.06

The best of Bourgeois (apart from her giant phalluses but they're Not Work Safe).

13:35 / 11.05.06

What are these things? I saw one in the modern tate and another one in the natural history museum in Paris.

13:43 / 11.05.06

Right now I'm patiently waiting for the maids to leave so that I can go downstairs and watch television programs on a 52-inch flatscreen. So no, I see nothing wrong with being bourgeois. All I know is that the living is better here than there.

13:48 / 11.05.06

Wow xoc.

Can you get those on ebay?

Wow.

I love her grin. Truly the grin of a woman who sculpts cock.

13:51 / 11.05.06

I'm patiently waiting for the maids to leave so that I can go downstairs and watch television programs on a 52-inch flatscreen. So no, I see nothing wrong with being bourgeois

Well, if you were upper-class rather than bourgeois:

(a) you would have sufficient BREEDING to know that you don't 'wait for the maids to leave', because
(b) your maids would be sufficiently well-trained that they would be IMPERCEPTIBLE to the gentry AT ALL TIMES.

So that's what's wrong with being bourgeois. The upper classes can watch telly whenever they like!

14:02 / 11.05.06

A bit more seriously, in response to Legba:

there's defintely a kind of crushing banality that can afflict your (my) life- like say if you get into dressing up as star trek characters or something- and indeed a sort of faux-intellectualism such as you might find in people who write Bridget Jones's Diary

I think you're going to have to work a bit harder to convince me that those things are inherently tied in with bourgeois ideology. As it stands, this feels to me more like a complaint based on taste - you, personally, think that dressing up as fictional characters is naff and that Bridget Jones's Diary is a marker of faux-intellectualism (I'll admit that you chose two examples I'm particularly likely to disagree with, as I love Bridget Jones's Diary and go to fan conventions in costume every couple of years). Can you say a bit more about why you think costume and chicklit are bourgeois?

Just so you know where I'm coming from, for me, pernicious examples of behaviour/attitudes which seem to be directly linked to bourgeois ideology are:

* the increasing conceptualization of students as 'clients' or 'customers' who are paying for a 'service', that service being the provision of a degree which will 'add value' to their CV and hence get them a job

* a strong belief in individual choice, with no ability to analyse choices and/or behaviour in terms of the internalization of social pressure, economic necessity, etc (the belief that lap-dancing is only an empowering form of free sexual expression for women) - the invisiblization of oppression.

Disco is My Class War

14:03 / 11.05.06

Why are the people who spring into mind when i hear the word (Marx and Sartre) pretty bourgeouis themselves?

I can't speak for Sartre, but Marx wasn't that affluent, actually. He had to submit his PhD to a different university than the one he studied at, because his politics were unpopular; the his mentor got kicked out, so he left academia altogether. He had to quit most of the jobs he got, since those in power didn't like what he had to say; and was hounded out of most countries in Europe for spreading communist dissent.

From Wikipedia:

During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Money from Engels allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodging in a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although it is worth noting that this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.

Being picky, to be sure, but you can't really claim Marx was a paid-up member of the leisure classes.

All Acting Regiment

14:07 / 11.05.06

I watched this Brian Sewell show once where...

Hey!

Come back!

As I was saying, I watched this Brian Sewell programme once where he was in Venice. He went to a modern day "masked ball", a tourist's club night, and was complaining about how "dreadfully middle class" it was- all the subtleties and special, kabuki-like rules of the aristocratic teenager-matching event were gone, and instead this event was comprised of old english bank-workers eating sausages on sticks and so-on.

Now, I don't like the social injustice that comes with notions of an aristocracy, and this tends to soil stuff like masked balls and historic palaces, however pretty they are- but I have a feeling he might have been on to something. Not sure what though.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:11 / 11.05.06

On to his thirteenth sherry of the night, I imagine.

All Acting Regiment

14:18 / 11.05.06

Deva, you're right and had I been able to think of your, better, examples I would certainly have put them instead. My reasons for putting my examples in (and bear in mind that I don't deny doing worse things myself):

Dressing up as Star Trek characters as in just consuming the show, taking an identity it gives you, rather than watching a show about space and then going off and creating something new (being an astronaut or a scientist or teacher, or something). Taking an uncritical view of the identities given by the show in relation to your rela life one (i.e. always better)...

Reading Bridget Jones' diary because it's been advertised instead of going to the library and looking for women authors

I know this is a hugely problematic analysis but there might be some good in it somewhere. I wasn't trying to get at anyone for doing the convention thing and I'm sure you'll be able to explain your reasons for it. As I said, your examples are much more relevant.

I seem to have a history of getting into trouble with people who like this sort of thing. I suggested to someone the other night that dressing up as Cloud from Final Fantasy during sex might perhaps be read as an unhealthy attempt to neutralise the dangerous new concept of "real person having sex with other person, one of whom is me" with "Two fictional charcters from my early adolescence having sex with eachother, seaprate from me". Hmm.

14:19 / 11.05.06

For me, the bourgeois are represented by a general ennui in society. A lack of outrage I suppose - why are people so happy to consume, conform, obey? Flaubert hated what he described as "bêtise" in people; a kind of smug, willfull ignorance.

All Acting Regiment

14:36 / 11.05.06

For me, the bourgeois are represented by a general ennui in society. A lack of outrage I suppose - why are people so happy to consume, conform, obey? Flaubert hated what he described as "bêtise" in people; a kind of smug, willfull ignorance.

But what about daily mail type outrage?

17:22 / 11.05.06

Legba - thanks for the explanation, I understand the point you were making now (and it makes sense - don't worry, I don't feel personally got at). But my takeaway curry has just reheated and I must away - will get back to you later.