‘Speaking for more than Itself’: Answerability and the Working-Class Text

Abstract

Beverley Skeggs’s focus on the ‘symbolic’ construction of class — that is on the effects and implications of a range of discursive forms which articulate class subjectivities and in the process of so doing bring that subjectivity into being — provides us with key insights into understanding class relations. While we may want to insist on class as an objective relation to the means of production, this does not tell us the whole story about how class is lived in society. How class gets talked about, depicted and discussed — in short, represented — is also a central area of concern for those studying as well as living class, and it is the production of class through the ‘multiplicity of writing’ (Williams, 1977) in society that constitutes another important arena of class struggle or the site of the construction of class differences. Representations of working-class life come to us through a range of forms, particularly within the field of popular culture, and in this chapter I will concentrate on writing in particular as a site where working-class subjectivity is delineated. But here I will be concerned with examining working-class self-expression and some responses to it: in other words, I will be exploring cultural formations and institutions which help constitute working-class writing, examining key characteristics of such writing in terms of themes and form, and within the broader contexts of its production and consumption.