Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through The American Status System

Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through The American Status System (1983)
by Paul Fussell

Synopsis: Fussell's basic goal is to debunk the very American idea that we live in a classless society. He does this by providing a tongue-in-cheek, yet somewhat accurate, taxonomy of the various class markers. He shows that even the most minute details can be seen as clear depictions of class. He discusses body shape, gestures, recreation habits, clothing, household objects, decor, materials, attitude, reading preferences, ways of speaking, food preferences, higher education, and architecture. The book's tone is self-consciously ironically snobby and playful, and is decidedly non-scholarly and footnote-free. His final point seems to be that the only way to escape your class is to bow-out of the system completely and become a self-made "inner-directed" "Category-X" person. This is the escape route he grants to (presumably) all his clever, creative, in-the-know readers (and himself). Overall, he argues that the middle class is intensely insecure about its status, and hence is obsessed with the inoffensive (which is perceived as "tasteful") and un-ideological. The middle class is horrified of conflict, controversy, and ideas, and this shows in most of what they do. The implication of this is that the middle class is a very dangerous class to be immersed in, as it avoids all conflict and pain to the point of ignorance and inaction. [This really connects to Radway].

Interesting Specifics:

"Style and taste and awareness are as important as money" (16), and the source of ones money is more important than the amount.

Really emphasizes the fact that the middle class suffers from status anxiety and intense desire to belong (35). For the middle class "Argument or even disagreement must be avoided at all costs" (97).

"Classy people never deal with the future" (74).

Says the desire for privacy is an upper class marker [but don't all people desire privacy, and it's just that the upper class has more access to it?]

The term "weekend" came about in 1878, "a moment marking what can be said to be the flowering of high bourgeois culture" (120).

"We're pretty much stuck for life in the class we're raised in" (198).

Says all of U.S. culture is immersed in a class-lowering, or "prole-drift" (205)

"It's only as an X, detached from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket, that an American can enjoy something like the Liberty promised on the coinage" (223). [Geez, that's not too overdramatic).

Interacts With:

Bourdieu (Class can be seen as an obscenely simplified and lay-person version of Distinction, without the theoretical framework. Is basically about the role of "stuff" in constructing a self. Departing from Bourdieu, Fussell does grant people some agency by allowing them to sneak off into the Category X realm if they want to.)
Connects with all the books that discuss the role of "stuff" in constructing a self/identity.
Rudeness and Civility (in the use of labels and clothing and goods to distinguish one person and "type" from another; also in the rise of "gentility" and its scorn of anything that seems offensive or rude).
Radway, Reading the Romance and A Feeling For Books (both demonstrate the ways in which middle class women go out of their way to avoid reading anything that is too heavy or upsetting - especially Reading the Romance; fits with Fussell's argument that the middle class goes out of its way to avoid pain and conflict of all kinds)
The Lonely Crowd (Fussell seems to run with a tweaked version of the "inner-directed" person in constructing his glorified class-dodger "Category X")