#42: The Classification Struggle

Stolen Youth, Pierre Bourdieu, small liberal arts colleges

Dear Readers:

Each month you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 42nd one.

When I was getting my MFA at Michigan I noticed that my classmates who had attended small liberal arts colleges (Barnard, Connecticut College, and Oberlin, in this case) prefaced everything they said with “I feel like.” 

I feel like we can walk down Washtenaw to get to the restaurant.

I feel like Paul Muldoon is coming to read next week.

I feel like she’s applying to law school. 

Through a mysterious-to-me trickledown process, all kinds of people say “I feel like” now.  But in 2004-6, the years I was at Michigan, it was new to my ears. It sounded intellectual, self-effacing, humble, cool. It set you at an ironic remove from the rest of what you were saying. There was you and, off at the other side of the sentence, was the world, with its logistics, its information and gossip and plans. 

When Brian and I lived in Ohio, I taught at Heidelberg, a “regional” small liberal arts school, where 40% of the students were first-generation college students, but we lived in Oberlin, home of the namebrand, high-endowment, highly selective, 80k-a-year small liberal arts school. These two schools were close enough for me to commute between them (I mean, the commute was so long it ruined my life, but still, it was technically doable). But the students at Heidelberg had never heard of Oberlin and the students at Oberlin had never heard of Heidelberg.

This makes me feel awful to say: the students at Oberlin were the dominant class and the students at Heidelberg were the dominated. But it’s more awful not to say it. Because, as Pierre Bourdieu writes in his still-jaw-dropping 1979 sociological study Distinction, the very source of the dominating class’s power is in its silence and its subtlety. It’s a hard, aggressive, absolutely life-determining power that exists entirely in nuance. Like, this isn’t about “choices” the students are making. You don’t make a choice between going to Heidelberg and going to Oberlin. I understood why the students at Oberlin hadn’t heard of Heidelberg. I knew what life you had to have had to have never heard of Heidelberg, because that was my life. And Bourdieu explains why the Heidelberg students hadn’t heard of nearby Oberlin, the world-famous college. Because being dominated means “refusing what they are refused…adjusting their expectations to their chances, defining themselves as the established order defines them, reproducing in their verdict on themselves, the verdict the economy pronounces on them.”

Bourdieu quotes Flaubert (who never misses) saying, “I call bourgeois whoever thinks basely.” This is an example, Bourdieu says, of the “essential overdetermination” by which the dominant cultural elite “can so easily use the art produced against them as a means of demonstrating their distinction, wherever they seek to show that, compared to the dominated, they are on the side of ‘disinterestedness,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘purity’ and the ‘soul,’ thus turning against the other classes weapons designed for use against themselves.” When I worked at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and made $27,000 a year, I made a nice, professional sheet showing how much money I had saved the organization with my good work. For this reason, I said, I believe I deserve a raise. “Isn’t that a bit mercenary?” he said. I had made a strike against freedom and purity, offending this executive-director-poet’s soul.

Most French philosophers are handsome—that’s just a fact!

Recently my friend and I were talking to this guy at the farmers market. He said, seemingly apropos of nothing, “My daughter went to Brown for undergrad and then Wash U for her masters degree.” My friend was like, OMG, I went undergrad at Brown! And I was like, and OMG, I went to undergrad at Wash U! He smiled widely at my friend and said, “Oh, how wonderful.” Then he turned to me and said cuttingly, “My daughter got her masters at Wash U.” 

“Distinction and pretension, high culture and middle-brow culture,” Bourdieu says, “only exist through each other, and it is the relation, or rather, the objective collaboration of their respective production apparatuses and clients which produces the value of culture and the need to possess it.” Even though I felt this man at the farmer’s market was a fool and a maniac, he had successfully offended me. He, my friend, and I were all helpless in the middle of these apparatuses, helplessly producing and reproducing the dumb value of our culture and the dumb need to possess it. 

Bourdieu talks about the classification struggle, like as opposed to the class struggle. It’s not only about money. It’s about who gets to say what a good, worthy person is. Sometimes it works in direct opposition to money. A woman in the playground told me her husband had just left his job as a tenured professor at Oxford University because he had been making 40,000 USD a year. “The power of the dominant to impose, by their very existence, a definition of excellence which, being nothing other than their own way of existing, is bound to appear simultaneously as distinctive and different, and therefore both arbitrary…and perfectly necessary, absolute and natural.“ I mean, wouldn’t it be kind of mercenary to have a higher salary anyway?  

*

Brian and I watched Stolen Youth recently, a documentary about a cult at Sarah Lawrence College, an I feel like institution if there ever was one. In 2010, a student’s father, Larry Ray, moved into his daughter’s group housing unit, where he integrated himself into the psyches of his daughters’ friends. He brought the most vulnerable of them into a small apartment in Manhattan and abused them in every way a person can be abused–physically, emotionally, sexually, nutritionally, mentally, financially. He abused their sleep, their families, their souls. He shook the foundation of their reality, and kept jiggling and jiggling until they cracked. 

Most of the victims speak at length in Stolen Youth. None of them say I feel like. They lost the romance and the irony; they lost the I, even. They are at varying stages of recovery from this cult; some of them escaped many years ago, and some begin the painful process of clawing their way back into reality during the documentary. One of the victims grew up poor and was raised by an alcoholic mother. Three of the victims, all from one family, the children of immigrants, had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment with 10 people living in it. They are reflective, kind, loving, and thoughtful. Ray took all the beautiful things they brought to college–their differences, their promise, their youth, like the title of the doc says–and he destroyed them. 

Ray met many students in his time at Sarah Lawrence, and he attempted to lure them all, but I think he was only really able to snag these few students who hadn’t grown up with the combination of “cultural nobility” (to use a Bourdieu term) and financial comfort that naturally leads one to Sarah Lawrence. Many of the students who weren’t convinced by Ray talk in this film, and I can’t know for certain, but I feel pretty confident in my ability to recognize them. Facing the “educational system,” they are “effortlessly elegant,” as opposed to “‘scholastic/ pedantic’” (Bourdieu terms). They were never going to fall for it, with their cocked eyebrows. It was the earnest, brilliant, dominated students who were vulnerable. They couldn’t read the difference between the kind of cult an elite small liberal arts college is and the kind of cult Larry Ray made for them. Both told them they’d been selected, and now they would be educated–thoroughly, irreversibly. Both took all their money and all their parents’ money. Both offered them new identities, new ways of thinking and being that, they promised, would lead them away from the world they had grown up in, to something better, higher, more important, more good, more true, more real. 

The only student who served prison time was Ray’s lieutenant. She talked to the documentarians, and she’s the only cult member in the film who doesn’t give an inch. We never see her question the lies Ray told her. As she faces prison, she is absolutely loyal to him. She stares hard at the camera, stubborn and defiant, not thinking critically. She’s completely dominated. She doesn’t seem like someone from Sarah Lawrence. She’d never say I feel like.

I noticed there has never been an article so much as referring to the Sarah Lawrence cult in the Chronicle of Higher Education; there are two very brief news stories about it in Inside Higher Ed (the undeniably superior of the two). No one from Sarah Lawrence, no professor or administrator, talked to the documentarians in Stolen Youth. There’s no stain at all. Nothing adheres. Sarah Lawrence, highly selective small liberal arts colleges, the whole higher education system, which is in the business not of educating, not really, but of classifying, are blameless. Disinterested, free, and pure.

Sincerely,

Lucy