Elites and class

Not sure if this is Foucault’s fault or just a random historical trend, but I see more and more posts defining class not on material conditions (i.e. on the number of assets you own, amount of sex you have easy access to, disposable income, free time) but on cultural aspects (i.e. the way you sound when you talk, the kind of work you do). This is particularly prevalent among right-wing bloggers; somehow the idle classes have decided that the elites are overworked middle-class professionals and art school graduates. What I find astonishing is that the same middle classes, while losing privileges and status like never before, quite often internalise this “elite” self-image and focus all their efforts on cultural issues of tertiary importance.

I’ll come back to this in another post…