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Tag: Martin Heidegger

The Death of the Author, and The Birth of the Reader

To illustrate how a writer can write something unintentionally that later fits into a broader context, I’ll look no further than my own essay that I wrote at Cornerhouse in July 2007:

“I came here with the intent to carry on with my musings on self-identification and categorisation. I spent the most fulfilling half an hour on the train spilling the words out on the lined pages of a reporter’s notebook, where I’m now continuing with this. Henry Miller – and with him many a writer – would call this “dictation”. It’s this wonderful state of things when you feel as a tool in someone’s hands who, somewhere afar, is whispering these words into the tip of the tool, and they pass at the speed of light to land in your head to be heard and discovered” (Exercises in Loneliness – IV).

As you can see, I was aware of Henry Miller; but I wasn’t aware of the passage quoted below. In spite of knowing of the ideas spelt out in Barthes’s famous essay, I never read the essay itself – until recently.

“For him [writer], on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin… […] The writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum. […] Succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation” (Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author).

The Death of the Author was published in Aspen in 1968; Exercises in Loneliness-IV was written in one and half hours in 2007; and Barthes’s text was read by me in May 2009. It is evident, however, that I, without precise knowledge of his work, shared the same mystic vision of a writer as a tool with which Language expresses itself.

Although I share most of ideas expressed in this essay, I am not overly enthusiastic about it. As a writer, I can certainly state that when I write I write. As I said before, most texts are written as they are – possibly, the case of George Orwell wouldn’t be my case. And when I write I don’t think of coherence: most of it arrives naturally; the gaps are noted and filled in the process of editing. Moreover, judging by my own texts, I know that I cannot impose a single reading on them. And if I cannot do that, how can a critic or a reader?

What is interesting about The Death of the Author, of course, is that it spoke of writers who by 1968 were long dead. I find fascinating the idea posited by Umberto Eco: that, in order to translate a text correctly, we need to discern and understand the intention of the text and the intention of the author. And what is reading if not translation? Given that Shakespeare probably didn’t think that the world would live much longer after his death, the readings of Hamlet infused by Freud’s psychoanalysis are very daring translations. However, as Zizek pointed out in his talk on Wagner, it is necessary to re-read or newly translate a work of art, to breathe life in it for new generations. In case with Hamlet, there is a bigger chance that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would fathom our Freudian reading of the tragedy, than for us to step into the shoes of Tudor-Jacobean Englishmen and to understand, exactly why Shakespeare composed what he composed in the way he composed it.

Paul Ricoeur said he preferred reading a text as if the author was already dead. To me, this simply states the obvious: the desire of Ricoeur as a reader to abandon the living author as a reference point. I cannot find a fault with it, for the absense of reference point is precisely what transforms a non-critical, unattentive reader into a precocious analyst. Thus, the first problem I find with Barthes’s essay is that it proclaims the birth of the Reader but doesn’t tell us who the reader is. I’d argue the reader is an existing or prospective writer – for it is only the person who understands the making of a text that can dissect another’s narrative.

What I often notice in practice, however, is that the birth of the Reader and the death of the Author are married to make an excuse to 1) a reader’s infusion of a text with his/her personal experience and views, and to 2) an author’s (=physical body who wrote a text) withdrawal from critical discussion of their text and hence, from responsibility for having said what was said. Another problem that boggles my mind every time I read a text in Russian is grammar. It is OK to think, together with Heidegger and Barthes, that Language speaks with us – but how does this explain the fact that some texts are more accurate than others? The question is not about typos or omitted commas, for this can happen anytime; the question is about literacy in general.

After all, The Death of the Author, now that I read it, is a wonderful example in itself of how a text is appropriated by its readership. Suffices to say, if it took me as a writer years to read this text, there are doubtless writers out there who never read it. All of us, however, as the beginning of this post indicates, willingly operate from the same premise: that we aren’t in control of the text we’re making. What is curious is where we proceed from here. For me, the next questions we ought to ask are: 1) what is the role of the writer as his/her own reader? 2) when we put our name to our work, why do we do it, and what do we expect from this action?

Parole, and Paul Ennis on Heidegger and the Word

I wrote The Word in 2006, and then it took two years and a Dublin Heidegger student to write a review of it. Paul Ennis is writing a Ph.D. thesis on Heidegger, “mostly on topological concerns, but also trying to work out authenticity“. As I admitted in the comment to his post, I am not as good a student of this philosopher as Paul evidently is. In fact – and it even surprised me to an extent – I recently found some Heidegger-esque thoughts about language and its expressive potential in one of my paper notebooks that date back to 2004, whereas I first read Wozu dichter? in 2006. I suppose this means why I was so taken by this essay in the first place, even though it seems that by 2006 I’d forgotten about those jotted thoughts of mine.

I should be quick to say that I read several of his works, but invariably, the reason why I’m also so interested is because since 2003 my modus vivendi has been bilingual and multicultural in the widest sense of the word. I have also been taking considerable interest in Translation Theory, and Heidegger’s conclusions intrigue me because I am immediately aware that, when I read his works in Russian or English, I read the interpreted Heidegger. And while I don’t doubt the skill of his translators, I nevertheless understand that there are stylistical and interpretative differences between the German and English languages. The matter is all the trickier because Heidegger in those essays is concerned about poetry, and we all know how difficult it is to translate a poem.

Paul’s enthusiastic response to The Word enthused me, too, and I left a rather long comment on the post in his blog. Being a Sagittarius, hence ruled by Jupiter, I do have this strong inclination to Philosophy, on the one hand, and abundance, on the other, and in that comment the two happily came together. I think this frightens people off sometimes, but thankfully, Paul is now intrepidly answering the comments to that post. I am really grateful to him for this, especially because I have been following his blog, too. Another Heidegger Blog is tightly focused on Heidegger, the various themes in his work, and the response to Heidegger’s work both by his and our contemporaries. The only real problem methinks with Arts and Humanities blogs is that their authors often tend to do something else in life (like earning money to support the body, writing dissertations, and such like), whereas the thought requires time and – contrary to whatever we may think – some physical effort, especially when writing is concerned.

Discussion about Heidegger and The Word.

I contemplated recently the use of language once again, which resulted in the poem that I titled in Italian, after Mina’s song. Both poem and its translation were impromtu, but when I read the text over I realised there was yet another link to Heidegger’s text. In Wozu dichter? again he speaks about the man being a “merchant” (apologies, I’m relying on the Russian text) who constantly measures things without ever knowing their true value. While the English translation is very faithful to the original, I substituted the Russian for “words” (слова) with the French “paroles”. The reason is simple: the Russian poem is titled after Mina’s song in Italian which was famously covered in French by Dalida. It made sense to highlight this in the translation, which can also elucidate the interpretative facility of language.

Paroles, paroles

Paroles, paroles… Is there a price to words,
Or their value is indeed invented,
When scales are used to measure their worth
To give to someone as a gift or credit,
To which the weights are always other words?

Paroles, paroles… From underneath their face
A subject lurks, occasional and silent,
Escaping to the infinitive’s maze,
Abandoning the predicate’s confinement,
Confusing all superlatives in haste.

Paroles, paroles… I also live the words
But now, taking off my famous smile,
I think: do you have really any worth,
So usual, wise, eternal, versatile,
Or are you always words, but mere words?

English translation © Julia Shuvalova 2008.

On Human Identities and Language

I pondered a lot on the problem I have with identifying myself or other people in one way or another. The generic “identity-search”, to which we are so often subjected these days, is usually a kind of labelling, with all consequences. To take myself as an example, since I am originally Russian, some people rather honestly marvel at the fact that I don’t drink much alcohol. This is not the most complimentary trait of the Russian character those people are looking for in me, but so it goes. On the other hand, I sometimes have to wear glasses that are round in shape. They date back to the time when I was head over heels in love with The Beatles and John Lennon, in particular. Eleven years of quasi-Britishness paid off this May when my Russian compatriots who came for Zenith match mistook me for an Englishwoman because of my glasses.

On both occasions, as you can deduce, I don’t feel obliged to drink because I am Russian, and I have been wearing the “British” glasses long before I adopted the second citizenship. This can be taken further and wider. One doesn’t have to subscribe to the code of conduct of a group they socially, culturally, nationally, religiously, etc. belong to (as an example, on Flickr there is a group called “gay but not GAY”). But the pressure to “find your identity” or “express your identity” seems to be mounting.

Interestingly, this pressure has to do with what Diane Arbus described in the following phrase: “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be“. This isn’t non-sensical. The more one tries to follow the code of conduct of a group they identify themselves with, the more they become identifiable with the group. They will be less individual and more generic, as a result. This is why we are so obsessed with the quest for one’s identity: because we are constantly looking in the wrong direction. We assess the particular and specific, whereas it seems the New World is somewhere way off this track. On the other hand, the more inventive, the less specific an individual is, the less it is possible to shove him or her into a particular category. For this, Arbus had another beautiful quote:

“Invention is mostly that kind of subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular in it. […] Some people hate a certain kind of complexity. Others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of“.

So, identity is “what’s left when you take everything else away“. “Everything else” should be understood precisely as “everything else”. That is an interesting junction to Exercises in Loneliness-4, when I said that the last thing that remains, after all those socially demanded identities had been stripped off, is our human nature – however, this human nature, strictly speaking, should also be stripped off, if we were to reveal some kind of “true”, quintessential identity of one’s self.

In the poem The Word, which was obliquely inspired by various texts by Martin Heidegger, I raised the very problem of trying to apply a word to the infinite nature of a being. The problem is born in the ultimate complexity of the latter and the ultimate limitations of the former. Why is this? Supposedly, if our, human, language is produced by ourselves in the process of historical development of the mankind, then why should it be so difficult to describe anyone in one word – that is, to give them a fathomable identity?

Two viewpoints come to mind. First, is Nietzsche: in Human, All Too Human he asserts that the biggest flaw of all philosophers is that they do not recognise the evolution of a human character. They regard and study a man of the past from their, philosophers’, contemporary point of view. This phrase can be applicable to the point I am making in a variety of ways. We can remember the late Edward Said with his studies into how the Western thought “domesticated” the Eastern culture, whereby the pre-existing misunderstandings were aggravated by further misinterpretation. We can thereby also extend the notion of translation, and see it in a more general sense, as a multi-format interpretation, which will help explain why philosophers whom Nietzsche decried had this flaw: because they interpeted a man of the past within, and for, the context of their present time, whereas a correct approach would have been to interpret a man of the past in the context of the past. So, the first problem with “identifying” someone or something is that the researcher may be standing on the essentially wrong point of view, i.e. putting an object of enquiry into the context to which the object doesn’t belong. Notwithstanding our awareness of the historical evolution of the language and mankind, we tend to forget about it when it comes to identifying and interpreting.

And second comes Zizek with an array of quotes and interpretations, which can be found in the very first subchapter of his recent book, In Defense of Lost Causes. He juxtaposes two views on the Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbour”: the one, held by Levinas, involves “the ethical domestication of the Neighbour“; and the other is endorsed by Freud and Lacan who insist on “the problematic nature” of this injunction. If we bring in the above argument on translation, especially in connection with the “domestication” of ideas and cultures for “better” understanding of foreign “things”, it will become apparent why Freud, Lacan and Zizek have all found Levinas’s “ethical domestication” problematic: because such domestication excludes the possibility of the Neighbour to be unethical or inhuman. This doesn’t happen because the Neighbour cannot be inhuman in their behaviour, but rather because we, as the neighbours of the Neighbour, apriori consider the Neighbour human because we are. Just as we usually consider ourselves free from the Freudian Thing (“the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability“), so we believe that the Neighbour doesn’t have it either: “”man”, “human person” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour” (Zizek, p. 16).

And then comes this beautiful quote, which can be difficult to grasp, but an attempt is worth its own fruits:

“…when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards the unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow man, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbour-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular” (Zizek, pp. 16-17).

What we read here is precisely the assertion of Arbus’s “the more specific, the more general“. The more “humanity” we invest in the Neighbour, the more general they will be, and hence, the less obvious will be their flaws or even danger. A true individuality resides where everything particular has been taken away – this becomes the identity, but it’s no longer a “human” identity, but rather an identity of someone as a subject: a subjective singularity that becomes a true universal singularity.

Yes, these categories are Platonic, as Zizek recognises, but they are important for the enquiry: only if we introduce these “extra-human”, “inhuman” (= not grounded in our actual experience) categories, will we be able to comprehend their “human” dimension. Zizek demonstrates this with the title of Walter Benjamin’s work, On Language in General and Human Language in Particular: language-in-general is introduced in order to provide “a minimal difference” between the particular and the general. He then shifts to a quote from G. K. Chesterton’s Napoleon of Nothing Hill, to show that “there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human”“.

What this means is that this inhuman core can be comprehended in its own terms, but that it cannot be properly described in human language precisely because the “inhuman” relates to the universal, and “human” to the particular. Hence, when trying to actually spell out one’s true identity, which is the very “inhuman core”, we are effectively domesticating this identity to the limitations of our, human, language. (Cue Heidegger’s Wozu Dichter? again). Add to this that the language itself can be limited by a huge variety of factors, and it will become apparent that (and why) all socially demanded or attributed “identities” are false.

One last question that remains is whether or not it is actually possible to perform some sort of trick to help us put the “inhuman” substances into “human” words without losing the touch with the “inhuman core” of those substances. To quote from another chapter in Zizek’s book, there are two possibilities. One is that an eternal Idea that survived its historical defeat regresses “from the level of Notion as the fully actualised unity of Essence and Appearance, to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its Appearance“. Another is that “the failure of reality to fully actualize an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself continues to hold“. Therefore, “the gap that separates the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself” (Zizek, p. 209).

Precisely what Idea are we pursuing in our identity-quest? The actual quest, may it be provoked by the demands of the society, is spurred by a somewhat selfish but very humane desire to comprehend oneself. So, while looking for an identity, we are actually trying to find out what a man is. And this is where we get back to Heidegger, to that place in Wozu Dichter? where he discusses the impoverishment of Time. It happened, on the hand, he argues, because God had died; but, on the other hand, it also happened because the mortal people haven’t fathomed their mortality. Mortals don’t comprehend (and hence don’t own) their essence, but they continue living because the language survives. I would like to come back to this thesis later, but at present it is this thesis that answers the question of why the identities are so magnetic, and yet why the gap between the “inhuman core” and the “human” language hampers the quest. The gap is in the very Idea of man, the way we like to understand it in this part of the world, but, contrary to what one would be tempted to assert, the gap has to do with death, not survival. And it is for the protection against death that we look for identities and cultivate them, so that they can be preserved in the human language and memory as the living identities.

The Word (Reading Heidegger)

I want to love you, but I know not, how;
To call your name – but is there such a name
That may become you? To the spheres above
I now entrust the knowledge of the same.
I barely hope and yet I almost fear,
They will have found the word, and then (alas!)
I will gain power over you to bear –
The power that no mortal ever has.

(English translation © Julia Shuvalova 2006)

(Хочу любить, но как – не знаю сам.
Хочу назвать тебя, но что за имя
Мне назовет тебя? Я небесам
Вверяю свое знание отныне,
Едва надеясь и почти боясь,
Что слово для тебя они мне явят,
И с этим словом обрету я власть
Над тем, чем я совсем не в силах править.

04 апреля 2006 г.

© Юлия Шувалова 2006)

While this poem probably reads as a love poem, it was, in fact, inspired by several essays by Martin Heidegger, particularly Wozu Dichter? (1946), translated into English as Why Poets? or What Are Poets For? The theme I picked upon was the immanent limitations of the language, which, however, remain unknown to people. It is through poetry as the most symbolic and historic genre that people can access the past and therefore establish a link between their time and the time-before-Time, i.e. eternity. It is thanks to this linguistic, poetic link that the mankind exists, although it is by no means close to understanding of the essence of things.

So, in my poem I attempted to look at my object of affection as if I was aware of these limitations. Because our world has reportedly begun with the Word, it is important that we find a -potentially – precise description for our object. It is all the more important, if we want to express our love for them, for apparently we want to underline the uniqueness of this person through a particular verbal expression. How can you possibly “boil” someone down to but one word? How can someone, being an individual and invariably a complex person, be pushed within the boundaries of a single word? Is there such word at all? The limitations of the language are the limitations of our knowledge, and if there is someone who may help us, they have to reside in the “spheres above”. In the original Russian text I use the word “the skies”, which can be interpreted as either Cosmos or God.

I entrust these spheres to return me the answer to my question. And then I am torn between the hope to receive the answer – for I want to be able to love this person, and so to name them, to describe them, – and the fear. Why fear? Because if such word is to be found, such will be what we would conventionally call the divine knowledge. Again, it can be called the secret knowledge or cosmic knowledge. Whatever we call it, this is something that doesn’t really belong to this world. The idea I express in the last two lines is that an individual carries a universe within themselves, which no other individual can rule or comprehend on a purely rational (in this context – mechanical) level (i.e. through a single word). Yet with such word we bring the universe down to a tiny particle, thus imagining that we have known and understood it. This is not possible, and therefore, if the spheres above do return me the answer, I will appear as if I have gained power over something, which in fact will always remain a mystery.

Some Heidegger links:
Ereignis – an excellent English-language source of articles and publications by and about Heidegger, plus useful links, collected by Pete.

Martin Heidegger – a German site, without the actual works, as I could gather, but with a full bibliography.

Heidegger.ru – in Russian, many texts available in Word format documents.

Martin Heidegger at Evene.fr – in French.

Heidegger Association of Tokyo – in Japanese.

The bibliographic details for the essay What Are Poets For? are:

Heidegger, Martin. “What are Poets For?” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971.

Wozu Dichter? – a full German text in a .PDF file.

The Politics of Art (Manchester International Festival, Art and Politics Debate)

As I’m planning to attend MIF’s Arts and Politics Debate at the Town Hall, I’ve been looking for what the visitors to the official website of the festival had to say on the matter. I don’t know what I expected, but the numbers of posts and visitors to each of the forum’s categories are telling.

And then I went to Debates and Discussions section, and there was a selection of questions put up by The Guardian Debates:

  • is religion a force for good in modern times?
  • do art and politics mix?
  • is London bad for Britain?

These are said to be the issues that are to be debated by ‘some of the world’s finest minds‘. I’d especially love to hear their views on the third question, considering how important capital cities are in the development of most of the careers. As far as the first question goes, I’ll gladly quote Mr Tony Blair, ‘I’m certainly not bothered about that‘. Arts and politics is, however, a different subject, and before I go to the debate this afternoon I’ll jot down some of my views here.

Before I do, however, may I say that these generic questions often enrage me. They are usually asked in order to coax the audience into a “debate”, in which any common ground cannot be found by definition. Seriously, how many definitions of art do you know? They say that truth is born of an argument, which is true, providing we know exactly what we’re arguing about.

I had a short-period email correspondence with my compatriot, in which we were talking comfortably about globalisation, Europe, Heidegger, etc. All was fine, until I noticed that he wasn’t actually reading my letters. He was sieving through them, picking up certain phrases out of context, which led to various degrees of misunderstanding. When I finally expressed my concerns, he reproached me: ‘This is the beauty of an argument – soar freely, exchanging ideas, leaving them behind. Disagreements are what I find beautiful, and you don’t‘. I replied that there was nothing beautiful about losing my time.

Let us get back to our sheep. Do art and politics mix? Questions like this force on a thinker a suggestion that art and politics are two completely different, unconnected spheres of life. Whether or not this is possible, each of us can decide for themselves. As far as George Orwell was concerned, one of the four reasons why writers write was ‘political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude‘ (Why I Write).

This must be second or third time I’m quoting this passage from Why I Write in my blog, which should unambiguously suggest where I stand. This blog is not about politics, although I expressed my opinion on certain political issues. However, there’s another reason, why I avoid writing about politics in my blog.

There is today what I would call “the politics of art“, which comprises absolutely everything: from language to the themes of your art. The very fact that political correctness is now fully integrated in the process of making or discussing art manifests that art possesses (or is developing) its own political culture. I personally experienced this during Brokeback Mountain release, when even the most humble critical opinion of the film was decried as a homophobic propaganda. I put the word “film” in bold because the whole BM-gate showed the inability of some faithful followers to distinguish between nasty anti-gay comments and a careful critique of the film as a work of art. The art scene thus came across as even less democratic than politics.

So, art and politics not only mix, they’re always entwined to the extent when you can no longer say exactly what feeds from what, art from politics or politics from art. This occasionally leads to confusion. One such on my memory was calling the monumental architecture and sculpture of the 1930s “totalitarian” because the author analysed it on the examples of Italy, Germany and Soviet Russia, failing to notice the examples of similarly “totalitarian” structures on the other side of the Atlantics. Had this been done, the 1930s monumentalism in art would have had to be placed in the context of industrialisation and the world economic crisis. But objectivity wasn’t the author’s political purpose.

I’ll be writing more on the subject after this afternoon’s debate. Since I don’t see the reason to refute the exchange and connection between politics and art, I think the fundamental question to ask is where the two are heading. How do politics and art see progress and mankind? I’ll wait to see if today’s panellists bring this question up.

You Are What You…

[This post is dedicated to the playwright from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, who was gifted, but liked listening to The Monkees’ I’m a Believer].

… Listen

Psychologists have found out that the music young people listen to can tell (almost exactly) who they are. In simple terms, if you’re a jazz aficionado, you’re probably a very brainy person. If you like pop, you don’t like overcomplicating things. If you like dance or soul, your tongue is likely to be your enemy. If, however, you’re a fan of gangsta rap, it’s very possible that you’re timid by nature.

Music, claims an article by Lane Jennings in The Futurist (vol. 39, 2005), is forming the communities, and portals like Last.fm and, of course, My Space, certainly prove the point. But, personally, I have reservations about the idea that it is iPods and iTunes that are causing this change. Rather, they ferment or even bring to the surface the long-existing tendency. And we’ve become more aware of it because fans don’t have to travel miles to the annual meeting of Ella Fitzgerald or ABBA fan clubs – they can simply meet online as often as they like.

To test the findings, follow this link, to listen to The Wicked and Unfaithful Song of Marcel Duchamp to His Queen. The text of the poem was written by Paul Carroll, and was put to music by John Austin. Feel free to tell us what it made you discover about yourself.

[In case if the link doesn’t work, please go to www.toutfait.com, to ‘Music’ folder, and look for ‘The Wicked and Unfaithful Song…’ in the list of works. I do hope, however, that the above link will take you there directly].

… Eat
Another researcher’s findings (in the article by Kathy Lane in The Mail on Sunday, April 2004) have revealed that in England your eating habits stand for your social status. Apparently, if you’re an upper-middle-class person you won’t be seen dead eating bacon and chip butties, prawn cocktail with Marie-Rose sauce, or rice salads with sweetcorn – typically working-class or lower-middle-class foods. [Strictly speaking, you may indulge in any of these, but only if you’re socially secure enough to be eccentric].

Then, of course, we can bring the whole bunch of food advice in the picture, and it will turn out that the lower classes shop for ready-made foods in cheap supermarkets, while the upper branches shop for organic and ‘healthy’ foods in more expensive stores, or even have their friendly butcher and greengrocer.

It all looks kind of funny and superficial if we take this simply as the reflection of class differences in food consumption. However, I was astounded to read a booklet containing advice on healthy eating for those who suffer from MS (multiple sclerosis). This is the list of products they were not supposed to have: lard, butter, cream of soups, caffein, and – most importantly – fish in batter and chips.

Why ‘most importantly’? Because all of us who’ve been to England at least once already know that fish in batter and chips are one of the favourite English meals, especially in the North. As a matter of fact, the statistics show that the Northerners are more often affected by MS that the Southerners. I asked a representative of one MS Care Centre in South Manchester, if the food guidelines for the MS sufferers can also be used as general guidelines for MS prevention. His answer was ‘yes’. ‘Then doesn’t it look like’, I asked, ‘that the favourite Northern food may also be the cause of MS?’ I would like to be wrong, but I felt that his ‘yes’ to my question contained a lot of astonishment.

So, eating habits evidently define much more than just your social status, which sounds quite commonsensical, and is exactly what Jamie Oliver has been uttering for a long while. Perhaps, then, it is time to do something about it?

… Say

What you say and how you say it is also manifestant of your class background. Two years ago I was returning to Manchester from my research spell in London. It was an evening train, and in the carriage there was this group of young office workers, two men and two women. They were talking loudly, and eventually I heard one man, speaking in RP [Received Pronunciation, also known as the Queen’s English], explaining to a woman, how he could tell her social background. She referred to her father as ‘Dad’, which gave away her not-so-high social status. If she was posh, he explained, she’d call her parent ‘Father’.

… Read

Until now we may be thinking that everything that is written here may or may not be true. In the end of the day, the egalitarians will say that people must not be judged by the music they listen or by the words they use in their speech. On the other hand, all people like coming together in groups, and the entering criteria must be defined. So, whether one likes this or not, if there are people who want to be ‘upper-middle-class’, there will always be those who don’t fall into the category.

However, reading habits is my most favourite example of how little reading tells about who you are. To define people by their bookshelf is totally futile, because they may be buying books simply to decorate the room or to impress the visitors. Such thing as the entire edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica standing in the most prominent place in someone’s study never means that the owner has actually read it.

Then there are people who read Dan Brown and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the same degree of pleasure. There are also people who we’d assume are very cultivated because they listen to Antonio Caldara (an Italian Baroque composer) and read Martin Heidegger. I’d imagine that reading Heidegger’s musings on language would at least make one more attentive and sensitive to their own speech. And yet, I’ve been proved wrong.

Thanks for reading and visiting! You can connect with me on Google+ @ https://plus.google.com/108262661313082363581/posts/. Julia x
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