In Transclasses, Chantal Jaquet supplements work on social reproduction theory by considering exceptions to the rule, counterexamples where habitual models of identification are rejected, instances of what Jaquet calls ‘social non-reproduction’. With reference to social class – the subject of Jaquet’s text – non-reproduction relates to situations where individuals leave their familial class and crossover into another. Depending on the direction of travel, these are either celebrated as exemplary cases of upward mobility – embourgeoisement – or cautionary tales of the downwardly mobile – declassement. To be a transclass is to enter milieus distinct from ones assigned social background, a passage which remakes the individual’s habits, conduct, and comportment – a remodeling that never completely erases the traces of their original setting.
The left, Jaquet notes, has generally been suspicious of personal success stories heralding the elevation of individuals from the subaltern into the rarefied world of business, political, and cultural elites. On the one hand, such narratives of defiant ascendancy function as myths that legitimate the structurally necessary domination of the many. A meteoric rise for the exceptional does not remove the barriers confronting all, but it does reinforce a belief that personal merit and hard work alone will win out, a logic that pits individual will versus entrenched social structures. On the other, a narrow focus on biographies of private advancement forecloses broader questions about the generalized non-reproduction of capitalist social relations – that is, their abolition.
What this earned wariness overlooks, is the extent to which in periods seemingly devoid of change on a collective scale, individual transformation, and the transformation of the individual, are at least occasions where the new is produced, where novel modes of existence are invented within an otherwise implacable social order. ‘Anyone dreaming of better days’, Jaquet writes, ‘has every reason to consider actual cases of transformation in a disenchanted world’. (This perhaps also explains the attraction to, and significance of, reality TV shows like Queer Eye, with their affirmations and manifestations of personal change and uplift).
Alongside philosophical and sociological concepts, Jaquet turns to the encounters, affects, and personal experiences depicted in literary fiction to elucidate an account of social non-reproduction. Transclasses draws on the ‘auto-socio-biographical’ work of novelists like Annie Ernaux, a genre of writing which presents the individual as a ‘social product’, bounded by a determinate set of historical conditions. One of the themes running through Jaquet’s cultural canon of non-reproduction is the role of education and educational institutions in recalibrating the social trajectory of transclass intellectuals, novelists, and artists. An emphasis on legitimate forms of social transition leaves open the question of other modalities through which non-reproduction might be lived. For instance, the real-life fraud to streaming content pipeline (Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Pain Hustlers) amplifies the exploits of individuals who similarly decline their assigned roles but embark on criminal rather than vocational enterprises. Outlaws, in this regard, flee their social destiny too, but rather than cultivate the manners, sensibilities, and credentials of a good bourgeois, they exploit the powers of the false.
Following Jaquet’s lead, it could be argued that part of the appeal of the fictions of outlaw appropriation resides in their attachment to social non-reproduction as a concept, image, and horizon. Outlaw texts typically dramatize the transformation of characters relationship to work, one which sees them escape the quotidian banality of waged employment and reclaim autonomy and authorship of their creative powers. Whether it is out of personal disposition or material necessity, such characters refuse to diligently return to the factory, office, household, or service job. The mute compulsion of economic relations is vehemently rejected. Outlaws thus militate against the ideology of work (at least initially) and engage in acts, actions, and activities which alter their relationship to the conditions of existence, deviations which also see them suppressed politically – they are outlaws after all.
One drawback of styling the fictions of outlaw appropriation in terms of giving expression to the underside of social non-reproduction is that it leans into a certain Manichean framework. Such a reading is explicitly invited in the titles of shows like Breaking Bad and Good Girls – even if their narratives trouble overly neat ethical binaries. For Micheal Szalay, Breaking Bad and Good Girls are examples of the ‘black-market melodrama’. A black-market melodrama typically revolves around a disillusioned middle-class professional who turns to crime to arrest their declining economic status and increasingly proletarianized working conditions. Walter White discovers his true calling as a meth cook and drug lord, whilst Beth Boland has a talent for pulling off heists. Characters are thus awakened into ‘second lives’, a reprieve that tends to short be lived, as the precarity from which they initially flee bleeds back into and envelopes the family even more insidiously. In Szalay’s reading, the black-market melodrama is one of the aesthetic genres through which the decades long deindustrialization of the US economy is mediated culturally. It is a form that both stages a flight from the casualization of work, but which also depicts the tendential extension of casualization across every facet of emotional and social life, rendering the family wage that the genre’s protagonists seek to revive constitutively impossible.
Another objection I’ve encountered to presenting outlaw appropriators in terms of social non-reproduction, concerns the genre’s revisionist take on the ‘social bandit’. This is not the place for a more thorough discussion of Eric Hobsbawm’s influential historicization and theorization of the social bandit. For now, it is enough to note that for Hobsbawm, the social bandit is positioned as an enemy of the state and capital, on the one hand, and as a hero of the people, on the other. Robin Hood would be one example of an archetypal social bandit, Pancho Villa a more historically complicated version. In a character like Walter White, the connection with collective aspirations is liquidated and replaced by a militarized fantasy of self-reliance. Where the social bandit once waged war on lords, masters, and landowners, avenging injustices and redistributing material goods, forming an apparatus of counter-power within their popular base, the ‘anti-social bandit’, embodied by Walter White, strikes against the social itself, siphoning off commodities, goods, and riches for their own private consumption. Figures like White and Ozark’s Marty Byrde break the law out of a furious conviction that their economic privileges and social dispensation must be maintained at whatever price.
The myths accrued to social bandits like Robin Hood are primarily concerned with the distribution and allocation of scarce resources. Social banditry itself is closely associated with coercion and force, with stick up artists and armed gangs, with the theft of livestock, products, and money. The myths of outlaw appropriation which I find of most interest are related to production; or, more specifically, to types of production which intersect with literature, performance, and the imaginary. Forms of appropriation which manipulate soft power, the deployment of stories that are designed to cajole, persuade, seduce; or stories that manufacture, fabricate, and falsify commodities out of junk matter and citations. To be sure, this division of labor is not fixed fast: heists, for example, rely on a tremendous exertion of intellectual labor in their planning and execution; whilst fictional origin stories are required to cleanse and launder profits acquired from illicit activities. Likewise, a counterfeit object does not in itself produce new value. The art of counterfeiting, however, does introduce the role of labor, of the way in which bodies and minds inscribe their presence in the world. If there is a dialectic at work here, perhaps it is one driven by the non-identity of the imaginary (the longing for better days) and the recuperation of bodily gestures (the remythologization of the outlaw as capitalist magician).
Thomas Travers 