ABSTRACT

So far I have examined ho\v class is valued, conceptualized, coded, re-signified, produced by rhetoric and representation, or displaced from academic and popular agendas. The previous chapters have sholvn that theories and methods are constitutive of what we know and understand to be class, but also that theories and methods of class ahvays assume a particular self. No\v I s\vitch emphasis to consider how theories of the self also implicate particular class relations by examining the role that culture plays in self-formation, demonstrating that, underpinning many new theories of the self, is a particular model of exchange. Exchange, as Day (200 1) notes (see Chapter 2), is ahvays central to ho\v class becomes kno\vn; it is therefore important to see ho\v forms of exchange condition the possibilities for class formation. In most contemporary theories, including those that explicitly theorize class, and even those that aggressively deny the existence of class (such as mobility and reflexivity theorists: see Chapter 3), there exists a particular adherence to the historic ideal of the possessive individual; namely that cultural properties, resources and/or assets can be accrued to the self, propertized and institutionalized to produce a specific form of personhood. The legacies of the possessive individual are institutionalized through contract lam; predicated on the relational capacity to draw to her or himself objects waiting to be personalized through acts of appropriation or consumption. The 'individual' is defined through his capacity to olvn property in his person, with the capacity to stand outside of himself, to separate 'himself' from 'his body', and then to have a proprietal relation to himself as bodily property (Pateman 1988).This chapter will thus focus on ho\v culture is exchanged to accrue value to the person, generating a contemporary version of possessive individualism, an exchange-value accumulative self, for the middleclasses.