ABSTRACT
The understanding of middle-classness as a socio-spatial category must be extended to understanding the meaning-making involved in the production and performativity of the self and subjectivity. Class is as much about practices as what orients those practices and behaviours; and how one makes sense of them. This meaning-making and meaning-giving allow one to understand the linkages between the self and the broader socio-spatial class distinction. It situates itself in patterned interactions with other subjectivities and shapes itself in relation to it. The way in which it is invoked in the context of EMC cosmopolitan subjectivity would build upon Jeremy Waldron’s ideas about cultural cosmopolitanism. A critical part of EMC’s cosmopolitan values is the celebration of the idea of de-historicised and individualised merit, talent and fair and objective competition. The merit-talent-free-and-fair-competition rationality employs the logic that aligns well with the desire to discredit other markers of identity and historical advantage resulting from it.
