The Twilight of the Middle Class

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

“…80 I therefore partly agree with Andrew Hoberek that Jameson's approach to the emergence of postmodernism, inasmuch as it comes at these transformations from the market-side of the commodity-form, suffers from a "symptomatically postmodernist turn away from production and toward consumption." 81 The point, however, is not that one should shift over to the worksite from the marketplace -as Hoberek implies -but rather that we should understand the marketplace as worksite. It is not, therefore, that Jameson is attending to the wrong things, but rather that he does not register that the things he is interested in -changes in the built environment, in technology, in the market, in the international space of flows -also have work and workers behind them, and that the changes at stake for him also involve changes in the character and form of work.…”

“…Although in the last few pages of his book, Hoberek recommends that the white-collar workers "stop thinking of themselves as middle-class, if by this we mean occupants of a position outside the binary logic of capital," presumably because the decline of middle-class fortunes brought on by proletarianization had finally, become "statistically noticeable" by early 2000s, I would argue that Hoberek misses the mark by a couple of decades at least, since wages for most white-collar workers actually began to stagnate in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 83 Add to this the fact that hours worked were rising precipitously among white-collar workers during the 1980s and 1990s, and one begins to see how thin the special privileges of white-collar workers really were. Thus, during the period in which postmodernism began to appear as a theoretical object, there was a real equalization of the experience of the white-collar workforce with many of their blue-collar counterparts.…”