Working-class achievement is paradoxically self-erasing under class linguist hierarchies
Evidence
Perhaps all his writing was, from the start, an attempt to find a way out of that paradox which all working-class aspirants face — the impossibility of working-class achievement. Stay where you are, speak the language of your fathers, and you remain nothing; move up, learn to speak in the master language, and you have become a something, but only by erasing your origins — isn’t the achievement precisely that erasure? (“You can string a sentence together, how can you possibly be working class, my dear?”) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1100
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The double-bind of class mobility as origin-erasure, and the trap that representing the disorder reinforces it, is dense enough to sit with.
- SEED: Could anchor an essay on how contemporary meritocracy reproduces class erasure through ‘achievement’ language.
- XREF: connects to: Working-class representation traps the speaker in an assigned social place — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1101; Regional accents are erased through class-aspirational self-suppression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1348; Adopting a new language evidences dislocation and the inferiority complex among the educated. (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Regional accents are erased through class-aspirational self-suppression
#exemplifies(0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1348 - Working-class representation traps the speaker in an assigned social place
#expands(0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1101 - Adopting a new language evidences dislocation and the inferiority complex among the educated.
#expands(0.80) - The seclusion-or-universality dichotomy legitimizes linguistic domination
#expands(0.78) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 533