Jon Baldwin reviews Can Working Class Culture be Knowledge? by Stefan Szczelkun, Routine Art Co., London 2025
Through a discussion of aspects of working-class culture, this book challenges a basic tenet of classism: that working-class people are lacking intellect. In terms of epistemology – the nature and scope, and ‘what counts’ as knowledge – working-class culture is deemed to offer little. Certainly, in comparison to high culture. To this classism we should add the intersections of sexism, racism, ableism, and so forth. But the problem is underscored:
Working-class people internalise the myth of their own lack of intellect.
The book is motivated by a modification of Tony Benn’s famous five questions on power but in cultural politics terms: What cultural power and cultural capital have you got? What class privileges afforded this? In whose interests, institutions, tastes, and theories do you exercise it? Who are your paymasters? And how can we get rid of you, and replace you with our voice?
There is a theoretical framework with sections on taste, reflexivity, aesthetics, discourse and knowledge. Pierre Bourdieu features and Szczelkun selects some core quotes positing cultural questions as essentially class questions:
It must never be forgotten that the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetic.
And:
tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others…Aversion to different lifestyles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes.
The celebration of high culture over popular culture is often class snobbery and a manifestation the attempt to maintain class privilege and material power.
What is working-class culture? It could be folk culture, associated with rural traditions, as well as popular culture, more urban and commercial. What working-class culture has in common, Szczelkun demonstrates, is that it is attacked, devalued, and demonised by intellectuals from the left and right often in contrast with the notion of high art and high culture.
When working-class culture is finally recognised and celebrated, it is often also deformed and neutered. Take the 1930s folk revival, which saw the emergence of groups such as ‘The English Folk Dance and Song Society’, ‘The Morris Ring’ and ‘The Folklore Society’. The folk revival was mannered, with material ‘de-vulgarised’, and cultural management and monetisation was performed by the upper and middle classes. In such a way working-class culture with a vitality, rowdiness, participation and democratic spirit was frozen, cleansed, owned and ruled over. This process happens time and again.
For instance, as a time-based media practitioner, Szczelkun is well placed to describe the formal qualities, development, and reception of an initially working-class, democratic, inclusive, gallery-resistant, configuration of mixed media. This is a form which might foreground process, experience, activity, duration, and often their sequencing of images in film and video installations.
Looking back, it seemed as if “a deep strata of pressurised molten lower-class culture had erupted through the fault-line caused by the sudden expansion of higher education in Art.”
All too soon institutions, agencies, curators, and elites “scrambled to tidy up and arrange into new orthodoxies.”
Szczelkun enumerates four themes common to the criticism aimed at popular culture and offers retorts:
The purported low quality of popular culture. However, the charges levied, such as standardisation, commercialisation, and predictability, can also occur in high culture. In such arguments the best of high culture (a Bach Concerto) is compared with the worse of popular culture (an advertising jingle). Never are the plodded steps of a courtly dance compared to the improvisation and skill of break-dancing.
The negative effects of popular culture on high culture. Another spurious argument whose basis seems to rely on the notion that low-paid high culture artists might be poached by the popular culture industry. The argument could be reversed with the notion that high culture has such a monopoly on what counts as art that it overshadows working-class culture.
The negative effects of popular culture on its audience. The popular audience is conceived of as passive and vulnerable to images of sex and violence and might even become sexed and violent. Which is to say that behind this assumption is the political fear is of a growing working class which is angry.
The negative, de-civilising effect that popular culture has on society. Here the anxiety is that popular culture will cretinise tastes, brutalise the senses, and narcotise the mass. This is often made by elites who are not well imbued in the culture they attack and fail to spot nuance, irony, innovation, pleasures and as Szczelkun suggests:
You can only read complexity in a culture within which you are ’literate’. This usually also means that you have grown up or spent many years immersed in.
In essence:
The distinction between high art and the popular arts is a social distinction: one which cannot be wholly located in the intrinsic qualities or the affective dimension of the work itself.
These ‘social distinctions’ are class distinctions, and the high vs popular culture debate is often a proxy for class-war proper.
Szczelkun highlights a working-class process of generating knowledge, a form of working-class epistemology. At best this is collegial, democratic, situated, contemporary, ‘from below’, and innovative. Of course, this is not to romanticise and claim that all in this process is progressive, there could be people left out and certain avenues unexplored. The example of a new football chant is provided:
The spontaneous and intuitive consensual process by which a new football chant is created is certainly awe inspiring. Middle class heritage assumes creativity can only be driven by individual activity, it is different for the intellectual tradition to envisage the crowd or group, thinking creatively.
The new football chant, or political slogan, or work song, or popular music, or open artist collective, involves a process of experimentation, innovation, consensual agreement, flourishes in informal meetings, and culminates in gatherings at a football match, political rally, the workplace, rave, or happening:
The birth of a new football chant comes from a great number of individuals in close proximity with an emotionally charged agenda who take up a potent idea.
This form of collective will is autonomous and does not require guidance, management, authorisation or leadership from ‘on high’. Crucially, at best, working-class tradition and culture:
…is both interpenetrating and typically unseen because its aesthetic value lies exactly in those evanescent and discursively elusive processes which are not always reflected or contained with their material outcomes.
Some of the more effective parts of the book are poignant autobiographical passages, regarding growing up in the London suburbs with parents displaced from their communities, his father from eastern Poland and mother from Nottingham and Lincolnshire. A family with ‘lower middle-class’ values presented as aspirational:
I was hit for saying ‘ain’t’ and ‘fings’, told that God would blind me if I said ‘Cor Blimey’ and endlessly told to ‘speak prop’ly’.
He is part of a minority who pass the 11+ and enter Grammar School. Then on to the Portsmouth School of Architecture, where:
…the pretentious ‘professional’ ethos there, and later in the art world, grated at me constantly.
There is a revealing anecdote of what today might be considered a form of class control, or micro-aggression. The type that many working-class entrants to typically middle-class fields encounter regularly which lead to the necessity of resilience or opting out of certain spaces and places:
I was with a group of middle-class students when I announced that I was ‘Going to the toilet’. One person commented; ‘It’s the ‘loo’, no one says toilet’. This caused a heated debate, overheard from the WC, in which someone else defended my usage as ‘a working-class word’ and ‘perfectly good’. Such incidents may seem inconsequential in isolation but as a long sequence they had a profound effect on my class consciousness.
Szczelkun is a veteran of initiatives and open artists’ collectives of cultural production such as the Scratch Orchestra – the British version of Fluxus; Exploding Cinema – an underground film and video showing collective; Working Press – books by and about working-class artists; and Agit Disco – an exploration of the politics of playlists.
He has worked in music, mail art, drawing, printmaking, performance art, film, and digital media as well as in curation, archives, and academia. He is the author of three 1970s Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter, Food and Energy, and his other books include Class Myths and Culture (1990), The Conspiracy of Good Taste (1993), Improvisation Rites: from John Cage’s Song Books to The Scratch Orchestra’s Nature Study Notes (2018), SILENCE! the great silencing of British working class culture (2020), Exploding Cinema 1991-999: culture and democracy (2021). This book is a welcome addition to the collection.
His works reads like a series of dispatches from the culture wars and class wars. The current compendium includes theoretical reflections, cultural history, class polemics, autobiography, and interviews. It ends with this call-to-arms:
It is a network of class-conscious working-class critics and a community of readers and responders that is missing. It is working-class publishers that are missing. There is no working-class intelligentsia with its own institutions. Working-class people don’t demand this because class oppression denies it. Working-class artists can and do achieve success but when their work is collected, discussed and written about there is an eerie silence about the, often prominent, class aspects of the work.
Highly recommended!
