ASPIRATIONALISM AND ASSIMILATION: “The Melancholia of Class” By cynthia Cruz
by Lucy Myers
The Melancholia of Class is a biting analysis of the violence which middle class aspirationalism enacts upon the working class. Cynthia Cruz discusses the reducing of the working class subject into a ghost that haunts the bourgeois values of neoliberalism.
The book’s title is an evocation of the Freudian conception of melancholia, a depression produced by the environment that the individual lives within. The working class, and Cruz herself, is trapped within the middle class world which is necessarily exclusionary of them. Cruz is particularly focused on “the melancholia that ensues when one abandons one’s working class background”, on an attempt to leave one’s origins as is made necessary within capitalism’s aspirationalism.
The book is a series of essays which span varying forms of pop culture derivative of working class spirit. Cruz braids personal experience, critical theory and cultural products - Amy Winehouse, Joy Division and Clarice Lispector - as evidence for her hypothesis. The analysis largely takes place in an anecdotal frame, of the artists Cruz engaged with - both popular and more undercurrent - who give articulation to her melancholia. The series of essays are broadly divided by different cultural products but the work still reads as a coherent book, with examples reappearing in other chapters to tie it all together.
Separate from cultural products, Cruz heavily cites Mark Fisher, and her project can be understood as a specific articulation of the working class under capitalist realism. She also heavily cites Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis, but the critical work is done through an analysis and celebration of the artistic output of the working class. This is particularly important as Cruz identifies (rightly so) that the artistic world in contemporary understanding is defined and dictated by middle class values. The identification of existing examples of working class artistic output allows for this narrative to be disrupted, and for the creation of a narrative that realises the emancipatory nature of art when in the right hands.
This combination of sources means that Cruz’s work is made very accessible; she explains more complex theoretical examples through the pop cultural references and through the expression of her experience. She moves between Joy Division and Walter Benjamin easily; using both and an articulation of her own experiences to make her point - but this does not diminish the intellectual rigor. Her work masterfully disintegrates the distinction between high and low culture created by neoliberalism, reclaiming art and critical theory for the working class - to the place where this power of imagination and critique is most natural and thus most powerful.
Though the content is obviously depressing, the popular reputation of these artists are defined by their lifelong struggle and eventual early deaths - Cruz is right to subtitle her work as a manifesto. In an interesting engagement with Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, Cruz makes an argument for working class leisure as loitering, as a creative existence criminalised by the bourgeoisie. In this criminalisation, working class art is freed from the market expectations and returned to its ideal state - creativity needn’t or shouldn’t exist for the market; it should be always distinctive (against) the market and capitalism at all turns.
One potential drawback is the book’s reliance on Joanna Hogg’s film The Souvenir as a major and recurring reference point. Cruz identifies that the problem with most culture is that it is created for the middle classes and this controls the depiction of the working class. The Souvenir is a limited release indie film, which focuses on an upper class artist’s relationship with a drug addict who is attempting to escape their working class origins. This creates a tension with the celebration of working class art that occupies much of the text, as it is not a particularly accessible reference, and relies on tropes of neoliberal aspirationalism.
To be fair, Cruz’s reading of the film is based on the working class character’s struggle with addiction, arguing that his desperation is driven by neoliberal aspirationalism - but the film is from the perspective of the upper classes. Even still, this contrast is made particularly bleak as she writes about the numerous working class artists whose lives were ended by this melancholia she diagnoses: the inability to escape the fundamental loss of identity that is caused by neoliberal ideology’s naturalisation of its values.
In this, the ultimate tension that the working class is caught in is revealed (to which Cruz’s point comes back, perhaps in a similar inescapable vein that haunts Fisher’s Capitalist Realism): the aspirationalism and the impossibility of assimilation (which shouldn’t be wished for anyway, as Cruz rightly identifies assimilation as death) eat away at each other until there is nothing left but exchange value.
Overall, Cruz’s book is equally creative and intellectually rigorous, making an explosive, rightfully angry account of the impossible tension that the working class artist is forced to occupy; in exploring this tension it can disintegrate and true creativity can blossom.
ISBN 9781912248919
The Melancholia of Class is available for pre-order at NIBS and will be available again soon