Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture

By Sieglinde Lemke

This book analyzes the discourse generated by pundits, politicians, and artists to examine how poverty and the income gap is framed through specific modes of representation. Set against the dichotomy of the structural narrative of poverty and the opportunity narrative, Lemke's modified concept of precarity reveals new insights into the American situation as well as into the textuality of contemporary demands for equity. Her acute study of a vast range of artistic and journalistic texts brings attention to a mode of representation that is itself precarious, both in the modern and etymological sense, denoting both insecurity and entreaty. With the keen eye of a cultural studies scholar her innovative book makes a necessary contribution to academic and popular critiques of the social effects of neoliberal capitalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137597014

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© The Author(s) 2016

Sieglinde LemkeInequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture10.1057/978-1-137-59701-4_1

1. Introduction

Sieglinde Lemke¹ 

(1)

University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

As I write this, two days after the end of the 2016 election, it is astonishing to what extent class and inequality have determined the outcome. Americans have preferred to ignore class issues for the greater part of their history, and it is only since the financial crisis of 2008 that class awareness has emerged with a vengeance. In the years since, Americans have increasingly confronted the (structural) inequalities that have grown with globalization. This book takes an inventory of the myriad ways Americans have described economic precarity in the twenty-first century, revealing the secret history of a discourse that otherwise appears to be a new phenomenon.

Inequality, Poverty, and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture charts the rising concern with economic hardship, analyzing hundreds of scholarly and journalistic articles and books whose authors either explain the multiple causes of inequality or express their indignation at its effects. The book draws on a number of texts, including political speeches, cartoons, and visual and prose documentaries. As the discourse on systemic divergence is booming, this book inevitably fails to give an up-to-date account. Nevertheless, this book represents the most extensive survey of artistic and media representations on economic hardship in America. It draws upon structural aspects of the ways we talk about class in the twenty-first century, and offers a conceptual tool, precarity, with which to approach representations of this new reality.

While a host of scholars have measured inequality (economists), ascertained its spatial articulations (geographers), studied its effects (sociologists, psychologists, and medical scientists), and assessed its ethical, legal, and cultural causes and consequences (philosophers, theologians, and legal scholars), the following examination of class-based narratives adds to the discourse in the field of literary, cultural, media, and critical studies. ¹ The representations taken up here deal with personal accounts of economic and social precarity, as well as pleas, written and visual, made on behalf of the dispossessed. This book pays particular attention to the nature of that social dependency which is inevitable to a precarious existence and central to the process of looking at, reading, and talking about precarity.

Federal statistics on poverty, ² shocking as they may be, remain abstractions. They do not necessarily help us to grapple with causes and effects, let alone the costs—trillions of dollars—of decades of anti-poverty interventions. Fifty years ago, Lyndon B. Johnson launched a war to fight it, but poverty has not yet been defeated. The price tag attached to mass poverty and inequality is, however, not as often remarked upon as the size of the poor population, even though according to a recent study, child poverty costs the nation $500 billion each year (in extra education, health, criminal justice costs, and loss of productivity). ³ If they are not in a position to inherit wealth, large parts of the so-called millennial generation—and this portion is even greater among Generation Z, my daughter’s generation—will be economically disenfranchised by the time they retire.

The way we currently talk about economic inequality is replete with slogans (the 1 percent, we, the 99 percent, the gap, at risk), euphemisms (the shrinking, floundering, dwindling, melting middle class), and clichés (fat cats, banksters, sharks, welfare queens, moochers, freeloaders). But the rhetorical war on poverty also has its tropes. Poverty in the midst of plenty is a common one, as are condemnations of poverty as a shame (Harrington 60, 191; Shipler 300; Ehrenreich 220) or a scandal (Abramsky 1). The master trope, however, by which the issue of class has been glossed over and pitched as a matter of opportunity is, of course, the American Dream. This notion, or rather myth, promotes a patriotic and individualistic ideology intended to foil systemic narratives of poverty. The best solution to class inequality, this ideology suggests, is to work hard, be inventive, and keep one’s eyes on the prize.

Ironically, James Truslow Adams’ canonical formulation of the American Dream is thoroughly egalitarian: the dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (375; emphasis mine). His rhetoric is noteworthy. At the height of the Great Depression, Adams articulated a social democratic version of American life. Not only did he anticipate our contemporary politics of recognition, he also echoed Karl Marx’s famous definition of communism (From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!). It was only in the 1950s and 1960s, during the era of the Great Compression, that this dream became associated with home ownership, car ownership, and the nuclear family. Today, however, in the era of the Great Divergence, the American Dream is more often than not declared dead, or at least dying. Note the subtitle of Robert D. Putnam’s book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015); Hedrick Smith rhetorically asks Who Stole the American Dream? (2013); and in the subtitle of Ending Poverty in America (2007), John Edwards, in the year before he was elected to the US Senate, urges Americans to Restore the American Dream.

To illustrate the end of the American Dream and the dire economic realities of the era of neoliberalism, experts and journalists continue to cite numbers, but their data are often illustrated by colorful visual graphs. The discourse on inequality has produced a visual language of its own. Declining graphs show the stagnation of workers’ wages; inclining ones chart, for example, the increase in executive pay or the resounding income share of the superrich. The income gap is symbolized by the widening of two curves. And then there is the suspension bridge-shaped curve featured, for example, in Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013), which peaks first in 1929 and again in 2008. All the corrosive social consequences of the Great Divergence (regarding public health, education, household debt, incarceration rate, child mortality, suicide rate, etc.) have been presented through colorful infographics. Dire data glossed with bright tones are less reprehensible and therefore, it seems, more representable.

The inequality discourse, which I examine in Chap. 2, has also produced new heroes. The French economist Thomas Piketty received unprecedented public attention when the English translation of his longitudinal study on wealth distribution appeared under the catchy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published by Harvard’s Belknap Press in the spring of 2014. Piketty was marketed as a rock-star economist and intellectual superstar (Kachka). What had previously been an oxymoron became a new media phenomenon. His message about the persistence and detrimental consequences of inequality, coupled with his bold call for redistribution, struck a chord. Piketty’s rise to fame is astounding, given that his data affirmed a phenomenon observers of the American economy have known for a decade: that the rate of capital return has proven higher than the rate of economic growth allows for a concentration of wealth in the hands of an economic elite, rather than allowing it to trickle down to society as a whole. Because of laws governing inheritance, first wealth and then power accrue to a small patrimonial class (as Piketty puts it), putting at stake the notions of economic mobility, meritocracy, and even democracy itself.

Piketty’s assessment affirms a liberal narrative of inequality that has punctured a hole in the myth of the American Dream, which in turn has instigated a crisis of legitimacy on the right. Those who endorse the view of inequality as a product of freedom (some of whom might be inspired by Ayn Rand’s philosophy) or as a positive incentive dismiss Piketty’s argument as a rallying cry for the left. ⁴ The avalanche of critical commentary by economists of different political persuasions, who subjected Piketty’s findings to meticulous scrutiny, is but an indicator of the boiling point this hot-button issue reached in 2014. I will elaborate on this in Chap. 2.

That Piketty’s book was a bestseller bespeaks the fact that a shift in American public opinion was underway in the summer of 2014. ⁵ Many forces, including artistic representations, had already been at work to effect change in social and political consciousness, of which Piketty was the beneficiary. Class consciousness in the USA is on the rise, its evolution owing to countless pundits, readers, journalists, bloggers, and artists who collectively have initiated and sustained this discursive formation. Talk about inequality started as early as 2001, gained momentum around 2008, and peaked in the post-recession years with Piketty’s 2014 publishing coup. And according to some commentators, we have not heard the last of it: inequality, they predicted, will be the watchword for the 2016 election, as both parties have realized the need for an economic populist message (Rucker and Balz).

The main message in this discourse on inequality is aptly und succinctly summarized in the following punchline: Increasing Inequality: It’s happening, it matters, and we can do something about it (Bernstein, A Comprehensive Look at the Inequality Story…To Go!). Jared Bernstein, once the chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, and Ben Spielberg chose this title for their presentation (delivered to a group of policymakers), which ends on the equally upbeat note that Inequality is a problem we can combat with the right policy solutions. ⁶ Most experts in the field of inequality studies (for instance, Stiglitz, Reich, and Noah) and poverty studies (Rank, Abramsky, Lister, and Shipler) are activist scholars, and their rhetoric follows suit. One shared rhetorical strategy of theirs is to remind readers that inequality is destructive, not only on a personal level (Pickett and Wilkinson), but also on a collective one. Since the commons—parks, kindergartens, community centers, and sports clubs—are notoriously underfunded, the wealth gap also destroys the infrastructure of our communities (Noah 172; Putnam 10). ⁷ The members of the prosperous class working on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, on K Street, so the story goes, are simply uninterested in those struggling on Main Street. On the contrary, the superrich pay lobbyists to uphold a political order that secures their privileges. This state of affairs advances economic apartheid, turning America, once again, into a house divided.

New York’s two Park Avenues are an apt metaphor for the state of the nation. The precarious class lives on the Bronx’s Park Avenue, while the billionaires live (and live well) on Manhattan’s. David Koch and Stephen Schwarzman reside at 740 Park Avenue in luxurious $40 million apartments cleaned, kept up, and protected by the working poor who commute to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. No wonder that Alex Gibney’s 2012 documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power, and the American Dream received such widespread attention. Its compelling cinematography communicated a sad message. This America and that America are worlds apart, but they are also connected, part and parcel of a nation once revered for its egalitarianism. To nineteenth-century observers, America was better off than Europe because it was more democratic. Now, goes the liberal argument, America has lost its claim to this distinction. In the age of neoliberalism and privatization, America’s democracy has become a plutocracy every bit as economically striated as feudal Europe’s.

A quintessential step in this regard is to acknowledge that precarity is not only a problem for the poor, as Mark Robert Rank observes in One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (2005). In the same vein, Harvard Kennedy School of Government senior lecturer Marshall Ganz stresses that the core question is not about poverty, it’s really about democracy. The galloping poverty in the United States is evidence of a retreat from democratic beliefs and practices (quoted in Abramsky 11). Likewise, the galloping inequality might be evidence of a collective problem, to which we have not yet attached a satisfying collective narrative. The American public deserves a better story about income inequality, Susan Nall Bales suggests, to make the public understand how the fates of the rich are connected to those of the poor. ⁸ Her passionate plea for a narrative affirming that the poor and the rich should not live in separate worlds amounts to an ethical and political appeal. Noble mandates such as these are common to liberal approaches to end economic inequity, but Bales’ call for a narrative that connects the privileged and precarious class foregrounds the role soft factors play in fomenting social and political change. Without a cultural narrative that promotes a collective we, economic polarization will abound and accelerate. Without the we there is no (American) people. What is left are two classes: the haves and the have-littles.

What have experts in the field of narrative, we might ask, contributed to the debate over the rise of inequality? Surprisingly little. The merging fields of cultural class studies or cultural poverty studies do not yet have much to offer in this regard. ⁹ Walter Benn Michaels, for example, has criticized scholars working in American studies, and in the humanities in general, for ignoring the topic of economic inequality and for being fixated on cultural identity. He did so even before the financial crisis made this issue even more acute. Two years after Michaels’ bestseller The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006) was published, the literary scholar Gavin Jones, in his study American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2009), alerted his colleagues that the topic of poverty remains the categorical blind spot in American studies (15).

Jones’ own study, which examines the themes of hunger and dispossession in classic American novels of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, tried to shine some light on this blind spot. Jones’ study of representations of the pauper circulating in novels written by middle- and upper-middle-class authors like Herman Melville and Edith Wharton is helpful for understanding how the reading public has configured poverty. The impoverished come across as either morally flawed or mentally deficient paupers or as poor victims of circumstances. Depression-era writers like Richard Wright and James Agee, although more sympathetic toward the poor, still perpetuated this dynamic of othering. The experience and worldview of the poor is never fully intelligible to outsiders, Jones insists: pauperism … resists representation (100). In other words, the economic subaltern cannot speak. And those of us who speak for her run the risk of misrepresenting or othering low-income subjects. In her response to the rhetorical question Can the Indigent Speak?, Barbara Korte implicitly disagrees with Jones: ¹⁰ whether subalterns are granted opportunities to speak, and to be listened to, are questions of social and ethical relevance, she claims, while encouraging literary scholars to address these issues (294). But are the non-poor disentitled to write about poverty? (294), she asks rhetorically, to suggest that literary representations of poverty made by the non-poor have the power to impact their readers’ social imaginary (295). This impact cannot be denied. Plus, Jones’ radical claim could even be mistaken as a pre-emptive strike against poverty studies within academia. In addition to the important insights working-class scholars have produced, the etic perspective—that of the outsiders—is of course relevant to explaining how poverty is framed in Western societies, which is one of the main concerns of this book. ¹¹

That we reaffirm the very class differences our literary or critical interventions set out to overcome is a vicious circle that haunts most reports on—or articulations of—poverty. Jacob Riis’ groundbreaking report How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), Michael Harrington’s influential The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), and Sasha Abramsky’s study The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (2013) all partake in the symbolic othering of those on whose behalf they speak. Their choice of titles is a case in point.

In The Other America, the political science professor and self-declared socialist Harrington expresses his commitment to ‘those people’ who live in the economic underworld of American life (2). By setting off those people in quotes, he signals his own identification and proclaims that the truly human reaction can only be outrage (2). This declaration of sentiment is followed by a citation of W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939: Hunger allows no choice/To the citizen or the police/We must love one another or die (2). Harrington’s rhetorical strategy of casting his anti-poverty agenda as a matter of love or death while taking the moral high ground to plead for an alliance between the two Americas proved successful. His report—like very few books after Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852)—actually played a role in influencing policy (in Harrington’s case, Johnson’s War on Poverty). One of the reasons Harrington’s narrative was able to improve the lives of those people has to do with the narrative strategies he deploys. For example, when he draws his (middle-class) reader’s attention to the America of poverty [whose] millions are socially invisible to the rest of us (2), he elicits curiosity and creates suspense, which is heightened by his dramatic tone. Because he repeats the terms invisible and invisibility 11 times alone in Chap. 2 (titled The Invisible Land), this trope is imprinted on the reader’s mind. This revelatory gesture functions as bait to create awareness and to mobilize his readers. Given its enormous reception, The Other America demonstrates that the abolition of poverty is inextricably related to the politics of representation—as cultural studies scholars have argued for decades.

The two Americas, to stay with the metaphor, learn from each other through representations. Members of the comfortable class—if they are not volunteers, activists, service providers, or in any way professionally involved with the other class—rely on texts (including filmic, televisual, and photographic images, journalistic articles, academic studies, and novels) to understand more about the poor. This list of texts can even be expanded. Birte Christ aptly observes that reality TV, computer games, and even paintings are among those texts that should be analyzed for a consideration of how poverty is socially and culturally imagined through specific forms in order to determine which forms may enable more critical and complex accounts and explanations of poverty (2014, 49). ¹²

Likewise, if the poor connect with the non-poor (outside of the work space or social networks), they do so mainly through representations (circulating on television, online, on billboards, etc.). Of course, their interest in the reality of the affluent (like the Kardashian family) is significantly higher than the prosperous class’ interest in the social reality (shows) about the dispossessed (such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, The Wire, or Shameless). The inequality in media access aside, representations play a pivotal role in our construction and understanding of class matters.

This is why a new narrative of inequality depends on textual and artistic representations, and this is why this book seeks to decode the representational matrix of inequality and poverty. Today’s depictions exceed the binary of the pauper versus the poor, and those depictions are far more complicated than they were during the Great Depression, when (male) laborers and destitute Americans were represented in either a sensational (bodily) or sentimental (emotional) mode, as Joseph Entin describes in Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007). During that time, the poor were either romanticized—taking the free-spirited vagabond as an example—or they were turned into spectacles of abject bodies in pain, as in sensational modernism. Entin’s contribution to the emerging field of cultural poverty studies, sensational modernism, or poverty modernism, is helpful to determine the predominant modes of representation in the twentieth century. What about representations circulating in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Gregory Mantsios lists six ways in which the poor have been represented in contemporary media: either by denial or denigration, or as numbers, irritants, the pitiable, or the blamable. ¹³ Diana Kendall’s Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America (2011) also distinguishes among six categories (correlating with Gilbert and Kahl’s class model) which affect our thinking about inequality and our personal identity in regard to the class structure (Kendall 6). Each of these frames has distinct stereotypes (the greedy rich, the lazy poor, or the working-class hero) and metaphors (for example, sour grapes, bad apples, and white trash). To cite one of Kendall’s examples, the fragile frame through which the poor and the homeless are presented tends to represent them en masse as statistics rather than as real people (100), as sympathetic (106), as dependent and deviant (112), as exceptional individuals (121), or through