> > Have any of you read very much of the works of sociologist Herbert Gans?
> > (Is he on this list, maybe?) Having only read a few things by him, I'm
> > wondering where he stands politically and pedagogically. Would it be fair
> > or accurate to consider him one of the consensus generation of scholars?
> > What is the opinion of him, if any, in cultural studies or other postmodern
> > circles?
> > Tom Frank
>
> Gans calls himself an upper-middle-class liberal...most of his work
> has been about 'mainstream' America (i.e., white middle-strata)... he
> offers the following generalizations in his book _Middle American
> Individualism: Political Participation and Liberal Democracy_:
I've got a distinctly different impression of him from recently reading "The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy".
In this book, Gans was extremely aware of mainstream perceptions, and extremely ticked off at the way these perceptions have been used to dehumanize the poor.
For example, I took down verbatim a passage from a section "The Threats of Undeservingness" p 75-6:
"‘Threat’ is a strong word, but it is apt because the intensity of feelings harbored by the more fortunate classes about the poor thought to be undeserving is so strong. Indeed, the liberal politicians and policymakers of the 1980s and 1990s have paid a heavy price for underestimating it. In reality, the feelings are a mixture of fear, anger, and disapproval, but fear may be the most important element in the mixture. Such feelings are expressed not only in the political rhetoric of increasing numbers of seekers for public office but in news, entertainment, and other outlets of public communication. These all tell alarmist stories in which the villians often have neither motive, reason, nor any redeeming human features. Whether they are street criminals or youhng mothers without husbands, they are in effect demons, usually black, who have been let loose on an innocent country. And the privately told stories are much worse than the public ones."
Overall, I thought Gans did a pretty good job of analysis, and not incidentally he's miles away from anything remotely PoMo. His politics may be considerably more mainstream than mine, but his approach seems far more helpful in building arguments that can have broad appeal.
For example, before getting to the "underclass" label itself, he does prep work looking at other examples of dehumanizing labels for the poor. He talks about 19th century labels that divided poor into 3 classes -- ‘defective, dependent and delinquent’ -- then moves on to the 3 major lables popular in 20th century: febblemindedness, the culture of poverty and the underclass. His exploration of the earlier terms does a very effective job of preparing the way for his critique of the "underclass" label.
I found his whole description of the label-formation interesting and informative. It was sharply different from the schematization that PoMo writers seem to revel in, quite sensitive to the hisotical contingencies. He notes tht a new label is normally in same genre as the old -- as when post-Civil War America invented ‘tramp’ to replace ‘vagrant’ and ‘vagabond.’ But, on the other hand, when conditions change, a new genre of term will emerge -- as when ‘feebleminded’ appeared.
What I really appreciate here is his characteriztice tension between a desire to analyze on the one hand, and on the hand his respect for the historical messiness that limits the degree of order that an analytic scheme can rightful claim.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"