REVIEW - The Melancholia of Class

The Melancholia of Class 

A Manifesto for the Working Class

Cynthia Cruz

Repeater Books

review by Jessie Flo Jones

CONTENT WARNING

discussion of eating disorders

In an increasingly visual, hyper-consumerist society, Cynthia Cruz’s initial insistence that ‘being [...] working-class is not a “look”’, is a canny way to set up her new book Melancholia of Class. Her text, newly published by Repeater, aims to resist these parameters. The strongest moments ask a metatextual question: how to reconcile diagnosing the hauntological conditions of the working classes, in a language that’s accessible to those living this reality?

She celebrates art that illustrates material conditions instead of purely external signifiers of class, such as in the lyrics of Paul Weller. Other artists such as Jason Molina and Mark Linkous, for Cruz, perform their background through ‘collecting objects and including text and other references in their lyrics’. Instead, Weller combines reference ‘to the objects and landscape of his working-class origins’ with an explicit reference to ‘the hegemonic powers [...] that result in class antagonism’.

Overall, Cruz’s text shines as a cultural investigation into working class art; when it succeeds, when it fails, and the ghostly liminal identity that it illustrates. However, it is explicitly problematic when it deals with anorexia and its cultural implications. Cruz professes to be a long- term sufferer herself whilst, in the same breath, irresponsibly combining political resistance with the mental illness. When she proclaims starvation is a method of becoming ‘indigestible to the capitalist system’, this is a straight up category error. Plenty of psychoanalysis has dealt with the roots of anorexia as a perceived resistance, in the sufferer, but to confirm this in her text is to portray something analogous to fruitful politics.

The combination of memoir and close reading of culture can sometimes be jarring, sometimes harmonious. However, Cruz succeeds in diagnosing something underdiscussed: the double-bind of trying to retain one’s working class roots, whilst attempting entrance into a hegemonically middle class world.

***

Jessie Flo Jones is a writer and literature editor of Radical Art Review.

@jessieflojones