I suppose it was inevitable that the claim everyone would focus on in k-punk’s recent post on class and confidence would be the one that the UK class system induces feelings of shame, embarrassment and inadequacy in those it designates as inferior. It’s a polarising sort of claim: there is a constituency, let us for convenience call them “the British”, to whom it appears simply obviously true, and then there is the group I will call, without particular regard for the empirical nationality of its constituents, “the Americans”, whose attitude is perhaps best summed up by the inimitable Patrick Mullins’s epistle to the disadvantaged: “Go improve yourself!”. Or, as one of our own politicians once memorably put it: get on yer bike!

In The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart’s survey of working class literacy in the 1950s, special attention is paid to the figure of the “scholarship boy” lifted - as the language of the time had it - out of his class through the improving offices of a grammar school education. In Hoggart’s view, such selective elevation deprived the working class of those who would have become its organic intellectuals, while at the same time depriving the scholarship boy himself of the resources of working class confidence that were his birthright, plunging him into a social and intellectual milieu for which nothing in his home life could have prepared him. Such an interloper would forever be haunted by feelings of shame, inferiority and a restless social anxiety, unable to settle either in the working class environs of his upbringing or in the professional or academic world into which his formal education - but, alas, only his formal education - had inducted him.

There is much that is fanciful or reactionary in Hoggart’s account, even if one allows that at the time he was writing there was indeed a “strong” working class, in some manner collectively aware of its own strength, that had yet to fall beneath the hammer-blows of Thatcherite and subsequent neo-liberal class warfare. It is, for the most part, not the organised political strength of the labour movement that Hoggart regards as the lost spiritual sustenance of the scholarship boy, but the maternal-communal warmth of the working class hearth and home, emotionally indulgent and easy-going, that must be sacrificed for the sake of academic credibility and the cultivation of an appropriately acidic conversational manner:

He cannot go back; with one part of himself he does not want to go back to a homeliness which was often narrow: with another part he longs for the membership he has lost, “he pines for some Nameless Eden where he never was”. The nostalgia is the stronger and the more ambiguous because he is really “in quest of his own absconded self yet scared to find it”. He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of ihs own and their situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother. And this is only one of his temptations to self-dramatization.

If the “father and mother” are persistently infantilized in Hoggart’s account they are also the objects of an infantile fantasy: note the grammatical ambiguity of that phrase, “the…pleasures of his father and mother”. The obvious conclusion would seem to be that it is in the mother, the alma mater, that confidence confides; and yet the passage above refers to an “ambiguous” nostalgia, a quest for an “absconded self” that is not, perhaps, to be found where it is sought. There is something else going on here, which the “temptation to self-dramatization” obscures.

As IT observes, the anxiety and insecurity that hobble her students’ efforts to persuade themselves that they understand Heidegger come into full effect at a particular moment: these students are “pwned” by insecurity at just the point where the “capacities and talents that are already there” should be brought most fully into play. As the video-game language suggests, watching this happen is not unlike watching people being picked off by an invisible sniper with a laser-guided rifle aimed at their Achilles tendons. The expression “lack of confidence” does not really capture the rapidity or severity of the malaise to which people succumb: what may formerly have been a persistent “background noise” of inferiority suddenly becomes a crashing roar, in a self-amplifying cascade of affective automatism.

This leads me to think that some additional mechanism is involved, that the moment of collapse is - again, reaching for the sniper rifle - triggered, and is caused less by the failure by schools to instill the proper level of self-belief and more by their success - or that of society at large - in installing something else. Here I must confront Daniel’s skepticism concerning the social production of affect, which he seems to regard as spontaneously and indifferently woven by the subject of fantasy out of whatever experiential material happens to come to hand. In the first instance, I wonder how it is that corporations ever get to see a return on the millions of dollars they put into advertising if it is literally absurd to suggest that the affective lives of individuals can be prompted, moulded, manipulated and operationalised by outside forces. (Clearly there is something a bit rum about fantasizing that my emotional life is constantly being manipulated by evil corporations, but that is because in the fantasy I am aware of the manipulation but can do nothing about it).

Let us consider the nature of insult. I insult you; you take offense. If I have insulted you effectively, you will take offense in spite of your determination to rise above my petty jibes: the insult is effective to the extent that it causes its target to feel offended in spite of himself. Later you will curse yourself for responding so hastily and angrily to what were, after all, only words. You will, if you are exceptionally disciplined, own that your response was unworthy, that you should not have allowed yourself to become besides yourself with fury. I will then insult you again, making artful use of the humiliation I have already inflicted, and if my aim is true you will again fly into a rage. I enjoy a power over you that you do not wish to grant me, and would withhold from me if you could.

Now, from my perspective as a skilled verbal abuser, my words do indeed appear to have a causal power: I can make you feel bad, I can provoke a reaction and deprive you of your equanimity. Of course I can only do this because I know what will make you feel bad, because I have some knowledge of your vulnerabilities, your affective triggers (yo momma!). The early stages of verbal combat often involve a search for those triggers, a series of more or less effective sallies. So this causal power does not operate on an inert object, but on a psychic system that cathects and binds stimuli precisely in order to avoid being thrown out of equilibrium. If I keep plugging away with the same old taunts, you may eventually become immune to them; but you may do this by internalising the gibe, accepting its essential verity, making it a persistent feature of your inner mapping of the world - in a word, “ontologising” it. The insult loses its immediate power to wound because it tells you nothing you don’t already “know”; but the attendant humiliation is now permanent, a part of who you “are”.

Is the abrupt psychic “takedown” of students overwhelmed by the challenges of university the reactivation of some deeply embedded conviction of inferiority? I’m not sure; my own hypothesis is that it has more to do with a fear of becoming separated from the group, marked out as different. The intense specialization and accreditation of knowledge that take place in a degree course mean that for perhaps the first time the student begins to know and be recognised for knowing something that is not common knowledge - the Big Other is well-acquainted with the contents of the National Curriculum, but knows comparatively little about Husserl. Being marked out as different in school is not a happy fate, and I suspect that the intense conformism of adolescent peer culture, combined with the homogenisation of education in the service of the mighty League Table, may have left many students with a profound anxiety about stepping out of the charmed circle of shared affect and common opinion.