ON NOT ASSIMILATING:
AN INTERVIEW WITH CYNTHIA CRUZ
ON THE MELANCHOLIA OF CLASS
THIS INTERVIEW FEATURES CYNTHIA Cruz in conversation with Asphalte editors Emmalea Russo and Michael Newton about her new book, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto For The Working Class (Repeater Books, 2021). The following exchange took place in the summer of 2021. In it, Cruz discusses some of the writers and artists that travelled with her during the writing of the book, a recent trip to a working-class town in Germany where her mother grew up, the importance of coming together communally, and more.
Michael Newton: The book beautifully weaves theory, cultural criticism, and memoir to describe this idea of the melancholia of the working class, which you identify as pervasive in society and in your own life. This book was so helpful to me personally, because it allowed me to identify and name some of the feelings I’ve had about class, art-making, and looking back. Could you talk about the process of becoming aware of this melancholia of class within yourself, and specifically about how it may have changed the way you make art?
Cynthia Cruz: Before anything else I have to point out the importance of Mark Fisher’s work to my own work and thinking. Without Fisher’s work, I would not have had many of the realizations I have had and continue to have. Having said that, Fisher’s work, and especially his book Ghosts of My Life, have been paramount to my own understanding of class and my own class consciousness.
In 2016, while working on Disquieting I began to address class. During that summer I was in correspondence with a poet. We had decided to engage in a collaborative project. I can’t recall now which of us came up with the topic, but we both agreed to write something on shame. I sat down and wrote pages on what I realized then was my original shame—my social class (not that I originally had shame around my social class but how shame was interpolated onto me due to my social class). When I realized my original shame was connected to my working class origins, there was an incredible internal shift in my thinking. I could see immediately how my entire life had been and continues to be formed by my social class. So, this moment was incredibly potent for me. After that initial realization, nothing remained the same.
I wrote my friend and told her I’d written something on shame and class and I never heard back from her (she is not from a working class/poor background). I don't remember now whether I sent her my writing or merely told her what I’d decided to write about. But this event—of my realization that my original shame was related to social class and then the way that the mere utterance of the word class was so potent it could dissolve a friendship—marked the beginning of something. This something, of course, being my further exploration of class and my own class consciousness.
Sometime after this I was invited by the Poetry Foundation to write an essay for Harriet, their online platform. I decided to propose an essay on what I had just began to discern at the time, this concept of Freudian melancholia and its connection to the working class. I was stunned when they said yes, having become accustomed to encountering antagonism whenever I mentioned the topic of social class or the working class. I began researching for that essay, an essay that became the current book. The original essay explored Barbara Loden, Mark Linkous, Jason Molina and also Frank Stanford and DJ Pancake.
With regard to your question in relation to my making art—I imagine here you mean my making poetry—has not changed. Looking back over my poetry collections I have always had a strong conviction regarding not abandoning who I am and where I come from. If you read through all the books you’ll see this. Indeed, the one consistent theme throughout all my writing has been this stubborn adherence to my origins, to my social class, and my refusal to assimilate. Most often this manifests in a poetics of the now, with the inclusion of the concrete, material world and constant references to where I come from/where I am (i.e. the food and internal sphere of the quotidian lived life, references to food stamps, the television set, radios, alcohol and cigarettes, and so on). Resistance and the refusal to assimilate also runs throughout. For instance, in the poem “The Treasure” from How the End Begins:
I found myself naked,
My cupped hands asking for more.
Adoration, adulation.
They called me brilliant, Beautiful.
They said I could join them.
I was afraid to be pulled out from the circle.
Meaningless, empty:
The world and its melodious Music, in the end,
A kind of hologram.
But what of Mary and her halo of stars?
I stood before her— Broken, but still
Child-like,
In her vast cathedral Of silence,
The ghost of what I was
Flickering fast
Out of me.
*
The poem describes the experience of the working class/poor writer entering the US literary establishment, and the ways such an encounter threatens to warp and ultimately erase, which is to annihilate, us. So, to answer your question, my writing practice has not changed. Though I was not cognitive of it, I have always known that who I was was different than those I was surrounded by and that this difference had something to do with where I came from.
Emmalea Russo: I’m interested in hearing more about this “communal negation” that you write about, which allows one to both resist the aspirational narratives of recuperation and self-help so common to neoliberal ideology, and reclaim their origins without smoothing them over. It seems like there’s a key to this rehabilitation-not-recuperation in the Jean Genet quote which opens the book: “I want to rehabilitate this period by writing of it with the name of things most noble. My victory is verbal and I owe it to the richness of the terms, but may the poverty that counsels such choices be blessed.”
CC: At the end of the book I use the term “communal negation” to refer to the idea of all of us—the working class and working poor (including also the unemployed, those seeking work and unable to locate employment, and those who are unable to work)—saying no. “No” to assimilation to capitalism/the middle class world. When I say no to the multitude of ways I am forced to abandon who I am and attempt to participate in the middle class world—despite the fact that I will never be fully integrated—it is, of course, both an act of protection and of self-affirmation. At the same time, it also an act of self-annihilation (I need to assimilate in one way or another in order to earn a living, for example). And yet if we all resisted, if we all said no—in a communal act of negation—in various forms of “no,” this could very well be a first step toward something entirely new.
With regard to Genet: I have a lot to say about Genet but, for now, I will say simply that Genet’s writing, his thinking, and who he was, he protected by not assimilating into capitalist culture, by resisting, regardless of the repercussions. Genet, as he is, without compromising (by editing out parts of who he was that may be indigestible by the middle class world), is indigestible, which is to say: original and brilliant, strange. The etymology of the word strange derives from the late 13th century word “straunge,” meaning “from elsewhere, foreign, unknown, unfamiliar, not belonging to the place where found.” Strange, as in unlike others. Here, we come up against a threshold: are the working class strange, inherently, or are we strange only to the middle class?
More important to me is that we not change ourselves to fit ourselves into middle class society but rather protect who we are. Here I am reminded of Mark E. Smith’s “You don't have to be strange, to be strange,” and the idea that by merely being who we are (by refusing to conform or assimilate to middle class culture), we are already strange. We don't have to try.
After a lifetime of having my strangeness pointed out to me—explicitly and implicitly—a lifetime of shame that I then internalized, I finally realized that this “strangeness” is originality. It is who I am.
MN: You describe how working class artists are often faced with the choice of either assimilation (Cat Power's later albums) or self-destruction (Jason Molina, Amy Winehouse), and yet you describe a third option/space: 'returning home' (literally moving back home and/or making work that reckons with one’s working class origins). Can you talk about this return home and what this resistance to dominant neoliberal ideologies has been like for you? How might we go back home without exploiting or commodifying our pasts or the people in them in order to record, archive, bring up, and carry forth?
CC: In the book I suggest a few possibilities. One, of course, is to literally return to our working class origins. For some of us, myself included, this is complicated. Though my family is working class, in an attempt to assimilate, we grew up in middle class neighborhoods and attended middle class public schools. So, returning to these neighborhoods would not constitute any kind of working class home for me. Furthermore, my family no longer live in these places—the rents are too high. This past week I visited my mother’s hometown, Völkingen, Germany, a factory town. Though I had visited the city as a small child, I had, at the time, no understanding of class. So at the time, I didn't understand what it meant to grow up in a town where everyone works at the ironworks. The trip was incredibly powerful and changed the way I think about my mother, her childhood and upbringing. During my visit I stayed with my mother’s best friend, a friend she has had since childhood, and her husband. They both worked at the iron works, as had everyone in their families. Indeed, everyone they knew was in some way connected to the factory: their neighbors, friends, politicians, and so on. I have much to say about this visit—as it was incredibly powerful for me— but for now, here are some things I would like to say about it.
The sense of organic, and fully integrated, pride in being a part of the factory was palpable and was also displayed physically. For instance, in the center of my mother’s friend’s home is a large black iron work of art and what was, upon closer inspection, a large work of iron with a crest, the insignia of the ironworks, carved in it. I saw how the shame that had been interpolated into me by the middle class, shame of my being working class, is not natural, and that, in other circumstances, such as with my mother’s friend and her husband, this interpolation of shame might never even happen. Their pride of the work they had done, and the work others in their community have done and continue to do (the ironworks closed in the 1980s and were replaced by a series of factories where the workers from the ironworks are now employed), is integrated into their beings.
I saw how being surrounded by other working class families, by a larger working class community, protects one from having the poison of shame projected onto and into us. And I saw the importance of staying close to our working class origins. I saw, too, how as the direct result of capitalism, communities and families are individualized, broken down into separate, self-focused, individuals, separated from our communities, and our families. With this break we lose the possibility of having our selves accurately reflected back to us. Instead, we turn to the people we are surround by—the middle class—expecting to have our true selves reflected back when this task is impossible. To the middle class I am strange, “feral,” my work “mystical,” and “enigmatic.” In contrast, I am comprehended and known by members of the working class. After visiting my mother’s best friend, a woman I’d not seen for decades (and so encountered as a “stranger”), she told me in an email, reflecting back what she saw in me, that I was, that I am, “a smart, lovable and humble woman” and that during my stay with her, she did not feel nervous but instead felt at ease with me.
All of this is to say: by staying close to who we are—by remaining in contact with our family and friends—and surrounding ourselves with music or literature, films, or, if we are lucky, other artists and thinkers from the working class—we will feel more at home, more “at ease,” have a better chance of having our true selves reflected back to us (as opposed to having shame interpolated into us). As a result, we will feel less alienated in the world.
ER: In your insightful critique of Natalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, you speak of the ruling class’s inability to see the working class. You write: "Rather than attempting to understand Loden or Wanda through Loden's own words and film, her experience as a working-class woman, Leger looks to herself to find the key." You note a similar oversight and erasure with Clarice Lispector’s work, which appears incomprehensible to the middle class. This made me think of something Helene Cixous wrote in a passage on Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. in “The Author in Truth:” “The text teaches us that the most difficult thing to do is to arrive at the most extreme proximity while guardian against the trap of projection, of identification. The other must remain absolutely strange within the greatest possible proximity.” How to allow the other their strangeness, to de-mirror, while remaining in proximity?
CC: It’s important for me to recognize our differences, to acknowledge that I actually do not know what another person has experienced. In this way, by insisting on this gap between, I am better able to listen to another person fully— without having to constantly see how their experience relates (or does not relate) to mine. Contemporary liberal ideology with its insistence that we are all one, we are all equal and thus, we are all the same, takes for granted an “us,” which is, of course, not “us” but the middle class, relating all experiences back to the experience of the middle class. In journalism, in the art, literary and film worlds, we see this over and over—we are told to make our work “more relatable,” “more accessible,” but to who? More accessible to who? To the middle class, of course. But by insisting that, in fact, my experience is unlike anyone else’s and that this is what makes it “strange,” which is to say entirely new, work, I am able to create new, highly original work. To be able to hear another person only if we are somehow able to connect it back to our selves insures we will never learn anything about another person.
MN: In the book, you describe three kinds of capital: material, cultural, and social. You write: "Without these three forms of capital, one cannot, in fact, 'succeed' in capitalist culture." I’m thinking about how the internet and social media are integral to accruing these forms of capital in today’s world. What do you make of the fact that people use social media, a tool of private corporations, to increase social and material capital? What is your own relationship to social media and the internet, or what Mark Fisher calls “the digital ether”?
CC: I have an ambivalent relationship with social media. I am always promising myself that I will quit—buy a rotary phone and get rid of my home WiFi (I did buy a rotary phone)—but because I teach so much, having access to my work emails is a necessity. Also, because I want to reach as many people, from as many different worlds as possible, the internet—and using Instagram and Twitter—are helpful in that regard. At the same time, I am careful and I hope thoughtful about how I use social media. I rarely post about myself and my daily life, and instead prefer to feature images or texts by other artists and thinkers. Originally, my social media accounts were literally an archive where I shared whatever I was at the time researching and this tends to be true now, as well. In other words, I don't plan out what I am going to share but, instead, share what I am looking at—researching or obsessed with—that day, in the moment. So there is no theme or “brand.” I don't want to commodify myself and so, as I said, I try very hard to “not try”—by posting spontaneously, without much thought. Sharing what I discover, the things I am excited about.
ER: I often return to the essay “Melancholia and the End of the Future” from your book Disquieting, which talks about Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia, and which I view as a doorway to The Melancholia of Class. In the essay, you describe how one of the main characters in the film, Justine, is able to successfully assimilate into neoliberal capitalism. The film opens with her lavish wedding and she’s been offered a raise at her advertising job, a more prestigious position. Yet, as you point out, she keeps saying “No”, resisting, leaving the party, sabotaging her position. This dynamic foresees some passages in The Melancholia of Class where you write about how ruptures in landscapes, sounds, and routines open up possibilities for daydreaming and artmaking. In the chapter “The Gap Between Worlds”, while writing about moments of static and silence in David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, you say:
…these intervals or ruptures result in spaces where a dialectic, a form of question arises, and with it, another, entirely new, possibility. At the same time, within these hesitations or pauses a kind of death enters. A form of haunting or ghosting. These instances of dialectical thinking, or what Walter Benjamin called ‘historical awakening,” are moments when the present and the past appear as one, and access to a forgotten past becomes possible.”
Can you speak about the importance of these ruptures and where you find them in your own life?
CC: What first comes to mind is the way my life itself is fragmented —for example, this term I’ll be teaching at five institutions which will include commuting once a week by bus to Massachusetts and once a week to Westchester which will allow me three days between teaching to work on a new book, my dissertation proposal, a number of essays, all the while reading and correcting students’ work. I don’t have work lined up for a year from now so I don’t know what my life will look like then. All of this is to say the very structure of my life—the endless work alongside my precarious work position(s)—creates a series of fragments which in turn create a series of breaks or ruptures. Though I wish the structure of my life were different, I wish, for instance, I had solid chunks of time to think, research, and write and I wish I had a sabbatical, or even just one semester’s time without work, with enough funding to research and write, the way my life is structured forces me to come up with alternative ways of working while, at the same time, because my life is constructed of fragments, these gaps in my life, both literally (four hour bus rides twice a week) and figuratively (the space between my precarious, material survival, and my theoretical thinking) automatically force me to find new ways of thinking, new ways of working, and, in turn, forces me to create in entirely new ways.
Also, these gaps between—riding on the bus four hours twice a week, two hours round trip once a week, reading students’ work and preparing for classes while trying to locate down time to think, research and write— provide spaces where the quotidian lived experience of my life (precarity, monetary and health concerns, etc.) push up against the more metaphysical concerns (how does Lacan’s concept of drive, for instance, inform the lives of the working class) and through this dialectic, something entirely new is created. This is one of the reasons why it is so important for the working class and poor to have access to work that provides the concepts and language through which to articulate class and our own class position, time in order to work these things through, and publishing opportunities so that the working class and poor are able to write about our lived experiences. One of the hopes of my creating the online journal Schlag Magazine, a ‘zine-like journal I edit with my husband, the painter, Steven Page, is to create such a space. We read submissions without concern for the bios of the writers, artists, or thinkers who submit work, and are happy to have had the opportunity to publish work by writers who’ve not published elsewhere, who have not studied writing in a formal setting. We are always looking for working class/poor artists, writers, and thinkers to include in the journal.
MN: Walter Benjamin’s presence throughout the book is evocative, specifically his ideas about the Textus and “Theses on Philosophy of History.” Thinking about how Walter Benjamin described himself as melancholic or saturnine (slow, contemplative…) and also wrote extensively on objects and miniatures, how does Benjamin’s work and the temperament of melancholia inform this book?
CC: Benjamin’s work is important to me for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly for his ability to combine the metaphysical with historical materialism (what I refer to often as the combination of the mysterious and the everyday, lived experience). Too much materialism and we get empiricism, too much metaphysical and we get neutralized abstraction. I love Hegel and Marx for the same reason (among other reasons, of course). Benjamin is also important to me due to his continued insistence of chasing down the unknown and going after what I would call truth. His work in the US has been domesticated and is often read in literary circles as if his texts aren't political, as if he weren't a Marxist. Over and over in his writings he returns to the working class, to the oppression of the working class, and the importance of our working for the redemption of the forgotten oppressed working class. These elements are lost when US academics and writers fetishize his work, erasing the political aspects of his work, reading his writings as if they were enigmatic, purely mystical. So part of my continued inclusion of Benjamin in my writings is as an act of intervention—-reading his political intentions back into his work— and as a means of having him by my side, as a ghostly companion, as I enter into the unknown.
ER: Notions of waste, excess, free time, silence, crackles, and necessary extravagance resound throughout the book. For example, you describe buying a beautiful and expensive dress with your rent money at a time when you were living in poverty. Logically, it wasn't a necessity and didn’t serve an immediate purpose (you had nowhere to wear it, you needed food and shelter, etcetera) but something about its beauty was essential and enlivening to you.
I saw a connection between the feeling of that moment and the anorexia much of your work addresses. That is one of the things I most immediately recognized and related to about your poetry so long ago. When hunger strikes, cravings for calorically dense, sweet, salty, and extravagant foods ensue, even though these are not necessarily the most nutritional or sensible foods. Could you speak about hunger (all kinds) and necessary excesses that can't be delimited to utility in the melancholia of class?
CC: This desire for what is not necessary, for an excess or surplus beyond need, in my mind defines anorexic desire. As I write in the book, my needing that useless but beautiful dress when I was homeless, without money or any kind of safety net, was such a desire. I attribute this desire for this excess, as being related to Lacan’s concept of petit a or perhaps jouissance, what, in both instances, is beyond—and so in a way circumnavigates capitalism. Pushed to the extreme, you have looting—those living in poverty breaking into shops in SoHo to take shopping carts full of luxury and yet absolutely meaningless goods. Someone who can’t pay their rent, who is having difficulty locating food and clothing, let alone telephone, WiFi, risking their lives for objects that cannot help them in any true way. You see how similar this is to the anorexic who is literally starving herself to death, who, when she eats, consumes only Gummy Bears and taffy. In both cases, those involved are often accused of engaging in capitalism—the looter for taking luxury goods and the anorexic for starving herself to extreme thinness. It would be a mistake, I think, to ignore this aspect. Anorexia appeared as a pandemic alongside the appearance of neoliberalism and the anorexic’s thinness is akin to the Western ideal for thinness, but she takes it too far. Just as the looter who takes without exchanging (in capitalism we exchange money for commodities while the looter skips over this point). In other words, both the looter and the anorexic take aspects of capitalism too far, subverting it, making it into something else entirely.
MN: Class is so complicated, as you point out in the book. Even within the working class there are a number of different, sometimes contradictory definitions and stratifications (the position of a union carpenter vs. an undocumented farm laborer, for example). It seems to me that (one of the) general tragedy(s) of American history has been a splintering of the working class, causing members to turn against each other instead of focusing on common struggles. Your book is part manifesto, and ends with the sentences: “There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.” How can the working class and those who resist neoliberal ideologies come together in solidarity through resistance?
CC: To begin with, all working class and working poor, regardless of the ways we earn (or don’t earn) a living share in the fact that we are exploited by the ruling class. Furthermore, there is a very clear delineation: there is a middle class who created a world in their image, the capitalist world we find ourselves in, and then there is the working class. If the middle class is unhappy with capitalism or neoliberalism, they need to examine their own lives carefully: where does their capital come from, and at whose expense? For me, this is not about making capitalism a friendlier place but, instead, abolishing capitalism, which means, for the middle classes, being willing to lose everything that they gain in a capitalist society (all forms of capital including not just monetary/material capital but also social and cultural capital). For the working class and poor, we know there is no place in capitalist society for us, it exists because we are exploited. Furthermore, because we have nothing, we have nothing to lose. The impulse to compare everyone with ourselves—to form levels of hierarchy and see where we fit in, is the result of capitalist society where we are all meant to scramble and hustle and compete with one another. It is rooted in individuality. In contrast, when we come together communally, we let go of our ideas of being special, of being better or worse than one another, and, instead, focus on the fact that we are all exploited and that we want something else.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poems and a volume of critical essays.