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Translating Class, Altering Hospitality

A respon se by Adrian Rifkin

I,

The concept of class is something of an historical and a theoretical embarrassment of

riches, and so too is the concept of transla tion. Add to them the notion of hospita lity
and it's quite difficult to know where to start other than with the exponential
embarrassment of their potential intersections.
You will remember that at the height of those upheavals of the twentieth century once
quaintly referred to as moments of intense class strugg le, such as the long-gone
Russian revolution, people put an enormous emphasis on the concept, and indeed the
living out of the its - the concept's - final destiny, which was to have been the rule of
the working class; the only class whose interests were of a near Kantian disinterest
: 1"1 , :-- \.~'- '>1,1/..,._~~....,.r,,\.
and universality. l\~L,..
The path from E P Thompson's working class, or the eager artisans of the early
working men's institutions , to Lenin's tomb was not an easy one, that is to say, not a
pathway of ready mutual recognition's nor transla table representations, even though
the relations between the two spaces meant that, in the end, via the Daily Worker, or
local organisations, British working men probab ly got to apprec iate Russian radical
cinema before the intellectuals did, even though some of it was purveyed to them by
honourable men from Eton or Oxford . .. who had trans lated themselves into
something that was neither their origin nor their destination , but that interim, split off ..
and enlightened fragment of the ruling class, who not so much translated Marxism
into the language of the working man, but into their own , and then transported
virtuously it to the other side of the class divide.
Within this space of translation and transference is the object that we might in
psychoanalyt ic terms call transference, an interim object between classes, negotiating
their misrecognition both as a condition of their being for themselves and as an aporia
of a social transformation in which neither so much wants to become the other, as to
become themselves in a form of the other, as a poet or an artisan, inappropriately,
phan tasmatica lly, as J Ranciere has shown .
How unlike Shoreditch of our day, in the special times of Blaireite inegalitarianism;
the classless elites of the culture industries always and indeed already know
everything first; perhaps, in part, - perhaps - on account of their very specialised and
privi leged position within the signifying structures of sexual or ethnic marginalities.
But then this is still a long-term and 'natural' reaction to the dismal failure of the
revolutions to translate class into sex or otherness .
I want to set out from Paul Verlaine, in his late poems Hombres, admiring a droplet of
pre-cum on a working class dick, and try to trans late this exquisite poetic procedure
back into the politics of the Paris Commune as a means of beginning to restitute some
of the traumatic absences in this history of familiar tragedy .