Annotations & Reflections on A Place to Stand

Annotation:

I apologize for the quality.  I had to use a photo of my Kindle for this one.  I like the idea that class identity is formed and asserted partially through individuals' assertion of what they are not, of what they are against.  The Smokehousers who Lindquist interviews are for the most part opposed to her political beliefs and what she represents, so they position her as an antagonist and argue with her not to persuade her to adopt their beliefs, but in order to reaffirm and "test" their own beliefs against the "enemy" through the medium of an every-day bar room argument.  A lot of this is also about performing through rhetoric: the regulars perform and take the argumentative stance which the others expect them to take; they are sort of playing a role which is part of their public identity in the bar.


About Lindquist's favorite theorist... Bourdieu: 

Overall Reflection:
I was able to identify with Lindquist and her subject position in the environment of the bar, since I also work part-time at an environment (a grocery store) populated with mainly working-class people who are far from tentative about expressing their opinions.  Her ideas about rhetoric and argument in particular as part of a "performance" by the bar regulars strikes me as reflective of what I have privately observed...after reading A Place to Stand, I think that I will make my observation "site" for the class project the store where I work.

I like the idea of the Smokehouse Inn as a "womb-like" environment...very insular and a place where people have to reconcile their private and public selves and put on a kind of performance after work.  Lindquist's exploration of what the patrons of the bar appear to be (largely homogeneous in their political beliefs and experiences of life) versus what they actually profess about themselves in the private interviews with her (they all have very different experiences of and beliefs about class, education, and life) is particularly interesting.  What I really took away from the book is that the differences between public (constructed, performative through the means of verbal rhetoric) identity and private identity are vast, but must be reconciled somehow by the individual when they are trying to take on an associative identity (such as a regular at the bar or a conservative or an eloquent speaker).

Like Lindquist, I'm convinced that much of "class ideology", including working class ideology, is actually "mythology" in the sense that it is loosely constructed and far from homogeneous.  She writes that the people she works with and meets at the bar are both "mainstream" and "other", by which I think she means they are part of the communal working class group at the bar and share attributes with the other patrons, and yet they are also overwhelmingly individual and heterogeneous in their experiences and beliefs.  Her points about sociolinguistics-- the true objectives of persuasive rhetoric and joking and even small talk-- as "speech genres" are also interesting.  I sometimes had a difficult time following the conversations she transcribed, perhaps because of her determination to make them authentic.