The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics

Abstract

The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlocking semiotic landscapes: the Luxury Travel Fair in London, the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai and then 'elite' signage and 'luxury' labelling from around the world. Using this kind of discourse-ethnographic evidence, the point we make is a simple but, we believe, important one: the geographies of eliteness are deliberately permeable just as its rhetorics are strategically slippery. Indeed, the hegemonic power of contemporary class privilege lies precisely-albeit paradoxically-in a constantly maintained appearance of ubiquity, inclusivity and ordinariness.

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

“…Following the tomato fields, one might move onto an event ethnography (cf. Thurlow & Jaworski, ; also Comer, ) of trade fairs (Site 2), such as the vast brokerage between food suppliers and airlines which happens each year at the World Travel Catering and Onboard Services expo. (Held alongside this event is also the annual Passenger Experience Conference, which promotes itself as showcasing “the next steps in the evolution of … onboard environments and services.”) From these, and moving through typical sites of textual analysis (i.e.…”

“…All of which is, of course, ultimately enacted in the service of the materialist order, the socioeconomic hierarchy. The meal is also given particular analytic prominence partly because it arises from my wider studying‐up research on elite discourse, the aspirational logics of elitism, and the production of bourgeois desire (Thurlow, in press; Thurlow & Jaworski, ). It was my own atypical, but undeniably privileged encounter with another business‐class meal that prompted me to reflect critically on the “triple commodity fetishism” (Thurlow & Jaworski, , p. 187) underpinning this lavish food—grown and picked out of sight, washed and sliced out of sight, heated and plated out of sight.…”

“…also Shankar, ). The wider principles of articulation inherent in commodity chain analyses offer a potentially powerful perspective on, and approach to, the kind of class critique which has been making something of a comeback in language studies (again, see Block, ; Machin & Richardson, ; Rampton, ; also Thurlow & Jaworski, , for a review). With its micro‐level focus on situated, everyday talk, a discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis stands to complement Chun’s () recent analyses of the discourses of capitalism; it is certainly closely aligned with sociocultural linguists’ growing commitment to political economy (see Block, ; Del Percio, Flubacher, & Duchêne, ).…”

“…As part of a larger “studying up” project on the discursive organization and production of privilege (e.g. Thurlow, ; Thurlow & Jaworski, ), I am keen to make sense of the meal and the menu as material, multimodal, and affective practices. I also want to figure out how, as a sociolinguist or discourse analyst, I can make the most culturally and politically appropriate sense of them.…”

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

“…In a recent search conducted for a tenure-track position in applied linguistics in a mid-sized American university, results demonstrate important shifts at work specifically as they pertain to global flows in intellectual capital. Ever more interestingly, as in other hyperstratified spheres of late modernist arrangements, we encounter a globally spanning job market which is “simultaneously inviting and repelling, open and closed” (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017: 546). Most interesting in the data examined are possible explanations as to why tenure-track positions in fields such as Applied Linguistics are emerging ever more competitive.…”