identification and non-identification with power

I continue to work on an article on working-class poetics that uses my great-grandfather's anti-FDR writings. Poetics value performance over persuasion; the affective goal is catharsis. To understand the rhetoric that working-class folks use to self-identify, we must contend with poetics--the performance of identity via utterances meant to provoke. Performative utterances like the chapbook of political poetry my great-grandfather published during the Depression revel in irony and contradiction. The ironies and contradictions of working-class identity.

Power lies at the heart of those contradictions. Claiming working-class identity acknowledges lack of power/cultural capital/materiality. Paradoxically, laying claim to being w/c entails touting dignity, value and power of collective identity. The contradiction of w/c identity: a simultaneous and/or alternating non-identification and identification with power.

Poetics facilitates the articulation of these contradictions in a way that a "rhetoric" cannot. Not because of some kind of heart-head binary, but because the performativity of poetics (whether sitcoms about w/c families, FDR poems my grandpa wrote, trash talking in w/c bars) allows for enactments of empowerment, disempowerment.

Here's where I'm going: the theorizing of working-class rhetorics. First step in theorizing such a rhetoric is the collapsing of a rhetoric-poetic binary, a full accounting of the poetry and performance involved with w/c identity. Defining anything called working-class "rhetorics" (in aristotelian sense) is impossible: the terms are contested and divisive to the point of chaos. However a w/c poetics offer contradictory, aesthetically rich, performative enactments of w/c identity.