Between Practice and Imaginaries: Class and Classification

Despite the revival of interest in class and class analysis, my paper suggests that this renewal has yet to fully incorporate some important developments in contemporary social theory. It will make two main suggestions concerning how the dilemmas of the relationship between class and classification can be addressed in ways that build on current theoretical initiatives. First, it will contend that class, both as a category and a ‘reality’ of lived group experience, whether defined subjectively or objectively, has been considerably shaped by the two dominant modern social and political imaginaries. These are, in Cornelius Castoraidis’ opinion, the imaginaries of the project of autonomy and the capitalist imaginary of rational domination. It is from these imaginaries that the interpretation of class as constitutive of society originated and this horizon of understanding was integral to the formation of class as a collective subjectivity in modernity. The tension between the two modern social imaginaries and their intermingling would have a range of implications, including those contributed to notions of the transcendence of class and class conflict. The exploration of these social and political imaginaries institution is salient to comprehending the variations in class formation from the perspective of global modernities. Second, it will be suggested that the broadly defined contemporary strands of the sociology of practice have illuminated significant dimensions of classification struggles and their contemporary implications for social classes. There is, nevertheless, a need to assess and systematise these insights in order to capture the dynamics of class relations and their layering, as well as the nexus between class and other dimensions of inequality and injustice.