Communities are not formed haphazardly, and if the development of a class culture or identity includes a degree of contingency, it is supplied with ballast by ‘objective’ socio-economic factors.
No doubt the most widespread theory of social classes at present is the constructivist one. Constructivism is a trend in contemporary social science according to which reality – social and/or material – is ‘constructed’ or ‘socially constructed’.
An imbrication of the natural and the artificial is now the rule, and their separation is an increasingly rare exception with the passage of time.
Žižek adopts the Marxist argument of ‘reification’ developed, in particular, by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923).
he argues that the form of domination which obtains in the economic sphere – exploitation – possesses primacy over other forms of oppression. Together with his desire to rehabilitate the Cartesian subject, this is a second thesis which sees the philosopher oppose the reigning doxa in ‘western academia’.
on Žižek
