There has been much discussion in the media about Duplessis Streetthe autobiographical essay by Jean-Philippe Pleau, which has enjoyed phenomenal sales success in bookstores. What has attracted most attention is the concept of class defector, considered as the sociological incarnation of the narrative proposed by the author for his essay. Referring to Annie Ernaux and Pierre Bourdieu (through the split habitus), Pleau has subscribed to a movement that has its origins in the works of Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, in France.
Things should have ended there, but with the appointment of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate in his presidential campaign, Vance’s best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegyresurfaces, but in opposition to the concept of class defector as claimed by Pleau.
To fully appreciate the media coverage of Vance’s essay, it should be noted that it was the subject of a film by Ron Howard produced by Netflix in 2020, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. Even though the film was considered a dud by critics, it did not tarnish Vance’s political career, whose current appointment has just boosted sales of his book on Amazon. While Vance’s essay generated many very positive reviews in the American press, it was also very harshly criticized by academic researchers: the narrative framework emanating from the success story of his social ascension lacked sociological and historical credibility, as regards the arguments and facts put forward to legitimize a position of class defector.
In Germany, Carlos Spoerhase published an article postulating what distinguishes right-wing populist rhetoric, which includes Vance’s “literary” essay, from the autosociobiography advocated by Didier Eribon (in Back to Reims) which, on the contrary, denounces this right-wing populism promoted by Republican conservatives in the United States. In France, the philosopher Chantal Jaquet has sparked a discussion in the academic field by proposing to use the concept of transclasse instead of class defector, thereby seeking to give a philosophical extensionality to the sociological analyses devoted to this phenomenon which, according to her, is as much about language as about politics. However, one can be perplexed as to what this distinction can tell us more about her research object, as to what it implies in terms of the impact on the essayists involved in this debate in the public space.
What characterizes the class defector is his improbable passage from a “disadvantaged” social environment to another recognized as “prestigious” in the social space. The best known (and recognized) cases relate to access to the university field, which, since Keynesianism, was part of institutionalized social mobility in Western countries after the Second World War.
But then, what distinguishes the academic analysis of the class defector from this social mobility erected as a norm attributable to democratic governments? Everything is in the refinement of the method proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in The reproduction and in The distinction, and more particularly at the end of his life in his courses at the Collège de France under the generic title Science of science and reflexivity. However, it is precisely this reflexive methodology that Chantal Jaquet contests in Transclasses or non-reproduction, published in 2014 and which has had its followers both in the academic field and in the media for around ten years, in France and Germany.
The meritocratic rise of JD Vance, a lawyer for a major Silicon Valley investment firm, is accredited according to the elitist academic codes of American society, which are very different from those established in France involving a sociologist like Didier Eribon or a writer like Édouard Louis.
As for Jean-Philippe Pleau, one should be careful in the way he considers his own social ascension and his media success as falling within the concept of class defector, rather than the more traditional one of social mobility specific to Quebec society over the last 40 years: the risk being to make Duplessis Street an autosociobiography, which would be a contradiction to the definition that Annie Ernaux used for her own literary writing or to that of self-analysis by Pierre Bourdieu applied to the sociological reflexivity of his work.