One more thought for the morning. My family is all working class, but I’m middle class because of the educational aspirations instilled in my parents by their parents. When I talk about ‘the Hogwarts experience’, I know what I’m talking about: I got sent to private school.
I have a GCSE in Latin and some barely resolved dissociative trauma to show for it. When I say ‘I’m a Ravenclaw’, I mean I was literally out in one of four houses, the one whose colour was blue, whose animal was a bird (swift), and whose reputation was for being swatty.
When I talk about the ideological force exerted by Oxbridge on our national character, a sort of educational Mythos in relation to which everything else is defined, either through affinity or in opposition, ‘the Hogwarts experience’ is the easiest way to encapsulate it.
There is a direct connection between the primal desire to fit into a hidden ruling class (secret and powerful) that Rowling’s books channel and the educational compact between the liberal middle class and older monied/landed interests at the heart of the English establishment.
One of the things Mark Fisher was so good at articulating was the creeping sense that this compact reasserted itself with savage force in e age of capitalist realism, arresting then reversing the pedagogical social mobility that liberalism supposedly stood for. Fucking A levels.
The qualification system has been bent into a shape that serves almost exclusively to guarantee the passage of the children of wealth into the halls of Oxbridge. It's more than just this, but that's the priority everything else is organised around:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346550499231870977?s=20
I fled my Hogwarts experience at 16, as soon as I got the chance. I went to FE college and it so drastically improved my psychological well being it's hard to explain. Yet I couldn't escape it even there: I was encouraged, coached, and cajoled into becoming a wizard nonetheless.
I could say more about how this works from the perspective qua educator, and how I see bright working class students struggle to calibrate their expectations in ways that let them compete with mediocre upper middle class ones, but my perspective qua educated is useful here too.
The symbols that are given to us as tools to articulate our self-identity are not just our own tools, but the tools of those who would like to dictate our (class) interests. It is surprisingly easy to take cultural alienation and turn it into identification with an alien culture.
This constructive alienation can be positive and future oriented (#xenofeminism), but it's also what the ruling class use to instil those with dysphoric class consciousness with a sense of nostalgia for an older, aristocratic order (#NRx). Dreams of lords, ladies, and wizards.
These dreams can be obvious wish fulfilment fantasies (Potterverse), but they can equally be much darker fantasies, ermine cloaks hemmed with bloody medieval realism (Game of Thrones). Anyone looking for an escape from/through alienation can as easily turn to fantasy as scifi.
To be clear, I'm not saying all fantasy is nostalgic nonsense, anymore than all scifi is progressive futurism. There's plenty good and bad in either, and its important to see how fiction helps us articulate our relation to our past inheritance as much as to our future destiny.
This is what I've been trying to do recently by re-examining the art that resonates with me and the symbols that guide my personal trajectory of self-realisation. Its not just about aesthetics, but about making sure there aren't any ideological back doors left in my toolchain.
To see what this looks like in practice, try this:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1357765000367120385?s=20
There's also this thread in which I talk about TV shows and my relation to the past and future:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1348775616263442433?s=20
If you want a more theoretical reflection on the nature of this sort of soul searching and the stakes involved in it, see this thread on aesthetics, praxis, solidarity, and joy:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1356925172742303744?s=20
Finally, if you want something maximally speculative that ties this all together, check out this fragment of a thread on the divine and the beautiful:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1358902140807299073?s=20
To say something more concrete here, I want to emphasise that I'm hostile neither to the Harry Potter books nor to the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I've a lot of time for the latter precisely because @GRRMspeaking draws so much inspiration from ignored bits of British history.
They're chock full of imperfections, but they not only recapitulate the strife of the Wars of the Roses, but also the nature of the pre-Conquest kingdoms that have been so completely erased from British history education. That they do this symbolically is perfectly acceptable.
I'm particularly impressed by the attention to minor details, such as the vicissitudes of the rivalry between Newcastle and Sunderland, that are accurately reflected in the conflict between White Harbour (House Manderly of the New Castle and the Three Sisters (House Sunderland).
But it raises the question: if being a Ravenclaw is a bit too on the nose for me, what about being a Stark (or even a Greystark)? I'm a Northerner from a family of wolves after all. There's even some probably apocryphal heraldry (houseofnames.com/wolfendale-fam…).
It's a pretty cool coat of arms (three white wolves on argent with a chevron or), even if the depiction is a bit shit. Is it worth reappropriating that, as a sign of lost Anglo-Saxon nobility crushed and immiserated by Norman conquest? There are competing concerns here.
One the one hand, I'm very much in favour of symbolic opportunism. Use the semiotic resources you have to hand and see what you can make resonate in the right way. If that means astrology (Leo here), then go for it, as long as you don't lose sight of its artificiality.
On the other, my moral compass was squarely calibrated by reading Terry Pratchett as a kid, and the Guards books are my favourite. They are entirely about the symbolic traps of heritage, from Carrot, the man who would not be king, to Sam Vimes, the man who would not be Cromwell.
A major theme of Feet of Clay is the tension Vimes feels between his working class roots and his newfound nobility, encapsulated by his relation to a famous ancestor who was not only a regicide, but whose coat of arms is quite literally fascist. It's all there basically.
The lure of aristocracy is the way fascism bootstraps itself, even in opposition to the dysfunctional democracies or functional tyrannies (Lord Vetinari) within which its ontogenesis takes place. Beware basing politics on sorting hats or speculative heraldry (facebook quizzes).
Figure out what's really important and refuse to let the useful symbols you find strewn about your cultural context be used as hooks to draw you into patterns of thought and action that conflict with them. This is what's important to me. 
I spent a lot of the decade feeling like I'd not lived up to my grandparents' aspirations, that I'd not successfully assimilated into the middle class, or at least achieved the academic career such assimilation was premised upon. It was a knot of shame too hot to touch.
It took my Nana dying to pull it loose. To realise that these expectations I'd internalised weren't hers, and that she'd been nothing but curious, supportive, and proud of every opportunity I'd taken that had been denied to her. That was her parting gift, and I'm grateful for it.
More grateful than I can say, honestly. All I have is love with nowhere to go. But I'm storing it up and turning it into words when I can, when it doesn't hurt too much. Hopefully they'll eventually coalesce into something that might be worthy of her, and her infinite wisdom. 🖖
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