History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

6 “Tekin’ the Piss”

171 As Begoña Aretxaga observed during discussion of my paper at the SAR seminar, between the transgression and reproduction of a social system undoubtedly lies the historical space for a theorized and grounded sense of human experience. This is also to say that systems reproduce themselves not mechanically but at least in part through “self-directed” cultural forms, fulfilling themselves in a way that also ful- fills some general system needs. This view differs from an account of experience as arising from some kind of transhistorical human essence, on one side, and from arguments that see it as arising from the determinations of economy or “discourse,” on the other. Here is a historical and dialectical space in which specific kinds of agency in determinate conditions produce “creative” and challenging responses that nevertheless act finally to “re-create” aspects of what has been opposed. What “fills up” this space between transgression and reproduction, and how it does so, is truly the focus and material of “history in person.” One such “filling up” is the focus of this chapter: the “piss take”— particularly in its fool’s errand or “put-on” version—that is visited so often upon young male manual workers during their “cultural 6 “Tekin’ the Piss” Paul Willis For the first six months they took the piss out of me. For the next eleven years I took the piss out of them. —Worker in a foundry in the English industrial midlands, 1979 apprenticeship” after arriving “on the shop floor.” My ethnographic example is specific to the factory culture of the English midlands during a particular historical period, and it is drawn from a class formation that has since been “rearranged” by devastating economic change, shifting and tightening labor regimes, and different varieties of gendered , racial patterns of worker response. Nevertheless, I would argue that we are dealing here with certain “long-term” cultural categories. They contain forms of knowing and belonging that, mutatis mutandis, persist through population shifts and diasporas and through different historical conjunctions. They provide the bedrock for the continuing currency and reproduction of a whole genre of “urban myths.” These stories, myths, and practices pertain to structural aspects of capitalist formation per se, in particular to a grounds for inevitable, though variable , human response to the mental-manual division of labor, to the deepening real subsumption of labor to capital, and to claims by the managers of capital to control what we must now call “truth regimes” behind the “Entry Forbidden” signs at the point of production. The “piss take” is a widespread form, especially in exaggerated male cultures; it is notable, for instance, in bar, sport, and criminal cultures . My arguments later in this chapter about relations of the symbolic to the “real” as brokered through the exercise of power, and about the specificity of certain kinds of “knowing” related to a variable sense of the (labor) powers of the self, have pertinence to all these sites. I would argue, though, that the major and connecting site for a certain kind of “rough” male humor continues to be the shop floor. Other common informal names for the piss take include “taking the mickey,” “ribbing,” “pulling your leg,” and “taking it out of you.” It is elusive to definition and is reduced by it, but the piss take hinges most basically on a form of irony, on a “doubling” of reality, or being in two places at once. The Oxford English Dictionary classifies “to take the piss” as “coarse British slang” meaning to “mock” or “parody.” This is close but misses the element of the real or assumed incomprehension of the victim about the meaning of what is said or unfolds. If you like, the piss take is “po-faced” (solemn or humorless) mockery. It involves a double reality or definition, only one of which the target is aware of, or is deemed to be aware of. This real or assumed innocence of the victim is particularly charPAUL WILLIS 172 “TEKIN’ THE PISS” 173 acteristic of a specific form of the piss take visited upon young manual workers: the put-on, or fool’s errand. The OED classifies “put-on” as a colloquialism meaning a deception or hoax. It is an irony played out with a physical dimension involving the real disposition of bodies, as in a practical joke, resulting in somebody’s being...