Most narrative and film representations of organizing substantially misrepresent the labor of being an organizer. Hell, most conversations that organizers have with each other engage in the same misrepresentations. The reason for these misrepresentations is pretty simple. They only engage with a very small percentage of the work that organizers are involved in, the spectacular moments, the moments of success or defeat, the dramatic conflicts and mass actions that produce spectacle. If we were to draw from Ernest Hemingway's metaphor about story writing, these visible actions only represent the tip of the iceberg, the visible portion of the story that is translated into narrative, into spectacle. The vast majority of the process of organizing, like the iceberg, remains submerged, hidden, and is largely left out of our narratives. Those aspects of organizing remain outside of the public space of narrative, out of the public space of spectacle, except for those few moments of spectacular failure, where an organizer does something blindingly stupid to destroy a campaign or an organizing drive.
Organizing is ordinary. The vast majority of it involves small conversations, taking notes, and mapping the social relations in a workplace or a community. Just as often, it involves the tedium of trying to find where people are during the day, or going to empty houses and offices, and leaving empty handed. For those folks who do this professionally, it translates into long hours, bad food, and a strange combination of emotional obligation and loneliness. My purpose isn't to create a lament for the poor toiling organizer, but to simply note that the work of organizing is defined by the forms of repetition, drudgery, and small interactions that define the vast majority of our lives. This work produces the sorts of social bonds that allow for the kinds of spectacle that emerge into the public spheres of our lives. In many ways, those moments make the long slog we went through worth it, but we need to recognize that those moments are the superstructure to the base of the everyday communicative labor that is submerged. Activists frequently claim the need for talk, rather than action, but it's generally talk, a lot of little conversations with a lot of people that produce actions.
I often remark that organizing is fundamentally about producing social relations, but that doesn't quite capture what really goes on in organizing. What might be better said is that organizer both forms new social relations, and reshapes existing relationships to fit different purposes, generally as a form of counter-conduct to the institutional structures that first facilitated those social structures. To put it another way, organizing engages with the networks of social reproduction to begin the process of resisting the small, and at times, large forms of social domination and exploitation that exist within them. I want to make it clear that this is a long and laborious effort. Folks who are on the sidelines rarely move from inaction to dramatic action quickly. That inaction is inevitably produced through a powerful set of factors based on a complex mixture of fear and consent that regulate and preserve those institutional structures. Perhaps to put it a little more simply, your goal is to get folks who are doing nothing to do a little bit, to translate mild hostility into neutrality, to translate neutrality into mild support, etc. You're probably not going to get someone who's never been involved in politics to lock themselves to an office door, but you might get them to sign or even pass out a petition, or even come to a meeting.
It's hard to avoid the comparisons to the conventional expectations put upon women in the conventional structures of heteronormativity if one has spent any time engaging with feminist politics. Indeed when we look at the history of the new left, we see a history of a wide array of organizations that were held together by the unvalorized labor of women, who brought coffee, took notes, and all too often soothed the fragile egos and social relations of the men who took credit for the organizations that were held together by women. Activists often make this argument by contrasting the figures of Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., the behind the scenes organizer contrasted with the public face of the movement. But even this is inadequate. After all, people know who Ella Baker is, at least within activist circles, while the vast majority of the figures who built these networks are unnamed in any books, are probably unnameable for future histories except for a few notable exceptions. Radical feminism is ultimately an intervention into this situation, a situation in which the ostensibly counter-systemic formations were replicating the gendered forms of social reproduction that drove the dominant structures that they were ostensibly opposing.
I don't want to pretend that the profound sexism that produced radical feminism doesn't exist. I can see the same implicit expectations that women take the notes, do undervalorized forms of labor that allow for radical organizations to survive, and provide forms of emotional support that men are not expected to support. In effect, radical feminism marked a set of concerns that need to be dealt with, but it did not resolve them. But, I also want to bring up something that doesn't get explicitly get dealt with within that framework, we need to not just distribute these tasks, but radically reevaluate how we value that work. We need to have moments that the people who spend day in and day out doing the tedious work of talking to people, taking the notes, and making things happen move from the sidelines of our narratives to the center of our narrative. I say that not only out of concern for the psyches of the folks who do this work, but as a way of getting us to put more effort into this work, work that allows for everything else to happen. All too often, I've been a part of groups that have neglected that work, leading to failed campaigns, poorly attended events, and unfulfilled potentials. We need to both return to an understanding of the ordinariness of organizing, and to create ways of making that work valued and meaningful to those who participate in it. At its heart, we find ourselves at a place where we need to learn how to narrate ourselves and our labor in profoundly different ways.
(Brecht's theoretical work may point a way forwards.)
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
an initial and short posting on Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed
I'm going to let myself have a little time before I return to the conversation around the Khatru debates, but I certainly will be returning to those conversations. However, I want to put down some of my initial thoughts in regards to Ursula Le Guin's novel, The Dispossessed. I've been rereading the novel to prepare for my final chapter of my dissertation, which is going to deal with that novel, along with Samuel Delany's novel, Trouble on Triton, as responses to the radical feminist provocations produced by critic and theorist Joanna Russ through her essays of the time, and her novel, The Female Man. Both writers had read early drafts of that novel, and the influence of the novel on both later texts is fairly clear. Additionally, Delany acknowledges the influence that reading Le Guin's manuscript had on his novel, an influence that can be seen in his extensive critical engagement with the novel, contained at the end of his first book of science fiction criticism, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, initially released in 1977. The influence is understandable, given the incredibly richness and complexity of the novel, which is still one of the greatest formal achievements within the subgenre of science fiction.
I want to take a little time to put down some of my initial thoughts on the novels take on the topics of social reproduction, and the forms of domesticity represented in the novel. A number of feminist critics have taken Le Guin to task for a lack of engagement with these questions in the novel. At an initial glance these claims are extremely problematic. The novel through its observation of Shevak's childhood and education on his own planet, Arras, on one hand, and his observations of the alien world of Urras, on the other hand, produce a deep engagement with the institutions of the home, of the radically different educational approaches of the two societies, and the informal forms of common sense found within each society. Le Guin uses the radically egalitarian structures of the moon society to question and estrange us from a long series of common sense assumptions about the sex/gender system found on the analog to our society, the wealthy and authoritarian Urras. (Le Guin's critique of the university is particularly relevant, and is something I probably will return to.) But when we turn to the particular ways that Le Guin conceives of sexuality, we find something a bit more troubling, and aspect of Le Guin's work that reveals that the feminist critics that I previously mentioned are perhaps more perceptive than is revealed in a cursory glance at the novel.
I'm inclined to direct folks to Delany's lengthy review of the novel in dealing with it's representation of homosexuality in the figure of Bedap. Instead, I want to turn to the novel's representation of the relationship between Shevak and Takher, and how the particular mixture of romantic convention and mysticism allows for a reinscription of the heterosexual couple as the central institution of the society, undoing, in many ways, the forms of collective living found in the rest of the novel. We can see this in operation through an early description of their romance, which occurs early in their relationship, and is linked with Shevak's involvement with a small group of dissidents within the anarchist society of Arras.
"They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons. after dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Desar and others from the Institute, Taker's colleagues and friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents--the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters' Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba sea. They gave the present to Takher, saying "Here, Shev might like this for a paperweight," or to Shevek, saying, "Here, Tak might like this color." In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takher shared, and to celebrate and to praise." (Le Guin 152-153
If the text attempts to reimagine forms of childcare, of education, and of the family structure, it remains deeply committed to the centrality of heteronormative romance. Breaking away from the concepts of mutual aid that ostensibly define the society of Arras, the text informs us that the love of Takher and Shevak "was enough, and they could not hide the fact." The social structures of the society become 'peripheral' to the story, and the political questions that drive the various small dissident groups take the same position. Indeed those social formations begin to draw sustenance from that bond, rather than the reverse, treating the relationship as a combination of a religious shrine and a perpetual wedding, continuingly granted the couple gifts, and attempting to strengthen the relationship through a peculiar reversal of the description of the exchange of women that Levi-Strauss posits as the central tenet of human civilization. Rather than reading this as an aberrant moment in Le Guin's text, I want to argue that it directly connects to the Jungian theory of anima and animus that she acknowledges as a central influence on her work at the time. The relationship of Shevak and Takher takes this position because it reveals the secret essence of the potential of the society as a whole, a kind of social symbiosis that is produced through this heteronormative bond. Additionally, this notion is reinforced through the repetitive insistence on the notion of sexual privacy contained in the text, a notion that allows for a reinscription of the public and the private, a conservation of the space of the personal without politics, while ostensibly challenging these structures.
The question is how to resolve this dimension of the text with extraordinary exploration of the explosive political antagonisms that also define the text. In a certain sense, we see a tension that might be at the heart of the 'ambiguous' utopia, between the forms of antagonism and multiplicity that form the collective formations of the proletariat and the attempts at recuperation appropriation that define the engines of the changing formations of capitalist appropriation.
I want to take a little time to put down some of my initial thoughts on the novels take on the topics of social reproduction, and the forms of domesticity represented in the novel. A number of feminist critics have taken Le Guin to task for a lack of engagement with these questions in the novel. At an initial glance these claims are extremely problematic. The novel through its observation of Shevak's childhood and education on his own planet, Arras, on one hand, and his observations of the alien world of Urras, on the other hand, produce a deep engagement with the institutions of the home, of the radically different educational approaches of the two societies, and the informal forms of common sense found within each society. Le Guin uses the radically egalitarian structures of the moon society to question and estrange us from a long series of common sense assumptions about the sex/gender system found on the analog to our society, the wealthy and authoritarian Urras. (Le Guin's critique of the university is particularly relevant, and is something I probably will return to.) But when we turn to the particular ways that Le Guin conceives of sexuality, we find something a bit more troubling, and aspect of Le Guin's work that reveals that the feminist critics that I previously mentioned are perhaps more perceptive than is revealed in a cursory glance at the novel.
I'm inclined to direct folks to Delany's lengthy review of the novel in dealing with it's representation of homosexuality in the figure of Bedap. Instead, I want to turn to the novel's representation of the relationship between Shevak and Takher, and how the particular mixture of romantic convention and mysticism allows for a reinscription of the heterosexual couple as the central institution of the society, undoing, in many ways, the forms of collective living found in the rest of the novel. We can see this in operation through an early description of their romance, which occurs early in their relationship, and is linked with Shevak's involvement with a small group of dissidents within the anarchist society of Arras.
"They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons. after dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Desar and others from the Institute, Taker's colleagues and friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents--the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters' Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba sea. They gave the present to Takher, saying "Here, Shev might like this for a paperweight," or to Shevek, saying, "Here, Tak might like this color." In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takher shared, and to celebrate and to praise." (Le Guin 152-153
If the text attempts to reimagine forms of childcare, of education, and of the family structure, it remains deeply committed to the centrality of heteronormative romance. Breaking away from the concepts of mutual aid that ostensibly define the society of Arras, the text informs us that the love of Takher and Shevak "was enough, and they could not hide the fact." The social structures of the society become 'peripheral' to the story, and the political questions that drive the various small dissident groups take the same position. Indeed those social formations begin to draw sustenance from that bond, rather than the reverse, treating the relationship as a combination of a religious shrine and a perpetual wedding, continuingly granted the couple gifts, and attempting to strengthen the relationship through a peculiar reversal of the description of the exchange of women that Levi-Strauss posits as the central tenet of human civilization. Rather than reading this as an aberrant moment in Le Guin's text, I want to argue that it directly connects to the Jungian theory of anima and animus that she acknowledges as a central influence on her work at the time. The relationship of Shevak and Takher takes this position because it reveals the secret essence of the potential of the society as a whole, a kind of social symbiosis that is produced through this heteronormative bond. Additionally, this notion is reinforced through the repetitive insistence on the notion of sexual privacy contained in the text, a notion that allows for a reinscription of the public and the private, a conservation of the space of the personal without politics, while ostensibly challenging these structures.
The question is how to resolve this dimension of the text with extraordinary exploration of the explosive political antagonisms that also define the text. In a certain sense, we see a tension that might be at the heart of the 'ambiguous' utopia, between the forms of antagonism and multiplicity that form the collective formations of the proletariat and the attempts at recuperation appropriation that define the engines of the changing formations of capitalist appropriation.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
scattered thoughts
Since I am between large formal writing projects, I thought I should make a greater effort to write for the blog. I'm currently taking a few days to access the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which resides in the special collections of the University of California-Riverside library, in order to read through the lengthy debates between Samuel Delany, Ursula Leguin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. and others that occurred in the third and fourth issues of the Khatru fanzine. I've only just started this process today, and have only read a later issue that catalogs a series of fan responses to the debate, responses that have ranged from the thoughtful to the esoteric. It's a nice reminder that one can find genuinely interesting intellectual debate outside the academy, in a language that a lot of the inhabitants of that institution would probably not deal with very well. Don't worry, I'll put up some of my initial thoughts as I start to read the actual conversations between the authors, which sound like they're fairly contentious, if the rather large secondary literature on the debates is true.
Asides from that, I'm trying to use my week of spring break to get myself prepared for the rather large amount of work that I am going to have to take on for the spring quarter. I have to finally complete my chapter on the implicit debate between Ursula Leguin and Samuel Delany that can be found in their respective novels, The Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton. Additionally, I need to edit my chapter on Judith Merril, along with my chapters on Joanna Russ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that those earlier chapters are not in as bad shape as the initial draft of the Gilman chapter that I took care of this quarter. Finally, I need to put together a definitive prospectus/introduction to the project, based of the many earlier versions of that conversation. I feel that I'm in a much better position to do this sort of writing, but I've never been good at that kind of abstract summary. I suppose I need to figure out how to do this, if I want to apply for any jobs, or apply for grants of any sort. Not my favorite activity in the world, but as Bertolt Brecht notes, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."
In addition to that, we are going to have a lot of work ahead of us, politically, because of the contract negotiations that will be beginning in the summer, at latest. I feel that we actually have a lot of positives on our side, from the passage of Prop. 30 to the long history of protests that have created a deep crisis amongst the upper administration of the UC system, but it's going to take a lot of work to move away from the older forms of bargaining that have defined the last couple contract negotiations. We have introduced a series of demands that I feel are quite strong, but without concerted action on the part of the rank and file, it's going to be an uphill battle, at best. Within this context, I think our reform slate has done a very good job of creating democratic structures amongst the representatives and has gotten rank and file activists deeply involved in the process of organizing, but we haven't as of yet created the democratic representative structures that we need to bring 12,000 members into the conversation, rather than a small portion of that. In many ways, the folks at Berkeley seem to be about as close to that ideal as anyone, with their Contract Action Team structure, but we need to come up with a structure that makes sense to activists and members on the Irvine campus, a campus that sees a substantial amount of police repression, even of simple actions such as canvassing and handing out fliers. One thing I am hoping we will do is create a lot more media about what we do, another thing we can learn from other activist groups around the state.
In any case, I might find myself continuing the low output on the blog that you have seen over the past couple months, but just be assured that this doesn't indicate a lack of commitment to the blog, or my implicit plans to close it down. It just indicates that I have a lot of work to do. Incidentally, I will be giving a paper at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this year on The Stepford Wives. More details on that in the very near future.
Asides from that, I'm trying to use my week of spring break to get myself prepared for the rather large amount of work that I am going to have to take on for the spring quarter. I have to finally complete my chapter on the implicit debate between Ursula Leguin and Samuel Delany that can be found in their respective novels, The Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton. Additionally, I need to edit my chapter on Judith Merril, along with my chapters on Joanna Russ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that those earlier chapters are not in as bad shape as the initial draft of the Gilman chapter that I took care of this quarter. Finally, I need to put together a definitive prospectus/introduction to the project, based of the many earlier versions of that conversation. I feel that I'm in a much better position to do this sort of writing, but I've never been good at that kind of abstract summary. I suppose I need to figure out how to do this, if I want to apply for any jobs, or apply for grants of any sort. Not my favorite activity in the world, but as Bertolt Brecht notes, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."
In addition to that, we are going to have a lot of work ahead of us, politically, because of the contract negotiations that will be beginning in the summer, at latest. I feel that we actually have a lot of positives on our side, from the passage of Prop. 30 to the long history of protests that have created a deep crisis amongst the upper administration of the UC system, but it's going to take a lot of work to move away from the older forms of bargaining that have defined the last couple contract negotiations. We have introduced a series of demands that I feel are quite strong, but without concerted action on the part of the rank and file, it's going to be an uphill battle, at best. Within this context, I think our reform slate has done a very good job of creating democratic structures amongst the representatives and has gotten rank and file activists deeply involved in the process of organizing, but we haven't as of yet created the democratic representative structures that we need to bring 12,000 members into the conversation, rather than a small portion of that. In many ways, the folks at Berkeley seem to be about as close to that ideal as anyone, with their Contract Action Team structure, but we need to come up with a structure that makes sense to activists and members on the Irvine campus, a campus that sees a substantial amount of police repression, even of simple actions such as canvassing and handing out fliers. One thing I am hoping we will do is create a lot more media about what we do, another thing we can learn from other activist groups around the state.
In any case, I might find myself continuing the low output on the blog that you have seen over the past couple months, but just be assured that this doesn't indicate a lack of commitment to the blog, or my implicit plans to close it down. It just indicates that I have a lot of work to do. Incidentally, I will be giving a paper at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this year on The Stepford Wives. More details on that in the very near future.
Thoughts in regards to the Popular Front, its destruction, and the relationship of that destruction to the rise of '2nd Wave' Feminism
It's been a while since I have put up anything on the blog. I've been trying to get finished with my dissertation, and put together two substantially revised chapters over the past quarter, the last two weeks focused on the revisions of my very unorganized Gilman chapter. Within that context, some folks have been wondering about my argument in that case. I thought I would put up this discussion here, which supplies the context of my argument.
Merril’s work needs to be placed within the context of the destruction of the Popular Front of the 1930’s and 1940’s with the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism. The destruction of that social formation ended an array of political and aesthetic possibilities that existed within that historical bloc. Those radicals that survived the purges and the deportations of the period had to create a new style and form to be heard. The artists involved in that project were left without a cultural milieu to work within, or any substantial institutional support. Ideological purges were a defining aspect of the era, occurring in locations as disparate as the university and the steel foundry. Chandler Davis noted that between the years of 1947-1950, “most institutions, from the government through the unions and universities to the American Civil Liberties Union… declared Communists unwelcome,” setting a precedent for the years to follow. (Davis 272) He also notes that the loyalty oaths utilized by those institutions not only restricted the involvement of members in the Communist Party, but also organizations with associations with the Communist Party. Radical artists had to navigate this minefield in order to find legitimate spaces to offer critiques of the society and avoid censure. Failure to negotiate these dangers could lead to the blacklists, that is, the inability to publish or work in the industries of popular media. In a few cases, it led to criminal charges or expulsion from the country.
In order to understand the full implications of this destruction, it’s necessary to briefly sketch out the impact of the Popular Front on U.S. culture and politics. Until recently, the dominant critical interpretation of that formation reflected the narrative produced by the forces that supported its destruction, putting an emphasis on Moscow, the naiveté of artists, etc. However there have been a number alternative interpretations of the period, most notably the argument presented in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front. Denning makes the argument that the Popular Front was a part of a larger cultural formation, one that he calls the Cultural Front. “The cultural front was… the result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatus of mass entertainment and education.” (Denning xvii-xviii) The formation of the cultural front consisted of a mass movement, a tentative formation of organic intellectuals, and institutional structures, ranging from magazine publishers to trade unions. For Denning, this formation cannot be simply reduced to the influence of the Communist Party and “Moscow gold.” Instead, it constituted a counter-hegemonic force within the society, a force crucial to the New Deal alliance, and yet, “making a culture that was neither a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture.”[1](Denning 5) For Denning the culture of the Popular Front constitutes radical social democratic social formation in which the Communist Party played a significant role, although not a central role. At the same time, the cultural front was inextricably linked to the rising mediated spectacle of mass culture.
As Stuart Ewen notes through his analysis of advertising, that system, the system of mass culture and the structure of the advertising that supports it, is intimately linked with the system of mass industrial production.[2] These institutions not only represented industrial capitalism, but were enmeshed in its interests, material processes, and social networks. They operated simultaneously as a system of legitimization for industrial capitalism, and contributed to the process of incorporating workers into that system as consumers, rather than as simple cogs. Mass production simultaneously demanded an increased mass consumption base to thrive. As Stuart Ewen notes, a group of intellectuals began to develop a sort of social democracy of consumption, responding to Henry Ford’s experiments in social control in his factories.[3] Ewen notes, “The image, the commercial, reaches out to sell more than a service or a product; it sells a way of understanding the world. The basic premise is that in a corporate, industrial world, it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanisms of social order.”[4] The apparatuses of the social democracy of consumption are implemented to simultaneously respond to and shape popular desires, while maintaining the basic structures of capitalist accumulation. Rather than limiting themselves to the limited, crudely instrumental forms of control used by Ford, the intellectuals developing these structures began to draw on the recent development of psychoanalysis, linking structures of consumption with formations of desire. Ewen’s work links the shift in mass production with the rise of an image based advertising structure, tying into unconscious libidinal structures of the society. The cultural front can only be understood as a network of individuals and institutions the simultaneously immanent to that nascent system, yet exogenous to its logic.
Denning argues that the cultural front constituted a powerful counter-hegemonic force within the period of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, as well as containing a powerful legacy for the rest of the century through its intellectual, literary, and musical contributions. Denning notes, the most literal measure of that power can be seen in a 1942 Fortune poll in which, “25 percent of Americans favored socialism and another 35% percent had an open mind about it.” (Denning 4) However, the depth of that success went considerably beyond those numbers. The Popular Front was linked to innumerable campaigns from union organizing, fights against racial discrimination, to direct action efforts to keep families in their houses and apartments. Denning notes that these modes of politics drew on the tradition of the “voluntary reform association”, large popular organizations focused on single issues, from the League of Women Shoppers to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. (Denning 63) These public sphere activities merged with the massive labor unrest and strike activity in cities ranging from San Francisco, Minneapolis, Harlan, and Detroit to form a network of organizations and activists throughout the country. Those structures posed an alternative vision of inclusion, one that was based on a participatory social democracy, rather than a vision of inclusion based on the social democracy of consumption being developed by the intellectuals linked to Fordist forms of production.
However, this formation, what Denning, working in the vocabulary of Antonio Gramsci, refers to as a historical bloc, was quickly destroyed in the post war years. The alliances of the Popular Front had already been put under strain because of the acceptance of the no strike clauses insisted on by the Roosevelt administration during the war, as well as the acceptance of the Japanese internment camps by most of the Popular Front. These actions simultaneously delinked the cultural formation of the Popular Front from worker militancy and led the institutions of the Popular Front into a more uncritical alliance with the Roosevelt administration. However, this alliance began to quickly unravel with the end of the war. There was an immediate upsurge in labor militancy with the end of the war, represented by a wave of strikes throughout the country. The reaction to this upsurge in labor militancy was the Taft-Hartley act, which both limited the abilities of labor to strike and disallowed unions with membership involved in the Communist Party to benefit from the National Labor Relations Act. Despite initial opposition by the CIO leadership to this act, the conservative elements of the federation took advantage of the law to expel Communists and Communist affiliated unions from the CIO, effectively removing the influence of the radical left from the union movement.
The shift in the trade union movement had an immediate effect on the cultural front of the movement. The trade unions were a major funding source for publications such as the Federated Press, as well as a whole set of union publications. (Horowitz 102-152) Denning notes that half of all Popular Front publications were funded by the union movement, and this funding evaporated as those unions either became more conservative to respond to Taft-Hartley, or became smaller, more embattled units outside the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (Footnote) In addition, subscription funded publications such as PM closed due to cheaper, advertising funded publications. At the same time, the independent studios involved in the production of socially conscious films closed due to the post war economic crisis in the film industry as well as the effects of the red scare. (Footnote) The destruction of these institutions also contributed to the destruction of the cultural front. With a few notable exceptions such as the independently financed Salt of the Earth, spaces for explicit radical critiques in popular publications evaporated, and the attempts to express radical ideas could only occur in veiled terms.
Furthermore there had been a radical transformation of the social structures and the class structure of the nation. Many of the political goals of the Popular Front were accomplished by the liberal New Deal State. It’s already been noted that the middle class had double from 30% in pre-depression times to 60% after the war.[5] The United States government worked to create the conditions for economic security internally. In addition to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, the intervention in education was probably the most obvious of the interventions, taking the form of the G.I. Bill for education. Although it also included the National Defense Education Act, which both subsidized industries and the education of individual scientists. These policies were also linked to a shift in the loan structure of housing, which allowed for families to purchase a house with only a very small deposit. However, these benefits structurally excluded African Americans. These transformations, as David Roediger notes in his recent work, Working Towards Whiteness, occurred within the white supremacist context of the New Deal. The shifts in the access to housing, education, and other benefits was segregated at best, structurally reinforcing the practices of redlining and restrictive covenants, and at worst, were completely inaccessible to African-Americans. The programs and institutions constituted what historian Ira Katznelson called affirmative action programs for whites.
The post-New Deal political consensus can be read as a combination of fulfilling the incorporation of the white working classes and former new immigrants as consumers, rather than simply as cogs, and the systemic destruction of the radical elements of the Popular Front who wanted a more radical destruction of the society. The need to incorporate working classes into the society as something beyond simple cogs of the machine had been seen as early as the turn of the century, by a number of intellectuals responding to the phenomenon of mass production introduced by Ford. These individuals “Built on the expanded production and the economic potential of consumer markets, advertising created the imagery, the aesthetic, of a social-democratic capitalism, one that understood and would claim to solve the most basic contradictions of modern life.”[6] These theories had been developed around the turn of the century, but the working classes remained too impoverished to be fully incorporated in a consumer society. As we had seen previously in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, project of incorporation depended on a combination of modes of expertise and through that, a re-imagination of the reproductive labor of the household, although the modes of redistribution to create that vision were left unimagined. The radical activism of the Popular Front through its demands for redistributive programs and contributions to industrial unionism ironically created the conditions to fulfill the promises made by Fordist democratic capitalism.
The new regime of consumption was to be anchored in the new suburban household. This household was meant to fulfill a multiplicity of purposes, social, cultural, and psychic. Elaine Tyler May notes that the new household was widely seen as an analogous form of containment, a domestic equivalent to the Cold War foreign policy of the U.S. government of the late 1940’s through the 1950’s as a way of neutralizing the class struggle through the containment of the home. Uncannily replicating the logic implicit in Gilman’s Herland, the household was supposed to act as the supplement to the alienated and regimented nature of the workplace, providing a space of leisure, and the creation of social meaning. That supplement was dependent on the labor of women who were expected to carry the weight of this process. To accomplish that, the household had to take on a radically different function within the society. As Stephanie Coontz notes, the post-war period was defined by a cultural shift in the family structure as well as the economic shift discussed earlier. As I noted in the earlier chapter, the vast majority of new housing was constructed in the suburbs, and the new families distanced themselves from their parents, moving out of their parents’ house earlier, and moving farther away from them. The new nuclear family additionally was designed to fulfill the social psychic and emotional needs of its members in an unprecedented manner, marking former homo-social gathering places such as the bar as pathological. The new household was both the sign and seal of the guaranteed social wage, and the compensation for the lost possibility of social democracy.
Within this context, Betty Friedan offers a useful narrative of the shift from the formation of the Popular Front to the rise of a feminist politic in the wake of the ruins of that earlier formation. Daniel Horowitz maps out this transformation in his biography, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. Horowitz places Friedan’s intellectual development at the center of the culture of the Popular Front, from her role as the editor of her university paper, SCAN (Smith College Associated News), to her involvement with the Popular Front news service, and for the new service of the radical trade union, the UE. Friedan was intensely involved in what Michael Denning called the ‘laboring of American culture,’ the creation of genuinely participatory social democracy within the structures of mass culture, both within the workplace, and through modes of consumption. At the same time, her involvement gestured towards the nascent forms of feminism contained in the Popular Front, both through the participation of women in the movement, but more notably, through later efforts of the movement to distinguish itself from the explicitly patriarchal politics of fascism, leading to connections on the part of the movement with the initially suspicious institutions of the official women’s movement. However, she also mapped the disintegration of that alliance. She was pushed out of the first job because of a combination of political conflicts, and the news service’s desire to return jobs to veterans through firing women to open spaces. The UE position collapsed due to the attacks on the union because of their refusal to recognize the stipulations of the Taft-Hartley Act. For Friedan, the loss of these jobs constituted a fundamental betrayal of the Popular Front, gesturing to its limitations and defeat.
The 1950’s were a period of reevaluation for Friedan, as she married and moved to the suburbs. She worked as a freelance writer for a variety of women’s magazines and was involved in neighborhood politics. Horowitz notes that Friedan’s shift in concerns, from the urban to the suburban; from the problems with poverty to the problems with prosperity were a common theme within the work of social criticism of the time. This collective effort can be seen as an attempt to produce a new political aesthetic that could be heard through the atmosphere of red baiting and the cold war, and produced a new critical framework to understand the new prosperity. However, Friedan’s work was markedly different than other leftist intervention through her emphasis on the suburban household, and expectations put upon women within that household. She focused on its many functions in the maintenance of the new dominant structures of the society, mapping out the construction and legitimization of the new role of women through the expertise of home economists and psychologists in the pages of women’s magazines. She argued that women’s restriction to the household effectively legitimated and expanded levels of consumption needed for the Fordist state, and created a way of mediating and creating an escape valve for the pressures created by the new society. Friedan states this quite polemically,
“The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home…. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous of the purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur or dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures.” (Friedan 297)
The figure of the housewife then becomes the lynchpin for the entire social system of the post war era. She simultaneously acted as a force of legitimating remaining in the system for men, and at the same time, became an escape valve for the anger and aggression produced within such a system. Friedan implicates the entire superstructure of expertise, from psychologists to home economists in this process. The professionalization of child raising demanded by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, rather than facilitating new forms of collectivity in the household, was used to further isolate housewives, legitimating the new system of consumptive social democracy. The patriarchal control of the household became the social contract between men, legitimizing the often meaningless and repetitive labor of the Fordist factory or the assembly line logic of the business office. Drawing from the work of Sylvia Federici, the ‘mystique’ of domestic femininity created an implicit cross-class alliance between primarily white men, not only dependent on the social wage, but also on the access to women as a commons for men. It expanded the sexual contract to the white working class as well as the middle classes. The contract offered both material as well as psychic benefits to those who accepted its strictures.
The power of Friedan’s text largely arises through her rhetorical identification with the feminine mystique. That is to say, the power of her narrative is derived through her claim to be a housewife negotiating her way through this new form of domesticity. However, it is precisely this rhetorical claim to the conventional role of the housewife that causes a set of limitations to the text. To begin, Friedan’s censorship of her radical past leads to an erasure of the history of working class. Unlike many later radical feminists, Friedan’s claims about the mystique are limited to the post-war period, but her history of women’s activism is limited to the activities of the middle classes. Women’s union and radical activism is placed under erasure, which limits the forms of activism analyzed in the text.[7] Additionally, Friedan’s critique is dependent on her engagement with the psychological conventions of her time. That engagement is often quite critical of the discipline’s complicity with the feminine mystique, but it also embraces the hetero-normative impulse of psychology, arguing that homosexuality is a possible pathological response to the mystique.[8] If Friedan strategically engages with these conventions to be heard, these conventions profoundly shape and limit the epistemological possibilities of the text.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
A long selection on cultural studies
In order to deal with this set of questions, it’s necessary to look at the formation of cultural studies historically, or to put it in other words, why does a formation called ‘cultural studies’ come into existence at the time it does? To begin, it’s worth delimiting this field; we are primarily discussing the center of the capitalist world system, primarily Europe and the United States, although the effects of decolonization cannot be ignored on these locations. This means sketching out some of the challenges that the transformations of the capitalist world system pose for radical social movements after the second war. It then means looking at the critical engagement that is posed by the group of thinkers that are organized under the category of ‘cultural studies’, and the set of tools that they develop in order to understand the new forms of social institutions and relations that exist under Fordist and Post-Fordist modes of production, relations that are not easily reduced to the economic, but rather permeate all aspects of daily life. At that point, it’s possible to engage with the question of the questions posed by the prompt, although not necessarily within the same terms posed by them.
The end of
World War II was marked by several shifts in the capitalist world system. Perhaps the most obvious of these
transformations is the shift from a world system that was dominated by the
British Empire to one that was dominated by the United States. This shift also marks a distinctly different
relationship between the center and the periphery, from a relationship of
direct colonialism to a more diffuse set of indirect and diffuse relations of
domination defined by the developmental state and later, neo-liberalism. At the same time, the process of
decolonization is also defined by resistances to these new forms of domination.[1]
Shifting to
the social structures of the core countries, there is a shift in the economic
conditions of the working classes, as well as its political position in these countries. This shift is defined by the consolidation of
the Keynesian economics in the post war society, integrating the working
classes through increased wages, a social safety net, and union representation,
at the cost of some of the more radical aspects of the political movements of
the time. This economic model was
reproduced throughout Europe through the economic aid given in the Marshall
Plan. This shift simultaneously brought
a left a level of comfort to workers that was never previously available, but
simultaneously compromised the formerly autonomous structures produced by the
worker’s movement, producing a serious crisis in both Marxist political
practice and theory.[2]
Simultaneously, this project, most
frequently identified with Fordism, also produced a remarkable transformation
in working class households, although unevenly, and in a manner that reproduced
the structural racism of the period.
This transformation was marked by a shift of working class families from
the city to the suburbs, and into single family dwellings. Those families were placed in a position to
live comfortably for the most part on one salary, and the living conditions of
unionized workers and their middle-class managers were at times,
indistinguishable. This also created a
large body of working class women who stayed at home to raise children and
focus on the responsibilities of reproductive labor, although in isolation.[3]
The
construction of this household could be the most important technology to bring
the working class family into a regime of sexuality. According to Foucault, this regime initially
starts with the self conceptualization of the bourgeoisie as a class, and, “by
and for the privileged classes, spread through the entire social body.”[4]
The urban proletariat enters into this regime at a very particular moment,
first with them implementation of set of census practices of the 18th
and 19th centuries, and then at a more intensive level, with the
beginning of “the epoch of Spatkapitalismus in which the exploitation does not
demand the same violent and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century,
and where the politics of the body does not require the elision of sex….”[5]
Although,
Foucault never makes the connection himself, there is a distinct connection between
the construction of a gendered division of reproductive labor in the household
and the intensification of a regime of sexuality of the working classes. It would be too complex to deal with
adequately, this construction of the household comes at a moment where the
construction of this social class becomes an additional wage to the working
classes, a wage that takes the form of the use of women’s labor as a social
commons for the benefit of men across class lines, a social contract that is
noted in the work of Gayle Rubin amongst others, although theorized in a
trans-historical manner.[6] The
collective labor then became marked as the grounds that would guarantee the
reproduction of the society, a class configuration radically naturalized and
depoliticized.[7]
With this
in mind, one can understand the activities of a number of small, radical
political groups, such as the Forrest-Johnson tendency[8] in
the United States, the Socialism or Barbarism group[9] in
France, and the Potere Operia group[10]
in Italy, which can be defined by the attempt to understand the recomposition
of the working classes in response to the immense social transformation of the
capitalist world system after the war.
Each of these group’s investigations were both extremely provincial, in
the sense that they put a great deal of emphasis on linking Marxism with a
strong, concrete sociological interest in investigating the lived experiences
of contemporary factory workers, at the same time these groups saw their
projects take a global dimension in their emphasis on the linkages the groups
made with each other, along with their exchanges of ideas. These projects, along with a number of
feminist projects, become the first steps on the long march to a new
revolutionary project, one that draws from them but takes form in a way that
they could not predict.
To turn to
the more formally academic sphere, this radical shift in the social relations
of the system are most immediately taken up by three thinkers, within different
social context and with different critical tools, Richard Hoggart borrowing
from and transforming a literary and cultural analysis borrowed from F.R.
Leavis within an English context, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s
engagement with a German critical tradition from the perspective of exile, and
Henri Lefebvre’s attempt to construct a Marxist sociology in France in the
immediate aftermath of the liberation of that country. Despite their considerable differences, all
are beginning to try to use the resources they have available to them to start
to produce conceptual tools to produce a critique of dominant social relations,
emphasizing its forms of alienation and exploitation. None paint a particularly positive portrait
of their present days, although Lefebvre’s analysis is less phobic then the
ones offered by Hoggart and Horkheimer and Adorno.
The
earliest of the engagements is by Adorno and Horkheimer through their
engagement with the concept of enlightenment in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly through their engagement
with the culture industry. This industry
is seen to replace older forms of the myth of the society, one that introduces
a new and more pernicious form of deception.
As the two note, “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of
the culture industry.”[11] The role of this industry as a social
mediator operates a sort of analogy to exchange value in the everyday life
relations. Just as the structure of
exchange value allowed for the masking of the domination that occurred at the
workplace, creating an abstract machine of equivalence that could create
surplus value, the cultural industry as a whole has molded men as a type
unfailingly reproduced in every product.
All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs,
take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced
or extended in any way.”[12] The culture industry then becomes the face of
nature of social domination and alienation that marks the entire history of the
Enlightenment, through its engagement with instrumental reason. It marks the intensification of this social
domination along with its impoverishment.
At the same time, this system is also marked by the inability to imagine
a positive alternative to it, leaving the negativity of the dialectic as the
only way to engage with the system.
Lefebvre’s
engagement is the second one to occur historically, the first of the texts
being produced just after the liberation of France in 1947. His text poses the need for a new approach to
the critique of everyday life that he sees previously fulfilled by a French
literary avant-garde, moving from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to the
Surrealists. He argues that this
critique operated from the outside of everyday life, and was limited by its
refusal to engage in an immanent critique of the phenomenon. Instead, Lefebvre proposed a new sociological
approach to the question, which would offer an immanent approach to the
problems of everyday life, an approach that would focus on the concept of
alienation, and the ways that alienation both had to take on its own terms as a
form of reality, and at the same time, had to recognized for its modes of
deception.
Similar to
the approach offered by Horkheimer and Adorno, Lefebvre argued that this was
only possible through an engagement with the dialectic, although in a far more
conventional manner. For Lefebvre, this
meant producing an engagement with the concept aufgehoben, which he notes is
not easily translated into French. The
critique of everyday life needs to be able to both ‘abolish something (as it
was) and to raise it to a higher level.[13] This double movement, which contains an
element of conservation through its fulfillment of the alienate possibilities
of the earlier social formation, while abolishing it for a new social
formation, presumably defined by less social alienation. This is tied to a process of trying to find
the ‘total man’, the unalienated man.
It’s not sure whether this could actually come into existence within
Lefebvre’s analysis, but it is a necessary concept to allow for the critique of
everyday life to be linked to radical political project.
Hoggart’s
analysis is the last of the three initial engagements with the questions of
culture and the everyday, and, in many ways, is the strangest of the grouping. Written in 1957, it draws from a traditional
approach to literary criticism, however it also includes elements of
ethnography and autobiography in its analysis.
This strange and eclectic mixture of genres and disciplines tries to map
a shift in the culture of working class England by first establishing an
earlier formation of this culture, and then map out the shifts that are
currently occurring in that culture. He
does this by defining the social milieu of everyday life, the household, the
neighborhood, religion and popular texts.
Within that, he shifts between an analysis of culture as a lived
experience, and culture as a system of signs.
His analysis is not an optimistic one as can be seen early in the text.
This
cultural pessimism links up Hoggart’s analysis to a conservative
anti-capitalist tradition[14]
that runs from the 18th century to the middle part of the 20th
century, although in a slightly more cautious form then found in those
writers. Hoggart refuses the concept of
the golden age that defines that tradition, [15]however
he still emphasizes the loss that occurs from the shift to the city from the
countryside. This new development only
completes the process that had already started some time ago. For Hoggart, the most valuable resources of
working class culture are those which are preserved from the agrarian
traditions that were brought into the city. The earlier formation of the
working class can engage with the novelties of capitalism in a manner that is
selective. It could take in those
innovations that were useful to it; however these innovations are now deluging
this culture and can no longer be engaged with in the same manner.
“My argument is not that there was, in
England one generation ago, an urban culture still very much ‘of the people’
and that now there is only a mass urban culture. It is rather that the appeals made by the
mass publicists are for a great number of reasons made more insistently,
effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralized form today than they
were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that
the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture ‘of the people’ are
being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less
healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing.”[16]
The effect
of this deluge is marked by a profound loss.
Although the old forms of society are not defined by the authenticity
that so many generations of conservatives found in their childhood, they are
still marked by a health that is missing from the new order that is coming in
to being. The cheap flood of commodities
that dominate this new set of social relations have some immediate benefits, as
that they are cheap, readily available and often durable. But beyond this shallow benefit, it produced
a coarsening of the social relations, as well as the destruction of a long
lasting social symbolic. Within this
analysis, he focuses on many of the aspects of youth culture that would later
be taken up in later formations of cultural studies, although the reading those
formations is marked by conservative pessimism that do not mark later cultural
studies engagements.
Before we
move on to the shift in the critical approach in methodology that occurs as
cultural studies occurs as a practice, we should take some time to note some
important dimensions that will mark most of the texts discussed under the
rubric of cultural studies. First, all
of the texts were produced in response to a perceived crisis on the part of the
authors. These crises were not crises of
the social order, but rather of the ability to understand and represent the experiences
of the current form of capitalism. Second, in order to deal with that change in
social relations, the authors take what might be called a multi-disciplinary
approach. The epistemological crisis
puts the writer in a position where his or her original discipline is no longer
sufficient to produce concepts or methods to deal with the new formation of the
society that they are dealing with. Within
this crisis, the writers much seek out a new method, new concepts in order to
deal with the transformation of social relations.
In
addition, all accounts link the transformation of capitalism is marked by the
intensification of the role of the commodity in mediating all social
relations. The readings of this
intensification differ between the
authors. For Horkheimer, Adorno, and
Hoggart this intensification is read phobically, linking to the loss of the
ability to create authentic social relations.
This loss is far more radical within the work of Adorno, who unlike
Hoggart, even rejects the possibility of the nostalgia that can be found
throughout The Uses of Literacy. This
places contemporary late capitalism within what Adorno calls ‘damaged life.’ Whereas, the engagement of this question by
Lefebvre, still claims the ability to distinguish between “everyday life as it
is—as it has been made by the bourgeoisie—and the life which a human being
actually demands, begs for….”[17]
Marking the ability to map out what might be called an authentic life, a life
outside of the logic of capital, or at least not dominated by its structures.
We can also
see an attempt on the part of some of these thinkers to critically reread the
tradition of historical materialism, particularly though their critical
engagement with the Marxist concept of base and superstructure. As we have already noted, this engagement
already marks the work of Lefebvre and Adorno, through their separate
engagement with a particular European theoretical tradition, as well as a set
of critical approaches to Marxism. For
Adorno, this draws from the recognition that the commodity form’s ability to
reshape all forms of social life, and for Lefebvre, it comes through the
reading of Capital as a critical form of sociology, as well as an analysis of
economics. This critical engagement with these questions become a focus for
Raymond Williams, someone who provides an interesting transition from the
conservative approach of Richard Hoggart to the engagement made by the
Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies.
Williams
returns to the question of the base and superstructure throughout his career,
first appearing in his 1958 book Culture
and Society: 1780-1950 and then returning in Marxism and Literature, along with several other separate
essays. This analysis emphasizes a
number of important elements. The first
analysis in Culture and Society begins by noting that Marx’s analysis of
culture takes an incomplete form. He
notes that Marx’s occasional comments on literature, while thoughtful, don’t
necessarily link up to any particular literary theory.[18] His
analysis of further efforts on the part of Marxists to produce a complete
theory of culture from a Marxist perspective sees these efforts primarily as failures. He links this up with the continual linkage
of culture to the superstructure. This
limits the analysis of culture to something primarily acts as an effect or acts
as a mode of representation of other structures. It doesn’t allow for a theory of culture that
fully maps out a theory of culture. This
will only be found later on in his career with his reading of Gramsci, and the
development of his concept of a structure of feeling in relationship to
Gramsci’s concept of culture.[19]
This
engagement brings us away from Williams himself, and to a collective project
that Williams is indirectly, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. The Birmingham School then becomes a place in
which a group of critical approaches and methods are congealed into a practice
called cultural studies. It is a shift
that begins with Stuart Hall’s replacement of Richard Hoggart as the head of
the school, along with the rise of the politics of the new left. This shift moves from the study of the
experience of everyday life to the sign systems that construct its ideological
framework. It also a shift from the
pessimism and cultural conservativism that often marked the earlier models,
looking instead for the possibilities for radical change that could be found in
these various formations of everyday life and popular cultural formations,
keeping the same emphasis on a multi-disciplinary approach to its object. This engagement is marked by a search for
critical tools and approaches to reading the ideological formations of everyday
life, drawing from the interwar concepts developed by Voloshinov, Bakhtin, and
Gramsci. It also drew from contemporary
French theorists Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault. When one looks at the collected papers of the
school, they are marked by this exploration of method, often acting primarily
as explanations of various methods, and as translations of those methods into
the set of questions that the school was posing, turning into the school papers
into a method of reading.[20]
The most
significant of those engagements was the engagement with Antonio Gramsci’s
work, which had only become available in the 1960’s through the compilation of
his prison notebooks, which were translated in 1971. The most important concept that is drawn from
his work is the concept of hegemony.
This concept, which was already circulating within the discourse of the
Third Communist International[21],
became a central concept and concern for Gramsci in trying to understand the
rise of fascism in his country. The
concept of hegemony emphasizes that a ruling class must depend on the consent
of the governed as well as the use of force.
This consent must be created by this class through its presentation of
its concerns as universal concerns, that is to say by articulating a particular
social formation. This emphasis on
articulation emphasizes both the possible fragility of the ruling coalition as
well as the means to create another social order, the coagulation of the
subaltern classes into a new hegemony, a new state.
At the same
time, the modern, hegemonic state ends the possibility of conceiving of the
subaltern classes as existing outside the relations of consent, as unaffected
by the legitimating intellectual discourses of the state. Their modes of antagonisms are incorporated
into the state, through a variety of social organizations. As Gramsci notes, “The modern state abolishes
many autonomies of the subaltern classes—it abolishes the state as a federation
of classes—but certain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are
reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associations.”[22]
Within the modern liberal state, these organizations allow for the continuation
of a subaltern class life can occur through their rebirth as these social
organizations. This rebirth then links
up to a different mode of class struggle, a struggle defined by the war of
position, rather than the war of maneuver.
While
conceptualizing the possibilities of this new war of position, Gramsci spends a
considerable amount of time analyzing how the capitalist system produces
consent through what would later be called para-literature, that is, through
pamphlets, magazines, missionary stories, etc.
He focuses on this material, in part, because it is the only material
that is available in the prison library, but Gramsci also argues that this
material, material that is consumed, rather than critically engaged with, can
be particularly influential. Engaging
with it can allow for an exploration of the ideological structures that
legitimate the social order of his time.
He examines how this literature through cliché, through the pleasure of
the narrative, through constructing and meeting social expectations, that is to
say, how it produces structures of consent through forms of common sense, that
is, “a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external
environment.”[23]
For the
conversations at Birmingham, this approach became a more fluid and dynamic
conceptualization of ideological formations, responding to the limitations that
they saw in the analysis of ideology provided by Louis Althusser. On one hand, Althusser allows for a
conceptualization of totality that recognizes the complex structure of
totality, identified by Althusser as overdetermined, rather than expressive. It recognizes the need for an analysis of
society as a complex set of articulations, rather than as reducible to any form
of economic determinism. However, Hall
finds limitations in Althusser’s emphasis on the concept of structural determination
in his work in Reading Capital.[24] By emphasizing the totality of the social
formation, this concept loses the ability to deal with the always incomplete
nature of a social formation, a reality that is more fully recognized by
Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony.
This
concept of hegemony was supplemented by the concept of language provided by the
Bakhtin circle, notably in Voloshinov’s Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language. The
work can be seen as a double critique, both of the structuralist model that
finds its initial formation in the lectures of Saussure, and at the same time,
a critique of a reductionist Marxist model that would dismiss language as a
mere form of reflection and representation.
This second dimension links its project up with the critiques of the
base and superstructure model that Gramsci engages in. This critique is accomplished by emphasizing
language and sign production as another form of material practice, one that is
central to the social structures of a society.
The sign becomes the space for social contestation, and relations of
power. As Voloshinov notes,
“Existence
reflected in sign is not merely reflected, but refracted. How is this refraction of existence in the
ideological sign determined? By an
intersecting of differently oriented social interests within one and the same
sign community, i.e., by the class
struggle.
Class
does not coincide with the sign community, i.e., with the community which is
the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological
communication. Thus various different
classes will use one and the same language.
As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological
sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class
struggle.”[25]
The sign
then becomes the critical terrain of the class struggle. Its engagement in that struggle is defined by
the contestation of meaning that occurs through its various refractions. This emphasis on refraction points to the
creative dimension of language, its ability to not only reflect social reality,
but also to engage in that reality and pose alternative forms of sociality,
alternative futures. The possibilities
contained in this concept then link up with the possibilities contained in the
incomplete and contestatory nature of hegemony.
The possibility of social transformation occurs within the system of
language, within a set of social structures, and not outside of it. One is both a part of a sign community and
involved in struggle at the same time.
This
interest in the sign in forms of social struggle has obvious linkages with the
modes of semiotic engagement that can be found at the time, particularly the
work of Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel School of analysis. For the practice of cultural studies, the
earlier work of Barthes, particularly around Mythologies became the most important work, primarily because of
its focus on the banal discourses of everyday life, particular those around magazines,
advertisements and popular kitsch. The
arguments point to the utopian qualities of these texts, while at the same
time, marking the ways that this utopian possibility is caught up in a
structure of myth, a deformed structure of signification, which places its own
history and contingency under erasure.
It links their construction to the continued production of a naturalized
and timeless capitalism, and at the same time, pointing to a libidinal economy
that operates within that sign system.
This set of
engagements became a way of the Birmingham school to critically engage in the
changing practices of the working classes of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. They could begin to produce a critical
analysis of how youth practices indicated a shift in the class composition of
the English working class after the Second World War, arguing against a
conventional Marxist narrative that insisted on a static image of the working
class and at the same time, against a popular notion that youth culture
provided a transcendence from the old class divisions that defined the society
before the war. Instead, the negotiation
of class began to take shape within the increased consumption that increased
wages had provided the working classes, and through a set of relations produced
within the logic of the commodity and the pleasure of consumption and style.[26]
Within that
context, Gramsci’s concept of the war of position allows for an analysis of how
working class resistance occurs within the hegemonic structures of the welfare
state, focusing on tactical engagements, social formations that are not
necessarily immediately political, etc.
It marks a shift in the engagement of a whole series of social forms
that formerly acted as dominant forms of counter-systemic politics, such as
trade unions and communist and social democratic political parties.[27]
It tries to map the politics that are increased marked by a disengagement with
those traditional forms of politics, a moment that would eventually shift into
a time and place where, “one is a socialist because one used to be one, no
longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings”, etc.[28] We can find a radical political formation,
pluralist and contradictory, resisting the forms of social reproduction and
sketching out possible alternatives between that moment of depoliticization and
the quiet of the immediate post war.
Cultural
Studies offered a set of critical tools that allowed for an examination of the
transformations of the class struggle, marking out the terrain of the system,
its continuation and intensification of forms of exploitation, alienation, and
domination. It also marked the forms of
collectivity and resistance that could be found within that system. As those forms developed, it tried to
contribute to their growth. In short, it
becomes a project very similar to the radical and feminist groups discussed
earlier in the essay, and similar to them, the project became one that offered
those tools in service of those movements, although never fully as either a
vanguard or as a set of organic intellectual.
One could say that the engagement of these scholars is as much of a
social experiment in reimagining the relationship between intellectuals and
social movements, as the movements were experiments in creating alternative
modes of social reproduction.
Now that we
recognize the role a critical set of tools put under the rubric of theory, we
can now return to some of the questions posed by the prompt. First, theory can never be understood as a
method of ‘liberating’ everyday life.
Instead, theory offers a set of critical analytical tools that allow for
an analysis of everyday life, allowing for critical engagement with both the
social structures of a particular moment in the development of capitalism,
along with the forms of resistance immanent to it. The construction of new forms of life that
would ‘daily life’ must be produced by sustained forms of collective action that
may be informed by theory, but cannot be supplanted by theory. To enter into what the new forms of those
actions might be put us outside the framework of this essay, and to be frank, I
am not sure what those forms might possibly be.
Within this
context, the limitations of the American approach the genre can be linked to a
pair of problems, which while related, are distinct as well. The first problem is that the U.S. engagement
with cultural studies (at least the dominant moment) occurred precisely at the
moment that the critical practices of the new left were either being destroyed
or neutralized by being reincorporated in the service of capital. This fact does not immediately negate the
value of investigating these cultural formations, but the methods of inquiry
did not recognize the ‘re-colonization’ of those formerly ambivalently
liberated practices and institutions. To put it in Deleuzian terms, it posed an
endless series of lines of flight, precisely at the moment when those lines of
flight were being captured.
The second
problem could be lined to the concept of agency, a concept that is only
prominent within the U.S. context. It can be found in the structure of part of
the question itself, when it poses the question, “Does Consumer Culture, for example, necessarily preclude agency?” The most immediate answer to that question if
we take the engagement of the work of most of the authors seriously would be
no. But the notion of agency retains a
linkage with a liberal humanist project, doesn’t fully engage with the forms of
collectivity that define the attempt to resignify a series of commodities,
whether through formations of subculture, race, class or gender. These can only be understood through an set
of concepts that explore structures of inter-subjectivity, rather than looking
for an agent, whether individual or collective.
However,
these two problems don’t inherently explain the difficulties of theorizing
daily life, although they point to some inherent difficulties, viz. the
continual transformation capitalism through the incorporation of its own crises
and contradictions. This practice of
incorporation refuses the ability to find any form of stable resistance, given
the ability for those modes of resistance to be incorporated. Althusser offers a critical approach to
thinking through this process with his distinction between science and
ideology. Ideologies are marked by their
critical engagement with particular, and historic forms of capitalism, with its
structures of domination, and its forms of resistance. Science on the other hand is the attempt to
produce a method of critically engaging with the new structures of power,
resistance, etc. as they make the old ideological structure obsolete. This engagement, as we have seen, is neither
a simple or easy process.
[1] For more
on this please look at Aime Cesaire, Discourse
on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 2001)
[2] On this topic, see Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985),
amongst others
[3] See
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The
Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Wall
Press, 1975)
[4] Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 122.
[5] Ibid.,
114.
[6] Gayle
Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy” of Sex” in Women,
Class, and the Feminist Imagination, Ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
Also look at the readings by Jacques Lacan on the concept as well as the
various feminist takes on his work.
[7] It goes
without saying that this project never becomes fully successful, although it’s
worth noting that the erasure of the contingency of this project was more
successful.
[8] C L R James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Paul Buhle, State Capitalism and World Revolution
(New York: Charles H. Kerr, 1986) is probably the most definitive statement of
the group, although there are a lot of essays by James floating around that
also cover the topic.
[9] The best
examples of the intellectual engagement of the group can be found in Cornelius
Castriadis’ Political and Social Writings, which cover the period from 1956
through the 1960’s
[10]Steven
Wright, Storming Heaven (London:
Pluto Press, 2002) Although minimizing
some of the debates around feminism, Wright offers a good history of the
activist and intellectual practices that lead up to the formation of the
various Autonomy groups, moving from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.
[11] Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1999)
[12] Ibid.,
126.
[13] Henri
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol.
1 (London: Verso, 2008), 177.
[14] For
more on this, please look at Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983)
[15] Raymond
Williams, The City and the Country (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1973)
[16] Richard
Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
(London: Transaction Publishers), 9-10.
[17] Henri
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol.
1, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 140.
[18] Raymond
Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 265.
[19] Raymond
Williams, Marxism and Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
[20] Culture, Media, Language, Ed. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinton
University Library, 1987)
[21] See
Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” and Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (London: Verso, 1985) for this history. Also, Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s relevance for
the study of race and ethnicity”
[22] Antonio
Gramsci, Gramsci, Antonio and Joseph Buttigieg. Prison
Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 61.
[23] Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffery Nowell Smith (New York:
International Publishers, 1971), 323.
[24] Stuart
Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematic and problems” in
Culture, Media, Language, Ed. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson
University Library. 1987)
[25] V.N.
Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge,
Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), 23.
[26] Resistance through Rituals, Ed. Stuart
Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1993) and Dick Hedige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979)
[27] Read
Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World System: Theses and Queries” Wallerstein argues that the revolt of 1968
was both against U.S. hegemony, as well as against a set of older
counter-systemic movements that succeeded in taking state power, without
producing the transformation in social relations that were promised by these movements.
[28] Michel
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), 177.
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