There was an interesting thought in the TLS
17 & 24 August (“No cause for despair”, review by David Hawkes of Susan
Hegeman, The Cultural Return, [paywall]). This
is a review of culture and its development in the 20th century, and it offers
the suggestion that the radical left, drawing on Gramsci, recognised that it
was failing at the ballot box, turned to culture, to eliminate “bourgeois” high
culture and replace it with a “proletarian” one. This would be a step towards
the elimination of capitalism, by launching a “war of position”. The hegemonic
project was adopted by the post-war left and in academia cultural studies
emerged as its offspring, one that played a significant role in reproducing the
norms of the hegemony.
To this should be added the twin developments
of the radical impatience identified by George Steiner (in his In Bluebeard’s Castle); the argument
here is that the long 19th century allowed the evolution of a high bourgeois
culture that the intellectuals of the time were determined to challenge as uncreative,
banal, anti-innovative and a tiresome obstacle to art. The cultural dimension
was soon paralleled by a political one, notably the one articulated by Marx,
but also by Bakunin, Proudhon and others.
The aftermath of the First World War saw the
rise of modernism which, faced with the complexity of the world, sought to
break it down into its most basic, essential elements, so that the world could
be made intelligible again. Becket’s minimalism was an extreme case. The
destruction of the two world wars was blamed on capitalism, the bourgeoisie and
their values; the rejection of these became the mainstream for the proponents
of the hegemony. The aim of the project was “never again”.
In this context, one can happily cite
Barthes, one of the key figures in the history of deconstruction. Barthes’s
analysis aimed to decentre the petit-bourgeois culture of his time by showing
that its tacitly proclaimed universalism and naturalised propositions were no
more than a mystification. The process aimed to transform something contingent,
the cultural practices of the time, into something immanent, the normal and
natural order. Barthes’s analytical method can just as readily be applied to
the mystification practised by the left and the hegemony that the left constructed
in the 20th century. The deconstruction, once performed, shows the process to
be a similar sleight-of-hand to the one attacked by Barthes. So, beware claims
to universalism; if you see reference to “a single humanity”, be on your guard,
because (to switch registers), “it ain’t necessarily so”.
Cultural studies, the academic counterpart
of the hegemony, was and is about identifying the same processes of “bourgeois”
culture, showing them to be constructed (or “artificial” or naturalised), which
would thereby provide the possibility of deconstructing them and thereby bring
into being the basis for the longed-for radical transformation that would
produce utopia. In this they were following Marx, who proclaimed that it was
not enough to understand the world, one must work to change it. The irony is
that success in culture has not been accompanied by success in attaining
political and economic power, on the contrary.
The outcome has been a widespread acceptance
of a cultural assumption set that decries the Western canon as exploitative and
imperialist. But, nota bene, the hegemony does not examine itself, it rejects a
reflexivity that goes beyond the decried target and is, therefore, revealed as
an ideological project, neither more praiseworthy nor to be decried than any
other. In common with other cultural constructs, the life cycle of hegemony is
historically brief, contingent and eventually it erodes. While they last,
however, they do affect those socialised into the hegemony of the moment and
thereby limit their choices, function as a constraint on thought and ultimately
on freedom. So, it may be, that if one is looking for a true emancipatory
proposition, the need is for another project to train people to recognise the
hidden ideologies that lurk everywhere.
All this has present day implications for
the centre-right and its values, which understandably are down-slope from the
leftwing hegemony. Not least, cultural hegemony has to some extent found a
political home in the liberal consensus identified by Chantal Mouffe. At the
same time, the liberal consensus and the cultural hegemony, though conjoined,
are unable to attain their political objective, not least because a sizeable
section of the (voting) population is indifferent towards the culture that they
promote, even while is very much affected by the economic dimension of market
despotism espoused by the liberal consensus, must live with the resulting
insecurity, for which the left-liberal culture offers no remedy. On the other
hand, for the liberal consensus, rooted as it is in preserving the status quo,
sustaining hegemony became feasible.
My intuition that the leftwing hegemony of
the last 50 years, since 1968 certainly, is slowly coming to an end. The
internal contradictions of the project, or rather the conjoining of the two
projects – in effect, that democracy proclaims a kind of political equality,
yet manifestly treats the losers of globalisation as less worthy of support
than immigrants, with the consequence that they move towards political movements
that do embrace them, is not without effect. Crucially the absolute market
freedom embraced by the left sits uneasily with the set of cultural norms that
insist on universal principles but are applied selectively. Starting from
universalism, the idea of a liberal consensus was projected outside Europe as
well, yet the entire construction simply failed in North-Africa, creating an
interesting and evolving vacuum for the Arab Spring and its interpretation. The
outcome is not yet clear.
Two further elements are relevant. Hegemony
is seldom analysed or deconstructed, above all that left regards its cultural
hegemony, possibly domination, as the natural order of things (with just a
little nod towards Foucault), yet any hegemony whether of the left or the right
or the centre makes a dent in democracy, in that it necessarily excludes
sections of the voters and citizens and tends to see the excluded as pariahs,
if not heretics and apostates. Hence popular sovereignty, the foundation of
democracy, becomes something more to be accepted in the breach than in the
observance. Furthermore, this state of affairs tends to lead those who sustain
the hegemony – the reality defining agency – to distrust those outside the
hegemony as potentially hostile or recalcitrant is their disdain for the
“truth” (“truth-claims” is better).
Just as problematical is the tacit or at
times explicit claim that the “truths” of the hegemony are universal, something
desired by the single humanity
that the left dreams of, but in sociological reality is no more than a
construct of the same hegemony, is very much an imagined humanity in Anderson’s
terms.
As in so many other areas, the
post-communist political and cultural fields diverge from those of the West. In
sum, the legatees of the nomenklatura latched on to the liberal consensus with
both hands, not least because they were very much used to operating in a
hegemony. This left the post-communist centre and right with a severe
definitional problem – what did it mean to be conservative or Christian
Democrat in contradistinction to the post-nomenklatura left? This necessarily
made the post-communist right different from their Western counterparts, where
the political field was substantially different. The outcome was a
significantly different concept of the right than in the EU-15, crucially
because it had to begin from a rejection of the ex-communist now liberal
consensus-based hegemony. The longer term consequence is that the
post-communist right is much less open to accepting the liberal consensus that
rules in the West and diverges from it. To that extent, it also diverges from
those in the EU-15 centre-right who have accommodated themselves to the
consensus. In simple terms, the centre-right has a somewhat different concept
of democracy, which is neither superior nor inferior to that of the EU-15, but
by its very existence challenges the proposition that this consensus is the
natural order of things. This differentiation is unavoidable, given that the
ex-nomenklatura left did so much to define the political field in the first
place.
By the same token, it argues for a somewhat
different set of centre-right values, notably solidarity, social protectionism,
family values. Some limits on the freedom of the market and on the radical
individualism of the left. The ex-nomenklatura left cannot tolerate this,
because it lives it as a frontal challenge to its hegemonic aspirations, its
attempt to control all cultural norms and ultimately its very identity, hence
it denounces the centre-right as crypto-fascist, xenophobic, populist,
whatever. As might be predicted, those who live within these norms utterly
reject any thought of dialogue with the challengers, not surprisingly as any
such dialogue would be tantamount to accepting that the hegemony was not quite
as hegemonic as all that. There is a certain irony in all this, that the
ex-nomenklatura left is probably less tolerant of alternatives than the
cultural tsars of the late communist period were. This is a comparison that
they would not welcome.
All this helps to account for the problems
encountered in the integration of the former communist states into the EU’s
order. The ex-nomenklatura left basically accept what the EU-15 tells it to do,
whereas their centre-right counterparts try to find common ground with the
EU-15, but without abandoning their principles, their voters and the national
interest that they represent.
It follows from the foregoing that I have
been sketching a deep structural problem. So do not expect change at any early
date, but if one were to apply to Yuriy Lotman’s theory of cultural explosion
to the hegemony, then it is quite possible that the left’s cultural system will
collapse very rapidly once some serious flaw enters it. That, after all, is
what happened to communism.
If the left collapses, how will this affect
the centre-right? What happens then to the European centre-right, given that in
the EU-15, the centre-right is tacitly a part of the liberal consensus, the
status quo? Would a polarisation on the centre-right be a feature of this
process?
Sch. Gy.
A guest post, sent in private correspondence, posted with the author’s
permission
It seems to me
after reading the draft post, that the author of the TLS article, Hawkes, (or
maybe the author of the reviewed book) has a confused definition of
culture. For Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, etc. culture meant
everything humans do to make sense of the world and move about in it:
university programmes like Cultural Studies can be a part of it, but so are
particular ways of living, habits of work and leisure, local libraries and adult
education, folk and pop culture, etc.
People's
attitudes towards 9/11 mentioned in the article are very much part of
culture in the sense of Gramsci, Williams or Hall, so it should not be
contrasted in the manner culture/politics. It is exactly the point of Cultural
Studies that we study culture not only in the sense of music or books, but
also in the sense of e.g. the culture of political dispute. Furthermore,
contrary to what the article argues, Cultural Studies (like the Left in
general) have quite varied attitudes towards commercial popular culture (for
once, Wikipedia is not a bad source ).
Initially British Cultural Studies tend to be quite wary of it, it is
contemporary American Cultural Studies which celebrate it (more of it
later).
Left hegemony. As
I have understood it, it is true what you and the article argue that the Left
had a hegemony after WWII. Capitalism didn't collapse as Gramsci would have
wanted, but a rather changed (welfare state) version of it came into being.
However, this changed version is not only an important part of the story of the
Left, it is also an important part of the history of Christian Democracy.
However, both Christian Democracy and the Left seem to have abandoned it
in most of the places that I know.
There came next
phase in the 1980s when the Left, but also Christian Democracy, lost their hegemony, the welfare state
model considered "normal and natural". There developed Thatcherism,
neoliberalism, the Soviet Union collapsed and the former communist area adopted
neoliberalism which became the new hegemonic culture in the Gramsci’s and
Williams’s sense of the word.
The mainstream
Left moved to the right and is still there. This is the liberal consensus. I
don't think there is much of a real Left in mainstream politics because the
Left ought to be at least a little critical or capitalism or I don't know what
the word means otherwise. Also the mainstream left popular movements are
protesting against the limitation on their consumption capacities, not against
capitalism.
Furthermore, I
think the consensus is really only "liberal", not liberal: they are
liberal towards historically persecuted minorities (which is good), but
illiberal towards other totally legitimate ways of political and cultural
thinking (as you say in your piece and as Mouffe says). Also, in case of the
historical exclusions too, e.g. immigrants (who should also be often
counted among the losers of globalisation), much of liberalism seems to
consist of preaching how it ought to be, not real political debate,
decision-making and coordinated action. This is a very stagnant form of
liberalism. And I should add there is a non-mainstream contemporary Left,
exemplified by the Occupy movements, for instance.
The neoliberal
hegemony undoubtedly also manifests itself in the field of culture in the
narrow sense (music, books, formal education, etc) and in the field of Cultural
Studies. Increasingly, especially in the US, Cultural Studies have lost
their critical and political edge and have become simply an umbrella term under
which to study pop music, Hollywood, minority cultures, feminist issues, etc.
Actually, in the US it was not very active politically in the first place, when
compared to Britain.
The attitude is
liberal in the broadest sense (what a US friend of mine called "sort
of centre-progressive"), but also politically lukewarm, not left at all.
It is certainly not anti-capitalist, it celebrates commercialism and
consumerism as I see it, or at least accepts them as normal and natural. Many
people say (I among them) that it has also to a considerable extent lost its
academic edge and much of it is a rather naive positivistic
accumulation of knowledge about pop culture, an elevated form of
"fandom". Music critics tell me they regret that sophisticated ways for
in-depth discussion of contemporary pop music are very underdeveloped.
I agree with you that Cultural Studies ought to
promote analytical and critical thought about all sorts of culturally encoded
power structures ("ideologies lurking everywhere"), not necessarily
judging them as all negative. However, I think Stuart Hall's thought, for
example, fosters it very well. He makes quite clear that he has particular
political views, but also makes it clear that he has no truth monopoly: there
are no final truths and truth is not "out there". One does not
need to accept his political views to benefit from his approach.
Piret Peiker
