Hegemony and liberalism

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