The Raven – a much maligned bird

Human societies frequently make attributions to animals. Foxes are cunning, bears hug you, badgers badger you (for some reason), the eagle is noble, the sparrow is chirpy and so on. But it’s hard to think of another animal that has such a hard time as the raven.

The ravenstone is so called because ravens would sit by the execution block hoping for a bite from the executed victim. Someone who is ravenous is very, very hungry indeed.

Poe’s Raven is a bird of doom, issuing denials at the end of several stanzas, uttering the ominous “nevermore”.

“this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking 'Nevermore.' ”

As every Londoner knows, if the ravens should ever leave the Tower of London, the kingdom will fall, hence the birds with their clipped wings, the prisoners of the Tower.

 

Cassius, towards the denouement of Julius Caesar, just before the fatal battle of Philippi, sees the raven (with the crow and the kite) as a grim omen:

“This morning are they [two mighty eagles] fled away and gone;
And in their steads do ravens, crows and kites,
Fly o'er our heads and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem
A canopy most fatal, under which
Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.’

At least Thomas Middleton is relatively neutral about the raven, a night bird, sure, with a poor voice, but not otherwise nasty:

“Ravens croak on chimneys' tops;

The cricket in the chamber hops;

The nibbling mouse is not asleep,

But he goes peep, peep, peep, peep, peep”

And that’s just in English. I think we can add the Scots ballad “The twa corbies” to the list, corbie can be variously raven and crow.

“As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies makin a mane;
The tane unto the ither say,
"Whar sall we gang and dine the-day?"

"In ahint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight”

and, they go on,

So we may mak oor dinner swate."

"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike oot his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek oor nest whan it grows bare."

From the TLS we also learn:

“A raven deity figures, we are told, in the cosmologies of many cultures, sometimes as the creator of the world, the bringer of light to the world, or the bearer of civilization. In Celtic mythology there is, among other raven deities, the giant-king Bran the Blessed. (Bran means raven in Welsh, and the bird may be regarded as his emblem.)”

Then:

Ravens (and Crows) are associated with war and death in Irish mythology. In Cornish folklore crows are associated with the "otherworld" and so must be treated with respect. In Australian Aboriginal mythology, the crow is an ancestral being. In Buddhism the protector of the Dharma is represented by a crow in one of his physical/earthly forms.

The raven is revered as God by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest in North America and in northeast Asia. Several totem poles erected by native Americans in Washington, Alaska and Oregon depict ravens and the stories they feature in. In the Old Testament of the Bible there are several references to common Ravens. In the British Isles, ravens were symbolic to the Celts. In Irish mythology, the goddess Morrígan alighted on the hero Cú Chulainn's shoulder in the form of a raven after his death.

In many post-conversion Western traditions, ravens have long been considered to be birds of ill omen and death, in part because of the negative symbolism of their all-black plumage and the eating of carrion. In Sweden, ravens are known as the ghosts of murdered people, and in Germany as the souls of the damned. In Danish folklore, valravne that ate a king's heart gained human knowledge, could perform great malicious acts, could lead people astray, had superhuman powers, and were "terrible animals"

In French, not only is La Fontaine’s raven, Maître Corbeau (with cheese), vain, but also stupid, allowing himself to be flattered by the fox (cunning as ever), who says to him, sing, your voice is so beautiful:

Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le Phénix des hôtes de ces bois."

(Really, if your voice Is like your plumage, You are the phoenix of all the inhabitants of these woods.)

The raven sings and drops the cheese he is holding in his beak. The fox, not content with getting the better of the bird, adds a little lesson,

Mon bon Monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute

(Learn that every flatterer Lives at the expense of the one who listens to him.)

As if that were not enough, for the French the corbeau is the writer of poison-pen letters. Something should be done for the raven brand en France.

In German, there are Wotan’s ravens, rather more powerful than La Fontaine’s, they are his eyes that fly over the earth and report back to their master. That presumably why one of the US observation drones has been named “raven”. As Time Magazine tells us: “Already soldiers carry hand-launchable Raven surveillance drones”. I’m only surprised that there is a Wagner fan in the US Army unit responsible for naming drones, though on second thoughts why not?

Christian Morgenstern had rather poorer view of the raven, seeing it as a kind parrot:

Der Rabe Ralf

        will will hu hu
    dem niemand half
        still still du du
    half sich allein
    am Rabenstein
        will will still still
            hu hu

And in the Winterreise, the raven is evidence winter and the cold:

“Da war es kalt und finster,
Es schrien die Raben vom Dach.”

(It was cold and dark, the ravens cried from the roof.)

In Estonian, a raven-mother is the evil mother who neglects her children and, maybe, exploits them, not unlike the wicked stepmother of many a fairy tale.

The Hungarian view of the raven is rather more divided. On the negative side, there is the legend, one I was certainly brought up with, that the raven was once white, but now washes his son on Good Friday, because – so the mythic narrative – when Christ was in hiding, He was seen by the raven (cf. Wotan) and shouted “kár, kár”, (meaning “what a pity” or “shame”).

For this he was eternally punished by being turned forever black, the colour of sin, and having to eat carrion.

Ravenstone is known in Hungarian, not just in English – hollókő is the word and there is a castle of this name, but its putative origin differs considerably from the English. According to the legend, there was once a castle at Pusztavárhegy and the lord of castle, one András Kacsis kidnapped a beautiful maiden, but he evidently chose his target badly, because the young woman’s nursemaid was witch. The nursemaid then did a deal with the devil to free the maiden and that was how it came to be that many demons assumed the form of ravens and carried away the stones of Kacsis’s castle, leaving mere earthworks behind. The stones were taken  to a massive, high rock where an entirely new fortress was assembled, and this is called Hollókő.

So, it’s not enough that Hungarian ravens have to do the annual cleansing ritual on Good Friday, they are also the spawn of devil, though usefully employed in the building trade. Incidentally, the story doesn’t tell whether the kidnapped maiden lived happily ever after. Or not, as the case may be.

As against this, the raven on the coat of arms of the Hunyadi family is still celebrated. Matthias Corvinus bears his name, Arany wrote a ballad about the raven as a first rate messenger and the former Karl Marx University in Budapest is now the Corvinus University. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Sch. Gy.

Serbia and Hungary

There is an exhibition of Serbian religious art in Hungary currently at the Balassi Institute, Brussels. The opening was held on 13 February; this is an edited text of my remarks. A video version of what I said can be found here or here.

We have been together a long time, Serbs and Hungarians. I did a little research this afternoon to look into the history and there was interaction between the Serbian and Hungarian monarchies from early on, despite the adherence of the one to Byzantium and the other to Rome. As every Hungarian schoolchild knows, or did when I was young, the relief by János Hunyadi of the siege of Nándorfehérvár (Beograd to the Serbs, but it’s the same “white castle”) in 1456 was a key event that halted the northward expansion of the Ottomans for several generations.

The same fate, conquest by the Ottomans overtook us both, though we were fortunate that Hungary was just that bit further to the north and thus at the outer limit of the Ottoman empire’s military capabilities and we were freed from the Ottomans a century and a half sooner. That allowed the kings of Hungary, by then the Hapsburgs, to allow Arsenije III to bring the 37,000 Serbian families to the Vojvodina as refugees. They then became the guardians of the marches, the graničari; their descendants live in Vojvodina to this day.

Some of the Serbs settled in Szentendre, (and in some other towns on the Danube, like Ráckeve) and were active in the water-borne trade on the Danube. The wealth of some of these merchants, the export-import multinationals of the time, was to pay for the religious art that we can see here tonight.

Of course there were unhappy interactions as well, in 1848-1849, and the Second World War brought about the lowest point, with vicious massacres on both sides. The truth about these terrible events is slowly being brought to light by Serbian and Hungarian historians working together.

But the meeting point between Western and Eastern Christianity produced its own complex interactions and mutual influences, which have left their mark on both parties. In sum, Western Christianity has always accepted a multiplicity of forms and complexity as a central features of life. The doctrine of Purgatory meant the acceptance of intermediacy between good and evil, between Heaven and Hell, together with the possibility of redemption. The Reformation meant an end to Catholic Universalism and gave rise to a competitive religious environment. Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, insisted on the unity of the physical and the metaphysical, the transience of life on this earth, and the role of the collective together with the individual conscience.

The art produced by Western Christianity sought to portray beauty as the gift of God (in the south) and the fragility, emotion, and realism of religious belief (north of the Alps). Protestantism mostly abjured pictorial representation in the religious realm, although it built on the realism and was brought to its peak by Rembrandt. Orthodox art reflected something else. It emphasised the unchanging quality of the sacred, a stillness and relied on two-dimensionality to portray this.

What we can see here tonight is a subtle blend of the Orthodox style touched by elements of the Baroque, in a manner one never finds in Russia in St. Petersburg or Moscow or Pskov. The pictures in this exhibition indicate that these mostly unknown icon painters accepted three-dimensionality and a sense of colour that brings them to within hailing distance of the Western tradition of art, while remaining clearly Orthodox in inspiration. The only parallel I know in art history (and I’m no expert) is the Venetian tradition that lived on until the 17th century, the paintings representing groups of saints in the sacra conversazione depicted by Giovanni Bellini for one, but traces can be found in Titian too.

So my congratulations to the organisers, what they have put on is genuinely a product of the best of Serbian-Hungarian relations.

Sch. Gy.

Kurdish issue in Turkey

A debate was held in the European Parliament on the 6 February to discuss the Turkish-Kurdish dialogue. This is a slightly edited version of my contribution.

The Kurdish problem was built into the Turkish political system from the outset. The Kurdish population of Turkey was denied its political rights as Kurds and as the country modernised, they began to demand changes. The Turkish state, with its strongly centralising tradition, refused and the result was violence, a low-level insurgency that has claimed many lives.

What has changed in the last few years has been the slow shift in the attitude of the Turkish government that is moving, however reluctantly, towards accepting that the suppression of the Kurds doesn’t work. Equally, the emergence of a very extensive autonomy in the Kurdish region of Iraq has shown that the Kurds are perfectly capable of acting as a factor of stability and do not threaten Turkish territorial integrity.

Against this background, it is vital that the Turkish government recognise that without accepting the Kurds as equal citizens, the Turkish state will be scene of ongoing conflict, one that will gravely weaken the chances of sustaining a functioning democracy.

Let there be no illusions about this. The change we are discussing requires a redesign of the Turkish state and citizenship concept, a shift away from the mono-ethnic basis that has marked Turkey since its emergence from the Ottoman Empire. It has to become markedly more tolerant towards those of its citizens who are not ethnically Turks or Sunni Muslim.

But the Kurds too will have to accept that their future lies in Turkey and that they should not dream of restoring the state that was promised them after the First World War by the West (the Treaty of Sèvres). Territorial integrity is a neuralgic point for any state.

That is what the transformation is about and we should not pretend that it will be easy. Giving up bad habits is always hard.

Sch. Gy.

Sándor Márai and Košice

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An exhibition was opened on the 4 December in the European Parliament to honour Sándor Márai, the great Twentieth Century Hungarian writer in connection with his city of birth, Košice-Kassa-Kaschau, becoming the European City of Culture in 2013 (together with Marseille). This is a slightly edited version of my remarks.

I’m delighted to hear that Košice will be the European City of Culture next year, together with Marseille, and I’m looking forward to eating bouillabaisse in Košice and sztrapacska in Marseille.

Sándor Márai was a friend of my father’s. I never met him personally, but I was aware of his status as a major Hungarian writer from an early age. By common consent, he was an extremely proud man, even an obstinate man. Certainly, to judge from his correspondence with my father, he absolutely refused to believe that anything had changed in communist Hungary, which he left in 1948, by the 1980s.

He is best known as a novelist, though his writings, which were under complete ban in Hungary until the end of communism, include plays, poetry, essays, journalism and his diaries. One volume of his diaries, the one dealing with the last year of the war and the first few years thereafter, provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of the time, and they are available in English. And his Verse Cycle is a testament to Budapest after the siege of 1944-1945.

His novel Embers – a rather inadequate translation of the Hungarian title – turned out to be a major success. Hereby hangs a tale. Some time in the late 1990s, the Italian writer and publisher, Roberto Callasto, rediscovered “Embers” in a French translation from the early 1950s that had attracted no attention at the time, and was entranced by it. He draw the attention of the English-language publishing world to it and the editor in charge, Carole Brown (whom I know a little) read it and was also determined to bring it out. Carole looked around, but could find no translator, so decided to translate it herself from the German, using the French as a parallel text. You can judge the result for yourselves, but to my mind, while serviceable, the English is a rather anaemic and certainly fails to render the beauty of Márai’s style.

Still, it’s better than what happened to “Casanova in Bolzano” (Vendégjáték Bolzanóban), which in the English begins with the words, “In Mestre I left thought behind”. In the original, Casanova only left his gondola. George Szirtes, the leftwing poet, is responsible. Ah, the pitfalls of the Hungarian language – the distinction between gondolat and gondola clearly proved too much for this translator.

A final anecdote. Some time around 2000 or after, I was sitting in Amsterdam airport rereading Embers in Hungarian. I noticed that the woman next to me was reading the same book in Dutch. Quite a coincidence, you might say. So I decided to try and start a conversation with her and asked her as an opener, showing her the Hungarian, “Please tell me, is the Dutch version translated from the original?” She looked it up, said “Yes”, then got up, walked away and sat down somewhere else. One of the shortest conversations on record. Márai could well have written a short story or a novella about it. The woman in question indubitably behaved like one of Márai’s laconic female characters.

Sch. Gy.

“The right side of history”

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I’ve come across this phrase twice in the last few days  (here and here) and it’s a wonderful instance of a hidden normativity. First of all, it assumes that history has a purposiveness. I thought that this very Hegelian concept was dead and buried, but, no, despite the intellectual stake driven through its heart, it sneaks out of its grave yet again. Anyone using it, should be forced to read Popper’s Poverty of Historicism – repeatedly, until they get it right.

Second, it assumes that whoever voices the opinion knows (a) what history is (b) which is the right side and which the wrong side and (c) that they have the knowledge to pronounce who is on which side, to set the agenda.

Third, the phrase is very helpful in dismissing counterarguments. Who, after all, wants to be on the wrong side of history, indeed on the wrong side of anything? It is yet another instance of attributing guilt and dismissing the presumption of innocence.

Fourth, it springs from the inexhaustible well of presumption, that of the liberal consensus, that those who are insiders do not need to engage in argument with those who hold different views, because (of course) the latter are inherently wrong, or at any rate incorrigibly mistaken.

Fifth, it constitutes as fine an instance of ideological thinking as one would wish. Arendt would have seized on it with a will and trashed it as a very bad case of a muddled and dangerous argumentation.

Sixth, it is frequently applied to collective views and political programmes. So, those using the phrase, do they really believe that collectivities can be castigated by making moral attributions? Because if they do, then they are contradicting another key tenet of the liberal consensus, that of the supremacy of the individual.

Finally, what kind of democracy do those who use this phrase actually believe in? One in which one’s opponent can simply be dismissed for being “wrong”?

Alas, poor Clio.

Coda (ok, an ironic coda, lest anyone misunderstand, I repeat, it’s irony): here are some further propositions, yes, colonialism was on the right side of history or patriarchy is (still) on the right side of history or maybe that Europe is on the wrong side of history and, who knows, has always been.

Sch. Gy.

Sacred cows

Are there sacred cows in democratic politics? Ideas, institutions, procedures that may not be questioned, criticised or challenged? The answer is yes, however surprising that may be, seeing that democracy is the grandchild of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment stands for the questioning of everything. There can be no privileged knowledge, no special status, no opt-outs from ongoing enquiry. Or so goes the theory.

In reality, the reality that is constituted by the current assumptions of the EU, the US, the IMF, NATO, Council of Europe etc., the democracy agenda in other words, as well as the ideas that have grown up around it, seem to be exempting an ever wider area of power from scrutiny.

The result, of course, is that an area of democracy thereby becomes depoliticised, that in turn means that the bodies in question are not open to questioning and those disadvantaged by this exercise of power have to live with their frustration. Frustration, as we know all too well or should, breeds resentment and that gives heart to those labelled as populists, extremists and others placed in that category.

What institutions, then, fall into this category? A broad-brush list would certainly include constitutional courts, national banks, civil society and, increasingly, the international guardians of democracy, all too often the self-appointed guardians. Note that there is nothing new in certain institutions being sacralised in this way. In the 1970s, it was the state and the working class that enjoyed this status, buoyed up by the legacy of Marxist, Marxisant and sub-Marxist thinking.

As far as the international guardians are concerned, the question of reciprocity, transparency, accountability – legitimacy at the end of the day – really does not apply and does not do so in spades. Their right to tell other states how to run democracy is decidedly precarious, especially if that right is exercised in one direction only. The international treaties that are generally the reference point seldom provide a carte blanche for intervention. The right to intervene, though it may be wrapped in the sweet-paper of “advice”, is never open to the challenge on the part of the citizens of the state that is the recipient of the sweet-paper wrapping, even although the “advisers” are supposedly acting on their behalf.

Is this intervention desired? No one knows. Some lobbies may welcome it, especially if the intervention serves their interests, but the majority? Doubtful. Is the power that is exercised by “advisers” democratic? Hardly. Does the intervention strengthen resentment and increase support for non-democratic and semi-democratic forces? Certainly. Is it counter-productive? Is the Pope Catholic?

What really angers public opinion in the countries at the receiving end of “well-meant” advice about democracy and democratic behaviour is that there is no come-back. The critics may be Arcadian shepherds living in glass houses (to merge my metaphors), but no country is and should be beyond reproach. The proposition that a country pulled by the scruff of its neck by a self-appointed repository of democratic virtue can tolerate this without, at least, the capacity to respond in equal measure to its critics is simply not true. It does not and cannot happen. The outcome is a double standard and there is nothing like a double standard to erode trust, credibility and democracy itself.

As far as the sacralised domestic institutions are concerned, the problem is a little different. They acquire their political legitimacy via the elected parliament and are thus an emanation of popular sovereignty, but the parliament in question then must abandon all right to any say as to how these bodies work. The assumption, tacit for sure, is that these institutions will work with Platonic objectivity, will have no personal or institutional interests that distort this objectivity and will invariably know best. On this assumption, they quite likely have access to perfect knowledge, the philosopher’s stone and Harry Potter’s mobile phone number.

There is a counter-argument to all this, that these bodies are a necessary part of the democratic infrastructure and constitute the vital checks and balances without which democracy inevitably defaults into majoritarian tyranny. This is a genuine point and must be addressed. Without intermediate institutions a democracy is not worthy of the name and given that popular sovereignty can never be expressed as the views of the entirety of the people, minorities must enjoy protection of their rights as citizens are to be addressed and safeguarded.

The problem, however, is the growing sacralisation of these bodies, their exemption from criticism, their being under no particular obligation to exercise their functions with due attention to self-limitation and to transparency. If these trends continue, then the clash between popular sovereignty and the system of checks and balances will only intensify and democracy will be the loser.

Sch. Gy.

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