After the Future

April 22, 2013

Cultural Hegemony

There was a time way back when–in the seventies–when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't…

There was a time way back when–in the seventies–when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort to hack through it. During that time I must have come across Antonio Gramsci, but I don't remember anything about him. My recent reading of David Harvey has piqued my interest. I will get around to reading Gramsci at some point, but meanwhile, here's what the Wikipedia article says about his idea of "cultural hegemony":

Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the 'common sense' values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests. Neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.

Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He was also impressed by the influence Roman Catholicism had and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism and the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience.

For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a "consented" coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.

Gramsci and I probably differ regarding what this alternative culture ought to look like, but maybe not. We would probably both agree that the social movements associated with Liberation Theology in Latin America in the seventies and eighties were an attempt to create precisely this alternative worker culture that met both the spiritual and social/economic needs of the immiserated. People like Joseph Ratzinger, who did everything he could to quash it, feared that the movement was driven by cynical communist agitators rather than by the Holy Spirit. Nothing is pure; I'm sure there were some who used Liberation Theology as a demagogic tool for their own political ends, but there were also plenty of people who didn't. It's too bad Ratzinger felt himself incapable of trusting that perhaps the latter was really in control and would win out in the end.

I'm spending so much time recently on trying to understand what Neoliberalism is because it's the best name we can give to the ideology of our current cultural hegemons. It's important to understand it and how it works. But it's one thing to have a critique; it's one thing to know that almost everything you hear in the media is b.s. because it is subordinated to self-justifying Neoliberal narrative. It's another to provide a robust alternative that works because it's saturated with truth–in the satyagraha sense. Such a social-cultural movement would be irresistible if it came into being, and I believe sooner or later it will. Nothing short of it will work. Nothing short of that will have the unifying cultural legtimacy to provide the countervailing force that can take on the reigning cultural hegemenony that is saturated with bullshit and the soul-crushing alienation that comes with it.

P.S. I've been watching House of Cards over the last week, and it's great study in legitmation and delegitimation within the very narrow limits of the cultural hegemony that dominates within the Beltway. Ideology is a means to an end, the end being power acquisition. There are sincere ideologues, in the sense that they believe their own b.s., but in that world sincerity is a weakness that makes them useful fools, putty in the hands of the people who understand how power works and could care less about anything else.

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3 responses

Jonathan

April 22, 2013

I think I’m beginning to understand what you’re calling Neoliberalism, Jack. It might not be the term I would use (I’m not sure what term I would use, although sometimes Anti-Christ comes to mind — I’m only half kidding). I actually don’t think what you’re calling Neoliberalism is a cultural hegemon. This is because I don’t think Neoliberalism is cultural at all. It has no cultural origins, it has only intellectual origins. As you point out, it uses culture as a weapon, it mobilizes it in the form of pared down idiotic ideologies. But there is nothing cultural about Neoliberalism itself. It has no folklore (Gramsci’s distrust of folklore makes me distrust him, although I understand why, in his time and place, it seemed potentially diabolical), no aesthetic, no spirit. It is the nullification of these things. Neoliberalism is not the same thing as the bourgeois Capitalist culture that Gramsci and the other Continental thinkers tried to unravel. I think it’s a mistake to assume a continuity between the Marxian discourse, which evolved in the 19th century and early 20th century, and the socio-political situation of the present. When I had to read all that stuff in grad school, it struck me as almost sad how ill adapted it is to the very post-cultural moment its critique of power structures has helped create. . . more on that in a second. The old bourgeoisie is dead. Something far more sinister has taken its place, in comparison with which the lapsed bourgeoisie seems beautiful, charitable, almost pristine. Proust was a bourgeois aesthete. Show me a Neoliberal aesthete. You can’t, because it’s a contradiction in terms.
Don’t you think there’s something anarchic at the heart of all that Continental thought in the 20th century? Europe was ripped to shreds by one form or another of totalizing ideology that fructified in autocratic regimes: nationalism, state communism, fascism, colonial imperialism. So what do all those thinkers, in the Frankfurt School or elsewhere, do? They come up with analyses of social power structures. They want to kill those structures, they want to expose and thereby delegitimate power of any kind.
They all have a point to a certain extent. Anyway, it was a level of self-awareness we were bound to reach sooner or later. But what kind of world does it leave you with? The fantastical answer is something like William Morris’ News From Nowhere. And the thing about Nowhere, of course, is that it is nowhere, it is as utopian as its original namesake, even though Moore’s Utopia looks in every way like Morris’ utopia’s opposite. When I first read News From Nowhere I thought it was a heavenly vision. Now, I’m not so sure. Or rather, I’m sure that’s exactly what it was, which is precisely the problem with it. Culture, or at least civilization, implies some kind of hierarchy and the aesthetically and spiritually productive constraints and struggles that hierarchy and norms engender. It is a distinctly Postmodern notion that power must always and everywhere be bad. I would say it is a misunderstanding, though I grasp the decent reasons why that misunderstanding arose. There is a way in which Christianity, or any true conception of the Kingdom of God, is a negation of hierarchy of any kind. That is one of the main reasons authentic, faithful Christianity has had such a hard time fitting into the world. As I believe someone says in one of Gaddis’ novels: in Heaven there is justice, on Earth there are lawyers.
Anarchy is only desirable in a perfected world. Until then we’re supposed to render unto Caesar, etc. . . Now, the Neoliberals, I would say, are in favor of anarchy (they’re definitely not friends of Caesar), but without the crucial intermediary step of perfection — or we could call it glorification. The Neoliberal order depends on imperfect anarchy. Passions must be given free reign and social relationships eliminated, because then people are isolated, and therefore vulnerable.
I see what we’re calling Neoliberalism as a somewhat predictable, if unintended outcome of Postmodernism’s project to dismantle culture, or legitimacy or authority in any form. That is what 20th century thought did. Having suffered so much at the hands of bad culture, it ripped the rug out from under all cultural forms. The problem is, we’ve discovered that that rug was actually a magical flying carpet, and beneath it is nothing but empty space. . .

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JP

April 22, 2013

“I see what we’re calling Neoliberalism as a somewhat predictable, if unintended outcome of Postmodernism’s project to dismantle culture, or legitimacy or authority in any form. That is what 20th century thought did. Having suffered so much at the hands of bad culture, it ripped the rug out from under all cultural forms. The problem is, we’ve discovered that that rug was actually a magical flying carpet, and beneath it is nothing but empty space. . .”
This is why it’s best to not create a catabolic program.
I’m not saying that a catabolic program doesn’t work. Of course it *works*. You can always dissolve or destroy.
Granted, the massive constructs of the 20th century were annoying too. But, there the point was that they were built, rather than grown. What’s funny is that the U.S.S.R. really was taken down by a thunderbolt. See Meditations on the Tarot – Chapter 16 – The Tower of Destruction. It stood for 80 years and then crumbled in an instant.
Now *that* would have made it into Tomberg’s book.

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Jack Whelan

April 22, 2013

“But there is nothing cultural about Neoliberalism itself. It has no folklore.”
Neoliberalism is repackaged classical19th century liberalism, which is deeply rooted in the Anglo-American Enlightenment tradition that comes down to us through Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and J.S. Mil. Thinking like that does not develop in a cultural vacuum.. It has both intellectual legitimacy, and cultural legitimacy insofar as those ideas and the spirit that shaped them, also shaped the cultural soul of the early American republic.
On one level it’s a head trip, but it legitimates itself by reference to the popular traditions that enshrine self-reliance, rugged individualism, the frontier spirit, and the raft of behaviors and attitudes that are celebrated most recently by the Tea Party. The Tea Party has more heft, IMO, that OWS because it resonates more deeply with this classic liberal Anglo American tradition that has been repackaged by American elites in it present-day neoliberal form. But they can do it for reasons both Harvey and Gramsci point to–it works with what is already deeply embedded in the American soul.
I think that the liberal project is at its core a nihilistic project. Toqueville picks up on this in very interesting ways. And I’d argue that the Great Awakenings in both the 18th and 19th century were spontaneous movements to compensate for that anarchic, nihilistic quality that is at the heart of the Enlightenment Liberal project–both in its continental and Anglo-American streams. The continental postmodern thinkers have simply taken the fundamental nihilism and anarchism to its logical conclusion. The nihilism is more shrouded in the Anglo-American version because it has this eternal optimism about it.
And the result is that the PoMo cultural left is powerless against the narrative power of the neoliberal right, which is not at all interested in overly educated irony and debunkery. And that Po o stuff gets no traction outside the universities in the U.S. anyway. It does’t describe the world in the way most Americans experience it. It feels alien and un-American–to French–whereas Neoliberalism feels comfortable.
The challenge is to understand the way that neoliberal ideas and evangelical Christianity have developed this bizarre relationship, that while often strained, nevertheless plays an essential role in shaping the American soul. Neoliberalism without evangelical Christianity is nihilism; Evangelical Christianity without neoliberalism is political impotent. That’s how the Republican party stays competitive, despite the demographics–it’s powerful and impassioned.
I think that what is more disturbing, however, is the way that neoliberalism has coopted the Democrats because neoliberalism is in many ways alien to the spirit of the party, which has not been so much about the individual, but about solidarity of the ordinary man and woman, about the common good.
Harvey has interesting things to say about how the New Left in the 1970s, because of its focus on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, and identity politics, and because of its embrace and celebration of a kind of hip narcissism was vulnerable to be coopted by the kind of PoMo anarchism that you point to, and in effect destroyed its ethos of solidarity with all ordinary men and women. Harvey talks about how this kind of narcissism was coopted by neoliberal elites.
The people attracted to the New Left don’t have the discipline or the imagination to sustain long-term commitments that a satyagraha-centered movement would require. To me the New Left and its ethos were a disaster for American politics and were easily coopted by the neoliberals who shared their anything-goes cultural values.
And when the protesting thing got old, they decided that making a ton of money was the next thing that their narcissism required. I cannot bring myself to attend “left” events anymore precisely because they are dominated by this cliché sixties/seventies ethos even now. It is for me deeply, deeply alienating. Give me MLK; give me Gandhi, give me Mandela, give me the priests and nuns who gave their lives in Central and South America. Give me somebody who understands that there’s a price to be paid for effecting justice, and who is willing to pay it.

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Cultural Hegemony

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