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Potted Politics

“I tried on many occasions, and other people in British cultural studies . . . have tried, to describe what it is we thought we were doing with the kind of intellectual work we set in place in the Centre [for Cultural Studies at Birmingham].  I have to confess that, though I’ve read many, more elaborated and sophisticated, accounts, Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do.  Admittedly, there’s a problem with his phrase ‘the production of organic intellectuals.’ But there is no doubt in my mind that we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual.  We didn’t know precisely what that would mean, in the context of Britain in the 1970s, and we weren’t sure we would recognize him or her if we managed to produce it.  The problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historical movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found.  We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope (to use Gramsci’s phrase from another context) that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that kind of relationship.  More truthfully, we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such a relationship in its absence: ‘pessimism of the will, optimism of the intellect.’”
—Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”

Forgive the wistfulness of this passage from Stuart Hall and forget its hint of a Marxist reliance on the elevator of history.  I use it to introduce the notion of “organic intellectual” and want to couple that notion with Gramsci’s insistence (I learned this from Grant Farred’s work) that “everyone is an intellectual.” And let me remind you that Gramsci distinguishes the “organic intellectuals” from “traditional intellectuals.” These last are the sanctioned wordsmiths in a society, the ones who have positions within various institutions—the church, the schools, the corporations, the government, the media—and whose job is to articulate “official” accounts of what those institutions are up to.  Traditional intellectuals are in the legitimation business; organic intellectuals are just trying to make sense of it all from the midst of where they stand in the society.  (That’s my post-Marxist spin, one that abandons any reliance on there being some “emerging historical movement.” There are just multiple struggles, and multiple conflicting accounts of who we are, what we need, and what we should do.)

So what I liked about the potter, Mark Hewitt, is that his work appeared to spawn his politics “organically.” His work (again, make allowances for the fact that this might all be fantasy; I am interested in why this fantasy attracts me first, before considering whether it tells us anything interesting about the possibilities of politics in our time, or whether it offers something that can be actualized) came first; the politics followed upon some basic reflection about what makes that work possible and who can do that work.  In his lifetime, he noticed, the potter with an old farmstead in North Carolina and a website can flourish; the potter in a Nigerian or Korean village can no longer practice his or her art.  Hence a set of ideas and attitudes toward what we loosely call globalization grows “organically” out of his daily rounds.

The next obvious question, it seems to me, is (once we place no stock in an “emerging historical movement” that could sweep up these isolated organic intimations and bring them onto the public stage) how to get to an effective political program from these nascent political ideas.  Cultural Studies has its answer to that question, one also indebted to Gramsci, and dependent on notions of “articulation,” “conjuncture,” “ideology” (understood much more neutrally than is usual in Marxist thought), and “hegemony.” To be very schematic about it, the grand miscellany of ideas must be “articulated” in such a way that at least a lot of them hang together in an “ideology” that suggests a somewhat (but never completely) coherent world view and blueprint for action.  The “articulation” (the work of the organic intellectuals who give this worldview—or political ideology—its words for describing itself) will move toward “hegemony” (achievement of a momentary and never total, but still effective, dominance in the sociopolitical field of contending forces) if the “conjuncture” of social forces in a given moment are aligned in such a way (while also being nudged into that position by the action of this group or that) to favor that “articulation’s” assumption of power.

In other words, Cultural Studies attends to—and provides an account of (no matter how implausible or abstract we might find it)—the movement from individual political convictions or insights to their being brought to bear collectively upon the body politic.  Perhaps the Cultural Studies story about these matters will lead us, eventually, to the notion of a political party, but that’s what Gramsci was trying to avoid (because he was trying to revise the Leninist conclusion that the revolution—along with all other forms of political action—can only find its agent in the party.) Whether Gramsci succeeded or not, in the absence of much thinking about these matters, politics-on-the-ground in the United States tends to offer two possible avenues of action.  Either individuals or a group or a coalition of groups can try to capture one of the major parties.  (Of course, there is also the recurring fantasy of—sometimes linked to valiant efforts to—create a viable new party, a feat only pulled off once in American history.) Or individuals or a group or a coalition of groups can try to address the sitting government directly, bypassing the parties.  To put the options another way: one can try to further one’s agenda by winning elections or one can try to further one’s agenda by influencing the actions of the current government.  Winning elections entails a prior step: making sure the person who wins the election with your vote is actually someone who will use the office gained in ways you approve.  Hence the need to capture the party, since it puts forth candidates for office.

So much for today’s installment.  I think a number of things follow from thinking about the scene of political action this way.  But let me hear your objections and thoughts first.  And then what I write on Friday will undoubtedly be very different from what, at this moment on Wednesday afternoon, I think I am going to write.

Posted by on 11/16 at 02:01 PM

  1. The trackback here seems to be broken, so let me simply point to my thoughts, elsewhere, as a rather different take on hegemony.

    Posted by Jon  on  11/16  at  04:09 PM

  2. Just a word from the maintenance crew:  trackback isn’t broken; it simply requires a security code, like the “captcha” function in some comments sections.  The idea is to prevent “throttling,” and I assure you that for the couple of hours during which I turned off the code the other day, this poor blog was throttled by casinos and poker sites.

    Thanks for the response, Jon.  And for the deftly potted post, John. 

    Posted by  on  11/16  at  04:30 PM

  3. Hi Michael, I can’t seem to see how to send a manual trackback via haloscan, then.  No word on security codes here, either.

    But no great loss.

    Posted by Jon  on  11/16  at  04:35 PM

  4. I am really looking forward to where you are going with this John, although i am not sure what that direction will manifest.  I do hold in my head an example of process that may be indicative of an entirely different set for developing political “consensus” and action (warning for Chris Clarke, yes i am mentioning Burning Man). 

    The following is from an email i received a couple of days ago from a friend who serves on the board of the Burning Man Arts Foundation:

    “At the core of the Foundation’s mission, is the mandate to work with artists and their communities to create and display works of art that help bring about change. The artwork is a medium for change to the degree that it causes people to interact with one another in ways that they normally might not. In urban areas, if the artwork gets people to talk with one another, if it seeds engaging conversation, and it gets people to cross normal social boundaries, it’s working. By putting artwork in public places, it takes it out of the sometimes rarified context of museums and galleries and brings into people’s daily lives. Creating the work and bringing it to public life is usually accomplished by a team of volunteers who are drawn to the spirit of the project, and this puts people in close and rich contact.  In these and other ways the artwork that we help place becomes truly interactive, brings people together, and creates contexts in which the transformative feels possible.

    Okay, so we freely admit we’re involved in a bit of alchemy. Those of you who have travelled to Black Rock City (most of you) know that you came away from that experience with an expanded sense of what’s possible. We at the Foundation are experimenting, testing ways in which we can help bring that expanded sense of possibility to people and places beyond BRC. There is no one answer, but we have to try to find a few models that work. Best way to do it, we think, is to work with artists who share our intentions, through grants or by working in concert to produce projects, and to see what
    happens.”

    The overarching goal of the BMAF and BMF is to facilitate substantive political transformation, particularly at the most local of levels, inspiring increased civic involvement and discourse to create ever expanding consensually derived solutions to society’s issues and problems.  Few have endeavored to study the political engagements and activities that must be experienced by the nearly 40,000 “citizens” of Black Rock City over the course of nine days that indeed “make it work.” A temporary city w/ only a barter economy, socialized public services, very limited legal enforcement, no hierarchical justice system, etc., all predicated on citizens participating in co-creating the totality of performance art productions.

    Posted by  on  11/16  at  07:23 PM

  5. It’s hard to know where to start with the various objections I have to this.  First, perhaps, how do you know that populism (for the idea that everyone is an organic intellectual is a form of populism) will result in the kind of politics that you like?  I understand that in principle you will say that it won’t, necessarily.  Then what?  How do you delegitimize a process that you’ve spent your time legitimizing?  Second, why do you think that cultural studies has anything interesting to say about the basic processes of politics in the first place?  I understand that if you’re a cultural studies person, and you’re interested in politics, you’d like to find some way to bring the two together.  But that’s the old story of a person with a hammer treating everything as a nail.  Assuming that art theory has something to say about politics inescapeably involves avant-garde modes of thought, despite the attempt at Gramscian populism, and the end result is a strange combination that I think is both obscurantist and ineffective.

    I’ll start with the fantasy about the potter.  Isn’t the driving force behind this fantasy the idea that he so naturally, organically came to a political conclusion that you agree with?  I assume that you wouldn’t be rhapsodizing about it if he had come to the conclusion that people in the good old U.S.A. are just better than foreigners.

    Posted by  on  11/16  at  09:32 PM

  6. First, perhaps, how do you know that populism (for the idea that everyone is an organic intellectual is a form of populism) will result in the kind of politics that you like?

    Well, whatever it is that we have now sucks pretty bad.

    I think Rawls was on the right track, or at least a better path. His idea, in a nutshell, is that the person dividing the cake should be the last to choose a piece. Of course, there are issues with application, but I think it’s the right frame for making political decisions.

    What we have now, is the cake cutters choosing the first piece as well - a recipe for instability.

    Posted by a-train  on  11/16  at  10:06 PM

  7. I think the notion of “organic intellectual” is in danger of being applied in such widely varying ways as to lose its usefulness as a signifier. I read one self-identified Gramscian--can’t remember who--who declared that “the New York Times is an organic intellectual.” I think he meant that the Times expresses the viewpoint of a historic bloc; I suspect that’s more or less what Gramsci meant, too. If so, then intellectuals who aren’t connected to a social-political force of some kind can’t be “organic” in the original meaning of the word. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But Gramsci was, I think, enough of a Marxist to believe that social forces (blocs, “groups,” classes) are the soil from which intellectuals grow; the difference between “traditional” and “organic” would then be more a matter of the difference between pre-bourgeois, clerical-feudal social formations and bourgeois-democratic ones. And the “production” of organic intellectuals is part of the historical mission of a new historical bloc, one based on the subaltern classes and groups. (As a practical matter, the PCI did a pretty good job of this--better, in some ways, than the job it did in politics strictly so called.) Where does John’s potter friend--where do most of us--fit in this schema? Nowhere, I’d say, which may help account for our persistent feeling of being adrift and rudderless in the sphere of effective social action, however acute our understanding.

    Posted by  on  11/17  at  12:30 AM

  8. Those who followed the link I provided will know I’m with Rich on this.

    As to “whatever ist is what we have now sucks pretty bad” ... the experience of British cultural studies was that worse could always be around the corner.

    Indeed, Stuart Hall and co. realized rather belatedly that the movement that had in the 1970s best succeeded in articulating a populist politics proved to be Thatcherism.  No wonder Hall should say in “The Toad in the Garden” that “Thatcherism gives you a better understanding of what the struggle for hegemony is about than almost anything one has seen in the politics on the left” (61).  And no wonder no wonder he should also suggest that “make no mistake, a tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project” (The Hard Road to Renewal 165).

    The wages of populism are always the risk of being outflanked by the right, who tend to do populism so much better than the left.

    Posted by Jon  on  11/17  at  02:01 AM

  9. In turn I should say that I mostly agree with Jon, although I don’t have his theoretical background.  My opinions are motivated by my experience in the grassroots toxics-related environmental movement in the U.S. (I’ve also worked for DC-based advocacy groups). 

    In this experience, the archetypal version goes something like this.  A community group forms in opposition to a particular polluter or site—not because of ideological reasons, but because they have a well-founded belief that their health is at risk.  Their natural progression would be a victory of some sort at that site (closure, cleanup, etc., the original of this type being the relocation of 800+ families at Love Canal) followed by participation in broader political political work (support of other groups, making “siting” of a particular type of facility practically impossible, legislation, etc., the original of this type being Superfund).

    There tend to be certain defined points along this path at which people bearing theory appear.  Typically this theory is 1) fundamentally unconcerned with the specific goals of the group, 2) eager to use the successes of the group as stepping stones towards broader societal goals, 3) devoid of actual methods of getting from here to there, 4) celebratory of populism on the implicit (and implicitly condescending) assumption that populism will lead to a particular outcome.  John McGowan, I’m sorry to bring up this stereotype, but the swoop from humble potter to concern with globalization does seem to mirror this experience very closely.

    a-train, the idea is not only that things could be worse, but that they are worse.  A little bit more or less than 50% of the voting public in the U.S. voted for Bush the last time around.  Not all of those people were “fooled”.  Consent is manufactured among people who largely agree with the premises of that consent.  There are reasons why liberalism has such an equivocal historical relationship with populism.

    Posted by  on  11/17  at  10:34 AM

  10. I must agree with Rich’s perspective as my own experience in environmental activism evidences it all too well.  He did leave out the NIMBY factor that seems to inspire a great deal of populist action in overcoming general societal stationary inertia.  But as one who--in too many senses lives out his third paragraph--organizes various “grassroots populist” direct actions i do work from my own theoretical constructs (as well as from those of others for whom i have profound and deep respect) in trying to lobby, cajole, inspire, motivate, move, educate, etc. a “certain” population--a segment of a given population willing on its own terms to join voluntarily in such efforts.  Were these people unwilling to engage (and Rich’s identification of motivation for their engagement is deadon), there really would be no opportunity for me to espouse the overviews and strategies of a particular movement that culminates in a greater planned outcome, for which most of those involved don’t really have a vested interest. 

    Generating populist support for general causes- -liberalism, social justice for all, expansion of 14th amendment protections, insuring first amendment liberties, and so forth--is very frustrating work.  Theory is not very provocative for most people, nor is it oft a reliable predictor of possible successful strategies to advance progressive agendas that would/should directly benefit those that would/should become involved.  We always have to get back to the “bread & butter” issues that directly impact the health, need acquisitions, and infrastructure support of people.  “Fear” is a much greater and more immediate motivator of populist action.

    Posted by  on  11/17  at  04:52 PM

  11. Get your Organic intellectuals.

    Now with less pesticide and artificial fertilizer!

    (sorry, can’t resist that. carry on. :D)

    Posted by  on  11/18  at  11:05 AM

  12. It’s interesting to hear from someone else with some of the same experiences, spyder.  When you write “But as one who--in too many senses lives out his third paragraph--organizes various “grassroots populist” direct actions i do work from my own theoretical constructs”, I do think that may be a different kind of theory than what I was talking about, more informed by the day-to-day activities that you do, more directed towards theorizing about goals and less about broad ideas about how politics works.  I could hardly say that all political theory is useless—but I do question why Gramsci is being chosen.

    I’m quite familiar with NIMBY—I started out as an intern for CCHW (now CHEJ), whose “Everyone’s Backyard” newsletter addresses this ideological concern directly.  The thing is, NIMBY doesn’t matter much, because the inevitable process of radicalization will ensure that by the end of any serious local fight a good chunk of the former NIMBYites will stay involved.  (That and the discovery of a source of power for people who have had lousy jobs all their life and who have found that they can be leaders.) What really matters, I think, is what gets people involved in the first place, and that remains the same whether it is phrased in terms of general concern or as NIMBY.  And these populist getting-people-involved factors are just as amenable to right-wing use as they are to the kind of politics that I think that John McGowan would like.

    Posted by  on  11/18  at  12:32 PM

  13. "I do think that may be a different kind of theory than what I was talking about, more informed by the day-to-day activities that you do, more directed towards theorizing about goals and less about broad ideas about how politics works.”

    Actually i am referring to the “big picture” theory work of political processes--the day to day efforts are informed by them as steps along lines towards overarching goals.  I spent six years with the US Senate in the 70’s; sufficient to garner a deep understanding of not only the political landscapes (fed and state) but also the funding and corporate involvement that no matter how bad it was during Nixon is exponentially (thousands of times) worse now.

    Last night for example, i attended the introductory press conference/ symposia of an organization (i serve on its founding Advisory Board) that i have been trying to put together (anywhere) for close to fifteen years.  In the efforts of John to encourage this discussion over the last few months, i note his interest in framing theory with a critical eye towards utopianism.  I must confess that i am a utopian visionary, seeing a future i believe is possible, and identifying the various diverse identity issue interests that can be better brought together to facilitate movement among the “people” on the path towards my ideal vision.  This is especially true for me now, as i am engaged in actively trying to turn conservative fundamentalist/evangelical Christians away from their political principles; most of which are, i agree, framed and formed by populist getting-people-involved factors.

    Posted by  on  11/18  at  04:14 PM

  14. Isn’t some of the point of Cultural Studies that the “politics” that can be actually affected might be in a whole lot of places outside the government (e.g., the classroom, the media), therefore requiring a focus outside of those two options?

    Posted by  on  11/18  at  10:20 PM

  15. Get your Organic intellectuals. - Now with less pesticide and artificial fertilizer! <--- great joke :D :D

    Posted by Flesko  on  11/24  at  09:30 AM

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