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Some things the American left should think of when it thinks of “cultural studies”

With my apologies to the couple of hundred readers who read this stuff back when I first posted it, under the heading “Stuart Hall Interlude,” back on February 14 of this year.

The political context of Stuart Hall’s brilliant 1983 lecture, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” was the British Left’s failure to anticipate or understand Thatcherism’s appeal for the very people it was screwing; Hall was writing at a time when unemployment in the UK had reached three million, even after analysts had predicted mass uprisings and riots once the number of unemployed reached two million.  In the following passage, Hall offers one of his most stinging rebukes to neo-Leninist Leftists who think that the masses will flock to their cause once the “objective conditions” of their society are sufficiently draconian.  Adapt to your local circumstances as you see fit-- and pass the word along to anyone you know who still thinks that all we need is another four years of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft-Wolfowitz-Rove in order for tens of millions of Americans to see the virtues of Green/Socialist/Anti-Imperialist/Vegan/Whatever politics:

The traditional escape clause for classical marxism . . . is the recourse to “false consciousness.” The popular classes, we must suppose, have been ideologically duped by the dominant classes, using what The German Ideology calls their “monopoly over the means of mental production.” The masses, therefore, have been temporarily ensnared, against their real material interests and position in the structure of social relations, to live their relation to their real conditions of material existence through an imposed but “false” structure of illusions.  The traditional expectation on the Left, founded on this premise, would therefore be that, as real material factors begin once more to exert their effect, the cobwebs of illusion would be dispelled, “reality” would be transferred directly into working-class heads, the scales would fall from workers’ eyes, and Minerva’s Owl-- the great denouement promised by the Communist Manifesto, as the socialization of labor progressively created the conditions for mass solidarity and enlightenment-- would take wing at last (even if timed to arrive approximately 150 years too late).

This explanation has to deal with the surprising fact that mass unemployment has taken a much longer time than predicted to percolate mass consciousness; the unemployed, who might have been expected to pierce the veil of illusion first, are still by no means automatic mass converts to laborism, let alone socialism; and the lessons that can be drawn from the fact of unemployment turn out to be less monolithic and predictable, less determined by strict material factors, more variable than supposed.  The same fact can be read or made sense of in different ways, depending on the ideological perspective employed.  Mass unemployment can be interpreted as a scandalous indictment of the system; or as a sign of Britain’s underlying economic weakness about which mere governments-- Left or Right-- can do very little; or as acceptable because “there is no alternative” that is not more disastrous for the economy; or indeed-- within the sociomasochistic perspective that sometimes appears to be a peculiarly strong feature of British ideology-- as the required measure of suffering that guarantees the remedy will work eventually because it hurts so much (the Britain-is-best-when-backed-to-the-wall syndrome)! The logics of ideological inference turn out to be more multivariate, the automatic connection between material and ideal factors less determinate, than the classical theory would have us believe.

I’ll be back in a few days with more on this theme.

Posted by on 09/18 at 10:19 AM

  1. The left has always assumed that objectively worse consequences of their opponents’ views will redound to their benefit, as if ignorance alone were the issue.  Further, a segment of the left has always assumed that more extreme right-wing issues were more productive of reactive progressive change, and thus not terrible in the end.  Pace Gore, Nader and my mom, these are mistakes.  People don’t like being condescended to or manipulated--by the left, at any rate…

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  05:18 PM

  2. I live in an urban blue zone and every so often I travel to the red zone (Kansas) to visit family. I frequently get into political arguments with my brother-in-laws.  They are typical red zone denizens: religious, Republican, Bush-Cheney supporters.  I try to use my tremendous political enlightenment and sophisticated knowledge from all the liberal blogs I compulsively read to open their eyes to the evils of the Bush-Cheney junta. I try all the usual tacks: what they do is not what they say, easily demonstrable lies they have made, that they don’t really share your religious values- if you saw how they behave in private you would realize who they really are and how much they have fooled you.  Of course much of this is dismissed by chalking it up to the “liberal media.” But there is some of it for which I can tell they have no good responses. But still they will not budge in any of their fundamental beliefs.  So I keep asking myself why are these things are so obvious to me and yet so unpersuasive to them? Is there a certain magical argument, one so forcefully presented and powerful in it’s logic but that they can’t help be swayed?

    I have to come to realize that these political discussions parallel my arguments with them about literal interpretation of the Bible (was the Earth really created in seven days etc.) No matter how much overwhelming scientific fact to the contrary I present to them they concede no ground on this issue.  I have come to realize that their fundamental worldview doesn’t come from a rational examination of the world. It doesn’t even occur to them that it should. Instead their belief system is preeminent, and everything else they encounter is compared for validity against it, not the other way around. Everything they hear or that happens to them must be interpreted to match this underlying belief system.  It is a fundamental tenet of the belief system that it cannot be questioned or changed- it would not be the same belief system.  This is what makes the problem so intractable.

    In both the political and scientific realm you have this chasm between what the red zone denizens believe and reality itself. Into this chasm come the charlatans of the religious right, whether they be politicians or pseudo-scientists who help this population disguise this chasm from themselves.  This populace wholeheartedly participates in its own deception. They have to- to not do so would introduce the terrifying idea that their fundamental belief system doesn’t adequately explain reality. And like I said above, their belief system itself precludes this. Every belief system (especially the religious ones) have built in defenses against their own erosion. So it follows from this that the Bush/Cheney team could turn the U.S. into a third world nation with a wealthy super class ruling the impoverished rest and this demographic would still be swallowing the rhetoric explaining it all in a way that doesn’t challenge the powers that be. 

    I have been wrestling with finding an effective approach to take with my brother-in-laws.  Sometimes I even wonder if there is one.  But I suspect there is, and that it has to do with challenging their belief system itself with itself.  For example, using the Bible to challenge what they belief about the Bible, or the Bush administration. Does Bush really reflect the ways of Jesus? Do you really literally live the way Jesus instructed his disciples to do so? (A virtual impossibility in our society- sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, turn the other cheek, perform miracles in my name: why aren’t you doing these things I’m going to ask them.) If you really are a disciple of Jesus, why not?  If you don’t take this part of the Bible literally then how come you do so with certain other parts (the parts of the Bible (Genesis) that can’t impact anyone’s lifestyle are taken literally while the parts that would (Jesus’s teachings) are always “interpreted.") I don’t know where this tack will lead but it will be interesting to find out. Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to approach this?

    Posted by  on  09/19  at  09:17 AM

  3. Michael,

    Thanks for starting this conversation.  Like many others over here on the Left, I’ve taken to banging my head against the wall in frustration over my inability to comprehend the sorry state of political affairs in our country.  To my way of thinking, Abu Gihrab should have turned things around.  Horrifying, photo-documented acts of torture committed by American military and mercenaries-- was that not enough to rattle the consciousness of the electorate and move us to some serious soul-searching?  Where are our supposedly devout Christians when we need them?

    Posted by  on  09/19  at  04:11 PM

  4. The ability of Americans to support a government that hurts them as individuals, as a society and as a country amazes many folks outside of the USA.

    http://tinyurl.com/44m77

    IS it someting in the drinking water?

    “c’est pas”?

    Posted by  on  09/19  at  04:59 PM

  5. Michael,
    let me start by saying thanks for posting this piece. Thought provoking as ever.

    One thing I’d like to throw in here, though, is that the description of the situation as in the quotes from Hall’s speech (and as a caveat note I’m going on your quotes, not on the entire essay) misses something which I think is quite fundamental, and means that what occured in the UK in the early eighties cannot necessarily be taken to apply to the current situation in the US.

    It is this: immediately prior to the Thatcher administration, a Labour government had been in power, and turned the UK economy into what could charitably be described as a disaster. The 1970s were not good times economically in the UK. Given that, the left (ie the Labour party) had a much bigger problem in convincing voters that they could do a better job: the voters had already seen what they had done, and not liked it very much. Only one of two things could get them back into power:

    a) They convinced the electorate that they now had reinvented themselves with a completely different set of policies that would somehow make the result different or
    b) A sufficient length of time passed that the electorate had forgotten how bad it had been (or were too young to know in the first place).

    In the event, both of these happened.

    Firstly, Tony Blair made a point of taking on the far-left of his party when he became leader, particularly fighting for and winning an amendment to clause 4 of the party constitution (I hope I have all the details correct here...). That clause had until that time included a commitment to “common ownership of the means of production”, which was widely interpreted as referring to a Marxist economic model. The party subsequently started referring to itself as “New Labour” and explicitly distanced itself from its older policy model.

    Secondly, 18 years had passed. There were indeed voters actually too young to remember.

    Take this for what it’s worth, of course; likely to be not much grin

    Posted by  on  09/19  at  08:42 PM

  6. "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth ‚Äî i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

    --K. Marx, Theses On Feuerbach

    Qu’est-ce que c’est “classical Marxism”?

    Posted by  on  09/20  at  04:48 PM

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