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Wednesday, November 16, 2005

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 John McGowan on 11/16 at 02:01 PM
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