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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Theory Tuesday V (part two)

Welcome to Raymond Williams’s “Base and Superstructure 2:  Theorize Harder,” the sequel!

The sections on totality and hegemony take the essay to the Next Level, at which we’re dealing not just with how productive forces do or don’t influence the world of art and ideas, but with the question of how to conceptualize Marxist cultural theory in toto.  In only eight paragraphs, Williams covers an astonishing amount of ground, so I’m going to go over it in super slo-mo.

The idea of “totality” remains every bit as vexed today as it was in 1973, if not more so.  As Fredric Jameson was wont to complain, by the 1990s, “totalizing” was commonly used as a term for All Bad Things Theoretical, as when people would say (and they said it often) that they did not want to produce any “totalizing”account of a cultural phenomenon or historical period.  In the gestural politics of the time, Jameson noted (and he was largely right about this), “totalizing” meant something like “monocausal” or “simplistic”or “really bad straitjacket thinking that reduces lots of different stuff to just one thing, man.” And it was uttered with the same disdain with which people used the term “linear” (as in, “that’s an especially egregious example of linear, totalizing thinking”)—a habit that got some humanists in trouble in the early 1990s when they glommed onto chaos theory in the belief that nonlinear differential equations must be more nuanced and generally cooler than linear differential equations.  So, then, if you were called “totalizing Marxist” back in the day, you were being insulted.  Jameson, meanwhile, insisted that the term “totalization,” at least in the work of Sartre, referred to a mode of analysis—a mode of analysis without which, like T. S. Eliot on Margate Sands, you can connect nothing with nothing.

That’s basically what Williams says here, harking back to Jameson’s forebear, Georg Lukacs.  He opens the section like so:

Now the language of totality has become common, and it is indeed in many ways more acceptable than the notion of base and superstructure.  But with one very important reservation.  It is very easy for the notion of totality to empty of its essential content the original Marxist proposition.  For if we come to say that society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recognition, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of determination.  And this I, for one, would be very unwilling to do.

And that’s why, to answer Bill Benzon in yesterday’s comments (comment 18), we don’t junk the Marxist apparatus altogether—at least if we’re Raymond Williams.  (I’ll say more about this later.) Not just anything goes with anything; as Stuart Hall would insist in the ensuing decade and a half, there is a vast difference between saying there is no necessary correspondence among the various facets and practices of a society (against those reductive Marxists) and saying that there is necessarily no correspondence among them.  A society takes a certain shape and a certain character, and though this may be exceedingly complex and conflicted, it is not random.  “Indeed,” Williams adds,

the key question to ask about any notion of totality in cultural theory is this: whether the notion of totality includes the notion of intention.

Note that this is the stop where Foucault gets off the bus.  The emphasis on “discourse” rather than on “ideology,” and the insistence on regimes of power/knowledge rather than totality: these are moves designed expressly to forestall the question of intention.  Why would Foucault want to do that, you ask?  Partly because he doesn’t like what he considers the residual humanism at work in Marxism Williams-style.  Whereas that’s precisely what I do like about Williams, so go figure.

I could add, and therefore will, that Williams’ passage on the different between “epochal questions” and “historical questions” speaks pretty well to the strengths and weaknesses of Foucault as a theorist of history, even though Foucault’s not a Marxist:

For one thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural analysis is that it is very much more at home in what one might call epochal questions than in what one has to call historical questions.  That is to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features of different epochs of society, as commonly between feudal and bourgeois, than at distinguishing between different phases of bourgeois society, and different moments within these phases: that true historical process which demands a much greater precision and delicacy of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis which is concerned with main lineaments and features.

I don’t mean to pick on Foucault here, because you could make the same charge (as many have done in recent years) with regard to Jameson: I believe it was Gil Rodman who pointed out, à propos of Jameson’s distinction between van Gogh’s shoes and Andy Warhol’s, that you can do a pretty convincing compare-and-contrast between modernism and postmodernism if you simply skip over roughly a hundred years of grainy details.  But the point remains that Foucauldian history does better with epochs than with historical processes.  Foucault did great work on specific institutions and their histories—from asylums to prisons to the sciences of population management—but if you go to his work looking for an account of why and how things change (whether prisons or sexualities), or why episteme X was superseded by episteme Y, you are going to come away frustrated.  Sure, you may be able to forestall that sense of frustration by telling yourself “power produces resistance” over and over, but that’s about it.  And don’t go to his work looking for an account of “totality.” Just don’t.

Now for hegemony.  This part, my friends, will be on the final.

Here’s most of the opening paragraph of the section, and I suggest you tattoo it onto your forearms for ease of reference:

It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare.  For hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideology, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway, that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For if ideology were merely some abstract, imposed set of notions, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely the result of specific manipulation, or a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change than in practice it has ever been or is.

I apologize for all the italics.  I’m not usually so indulgent.  But, you know, I really want to emphasize this point, so I got all emphatic about it.  A generation later, people still talk about ideology and hegemony this way, as if, once the blue pill is consumed, they will cast off the veil of illusion and discover at last the Real Nature of the World Around Us.  And I’m not making the Matrix reference to be “hip” and “with-it” and “teh r0xx0r,” either.  The first Neo-Morpheus scene is precisely a staging of the notion of ideology against which Williams is arguing:

Morpheus:  Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Neo: The Matrix.

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?

Neo: Yes.

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

But you don’t necessarily avoid the Matrix-scenario simply by substituting the word “hegemony” for “ideology.” For “there are times,” Williams writes, “when I hear discussions of hegemony and feel that it too, as a concept, is being dragged back to the relatively simple, uniform and static nation which ‘superstructure’ in ordinary use had become.” As Morpheus would say, I know exactly what Williams means.  This is, in a nutshell, my complaint about the kind of left media theory one finds in Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent and its many offshoots: on those accounts, the people are blinded from the truth by a constant ideological onslaught from Commercial Media, a prison for their minds.  Remove the Commercial Media, tell people the truth, and the scales will fall from their eyes.

(Remember last month, when I was arguing against Ed Herman’s claim that “on some issues, like “free trade,” and the merits of overseas military ventures [except in the heat of battle and under a furious elite propaganda barrage], the “radical left” is far closer to mainstream opinion than is the “decent left,” and it is listened to on those issues by ordinary citizens when they can be reached”?  This is why.  The argument that The People line up with the radical left “naturally” and are diverted from their true interests only by a furious elite propaganda barrage is not only bad politics; it’s bad theory, the kind that some leftists fall back on to explain to themselves why their followers are so few.)

Furthermore, hegemony doesn’t sit on your chest and tell you what to think; it merely seeks to set the bounds of the thinkable—and this, again, is where Williams’ insistence on the meaning of “determination” as “setting limits, exerting pressures” pays off.

Williams underscores the point about the substantiality of the social two pages later, and this time I suggest you should also hear in his words an implicit rebuke to people who think that you’ve pointed out the “socially constructed” nature of X, you’ve all but toppled X forever:

The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends.  If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow.

My advice, folks, is to let this point sink in. 

But wait!  Lest you begin to worry that Williams is turning into the Voice of Quietism here, there is still hope—precisely because hegemony is so complex.  As we used to say at the University of Illinois’ Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory,

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Hegemony is leaky
And so are you.

Hegemony has to be maintained and patched up by actual people and institutions with determinate intentions, and it’s hard, hard work: “it is continually active and adjusting,” as Williams notes, partly because it’s got so much unruly stuff to deal with, some of which it has to try to incorporate:

Thus we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture.  This has been much underemphasized in our notions of a superstructure, and even in some notions of hegemony.

And quite apart from the “alternative” (lest you think that “alternative” culture and politics is your only alternative), there is the “oppositional”; whereas the merely alternative modes of thought “do not in practice go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant definitions,” and can therefore be accommodated or tolerated, the oppositional poses a serious challenge to the way things are:

There is clearly something that we can call alternative to the effective dominant culture, and there is something else that we can call oppositional, in a true sense.  The degree of existence of these alternative and oppositional forms is itself a matter of constant historical variation in real circumstances.  In certain societies it is possible to find areas of social life in which quite real alternatives are at least left alone.  (If they are made available, of course, they are part of the corporate organization.) [Note here that Williams does not mean that they become part of a “corporation”; he means they are incorporated into the hegemonic formation somehow.] The existence of the possibility of opposition, and of its articulation, its degree of openness, and so on, again depends on very precise social and political forces.  The facts of alternative and oppositional forms of social life and culture, in relation to the effective and dominant culture, have then to be recognized as subject to historical variation, and as having sources which are very significant as a fact about the dominant culture itself.

OK, I’ll stop here, with yet another suggestive insistence on historical specificity and variation. 

But at this point you should be asking me, “Michael!  You disposed of all of Russian formalism in one post, all of structuralism in another, and did an intro to deconstruction in yet another.  How is it that it takes you three long posts to get through just one of Raymond Williams’s essays?”

Because this essay is really, really rich, that’s why.  How rich?  Very rich.  It loads-every-rift-with-ore rich.  And now you know why I put off blogging about it for thirteen months.

Tune in next Tuesday for the thrilling finale!

Posted by Michael on 09/06 at 05:28 PM
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