Gramsci and us: by Stuart Hall (Marxism Today: June, 1987)
Stuart hall very early on in this fantastic article says:
"the whole thrust of his thinking was to refuse this easy
transfer of generalisations from one conjuncture, nation or epoch to another."Which is a shame, because I am trying to do just that type of generalisation in my analysis of his idea of cultural hegemony and its application within the sphere of the British Press!
I'm saved though by this paragraph which fits neatly with my attempts to ask whether crowdfunded journalism could be a new saving construction of the press:
"There is nothing more crucial, in this respect, than Gramsci's recognition that every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction; that there is no destruction which is not, also, reconstruction; that, historically nothing is dismantled without also attempting to put something new in its place; that every form of power not only excludes but produces something."
There is certainly a lot of reconstruction going on in the British press and certainly a crisis. So Stuart Hall would probably agree that there is a shift in power, or at least the potential for a shift in power at the moment within journalism. However whether this is as a result of crowdfunding or the inevitable changing face of the industry as a result of the internet is a different matter. Anyway on with Stuart Hall's article...
He first starts to question, and indeeds mocks marxists for not being able to question skilfully in general, when he asks whether this Hegemony can exist in a system that includes a huge range of people:
"What is the nature of this ideology which can inscribe such a vast range of different positions and interests in it, and which seems to represent a little bit of everybody — including most of the readers of this essay! For, make no mistake, a tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project. Of course, we're all one hundred per cent committed. But every now and then — Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration — we go to Sainsbury's and we're just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject."
He does show however that Gramsci had already preapred an answer for this :
"The whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a 'unity' out of difference."
Another observation one could make when reading this article, that first appeared in the late 1980s, is that despite its huge focus on the politics of the time and specifically Thatcherism, the similarities with which contemporary conservative politics and the situation the left now find themselves in are striking. Hall also draws us to Gramsci's observations as to the time these processes take:
Gramsci warns us in the Notebooks that a crisis is not an immediate event but a process: it can last for a long time, and can be very differently resolved: by restoration, by reconstruction or by passive transformism. Sometimes more stable, sometimes more unstable; but in a profound sense, British institutions, the British economy, British society and culture have been in a deep social crisis for most of the 20th century
If we think about the current political message newspeak of 'Austerity' and the 'Migrant crisis'' its nearly a daily occurrence to see headlines such as the ones below.
"So one of the most important things that Gramsci has done for us is to give us a profoundly
expanded conception of what politics itself is like, and thus also of power and authority. We
cannot, after Gramsci, go back to the notion of mistaking electoral politics, or party
politics in a narrow sense, or even the occupancy of state power, as constituting the ground
of modern politics itself. Gramsci understands that politics is a much expanded field; that,
especially in societies of our kind, the sites on which power is constituted will be enormously
varied. We are living through the proliferation of the sites of power and antagonism in
modern society."
This analysis is extremely appropriate in today's age of web 2.0 and social media. Gramsci would indeed remind us that the politics of class struggle and the dominant hegemonic ideology is fought for on a whole host of platforms and increasingly technological platforms.
Stuart Hall in this article is illustrating one of the key criticisms of his model; that political thought or ideology within a particular era of government is not homogenous. We can look to Thatcher's Britain and see waves of rebellious cultural artefacts that were clearly ideologically opposed and indeed took inspiration from a hatred or opposition to Thatcherism. Music in Britain ironically owes much to the nature of vitriol and anger that Thatcher enthused amongst the artists and working classes. Bands from The Smiths to The Prodigy, nearly all bands in Britain I can remember were opposed to Thatcher policies such as The criminal justice act etc These were huge movements of popular culture that were clearly against the hegemonic values of the ruling classes. What would Gramsci have to say about media texts such as these?
Stuart Hall highlights Gramsci's views on this question here:
"Gramsci looked at a world which was complexifying in front of his eyes. He saw the pluralisation of modern cultural identities, emerging between the lines of uneven historical development, and asked the question: what are the political forms through which a new cultural order could be constructed, out of this 'multiplicity of dispersed wills, these heterogeneous aims'. Given that that is what people are really like, given that there is no law that will make socialism come true, can we find forms of organisation, forms of identity, forms of allegiance, social conceptions, which can both connect with popular life and, in the same moment, transform and renovate it?"
"Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological phenomenon. There can be no hegemony without the decisive nucleus of the economic. On the other hand, do not fall into the trap of the old mechanical economism and believe that, if you can only get hold of the economy, you can move the rest of life. The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions. The question of hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order."
I think the ideas the Hall illustrates and illuminates in his writing here are crucial to the thinking of gramsci's work in my own project. Gramsci is drawing the battle lines for Hegemony firmly within the cultural sphere and asking the stake holders in that to wrestle the power back into the hands of the people. Something that I believe can be seen in the crowdfunded model of journalism. Does this model of journalism reflect a new 'cultural order'? Well its certainly inline with the wed 2.0 phenomenon that Media Studies teachers are only too familiar with. If you take the 'new cultural order' to read 'people as creators' then there certainly could be something in these words. I will tackle this in a future post on pluralism.
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