English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments
on Marx and Raymond Williams: Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Our starting point in understanding Williams is that he is responding to a very basic problem: Marx's theory of revolution had predicted that capitalism was on the verge of giving way to communism, but in fact capitalism showed little sign of giving way decades after Marx had passed from the scene. Evidently, capitalism—which like any human system has its flaws, some of them very serious and disturbing ones—has been far more flexible and adaptive than some might have thought. In our own time and place, we can see that American capitalism has survived terrible wars and a mind-bending economic depression during the 1930's. The market may not be a cure-all for ancient problems like injustice, poverty, and war, but the market hasn't gone away, and in fact it's commonly conceded that it is a pretty resilient system that has outlasted communism as a major world view and set of political, social, and economic practices. Whether that's because it's in tune with the attributes some call "human nature" is another question, (Note 1) but it is undeniable that the system is a survivor—it protects itself, adapts to new conditions, and thrives, recent arguments about economic globalization being a partial return to a feudal order notwithstanding. That resilience creates a need for the opponents of capitalism to refine their critical framework and terms. Here are a few definitions adapted from Marx: a) The base is a combination of the forces of production—raw materials, industrial processes, factories, etc.—and the relations of production, or more simply the wage-based relationship between the working class and their employers. Marx said that the only tie between one person and another in a capitalist order is "the cash nexus." Workers get their wages for the work they have done, and their employer has no further obligation to them, nor they to the employer. The base is dynamic as Marx says, but it all has to do with a given society's economic system—how the goods get made, who makes them, who gets to sell and buy them, and how these groups relate to one another. b) The superstructure is everything that isn't the base but that is instead founded upon the base. It includes institutions like law, politics, the church, education, art, and so forth. In the simplest kind of Marxist theory—not so much that of Marx himself—the superstructure is a direct or nearly direct reflection of what is happening at the level of the base. So the church functionaries, for instance, would go about reinforcing class and economic hierarchy, the law would be the watchdog for private property, education would defuse potentially threatening dissent and train students to accept and aid the ruling class, and art would reflect the values of the middle-class defenders of the capitalist order. (Note 2) Raymond Williams respects Marx a great deal, but he also considers it necessary to adapt the old framework to suit the times. As he explains, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's term "hegemony" goes a long way towards the necessary update. Marx had always treated the term "base" as a dynamic one dealing with the specific, and sometimes contradictory, interactions of real workers and real employers, and indeed more recent authors like Georgi Lukacs had expanded Marxist terminology to begin accounting for a fuller spectrum of human relationships under capitalism. Already it had become possible to quit using rigid statements like "the base determines the superstructure" and to say instead that "the base exerts pressure and sets limits on what people can do and think." But Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" goes furthest of all: to say that the most prosperous class, the one most interested in maintaining its advantageous position, is hegemonic is to suggest that it sets the conditions for an entire way of living and perceiving. The hegemon-class essentially creates the "box" in which it and others must live and think, and it does this in a supple enough way to maintain control over events even when resizing or reshaping the box becomes necessary. The hegemon's control, explains Williams, is well described as a process of saturating people's lives with the ideas, images, and practices that best maintain the economic and social conditions most favorable to the hegemon. Williams captures this saturation when he says that societies in every historical period operate within "a central system of practices, meanings, and values" (494). Together, the elements of the dominant system give us all our sense of "reality" and make the rule of the hegemon appear natural. As Williams says, Gramsci's concept both allows for coverage of a wide range of what Lukacs called "the social totality" and makes it possible to ascribe events to the collective intentionality of the hegemon class, to its dominant influence. So the hegemon class is dominant yet nimble, and it is therefore able to maintain a state of affairs favorable to itself. How exactly does the hegemon class do all this? Williams identifies some of the main ways. First, education is among the most effective means of domination: it socializes students and provides them with selective political and cultural traditions and ideas favorable to the maintenance of hegemony. Williams might also agree with the much older Hegelian idea that within the university, intellect that might tend to stray into dangerously destabilizing areas of investigation is given a relatively harmless space within which to think more or less freely. (Note 3) And as Williams points out, education (like many other social institutions) is not only a cultural affair, it is also big business: education has an economy in its own right and what it produces—professors, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, and so forth—has an enormous impact on the economy and on the social system. Surely, then, education is not as pure or idealistic as we might wish. (Note 4) Another means Williams identifies has to do with how the past is handled: it seems that cultural traditions and historical facts are passed along quite selectively. What is useful to the hegemon class is emphasized, while threatening or useless events and traditions are either distorted or simply "forgotten." (Note 5) The present conveyance of the past becomes a kind of motivated anthology, with the principle of selection being what is useful to the hegemon. (Note 6) Williams' next concern is to explain the process by which practices and ideas that do not fit into the dominant set come into being and are either adapted or rejected. A convenient way to divide these phenomena, according to Williams, is to describe them as either residual cultures or emergent cultures. A residual culture, as its name implies, consists in elements of a past culture that have been carried into the present. Religious practices and ideas would be a good example of this kind of holdover from the past. A specific example (aside from Christianity in European capitalist states) would be the Falun Gong in China. The State doesn't seem to know quite what to do with the re-emergence of this belief system, and it's apparent that the Chinese government considers Falun Gong a threat to its dominance. An emergent culture is some new set of practices and beliefs, perhaps one that derives from the emergence of a new class. A fine example here would be the emergence of the social and economic tenets of bourgeois liberalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a free press, democratic politics, a free market, free trade among nations, etc.—were relatively new and not exactly welcome to the aristocratic rulers of Western Europe. The free-marketeers were indeed out to change the State, even to take control of it, and of course whether or not the residual and the new cultures see themselves as a threat has much to do with whether the governing authorities will accept them, ignore them, or fight them. What, then, of art? Williams addresses the role of art and the art critic towards the end of his essay. He insists that we must not ask simply "what are the relations between art and society" and that we must not simply consider works of art "objects." We should not do these things, he writes, because art is an inseparable part of the cultural process. Williams says it best in this passage: [I]n literature . . . in music and in a very wide are of the performing arts, what we permanently have are not objects but notations. These notations have then to be interpreted in an active way, according to the particular conventions. But indeed this is true over an even wider field. The relationship between the making of a work of art and its reception is always active, and subject to conventions, which in themselves are forms of (changing) social organization and relationship, and this is radically different from the production and consumption of an object. (500) Thus, Williams suggests, contemporary theory that seems so preoccupied with what he calls "understanding an object in such a way that it can profitably or correctly be consumed" have really advanced no further than eighteenth-century aesthetics. They do not get at the sophisticated processes whereby art is created and received. I shall conclude with a return to the issue of residual and emergent cultures. Here is a recent example of emergent culture that captures the sophistication in Williams' analytic framework and suggests how that framework has influenced the broad set of interests we associate with today's Cultural Studies. Consider the emergence of the counterculture and strong protest movements during the 1960's in America. The counterculture consisted in experimentation with drugs, sexual liberation, and general rejection of the conservatism and conformity associated with the 1950's, while other factors in that period consisted in the push for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, environmentalism, and an end to the Vietnam War. Much of this activity was consciously seen as a demand for specific changes in American social life and political affairs. It was seen that way both by proponents of change and opponents of it at all levels. This perception accounts for the turbulent nature of the 1960's. And what, we might ask in keeping with Williams' essay, was the upshot of all this turbulence? How much change did we get? The answer is somewhat mixed—the "rights" movements changed the country a great deal, and the anti-war protests probably had a lot to do with Nixon's eventual decision to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam. The more radical side of the sixties, however, has given us a mixed legacy—a subject for an entirely new essay. Williams' point would surely be that the hegemonic class was able to hang on—it took some hits and had to make some changes—some of them very much to the benefit of the populace—but we didn't have a complete overturning of the social or economic order. The name of the game is flexibility; the key is to be able and willing to change the box's size and shape when certain forces threaten to erase the box altogether. The point is to maintain control even if what you maintain control over alters somewhat: the accumulation and circulation of capital must go on. Another recent example that underscores the kind of adaptability Williams' essay invokes would be the music and fashion industries. I am going to have some fun with this example and state my views polemically. Rap music, for instance, originated as a perceived challenge to political and racial oppression. What happens when a politically charged form of music gets caught up in the wheels of commerce? Well, it becomes big business—the music becomes popular with millions, but most among those millions have no reason to rebel and no interest in doing so in any meaningful way. They just like the sound of the music. Daily one sees middle-class kids driving to school in their $50,000 BMW's, wearing their Malcolm X caps, listening to blaring rap music and wearing baggy shorts. What kind of radical political statement is that? None at all, I'd say—it's simply the eternal story of youth trying to gain peer acceptance. It's plain old fashion. And as for fashion, the fashion industry continually reinvents and sells sex as well as general nonconformity. What about all those pairs of jeans with raggedy holes in them—you know, the ones people pay good money for at the Gap? Or what about that multi-layered grunge look? Since I am being a "nattering nabob of negativism" at the moment, I'm going to say that this amounts to nothing less than a diabolically successful campaign to market an image of an impoverished, largely forgotten underclass. Poor people who live next the railroad tracks or under a freeway overpass aren't wearing holy jeans and seven layers of clothing because they're fashionable. They just don't have any money. But enough of my dark cynicism in the online classroom: is there another way to look at the effect of "emergent cultures" of music and fashion? I have been implying that the hegemon class simply absorbs such cultures, makes them fashionable and therefore politically and socially neutral. Is that entirely true, or do these cultures meaningfully change the hegemon that absorbs them? Whatever your response, you are engaged in one of the concerns of a varied, broad discipline that Raymond Williams' work has influenced a great deal—Cultural Studies. Notes: 1. A good question to ask whenever someone uses the word "nature" in defense of some political or economic view is simply, "if it's natural, why are you defending it?" After all, beavers don't stand around defending their dam-building practices, do they? I mean to say that the mere fact of our being able to question how we do things implies that the use of the opposition "natural/unnatural" is somewhat suspect. Some other set of terms might be more to the point. I think Oscar Wilde had it about right when he said, "humanity's first task is to be as artificial as possible. What the second task is no one has yet discovered." So much for nature. 2. Think of Dickens' Great Expectations, where the poor orphaned boy Pip grows up to be a respectable bourgeois gentleman after all, redeeming his sometime arrogance by thinking kindly on his lowly benefactor Abel Magwich. 3. It is true that some intellectuals—professors like Foucault, Edward Said or Noam Chomsky, to name just three, have attained a significance that goes well beyond the tidy bounds of academe, but on the whole, and at least in the United States, academics are not generally accepted as a major source of political or social authority. Things are somewhat different in Europe. 4. Think of teachers' unions, alumni contributions, government funding, and GRE or LSAT production and administration, and you can see what Williams means. 5. There is an Orwellian dimension to this means: readers of 1984 will recall that the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a department of the Ministry of Truth—his job is to help the Party "update" the past so that it supports their present world view. What Orwell describes in concentrated, synchronic fashion, of course, is exactly the kind of gradual, selective forgetting that conveys to the public an ideologized, sanitized past supportive of the hegemon's views and interests. 6. When you hear arguments about the literary canon, that is the basic argument: what is included or excluded, the argument goes, has to do with more than simple aesthetic judgments; it has also to do with politics, gender, race, and so forth.
|