Carnival masquerade, Rijeka, Croatia. Photo: Guba Zoky Rabko. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Structuralist theories of reproduction present the dominant ideology (under which culture is subsumed) as impenetrable. [But these formulations] simply do not allow for the degree of social conflict and protest that actually occurs.
The great contribution of Bakhtin to the study of the carnivalesque was to treat it…as the ritual location of uninhibited speech…For the lower classes, who spent much of their lives under the tension created by subordination and surveillance, the carnivalesque was a realm of release.
James C. Scott, Domination & the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
What understanding of social solidarity and political action can serve as the foundation for an effective, center-left, counter-hegemonic project? This is the urgent and troubling question that I’ve been asking myself for quite a while now.
I’ve been asking myself this question because, well, it’s hard. This question is nothing less than the question of what it would take for us to win, given the opening presented by the current neoliberal interregnum. There is no agreed upon handbook for this (probably because we can’t agree about what “us” means, much less what “winning” means). I’ve come to the conclusion that answering this question entails a stubborn determination to mix liberal political theory, post-Marxism, and also various flavors of sociology, even though doing so is sometimes rather awkward.
In my prior, three-part series on “power and politics” from 2018, I initially framed the problem of liberal post-politics as a kind of a psychological condition, as a hard-to-break-habit of ambivalence concerning the use of political power tactics among mainstream liberal-progressives. I tried to explain where this set of attitudes came from, and then (revisiting Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp) I tried to isolate the change in mindset needed in order to support community organizing for power and/or mass mobilization for nonviolent resistance. The idea was to try to chart the ideal course of the “liberal-progressive individual,” moving beyond passive reliance on electoral politics, and becoming radicalized for engagement with grassroots community activism under conditions of political struggle.
The total set of these reflections on power and politics got me thinking more deeply about the nature of civil society per se, and especially in relation to the prospects for counter-hegemony. In this present series, I have sought to move away from the prior focus on individuals. Instead, the focus here has been more about the nature of the civil society (and the social solidarity that can generally be found there) as a potential touchstone for how to think about center-left coalition building after the apparent end of “liberal post-politics.”
After recognizing the urgent need to “return to politics” one also quickly realizes that there are a number of competing ideas circulating about how we should understand political action today. But if we are seeking the basis for an effective and broad-based center-left coalition-building, it stands to reason that both leftists and centrist ideas and convictions need somehow to be harmonized if this is to occur. It should be possible to stand for a reinvigorated American civic nationalism, with renewed “thin solidarity” across class divides, while also recognizing at the same time the need to organize a leftist/new social movement coalition for nonviolent political struggle against the dominant class hegemony.
Over the course of the present series of articles, I have tried to see if I could “make the case” for a reinvigorated civic nationalism on the one hand, and then an agonistic or radical democracy on the other, by drawing out the contrast between Theda Skocpol and Chantal Mouffe, whom I consider to be leading exemplars of these two different socio-political impulses. The purpose of doing this was not just simply to “compare and contrast,” however, since I’m convinced that there is no real basis for deciding between what are essentially two distinct (and thus not necessarily incompatible) political orientations.
Instead, as I indicated, my interest was to look at the two political tendencies as resting upon different underlying interpretations of Antonio Gramsci’s account of civil society and the functioning of hegemony. This effort allows for a sifting and sorting of these two standpoints in order to show how they might be harmonized in the service of a center-left reinvigoration/radicalization of republican democracy.
In order to avoid more of this sort of peering into the abyss, it’s helpful to take a step away from theory and move in the direction of practice.
The implicit civic nationalism and constitutional patriotism of Theda Skocpol, resting on a thin-hegemonic understanding of civil society, calls forth a commitment to a renewal of cross-class fellowship, what I’ve been calling a restoration of the prior liberal détente that was more or less in effect for most of the twentieth century. If we need to ask ourselves what this previous liberal hegemony was all about, I have an example which more or less cuts right to the chase. There’s a scene of Vilgot Sjöman’s 1967 Swedish landmark softcore film, “I am Curious (Yellow)” where the young political activist Lena is wandering around Stockholm with a microphone asking people on the street, “Is there a class system in Sweden?” Lena is met with a full range of short answers from passersby, some more thoughtful than others, but all quite uncomfortable. But at the end of the sequence, a well-to-do-looking gentleman says, “There can’t be a class system. We live in a democratic society!”
Where Skocpol seeks to answer the question of how we might re-establish some measure of what she calls cross-class fellowship, she points to examples where membership organizations and professional advocacy groups are seen working together, cutting across traditional divides between labor and community-based organizing. The AFL-CIO’s “new unionism” in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, she says, was working to combine grassroots community organizing with labor organizing while moving into new kinds of workplaces. In so doing, it was welcoming women and minorities historically marginalized in union bureaucracies, as well as college students, religious organizations, and social movement activists.
By contrast, Chantal Mouffe begins with a highly thick set of hegemonic assumptions: society as a whole is never really society as a whole, because society is in fact what Cornelius Castoriadis called an “imaginary institution.” And since society as totality is really a null set, social identities are precarious, and stand in relation to one another antagonistically. This antagonism gives rise to the essential terrain of politics, where the movement from articulation of singular identities/needs to group antagonism defines the space for the working of hegemony.
In this account, where political legitimacy is everywhere without any rationally normative foundations, consent can be at best only putative, since it is only ever given against a backdrop of coercion. The idealizations supporting democratic institutions and governmentality are just another form of subjection.
Mouffe’s project of radical democracy is the attempt to get from the conditions of social and political antagonism to something that amounts to a defense and promotion of the norms of properly democratic socio-political legitimation. The whole effort of distinguishing agonism from antagonism (where the antagonists are adversaries rather than enemies) is in the service of what she describes as the need “to establish a we/they discrimination in a manner compatible with pluralism.”
But her frequent equivocation between thick and thin/liberation hegemony in this effort stands as a strong indicator that it really doesn’t work. As I tried to make clear in the prior article in this series, you can’t get to something like a defense of modern liberal, republican democracy from Mouffe’s thick hegemonist account of democratic popular sovereignty.
How then, she asks, do we get from pluralism to “the construction of a people,” what she identifies as “a collective will that results from the mobilization of common affects in defense of equality and social justice”?
The question sounds a lot like the framing we would expect to find on the part of a proponent of constitutional patriotism backed by a history and tradition of civic nationalism. And the answers she gives turn out to be rather indistinguishable from the thin hegemonic view of civil society and the so-called “war of position” in counter-hegemonic struggle that undergirds the socio-political impulses of Theda Skocpol and others similarly positioned.
James C. Scott’s symbolic-interactionist brand of cultural anthropology is a good example of the sort of “down to earth” account of hegemony we are needing at this juncture.
Gramsci’s war of position, Mouffe herself writes, gives us a resource: “it is necessary to broaden the domain of the exercise of democratic rights beyond the traditional field of citizenship…the logic of democracy cannot be sufficient for the formulation of a hegemonic project because the multiplication of political spaces and the prevention of concentrations of power are preconditions for democratic transformations.”
In my view, given that both Theda Skocpol and Chantal Mouffe would agree with this last sentiment wholly, without reservation, and in the same way, it seems possible to move on (at last) to an account of center-left counter-hegemonic practice that renews liberal civic nationalism–but with a more radical class consciousness.
The Post-Structuralist Concept of Hegemony, Revisited
As I have recalled several times in the course of this series, the “stubborn persistence” of Western capitalist economies deep into the twentieth century (i.e., long after the Russian revolution) led to a double crisis on the Left—on the one hand, a political crisis of socialism itself, which could no longer maintain the centrality of the working class and the role of the revolution as the founding moment of the unitary transition to a utopian, classless society.
On the other hand, a closely related (and underlying) theoretical crisis. Since the capitalist economies and dominant class hegemony will not collapse on their own in the unfolding of a necessary historical dialectic, we require a new appraisal of the working of hegemony, civil society, and the state. As David Forgacs has written, under this post-Marxist scrutiny, civil society becomes “the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”
As far back as Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe are quite explicit in their understanding of hegemony as a sort of paradoxical, “non-philosophical, non-concept,” as a term that, first and foremost, marks the failure of the Marxist philosophical concept to lay hold of its object (the concept of society as a whole).
“The concept of hegemony arose,” they wrote, “to fill a hiatus that had opened in the chain of historical necessity. The contexts in which the concept appear will be those of a fault, of a fissure that had to be filled up, of a contingency that had to be overcome. Hegemony will be not the majestic unfolding of an identity, but the response to a crisis.”
What kind of a concept is a crisis concept? For Laclau and Mouffe, theorizing hegemony after Gramsci is an adventure in post-Marxism understood as both structural Marxism and post-structuralism. It’s for this reason that we get statements like, “…using somewhat freely an expression of Foucault, we could say that our aim is to establish the archaeology of a silence.” Or “hegemony will allude to an absent totality.” Or finally, hegemony refers to a “logic of the contingent,” one that stemmed from “the fracture and withdrawal to the explanatory horizon of the social, of the category of historical necessity…”.
At the end of the prior article on Chantal Mouffe, I expressed my palpable distaste for this stuff. In my view, it’s really for the best when philosophers, (having recognized the effects of a certain theoretical poverty) decide to turn and look elsewhere for an alternative set of methods–like sociology or cultural anthropology, for example–before succumbing instead to language mysticism and what is effectively a species of negative theology.
In order to avoid more of this sort of peering into the abyss, it’s helpful to take a step away from theory and move in the direction of practice. So before turning at last to Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches for ideas about how to bring civic nationalists and radical democracy populists together on the terrain of thin hegemony, therefore, a quick detour through anthropologist James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, can help to bring hegemony back down to earth.
On the Social Production of “Hegemonic Appearances”
James C. Scott’s symbolic-interactionist brand of cultural anthropology is a good example of the sort of “down to earth” account of hegemony we are needing at this juncture. In Domination & the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Scott looks very concretely at processes of hegemonic incorporation, the processes by which dominant cultural groups win putative consent from the mass of subordinate groupings. By looking at social domination through the lens of what he calls “the dramaturgy of power” in displays of hegemonic public conduct, Scott works to confirm the existence of resistance to power in what he calls “hidden transcripts.”
If we consider how processes of domination actually work, Scott says, several things become apparent. First, domination does not persist on its own momentum—inasmuch as it involves the use of power to extract things like work, production, services, etc., it generates considerable friction, and can be sustained only by continuous efforts. Next, a good part of this effort consists in the “symbolization of domination” by “demonstrations and enactments of power” because the powerful have a vital interest in keeping up appearances.
So when we examine cases of what he calls this “dramaturgy of power,” we find a record of what Scott calls “the public transcript” which is a self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves be seen. It’s all about being publicly impressive in order to naturalize their power and to conceal or euphemize the dirty linen of their rule. Along with this record of hegemonic public conduct, however, Scott says, we can also discern (in various kinds of artifacts) what he calls the hidden transcript, which is “a backstage discourse consisting of what cannot be spoken in the face of power.”
We are in danger of making a serious mistake, Scott writes, “whenever we infer anything at all about the beliefs or attitudes of anyone solely on the basis that he or she has engaged in an apparently deferential act.” So while the powerful are interested in regular symbolic demonstrations of power, in order to maintain dominance, and subordinates, for their part, have some pretty good (highly pragmatic) reasons to help sustain those appearances, or at least to avoid publicly contradicting them, what Scott calls the “self-dramatization of domination” may actually exert more rhetorical force among the leading actors themselves than among the far more numerous bit players.
Scott’s particular version of “thick and thin” is laser focused on the plausibility of different intonations of false consciousness.
Also, because subordinate groups tend to have a fairly extensive “offstage social existence” in contexts of large-scale structures of domination, this means that they also have the opportunity to develop shared critiques of power. When we pay attention to the political such that we are focused neither on the command performances of consent, nor cases of open rebellion, but rather upon “political acts that are disguised or offstage” we begin to discern and map a realm of possible dissent.
Scott’s basic point here is that the hegemonic dramaturgy of power, with its public displays of domination and its concomitant public displays of putative consent are not the whole story. There are also what he calls the hidden transcript, which he goes on to identify as the “privileged site for non-hegemonic, contrapuntal, dissident, and subversive discourse.” Once these social facts are recognized (public hegemonic display coupled with only apparent public consent) we can also see important consequences for the analysis of power relations.
Reliance on the so-called public record alone provides a stream of evidence that tends to support thick hegemonic accounts of conforming behavior. As such, it feeds into the narratives of false consciousness as a preferred explanation, for example, for the relative quiescence of the Western working class despite the provocations of inequality, and their apparent access to the political remedies that might be provided at the ballot box.
Scott is thus a significant critic of what I’ve been referring to in this series of articles as the thick theory of hegemony. But where I previously rejected thick hegemony in my account of the agonistic democracy of Chantal Mouffe in the last article (because it precludes even the minimal normative idealizations necessary for modern liberal democracy) Scott rejects it because it relies on a two-dimensional, or overly abstract view of actual socio-political actors under conditions of domination. “The problem with the hegemonic thesis, at least in its strong forms proposed by some of Gramsci’s successors,” Scott writes, “is that it is difficult to explain how social change could ever originate from below.”
It is interesting to note that Scott also rejects what he considers to be the leading account of thin hegemony as well.
Scott’s particular version of “thick and thin” is laser focused on the plausibility of different intonations of false consciousness. In the thick version (which he rejects outright) the dominant ideology “works its magic by persuading subordinate groups to believe actively in the values that explain and justify their own subordination.” Here the operation of ideological state apparatuses, he writes, “such as schools, churches, the media, and even parliamentary democracy” exercise a near monopoly over the symbolic means of production. In “constituting subjects” as a Foucauldian would say, their ideological work secures the active consent of subordinate groups to the social arrangements that reproduce their subordination.
By contrast, the thin version of false consciousness, he says, maintains that the dominant ideology “achieves compliance by convincing subordinate groups that the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable.” Under this version, ideological domination defines for subordinate groups “what is realistic, and what is not, and to drive certain aspirations and grievances into the realm of the impossible, of idle dreams.” The thick theory, Scott concludes, “claims consent” while the thin theory “settles for resignation.”
The thin theory is more persuasive, Scott writes, because it claims nothing beyond the acceptance of inevitability (and thus results only in a kind of fatalism). But even this account of false consciousness, as the successful naturalization of the dominant order, is too thickly deterministic for Scott, for whom “the historical achievement of popular imagination to negate the existing social order” is something pretty much ubiquitous. Since the inability of subordinate groups to imagine a counterfactual social order is not an obstacle to resistance, Scott reasons, such groups are not in fact “paralyzed by an elite-fostered discourse intended to convince them that efforts to change their situation are hopeless.”
A “Paper-Thin” Theory of Hegemony
Scott’s main focus in Domination & the Arts of Resistance is upon what he calls “the social production of hegemonic appearances,” as an antidote to thick hegemonic tendencies that he thinks misleadingly accept “the public transcript” about relations between dominant and subordinate groups. Per Scott, an ideological hegemony under which subordinate groups actually believe the content of what Scott calls “the public transcript” of the elite groups can only be seen to occur at all under two very specific sets of conditions.
To the extent that some measure of real social mobility exists (where there is a strong probability that a good many subordinates will eventually occupy positions of power) then you also find subordinates buying in to the dominant narratives. For our purposes, one could say that this is the ideal condition of the prior liberal hegemony (if you work hard, anybody can make it here, because the playing field is sufficiently level). The other set of conditions have to do with a dystopian social condition under which there is “total panopticon-like surveillance, effectively eliminating the possibility of the hidden transcript (see China, see Uighurs).
Given these narrow restrictions (designed to protect his conviction that individual and groups are capable of agency even under conditions of extreme domination) how do we then explain the apparent effects of cultural hegemony?
Scott’s main point, repeated throughout the book, is that subordinate groups (as well as dominant groups) actually have strategic reasons for the things they say and do as part of the public transcript, and so should not be taken at face value. Subordinates, Scott writes, “have a vested interest in avoiding any explicit displays of insubordination while maintaining a practical interest in resistance. The reconciliation of these objectives is achieved by pursuing those forms of resistance that avoid any open confrontation with the structures of authority.”
If you are seeking an easy-to-grasp example, consider the experience and culture (and thus the strategy) of African-Americans with respect to social resistance that existed prior to the gains of the civil rights movement. Then consider that of the younger generation after it, who, due to hard fought advances, then found themselves in a position to categorically refuse the prior markers of deference (such as repeated bowing, smiling broadly, etc.).
Scott’s account of thin hegemony brings us into the vicinity of a breakthrough with respect to thinking about the trenches of civil society.
What we get here, with Scott’s “paper-thin” account of hegemony, is an illuminating way of looking at Gramsci’s trenches–the war of position in the civil society between subordinate groups and the systems of domination in which they live and work. The war of position is the constant face-off between the dominant group’s investments in hegemony by means of the public transcript (the set of things that they do and say, directly and by proxy to publicly defend the socio-cultural and political legitimacy of their dominance) and the strategic ways in which “resistance is cloaked in rituals of subordination in order to provide a ready route to retreat that may soften the consequences of a possible failure.”
Scott’s intentions with this super thin theory (subordinate groups are faking their hegemonic incorporation) are quite similar to those of Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—like them, he also wants us to be able to understand the functioning of hegemony outside the framework of what Marxist “class essentialism” in which the working class is regarded as a singular, revolutionary agent of history.
This is why Scott’s primary target in the book is the doctrine of false consciousness. He wants to get beyond the mentality in which “the working class under capitalism is seen as being involved in “concrete struggles with revolutionary implications, but because it is in the thrall of hegemonic social thought, is unable to draw revolutionary conclusions from its actions.” The point of making this departure is to be able to locate a counter-hegemonic potential in forms life and experience that depart from orthodox Marxist notions of class consciousness per se in order to promote the liberation potential to be found in the trenches of civil society.
As much as I hate to admit it, Scott’s “paper-thin hegemony,” with its characterization of what turn out to be merely hegemonic appearances (and allowing for only the most limited cases of false consciousness on the part of subordinate groups) may in fact be too thin even for me. It’s one thing to want to reserve conceptual space for voluntarism, for normative idealizations that guide human action, and then emancipatory possibilities for concrete individual and collective agency. It’s another thing to have a conception of ideological domination that is so narrow that the myriad ways that power/knowledge constitute social subjects becomes systematically under-determined.
This being said, Scott’s account of thin hegemony brings us into the vicinity of a breakthrough with respect to thinking about the trenches of civil society in a way that supports a center-left, counter-hegemonic practice. One that provides us with an understanding of civic solidarity that can unite both liberal de-polarizers and social movement activists ready to contest for political power. His “paper-thin” version of hegemony reinforces a fulsome picture of what it means to employ the metaphor of a war of position and trench warfare to describe the working of hegemony in civil society.
The war of position is not univocally about the persistence of the capitalist state via the complex network of trenches through which the dominant class’s thick hegemony permeates the civil society. As I quoted from David Forgacs earlier, “Gramsci’s picture of civil society is at once the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”
But what does it take, therefore, to shape resistance into an effective, counter-hegemonic practice? To answer this, we still need a way to re-think the unique dynamic of American class consciousness and the trenches of civil society.
In the fifth and concluding article in this series, “City Trenches & Counter-Hegemonic Practice,” I read through Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States as a way to get to a plausible answer to this question. I further argue that Katznelson’s take on civil society and counter-hegemony points the way to an account of center-left solidarity that can both renew liberal civic nationalism and also support a more radical class consciousness in the service of what Chantal Mouffe calls “radical democracy.”
