Silencing the Other. Hegemons and Subalterns
This section reviews the idea of alterity , prefacing analyses of the instantiations of selfhood/otherness at the level of the literary productions of the twenty-first century, dealing with the concepts of hegemony and subalternity, and with the means by which the more powerful manages to silence the weaker. The assessment of these concepts stems from the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who re(de)fined their Marxist-Leninist understanding in a manner later found appealing and useful by many postcolonial theorists. Gramsci’s writings on hegemony (and on its role within a social national environment) are expanded by a number of scholars in subaltern studies so as to encompass wider, international relations (between states), an idea that has been deemed applicable to the present case.
In view of the renewed understanding of the concept in focus, it seems appropriate to state that, long before its current usage, the term ‘hegemony’ was used in relation to ancient geopolitical realities. Even today, any historical writing on Ancient Greece is bound to feature a sentence of the kind: in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the city-states Athens, Sparta and Thebes were competing for hegemony. The literal meaning of hegemony in this context is leadership, and it is meant to denote ‘a limited control and influence [over] the subject [that] retained much autonomy’ (Ives 2004, 63). The meaning remained unchanged over the centuries and millennia, and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, that the Russian followers of Marx and Engels gave the term a new meaning which Peter Ives, American professor of Political Sciences, author of an interdisciplinary work on Gramsci’s political theory from a linguistic perspective (2004), claims constituted the foundation for Gramsci’s writings on the matter (63). While the Russian communists theorised hegemony as an alliance of the working class and the peasantry which was to secure power against the bourgeoisie and the nobility, Gramsci retains the idea of alliance, but takes it to another level—one whose key word is neither force, nor imposition, but consent.
Mention should be made at this point that Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony—and especially of cultural hegemonies—was never systematised and articulated as a theory: the writings of the Italian communist politician, shaped while he was imprisoned in a fascist prison (1929–1935), were collected and edited in the 1950s and translated into English in 1971 by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. The present review also cites from a more recent Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs (2000), in which the works under the lens, culled as Selected Prison Notebooks (henceforth, SPN), were annotated and adapted from the 1971 translation.
In the chapter ‘Ideology, Politics , Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe’, included in Slavoj Žižek’s influential volume Mapping Ideologies (1994), Michèle Barret explains the Gramscian idea of hegemony as an organisation of consent, as the processes ‘through which subordinated forms of consciousness are constructed without recourse to violence and coercion’ (1994, 238). As she notes , Gramsci’s particular interest lay in explaining how popular culture and knowledge secure the participation of the masses in the ruling bloc—which is, par excellence, a socialist concept and aim. Therefore, in Gramsci’s view, apart from political implications, hegemony comes also to signify the cultural and moral leadership of the state over the subaltern classes. The state should not be understood only as a sphere of domination (in Marxist-Leninist terms), as a gendarme or night-watchman, but rather as an organism which integrates both coercion and consent, that is to say, as a combination between the executive apparatus and civil society:It contains both the apparatuses of government and the judiciary and the various voluntary and private associations and para-political institutions which make up civil society. In this wider sense, the state possesses educative and ethical functions. (Forgacs 2000, 430)
Civil society is represented, according to Gramsci, by schools, churches, clubs, journals and political parties, which constitute a playground for intellectuals to share ideas, thus contributing to the formation of a coherent Weltanschauung (worldview). He draws his inspiration from Hegel, for whom society is divided into three spheres: family, state and civil society, where the last is:the realm of individuals, outside of family units, who enter into interactions that are competitive, especially those involving economic activity, [and] the distinctively modern realm that is neither public nor private strictly speaking, but is the social world where individuals attempt to meet their particular needs. (Ives 2004, 117)
Part and parcel of the civil society, the intellectuals succeed in creating hegemony if they ‘extend the worldview of the rulers to the ruled, and thereby secure the free consent of the masses to the law and order of the land’, as Thomas R. Bates explains in an extended article on Gramsci and the theory of hegemony (1975, 353). This shared worldview would then result in social unity, the one and only way, in the Italian theorist’s view, to achieve the awareness of a sense of belonging. Subalterns or ‘the ruled’ should not be construed as subjugated, but instead as integrated (Gramsci’s phrasing is ‘collective man’), not by coercive means, as would be the case with an imposed ideology , but by their own consent:An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular . (Gramsci in Forgacs 2000, 348)
In relation to this apparent dichotomy between coercion and consent, Terry Eagleton remarks that, while Gramsci usually uses the notion of hegemony to express the ways in which the hegemonic powers acquire consent from their subalterns, he sometimes also keeps compulsion and imposition in view, which would make the definition of hegemony overlap that of ideology (1991, 112). However, the British theorist asserts that, in fact, hegemony is not reducible to ideology , and actually represents a broader category, which includes ideology , because, as he explains, hegemony may be ‘discriminated into its various ideological, cultural, political and economic aspects’ (113). An example of hegemonic governance—that is, one having an interest in acquiring control and dominance at all the levels mentioned—is, in the opinion of another important British leftist critical theorist, Stuart Hall, the Thatcherite regime, whose ‘aim [was] to struggle on several fronts at once, not on the economic-corporate one alone; and this [was] based on the knowledge that, in order really to dominate and restructure a social formation, political, moral and intellectual leadership [had to] be coupled to economic dominance. The Thatcherites [knew] they [had to] ‘win’ in civil society as well as in the state’ (1985, 119, qtd. in Žižek 1994, 244). It is indeed easy to notice that, in fact, all domineering state structures except for those openly based on force—that is, political, military and/or religious dictatorships—actually abide by this subtle, inclusive and intricate form of imposing their authority, and that the discussion may be extended from intrastate to interstate structures. It has become, for instance, commonplace, ever since the Cold War, to speak about the American hegemony over Western civilisation (and not that only), and to acknowledge that American influence is rooted in both political-economic and cultural domination.
Gramsci limited his demonstrations to inner social structures. His notion of the subaltern does not make reference to other states, but only to social groups (the working class, the peasantry and even slaves, where applicable), religious and ethnic groups, as well as women. As far as the last category is concerned, Gramsci argues that ‘the formation of a new feminine personality is the most important question of an ethical and civil order’ and that women must ‘attain a genuine independence in relation to men’ (1971, 296).
A widespread oversimplification among the researchers who studied SPN asserts that the term ‘subaltern’ is a euphemism for ‘proletariat’, used to avoid the censorship of Marxist terminology in prison. Making use of quote
s from David Arnold, Gayatri Spivak and John Beverley, Marcus E. Green, editor of the book Rethinking Gramsci (2010) and of an important number of articles on the writings of the Italian theorist, demonstrates that this hypothesis cannot be valid, since Gramsci actually employed the term proletariat many times in his texts (2011, 392). Moreover, he asserts that this misconception would, in fact, completely annul Gramsci’s contribution to postcolonial and subaltern studies. Green pinpoints the paragraphs that prove Gramsci’s concern with a wider category of people, regarded as subaltern, and, in so doing, re-establishes this connection between the Italian theorist of politics and postcolonialism . He remarks that Gramsci addresses the issues of identity and otherness in the construction of subalternity and the politics of exclusion by making reference to races, or to people of different cultures and religions:Subalternity was not merely defined by class relations but rather an intersection of class, race, culture, and religion that functioned in different modalities in specific historical contexts. The focus on identity and otherness also concerns the issue of constructing categories of identity that provide the basis to exclude particular groups from participating in dominant political organizations and the practical difficulty associated with developing subaltern political organizations. This also suggests that Gramsci recognized that constructed categories of identity provided the basis for relations of inequality and exclusion and in turn produced the subaltern as the marginalized Other. (395)
In Gramsci’s view, such groups lack a coherent overall perspective, having only an embryonic conception and the ability to express themselves in actions rather than in words and thoughts, which is the reason why they consent to be ruled and adopt values and attitudes transmitted to them through language, religious ideas and institutions, school systems, folklore, family structures, tradition and ‘common sense’ (Ives 2004, 81). A similar idea was suggested, some years later, by Michel Foucault , who has often been compared to Gramsci . For both, politics and power are not restricted to government, the police, the army and the judicial system but are also in close connection with daily lives in educational, military, religious and even medical contexts. The difference between the two views is that, while Gramsci speaks about a consent originating in the intellectual inability of the subordinated/subaltern, the French theorist attributes subjection to the fear of surveillance and punishment.
However, there are at least two ways in which Antonio Gramsci’s writings are relevant to the present discussion. On the one hand, it is difficult to confute his arguments in regard to the effects civil society and its institutions have on the formation of the social (and national) identity. Similarly, it is undeniable that language plays a highly significant role in influencing/manipulating people—and thus Gramsci’s take on language may be placed in relation to any of the three types of discourse discussed in the chapters dedicated to text analysis. The Italian theorist regards language as a means of making sense of the world, a vehicle for philosophy and epistemology, central to political thinking but also to politics in a broader sense of the term—for him, politics is both science and art. Moreover, he discusses the impact of language and culture on the formation of national identity through a number of elements that are worth listing here, and out of which at least four are applicable to this undertaking:1.the education system;
2.newspapers;
3.artistic writers and popular writers;
4.the theatre and sound films;
5.radio;
6.public meetings of all kinds, including religious ones;
7.the relations of conversation between the more educated and less educated strata of the population […];
8.local dialects. (Gramsci in Forgacs 2000, 356)
Also of interest is the imagological reading avant-la-lettre, applied by Gramsci to a number of successful nineteenth-century novels. He notes an aversion for the English in all the types of French popular novels, which he connects, in historicist vein, with the long-lasting competition and animosities between the two European powers:One can observe how in the overall production of each country there is an implicit nationalism, not rhetorically expressed, but skilfully insinuated into the story. In Verne and the French there is a very deep anti-English feeling, related to the loss of the colonies and the humiliating naval defeats. In the geographical adventure novel the French do not clash with the Germans but with the English. But there is also an anti-English feeling in the historical novel and even in the sentimental novel (e.g. George Sand). (Reaction due to the Hundred Years’ War and the killing of Joan of Arc and to the defeat of Napoleon). (371)
On the other hand, despite their original social and mostly intra-national applicability, Antonio Gramsci’s writings on hegemony and subalternity constitute a starting point for many theorists of neocolonialism and imperialism who adopt and adapt them so as to meet their end: that of demonstrating some states/powers’ prevalence, influence or hegemony over others’ . Such is the case of the United States of America, which is why, when discussing concepts like ‘McDonaldization or ‘McWorld’, ‘coca-colonization’, ‘Disneyization’—all used to ‘colour’ Americanisation , or its imperialist/globalist/expansionist tendencies—one should refer to Gramsci’s cultural hegemonies and to the way they are employed to acquire peaceful consent from the others rather than to carry out any ideological impositions of force.1
Stereotyping the Self and the Other
This discussion of Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony is intended as an introduction to a conceptualisation of an inner form of alterity (concerning the international level), in which the two elements of the dichotomic pair selfhood/otherness are not as distinct from one another as they are (or have been described as being) in the context of the colonialist power relations. Overlapping the idea of consensual hegemony with the newer theories on imperialism , it may be assumed that, at the level of contemporary international relations, the United States may be seen as considering itself as the hegemonic self, with a superior stance that dominates practically any subaltern other, including the former colonial European powers that contributed to its coming into existence in the past. Conversely, it may also be considered that the hegemonic Other triggers reactions similar to those the colonised had towards their colonisers/invaders. This relation between America as the hegemon and the European countries as subalterns has gradually led to a paradigm shift in the anti-American sentiment that has prevailed among Europeans since the foundation of the United States as an independent republic.2 This attitude has shifted from one of cultural and historical superiority to one of dependence and unaccepted/unacceptable inferiority. The theoretical approach envisaged as the best option for understanding the representations of the Americans in British contemporary literature is imagology , the branch of comparative literary studies that deals with the ‘discursive representation of a person, a group, ethnicity or nation’ (Leerssen 2007, 342).
In ‘Imagology: History and Method’ (2007, 27–9), Joep Leerssen synthesises a few principles meant to create a methodological frame for an imagological analysis. Thus, what needs to be stated from the beginning is that imagology is a theory of national stereotypes and not one of national identity, being concerned with representations . The attributes of a given nation are not anthropological or sociological data but textual tropes circulating in a certain context , from the perspective of the ‘spectant’ (examiner). The analyst should bear in mind that imagology addresses a set of characteristics outside factual statements. An imagological analysis begins from the identification of the intertextual connections of the national representation as a trope: ‘What is the tradition of the trope? What traditions of appreciation or depreciation are there, and how do these two relate historically?’ (2007, 28) Furthermore, the trope must be integrated in its context of occurrence with respect to the type of text that contains it (narrative , descriptive, humorous, propagandistic, and so on), the audience targeted and the historical background at the moment of text production and/or reception. What has t
o be further taken into account is the so-called ‘hetero-imageme’ or national cliché, but also the ‘auto-image’, the representation which the ‘examining I’ has acquired about his/her own nation.
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