I wrote this review essay about the book Posthegemony
by my friend and colleague Jon Beasley-Murray over three years ago, for the
book launch we had at UBC. I then put it aside hoping to turn it, at some
point, into a longer journal article. But, alas, I never found the time.
It’s time to share it here.
Jon
Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America is a bold,
groundbreaking proposition to abandon the concept of hegemony that may allow
us, ironically, to re-politicize our understanding of hegemony by redefining it
as an affective formation. Some clues about this direction are on the book’s title,
an intriguing one given that this is a work committed to philosophies of
affirmation. Posthegemony, after all,
is a term that seeks to move beyond, and thereby to negate, “hegemony.” Indeed,
Beasley-Murray critically dissects the concept of hegemony in order to shows
how its alleged rationalism, its transcendent connotations, and its emphasis on
ideology and representation cannot account for the affective,
non-representational, and habitual dimensions that are immanent to political
forces. And he suggests that we abandon the concept altogether, for we live (always
have) in post-hegemonic times. This negative gesture against hegemony is thus articulated
as an affirmation of concepts such as affect, immanence, habit, and the multitude.
Yet “hegemony” is still on the title. Preceded by the “post,” the concept that is
so thoroughly negated in the book is still present, as if Beasley-Murray were drawn
to it through a Hegelian sublation that can only (wish to) destroy a concept by
preserving it. This oscillation between distancing and incorporation, destruction
and appropriation, pervades the entire book and reveals, I propose here, that Posthegemony is, against itself, a call
for an affective understanding of hegemony.
Beasley-Murray’s main argument is that we should
leave behind transcendent notions of hegemony as limit, pressure, ideological
representation, and negation, as something that a transcendent state imposes on
“the people” from the distance. He advocates, rather, an immanent, affective,
and affirmative approach to politics based on the corporality of multitudes
that come together through resonance yet may also resist change through the
force of habits. And Beasley-Murray elaborates this approach through a detailed
engagement with multiple bodies of literature: cultural studies, civil society
theorists, studies of populism, and the work of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze,
Antonio Negri, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. More importantly, he grounds
his argument on an intricate, impassionate examination of the political-affective
terrains of twentieth-century Latin America: the affective resonances that made
people support Juan Domingo Perón’s government in Argentina or join the FMLN
guerrillas in El Salvador; the elusive, hard-to-represent nature of the Shinning
Path guerrillas in Peru; the force of habituation in the resilience of attitudes
forged in the Pinochet-era that lingered in post-dictatorship Chile. These historical,
political, and conceptual dimensions make of Posthegemony a book of great originality and theoretical importance
that is stimulating debates on multiple fronts.
Yet
this is also a book that may reinvigorate the concept of hegemony by re-reading
it through an affective lens. Beasley-Murray will certainly protest. It is
clear that he does not want to revitalize
the notion of hegemony at all. Yet in the pages that follow, I suggest that the
notion of “affective hegemonies” may allow us to do this: i.e. to reveal the
convergence between Beasley-Murray’s argument about affective politics and
Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as a field of contestation that involves,
primarily, a struggle to define the contours of dominant forms of common sense.
This
is why one of the most fascinating aspects of Posthegemony is Beasley-Murray’s masterful silencing of Gramsci. The
book certainly begins by tackling Gramsci head on, naming the name that had to
be named. The problem to be deconstructed in the rest of the book is clearly stated
at the beginning of chapter one. Gramsci, we are told, says that no power can
subsist on “coercion” alone, that domination needs “consensus,” that consensus
is the bedrock of politics, and that power relies on violence only as
supplement. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is thereby presented by Beasley-Murray
as a theory of “consensus” structured by a neat opposition between consent and
coercion. And after being briefly presented in such a way, Gramsci disappears from
the text, not to be engaged again in a book devoted to debunking the idea of
hegemony once and for all.
As
a result, as I was reading Posthegemony
I kept looking for Gramsci and kept stumbling upon the cultural studies
literature and the work of Ernesto Laclau, who in the text becomes Gramsci’s Argentine
ventriloquist. Laclau is in Posthegemony
the body through which the absent ghost of Gramsci seems to speak. But is this
the voice of Gramsci? While reading the book, I was initially perplexed by this
absence. Because Posthegemony is not
just any book: it is a very ambitious intellectual project built upon a
relentless, thorough, very careful reading of vast bodies of work. Every time Beasley-Murray
engages with an author (be it Hall, Laclau, Bourdieu, or Deleuze), he dissects
their ideas from the inside out. Gramsci, in contrast, is invoked briefly and
in passing. Beasley-Murray read the cultural studies literature so thoroughly
that the Gramsci he objects to is the one invoked, largely, in British and
North American academia. Could it be that, in not confronting Gramsci, Beasley-Murray
was paying oblique homage to the man who first thought about the very problems that
Posthegemony seeks to understand?
A
brief line in the book hints in that direction. In Chapter one, Beasley-Murray
convincingly argues that in order to understand Laclau’s theory of hegemony and
his views of populism it is crucial to take into account that he produced those
ideas in the Argentina of the 1960s (p. 42). And Beasley-Murray adds in passing,
before coming back to Laclau, that the same applies to Gramsci: that his theorization
of hegemony was inseparable from his experience as a revolutionary leader and
thinker in the fascist Italy of the 1920s and 1930s. This was a remarkable
moment in the book, in which Gramsci is briefly evoked in the text to remind us
of the political, geographical, and historical terrains that made him write
about hegemony. Indeed,
this historical and positioning is crucial to understanding Gramsci’s thinking
on hegemony. As is well known, his Prison Notebooks were produced under
extremely difficult conditions in a fascist prison cell, aggravated by his weak
health. And these adverse conditions prompted Gramsci to articulate an affirmative theory of hegemony, evocatively
embodied in his emphasis on an “optimism of the will” that could counter the
“pessimism of the intellect.”
Gramsci’s primary goal as a revolutionary leader and thinker was
to create a socialist hegemony in Italy. Hegemony was for him goal,
affirmation, positivity: something to be fought
for. The goal of the Italian Communist Party was to persuade the Italian multitudes
that communism was the common sense of the subaltern classes through a confrontation
that was as political-ideological as it was cultural and tied to what counts as
“common sense.” Gramsci was particularly interested in analyzing the failure of the Italian bourgeoisie,
relative to other national bourgeoisies in Europe, to create political hegemony
in the whole space of the Italian peninsula, which prevented the consolidation of
a unified nation-state until the late 1800s. In Gramsci, this expansive view of hegemony took precedence over his own view of hegemony as negation, limit, and constraint.
Yet the historical and political conditions under which English-speaking
scholars read Gramsci in North America and western Europe in the 1970s and
1980s, in a context of conservative restoration, made them prioritize the
latter view of hegemony, as consensus and limit that erodes radical politics.
Beasley-Murray
may counter-argue that Gramsci still advocated a
conception of hegemony based on ideology and discourse, without looking at the
affects and habits that make multitudes resonate (or not). And Beasley-Murray
is here partly right. The strength of Posthegemony
is its forceful call for an affective understanding of the non-representational
forces that make ordinary men and women join certain causes or support
particular governments. But I would argue that the rudiments of an affective theory
of hegemony are already present in The
Prison Notebooks.
First,
Gramsci shares with Beasley-Murray a commitment to an immanent understanding of
politics that is critical of transcendent reifications. He famously insisted that
the philosophy of praxis should be conceived of as an “absolute historicism,
the absolute earthliness of thought” and explicitly rejected metaphysical
conceptions of materialism removed from historically-grounded, existing social
actors (Gramsci
1971 [1929-35]:465, also 450). And while he did not embrace Spinozian
notions of affect and the body, he did not reduce hegemony to ideology or to conceptual-discursive
representations. For Gramsci, the struggle for hegemony involved contestations over
popular culture and, more importantly, common
sense. This interest in common sense is particularly important because for Gramsci
the struggle for hegemony mobilized not only ideological disputes but also the non-ideological,
subterranean, not-fully-conscious subjective terrains that interest Beasley-Murray.
The starting point for the philosophy of praxis, wrote Gramsci, “must always be
that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude…” (1971
[1929-35]:421). And common sense involved for him the “feeling-passion”
that shapes the relationship between rulers and ruled as well as a naturalized view
of the world that is “the immediate product of crude sensation” (1971
[1929-35]:418, 420, etc.). These ideas are underdeveloped and often
under-theorized. But in arguing that the struggle for hegemony involves a common
sense not reducible to consciousness, Gramsci anticipated some of the points
made in Posthegemony about the
political power of affects and everyday habits.
Additionally,
it is important to note that Beasley-Murray’s argument for abandoning the
notion of hegemony is very different from the position articulated by other
authors who also reject the concept. Derek Sayer, for instance, criticized the idea
of hegemony by arguing that people may not challenge the state not because they
consent to it but because they are aware
of its power to unleash violence and repression. Every state, he concludes, is ultimately
founded not on hegemony but on violence (Sayer
1994). Another well-known critique is that of James Scott (1990), who argued that what we call “hegemony”
is merely the superficial appearance of
consent. For Scott, the oppressed pretend to consent in order to deceive the
powerful, presenting a “public transcript” of acquiescence that hides a “hidden
transcript” of dissent and critical awareness. Sayer and Scott, in other words,
argue that the idea of hegemony is misleading because ordinary people are aware
of their oppression and, deep inside, are free
subjects. As Tim Mitchell (1990) has argued in his critique of Scott, this
perspective assumes the existence of a mind-body dichotomy, in which the bodies
that strategically bow down to the powerful are assumed to be autonomous, free-thinking
subjects unaffected by domination.
Beasley-Murray’s
critique of hegemony, however, does not follow this path. His argument, in fact,
is hostile to utilitarian views of political action such as Sayer’s and to the type
of neat dualism between “public” and “hidden” transcripts proposed by Scott.
Even if he often flirts with the idea that people are, indeed, free and
conscious (as we shall see), Beasley-Murray is well aware that subaltern actors
are bodily, affectively, and subjectively
constituted by formations of power. Unlike Sayer and Scott, and very much
like Gramsci, Beasley-Murray is interested in the problem of the creation of
political legitimacy or, in his words, the reproduction of “social order”: the
subjective constellations that make bodies willingly
rally behind a leader, a political cause, or a government. And this is, at
heart, what the Gramscian theory of hegemony is all about, even if we may
debate the role of discourse, the body, ideology, affect, the working class, or
the multitude in it. Beasley-Murray, tellingly, never questions that Peronism was
hegemonic in the Argentina of the late 1940s and early 1950s. What he takes
issue with are the attempts to explain this hegemony through rationalized,
transcendent concepts (ideology, representation, consciousness) that miss the
affective nature of this hegemony: the fact that millions of men and women
willingly supported President Perón and his wife Evita at an often hard-to-articulate,
affective, intuitive, yet powerful level. This is why Beasley-Murray proposes, if
against himself, an affective theory of hegemony.
Beasley-Murray
may still object that the concept of hegemony is too full of representational baggage
to be redefined this way. But I think we still need a concept of this kind to articulate
this problem, which is one of the most fundamental in politics. The alternative
proposed by Beasley-Murray, post-hegemony,
is still very close, a hyphen away, to the term he tries to conjure away. Why
not just skip the post and rethink the
problem of hegemony along more
affective, immanent, non-representational lines?
The
reason we still need a variation of the Gramscian idea of hegemony is that,
contra Sayer and Scott, throughout history ordinary people have on many
occasions willingly and enthusiastically supported
the political conditions that kept them dominated. This is the same problem that
concerned Spinoza, who famously asked why people would fight for their
servitude as if they were fighting for their freedom (2007
[1670]:6). Spinoza’s answer was that “men are led more by passion
than by reason” and that affects such as fear and hope can, indeed, make people
desire the conditions that reproduce
their own domination (Spinoza
2000:64). Making explicit their debt to Spinoza, this was the question
that Deleuze and Guattari identified in Anti-Oedipus
“as the most fundamental problem of political philosophy” and that they tackled
in their analysis of fascism. “No, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and this is what
has to be explained” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983 [1972]:29, 257, my emphasis). In short, Spinoza and Deleuze and
Guattari anticipated the concerns articulated in Posthegemony about the affective dimensions of politics but without
downplaying the fact that affects fueled by fear can become hegemonic and
naturalized as common sense.
Paradoxically,
Beasley-Murray draws heavily on Spinoza and Deleuze to develop his argument yet,
at the same time, downplays their commitment to examining why social actors may
support the actors that oppress them. This positioning is clearly articulated
in the very first paragraph of Posthegemony,
where Beasley-Murray writes: “There is no hegemony and never has been. We live
in cynical, post-hegemonic times: nobody is very much persuaded by ideologies
that once seemed fundamental to securing social order. Everybody knows, for
instance, that work is exploitation and that politics is deceit” (2010:ix). Beasley-Murray mentions the last phrase
(“everybody knows…”) several times in the book. But what is it exactly that
people “know” and why would such an “awareness” undermine an affective view of
hegemony? Most people in North America, for instance, may know that they are
exploited in their alienating jobs and that politicians lie. But many of them
also believe that capitalism is the best way of organizing production and that
they are free subjects who live in democratic societies. In other words, people
may “know” that work is exploitation and politics is deceit but this cynical
awareness does not mean that they may not naturalize or support the status quo
and thereby contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic dispositions.
Likewise,
the fact that “everybody knows that politics is deceit” did not prevent George W.
Bush from securing unparallel levels of political legitimacy and support in the
United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The narrative of the
“war on terror” amplified by a powerful media machine indeed became hegemonic, accepted
as common sense by millions of Americans. But this was a profoundly affective hegemony,
based on the memory of the attacks on 9/11 and the inculcation of fears modulated
by the media-state complex (Massumi
2005). The affective, visceral power of this hegemony, in fact, explains
its political resilience, and the fact that the American Left failed to
undermine it through rational, factual discourses alone: for instance, by arguing
that Bin Laden had been supported by the CIA in the 1980s or that the terror
attacks were a response to US imperialism in the middle-East. This hegemonic
modulation of collective affects certainly lives on under Obama. The fact that
in the name of fighting “terrorism” Obama legalized the policy of assassination
of US citizens without due process and that this move enjoyed popular support
is a case in point. As Glenn Greenwald put it: “From an authoritarian perspective, that’s
the genius of America’s political culture. It not only finds ways to
obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens
from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens
without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap
and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.” It
is precisely to account for attitudes such as this that the notion of hegemony
remains crucial.
We
are therefore back at the problem that Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Gramsci identified as constitutive of politics. The sections of Posthegemony that emphasize the “cynical
awareness” that allegedly defines mainstream subjectivities seem unable to
explain these willing, non-cynical forms of support for state power and
domination. Yet in other sections of the book, Beasley-Murray moves in a different
direction, acknowledging the forces that constrain people’s willingness to
support radical change and, therefore, the type of problems that made Gramsci
write about hegemony.
One
of the most original contributions of Posthegemony
to an affective theory of hegemony is Beasley-Murray’s re-conceptualization of Bourdieu’s
notion of habit. And in contrast to other parts of the book, the sections on
habit reveal that Beasley-Murray is well aware that relations of power
constitute social subjects and that these subjects may contribute to reproducing their own domination over time. And he
turns to Bourdieu to try to explain this attitude, arguing that not-fully-conscious
forms of bodily habits (“affects at a standstill”) make people resist abrupt
changes. “Old habits die hard” (p. 178). This analysis is developed in the chapter
on Chile, in which Beasley-Murray examines how the transition from dictatorship
to democracy in the 1990s was notably measured and conservative in contrast to
other countries in Latin America, with the military (including the senator-for-life
Augusto Pinochet) retaining key positions of power. Beasley-Murray’s
examination of habitual forces in the reproduction of political legitimacy
provides us with an insightful and in fact fundamental theoretical tool to
examine affective hegemonies; but it also reveals something that Beasley-Murray
disavows: the labor of the negative. The Chilean case, in this regard, reveals
that the force of habits can, indeed, constrain
and negate the possibility of radical political change.
Affective
hegemonies, in this regard, not only produce subjectivities but also limit the
possibility of imagining alternative futures. Affirmative notions of hegemony,
in other words, also need to account for the negativity that is immanent to
politics and collective struggles. As Benjamin Noys (2010) has argued, the recent popularity of
theories of affirmation in the humanities (of which Posthegemony is a major expression) has led to an unfortunate
dismissal of notions of negativity that are fundamental to account for the
destructive-constraining power of capital and the state as well as for the
negation of the status quo by critical and potentially revolutionary action. An
affirmative theory of hegemony, in other words, should account for the
negativity of politics, not as abstract negation or as reactive force but as a
moment in the creative-disruptive generativity that is constitutive of fields
of confrontation (see also
Coole 2000).
And
the same way that an affective theory of hegemony needs to avoid a dualism
between affirmation and negation, it also requires overcoming a rigid
counterpoint between affect and consciously articulated discourses. While Posthegemony puts forth a compelling,
persuasive argument about the political power of affects, it often seems to
suggest that the latter are divorced from discourse, representation, and conscious
forms of ideology. In one of the many moments in which Beasley-Murray presents
this dichotomy, for instance, he writes, “Peronism shows that populist politics
are structured by habit, rather than belief” (2010: 63). But why should habit
exclude belief? The history of Peronism in Argentina, in fact, reveals that the
two dimensions have been entangled, and that for millions of men and women
their conscious endorsement of Peronist social reforms and ideological slogans
(i.e. their “belief” in particular narratives about the nation, the state, and
“the people”) was inseparable from their affective, visceral, intuitive, habitual
support for Perón’s and Evita’s legacy. While notions of ideology as false
consciousness or utilitarian manipulation are certainly too crude, “ideology”
is still a heuristically important concept to examine the legitimizing power of
certain conceptual and affective formations. Another example is the narrative
on “the war on terror” in the United States, which while engaging the public at
affective, not-fully-conscious levels has ideological dimensions linked to the
legitimization of imperial violence overseas and of increasing surveillance at
home. In short, the power of an affective notion of hegemony lies precisely in
its capacity to examine how affect, habit, and ideological narratives come
together to legitimize and naturalize particular relations of power.
There
is much more that could be said about Posthegemony,
a book that in its conceptual, political, and historical breadth defies
summary. But there is no doubt that Beasley-Murray has written a groundbreaking
book that will survive academic fashions and shape debates in years to come,
for it persuasively and originally challenges us to re-think older paradigms
through a new conceptual lens. In Posthegemony,
this exercise in critical thinking is not just a theoretical gesture but a bold
call to reinvent radical politics through an affective and immanent examination,
despite the book’s declared goals, of the ongoing political salience of
Gramsci’s explorations of “hegemony.”
References
Beasley-Murray,
Jon
2010. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin
America. Milwakee: University of Minnesota Press.
Coole, Diana
2000. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and
Dialectics from Kant to Post-structuralism. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari
1983 [1972]. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gramsci, Antonio
1971 [1929-35]. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. New
York:: International Publishers.
Massumi, Brian
2005. "Fear (The
Spectrum Said)". Positions. 13: 31-48.
Mitchell, Timothy
1990. "Everyday
Metaphors of Power". Theory and Society. 19: 545-577.
Noys, Benjamin
2010. The Persistance of the Negative: A Critique
of Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Sayer, Derek
1994. "Everyday
Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on "Hegemony"".
In Everyday Forms of State Formation:
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Joseph Gilbert and
Daniel Nugent, ed. Pp. 367-377. Durham: Duke University Press.
Scott, James
1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance:
Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Spinoza, Baruch
2000. Political Treatise. Indianapolis: Hackett.
2007 [1670]. Theological-Political Treatise.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
