A Lower Theory of Politics: Queering Gramsci's Intellectual PDF

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  A Lower Theory of Politics: Queering Gramsci’s Intellectual Ryan McGuire ENG 199: Directed Studies in English Professor Dustin Friedman 14 December 2012 McGuire  2   Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that ‘I greatly extend the notion of intellectuals, and I do not restrict myself...

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A Lower Theory of Politics: Queering Gramsci’s Intellectual

Ryan McGuire

ENG 199: Directed Studies in English Professor Dustin Friedman 14 December 2012

McGuire 2 

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that ‘I greatly extend the notion of intellectuals, and I do not restrict myself to the current notion which refers to great intellectuals’i. Intellectuals for Gramsci, in other places referred to as ‘philosophers’, can be a description of everyone insofar as everyone has distinct ways of looking at the world, and by the fact that everyone contains the ability to be more critical of that world in which they live. Artists, factory workers, and activists are therefore situated into this grouping, yet Gramsci adds to this that not everyone functions as an intellectual in society, namely as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was”ii. I will argue that this problematic aim is rooted in a flawed view of the subject and political action, which can be revealed through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity politics. En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, and therefore building on a broader project of subjectless critique, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding what constitute political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s poststructuralist and post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics1. This brief study should ultimately be read as a contemporary update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual—and therefore governing—activity for modern times.                                                                      1

In this paper, I will be referring to this author by his current name, Jack Halberstam. To be sure though, the book I will be drawing from, The Queer Art of Failure, was published under his pre-transition name, Judith Halberstam, as is shown in the works cited page.

McGuire 3  Gramsci’s Intellectual Antonio Gramsci embarked on the journey of understanding the institutional basis of power in society by rewording the terms of state and social sovereignty. In classical liberal state theory, the existence of the individual—figured as naturally autonomous within the field of the social and assumed to exercise rational judgment—provides the basis on which rights may be extended in order that state power will not impede on his or her life. Part and parcel to this rights-granting function of the state are the distinctions made between the private and the political, the social and the economic, the citizen and the politician, all of which are understood to be more or less mutually exclusive fields of activity. Sovereignty, in other words, most accurately describes the functioning of institutions in this framework, more or less immune to each other’s power, and furthermore, legally mandated to remain so in many instances: if one realm of power seems to be creeping into some forbidden realm, the governmental apparatus is presumed responsible for expediently attending to the matter, without question, in a purely disinterested manner. In contrast to the liberal state rooted in sovereignty—of function, subjects, powers, et cetera—Gramsci forwards a radically expansive sociology of the state, with the formal ‘representative’ arm of the state in political society, and the informal ‘private apparatus of the state’ in civil societyiii. With this distinction—merely ‘methodological’, not ‘organic’iv—Gramsci maintains that state power does not only (or even primarily) function within traditional governmental structures, but is fundamentally invested in the discourses constituting civil society as well. In other words, governmental power and economic ideology are fortified in areas like education, the family, and popular culture just as intensely as they are in the legislature or the police force. The status quo is not durable because of coercion in political society, Gramsci

McGuire 4  argued, but because of the persuasion and consent of the governed carried out in civil society to adopt the morals, interests, and worldviews of the dominant class2. ‘Traditional intellectuals’ are the ones responsible for these inter-class interest articulations, but this study will be dealing with ‘organic intellectual’ side that seeks to contest hegemony. Gramsci described ‘organic intellectuals’ as anyone emerging ‘organically’ out of a specific social class whose role was “organizing, administering, directing, educating, or leading” v members of their own class. Each class (in his case the orthodox capital/labor distinction) and profession or occupation has their own group of these intellectuals, but for fundamental counter-hegemonic struggle to ensue organic intellectuals from the working class needed to be cultivated. Furthermore, if this struggle to build a counter-hegemonic ‘historic bloc’ was to be anywhere near successful, these leaders needed to first work to build alliances with other (less) fundamental social groups (between factory workers and fishermen for example), and secondly work to progressively democratize their role within the ranks of their particular social grouping. The end here is clearly an “eradication of the division of labor between manual workers and the intellectual.”3 In the subsequent sections, I’d like to turn to a few problems within Gramsci’s framework, not as a way to discredit it, but to more fully realize its potential for twenty-first                                                                      2

It is important to quietly note the inclusion of interests in Gramsci’s analysis, which we will later see problematized as illusorily self-referential via a critique of the linear logic of representation. Indeed, Gramsci conceived of not only objectively achieving hegemony, but he also elaborated a linear process for going about it: first, ‘economic-corporate’ political consciousness realizes one’s shared interests across all members of an occupation; Marxist class consciousness follows this; lastly, moral and intellectual leadership gain political clout “not on a corporate but a ‘universal’ plane” (Forgacs 205) 3 Vladimir Lenin bellowed this necessity as a task for the revolutionary party in What is to be Done?. Gramsci, agreeing with Lenin’s end, preferred the means of elaborating organic intellectuals toward the end of self-sufficiency, carried out through such forms as workercontrolled councils.

McGuire 5  century radical organizing. Firstly, I will be subjecting the ‘organic intellectual’ signifier to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist, poststructuralist treatment of the subject, arguing that an antiessentialist understanding of alliance formation is crucial to our contemporary condition of hybridity and dynamicity in social movements. Alongside this I will also add critical remarks on the necessary orientation and expectation for political action according to this schema. Later, I’d like to propose a form of subjectless critique in Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way to queer the work done in the name of elaborating ‘subversive intellectuals’. Notes on Action and the Subject in Gramsci There will always be antagonisms, struggles, the partial opaqueness of the social; there will always be history. The myth of the transparent and homogenous society—which implies the end of politics—must be resolutely abandoned.vi – Laclau and Mouffe, 1987 Although Antonio Gramsci was highly critical of the ‘economistic’ thinking of traditional Marxists that presumed a direct line of influence between the mode of production and cultural phenomena, hidden behind his own view was nevertheless a dated conception of the subject that engaged in politics. In positing an objectively unifiable constituency, Gramsci is working upon problematic views of the subject as found in civil society as wholesome, stable, and capable of liberation. Over and against this view, I will propose, through a reading of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist writings, first an understanding of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ as mutually defining elements of political activity. Secondly, I will locate the subject in this power structure as a fluid potentiality—indeed necessarily so for alliance building—defined by a persistent lack of fullness, and exhibiting no essential being. Thirdly, I will resituate antagonism as a precise effect of resistance, not inherent to any social relation or struggle, while further drawing out the implications for political mobilization. Each one of these components—the ‘political’, ‘politics’,

McGuire 6  the ‘subject’, ‘antagonism’—are acutely founded through contingency, and their being perceived as such will allow my usage of Halberstam’s low theory to take root. I will begin with the most fundamental components, the ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ distinction. ‘The Political’ and ‘Politics’ The broad political terrain elaborated by Gramsci must be understood as having two orders of operation: ‘the political’ and ‘politics’. Such a distinction is made in order for politics and the eventual form it assumes to remain contingently connected, all but assuring the impossibility of closure of the political to contestation. Contrary to what Gramsci conceived of as the political, namely the material or understood sphere in which politics takes place, the political for Laclau and Mouffe is understand as the “processes, regime, or logics of language, knowledge, and power inherent in doing politics”vii. The political serves as the “empty space of inscription,” maintaining neither form nor content, neither goal nor need. Politics, in contradistinction with this, deals with the structuring of this amalgamation of discursive rules, actualizing potential through discursive articulation viii . Politics interrogates socio-historical, symbolic or geo-political relations of power through such forms as concrete measures or subversive practices, but they must be employed with the pre-knowledge of their ultimate ambivalence to their ends, namely the suspending or inducing changeix. Mouffe characterizes politics as ‘socio-discursive articulation’, working within a power structure that demands the paradoxical practice of calling upon the very same terms of one’s marginalization as a way to illuminate there necessary limits. This resonates with how Judith Butler conceives of localized transformation, namely through discrete subversive acts of ‘performative contradiction’, or “to be excluded from the universal yet to make a claim within its terms” x , inexorably highlighting the ambivalence in the social system constituted by the

McGuire 7  boundary of inside and outsidexi. I will later turn to a discussion of globally situating low theory as a way to account for this absurd ambivalence resulting from queer interventions, but for now I will turn to how articulation organizes the political qua politics.  I have arrived at a politics defined by an articulatory structuring of the political field, susceptible to transformation by virtue of its constitution through antagonism, providing at once the limits and targets for politics to act on. Gramsci speaks in this tone of dynamic change when referring to hegemony as a “continuous process of formation and superseding of compromised equilibrium”xii . Anna Marie Smith asserts that Laclau and Mouffe’s emphasis on articulation brings intersectional analyses front and center to radical democratic pluralism. “[M]ultiple forms of exploitation and oppression intersect, overlap, combine together, shape one another and contradict one another”xiii. These categories, articulated in and through other categories, might include race, gender, nation, sexuality, empire, or any number of other axes of oppression. Implicit in this intersectional elaboration is the practice of politicization, or the “rupturing…of chains of equivalence by translating them into antagonism, revealing how contradictory aims and interests are covered up through a shared signifier”xiv. The most durable ‘chain of equivalence’ in our society today might be that of freedom, commonly conflated with free market economics and consumerism, even though this “empty signifier” could just as easily be articulated as a guarantee to mobile healthcare or a protection from living without shelter. In contrast to these neoliberal tendencies of regulating the ‘framework of the sayable’ by privatizing decisionmaking and resource distribution, radical democratic pluralism seeks to multiply points of contestation and broaden the terrain of politicization and reactivationxv. Whereas the former mode of governance requires its citizens to formally proclaim an identity through ‘interest group’

McGuire 8  deliberation, the latter form, which I will promote as highly conducive to low theory’s dispersion across the social sphere, is fundamentally erected as vulnerable to myriad forms of contestation. ‘Our’ Identity and Interests Recognition of the peculiar ‘form-agnostic’ character of ‘the political’ can lead us into a clearer understanding of the subject in queer politics, or more precisely its impossibility as commonly imagined in identity politics. To keep it short, Annamarie Jagose has pointed out that the preeminent configuration of the subject for political empowerment to date has revolved around the “ethnic model”xvi. By this, she refers to the subject as the rational origin of and basis for social relations, both unified and stable enough to be collectively established as part of a legitimate minority group. With this recognition comes official recognition, realized through securing rights from formal institutions of government through formal procedures of governmentxvii. Although Gramsci’s program for hegemony undoubtedly differs in its procedure for gaining power, it indeed succumbs to the same problems of the ethnic model with regards to the subject, namely as fixable and objectively unifiable into group form. Queer theory sidesteps both this view of the subject and its procedural formalities, formalities that might be understood as a misunderstanding of the formless character of the political, and takes as its starting point the locating of those constitutive limits of the political that invite antagonisms. It affects, as Michael Warner put it, a broadening of minority politics to question the framework of the sayable; attention to the hierarchies of respectability that saturate the world; movement across overlapping but widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a series of margins that have no identity core […] not to mention an ability to do much of that—through the play of its own stylexviii.

McGuire 9  Queer theory, mobilized here as a way to queer and disperse the activity taken up under the overarching ‘intellectual’ signifier, insists that ‘widening the plane’ of representation—claiming legitimacy for what was formerly excluded—misunderstands the contingency of identity in its discursive constitution and unfixable character: “[identity politics operates] as if representation could neutrally display pregiven realities or as if visibility were not a power-saturated technology of creating realities”xix. For although the queer subject position is a purely discursive (not ‘self’) creation, this condition does not relinquish its ability to be articulated through different subject positionsxx, thus permitting the formation of alliance. Since this subject position necessarily denies the possibility for originary intent or meaning assumed in representative logics, how ought our understanding of political activity adjust to this situation? Interests are not ‘always-already-there’ to reference and therefore call upon to represent; rather, queer ‘subjects’ constitute the very interests they claim to represent in and through the act of political practicexxi. In this sense, articulation is critical for building alliances, and is indeed fundamentally transformative: “[i]n the context of this discussion, we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of articulatory practice”xxii. With this view of the political subject then, it goes without saying that the identify-represent linearity of traditional politics—and representational democracy more generally—is genuinely confused. Once we recognize our discursive (rather than ‘self’) constitution of identity, and the regulatory mechanisms that govern it (ie. ‘common sense’ or ‘the norm’), power and resistance must be reconceived in light of such a seemingly arresting lifeworld. We might turn to a nuanced view of antagonism for guidance, which will later serve as a hinge upon which low theory twists and turns to internally provoke rupture.

McGuire 10  Poststructuralist Antagonism/s Are we unable to think of the intensity of the present except as the end of the world in a concentration camp? You see how poor our treasure of images really is!xxiii – Foucault, 1975 By looking again at antagonism, we can relocate the subject—the ‘queered intellectual’ as proposed here—in a realm of activity separated from the essentializing logic all too familiar within Marxist understandings of historical change and agency. Antagonism must be read differently in different registers of political activity. According to ‘the political’, that formless discursive terrain upon which politics is tasked with structuring, antagonism is its exclusive precondition: “antagonism as the negation of a given order is, quite simply, the limit of that order, and not the moment of a broader totality”xxiv . Antagonism is therefore the precondition for securing potentiality. In ‘politics’ on the other hand, antagonisms are not essential. This is where Laclau and Mouffe contrast so sharply with previous Marxisms: each class does not have objective interests to be realized through a necessary revolution (for the proletarian). Antagonisms within politics cannot be understood as inherent to any social relation—whether between worker and capitalist (Marxism), women and the state (radical feminism), or otherwise. Interests—or political activity for that matter—likewise cannot be logically deduced from a subject’s position within a system of power relations4. Rather, antagonisms are only brought about through a force external to any                                                                      4

Leo Bersani implicated this form of essentialist thinking as a way to explain the tight connection between homophobia and misogyny in the societal responses to the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980’s. Gay sex, Bersani argued, exemplifies the dangers of sex more generally in that male-on-male penetration, figured as the ultimate abdication of power in the straight imaginary, has come to haunt the society as a whole through its (literal) infection of the community. In this sense, the largely static and isolationist responses to the outbreak could be read as not only a

McGuire 11  immediate social relationship (the relations of production for Laclau and Mouffe). In the context of queer politics for instance, class, sexuality, race, and gender might converge so as to implant an antagonism between working-class gay black males and private employers to recognize outof-state marriage contracts. “Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself”xxv. Just as the impossibility of the subject is founded on its unrelenting movement of differences, so too is society made impossible by virtue of the antagonisms that create its limits, inevitably exposing its impossibility of closure. Laclau and Mouffe continue to assert alliance building and contingency when saying that there aren’t any intrinsically subversive struggles per se, but a set o...