Berlin, James and John Trimbur. “Introduction.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 7-15. Print.
Villanueva, Victor. “Hegemony: From an Organically Grown Intellectual.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 17-34. Print.
Faigley, Lester. “The New Left Times.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 38-56. Print.
Hulbert, Mark C. and Michael Blitz. “The Institution(‘s) Lives!” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992):60-75.
Berlin, James and John Trimbur. “Introduction.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 7-15. Print.
In this introduction, Berlin and Trimbur explain the lack of a Marxist rhetoric. Citing the American fear of all things Marx (think the Red Scare, the cold war, cold war liberalism, McCarthyism) Berlin and Trimbur claim the discipline has no Marxist rhetoric since it came of age when discussing such a philosophical foundation was verboten. This issue, therefore, is a deemed a “progress report that unevenly and sometimes stutteringly seeks to articulate some of the determinants of what might become a fully developed position–Gramsci, feminism, British cultural studies, institutional critiques, American radicalism, the New Times’ Post-Fordism, radical pedagogy, working-class academics” (7). As an attempt to unify such a broad corpus of texts, Trimbur and Berlin describe the contributors to this issue as public teachers/intellectuals, and then situate these public teachers/intellectuals within the project of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. These intellectuals are “of the working class” who must be “‘permanent persuader[s]‘” who speak “for the workers and to the workers, articulating their interests and encouraging their rise to economic and political control in word and action” (Berlin and Trimbur 11, Gramsci qtd in Berlin and Trimbur 11). After explaining Gramsci’s concept of dual supersturcutre and hegemony, Berlin and Trimbur assert within this overarching ideological framework (which subsumes, I figure, the articles by the individual contributors) that the
rhetoric teacher’s fucntion as an intellectual speaking for the new order of the currently dispossessed, while situated within the structural position of the traditional intellectual, is thus to foreground for critique the rhetorical devies of hegemonic discourse in order to offer an alternative rhetoric, one that speaks for an emancipatory counter hegemony. The conduct of the battle for social hegemony–the effort to win consent through signification by dominant subaltern groups–becomes the special proviince of the instructor of rhetoric. The teacher described in the follwoing essays, then, also describes gramsci’s “active participation in pracitcla life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ presenting the teacher as activist continually rltaing the materials of the classroom to the struggle of the larger social setting…to assess realistically the kind of political action possible today and to pursue it with due intensity. (12)
Questions to be discussed at a later date:
Using Gramsci seems to be a move towards a cultural materialist form of material rhetorics, not a historical materialist form. Does a historical materialist form of material rhetorics automatically preclude a discussion of race, gender, sex, and ethnicity? Does it mean an exercise in–for lack of a better term–vulgar Marxism? Can a material rhetorical analysis informed by historical materialism be nuanced?
Quotable quote
The right’s gloating over the victory of the free market and democracy (democracy, of course, here equated with the freedom to exploit and the corresponding freedom to choose new and improved useless commodities) has been linked to an attack on the university’s turn to “political correctness.” This opprobrious designation has been attached to any political position the right has found contrary to its own, democracy being constructed as the freedom to think and say whatever the right wants us to think and say. Any other thought and expression is attacked as capitulation to the intellectual police of the academy. At least these attacks are correct about one thing: many university intellectuals are fed up with the economic and social havoc resulting from two reactionary presidential administrations, and some of them are returning to what remains the most powerful analysis of the horrors of capitalism ever written. Indeed, an increasing number of professors are, as in this collection, making the classroom one center of their political response to a time shameful in its treatment of women, children, minorities, workers, the poor, the uninsured ill, the elderly, and almost anyone else who has not joined the top two percent of the population in wealth. The trickle down spout has become curiously clogged. All of this is to say that no matter how loudly the death of Marxism is proclaimed in the popular press, capitalism’s unmitigated cruelties and fear of the truth will keep the critical spirit of Marx alive. (15)
Villanueva, Victor. “Hegemony: From an Organically Grown Intellectual.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 17-34. Print.
Villanueva’s article not only echoes Berlin and Trimbur’s introduction, but Villanueva also, literally, plays out the role of their idealized rhetoric teacher. Villanueva uses the space of the essay to explain Gramsci’s theories on traditional, organic, and new intellectuals, Gramsci’s ideas about the best type of classroom (30), and then explains how he (Villanueva) deploys both in concepts in his classroom. The major claim of the essay is social change comes through challenging and changing the dominant hegemony. The classroom is the space for Gramsci’s war of position, that is, the space to challenge and change the dominant hegemony through the creation of a counter-hegemony. Villanueva’s method involves teaching the dominant’s literacy practices, the teaching of dominant’s version of history, and then critiquing both by juxtaposing these texts and accounts from texts and accounts composed by subaltern writers. For my purposes (noting and understanding the differences between historical materialism and cultural materialism), this appears to be a materialist critique based on cultural materialism. The primary focus is on texts, language, and pedagogy.
The usual definition: hegemony equals ideological domination. Gramsci adds an essential qualifier: domination by consent. Without consent, hegemony fails. fro the most part, consent is granted ideologically. Ideology is not necessarily imposed from the top down, however. Ideology is not ascribed. As Gramsci sees it, every culture contains particualr world views, ideologies; some of these are common to the cultures within a society and are common to the cultures that comprise the dominant groups. We accept commonly held world views as truths. The dominant does more than accdpt; it capitalizes on the generally accepted truths. We accept the dominant’s actions as based on truths; we approve of acts based on truths; we consent. (20)
The settler’s dominant religion’s work ethic would support capitalism: shoulder to the wheel, a penny saved is a penny earned, waste not want not, self discipline, thrift, hard work. Liberal politics, with its emphasis on individualism and laissez faire economics, transmitted through the pulpit, the press, town hall meetings, would further serve capitalists. (22)
Scientific Marxism in Gramsci’s time believed that conditions would arise which would precipitate the forceful inculcation of change: the economy crashes; the workers revolt. But Gramsci had seen economic crashes without subsequent revolutions. No “natural” evolution toward revolution. Although Gramsci would not discount armed conflict, a “war of maneuver,” he saw armed conflict as secondary, to be preceded by a long “war of position,” a counter-hegemony… a war of position is waged rhetorically. (22,23)
Whatever the contradictions, whateer the current economy, there is momvement withing and through the classes; there is still affluence for many and the hope for affluence in many more. America has a special talent for revolution restoratin, able to keep hope alive. (23)
In other words, an organic strategy within a war of position seeks t bring about a new hegemony. For Gramsci, this means forming a new “historical bloc.” An historic bloc is formed when a war of position has been so successful that changes are sought and brought into effect throughout the cultural, politcal, and economic sectors of society. A new consensus is formed–a new hegemony. consent, the key to hegemony, had to have been gained through careful articulation and negotiation throughout the social system. New terms, or new definitions for existing terms, agreeable to all, had to have been developed. “Socialized medicine” becomes “national health insurance,” for instance. The war of position underlies Frier’s hope, that in changing the word we would change the world. An historic bloc, formed by a war of position, in order to bring about anew hegemony is, then, brought about by persuasive articulatory practice. Hegemony is rhetorical. (23-24)
Traditional intellectuals, even those who are conscious of class relations, are subject to a “directive hegemony,” an element of hegemony which seeks to control. Gramsci describes two ways in which a directive hegemony operates over intellectuals. One way is through an insistence on specialization. Intellectuals are enjoined to have “an activity of their own in their technical field,” keeping them tightly focused on minutiae, keeping them from contemplating the “ensemble of relations” (Notebooks 104). (25)
Faigley, Lester. “The New Left Times.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 38-56. Print.
In this article Faigley describes how using a “New Times” theoretical lens (named after the publication founded by Stuart Hall, which articulated this post-Marxist analysis of the 1980s political scene) not only explains how the Left in the US and Britain failed to rally against Reaganism and Thatcherism, but also how to make sense of the “micropolitics” springing up (keep in mind this was written in 1992) around social issues and taking the place of traditional party politics.
The “New Times” project was one of the first indications that Left theorists see the need for drastic rethinking. the “New Times” project itself is an acknowledgement that Marxism doe snot hold the answers. It abandoned the Lefts traditional disdain for consumption, and it drew on earlier feminist analyses to reinterpret consumption as a potential site for resistance. It recognized that part of the attraction of consumerism is the potential of release from identities constructed in binary oppositions…The larger project of those who still identify with the Left demands coming to terms with how political identities formed and what relationships those identities have to people’s lives. (54)
Third, a New Times analysis views the shift to the Right in the United States as well as in other Western nations during the 1980s as a shift away from traditional politics parties instead of a shift away from one party to another. The waning of loyalty to national parties has produced a void to be filled by numerous micropolitcal movements that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s…a more explicit appeal to decentered, postmodern politics was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 “Rainbow Coalition.” Jackson was the first progressive candidate to abandon the notion of a center to which various groups could be drawn and to make heterogeneity the organizing principle. (51,52)
Could be useful as a touchstone piece, ie, when the shift from party politics to politics from below began.
Hulbert, Mark C. and Michael Blitz. “The Institution(‘s) Lives!” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992):60-75.
In this article Hulbert and Blitz use Kenneth Burke’s concept of dramatism as a framework to explain how the academy shapes the material reality of the academics, staff, and students who work and study there. Their best claim:
In their role as custodians of knowledge, academic institutions are autopoietic–they make themselves and maintain themselves through an ability to make whatever is not in the instant themselves, into a part of themselves. Chilean theoretical biologists Humberto R Maturana and Francisco J. Varela propose that autopoiesis can be understood as ontology requiring no goal other than its own continuity. The autopoietic or living sysmem is, strictly speaking, a homeostat. It is intrinsically conservative, continually adjusting to maintain itself, continually incorporating that/those which would disrupt it. When “perturbated,” the organism is at once prompted to secure and to recognize the disturbance as already a feature of itself. It is always a t once making itself and receiving itself, and proceeding in its own scene, transforming that which is not itself into itself. (65-66, emphasis original)
In a very historical material turn, Hulbert and Blitz claim:
If we are to understand a system, we must study the various roles it plays in larger systems. In this sense, we see the university fulfilling two purposes. It proposes, at the very least, to be a scene of independent, liberal, “free,” and critical thought; at the same time, it services the state, promoting state models for political positions, ideologies, missions, and even, financial plannings and (mis)managements. But the academic institution also “organizes” the state. As it produces model citizens to serve the needs of the state, the university also helps to produce the kind of state that requires–indeed needs–these citizens, the production of which is one of the institution’s chief services. (66)
