Page 207 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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put forward than by his/her sensitivity to ‘new social and religious and
institutional possibilities’—a prescient and strategic orientation which
renders questions of ‘grounding’ and ‘legitimation’ irrelevant. Within such
a transformed knowledge-practice field, the function of analysis would be
neither to unmask ideology, to assist the forward march of Reason nor to
trace out the eternal perimeters of sociality, knowledge and the sayable but
rather, following Foucault, to explain ‘who was currently getting and using
power and for what purposes and then (unlike Foucault) to suggest how
some other people might get it and use it for other purposes’ (Rorty, 1984:
42).

GRAMSCI AND ARTICULATION

Such an orientation would seem to require that same combination of
qualities, that same mix of conjunctural analysis and strategic intervention
which typifies the Gramscian approach—(especially as developed by people
like Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), [albeit, as
Hall himself points out, along rather different lines])—where a ‘war of
position’ is waged between conflicting alliances of ‘dominant’ and
‘subaltern’ class fractions over and within a heterogenous range of sites
which are themselves shaped by a complex play of discursive and extra-
discursive factors and forces. But what distinguishes the Gramscian
approach is the way in which it requires us to negotiate and engage with
the multiple axes of both power and the popular and to acknowledge the
ways in which these two axes are ‘mutually articulated’ through a range of
populist discourses which centre by and large precisely on those prePost-
erous ‘modern’ categories: the ‘nation’, ‘roots’, the ‘national past’,
‘heritage’, ‘the rights of the individual’ (variously) ‘to life and liberty’, ‘to
work’, ‘to own property’, ‘to expect a better future for his or her children’,
the right ‘to be an individual’: the ‘right to choose’. To engage with the
popular as constructed and as lived—to negotiate this bumpy and
intractable terrain—we are forced at once to desert the perfection of a
purely theoretical analysis, of a ‘negative dialectic’ (Adorno) in favour of a
more ‘sensuous (and strategic) logic’ (Gramsci)—a logic attuned to the
living textures of popular culture, to the ebb and flow of popular debate.
In this shift in the critical focus, the meaning of the phrase ‘legitimation
crisis’ is inflected right away from problems of epistemology directly on to
the political, as our attention is drawn to the processes whereby particular
power blocs seek to impose their moral leadership on the masses and to
legitimate their authority through the construction (rather than the
realization) of consensus. The Gramscian model demands that we grasp
these processes not because we want to expose them or to understand them
in the abstract but because we want to use them effectively to contest that
authority and leadership by offering arguments and alternatives that are not