US President Donald Trump’s response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement is easily denounced for what it really is – a patently racist backlash tuned to consolidate his white nationalist base, and convert real and perceived grievances into a polarising “us versus them” pivot of his faltering reelection campaign.
However, the Black Lives Matter movement has not only rattled Trump and his ilk, but also the liberal gatekeepers of elite cultural institutions that are nearly as white and as unrepresentative as the Trumpian coterie. This moment of reckoning with the US’s founding sin has made the liberal intelligentsia uncomfortable by forcing them to engage with not only fraught race relations but also introspect sources of their own privilege and cultural domination.
In a remarkable letter published earlier this week in the Harper’s Magazine, over 150 leading cultural luminaries including academics, writers, and journalists call for a reexamination of how institutions “in a spirit of panicked damage control,” have apparently driven a wedge between “justice and open debate.’’ They cite several examples including leading editors that have been eased out for publishing opinions not congruent with the BLM moment. The heavyweight signatories include such household names as J.K. Rowling, renowned literary figures such as Salman Rushdie who have faced personal persecution on account of what they have written, and polymaths like Noam Chomsky who have for long been intellectual beacons of social movements around the world.
A demonstrator holds a sign during a Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, in Hemel Hempstead, Britain, June 13, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Boyers
Irrefutable argument
Even without the stellar cast of authors that includes several people of colour, it is hard to take umbrage with a letter that makes an entirely irrefutable argument that the “restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.” Indeed, it is axiomatic that justice can only thrive in a culture of “open debate.” However, braiding justice, liberty and freedom together is necessarily messy. The kinks in this braid, and especially the missing strands, have not always been visible to even the best exponents of “detached” scholarship and “irreverent” writing that dominate our academic and literary landscapes. The Black Lives Matters movement has forced cultural elites to pause and take note of how the (in)justice and (un)freedoms that mark the lived reality of the subordinated diverge from axiomatic theories of justice or freedom.
Justice and freedom are not threatened so much by the fact that protesters in the Black Lives Matter movement lack table manners, as by the fact that for far too long the marginalised have not been allowed a place at the table. Why has the elite liberal discourse not been able to distinguish between etiquette and exclusion? Incarcerated by the Fascists, the Italian political theorist, Antonio Gramsci famously answered this question in his Prison Notebooks.
Gramsci conceived of intellectuals most broadly as “organizers of culture.” His celebrated distinction between “traditional,” and “organic” intellectuals helps make sense of our own contemporary conundrums. The Gramscian “traditional” is the professional detached scholar with no apparent allegiance to any specific class (replace that by race, caste) interest. The “organic” intellectual, on the other hand, is squarely embedded in the predicaments of her own social class or group, and her intellectual work reflects this embeddedness.
Fictitious construction
What the Black Lives Matter movement has done is to forcefully bring home the true import of the Gramscian taxonomy of how intellectuals operate in society. Gramsci’s “traditional” intellectual or the detached scholar of our times is at least partially a fictitious construction. A scholar working for her tenure in the ivory tower, or a writer hoping to make it to the bestseller charts is actually acting in ways that are consistent with power structures that undergird elite cultural institutions. As the so many “#BlackInTheIvory” stories have poignantly shown, these institutions are guarded by hostile (and white) gatekeepers that make them nearly impregnable for the historically marginalised.
The “traditional” intellectual in reality is also an “organic” intellectual, principally representing elite interests. A practical corollary of the detached scholar fiction is Gramsci’s prescient observation that the underclass is forced to rely on the leadership of the “traditional” intellectual. Even as I write this, newspapers in India are reporting a new study about how “upper caste” journalists dominate writings on caste, including stories of caste discrimination. The burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement has sought to fundamentally challenge this arrangement.
Antonio Gramsci. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The response from the elite liberal establishment has predictably been a mixed bag. While there has been some soul-searching, an edifice constructed on centuries of violent subjugation and domination is not going to wither away overnight. If the Trumpian universe is offended by crumbling statues and monuments, the elite liberal order has been shaken by the more substantive challenges posed by Black Lives Matter. Both the entrenched establishment and the Black Lives Matter movement know that it is much harder to reconfigure networks of cultural domination than it is to bring down a statue or two.
The distinguished authors of the Harper’s letter know only too well that the marginalised have no choice but to turn their volume-knobs to eleven to make themselves audible. To take offence at the perceived din created by the Black Lives Matter movement is to be tone-deaf, if not entirely deaf. Street rap allows for the apparently chaotic notes of dissent and protest that the registers of a sanitised concert hall will not. At least not yet.
Alas, Gramsci cannot possibly roll in his grave (he was cremated). His ashes, interned in a Rome cemetery, are however resonating loudly with the present moment.
Deepak Malghan teaches at IIM Bangalore. Views are personal.
"discourse" - Google News
July 10, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Why Can’t the Elite Discourse Distinguish Between Etiquette and Exclusion? - The Wire
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