Reviving Gramsci: Crisis, Communication, and Change 9781317520986, 131752098X

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Gramsci in/for Critical Times
2 Selective Gramsci(s)
3 Gramsci and Communication: Dialectics and Translation
4 Occupy Wall Street: The Limits of War of Position
5 Movimento Cinque Stelle: Dialectics of Passive Revolution
6 From Indignados to Podemos: Sublating Vernacular Rhetoric into National Popular Rhetoric
7 A Dialectical Image
References
Index

Citation preview

Reviving Gramsci

Engaging debates within cultural studies, media and communication studies, and critical theory, this book addresses whether Gramscian thought continues to be relevant for social and cultural analysis, in particular when examining times of crisis. The book is motivated by two intertwined but distinct purposes: first, to show the privileged and fruitful link between a Gramscian theory of communication and a communicative theory of Gramsci; second, to explore the ways in which such an “integral” perspective can help us interpret and explain different forms of political activism in the twenty-first century, such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, Indignados and Podemos in Spain, or Movimento Cinque Stelle in Italy. Marco Briziarelli is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication and Journalism, at the University of New Mexico, USA. He is interested in critical approaches to media and communication, digital labor, and social movements. His work has appeared in Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Triple C. Susana Martínez Guillem is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, USA. Her research interests are in critical discourse studies and cultural studies. Her work has appeared in several internationally recognized journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

52 Barthes’ Mythologies Today Readings of Contemporary Culture Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall 53 Beauty, Violence, Representation Edited by Lisa A. Dickson and Maryna Romanets 54 Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction Edited by Michał Głowacki and Lizzie Jackson 55 Transnational Horror Across Visual Media Fragmented Bodies Edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer 56 International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies “This World Is My Place” Edited by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton 57 Comics and the Senses A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels Ian Hague 58 Popular Culture in Africa The Episteme of the Everyday Edited by Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome

59 Transgender Experience Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility Edited by Chantal Zabus and David Coad 60 Radio’s Digital Dilemma Broadcasting in the TwentyFirst Century John Nathan Anderson 61 Documentary’s Awkward Turn Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship Jason Middleton 62 Serialization in Popular Culture Edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg 63 Gender and Humor Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives Edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini 64 Studies of Video Practices Video at Work Edited by Mathias Broth, Eric Laurier, and Lorenza Mondada 65 The Memory of Sound Preserving the Sonic Past Seán Street 66 American Representations of Post-Communism Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives Andaluna Borcila

67 Media and the Ecological Crisis Edited by Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg

76 Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games Cognitive Approaches Edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach

68 Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels Edited by Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague

77 Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy Edited by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole, and Carrie P. Freeman

69 Media Independence Working with Freedom or Working for Free? Edited by James Bennett and Niki Strange 70 Neuroscience and Media New Understandings and Representations Edited by Michael Grabowski 71 American Media and the Memory of World War II Debra Ramsay 72 International Perspectives on Shojo and Shojo Manga The Influence of Girl Culture Edited by Masami Toku 73 The Borders of Subculture Resistance and the Mainstream Edited by Alexander Dhoest, Steven Malliet, Barbara Segaert, and Jacques Haers 74 Media Education for a Digital Generation Edited by Julie Frechette and Rob Williams 75 Spanish-Language Television in the United States Fifty Years of Development Kenton T. Wilkinson

78 The Middle Class in Emerging Societies Consumers, Lifestyles and Markets Edited by Leslie L. Marsh and Hongmei Li 79 A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations E. Deidre Pribram 80 Biopolitical Media Catastrophe, Immunity and Bare Life Allen Meek 81 The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film Affect Theory’s Other Pansy Duncan 82 Social Memory Technology Theory, Practice, Action Karen Worcman and Joanne Garde-Hansen 83 Reviving Gramsci Crisis, Communication, and Change Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem

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Reviving Gramsci Crisis, Communication, and Change

Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Briziarelli, Marco, author. | Martínez Guillem, Susana, 1976– author. Title: Reviving Gramsci: crisis, communication, and change / by Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem. Description: New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies; 83 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015040079 Subjects: LCSH: Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. | Political science. | Sociology. Classification: LCC JC265.G68 B75 2016 | DDC 320.53/2092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040079 ISBN: 978-1-138-85444-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72110-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To our parents and our daughter, for helping us create and connect our pasts, presents, and futures.

Te convido a creerme cuando digo futuro.

Silvio Rodríguez

Occorre persuadere molta gente che anche lo studio è un mestiere, e molto faticoso, con un suo speciale tirocinio, oltre che intellettuale, anche muscolare-nervoso: è un processo di adattamento, è un abito acquisito con lo sforzo, la noia e anche la sofferenza. Antonio Gramsci Tu mi dirai: le cose sempre cambiano. «’O munno cagna.» È vero. Il mondo ha eterni, inesauribili cambiamenti. Ogni qualche millennio, però, succede la fine del mondo. E allora il cambiamento è, appunto, totale. Pier Paolo Pasolini the fight to give meaning to the words of one’s own tradition and the fight to name things is probably the first autonomous act of the fight among ideas during the end of the twentieth century Fernando Buey

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Gramsci in/for Critical Times

xi 1

2 Selective Gramsci(s)

18

3 Gramsci and Communication: Dialectics and Translation

37

4 Occupy Wall Street: The Limits of War of Position

60

5 Movimento Cinque Stelle: Dialectics of Passive Revolution

78

6 From Indignados to Podemos: Sublating Vernacular Rhetoric into National Popular Rhetoric

98

7 A Dialectical Image References Index

120 141 159

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Acknowledgments

This project has haunted us for (too) many ups and downs during the last few years, and we suspect that, even though it is now formally ‘finished,’ it will continue to occupy our thoughts, conversations, and even dreams (nightmares?) for quite a long time. This is not because we wrote a particularly fascinating book, but because of the incredible amount of time, energy, and emotions that we put into it. Through all of this, we are grateful for the support and patience of those around us—including ourselves to each other—and hope to be able to offer the same kind of protecting net and encouraging shelter should they ever need one. We are grateful to our editor at Routledge, Felisa, for giving us the opportunity to develop and publish this project. We also would like to thank our copy editor Christine Garcia, for your fine work. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared in Briziarelli, M. & Martínez Guillem, S. (2014). The Counter-­hegemonic Spectacle of Occupy Wall Street: Integral State and Integral Struggle. IC–Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, 11, pp. 145–166. We thank those who have helped us think through the ideas exposed in this book, as well as balance our professional and personal lives in healthy ways. Our mentors, colleagues, and friends at (CU) Boulder: Andrew, Lisa, Pete, Janice, Megan, Jenn (Pep), Jorge, Carey, Leo, Jamie, Tobarish Olga, and Alyosha. Our UNM crew: compañera Ilia, Shinsuke, Myra, Tema, John, Karen, Stephen, Manel y Ana “marca España.” Our supporters back home(s): Marco’s Pattuglia Anitre silvatiche (Tafo, Mastro, Abu), Tommy, Crispo and Foyo, and Lorena. We thank our families for the sacrifices that helped us get here, and for growing with us as we keep pushing our definition of “home.” We miss you. A especial mention goes also to Smuffo: thank you for keeping M ­ arco’s legacy alive. … To our daughter, Emma, for her amazing capability to ­ patiently accompany us on this journey, and for inspiring us every day to be better people.

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1 Gramsci in/for Critical Times

Gramsci Is Dead, or Is He? Asking whether Gramsci’s legacy is dead is not a stylistic move, but rather a legiti­mate inquiry. In our current context of crisis, and almost 80 years after his death, much of the social, political, and cultural ground that stood at the basis of Gramsci’s considerations seems to have crumbled. The Russian revolution, the Communist party, the Fascist regime, even the revolutionary subject par excellence, the proletariat—understood as the industrial wage earner—have, in the context of Western capitalism, drastically changed its features. Gramsci’s most immediate political legacies, such as the Italian Communist party and its organ of information l’Unità, have also almost vanished. The Italian Communist party dissolved in 1991, after its leader, Achille Occhetto, declared the communist experience over, and today it only survives in fragmentary and increasingly weaker references in the political rhetoric of the Italian left. L’Unità, the Italian communist newspaper founded by Gramsci one year after Mussolini came to power, ceased its activities on July 31th of 2014 due to financial unviability. While the newspaper has been recently re-started, its transitory death confirmed to many commentators the end of an epoch in which L’Unità played as an intellectual referent for the left.1 Nevertheless, at the academic level the question about Gramsci’s relevance in contemporary times has triggered an important and lively debate. This debate can be synthetized into two recent publications whose titles eloquently reveal the distance of positions on this matter: on the one hand, in 2005, Richard Day published a book tellingly called Gramsci is dead, where he decries the “hegemony of hegemony” or the “assumption that effective social change can only be achieved simultaneously and en masse, across an entire national or supranational space” (p. 8). Joining the consistent body of literature—reviewed in more detail below—that advocates for a post-­hegemonic framework of analysis as well as activism, Day claims that the anachronistic state-centered vision of Gramsci should be replaced by a post-anarchist and autonomist perspective, which more effectively acknowledges the heterogeneity and multilevel nature of contemporary struggles. On the other hand, Peter Thomas (2010) argues in The Gramscian moment that Gramsci’s thought should be revived for its substantial contributions to

2  Gramsci in/for Critical Times contemporary philosophic and political questions. For Thomas, in order to recover the significance of Gramsci, we need to unpack what for many was just a euphemism for Marxism—the philosophy of praxis—as a theoretical and practical theory in its own right. This philosophy of praxis materializes in Gramsci’s dialectics, absolute historicism, and immanentism. Thomas explains that these: Can be considered as brief resumes for the elaboration of an autonomous research programme in Marxist philosophy today, as an intervention on the Kampfplatz of contemporary philosophy that attempts to inherit and to renew Marx’s original critical and constructive ­gesture. (p. 448) Day is representative of an important body of literature that, while recognizing the profound impact of Gramsci, evaluates his thought for its diminished capability to describe and understand the present, thus arguing, together with authors such as Beasley-Murray (2003, 2011), Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), Lash (2007), Moreiras (2001), Thoburn (2007), Williams (2002), and Yúdice (1995), for the need to re-think ‘Gramsci beyond Gramsci,’ in a context of ‘post-hegemony.’ Conversely, Thomas is representative of a smaller strand of scholarship including authors such as Ives (2004) and Morton (2007) that aims at extracting from the complex Gramscian narrative a broader method of inquiry, rather than a historically constrained and specific content. In this sense, while certainly recognizing the important task of historicizing Gramsci, we align with Thomas in claiming that, within the wealth of Gramsci’s intellectual legacy, there is a critical method of inquiry and evaluation that is still remarkably valid. We see the continuous relevance of Gramsci particularly amplified in the context of the current all-­encompassing Western crisis, as we consider him the Marxist theorizer of the dialectical outcomes of critical times. In fact, historicizing his thought, it is important to remember that one of the factors that contributed to the characteristics of his thinking—i.e., its intrinsically dialectic, fluid, and flexible aspects—derived from the object of his reflections: a social context profoundly marked by crisis, the tumultuous years after the end of World War II and the 1929 Great Depression. We thus believe that the enormous intellectual effort of Gramsci, in trying to capture the contradictory and complex phenomena produced by the crisis of those years, and the significant parallelisms of that crisis with the present one in the West, provides us with powerful tools to understand and evaluate current critical circumstances. We also think that the level of analysis proposed by Gramsci allows us to counter the call for a post-Gramscian framework. This call is pushed by arguments about the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production, as well as about the process of de-territorialization and de-centralization of national-states under the current pressure of globalization.2

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  3 It is in this context that the present study must be situated. Our book examines the communicative aspects of several contemporary episodes of social mobilization in the West, in critical times—Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the United States, Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy, and Indignados/ Podemos in Spain—through a Gramscian lens in order to demonstrate the continuous relevance of a Gramscian framework, as well as its privileged relation with communication. The project engages with the following fundamental questions: what are the conditions that (do not) allow for social mobilization and its specific communicative strategies to develop? How do these same conditions influence the extent to which these practices are successful? What is the relationship between a particular movement’s objectives and its participants’ rhetorical means to achieve such goals? How can particularistic and individualistic economic interests be translated into a collective and ethical-political project? How does the tension between progressive and regressive interests and practices both produce and constrain social movements? More concretely, in relation to the existent body of scholarship that in critical and cultural approaches to communication has dealt with Gramsci’s body of work, in this book we advance two main perspectives: first, a ‘positive’ idea of hegemony beyond its most prevalent conceptualization as a modern theory of oppressive power—a prevalence that is certainly signifi­ cant in communication literature, as we discuss later in this chapter. From our reading of Gramsci, hegemony can be constructively embraced as a concrete and practical evaluation of the historical conditions that allow for a given group to shape a particular social order. Second, as will become more clear throughout our three case studies in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, a practical approach that advances the revolutionary doctrine of the united front—intended as an interclass alliance against the ruling class—invites the examination of the whole spectrum of social actors that can be mobilized for social change. Thus, as the three experiences we study here demonstrate, the potential for social mobilization for change comes from not only the most marginalized sites in civil society, but also from actors that have a more direct experience with privilege, as they operated closer to the ‘center’ before the economic crisis began in 2008. Altogether, we use the three social movements analyzed in this book to constructively historicize Gramsci. Thus, while not necessarily following the same venues indicated by Thomas, we agree with him on the crucial relevance of Gramsci in the current circumstances, and we have tried with this book to complement his monumental theoretical work with an empiri­ cal engagement of concrete social phenomena. In this sense, we offer an operationalization of Gramscian tools for the understanding and evaluation of three influential social movements in three different Western countries. However, as we explain in more detail below, our own detection of a “Gramscian moment” is historically determinate as it is linked to the idea of an organic crisis.

4  Gramsci in/for Critical Times

Social Change in Critical Times In the summer of 1989, Fukuyama’s (in)famous article, “The end of history,” argued that human socio-cultural development had reached an end point, the final stage that would lead to the universalization of liberal democracy. His essay spelled out the capability of capitalism to ideologically reduce history to a category of nature, thus creating the myth of its eternal presence by “treat[ing] labor and the division of labor as human natural force in general, ahistorically linking the latter to capital and rent” (Mészáros, 2011, p. 277). However, despite the powerful neoliberal rhetoric of T.I.N.A. (i.e., There Is No Alternative) and its reification power, capitalism can still find moments of demystification. One of those occasions has been recently provided by the Western financial/economic crisis that started in 2008 and the shrinking of life chances for a wide segment of the middle class that followed it (Marshall, 2010). In this context, current economic interests are pushing (not only particular groups—some of them relatively integrated until recently—but also entire nations) toward a peripheral, precarious status where painstakingly won rights are no longer guaranteed. When seen from a broader point of view—as Gramsci did—a crisis represents a complex phenomenon with contradictory outcomes. In fact, in this book, our treatment of crisis parallels Schumpeter’s (1992) treatment of capitalism, i.e., we understand it as an ambivalent phenomenon that creates by destroying and destroys by creating. Thus, in the current dramatic scenario, it is important to point out that not everything has been loss and devastation; rather, loss and devastation have not affected all segments of the implicated economies equally. As the etymological origin of the word “crisis” reminds us—from the ancient Greek κρίσις: a turning point, an unstable situation— destruction is intrinsically linked to production. Certainly, one constructive element of the crisis is its capacity to estrange people. Thus, if capitalism achieves its own hegemony by transforming “history” into “nature,” an alleged crisis of hegemony has the potential to denaturalize the class-driven interests that move capitalism by producing painfully concrete contradictions in society. An especially telling example of this dialectical process is provided by the role that rating agencies such as Moody’s, Fitch, or Standard and Poor have played—and continue to play— in the current economic turmoil. Thus, as suggested by the Italian government in a fairly recent initiative to file a law suit against them (Onado, 2012), these agencies may have disseminated false figures and information in order to manipulate the financial markets, thus producing gains for their shareholders at the expense of the most vulnerable nations—which have in turn placed the burden of the crisis on increasingly wider sectors of their populations. The concurrence of both reproductive and transformative elements in the current crisis has thus shown the dialectical nature of such processes.

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  5 Hence, while the destructive forces of capitalism impoverished most people, fund managers and financial brokers have still found spectacular ways to accumulate financial capital. In other words, and to borrow Marx’s account, “the violent destruction of capital” took place “not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation” (1993, p. 750). In this context, a particularly interesting product of the crisis of capi­ talism is the wave of protest movements that demanded radical change. In the European context, the recent assistance conceded by the ‘Troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) to countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain derived into a series of imposed “austerity measures” in these nations that have seriously damaged their welfare states, impoverished vast segments of their populations, and dramatically raised unemployment rates ­(Robinson, 2013). As the ethically charged term implies, austerity characterizes a condition marked by severity and frugality, which, in the case of the many countries on which the measures were applied, implied the cast of strict moral judgment on allegedly irresponsible financing, extravagance, or lack of work ethic—ultimately suggesting that people were responsible for their own predicament (Krugman, 2015). In the US, even though the recession officially ended in 2009, the average household income has continued to decrease, thus exacerbating the social distance between the economic elite and the rest of the population (Chossudovsky & Marshall, 2010). In this sense, the three political projects examined in this book represent a historical product of the crisis, based on the explicit rejection of either anti-­austerity measures or a series of economic policies that accentuate an already highly stratified society. In the European context, what was presented as a cure for allegedly reckless spending has been so plagued by its contradictory outcomes that different patients/countries are starting to see it as the “cause” for their misery. In fact, so far austerity has only created a condition for more “punishment” (more austerity) because the rigorous impositions on a struggling economy have frequently suppressed the internal demand, hindering companies’ willingness to invest and encouraging households to save instead of spend—a propensity that ultimately shirks the demand even further. Finally, as the economy contracts, government revenues decline, and public debt increases, de facto calling for more austerity by forcing further public-spending cuts. According to Markantonatou (2013) the social cost of the crisis and its accompanying policies has systematically been: a constant drop in the affected countries’ GDP, the shrinking of domestic demands, loss of jobs, dramatic increase of youth unemployment, aggravation of working conditions due to the loss of workers’ rights under processes of “flexibilization” of work, marked impoverishment of the most precarious social strata, and last, but definitively not least, a dramatic increase in suicides. Especially in countries such as Italy and Spain, where the state has historically been

6  Gramsci in/for Critical Times operating as a powerful social service provider, the cutbacks have diminished the state’s role of social mediator between entrepreneurs and workers, thus further exposing the contradictions of capitalism. The social costs of the economic crisis thus went far beyond the immediate economic repercussions and led to what Gramsci defines as an “organic crisis,” or a crisis of hegemony. This happens when the cement of a given social order that provides a perception of cohesiveness to a hegemonic organization of society starts to fade away. In other words, from a Gramscian perspective, we can argue that in specific historical conjunctures, in specific countries, the dialectical but relatively stable connection between economic base and superstructure weakens. When this link loosens, ideas, beliefs, and practices that provide the support and consent of the majority of the population start to appear as void and meaningless. In this context, when the functioning of a social order no longer operates in an organic fashion, determinate social forces, such as the ones at the basis of the movements we study in this book, have the best chance to develop. Therefore, the “organic crisis” goes beyond the economic downturn and becomes an impasse of the ruling group, a stall of the mechanisms that legitimate a given social order. At this level, and following Gramsci, we see the crisis as giving room to the development of critical consciousness as well as alternative, potentially hegemonic worldviews.3 When the leading group, as Gramsci states, no longer leads but mostly dominates through the exercise of force, the crisis becomes organic in two different ways: it is an impasse of the old regime that is dying, as well as of the ‘new’ that struggles to be born. This is precisely the context in which we examine the three social movements studied, in a moment in which their emergence could translate into defeat by the repressive apparatus of the older regime, or into an opportunity for victory. Gramsci’s body of work allows us to understand how the organic crisis, far from being just destructive, produces a considerable amount of social phenomena: poverty for most, wealth for a few, contestation, and reactions to contestation. In this context, a particularly interesting aspect of the crude social re-distribution of wealth caused by the crisis, leading to its even sharper stratification, consists of the increasing amount of until-now economically comfortable citizens who have begun to seriously question the inherent characteristics of the current mode of production, such as the volatility of capital and the dramatic repercussions it has on the ‘real’ economy. Far from engaging in simplistic idealizations of the movements we analyze, we would like to stress here that it was only when the pressure exerted by material constraints produced a considerable and generalized risk of social exclusion that mobilizations such as the Indignados in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the US, and the emergence of new political parties such as Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy, and Podemos in Spain, became possible. Not surprisingly, then, and although under different motivations, these movements mostly attracted former economically integrated,

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  7 even privileged actors, thus disrupting the typical—and maybe more socially manageable—image of the subaltern, marginalized protester. It is towards this current and pervasive precarious privilege, towards its roots and implications that we want to direct our critical attention. Next, we locate this project within the broader literature on new social movements. New Movements, Old Struggles The main narrative informing theoretical approaches to new social movements tells us that “since the end of the Cold War, changes in the structure of national sovereignty and the emergence of supranational institutions have been accompanied by a re-distribution of power among states, markets actors and civil society” (Gautney, 2011, p. i). According to Gautney, such a fundamental change led to a parallel re-structuration of social mobilization, which supposedly departs significantly from an “old social moments’” paradigm—mostly with regards to important changes in their structure, ideological embracement, demographic compositions, and goals (Larana, 1993). In such a context, the emergence of alternative forms of collective action in advanced societies has stimulated a reconceptualization of the composition and meaning of social movements, which are now qualified as “new” in order to account for the supposedly fundamental changes they embody. The distinction between “old” and “new” ways of organizing and protesting is a widespread assumption informing much of the research on this topic developed in the last three decades. When referring to this key distinction, Offe (1985) proposed a set of differentiating characteristics that include broader factors such as motivations to act but also the movements’ internal structure and main actors. As we discuss below, other authors, even though they do not draw on explicitly distinguishable categories, still develop their understanding of “new” social movements in implicit opposition to an assumed older model. From this perspective, the typical “new” movement presents the following features: first, the social base of the group tends to transcend class structure (Klandermans & Oegema, 1987); second, it does not have a clear ideological characterization, exhibiting instead a pluralism of ideas (Cohen, 1985); third, it tends to frame its actions in terms of further democratization of the society (Larana, 1993); fourth, it lacks a distinctive ideological or class extraction, thus being mobilized by symbolic and cultural factors appealing to what has been defined as “identity politics” (Melucci, 1989); and fifth, it tends to link the individual and the collective, thus avoiding tight organization and hierarchical structure, advocating instead a segmented, diffused, and de-­centralized kind of organization (Larana, Johnston, & Gusfield, 1994). As a whole, and based on the implicit or explicit references to “old” vs. “new” ways of organizing, many of these accounts rely on the assumption of an epistemological break based on a widespread skepticism with regards to so-called grand narratives. The naturalization of this break is often

8  Gramsci in/for Critical Times enabled in this literature by emphasizing the relevance of communicative practices, as well as social constructionist principles, in “new” social movements (Larana, 1993). Thus, communication is a central component of new social movements’ theories. This is seen, for example, in the pervasive interest in studying the movements of the post-industrial era in relation to a turn from material concerns—such as labor and wellbeing—to symbolic ones, as well as social movements’ communication practices in (newly) mediated societies (e.g., Chesters & Welsh, 2004; Garrido & Halavais, 2003; Gamson, 1990; Gerbaudo, 2012; Gitlin, 1980; Melucci, 1996; Snow & Benford, 1992; Swords, 2007).4 The epistemological break is also facilitated in several of these accounts by a post-hegemonic and post-structural approach to discursive practices, which we critique more fully in Chapter 2. Laclau and Mouffe’s work (1985) is a primary example of such view. In their seminal study, these authors argue for the need to develop new strategies to challenge a neoliberal and neoconservative understanding of democracy by adding to the existing principles of freedom and equality the value of difference. Highlighting the unstable character of social relations, Laclau and Mouffe conceptualize them as discursively constructed and therefore lacking any objective foundation. Such a “structural undecidability” of social reality would provide the opportunity to transform and challenge dominant discourses and therefore engage social change from a politics of meaning and interpretation (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. xii).5 More recently, and in the discipline of communication, the capability of discourse to constrain and empower social movements has been taken up by Greene (1998, 2004). In his analysis of the relationship between rhetoric and capitalism, Greene invites social movements to abandon the faulty logic of representation that, according to him, still presupposes the existence of an essential reality formed by concepts such as class, economic structure, or material power—a position that has been directly questioned by Cloud, Macek, and Aune (2006) and more sympathetically critiqued by Foust (2010).6 While not denying the differences between more traditional and current forms of mobilization or the increasing role of communicative practices in enabling and disabling activism, we would like to propose that a Gramscian approach allows us to go beyond binary oppositions, especially the one that most directly concerns communication studies: the tensions between a ‘materialist’ perspective and the discursive oriented approach advanced by ‘post-hegemony’ literature.7 One way in which we accomplish this is by employing Gramsci’s concept of catharsis, which links materialist and discursive aspects as components of a process of transformation of consciousness and social action that, for him, becomes particularly significant in moments of crisis. Gramsci uses the term catharsis drawing on the Aristotelian idea of elevating at a higher level and going beyond one stage in dialectical fashion. In our different case studies,

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  9 we focus on the passage of consciousness and action from the sphere of economic self-interests of individuals to one in which those interests elevate into a collective ethical political project that concerns a social group or a community.8 We consider the instance of social movement studies here as examples of emerging visions that, while they cannot be considered as an absolute novelty, present novel features such as their synthesis of ‘old and new.’ In other words, the organic crisis gave to an individual existential condition of the deprivation of the crisis a social and collective character. In the contexts we examine here, the failure of the existing hegemonic apparati led people to develop new practices and cultural and ideological syntheses, new critical worldviews, and new political and ethical forms. Thus, to conclude, we position our Gramscian approach in interlocution with both new social movement theories and ‘post-hegemony’ literature in particular. In relation to those positions, we believe that Gramsci can provide adequate tools to understand that fluidity, the magmatic composition of movements that emerge in the particular moment of crisis, in which the ‘old’ seems decaying but not completed passed and the ‘new’ seems emerging but not yet consolidated. Next, we explore the particular relationship between Gramsci and communication that informs such analysis.

Gramsci and Communication One important goal of this book is to show the dynamic relation between Gramsci and communication, which we see as producing two united but distinct perspectives: on the one hand, a ‘communicative Gramsci,’ which means using communication as a particular key to read the Gramscian universe; on the other, a ‘Gramscian communication,’ which in our view means to operationalize Gramsci in order to advance a materialist understanding of communication. As scholars interested in materialist approaches to media and communication studies, we inquire and diagnose cultural practices as “texts” intrinsically connected to broader con “texts,” to the degree that, in a hermeneutic circle linking the particular and the general, the general context reveals fundamental aspects of a given text, and a given text reveals fundamental aspects of the context. Thus, the assumption that allows us to use communication as a privileged Gramscian tool to understand social phenomena can be found in our definition of texts as a composite ensemble of social relations in which their utterers are themselves an intersection of these relations. They are, at the same time, an “I,” as an individual active signifier, and a “we” or “they,” as a conditioned and constrained vehicle for a general social commentary about their social extraction, collectively shared ideas, and beliefs. Looking at a text as a composition of social relations reveals, in our view, a fundamental assumption of Gramsci’s understanding of history making, in which both human and structural constrains meet—a position that we

10  Gramsci in/for Critical Times develop in Chapter 2. A text, in this view, represents the point of intersection between a singular understanding of the world and a collective social commentary; an act of freedom and an assertion of the structures such as syntax and grammar that confine it and therefore define it. This is the kind of tension that makes every Gramscian concept—as we show in our more detailed analyses in Chapters 4, 5, and 6—oscillate between progressive and regressive tendencies under historically specific circumstances. As we argue in Chapter 3, we are certainly not the first to explore and reveal the elective affinities between Gramsci and questions regarding language (e.g., De Mauro, 1980, 1991, 1999; Helsloot, 1989; Ives, 2004a; Lo Piparo, 1979). We are also not the only ones to advocate a materialist perspective on communication. However, these two elements have not been consistently put together, thus resulting in partial embracements of a Gramscian framework for cultural studies in communication (see Chapter 2). While we recognize the remarkable value and importance of a body of literature that incorporates linguistics into Gramscian theory, we think that this could be complemented by an expanded understanding of cultural practices. Conversely, we believe that communication, understood as a highly interdisciplinary field of interest rather than a compartmentalized discipline, and especially from within its critical and cultural tradition, may help us revive a materialist perspective that is more clearly anchored in a dialectical reconfiguration of structural constrains and human agency. In relation to this move, and whereas, as we mentioned above, a significant portion of contemporary cultural studies in communication is moving towards a ‘post-hegemonic’ perspective, we argue that a synthesis of the so-called humanist and structuralist impulses in Gramsci—via the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall respectively—provides a powerful way to unpack the complexity of the Gramscian understanding of culture and communication, human agency, and history making, while at the same time making explicit Gramsci’s commitment to a positive critique that goes beyond uncovering ‘power,’ but provides instead a guide for action or a Telos (Zompetti, 1997).

Communication and Change A book dealing with crisis, communication, and change is certainly broad enough to become easily unmanageable. Needless to say, we are not working here with universal definitions of any of these concepts, nor are we attempting to claim automatic transpositions of our theoretical and analytical tools to any other contexts. Rather, and in the interest of a depth of analysis that would allow for well-documented claims, we choose to focus on particular manifestations of the dynamics among these three constructs as they unfold(ed) in three different—but all Western—countries. Beyond—or in addition to—manageability, there are three main factors that shape our selection of these particular case studies. First of all, we

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  11 consider them as the as important objects/subjects of the organic crisis we described earlier in this chapter. In other words, Occupy Wall Street, Movimento Cinque Stelle, and Indignados/Podemos are produced by the implications of the crisis, while at the same time they act upon this crisis, both accelerating it and potentially providing a partial resolution for it. In this sense, they help us both apply and develop a dialectical approach to crisis within our overall Gramscian perspective. Our choices as authors are also marked by—and result in—both an expansive and a reductive move. First, we are interested in these particular cases because the Western economic crisis was strong enough to affect not only the most socio-economically disadvantaged groups but also those more privileged strata that have experienced a substantial reduction of their life chances. In this sense, we are convinced that, in order to take account of the opportunity for mobilization in this critical context in contemporary Western capitalist societies, one has to look not only at the most marginalized actors, but also at a broader, socially heterogeneous collective, including a significant component coming from formerly integrated and now impoverished groups. Indeed, in a 21st century version of what Gramsci defines as a united front of the subaltern, i.e., a dynamic alliance with broader social forces, one has to consider those relatively privileged groups as a fundamental component. Our expansive goal is then to place our project within a broader discussion of cultural practices that can account for their reproductive and transformative elements. We argue that this can only be done by turning our scholarly gaze towards those sites where societal relations are negotiated through the actions of socio-economically integrated groups. As our analyses discuss, the particular demographics of the groups studied show that specific demonstration techniques, as well as the opportunity to be heard and gain support, capitalize on a certain amount of preexisting privileges—mostly in the forms citizenship status, racial and ethnic background, and social class. On the other hand, those ‘others’ who more consistently remain at the margins of society cannot play an active role in these ways of challenging the exclusive nature and/or outcomes of the dominant social order. In short, for those whose suitability is consistently questioned, directly challenging inequality is simply not an option. Our third, and in this case constraining, element involves a reductive move, as it concerns our positionality as scholars/authors. We see ourselves not as abstracted from reality, but as social and historically determined subjects who, because of our particular sociocultural extraction, and beyond a level of explicit volition, are organic intellectuals to the lower, white middle class of Western capitalist societies. When we use the term “organic intellectual,” we do not attach any positive or negative connotations to it.9 Rather, we deploy it in its broadest, descriptive, Gramscian sense to define intellectuals as historic products of social relations. As Gramsci (1971) explained, intellectuals are functional—i.e., organic—to a particular social group, a

12  Gramsci in/for Critical Times system of relations that shapes their activities and from which they cannot be easily detached. This organicity thus sets the limits of our discussion, constraining it to our respective native countries and the country where we have been formed as scholars and worked for the last 15 years.10 Finally, and in relation to the project that this book intends to realize, the Gramscian ‘pessimism of the intellect’ attitude obliges us to make explicit a critical self-reflection on an important aspect this project cannot address as it deserves. One fundamental question that contemporary Gramscian oriented studies needs to interrogate and explore is whether it is possible to develop a theoretical framework that can accommodate both a state-centered political project and the undeniable level that also constrains it and tends to operate outside the sphere of a single political party or a single country-state. The recent events in Greece, to which we return in our conclusions, are a good reminder of the need to orient potential future research in this direction.

The Structure of the Book This book is comprised of 7 chapters. In this introductory chapter, we present the book’s main themes: Gramsci, communication, and social change in critical times. We explain how the current context of organic crisis provides an ideal historic moment to test the validity of a Gramscian perspective on social change, as well as how communication can be used to empirically test the different theoretical and practical tools that Gramsci provides. In this chapter, we also describe our main argumentative goals, which consist of advancing our ‘positive’ approach to hegemony as it relates to the broader Gramscian framework. In contrast to both a prevalent assumption, at least in cultural studies in communication, about the negative connotations of this notion, as well as in an attempt to push back against a post-­hegemony framework, we believe that Gramsci provides an analysis of hegemonic mechanisms aimed at not simply demystifying power, but at actually using this power in emancipatory ways. We also provide a rationale for our decision to examine three particular social movements as one of the most interesting outcomes of the organic crisis in the West, as well as in relation to their particular composition and our positionality as authors. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of our main theoretical assumptions regarding a materialist approach to culture and communication and its relation with Gramsci. We approach the main themes of this chapter by discussing competing interpretations of Gramsci within the cultural studies tradition in communication and our repositioning between what we consider the two main emphases in cultural critique: a “humanist” take deriving from Raymond Williams’ reading of Gramsci and a “structuralist” take deriving from that of Stuart Hall. We claim that in order to privilege a perspective focused on the history-­ making capability of people through social mobilization we need to understand social change as tied to hegemony and recognize the role that relatively

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  13 integrated sectors of society play in these processes. In the context of our present study this means, on the one hand, considering popular movements such as Indignados/Podemos, Movimento Cinque Stelle, and Occupy Wall Street—their specific shapes, strategies, and impacts—as inevitably enabled and constrained by the ongoing economic/cultural crisis in the West, and on the other, accounting for the possibilities that these non-peripheral initiatives open for a rethinking, questioning, and undoing of contemporary hegemonic systems, as well as our ways to theorize them. Chapter 3 is dedicated to exploring what we consider the strong link that connects Gramsci and communication. Based on the broader theoreti­ cal framework presented in Chapter 2, we make explicit how, through a materialist approach, we can focus on a Gramscian understanding of communication founded on dialectics. A central idea advanced in this chapter is the notion of translation, understood as an important practice of organic intellectuals. We identify two main practices of translation, horizontal and dialectical (or vertical), both of which go beyond the literal transposition of meanings across different languages. This perspective helps us understand Gramsci’s thought as a system in which concepts interact with one another in relational and dialectical fashion revealing, for example, the synthesis in notions such as hegemony, catharsis, or translation between symbolic and material elements. On the other hand, we show how Gramsci provides an important contribution to a materialist understanding of language that regards any given text as an assemblage of social relations that function as enabling and constraining the communicating subject. After three chapters mostly dedicated to theoretical reflection, we inaugurate our empirical analysis with Chapters 4, 5, and 6. OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos represent three historic specific manifestations of a crisis that started as a general and global impasse of the financial and productive system but then developed in each specific context disrupting the organic functioning of their respective social orders. In order to emphasize the Gramscian need for a historicist and immanent investigation, each chapter highlights a different aspect of the Gramscian reasoning. Thus, while we attempt to be consistent with our overall theoretical framework that understands human history in the dialectics of human agency and structural constrains, we also provide three cases with three different narratives and three different historicizations of the Gramscian framework: the tension between state and civil society in the North American case of Occupy; the tension between autocratic leadership and the politicization of people in the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle; and finally the tension between vernacular and national popular rhetoric in the Spanish case of Indignados/Podemos. In Chapter 4, we examine the case of the initial stages of Occupy Wall Street in the United States, when it mainly gravitated around Zuccotti Park in New York. Of the three cases we study, Occupy exemplifies the most noteworthy combination of characteristics of ‘old’ and ‘new’ social

14  Gramsci in/for Critical Times movements. On the one hand, it presented the heterogeneous, multi-centered, structure-­less facets of a new social movement, and on the other hand it was ideologically cohesive, as a united front, by the rhetoric of the “99%.” We define Occupy as a case that reveals the still-fundamental relevance of organizing an integral struggle against a social formation in which civil society and the state’s interests intermesh. We claim that strategically, Occupy, while engaging in a ‘war of position’ within civil society, fell short by not engaging with the state via the transition towards a political party, thus neglecting the possibilities of a strategic unity of war of position and war of maneuver against the institutions of the ‘integral state.’ In chapter 5, we examine the Italian movement Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) as a movement that emerged out of what Gramsci called a “Cesarist” opportunity. In other words, M5S represented a third party benefiting from the political stall of the two main political forces in Italy. The examination of M5S’s rhetoric reveals the dialectics between rupture and continuity, which in Gramscian terms equals the oscillation between the regressive and progressive components of a passive revolution. Looking at the compound of discourses this group advances, we claim that M5S exemplifies the ambivalence of a movement that originally aimed at mobilizing the Italian popular base in remarkable new ways but that, in the end, mostly reproduces aspects of what Gramsci terms a “passive revolution,” according to which the people become gradually alienated from the political process by reducing their involvement in the decision making. As we shall see, from a historical continuity perspective, Movimento Cinque Stelle, in contrast to Occupy Wall Street, and even more pronouncedly to Indignados/Podemos, can be seen ambiguously as only a relative rupture. In chapter 6, we trace the communicative struggle of the social movement Indignados and the political party Podemos in Spain and their transition from vernacular to national popular rhetoric. We emphasize how Podemos was, in rhetorical terms, particularly effective at capitalizing on the cathartic process of transforming rage and frustration due to economic problems into political consciousness, which consisted of elevating the particularistic and corporatist interests of a particular social group to a broader ethico-political level. We detect such a cathartic movement in the transition from vernacular to national popular rhetoric in Podemos, which also signals the passage from a ‘defensive’ understanding of hegemony to expansive one. Thus, Podemos’ rhetoric was able to compact a united front by rhetorically constructing a morally and intellectually entitled people, as well as ‘la Casta,’ the nemesis of the people, and finally a new popular common sense, founded on anti-­ austerity and solidarity principles. Chapter 7 presents our concluding unit. By comparing and contrasting the three cases examined, we try to synthetize the knowledge that our Gramscian analysis helped us produce. We discuss how, on the one hand, using Gramsci allowed us to raise relevant questions about contemporary

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  15 practices of social mobilization in a media-saturated society, and on the other hand, how applying Gramsci to those cases allowed us to provide a useful historicization of his thought, or in other words, to revive Gramscian cultural studies. In this chapter, we also reflect on the limitations of the scope of this work, discussing how our project can be expanded both theoretically and empirically. We think that dominant narratives emphasizing the decline of the nation-state as the central unit of analysis should not be simply dismissed as an ‘ideological other,’ but rather be acknowledged in so far as they indicate how a Gramscian framework can be advanced. In this sense, a final consideration of our book is that a key issue for the application of Gramsci to current social phenomena is to be able to synthetize the national and supra-national levels in order to reach a ‘higher’ level of integrality of the Gramscian ‘integral state,’ in which the porosity of both civil and political society works not only laterally but also transversally, thus taking into consideration all factors and actors operating beyond the nation state boundaries.

Notes 1. See, for example, Peter Popham’s article in the British newspaper The Independent, titled: “L’Únità: The venerable organ of Italian communism breaths its last,” where he claims that the newspaper’s passing “will be seen as the end of an era” Popham (2014). 31st July 2014 “The Independent” Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/lunita-the-venerable-organ-ofitalian-communism-breathes-its-last-9640890.html. 2. There is, for example, a “globalization” argument, stating that globalization forces have challenged the state as a fundamental social, economic, and political category (Chomsky, 1999; Castells, 1996; Esping-Andersen, 1991; Hicks, 1999; Iversen & Cusack, 2000; Minda, 1998; Pierson, 1996; Saad Filho & Johnston, 2005), which obliquely defies state-focused analyses such as Gramsci’s. Second, there has been a profound re-qualification of the notion of the working class as a primary political subject (Negri & Hardt, 2009). This move is related to arguments about the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production (Harvey, 1991) or the emergence of a third stage of capitalism (Jameson, 1991), entailing a shift from a production to a consumption-oriented economy (Garnham, 1990), as well as the prominence of information and communication technologies (Schiller, 1995). Third, several authors have highlighted the emergence of a hegemonic neoliberal order that relies on a transnational capitalist class (Robinson & Harris, 2000) and transnational capitalist networks (Sklair, 1995, 2002) as challenging the direct confrontation between ‘working’ and ‘industrial’ class. 3. As we will consistently reiterate throughout the book, one of the assumptions of this study consists of interpreting Gramsci’s overall intellectual project, especially in the Prison notebooks, to provide a historically situated reflection of how, in times of organic crisis, (i.e., crisis of hegemony, legitimation, or production of consent) a given subordinate group can develop a theoretically and practically effective alternative hegemonic project.

16  Gramsci in/for Critical Times 4. Gerbaudo (2012), for example, claims that new social movements, operating in the digital media landscape, appropriate corporate social media and turn them into an expansive instrument of social mobilization. 5. Laclau and Mouffe’s work also paved the way for another post-hegemonic argument, which maintains that current social historical circumstances do not allow for a direct application of the theoretical framework that sustains hegemony (Berardi, 1978, 1986; Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Dyer-Whiteford, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004; Lazzarato, 1996; Tronti, 1973, 1976, 1980; Virno, 1980, 1992). One of the main drivers of Autonomist Marxism was the interest in providing a new fresh Marxist perspective that could make sense of the changes that the 1960s Italian society, under the tremendous force of modernization and industrialization, was experiencing. In contrast to Gramsci, who envisioned the communist party as a “Modern Prince” capable of grouping different subjects under its tent, the notion of ‘autonomist Marxism’ privileges the perspective of the emancipatory self-activity of the working class, operating without mediation between social and political bodies, such as political parties and trade unions. 6. While Greene’s intervention can be contextualized in the tradition of materialist rhetoric, primarily involving communication scholars such as McGee (1982), Kennedy (1992), Cloud (1994, 2001, 2002, 2006), McKerrow (1989), Charland (1987), or Biesecker and Lucaites (2009), he departs from the basic principles that locate the materiality of communication in the economic, institutional, and ideological structures that condition speech, knowledge, and the formation of subjectivity. Greene aims at shedding light on how rhetoric functions in institutional settings as a “technology of deliberation” informed by the Foucaltian idea of bio-power, as rhetoric operationalizes discourse, population, and institutions into the field of action taking, thus functioning as a foundational principle ­of the reproduction of life. In this sense, Greene challenges the dominant model of rhetorical effectivity, or what Biesecker (1989) defined as the logic of influence. The impact of Greene’s scholarship in current communication-­ oriented approaches to social change exemplifies this change of sensibility, focus, and perception of available instruments for social action that implies an abandoning of traditional forms of social mobilization and traditional objectives. Such an approach tends to privilege the rhetoric of social movements—focusing on discursive constitution—rather than social movements’ rhetoric as a strategic resource to accomplish the groups’ objectives. 7. According to Beasley-Murray (2003), “posthegemony […] combines the histori­ cal observation that the theory of hegemony (as advanced by Antonio Gramsci and more recently refined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and by cultural studies in general) no longer help explain contemporary social order, with the more radical claim that it has only ever appeared to do so” (p. 117). For Beasley-Murray, given that hegemony in “essence is a theory of social efficacy of ideology,” the decline of ideology is the most significant evidence of the condition of post-hegemony. 8. Catharsis and crisis are examples of how Gramsci provides the instruments to empirically engage with the constitutive tension of the real and material circumstances in which these groups emerge and operate. In fact, for Gramsci the general historic impasse created by crises consists of the old and new being indissolubly united, as the old cannot die and the new struggles emerge.

Gramsci in/for Critical Times  17 9. Gramsci is considered to be a prominent theorist of the figure of the intellectual, to the point that his well-known distinction in the Prison notebooks between organic and traditional intellectuals has been consistently used and abused. Particularly fetishized is the normative driven distortion of the meaning of being organic. While Gramsci’s relational perspective understands ‘organicity’ in structural and neutral ways, thus envisioning intellectuals as a product of given social groups that may function organically when they operate by representing the political, economic, and ideological interests of that group, in important scholarly works of the Anglophonic Gramscian literature (e.g., Hall, 1992; Mouffe, 1979), organic intellectual becomes a synonym for ‘critically engaged,’ ‘public intellectual’ embracing progressive and social justice principles. 10. Overall, we tried to translate biographic experiences into historically and socially grounded knowledge. Thus, we reject the idealized abstract aspirations of intervention that reproduce the position of a traditional intellectual who, assuming to stand above society due to his/her moral virtue and sense of justice, comes down to intervene in the human affairs as a Olympian god or a deus ex machina.

2 Selective Gramsci(s)

In this chapter we advance our critique of the selective tradition that, with regards to cultural critique, has contributed to a revival of Gramsci in conjunction with a decay in the scope of applications of his work. We think this is a necessary theoretical detour because, at least in communication scholarship influenced by cultural studies, ‘culture’ has—not without criticism—­progressively taken the center scene, understood as a main site of struggle, as well as a tool for social change and human emancipation. It is therefore important to trace what versions of ‘culture’ have been “chosen for emphasis” and which ones have been “neglected, obscured […] reinterpreted or diluted” to fit dominant narratives (Williams, 1958, p. 39), as well as how these trends relate to our project on crisis, communication, and social change from a Gramscian perspective. In the following pages, we identify how certain readings of Gramsci’s work have been incorporated into a selective history shaped by academic and disciplinary demands in communication studies. We distinguish two competing—although not completely incompatible—“Gramscis” in relation to cultural critique: a humanist/culturalist Gramsci through Raymond Williams and a post/structuralist Gramsci through Stuart Hall. Even though, as we will show, these readings are selective and have served different purposes at different times, the latter has progressively superseded the former in most cultural studies in communication. This has led to an overemphasis on the “negative” aspects of ideology-as-hegemony—tied to a reductive view of power as an abstract category—in detriment of a more dialectical and therefore constructive understanding of these concepts, and of Gramsci’s body of work as a whole. By dialectically constructive, we mean a reading of the Gramscian project as a way to theorize the active re-organization of social relations and ultimately of the social order. The purpose of this chapter is thus twofold: on the one hand, we situate our project within the existing scholarship in cultural studies in communication; on the other, we try to reposition this scholarship in a more historical and praxis-oriented realm through a revisiting of some of its key debates and the assumptions that inform them. We thus propose to revive Gramsci through, first of all, engaging in a cross-fertilizing critique of the biases in both Hall’s and William’s readings. Second, we review Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’

Selective Gramsci(s)  19 as a Marxist proposal on its own. Ultimately, we argue that incorporating a Gramscian approach to communicative practices—i.e., considering communication as a mode of action in a dialectical framework of constrains and freedoms as synthetized by his philosophy of praxis—and a communicative approach to Gramsci—i.e., treating rhetorical acts as always political acts of translation—stands as a crucial step in this task. In order to advance our argument, we first highlight a progressive (over) emphasis in cultural studies and communication literature—via the influential project of Stuart Hall—on marginality, micro acts of resistance, civil society, and ultimately performative and signification-oriented aspects of communication and culture detached from historically constrained praxes. This path, in our view, has resulted in a diluted, reoriented, and ultimately incomplete Gramsci whose use in communication is too often limited to ideology critique and/or discursive forms of resistance, thus losing its most heuristic impulses. Then, we review Raymond Williams’ emphasis on Gramsci’s body of work, and especially hegemony, at the service of a “cultural materialist” perspective (Williams, 1977). In our critique, we highlight Williams’ prefigurative politics in describing the uses of Marxism for different understandings and productions of literature. While Williams adequately captures in theoretical terms the Gramscian sense of history making, qua synthetizing the intersection of structural constrains and subjective interventions, his project over-emphasizes a humanist and voluntarist perspective and downplays class politics. By not always accounting, in the application of his framework, for concrete and complex instances of social struggle, Williams de facto engages with an abstract subjectivity rather a historical and political one. As a more productive framework for our project, we propose here a dialectical recomposition of the so-called “structuralist” and “humanist” paradigms in cultural studies and communication (Hall, 1980) under the general Marxian principle of people making history within a structural context that affects such agency and ultimately hijacks the conditions of their own making. In the process, we re/locate cultural studies in communication as a project invested in legitimizing the critique of human activities, not as an end in itself, but as a crucial first step towards creating spaces for an alternative political project. This move entails both an understanding of social change as necessarily linked to hegemony—seen both as a process and an accomplishment—and the important recognition of the role that relatively integrated sectors of society play in these dynamics. For these reasons, we consider social movements such as Indignados/Podemos, Movimento Cinque Stelle, and Occupy Wall Street as factors and actors of the organic crisis that has recently affected most countries in the West. Moreover, we also consider the opportunity that these historic specific social forces and initiatives provide for a re-evaluation of how social activism operates under the current historical circumstances.

20  Selective Gramsci(s)

Enter Cultural Studies, Exit Praxis? Cultural Criticism and/in Communication As Toby Miller (2006) put it, the unstoppable “cultural turn” in the human sciences has proven cultural studies’ magnetism and capacity to bring together perspectives that would seem irreconcilable otherwise. In his own account, Miller highlights a series of “continuities” in cultural studies work across disciplines that, he argues, are grounded in “shared concerns and methods: the concern is the reproduction of culture through structural determination on subjects versus their own agency, and the method is histori­ cal materialism” (p. 1). However, what Miller presents as an apparent shared starting point has not remained uncontested in every discipline that came to develop a cultural studies niche. In US communication departments, for example, the particular ways in which a critical and cultural perspective came to be (reluctantly) accepted as part of the discipline meant that its “concerns and methods” had to be reread through a “communicative” lens. Often, we would argue, this implied a move away from a historical materialist lens, and from a theorizing of communication as cultural praxis within an overall understanding of culture as a unique site inevitably tied to/constrained by other social spheres. One specific manifestation of this move, which we address more fully in Chapter 4 with the case of OWS, is the emphasis—both in academic and lay discourses—on discussions of culture and communication within the realm of civil society, as independent from and not intrinsically tied to institutions such as the state. Due to different contextual and disciplinary exigencies, then, critical approaches progressively fixed an understanding of culture and communication as “floating signifiers,” mostly autonomous with regards to other aspects and away from communication as a compound assemblage of social relations, and culture as a general and specific “expression of society” (Gramsci, 1975, Q9, $57) that “mediates the relationship between people and reality” (Gramsci, 1975, Q2, $37). From the Gramscian perspective that we propose here, we embrace an ‘integral,’ all-encompassing understanding of culture. This implies looking at multiple spheres, such as state and civil society and individual and collective dimensions, as sites of (re)production of the social order through consent and coercion. In this view, cultural praxis transversally cuts through different areas and levels of society and is seen as the dialectical product of symbolic expressions and material constraints. Our ‘integral’ perspective thus allows us to intervene in the debate between reductive and expansive understandings of cultural activity, which we see as directly or indirectly informing most work in cultural studies in communication. Lawrence Grossberg—one of the main facilitators of the landing of British cultural studies on US communication shores—exemplifies the critique based on a supposedly reductionist move in the translation of cultural practices from a cultural studies to a communication perspective. For him, the main problem was that, in the process of becoming a legitimate object

Selective Gramsci(s)  21 of study for critical communication scholars, “culture” was reduced and equated to media and signification. Grossberg situates the origins of this trend in Raymond Williams and James Carey’s emphasis on communication practices, such as media rituals, when studying culture. This, he argues, ultimately resulted in an overemphasis on “representation, meaning-making, and signification” that deviated cultural studies away from its main object of study, namely “the larger context” or “conjuncture” (in Hay, 2013, p. 78). Grossberg then goes on to propose “a cultural studies without the disciplinary object of culture,” (p. 84) an approach that, in his view, would provide scholars with the necessary flexibility in studying those aspects that may become culturally significant in particular places and at a particular times. Whereas we would agree with Grossberg’s reading in terms of what ­happened—i.e., the complex understanding of culture at the basis of cultural studies did not make it into most communication research—we would like to offer a different perspective on the how and why of this reductionist move and consequently what is to be done about it. In short, we think that different selective readings of Gramsci had a determinant role in the ways culture came to (not) be embraced in cultural studies in communication. In our view, this had important consequences for a field that has progressively centered ‘culture’ as a main site of struggle and potential freedom from oppressive dynamics. In contrast with Grossberg’s explanation, we would argue that the problem was not just about what cultural studies in communication enthusiastically embraced, but about what it did not embrace—including, most importantly, an ‘integral’ understanding of culture and communication grounded in Gramscian perspectives. In our view, these particular selections played a crucial role in this transformation, mostly through the progressive emphasis, in cultural studies-inflected communication scholarship, on so-called ‘cultural’ (meaning symbolic), consensual, and reproductive aspects of ­hegemonic processes, paired with a primary interest in centering media practices as fundamental elements of cultural critique, as they were seen as main sources of dissemination of dominant ideologies (Artwick, 2013; Gentry & Harrison, 2010; Hardin, Dodd, Chance, & Walsdorf, 2004; Jones, 2012; Kroskrity, 2000; Mihelich & Storrs, 2003; Venn, 2007). Grossberg’s account thus situates Williams’ framework at the center of a progressive abandoning of the heuristic potential of ‘culture’ in cultural studies work. As we will see later, Williams’ enthusiastic emphasis on communication and culture as sites of creativity was problematized first by Stuart Hall, and later—although for different purposes—by Marxist rhetoricians in communication studies (Aune, 1994; Cloud, 2010). Through Grossberg, Williams’ uses of Gramsci were discarded in favor of Stuart Hall’s particular translation of Gramsci’s ideas into his contemporary context—which he put in conjunction with Laclau’s notion of articulation (1977). This made them recognizable and thus suitable for scholarly interest in the US, specifically among communication scholars. Next, we trace this progression by paying close attention to Hall’s and Williams’ readings of Gramsci, as well as the

22  Selective Gramsci(s) implications that the unbalanced embracement of these readings had for cultural critique in communication studies. As Hall has been considerably more influential on US shores, we spend more time reviewing and critiquing his position.

Gramsci Through Hall: An Ideological Account A ‘Gramscian’ Project Stuart Hall’s contributions to the study of cultural practices through, among other means, his own understanding of Gramsci undoubtedly paved the way for the consolidation of cultural studies in communication, while at the same time imposing certain limitations on the contours of this path. Pointing to this restricting role, Hay (2013) recently proposed that: We should not forget that cultural studies was never primarily or only about studying communication/media—an important history to recall because U.S. communication and media studies’ mining and appropriation of certain veins of cultural studies (e.g., Stuart Hall’s essay on encoding and decoding) bolstered a persistent assumption that cultural studies was ever little more than the study of popular media. (p. 3) But how did this “appropriation of certain veins of cultural studies” come to be? If we examine Hall’s numerous and diverse intellectual contributions, we find that he was a consistently direct and strong defendant of what he called a “Gramscian approach” in cultural studies. However, Hall’s own contextual and historical grounding and its correspondent emphases and preoccupations, paired with the disciplinary exigencies in communication, may have had the unproductive effect of delimiting Gramsci’s contributions to the critical/cultural turn in communication studies in a way that ultimately left behind what we see as Gramsci’s most important legacy: a coherent project aimed at examining language as a historical and material force linked to the rethinking and reshaping of power relations, not limited to exposing/ deconstructing existing ones. As we discuss below, such a project necessarily entails conceptualizing rhetorical acts as cathartic translations of people’s earthly circumstances into politically feasible worldviews. In one of his last interviews, Hall pointed to his identification with Gramsci’s project in the following way: “Gramscian” is about the only title I own. When people say, “You’re a Marxist,” I don’t really recognize that, except in the way I just described. But when they say, “You’re a Gramscian,” well, sort of, yes. “Hegemony,” “historical block,” “conjuncture,” ‘‘social forces,’’ the whole panoply of his terms, have become the instruments or weaponry in my analysis of the present. So that explains why these concepts are very important. (2013, p. 16)

Selective Gramsci(s)  23 In spite of his unconditional embracement of a Gramscian vocabulary and as exemplified by his distinction in the above quote between “Gramscian” and “Marxist,” Hall’s translation of Gramsci, from the beginning, highlighted what he saw as “revisionist” elements in the Gramscian framework with regards to Marxist theory. As he put it: [Gramsci] works, broadly speaking, within a Marxist framework, but in some ways like me, he was not a classical or traditional Marxist at all. I don’t like to be pinned down, and I’ve always thought within that framework—have always been a very committed revisionist. (p. 15) It is this “revisionist” reading of Gramsci to better align with Hall’s own project that is of interest to us. Although we would not necessarily contest Gramsci’s innovative impulses, we would argue that many of those useful “instruments” or “weaponry” that Hall identifies in Gramsci were not directed at revisiting Marx’s contributions per se; rather, they were aimed at revisiting the ways Marxism had been read and used for particular purposes. Specifically, we propose that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis re-states both Marxist dialectics and materiality in reviving ways. As he put it in his Quaderni, Gramsci’s goal was to rescue historical materialism from both the orthodox position within the Marxist tradition— which he saw as afflicted by an excess of economics—and the ideological emphasis on individual and voluntarist elements. Gramsci wrote, “in the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes; in the second, of the voluntaristic and individual element” (1971, p. 178). This is a perspective that, in his reading, Stuart Hall progressively de-emphasized. His increasing relocation of his own “Gramscian” perspective within a structuralist—and then post-structuralist—approach to Marxism thus opened the door for an understanding of cultural studies as mostly an attempt to overcome Marxism’s humanist impulses. The particular embracement of a “Gramscian” approach that Hall recently recalled was already present in his earlier reflections on the origins and futures of cultural studies as it paved its way towards US academic departments. In his intervention at the 1990 Chicago conference on “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future”—one of the key moments establishing a connection between cultural studies and communication—Hall situated Gramsci as someone who “radically displaced some of the inheritances of Marxism in cultural studies” (During, 1993, p. 102, emphasis in the original). At the same time, Hall’s intervention pointed to a lack of understanding and reckoning with this “displacement” in cultural studies work at the time. Thus, for Hall, acknowledging the value of Gramsci for cultural studies necessarily entailed engaging the “displacement,” and it is towards developing this displacement that Hall would direct most of his future efforts. We would argue that through his studies on media and popular culture, Hall progressively understated the connections between Gramsci’s project and

24  Selective Gramsci(s) an overall Marxist commitment to an ‘integral’ perspective, according to which, in order to change a given social formation at its root, we need to consider how each societal element is linked in multiple ways and levels to the social whole. Hall’s 1980 classic “Cultural studies: Two paradigms” already advanced his disjunction between Gramsci and a historical materialist perspective, together with a quite reductionist reading of those authors who centered cultural practices as sites of production. In this text, he tried to resume “the characteristic stresses and emphases through which the concept [of culture] has arrived at its present state of (in)determinacy” (p. 59). In doing so, he distinguished between an emphasis on culture as ideas, exemplified by the work of Levi Strauss, and culture as practices, exemplified by the work of E. P. Thomson and Raymond Williams. For Hall, the latter constituted the “dominant” paradigm in cultural studies, and it stood “opposed to the residual and merely reflective role assigned to ‘the cultural’” (p. 63), containing instead an “experiential pull” and an “emphasis on the creative and on historical agency” that Hall claimed made it decidedly “humanist” (p. 63). Hall characterized Thompson and Williams’ contributions as “properly (even if not adequately or fully) […] ‘culturalist’ in their emphasis,” as they “constantly inflect the moral traditional analysis towards the experiential level, or read the other structures and relations downwards from the vantage point of how they are ‘lived’” (1980, p. 64). However, he also claimed that “in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous ‘forms’ underlying their most apparently differentiating areas, their movement [was] ‘essentializing’” (p. 64). In order to counterbalance this tendency, Hall (re)proposed what he saw as a less recognized series of “structuralist interventions, largely articulated around the concept of ideology” (p. 66) and emphasizing a view of culture as, above all, signifying practices. This ideological emphasis, Hall argued, entailed a different, but complementary, understanding of “experience” not as a primary ground, but as a result of categories already established. Hall then encouraged cultural studies practitioners to engage this dialectic in order to avoid “naïve humanism” and “populist political practice” (p. 67). In spite of his stated willingness to advance knowledge in cultural studies drawing on the “best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises, by way of some of the concepts elaborated in Gramsci’s work” (p. 72), Hall’s argument seemed to lean towards ultimately proposing structuralism as a corrective to humanism—a position that would be later confirmed in his theorizing of hegemony as mostly linked to ideological reproduction. He thus spoke of structuralism’s different “strengths,” namely the “stress on determinate conditions” (p. 67), the emphasis on “movement between different levels of abstraction,” and its conceptualization of the whole as “constructed through differences” (p. 68, emphasis in original). However, in this context, he proposed ‘articulation’ as a useful theoretical way to account

Selective Gramsci(s)  25 for “unity-in-difference,” or “complex unity,” as opposed to the absolute autonomy of practices (a la Foucault or post-Althusser). Hall also linked articulation to a needed decentering of experience and the consequent emphasis on ideology “as a terrain of struggle” that he saw exemplified in the work of Gramsci and Laclau (1980, p. 69). The concept of articulation, which nowadays informs influential work in cultural studies and communication (see Grossberg, 1986, 2010; Green, 1998, 2004) was thus born out of Hall’s alignment of Gramsci’s project with that of Laclau, which he saw as fundamental pillars in an effort to recover the contradictory character of ideology—more material for Gramsci, more symbolic for Laclau. However, it would be Laclau’s understanding that would eventually come to be attached to this project. In spite of the apparently dialectical impulse informing Hall’s argument in the piece just discussed, much of his later work tended to prioritize an understanding of ideology as signification over meaning and experience and to abandon dialectical thinking in favor of indeterminacy (see Peck, 2001). Hence, as frequently happens in scholarship, according to pendulum-like oscillations, what was originally a relative negation trying to correct humanism by asserting structural ‘unity in difference’ became an absolute one, thus moving to the opposite pole by privileging ‘difference’ under a post-­structuralist paradigm. Given this move, one of the goals of the present study is to rebalance the current leading direction in cultural studies and communication by re-proposing a humanist/culturalist element as a viable corrective to what we see as post/structuralist impulses. By reviving Gramsci, we aim at recovering a theoretical framework that synthesizes consciousness and experience through communicative practices, and to re-place Gramsci himself as somebody who productively proposed this synthesis. In the specific context of the social movements we examine, this translates into the study of communication as a cultural practice that is inevitably constrained by a variety of factors including material interests, established social relations, and ideologies—although that does not necessarily mean that ideology contains only negativity and regressiveness. In this sense, as we discuss in the following chapters, concrete changes such as the fulgurant raise of emergent and non-peripheral political parties and movements, or civil society’s overwhelming identification with a partially conservative kind of rhetoric, can be understood as constrained in the sense that they would not be possible without a specific political and economic scenario that facilitates this catharsis. A “Communication” Project Another primary example of Hall’s dialectical promise but ultimate embracement of Gramsci within an overall separation between ideology and materiality is his “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and

26  Selective Gramsci(s) Ethnicity” (1986). This is arguably one of Hall’s best-received pieces in US communication circles and also probably the best-known discussion of hegemony in this context—in detriment, perhaps, of more nuanced approaches such as Perry Anderson’s (1976). In this piece, Hall crucially addressed the possibilities that the notion of hegemony opened for theorizing the intersections between class and race. For Hall, echoing Gramsci, such approach was key in understanding conjunctural analysis, politics, ideology and the state, the character of different kinds of political regimes, the importance of cultural and national-popular questions, and the role of civic society in the shifting balance of relations between different social forces in society. (Hall, 1986, p. 8) According to Hall, these kinds of analysis would allow cultural studies to put together state and individual, or rather, to see individual activity and consciousness as a manifestation of the state and vice versa. Once again, we see in these initial statements a commitment to a dialectical kind of thinking that can account for the inevitable interaction between civil society and the state, between consciousness and experience, vernacular and dominant communicative practices, continuity and change—a project that we definitely embrace and try to develop in this book. However, at the same time, and drawing on Gramsci’s view that class unity is “never assumed a priori,” but internally fragmented, and in line with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) understanding of hegemony as discursively (de)constructed, Hall invited practitioners of cultural studies to explore the conflicting interests that inform particular group identities, mainly through mapping contradictory discursive formations in the (re)production of popular hegemony. This emphasis arguably paved the way for a ­plethora of studies based on an understanding of hegemonic processes as a negotiation of “ideological”—read: discursive—give and take by which state and individuals jointly set the limits of what is adequate, beneficial, and possible to pursue (Martínez Guillem & Briziarelli, 2012). In the realm of social movements scholarship, as we discussed in Chapter 1, this translated into a predominant post-hegemonic/post-Gramscian framework for analysis. In communication studies, this formalist take on hegemonic processes quickly became the dominant way of incorporating a “Gramscian” perspective into cultural critique, leading to a progressive disconnection between hegemony and material coercive elements. Much recent scholarship in our field thus highlights the capacity of different historically marginalized groups to negotiate and resist the meanings attached to them, mainly through their appropriation of dominant discourses (e.g., Jackson, 2005; Johnson, 2003; Shugart, 2007). Thus, as Eagleton ironically notes, “it is [the] lack of stable identities which for some cultural theory today is the last word in radicalism.

Selective Gramsci(s)  27 Instability of identity is ‘subversive’—a claim which it would be interesting to test out among the socially dumped and disregarded” (2013, p. 16). When trying to correct this overemphasis on re-signification practices as a primary source of agency, Marxism-informed communication accounts have tended to privilege structural forms of domination, either by highlighting direct forms of ideology reproduction—often equating hegemony to dominant ideology in the process—or by focusing on the indirect ways apparently inclusive practices are used to gain consensus for exclusion in even more pervasive ways—which privileges domination through consent (Aune, 1994; Cloud, 1994, 1996; Condit, 1994; Zompetti, 1997, 2008). Thus, materialist critiques have become inevitably tied to reproduction, (i.e., the reproduction of material inequalities) whereas accounts of production and change are limited to the symbolic realm (Miller, 2006). Although they do so in different ways, both of these emphases disregard people’s ­capacity—even if limited—to act upon their material environment in small but significant ways—and how communicative practices are part of this creative and constrained activity. As we will show in the upcoming chapters, ideological/material delimitations are important to bear in mind when accounting for social reproduction as well as change. This, in our view, is a crucial aspect in a dialectical approach to social dynamics of the kind Stuart Hall occasionally proposed. Next, we turn to the potential that the incorporation of humanist elements has for such a project.

Gramsci through Williams: A Humanist Account An ‘Ordinary’ Perspective In the context of a “first generation” of cultural studies practitioners preoccupied with legitimizing the study of all kinds of human activity, Raymond Williams’ interest was, first of all, on a view of culture and communication as productive activities, and second, on the systematic connection between cultural practices—including communicative practices—and the totality of society. For Williams, speaking to a Marxist tradition that, in its critique of bourgeois practices, restricted culture to dominant groups, culture was ‘ordinary’ and thus found everywhere, and the practices organically emerging from those spaces could serve alienating as well as emancipating purposes. He thus rejected the notion of ‘ignorant masses’ in favor of the experience-based and valuable knowledge that those excluded from the “centres of power” could offer. As he stated: There is an English bourgeois culture, with its powerful educational, literary and social institutions, in close contact with the actual centres of power. To say that most working people are excluded from these is self-evident […] But to go on to say that working people are excluded from English culture is nonsense; they have their own growing

28  Selective Gramsci(s) institutions, and much of the strictly bourgeois culture they would in any case not want […] There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value […] I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society. (1977, pp. 95–96) In his quest to give visibility and recognition to an already-existing, ‘best basis’ for social organization, Williams developed a theorization of culture as intrinsically tied to communication, and communication itself as a “whole social process.” To this end, he also put forward an understanding of Gramsci that overtly highlighted the creative, voluntaristic aspects of his project, as well as their potential to overcome the theoretical impasse of a Marxist rigid division between so-called ‘structural’ and ‘superstructural’ elements of society—an aspect that we discuss in more detail below. Williams’ project progressively proposed a rethinking of cultural praxis as a fundamental and creative set of human activities in its own right, which could account for its potential to transform societies. This is, in essence, Williams’ “cultural materialist” perspective, “a theory of the specificities of material culture and literary production within historical materialism” (1977, p. 5). Such theory is based on two fundamental principles: first, the incorporation of the materiality of communication as cultural practice; and second, the acknowledgment that, even though cultural manifestations are practices themselves and not mere reflections, their historical and political determinants cannot be overlooked (Higgins, 1999). This second principle, for Williams, involved engaging with Marxist concepts such as ‘totality’ or ‘determination.’ For him, looking at ‘whole social processes’ involved overcoming the limitations of “thinking of the democratic, industrial and cultural revolutions as separate processes” (1961b, p.  xi). In order to account for these dynamics in a holistic way, Williams offered a re-reading of the concept of ‘determination’ through a dialectical lens that, rather than getting rid of this notion, tried to overcome its restriction to a limiting process. As he explained, “[a] Marxism without some concept of determination is in effect worthless. A Marxism with many of the concepts of determination it now has is quite radically disabled” (1977, p. 83). Williams thus re-conceptualized determination as a dialectical movement through which the economic base sets the limits and exerts pressure over other societal spheres, whereas at the same time the cultural sphere exists not as a mere result of these pressures, but also can react to them and exert its own influence over the ‘base.’ In this context, Williams’ crucial interest was to counter simplistic understandings of ideology, which he tried to do with a notion of determination that, in alignment with his reading of Gramsci, refused “to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as ‘ideology’” (Williams, 1977, p. 109). This conceptual framework thus left room for the possibility of an

Selective Gramsci(s)  29 alternative and even an oppositional culture that emerged from the relationship between the different levels of society and was not just a result of particular external conditions and the interests of a few. Hegemony thus allowed Williams to counter ‘Marxist’ understandings of ideology as pure reflection. As he put it: ‘Hegemony’ is a concept which at once includes and goes beyond two powerful earlier concepts: that of culture as ‘whole social process’ in which men define and shape their whole life; and that of ideology, in any of its Marxist senses, in which a system of meanings and values is the expression and projection of particular class interests. (1977, p. 110) Importantly, as Chrehan (2002) puts it, these emphases were inserted in a specific academic conversation—mostly within literary criticism—and more concretely, they were part of a response to what Williams saw as mechanistic understandings of ideology that did not, at the time, allow for working class creativity to be considered part of ‘Culture’—a critique that is certainly in consonance with Williams’ defense of culture as ‘ordinary’ as seen in the quote above. It is also important to remember that “the essence of Williams’ project in the book [Marxism and literature] is an exploration of what a Marxist literary practice that took both Marxism and literature equally seriously might look like” (Crehan, 2002, p. 171). It was in this context that Williams tied his productive understanding of social determination to Gramsci’s ‘hegemony,’ and through his own emphases—and in contrast with those by Hall previously discussed—he put the study of hegemonic processes at the service of placing the particulars of culture in relation to its more general aspects and culture itself as a crucial and material site of production. In his quest to reconcile macro-structures and micro-practices, Williams also highlighted the processual character of hegemony, seeing it as in constant movement, always contested and unstable, and as a way to “relate […] whole social processes to specific distributions of power and influence” (Williams, 1977, p. 109). As he explained, The reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that, while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive. At any time, forms of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the society. (1977, p. 113) A ‘Whole’ Perspective The search for a totality that could simultaneously contain culture and historically determined configurations of power was thus a way to address Williams’ discomfort with the classic Marxist distinction between base and

30  Selective Gramsci(s) superstructure. In his seminal essay “Base and superstructure” (1973), Williams used Gramsci to go beyond such a distinction and replace it with Marx’s proposition that “social being determines consciousness” (p. 3). For Williams, as we explained, the sense of determination linking the economic activities of the base and the cultural sphere of superstructure ended up oversimplifying and not adequately describing the complex relations between the former and the latter. Hence, he suggested the term “mediation” to describe how a given element, such as cultural production, relates to the social whole. Mediation, in this view, dissolves the base and superstructure hypostatic nature into a more active and fluid relation between different elements. Williams was convinced that hegemony provided the adequate framework for an understanding of social totality that went beyond base and superstructure. However, while Gramsci recognized the “primitive infantilism” to see “ideology as immediate expression of the structure” (1975 Vol. 2, p. 871) he retained the distinction between structure and superstructure and their ‘reflective’ relations (1971, p. 366) because, in Gramsci’s elaboration, the superstructure had an important political function. As many other Marxist thinkers of early 20th century, Gramsci considered the superstructure as the site of consciousness (not only false consciousness) and political agency. In fact, for Gramsci, the superstructure represented “the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, their struggle” (1971, p. 377). Such move will be exemplified in our framework by the pivotal operation of catharsis, which ‘translates’ the necessity of the economic structure into freedom at the level of the superstructure. Williams, on the other hand, conflated all the different levels of social and practical life (such as economic and cultural production) into a ‘whole way of life’ by rejecting the more ‘determinate’ link between base and superstructure. Such conflation, we argue, ultimately limited his framework, as it does not allow us to explain how, historically, people can reach a level of political consciousness, and therefore political agency. Rather, this view tends to regress into the celebration of already existing knowledgeable, independent, but inevitably marginal culture. For Williams: If the people in the teashop go on insisting that culture is their trivial differences of behaviour, their trivial variations of speech habit, we cannot stop them, but we can ignore them. They are not that important, to take culture from where it belongs. (p. 94, our emphasis) This ‘class pride’ perspective, in our view, does not place enough stress on the intrinsic, mutually defining relationship between (relatively) marginalized groups’ experiences and practices and those of (relatively) dominant groups. When reflecting on this preferred focus on the “specific primacies” of (working class) culture and the reading of this as a ‘culturalist,’ purely idealist position, Williams proposed that this was just a needed stage in a

Selective Gramsci(s)  31 trajectory towards a “materialist, but non-positivist, theory of language, of communication, and of consciousness” (1976, p. 88). The move towards “cultural materialism,” for him, entailed seeing economic, social, and cultural symbolic processes as mutually constitutive, a perspective where “language and signification [are] indissoluble elements of the material social process itself, involved all the time both in production and reproduction” (1961b, p. 99). In spite of this insistence on the dialectical impulses informing his project, the predominant focus on certain cultural activities specifically located in terms of social groups and kinds of production, combined with a lack of references to political translatability into other contexts, permeated the ways in which Williams’ work was read by the second-generation cultural studies practitioners—most notably Stuart Hall—as well as, later on, in the discipline of communication studies. Although based on a different reading of Gramsci than the one we are proposing here, Hall’s characterization of Williams’ project as “naïve” was also addressed at his conceptualization of culture as a “whole way of life” (1980, p. 62). As discussed above, Hall saw this approach as ultimately collapsing culture into society and thus lacking strength to function as a heuristic and analytical starting point. This reading of Williams was strongly taken up in communication scholarship, and especially by Lawrence Grossberg, whose work arguably shaped the ways in which the current generation of critical/ cultural scholars came to understand the (im)possibilities of critique. For Grossberg, echoing Hall, Williams problematically collapsed “the social into the cultural,” understood as “the structure of social experience (which can be read off of the surface of class position)” (1984, p. 401). For other, more sympathetic, authors, the specificities of the US context made it hard for American authors to identify with the working-class-based sense of community that Williams so enthusiastically celebrated. In these readings, Williams’ preoccupation with the “fictional moment of the cultural over other elements” (Aune, 1994, p. 95) is also interpreted as paving the way for a link between cultural materialism and an overemphasis, in critical communication research, on “the cultural dimension of communication, especially television, film, and popular music” (Aune, 1994, p. 115). Yet another kind of critique situates Williams’ interest in culture as a fundamental site of production and reproduction as a bridge for a nondialectic kind of thinking that would eventually excise class-based relations from critical scholarship in communication (Cloud, 2010). For Cloud, “beginning with Williams’s articulation of a ‘cultural materialist’ and his rejection of the base-superstructure dialectic, cultural studies has on the whole focused entirely on political relations in discourse rather than economics” (p. 66). The scarce references in communication scholarship to Williams’ work, then, start from a common position of skepticism towards an overemphasis on culture as a material site of production and its distracting effects. Consequently, as Aune (1994) put it, Williams’ line of inquiry was never

32  Selective Gramsci(s) considered fundamental for US versions of cultural studies. However, as we tried to show in this review, there are certain aspects of Williams’ “particular appropriation of Gramsci” (Hall, 1982) that, in a dialectical tension with Hall’s, are extremely valuable for our project. By rescuing these aspects, we would also like to disrupt particular narratives, (re)examining a humanist/ culturalist perspective as a corrective to some of the “selective Gramscis” we identified in our discussion above. This, to be clear, does not mean to replace Hall’s reading of Gramsci with that of Williams. As we saw, adjusting Gramsci’s project to fit Williams’ purposes, although allowing for an important activity-based and democratizing view of culture, also implied a certain reduction of his framework. Thus, within a cultural materialist perspective, Gramsci was used to account mostly for the ways in which cultural production should be rescued from the epiphenomenal realm of the ‘superstructure’ and inserted into the material, productive level of society. The specific (dis)connections between Williams and Gramsci that emerged from such a project had important implications for cultural studies in communication. As Milner argues, within a broader battle between hegemony as structure and as culture, Hall’s proposal for “the structuralist ‘interruption’ as theoretical salvation” was much more decidedly embraced than Williams’ cultural materialism (2002, p. 114). By re-embracing Gramsci more fully through both perspectives, in this project we hope to revive those aspects that have more to do with materiality, communication, and social change— including, yes, hegemony. Overall, different contextual and disciplinary exigencies, together with selective interpretations of so-called structuralist and humanist projects, contributed to the progressive inability to capture the “dynamism of culture” in communication and cultural studies scholarship (Acland, 2013, p. 211). Next, we discuss the potential contribution of a repositioning of Gramsci’s work for a project invested in providing an ‘integral’ account of cultural practices.

Repositioning Gramsci: An Integral Account As we explained above, an important goal of this book is to re-center Gramsci’s work as a fundamental pillar in the study of the relationships among crisis, communication, and change. We use that framework to examine, interpret, and explain the different social roots, strategies, and accomplishments of three contemporary social movements in the US, Spain, and Italy. Our brief overview in this chapter on influential scholarship in cultural studies in communication points to the existence of a dominant narrative or ‘selective tradition’ that, first of all, situates the project of cultural studies as inherently overcoming a humanist bias in prominent works of that period (e.g., Williams and Thompson) and second, proposes (post)structural perspectives (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe) as more suitable tools leading the way

Selective Gramsci(s)  33 towards this necessary step. In this process, the work of Antonio Gramsci has been relocated to facilitate an approach to cultural practices that privileges the symbolic aspects of change and the material dimensions of reproduction—what Acland (2013) succinctly calls a ‘weak materialism.’ In contrast to these narratives, our goal is to highlight and work with the tensions derived from cultural studies’ initial impulses—seen both in aspects of Hall and Williams—to legitimate the study of often-overlooked dimensions in social life—i.e., their representational and everyday aspects, often understood as ‘cultural’ aspects—without precluding a commitment to examining how the material and institutional realms are also culturally embedded and also play a crucial role in enabling and constraining different practices. Going back to the question we posed at the beginning of this chapter regarding the conceptual parallelism between the (mis)uses of Gramsci and different understandings of cultural practices, we would argue that, instead of getting rid of culture as a heuristic category, what is needed is to recover cultural studies’ original project: a political ­re-conceptualization of cultural practices as integrally embedded in different areas and levels of society, seen as the dialectical combination of human and social agency and necessity. From this perspective, culture is both symbolic and material, unique and common, located at the margins and at the center of society, and all of these places matter in order to pursue not only “freedom from domination” but also “freedom to pursue other social relations” (McKerrow, 1991). As Hall put it: Unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, cultural studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. If you lose hold of the tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice as a politics. (1992, p. 284) Political praxis is precisely what we saw partially denied in both Hall’s and Williams’ takes on Gramsci. On the one hand, Hall traded cultural studies’ original strong sense of determination between social practice and social position for an increasingly post-structuralist position, which sees the ‘real’ as mediated by ideology with no required correspondence between the parts and the social whole. Indeed, the previously mentioned notion of articulation, as conceptualized by Hall, entails no necessary match between the representation and the meaning of the fragment, because the latter can attach to any structure of signification, thus creating the articulation of a myriad of factors that interact in complicated and contradictory ways. Such a framework thus undermines the envisioning of a political ground in which people can find a meaningful correspondence between their purposeful actions and their outcomes.

34  Selective Gramsci(s) On the other hand, Williams’s embracement of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony allowed him to combine the idea of the ordinariness of culture with an understanding of power relations and social organization revolving around classes. However, while both consider ordinariness as a manifestation of a conception of the world in its own right, for Gramsci the combination of traditional and creative aspects of ‘common sense’ needed to be dialectically superseded. For him, this was accomplished by a careful intellectual intervention in order to purify and systematize common sense into a quantitatively (rather than qualitative) superior degree of elaboration. This would politicize subordinate groups’ conception of the world in order to transform it into a means of self-liberation and the basis of a new hegemonic project. Thus, whereas Williams certainly introduces in the study of cultural production the dimension of class analysis and a stronger sense of social determination, he still does not adequately address class politics. One important step towards the goal of re-politicizing cultural studies, for us, is to relocate this tradition within Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis,” which pushes us to conceive the development of different spheres of society in integral fashion, “as intimately connected and necessarily interrelated and reciprocal,” and to avoid “the peaceful resolution of the contradictions existing within history,” but theorize them instead (Gramsci, 1971, p. 193). As Gramsci explained: The function and meaning of dialectics can be comprehended in all their fundamental significance, only if the philosophy of practice is seen as an original and integral philosophy, which gives rise to a new phase in the world history and development of thought, since it goes beyond (maintaining the vital elements of them at same time it goes beyond them) both the traditional materialism and the traditional idealism as expressions of the old society. (1971, p. 132) This praxis-oriented approach necessarily entails political activism because human activity, including language, necessarily operates within a web of social relations that are consistently informed by particular and historically determined political economic interests. When we say activism, then, we do not mean to advance a solely voluntarist understanding of agency. Rather, we see language as always operating politically—although at different levels of elaboration and coherence—and as inevitably constrained by the circumstances in which it emerges. Thus, based on the discussion so far and the way we locate ourselves in such debate, we advance in this book an approach to communication as strategically oriented actions that we describe as functioning as dialectical translation. They are dialectical because, through contradictory dynamics incorporating, for example, scholastic and lay elements, common sense and ideology critique, they aim at elevating a given discourse as well as its audience to a higher level of eloquence and coherence, as well as organization.

Selective Gramsci(s)  35 As we will discuss in Chapter 3, just like Gramsci aspires to elevate ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense,’ and ‘ideology’ into ‘philosophy’ (Thomas, 2010), our historical materialist approach to communication translates into a rhetoric committed to political projectualities by assuming that linguistic acts are always political acts that can be ‘ranked’ at the level of political elaboration.1 Thus, rhetoric as dialectical translation constitutes one important subjective factor that, in particular social and historical circumstances, varies the level of social, political, and historical coherence of a given conception of the world/language. In the three cases that we study, the practical aim of this rhetoric is ‘catharsis,’ or the goal to raise particularistic consciousness and practices of individuals concerned with their material interests into a collective political project. Moreover, inherently contradictory rhetorical acts function as translation because the dialectical lifting up from lower levels initiated by rhetorical intervention requires an unavoidable act of transposition of otherwise historic-specific instances. Thus, this rhetoric aims at strategically adapting multiple experiences and multiple levels into commonality: it aims for example at translating particular views of the world into a general one. At a different level, in this book we also deploy dialectical translation to utilize history ‘historically,’ thus establishing useful conceptual parallelisms among historically specific cases that allow for a more ‘integral’ kind of critique. This is exactly what we try to exemplify in Chapter 5 when we identify a tendency to reproduce previous passive revolutions in the contemporary Italian context and in Chapter 6 by drawing a red line that links the 1929 and the 2008 organic crises. As we shall see in the next chapter, it is the integral perspective of a highly interconnected reality we have advanced here that allows us to see the conditions of possibility of translation. In fact, translatability can only be conceived by assuming that behind the specificity of distinct cultural phenomena, ideas, and practices lies a terrain in which apparent individual fragments are part of the same social whole and the same social process. Ultimately, an integral account of Gramsci implies highlighting and recovering for our project his overall goal of mobilization and overcoming of oppressive conditions in order to establish an alternative hegemony ­(Morgan, 1996). As we demonstrate in our case studies, this necessarily requires developing a comprehensive uniting instrument that can help create and maintain a strong “national-popular” collective will, capable of generating large-scale change (Anderson, 1976). We thus want to keep these constructive aspects at the forefront of our discussion because, as Gramsci put it, analyses of relations of force “cannot and must not be ends in themselves […] but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particularly practical activity, an initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 202). In the next chapter, we expand on the connection between these goals and a Gramscian theory of communication.

36  Selective Gramsci(s)

Note 1. Ideology for Gramsci represents “any particular conception of groups internal to the class which are directed to the resolution of immediate problems” Q 10.I, §10); Philosophy, on the other hand, represents “a conception of the world which tends to raise the level of awareness of historical determination and increase the capacity to act of an entire social class, ‘not only in its current and immediate interests … but also in its future and mediated [interests]’” ­(Q 10.II, §31).

3 Gramsci and Communication Dialectics and Translation

Chapter 2 used the discussion of Raymond Williams’ and Stuart Hall’s seminal Gramscian readings as a way to define the broad theoretical ­ ­framework through which we draw our ‘integral’ reading of Gramsci. Such an approach ultimately sees people as making history and, at the same time, being structurally conditioned by historical materializations: in other words, people as subjects and objects of history, reflecting the tension between ­freedom and necessity. We ended Chapter 2 with a rendition of such a materialist reflection into communicative terms, conceptualizing a politically committed kind of ­communication that treats rhetoric as a dialectical way to cathartically translate the force and the limits of the material field into the elaboration of a new worldview, and then into a new political project. In this chapter, we push that reflection further by showing in more in detail how the affinities between Gramsci and communication allow us to elaborate out of his work what we define as dialectical translation, an ‘integral’ approach to crisis, communication, and change that we will successively apply in our case-studies chapters.

Communication and Gramsci According to Martin Jay (1984) there are two holisms in the Gramscian system: a Hegelian-Crocian one and a communicative one. The first mainly materializes in Gramsci’s telos, according to which historical manifestations provide a (historicist) sense of truth to ideas, as well as the notion of an organic integration of elements into a social totality. The second holism is based on several themes and specific modes of thought that particularly resonate with communication, such as his drawing on the rhetorical tradition inspired by Vico and his use of language to ‘narrate concepts’ (Gerratana, 1997). A communicative lens is particularly useful in interpreting Gramsci because many of his life experiences are in fact related to it (De Mauro, 1991). First of all, we could consider the linguistic and cultural shock that affected Gramsci when moving from the insulated Sardinian linguistic landscape to mittel-European Turin. Second, Gramsci’s passion for theater and literature led him to develop critical tools to appreciate the nexus between

38  Gramsci and Communication discourse and culture and the relation between elite/literary and vernacular discourse. Third, Gramsci’s experience as a journalist made him very aware of the power of rhetoric as a political instrument. Finally, Gramsci’s glottological studies at the university of Turin and his contact with Turin’s pragmatists and logicians gave him plenty of occasions to reflect on language as a historically determined practice. Like Jay, we are convinced that there is a privileged relationship between Gramsci and communication. Accordingly, in this chapter we treat communication as a vantage point from which to spell out our perspective, ­‘dialectic translation,’ as both a historicist method of analysis and a ­ theoretical framework to understand how, through communication, social movements can activate a process of catharsis. Accordingly, this chapter is structured around two main portions: we dedicate the first part to spelling out dialectics as it constitutes the core dynamic that moves our integral take; then, in the second portion of the chapter, we illustrate how dialectics applies more specifically to the notions of translation and translatability. Before we start exploring those two aspects, we would like to make a remark about the connections between the present communicative perspective and an already existing and well-established body of literature that specifically explores the relationship between Gramsci and language from a linguistics point of view. The scholarly interest of the Gramsci/linguistics nexus was initially developed by a handful of scholars (e.g., Rosiello, 1957, 1959, 1970, 1986; Gerratana, 1975). However, Lo Piparo’s 1979 groundbreaking study, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, provided the basis for transforming the intuition of a limited number of works into a field of Gramscian studies represented by authors such as De Mauro (1995), Salamini (1981), Helsloot (1989), Frosini (2000, 2003, 2004), Ives (2004a, 2004b), and Boothman (2004, 2008). Lo Piparo (1979) significantly contributed to consolidating the studies that linked Gramsci and problems of language. The central point of his arguments can be summarized as follows: “the primitive matrix of ­[Gramsci’s] philosophy should not be searched for in Marx or Lenin or in any other Marxist, but in the science of language” (Lo Piparo, 2010, p. 21). The existing parallelism between political and economic leadership and the idea of linguistic prestige seems to indicate to Lo Piparo that Gramsci’s innovative perspective derived not from Marx’s or Lenin’s ideas, but rather from linguistics. According to Lo Piparo, Gramsci heavily drew from Bartoli—a linguistics professor in Turin—and his reflections on language and power relations among linguistic communities. However, while Lo Piparo’s general thesis of a profound influence of linguistics on Gramsci’s political theory has received considerable credit (Ives & Lacorte, 2010), not all scholars accept the further implication of Lo Piparo, namely, that Gramsci’s originality derives from such a linguistic background rather than from a novel approach to Marxism. For instance, Rosiello (1982) responds to Lo Piparo by claiming that Marxism is not

Gramsci and Communication  39 incompatible with a historicist approach to linguistics. Thus, for Rosiello, Gramsci drew from particular approaches to linguistics that could work with the Marxist framework and not the other way around. Aligning with Rosiello, we argue that, when the role of language is understood against the overall Gramscian project, his interest in the historicist dimension of communicative practices seems to make sense only within a historical materialist background. In Gramsci’s words: “the history of ­languages is the history of linguistic innovations, but these innovations are not individual (as in art); they are innovations of an entire social community that has renewed its culture and ‘progressed’ historically” (1992, Q6, §71). Moreover, Gramsci considers language as a functional product of the politi­ cal economic interests of a specific social group. He states: Languages have never determined national formations. Nations were formed because of political economic necessities of one class: the language has only been one of the visible documents needed for ­propaganda, which bourgeois writers used to promote consensus among people and the ideologues On the contrary is the national ­unification that has always and everywhere determined the diffusion of the traditional literary language among the learned strata belonging to certain region. (in Ambrosoli, 1960, p. 548) In this passage, Gramsci treats language as a historically determined product of specific social relations organized around the material field as well as around material interests, clearly showing how the question of language must be understood in historical materialist terms. The link between ideology and language also explains why Gramsci was so receptive to Bartoli’s attempt to transform the study of language into a historical discipline. In fact, similar to Vološinov’s thesis (1986), Gramsci used his study of language and ideology as a way to provide arguments to intervene in Marxist debates by rejecting absolute materialism and absolute idealism as theoretical reductionisms.1 As we have already noticed in Chapter 2, Gramsci’s historical materialism is highly suspicious of both the ‘primacy of the idea’—dangerously leading to romantic voluntarism—and the ‘primacy of the matter’—a philosophical residue of metaphysics. In this sense, he thought that linguistic practices exemplified the indissoluble link in human praxis between idea/consciousness and the material field. In line with Vološinov’s argument, for Gramsci such a material field was socially structured in competing social and linguistic groups. It is then due to the different positions in the social organization, dictated by a given economy, that different groups, such as the working and entrepreneurial classes, linguistically confront each other. Thus, ultimately, it was such a positioning in the social organization of production/labor that explained linguistic ­prestige and not the other way around.

40  Gramsci and Communication Thus, while Lo Piparo’s thesis has been used here to provide an e­xemplification of Gramsci’s thought as developing in tight relation to linguistic concerns, we are also convinced that such a linguistic sensibility cannot be understood outside a historical materialist framework and the practical political aspiration of Gramsci: to establish a socialist revolutionary. This is in many ways what we tried to spell out in Chapter 2 when we explained that Gramsci’s uses in communication could not prescind from his constructive sense of history and praxis. Consistent with our integral and materialist reading, while bearing in mind the overlapping of linguistics and communication studies, we think that the critical cultural turn in communication propelled by cultural ­studies—as we have shown in Chapter 2—compared to linguistics’ general ­orientation towards social science can more satisfactorily make sense of the paradigm shift proposed by Gramsci: from considering language as a subject matter of natural sciences, towards treating it as an object of study of social, cultural, and political history. Therefore, despite the specific biases that, as we showed, a cultural studies perspective may have brought to the general interpretation of Gramsci in communication studies, it has still contributed to the expansion of the critical examination of human communication. The current cultural studies approach goes beyond the narrow conceptualization of communication as transmitting information by expanding the field of inquiry to the much wider framework of human signification as expressed in literature, social texts, and everyday practices. Thus, while linguistics tends to concentrate on one specific mode of communication, i.e., language, an ‘integral’ view allows for the exploration of Gramsci’s concepts from a multidimensional perspective that assumes that the production of meaning and the exchange of information go beyond language and encompass the whole spectrum of social phenomena.

Dialectical Gramsci In the following pages, we concentrate on a Gramscian understanding of communication founded on one main principle that seems to articulate all the others, namely dialectics. In fact, dialectical thinking constitutes for Gramsci the best weapon to fight hypostasis in order to preserve the fluidity, contradictory nature, complexity, and over-determined character of social reality. We introduce Gramsci’s critique of both neo-grammarians’ abstractions and Croce’s subjectivism, as well as a comparison of his ideas with those of structural linguistics, as a way to provide a sense of the historical materialist approach Gramsci proposes, which we consider an essential aspect of our ‘dialectical translation’ framework. The ‘Archangel’ of Hypostasis We provide here an account of how Gramsci dialectically entered into the debates of his time with regards to language and the production of meaning

Gramsci and Communication  41 via communication. The scholarly context in which Gramsci moved during the first decades of the 20th century was dominated by the neo-grammarian school, which centered on the principle of phonological laws without exceptions, thus reducing linguistics essentially to phonology. The assumption was that the most observable linguistic phenomenon in a given language was how it sounded. Such an aspect of language was considered by neo-­ grammarians as operating at an autonomous level, independent of semantics and syntax, and changing according to accidental mutations occurring inside its own system. The problematic implication of such a position was that language was assumed to change due to internal modifications only, thus independent of human intervention—a view that did not provide much room for people’s agency in history. While attending university courses in glottology in Turin, Gramsci found in professor Bartoli’s ideas an alternative theory that more adequately fit into his historical materialist framework. As Gramsci reports in his Quaderni, his mentor expected him to become an academic, the ‘archangel’ avenging linguistics against neo-grammarians. Yet, because of Gramsci’s increasing political involvements and the successive imprisonment, those prospects remained unfulfilled. However, failing to realize Bartoli’s aspirations did not prevent Gramsci from significantly contributing to the critical study of communication practices. In our view, his dialectical thinking makes him the ‘archangel’ destined to defeat hypostasis in the study of communicative practices. In fact, Gramsci’s historical materialist approach to language uses dialectics as a way to navigate through several reductionist tendencies that characterize this field: unity and diversity of linguistic practices, individual acts and structural constraints, and historical changes and historical institutionalizations of discourse. Gramsci’ intervention was not primarily scholastic but was motivated rather by the important political implications of competing conceptualizations of language—as his critique of Croce’s theorization of language well exemplifies. While appreciating his reaction against positivism, Gramsci rejected Croce’s (1921) subjectivist and romantic position, according to which language is individual and free and stands as an expressive production, like a work of art. Therefore, while the positivism of Neogrammarians negated human history via abstractions, Croce reduced it to individual idiosyncrasy, which implied the negation of collectively shared meanings. Conversely, the Gramscian idea that language could play a fundamental role in the construction of “senso comune”—a concept we address in more detail below—was fundamental in explaining a variety of phenomena such as power relations, organic ideology, and how that could ‘translate’ into a more elaborated political view. Consequently, Gramsci had become dissatisfied with the Crocean conception of language, especially after the 1923 Education Act, which followed Croce’s contention that a national normative grammar was impossible and therefore made no provision for the teaching of a nationally based Italian.

42  Gramsci and Communication The result was, according to Gramsci, the reinforcement of class divisions by leaving the ‘subaltern classes’ illiterate and trapped within provincial dialects: “Thus we are going back to a division into juridically fixed and crystallized estates rather than moving towards the transcendence of class divisions” (1975, Q12, §11). Instead, Gramsci understood communicative practices as unsolidified ­historical processes that produce equally fluid historically determined ­meanings, which derive from material circumstances and the concrete existence of people. Thus, through productive practices such as working, socializing, and producing cultural artifacts, a given social group, operating in a given set of social relations, produces and practices a language. Those specific concrete productive activities, collectively categorizable in terms of group belonging, produce, reproduce, and modify a vision of the world that is at the same time expressed and shaped by language. There are some important implications of those basic assumptions that we would like to stress in relation to our framework of dialectical translation. To say that meanings derive from the specific experience of a social group implies that meaning expressed through communication is always ideologi­ cal, because it reflects and operationalizes the worldview of that group. Second, it implies that, in a given social formation, there are competing languages and competing ideologies that enter into contact in conflictive ways, as they express conflictive material interests. Such a link between ideology and language is funded on the already mentioned (see Chapter 2) assumption that language, understood as an assemblage of social relations, reflects the vision of the world of a determinate social group. In this model, ideology and linguistic practices become two indissolubly intertwined dimensions. Language, in this Gramscian perspective, resembles a semiotic system of signs that, due to their relational and metaphorical production of meanings, cannot be studied and evaluated apart from ideologies. However, as we already mentioned, such a system is being continuosly changed by history, i.e., human praxis. Thus, in relation to the Marxist debate about the ultimate social determinants of capitalist societies, Gramsci proposed that not all linguistic innovations derive from changes in the social organization of the material production. Language, like ideology, is not a mere reflection of the infrastructure because “no new historical situation, however radical the change that has brought about it, completely transforms language, at least in its external formal aspect” (1975, Q2, §16). In this approach to communication, language and the world mutually shape each other. In other words, language becomes a material productive force that relies on the existing social organization of production as well as contributes to change it. An important factor in this capability to affect the ‘world’ has to do with the fact that language, like ideology, manifests a group/class bound understanding of the world: “Every language represents an integral conception of the world” (1992, Q5, §123) and therefore an

Gramsci and Communication  43 ideology. As a consequence, in a society inhabited by multiple social groups, multiple languages/ideologies compete with one another in order to assert their vision of society. Those languages/ideologies interact with each other based on their position in the socially organized productive structure. Thus, even when a determinate class/group comes to power, the linguistic environments keep interacting with each other but in asymmetrical ways. As Gramsci noted, “a new ruling class brings about alterations as a ‘mass,’ but the jargons of various professions, of specific societies, innovate in a molecular way” (in Martin, 2002, p. 235). However, even when a social structure is shaped according to a hegemonic apparatus of a given group, the hegemonic language does not cancel those subaltern “jargons,” but simply organizes them in homological ways, therefore mirroring the way the ruling group coordinates and mobilizes the ruled groups at the level of economic production. Consequently, on the one hand the hegemonic language is reproduced through institutional channels such as the school, media, or elite political rhetoric; on the other, there are persistent subordinate conceptions of the world that endure as linguistic and cultural folklore, which continuously intersect the hegemonic language and can provide alternative and even oppositional worldviews. As we previously noted, for Gramsci there are groups (such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) that can develop a more coherent discourse/ worldview by virtue of their position in the social structure and productive organization. In this sense, as we show in the chapter dedicated to the analysis of the communicative praxes of Occupy Wall Street, our Gramscian understanding of language assumes that the potential of the social movement’s rhetoric to be more or less effective depends on the social relations in which such discourse takes place. Consequently, one of the lacunas we identify as affecting Occupy’s discourse consists of its difficulties to produce a rhetoric that could offer strong enough lines of contact with productive categories of workers and their unions. Such a void of Occupy’s discourse possibly deprived its rhetoric of the adequate social leverage to mobilize broader strata of the US population. The recurrent preoccupation in Gramsci for constructing a broader linguistic community should be considered as a complex framework of analysis articulated at a minimum of two main levels of confrontation: social time and social space. From the diachronic perspective of social time, a given language carries simultaneously old and new meanings, old and new conceptions of the world that compete with each other. As Williams (1977) would put it, in this dimension, residual, dominant, and emergent meanings/worldviews meet and combine in new ways. Second, from the point of view of social space, under the umbrella of a dominant language, there are also competing local/ regional dialects that culturally strive to assert their own vision of the world. Therefore, as we will exemplify with our case studies, the dialectic between old and new, as well as among different social groups and geographi­cal

44  Gramsci and Communication communities characterizing Western capitalist social formations, is not simply reflected on language, but acts upon and is acted upon by it. Through dialectics, as Maas points out (2010): “Language is any kind of praxis, liberating and constraining. Language is at the same time the profanator and hostage of the social relations in which operates” (p. 88). This passage seems to confirm our reading of how language exemplifies for Gramsci his sense of history, as we understood it in Chapter 2, as a tension between human freedom and social determination. As a consequence, through the optic of dialectics, language becomes a fundamental battleground for different social groups facing each other. A second important theme of a Gramscian materialist inquiry that helps spell out our ‘dialectical translation’ perspective is tied to a conceptualization of communication as a mode of action—rather than the symbolic expression of action. Thus, Gramsci assumes that communication can only be thought of through its practices, as many conditions of communicability follow the communicative act rather than precede it. In this sense, Gramsci’s rejection of Esperanto’s experiment could be understood as pushing back against a theory that denied the “organic” nature of language, i.e., its spontaneous emerging in the form of everyday practices that mediates and realizes (rather than simply expresses or reflects) the material needs of a given social group. For instance, while a pre-existent normative grammar, the conformist tendency to accept it, and even its level of linguistic ‘prestige’ may all precede and potentially facilitate communication, the specific social positionality of the subjects involved in the speech act and their immanent way of speaking play a significant role in determining the meaning of their communication exchange. Moreover, in such an exchange, always metaphorical, different ideologically propelled visions of the world determine the nature of those metaphors, or in other words the link between a given object and its linguistic referent. Working within this theoretical environment, the question about the unity of language and reality finds its solution in the mediation of praxis, because the condition of possibility of communication does not reside in an ontology that tries to link signifying ideas, symbols, and signs to reality, but in a perspective that considers those elements as linked in practical ways when people act upon reality. Therefore, as we mentioned in Chapter 2, we propose to understand communicative practices as an instance of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis. The idea of language as a mode of action, one way to “make history,” represents the concrete manner in which individuals and groups are socialized into a given worldview, as well as inserted and operationalized into economic and productive relations. Thus, while not always organized and theorized as an organic philosophic system—because that depends on the level of politicization of a given group—communication, as a main vehicle of senso commune, should be considered as a spontaneous

Gramsci and Communication  45 philosophy that reflects and, through its development, acts upon a vision of the world: It must first be shown that all men are ‘philosophers’, by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’ (Gramsci, 1975, Q11, §12) Treating language as a spontaneous philosophy means combining two aspects united by an inherent tension: on the one hand, the explicit ­project of organizing a contradictory worldview into a coherent philosophical ­system, and on the other, the unstructured embryo of politics deriving from the extemporaneous conditions of living and acting. As we shall see in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, such a tension marks the ­examination of the three historical cases that follow this chapter, which treat language as a political instrument in its own right and at the same time as an intractable element whose signification always exceeds or escapes the conscious intention of the speakers and the interpretative efforts of the audiences. Next, we compare and contrast Gramsci’s view on c­ ommunicative practices with Saussure’s structural linguistics in order to highlight a perspective characterized by the fluidity and historicity of communication. Lingua and Linguaggio: Dialectic Recomposition of Stability/Movement and Unity/Difference In this section, we show how Gramsci provides a way for us to resolve the tensions between ‘stability’ and ‘historic movement’ and ‘unity’ and ‘difference’ in communication practices by constructing a comparison with S­ aussure’s structural linguistics. While in Saussure there is an ­unsettled ­tension between binarisms such as the synchronic and the diachronic, langue and parole, or a static and a dynamic model (Rosiello, 1982), ­Gramsci provides a ­perspective that, without rejecting the assumption of a certain stability of language, returns linguistic practice to historical change. There is certainly an affinity between Gramsci and Saussure. For example, when Gramsci claims that language is always metaphorical, he in many ways indexes a way of thinking about language that closely resembles Saussure’s structural linguistics. That is because Gramsci assumes that metaphors, like signs, are meanings standing for other meanings, always deferring meaning outside of its literal content, thus implying that, in order to understand a given utterance, one has to necessarily establish a system of relations with

46  Gramsci and Communication other words/metaphors/signs. Moreover, metaphorical ­ meanings change over time and thus are historically determined. Language is metaphorical in the sense that signs are arbitrary representations of the object. Indeed, metaphors, like signs, imply that language cannot represent the world objectively but rather by the mediation of symbols, rhetorical figures historically determined and historically mutating: All language is metaphor, and it is metaphorical in two senses: it is a metaphor of the thing or material and sensible object referred to, and it is a metaphor of the ideological meanings attached to words in the preceding periods of civilization. (Gramsci, 1975, Q7, §36) In Gramsci, like in Saussure, there is a level of stability that guarantees communicability beyond the specific communication practice of each individual. In this sense, when Gramsci compares language to a photograph (1975, Q29, §10) he means that it is possible to grasp a determinate phase of collectively shared language, historically shaped and in continuous development (1975, Q 29, §1). Therefore, language, according to Gramsci, possesses an enormous inertial nature, being at the same time in movement, and moved by historical processes. As Carlucci (2013) notices, on the one hand, and similarly to Saussure, Gramsci believed that in order to have a panoramic idea of language, one requires a single vantage point that provides a synchronic photograph of a complex scenario. On the other hand, this representation, while reproducing adequately the inert and static aspects of language, must be combined with the assumption that human communication is subject to life, to ­history. He states, The whole language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilizations. When I use the word disaster no one can accuse me of believing in astrology, and when I say by Jove! no one can assume that I am a worshipper of pagan divinities. (1971, p. 450, Q 11, §28) In this passage, Gramsci shows how language works as a mediating link among past, present, and emerging cultural practices, thus privileging movement over stability. However, in spite of these important similarities, what distinguishes Gramsci and Saussure is the tendency to lean towards one of those two poles: subjective and historic speech acts, or objective structural consistency. Definitely both thinkers look for a synthesis between the two sides, but they also produce significantly different combinations. However, the relationship between the collectively shared, relatively static structure of language and the always evolving linguistic practice is, in our view, ­inherently

Gramsci and Communication  47 dialectical: on the one hand, the daily usages of language sediment into a system that serves as a basis for any immanent use; on the other hand, any immanent practice, as a daily translation of the language system, de facto denies and violates the system in terms of grammar, syntax, and jargon. Gramsci’s synthesis of the speaking subject distinguishes between linguaggio and lingua, where the former describes the arbitrary linguistic practices (confused, heterogeneous, but not necessarily subjective) and the latter (a more organized, more coherent series of practices, not necessarily objective but rather historical). Thus, compared to Saussure’s levels of langue/parole, lingua/linguaggio in Gramsci become relative gradations of coherence and organization of language. In other words, lingua is necessary for social organization in order to coordinate people and avoid the potential disorganization of multiple linguaggio, but the former can never exhaust the practical creativity of the latter. Hence, both lingua and linguaggio move inside a history, which implies that ‘necessity’ in language is always a historical necessity, and thus circumstantial, particular, and conditional (Mansfield, 1984). Accordingly, the relative degree of coherence of lingua as “multiplicity of facts” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 349) is never guaranteed and it is not necessary. The so-called “conformism” (1971, p. 324) is what provides consistency and unity to a linguistic community: In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformist of some conformism or other, always a man in the mass or a collective man. (1971, p. 324) The implication then is that conformism becomes the result of the pressure on individuals of a dominant way of speaking and “written ‘normative grammars’ tend to embrace the entire territory of a nation and its total ‘linguistic volume,’ to create a unitary national linguistic conformism” (1985, p. 181). Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, the dialectic between lingua and linguaggio does not necessarily mean that Gramsci does not privilege one side of the equation. Actually, Gramsci treats language as he treats any other kind of praxis: dialectically producing history. According to Saussure (1977), the materialization of parole tends more to reflect the fixity of the linguistic system, i.e., langue. Thus, while in Gramsci people tend to ‘speak,’ in Saussure they tend to ‘be spoken’ by language. As Helsloot (1989) puts it, Saussure seems to be trapped in a determinist dilemma because of his privileging of langue over parole, the relatively inertial stability of language.2 Gramsci indirectly states his position when he criticizes the proposal of introducing the international auxiliary Esperanto, artificially engineered rather than organically emerged: The old playing cards—which draw on medieval illuminations portraying Longobard kings—have a language of their own, and

48  Gramsci and Communication nothing poses so many obstacles to innovations as language does. So much so, that after many years Esperantists are still in the state of a cocoon from which a butterfly is yet to emerge, despite the number of those who have taken up their cause, from Leibniz to Dr Zamenhof. (1980, p. 284) For Gramsci, Esperanto exemplifies a politically regressive project because of its rigidity and mechanic nature and denies the continuous movement of history that produces the organic emergence of language. By contrast, he considers language as an incredibly fluid practice capable of mediating and expressing a society in continuous movement: Language is transformed with the transformation of the whole civilization through the acquisition of culture by new classes and through the hegemony exercised by one national language over other, etc., and what it does is precisely to absorb in a metaphorical form the words of previous civilization and cultures. … The new metaphorical meanings spread with the spread of the new culture, which furthermore also coins brand new words or absorbs them form other languages as loans words giving them a precise meaning and therefore depriving them of the extensive halo they possessed in the original language. (1971, 452–453) This passage conveys an understanding of communication practices that, while carrying sedimentations from the past, never stops “transforming,” producing the language of new social groups, which produce new culture and new words. When compared to other thinkers such as Vološinov, who are concerned with the linguistic production of otherness and diversity, Gramsci, like Saussure, was more preoccupied with the capability of a collective to create a relatively stable, functional linguistic unity. At the same time, when compared to Saussure, a Gramscian understanding of language tries to negotiate between a historicist sense of constant “becoming,” and the idea that language is not arbitrary (Helsloot, 1989). It is a contradictory social agreement “which does not start from the unity but contains the reasons for a possible unity” (Gramsci, 1971 p. 356). Such a unity can historically materialize into the hegemony of specific social groups holding particular positions in the social structure: in Gramsci’s context, the bourgeois or the proletariat. The way in which Gramsci tries to capture this dialectical tension between stability and continuous change, collectively shared and individually expressed, is through the perspective provided by linguistic grammar. Grammar represents a historical document of human activity that, as we have already mentioned, comprises an inherent component that everyone applies in different ways, what he calls an immanent grammar. The second

Gramsci and Communication  49 kind of grammar, a normative one, derives from a reciprocal teaching, control, and censorship: Besides the immanent [spontaneous] grammar, in every language there is also in reality (i.e. even if not written) a ‘normative grammar’ (or more than one). This is made up of reciprocal monitoring, reciprocal teaching, reciprocal ‘censorship’ expressed in such a question as ‘what did you mean to say,’ ‘what do you mean,’ ‘make yourself clearer,’ etc., and in ministry and teasing. This whole complex of action and reactions, to establish norms, and standars of correctness or incorrectness. (in Ives, 2004b, p. 93) Normative grammar functions to create conformity and uniformity. It is thus a result of a cultural and political policy (Gramsci, 1975, Q29, §2), in other words, a political project to communicatively coordinate a given society. Therefore, the normative aspect of language is understood both from a functional and a critical point of view, as it constitutes at the same time a mechanism of disciplinization and oppression of linguistic communities/ groups/classes over others, but also an essential aspect of social organization that coordinates, organizes, and can even, to a certain extent, emancipate. As Brandist (1996) notices, learning a normative grammar implies that the local/partial insights are elevated to a level in which new languages/ ideologies can be produced. Thus, paradoxically enough, through broader horizons provided by normative grammar people can produce a degree of critical consciousness. Conversely, a regional/local dialect, as an organic expression of a given community’s understanding of the world and acting upon it, tends to stand in a relation of subalternity with regard to a dominant language, which tends to be enforced in specific institutional spaces such as schools or media. However, according to this view, a group that relegates itself to its own dialect misses the opportunity to open its vision to the world, to a bigger reality and bigger political projects. As we shall see in the chapter dedicated to Indignados/Podemos and their move from vernacular to national popular rhetoric, the processes of broadening a linguistic system and political project to a commonly shared level are intimately tied by a hegemonic project. In other words, what the examination of the case of Podemos reveals is that hegemony, when understood from a communicative political perspective, can become a constructive goal rather than a fashionable nominalization for denouncing operations and apparati of power. In fact, in the case of the national popular rhetoric of Podemos, we will show how the goal of this political group is not simply to defend its “vernacular” regional grammar against the “normative grammar” of traditional Spanish institutional politics, but to replace the current normative grammar with an entirely new one. We provided this comparison with Saussure to extrapolate a Gramscian perspective on language as an eminently historical mediating tool that allows

50  Gramsci and Communication people to understand the world in a particular way and share, to a certain degree, this understanding. In this historical dimension, the precarious “unity” produced by language parallels the ambivalence that we will find in “common sense” and therefore, the inherent instable coherence of a hegemonic environment.

Dialectically Translating In this second portion of the chapter we would like to concentrate, first of all, on Gramsci’s notion of translation as a way to apply his thought historically and provide a broad interpretation of the particular environment of the three social movements we study later. Second, we will use the notion of ‘common sense’ to exemplify how translation can be employed as political intervention. In translation, dialectics drives two important efforts: to p ­ olitically navigate tensions in constructive ways and to surpass them. Accordingly, dialectics in translation also implies Aufhebung, i.e., a sublation of contradictions (preserving them and changing them) into a superior synthesis, which Gramsci exemplifies in the elaboration of contradictory common sense into good sense, as well as in the notion of catharsis. Translation or Historicity of Social Practices As we argued in the first portion of this chapter, Gramsci considers language as a communicative practice that contributes to the sharing of meaning across social groups. The idea that a trope, or a gesture, may go beyond its original linguistic community or historical circumstances leads us to the question of translation or, more precisely, to a problem of reciprocal translatability. Gramsci thus expands the meaning of translation beyond the literal sense of finding an equivalent word across two languages and towards the ­problem of understanding the significance of a practice in ­different ­historically ­determined contexts. We distinguish two main practices of translation: a horizontal kind and a dialectical (or vertical) kind.3 By horizontal translation we mean the p ­ ractice of finding homological relations across different social/cultural f­ ormations, different stages of historical development, different social spheres or ­phenomena within a given social whole. For instance, our identification of an organic crisis in the US, Italy, and Spain that contributes to explaining the emergence of OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos implies the assumption of the existence of a degree of translatability among those three realities. While horizontal translation appears as a historicist method of creating comparative and practical knowledge, dialectical (or vertical) translation implies the practice of superseding a given worldview into a relatively higher level of elaboration, mediation, and systematization. As we shall see later on, catharsis could be considered as an example of the transformation of ‘common sense’ into a ‘good sense,’ a practically and theoretically more elaborated conception of the world aimed at operating at the political level.

Gramsci and Communication  51 The notion of translation thus provides a way to understand and convert practices, thus pondering their reproducibility and reducibility in a historical materialist context (Frosini, 2003; Boothman, 2004).4 For Gramsci, two given social and cultural formations are “interchangeable: [when] each one is reducible to the other; they are mutually translatable. This translability is not perfect in all details (including important ones) but deep down it is” (in Boothman, 2010, p. 113). In this process, establishing a level of translatability appears as more important than providing a translation of given meanings, because it means being able to translate the apparent differences between those two formations into their common ground: the development of their reciprocal economic structure and the reciprocal linkage between structure and superstructure. In this Gramscian preoccupation to transpose meanings beyond their original context, the historically determined practice of communicating, and the possibility to determine meaning in a different geographical and historical context, we see an important exemplification of the possibility to understand and make history under the relative (but still significant) conditions of people’s making.5 Accordingly, we treat translatability as the way people make their action socially and politically intelligible and vice versa, thus addressing the question of reciprocal translatability between theory and praxis in order to show “the practical power of theory and theoretical power of practice” (Lacorte, 2010, p. 213). In this view, the problem of translation occurs even at the level of relatively homogeneous linguistic communities, because a dominant language must deal with the theoretical and political question of how infinite immanent grammars spoken by each individual come to acquire meaning for an entire community. Like all other Gramscian concepts, translation is to be understood in dialectical terms. As Mansfield (1984) argues, the ‘ontological’ ground for Gramsci to argue for translatability among cultural elements consists of assuming a reality characterized by a dialectical unity in which elements are highly interrelated. Thus, for Gramsci, the basic units of analysis are not ‘objects’ but dynamic relations: In economics the unitary centre [sc. of analysis] is value, alias the relation between the worker and the industrial productive forces. … In philosophy [it is] praxis, that is, the relationship between human will (superstructure) and economic structure. In politics [it is] the relationship between State and civil society, that is, the intervention of the State (centralized will) to educate the educator, the social environment in general. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 402–403) In this context, translatability expresses a mediating link between elements in tension. Accordingly, translatability identifies a mediating sphere (in the passage above, ‘value,’ ‘praxis,’ and ‘politics’) that can translate ‘productive forces’ into ‘workers’ and ‘economic structure’ into ‘human will,’ and vice versa.

52  Gramsci and Communication The classic example that Gramsci uses to exemplify his reasoning is the equivalence, during 19th century Europe, of French political ideas ­informing the French Revolution and German idealism, possibly the most ­preponderant philosophical tradition of that époque. Thus, the fact that French J­acobinism could be translated into—ergo understood through— German idealism reveals Gramsci’s main preoccupation for a conceptual kind of translation that allows for a better understanding of societies and therefore a more efficient intervention upon them. Gramsci argues: Philosophy-politics-economics. If these are constitutive elements of a single conception of the world, there must be, in the theoretical principal, convertibility from one to others, a reciprocal translation into specific language of constitutive part: each element is constitutive of the others and all of them together form an homogenous circle. (1996, p. 196) In the three cases examined in this book, instances of both horizontal and dialectical translation are present and operate at different levels. On the one hand, we first illustrate the general (horizontal) translating question that deals with the need to historicize and operationalize Gramsci beyond the social and historical circumstances he originally examined. Particularly telling will be the analysis of M5S and the specific application of concepts such as ‘passive revolution,’ which in turn leads to a reduction of the distance that separates ‘passive revolution’ and another Gramscian concept, i.e., ‘national popular.’ Accordingly, in the examination of M5S, the regressive meaning associated with the former and the progressive meaning associated with the latter become aspects intertwined. The same could be said of concepts such as ‘nation,’ which needs to be translated into contemporary equivalent terms such as culturally bounded community, civil society, and social formation. From this point of view, translation also becomes a meta-theoretical problem of applying Gramsci’s terminology. In fact, the highly relational nature of his thought when applied to a historic specific case causes a necessary re-configuration of the elements inside his system of thought. Thus, similar to the metaphor of constellations in Adorno (1988), Gramsci’s thought works as a fluid and dynamic cluster of meanings that is illuminated differently—thus reconfiguring itself—each time it is applied on different objects of study. On the other hand, a way in which dialectical translation operates in our analysis consists of a way to make sense of the political project that entails raising consciousness through effective communication across social, cultural, and historic boundaries. This second aspect of dialectical translation leads us to examine the figure of the intellectual as the political agent who wants to establish reciprocal translatability between theory and praxis and abstract and concrete. In fact, for Gramsci, one of the main functions of intellectuals is to act as permanent translator, because the intellectual can more easily translate ‘philosophy’ into ‘politics.’ As Green and Ives

Gramsci and Communication  53 (2009) notice, while the classic intellectual enters from outside the reality of exploitation and injustice of the masses, Gramsci’s normative emphasis on the organicity of intellectuals focuses on the necessity for the intellectual to speak the same ‘idiom’ of the politically disenfranchised groups in order to be able to translate meanings out of and into that environment. As a permanent persuader, the intellectual operationalizes rhetoric in order to be able to translate discourses—such as, for Gramsci, the one of the Sardinian peasantry into the one of Turin’s manufacturing workers—for several reasons. First of all, both of them, in their ‘local dialect,’ in other words, in their language bounded to the immediate social circumstances of their lives, need to be expanded in order to increase their understanding of the world from ‘regional’ to ‘national.’ Second, because when one is capable of finding a dimension of translatability between different social and historical circumstances and groups, one can find common points for alliance building of the kind Gramsci advocated between peasantries and urban working classes. Thus, dialectical translation from a political point of view means mediating between the ‘spontaneism’ of any group in developing discourses concerning their own restricted reality and strategic political thinking that tries to act upon those realities. As Gramsci puts it: If it is true that every language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture, it could also be true that from anyone’s language one can assess the greater or lesser complexity of his conception of the world. Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is more or less limited and provincial, which is fossilized and anachronistic in relation to the major currents of thought which dominate world history. His interests will be limited, more or less corporate or economistic, not universal. While it is not always possible to learn a number of foreign languages in order to put oneself in contact with other cultural lives, it is at the least necessary to learn the national language properly. A great culture can be translated into the language of another great culture, that is to say, a great national language with historic richness and complexity, and it can translate any other great culture and can be a world-wide means of expression. But a dialect cannot do this. (1971, p. 326) As this passage shows, the significance of the relationship between ‘dialect’ and ‘national’ goes well beyond the historic boundaries of the Italian case, as it voices Gramsci’s concern to reach a holistic vision of a given matter. Accordingly, we have tried to show how Gramsci’s interest for language surpasses the linguistic content. His view approaches the semblance of a historicist method that can start with the translatability of meaning across languages but quickly broadens up to the evaluation of equivalence of concepts

54  Gramsci and Communication from one context to another, from one theoretical framework to another. As Sanguineti (2010) remarks, Gramsci is interested in structural parallelisms between different languages/conceptions of the world in order to map how individuals and social groups interact in complex social formations. Certainly, for a political activist such as Gramsci, the most important translating objective was to push a determinate practical life self-awareness, i.e., to translate ‘philosophy into politics’ (Frosini, 2010). In this context, we also stress another dialectical aspect of translation, which is not simply understood as navigating through contradictions, but as the process of preserving them in order to take them to a different and superior level, which is ‘distillated’ and ‘purified.’ As in Chapter 2, we follow that same path with our notion of dialectical translation that politically intervenes through ­contradictory processes. The Gramscian concept of ‘catharsis’ represents a key idea that deeply informs our perspective of ‘dialectical translation,’ as Gramsci defines it as “the synthesis of dialectic itself” (1975, Q 10I, §6), a transformative process of consciousness that he describes in the following way: The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethicopolitical moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men. This also means the passage from “objective to subjective” and from “necessity to freedom”. Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethicopolitical form and a source of new initiatives. To establish the “cathartic” moment becomes therefore, it seems to me, the starting-point for all the philosophy of praxis, and the cathartic process coincides with the chain of syntheses which have resulted from the evolution of the dialectic. (1971, pp. 366–367, Q 10I, §6) Gramsci utilizes the notion of catharsis in the Aristotelian sense of both elevating and going beyond in dialectical fashion, such as the passage of consciousness from the self-centered economic interest to one ethical politi­ cal that concerns a social group. Thus, catharsis defines the passage from an individualistic and particularistic perspective to a collective one, which is more solidary to a social group. The term catharsis signals then the qualitatively progressive step of an emergent social group from a condition of subordination to its evolution to a collective political actor with potentials to exercise hegemony. The catharsis implies an emancipatory process because it transforms the sphere marked by economic necessities into liberating social energies acting at the political level. In our view, it also effectively exemplifies Gramsci’s concept of ‘history making’ as it implies the synthesis of ‘objective’ conditions constrained by nature and economy, which sublimate into prospective subjective freedom.

Gramsci and Communication  55 We take catharsis as a politically crucial materialization of translation. As we already mentioned, conceptual translation implies the transfer of a theoretical category from one context to another, from one époque to another, from one social formation to another. However, bearing in mind Gramsci’s objective to pursue a revolutionary endeavor, his reflections also aim at something more specific, a politics of translation that ultimately entails a translation of human energies into politics (Frosini, 2010). In this sense, rhetoric as cathartic translation leads to the following transpositions: from philosophy to political praxis; from common sense to good sense; from an economic to an ethical political moment (the cathartic moment); from different idioms to a common language; from a corporative moment to a national popular; and ultimately, from the concrete empirical practical experience into consciousness. In the next section, we use the notion of common sense to exemplify how dialectical translation may function as factor of political transformation.

Common Sense: Language As Social Organization Principle A crucial way in which the notion of translation informs Gramsci’s thought can be found in his interest in transforming ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense.’ We claim that common sense represents a resource to build a collective project that requires the intervention of both horizontal and vertical translation, which synthetizes multiple common senses into one and also elevates its incongruous and multiple nature into a relatively more coherent and elaborate vision of the world. Whereas in English ‘common sense’ refers to a simplified judgment, a non-refined heuristic instrument, in the literary and philosophic Italian ­tradition, ‘senso comune,’ as Gramsci understood it, implies looking at a collective perspective, a group-based way to make sense of the world via an unorganized series of opinions, assumptions, and practices. Common sense is thus the concept that reveals Gramsci’s interest in language as a factor of cultural unification, as well as an unorganized reservoir of tools (popular ideas, beliefs, practices) to ideologically inform a political project. In this sense, as we already argued in Chapter 2—and compared to Stuart Hall’s reading—we think that Gramsci’s political project tends to privilege ‘unity’ over ‘difference.’ In fact, Gramsci’s notions such as ‘national popular,’ ‘united front,’ ‘modern prince,’ ‘national language vs. regional ­dialect,’ and ‘hegemony’ all point to the political objective of constructing a collective, popular based, will. Gramsci’s understanding of common sense appears to draw on Vico’s sensus communis. In the New Science (1968) Vico introduces sensus communis as a factor that ‘‘makes human choice certain with respect to needs and utilities’’ (p. 141) as well as a “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race”

56  Gramsci and Communication (p. 142). In other words, sensus communis provides “a common ground of truth” (p. 144), a level of uniformity, and social bonds across a particular community. Vico believed that common sense penetrates language practices, which in turn help reinforce it. Therefore, through language, sensus communis works as an organizing principle of society, providing a mental map and a reservoir for the fundamental values that constitute a given community. While for Vico common sense is considered a stable cultural foundation of a given society, for Gramsci matters are, for a change, more dialectical. In fact, common sense is on the one hand considered to be “uncritical and largely unconscious, dogmatic” (1971, p. 435), “conservative” (p. 423), a “chaotic aggregate of different conceptions” (p. 422), a “primitive historical acquisition” (p. 199). On the other, common sense can crystallize in powerful ways as a vision of the world ranked at different levels of elaboration. Therefore, in this case, the translation that elaborates and organizes common sense operates both as a synthesis of different historic specific plural experiences (horizontal translation)—such as different social groups’ take on common sense—but also as a progressive overcoming of it through a further level of refinement (vertical translation).6 In Gramsci, this ‘purification’ first entails transitioning from common sense to ideology, which implies extracting from the practical and empirical consciousness of common sense a conceptual elaboration of a group that responds to immediate needs, a common and necessary terrain where a group approaches a limited level of self-awareness. A given ideology, then, takes into account common sense with the goal of going beyond it. Second, purification entails the translation of a given ideology into a philosophy, a more elaborate view that transforms immediate needs into a broader political project. The history of philosophy for Gramsci consists of attempts to revise, correct, and perfect existing ideological conceptions of the world (1975, Q10, §10). The third and final step in purification involves translating philosophy into politics, thus reaching the level of making history through ‘good sense’ (Thomas, 2010). Such a worldview is reproduced through communication, which represents for Gramsci the terrain in which mental and practical activity, consciousness, and social being most clearly show their indissoluble union. In this context, as the case of Podemos most clearly demonstrates, ‘organic intellectuals’ engage in an act of permanent persuasion (1971, p. 10) that trades pure eloquence for a rhetoric that ‘dialectically translates’ to the extent that it is able to organize ideas in more effective ways. Gramsci’s dialectical understanding of common sense derives from a ­complex synthesis of collective and individuals, as well as mental and ­practical aspects. As we discuss later, it is in many ways through such a contradictory understanding of what is ‘common,’ ‘popular,’ and ‘collective’ that we identify an important driving force uniting the efforts of Occupy, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos: to gather together heterogeneous social forces and build a political commonality via rhetoric.

Gramsci and Communication  57 Based on these principles, we treat common sense as both a producer and a product of language that, in every epoch, creates a relative level of historical truths concerning basic dynamics of social life: political principles, decorum, politeness, aesthetics, and family values. From a perspective of dialectical translation, senso comune tries to explain how language can act as factor of socialization, aggregation, and social organization; how language creates a contradictory unity between an individual embracing of those common values, and a combined senso comune, in other words a ‘collective will.’ Thus, senso comune functions as a framework capable of conciliating a key binarism that seems to characterize the Gramscian historical materialist understanding of social reality: the relationship between individual consciousness and dominant ideology. As Gramsci claims, the crucial question about language is about its capability “of attaining a single cultural climate” (1971, p. 349). Such a cultural climate consists of an interior and exterior environment that provides the framework on which individual idiosyncrasies can develop with a relative sense of independence and freedom, while at the same time they cannot avoid making reference to such a basis provided by senso comune. This implies understanding hegemony as a dynamic production of such a singular social environment that, through communicative practices, materializes in common sense. Approaching hegemony through common sense helps cast light on an important aspect of the concept that, at least in our field, tends to be frequently overlooked. In fact, as we advanced in Chapter 2, and as we explain more in detail in the discussion of Indignados/Podemos, critical cultural approaches to communication are inclined to understand hegemony as an imposition and naturalization of a social order by a dominant group. Accordingly, such a tradition predominantly understands hegemony in negative terms, as an act of power of one group over another. However, hegemony interpreted as building ‘unity out of difference’ allows us to reiterate what we argued in Chapter 2, that it not only consists of the reproduction of a given social order, but it also becomes the productive way in which a given subaltern group can advance its political project. Moreover, from the perspective of commonality implied by common sense as understood by Vico and developed by Gramsci, derives a level of insurgent social functionalism that asserts the necessity of hegemony that, as much as a normative grammar, incorporates power as a way to organize and coordinate people in society. In other words, the extension of a worldview that aspires to become homogenously extended is, in many ways, understood as being functional. Thus, the instrumentality of hegemony goes beyond securing the vested interests of the dominant class, as it becomes purposeful to certain subaltern groups as well. In fact, these relatively marginalized groups, by incorporating ideas belonging to the dominant group, are able to expand their worldviews and therefore, paradoxically enough, capitalize on the relative emancipatory side of hegemony.

58  Gramsci and Communication In this sense, the quasi obsession of Gramsci with the need to reach a national dimension of the political struggle has to do with the goal to coordinate across an entire community—sharing “common” elements such as sense, language, consciousness, ideology—a political project. However, for Gramsci the ‘national’—understood as a socially expansive perspective that goes beyond the ‘local’ in order to mobilize people—is not an end in itself. In fact, as we will show in our discussion of M5S, communication, the politicization of broad segments of society—can at the same time lead to significant changes and towards a passive revolution that turns a potentially national popular project into a populist one. We have used Gramsci here as a lens with which to conceptualize common sense and the cultural practices associated with it as contradictory producers of meaning and chaotic containment against chaos (Jacobitti, 1980). Language in this sense, while being the most important vehicle of common sense, can also be used to educate/elevate people via journalism, oratory speech, and education, which organize/systematize what Holub defines as a “popular creative spirit” (1992, p. 54). Such a popular creativity can produce a new language, materializing a new conception of the world (ideally the philosophy of praxis for ­Gramsci) that can encourage the “bestial and the elemental passions through a conception of necessity which gives a conscious direction to one’s activity” (1971, p. 329). In our view, some of this creative potential of language can be described as a linguistic performance of ‘dialectical translation.’

Notes 1. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Vološinov maintained that language develops in concrete social situations and is inseparable from the practical context in which it is used. Like Gramsci, Vološinov considers language as a field of ideological struggle in which competing conceptions of the world interact and clash with each other. For a discussion of the affinities between Gramsci and Vološinov, see Holub’s Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (2005), in particular Chapter 5, in which Holub discusses the relationship between Gramsci and the Russian linguistic tradition. 2. We think that the juxtaposition of Gramsci and Saussure resonates in signifi­ cant ways with our discussion in Chapter 2 of Hall’s and Williams’ takes on Gramsci. Clearly, both Hall and Williams were drawing on a body of Marxist literature, eminently (but not only) represented by Gramsci, that insisted on rejecting the privilege of either ‘voluntarism’ or ‘social determinism,’ ‘unity’ and ‘difference,’ and either ‘optimism of the will’ or ‘pessimism of the intellect.’ ­It is then a question of emphasis. In fact, while Gramsci considers language as a practice that synthesizes ‘unity’ and ‘difference,’ he also claims that categories that unify through power, such as hegemony, national language, or normative grammar, are necessary to elevate particularisms to a shared dimension. 3. The distinction between horizontal and vertical translation can only be considered as an analytic differentiation of otherwise indissoluble and intertwined aspects of translation. As a matter of fact, from the condition of possibility of all

Gramsci and Communication  59 translations, i.e., translatability, both horizontal and vertical translations can be considered as dialectic manifestations. 4. In line with both Frosini and Boothman, we are convinced that Gramsci’s i­ nterest in translatability must be understood in the historical materialist relationship of structures and super-structures. In fact, the condition of possibility for translatability consists of the possibility of ‘reducing’ to its essential ­structure and evaluating how similar social structures—such as French and German ones— can produce similar, ergo translatable, cultural phenomena. The same principle operates within different spheres of a given social formation. Gramsci provides the example of two scientists that believe they are marinating different positions because they use a different language, but in reality, they imply the same concept or logic. 5. We share Lichtner’s (2010) understanding of translatability, which entails the reciprocal translation of abstract discourse and historically concrete praxis, because historical circumstances are re-instated in abstract discourse, which in turn materializes into a historically determined praxis. Therefore, for Gramsci, the translation of philosophy into politics corresponds to the translation of thought into praxis. 6. Gramsci is consistently concerned with the relationship between ‘common sense’—notions organically arising among people—and the ‘good sense’ provided by Marxist ideas. Accordingly, he theoretically considers whether “modern theory [i.e., Marxism can] be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ feelings of the masses” (1995, p. 52). For him there is only a quantitative difference of degree (as opposed to a qualitative one) between common sense and good sense. That is why common sense can be dialectically translated into ‘good sense’: “a reciprocal ‘reduction’ so to speak, a passage from one to the other and vice versa, must be possible” (p. 52). Thus, in Gramsci’s view, the organic, everyday based thought cannot be neglected or despised but needs to be “educated, directed purged of extraneous contaminations” (1992, p. 431).

4 Occupy Wall Street The Limits of War of Position

With this chapter, we begin our empirical engagement with the framework outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 through an exploration of the US social movement “Occupy Wall Street” (hereafter OWS). Our objective is to use the framework as a lens with which to interrogate this form of social mobilization regarding its ability to contribute to the construction of an alternative hegemony, as well as to provide a more general argument about the perils and possibilities of social mobilization in times of crisis. We interpret OWS as embedded in a framework of multiple frictions that we explain through Gramscian tensions such as those between identified objectives and adequate means to achieve them, between civil society and state, or between the strategies of ‘war of maneuver’ and ‘war of position.’ In this context, we argue that the movement was ultimately caught in the impasse of a cathartic process in which hard economic circumstances caused by the  2008 crisis were translated by OWS into an ethical pre-figurative politics that did not materialize into a viable political and economic project capable of attracting vast segments of the society. First, we examine how OWS members attempted to construct an alternative model of socialization characterized by an unstructured, leaderless, and ‘ideology-less’ organization enacted by a series of practices that utilize communication and re-signification as the main terrain of confrontation. We question whether those particular features of OWS serve as practical strategies towards constructing a new and different hegemony, or rather as symbolic representations of the society this group aspires to construct. In the second part of the chapter, we use Gramsci’s insights to advance a critical analysis of OWS by stressing the importance of generating what we define as an ‘integral struggle’ against the ‘integral state.’ Gramsci’s notion of ‘integral state,’ as a synthetic sublation of the cultural, social, economic, and political spheres, emphasizes how a successful hegemonic project achieves a “historic bloc” only when it operates at the levels of both state and civil society. We claim that OWS’s goals require an equally integral kind of struggle, one that operates at all these multiple levels. As mentioned in C ­ hapters 2 and 3, this shortcoming can be understood in terms of an incomplete ‘­dialectical translation.’ In other words, while OWS succeeded in translating the economic context of crisis into an ethical and ideal prefiguration of

Occupy Wall Street  61 a better society, it failed to translate such ethical views into the sphere of material/economic interests.

Occupy Wall Street After a brief outline of the history and progress of OWS, we examine here the main strategies and features that characterized this initiative. The movement gained media prominence on September 17, 2011, when a widespread group of activists organized a protest called “Occupy Wall Street” and camped in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned park in New York City’s financial district. Influenced by similar enterprises in North Africa and Western Europe (Adam, 2011; Castañeda, 2012; Kerton, 2012; Sterger & Manfred, 2013; Thompson, 2011), “Occupiers” took to the streets of New York City, demonstrating against the corruption of democracy due to social disparity, corporate greediness, and the erosion of life chances for the great majority of the population—as the group’s most prominent rhetorical slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” clearly asserted. The space engaged by OWS was both material and digital, as physical places were tightly linked to the virtual spaces provided by I. C. technologies—a strategy that enabled both familiarity with and the mirroring of Occupiers’ predecessors in other parts of the globe. Thus, the call to ‘occupy’ rapidly spread through social media, and some members were also quick to develop a website that could serve as an accessible platform for the expression of the movement’s demands. On September 30, 2011, the “Declaration and Manifesto of Occupy Wall Street Movement” was added to this website. The first paragraph of this document synthesizes the main motivations behind the occupation: As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. (NYCGA, n.d., 1) From the movement’s initial stages, the police responded with tough repressions, subjecting the encampments to consistent raids, obstructing the parades, and using them to justify arrests (Liboiron, 2012; ­Taylor & G ­ essen, 2012). In parallel, US mainstream political parties tried to opportunistically capitalize

62  Occupy Wall Street on the situation. The Democrats, initially motivated by the popular appeal of OWS, timidly expressed their support, but in the end, the party considered this social movement to be a dangerous radicalizing force (Berger, 2012). The Republicans, by depicting OWS as anti-American and Marxist, instrumentalized the movement in order to exploit the residual—but still powerful—­ rhetoric of the ‘red scare’ and the supposed dangers of populism. For instance, the right wing website The American Dream was quick to publish an article tellingly titled “Solid evidence that Occupy Wall Street is a C ­ ommunist movement run by Socialists who wish to bring down the Free Enterprise System” (Snyder, 2012). By the first week of October 2011, the protests occupied 7% of national news coverage, which went down to 2% in late October (Pew, 2011). In the following months, with its activists forced to leave the streets and evicted from their encampments by local law enforcement officials, OWS risked being consigned to the margins of public discourse. Between late October and December of 2011, mayors in cities across the country moved to clear encampments in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Boston, among others, with several removal attempts resulting in violent confrontations between police and protesters (Moynihan, 2012). By November of 2011, OWS moved to university campuses, mobilizing students against tuition hikes. In the spring of 2012, occupiers started to partially ‘re-occupy’ public spaces by sleeping on sidewalks outside bank branches, as well as organizing sleeping spots, although many of these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. Currently, close to celebrating its fourth anniversary, OWS-informed activism continues across the US, even though the movement has clearly lost visibility and diluted into specific initiatives. One of these is ‘Strike debt!,’ which aims at buying and canceling individuals’ debt derived from education, health, and housing. This ‘resistance movement’ defines itself as “an offshoot of the Occupy movement” that respects many of its principles (Principles of solidarity, n.d., 3). In the following pages, we examine some of the numerous ways in which OWS carried on its battle. Needless to say, it is not our goal to treat this movement as a single social body, but rather as a compound of different voices and contradictory positions that developed through incessant internal debates (Smucker, 2013, 2014). As we will argue later on, it is precisely for this reason that OWS’s practices needed to incorporate a cathartic element that could exceed the rhetorical, ethically based moment and address the ‘immediate needs’ of economic interests through political organization.

Occupy’s Counter Spectacle In this section, we spell out the different components of OWS’s rhetorical strategies as featuring elements of an imagined and ideal ‘true democracy.’ In short, the group’s different estrangement practices—in the shape of symbolic

Occupy Wall Street  63 and physical disruption of places and spaces, or participatory democracy techniques—all exhibit an approach that privileges the movement’s goals at the expense of the means to achieve these goals. OWS’s counter spectacle ultimately speaks to the struggle of and for a new common sense. As we commented in Chapter 3, the dialectical translation of common sense through further elaboration and purification of its ‘chaotic’ and contradictory elements into an ‘ideology,’ then a ‘philosophy,’ and finally into a politically oriented ‘good sense’ may be considered an important strategy to build an alternative hegemony. However, as we show in our discussion here, OWS’s discourse was not able to address the need to extend its interests beyond its original social boundaries. Instead, its rhetori­ cal strategies were prevalently directed towards the reinforcement of OWS as a community. One of the cultural promoters of OWS, Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn (Elliot, 2011) recommended that the movement should aim at the construction of a situation, a unity of space, time, and people capable of emancipating its inhabitants and resisting the pressure of the system. Together with this, the movement relied on recontextualizing and re-signification strategies. Last, but not least, OWS enacted the anarchy-driven idea of a structure-less and leaderless organization based on a refusal of traditional ideologies and conventional politics (Gitlin, 2012). While we acknowledge Gramsci’s prominent historicism and his rejection of the idea of a general formula to guide social struggle, we also think that the practices summarized above can be read as an example of incomplete catharsis. Thus, whereas Gramsci envisions catharsis as a movement from the moment of economic necessity to the moment of political organization, OWS appeared to highlight normative and ethical principles as overarching guides informing a discourse on economic disparities. But, OWS did not capitalize on the powerful unifying force of these economic constraints and their capability to drive mobilization at the state level as a means towards a more effective reconfiguring of social organization at the level of political institutions. In our view, such a move was an incomplete one, as it limited the movement’s agency to rhetorical counter-spectacle. Constructing a Situation Members of OWS tried to disrupt the ideological spectacle of Wall Street through their physical and symbolic presence. At the basis of their rhetori­ cal counter spectacle, “Occupiers” heavily drew on Guy Debord and the Situationist International—the movement that played an important role in the May 1968 uprising in France (see Elliot, 2011). For Debord (1982) late capitalism presents itself as a spectacle that stands in front of us as an “immense accumulation of commodities” (p. 1), a powerful collection of phantasmagorias that limit our sociological imagination. One of the most powerful spectacles of neoliberal capitalism is Wall Street, a stage in which

64  Occupy Wall Street money, commodities, and people transit at an incredible speed. However, even more spectacular has been the crisis of such a mode of production, as Badiou acutely describes: As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the “cinema”. ­Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the i­dentical— the Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New  York, the diagonal from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks—not to mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse. (2008, p. A1) OWS members thus attempted to materialize the concrete implications of the spectacle of the global stock market and the crisis and its increasing condition of being taken for granted as, for example, a personified subject: ‘somebody’ who thinks, expressing judgments and emotions. The idea of the constructed situation consists of the creation of an event or place that is an alternative to the status quo through the occupation of a space. From an ethical stance, OWS sought to create a dis-alienating situation that replaced representation with a real communitarian society. As such, the movement morally situated itself against what Marx called ‘commodity fetishism,’ seen as a misleading understanding of social relations whereby “what is, in fact, a relation between people,” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx, 1990, p. 165). The counter-spectacle could be considered an alternative to the mediated manifestation of common sense, understood as commonly held ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that operate as unquestioned substrata of truths. Through a mediation of common sense, via media, school, family, and other key societal institutions, we live and perform the spectacle of capitalism. As Zompetti (1997) argues, common sense represents the ideological superstructure in which subaltern classes find their understanding, position, and justification of the hegemonic  social order in which they live. Thus, the idea of a counter spectacle reflects OWS’s intention to create an alternative environment that both resists common-sensical spectacle but also produces an ideological terrain on which Occupiers develop and raise a critical consciousness. Accordingly, in some of the practices of OWS, we see a clear motivation to re-appropriate a particular space—most notably, Wall Street—thus providing new opportunities for people to relate to it. As “Mark,” one of the participants in the New York City encampment, puts it: “the idea of the occupation is to remind everyone that Wall Street belongs to the city of New York” (Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 22).

Occupy Wall Street  65 From the movement’s perspective, the spectacle of Wall Street was hypnotizing enough to provide the indisputable justification for dismantling social programs, automatically validating austerity policies for the people and bailouts for banks. Occupiers tried to shed light on such a spectacle by placing bodies in its way, therefore challenging its apparent sense of immediacy and substantiality. From this perspective, as Judith Butler put it when she publicly expressed her support for the group, the important fact is having “­Bodies in Public,” even if these bodies make no specific demands (in Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 192). As a way to go beyond mere ideological critique and propose an alternative ideology tied to concrete life experiences, Occupiers built their own scene as an occasion for estrangement from the everyday deceptive spectacle offered by capitalism (Debord, 1982). In this context, Zuccotti Park represented a situated space where people involved in both everyday practices, such as cooking, eating, and living together, and more politically oriented activities, such as discussions and deliberations of common issues, built on the principles of counter spectacle to provide an alternative common sense. Occupying Through Meaning A second important aspect of OWS is its reliance on re-contextualization and re-signification strategies as a way to actively shape the environment where actors operate. For Occupiers, the creation of an alternative space is both material—as we explained above—and symbolic, as “Occupying” entails not only re-appropriating a public space, but also re-appropriating a voice in the public sphere through the use of images, sounds, and slogans that are publicly exposed in that space. In this context, an important component of the strategies within OWS consists of re-signifying the discourse of capitalism through re-­contextualization, thus turning its meaning against itself. The culture-jamming operation of the magazine Adbusters stands out as the most important representative of this technique. This outlet has produced important visual icons for OWS’s imagery—such as the drawing of a ballerina dancing on the head of Wall Street’s charging bull. But there are also language-based examples, especially visible in the movement’s signs and slogans. In these texts, there is a constant reframing of issues that builds on and tries to ironically appropriate culturally shared meanings. The intended effect of these re-contextualizations, as seen in many of the posters displayed by New York demonstrators, relies on the assumed knowledge of different symbols of capital trading—as in the sign “No Bulls, no Bears, Only Pigs.” Other knowledge assumptions include the dominant, neoliberal economic narrative—as in the slogans “We are too big to fail,” or “Free Enterprise is not a Hunting License”—and awareness of corporate habit—as in the logos that read “Outsourced” and “USA: United Shareholder Association.”

66  Occupy Wall Street In relation to our discussion in Chapter 3 of how power penetrates linguistic practices at the level of language structures, by resignifying and re-contextualizing, OWS aims at creating its own ‘immanent grammar’ as a critique of the dominant grammar by showing its internal contradictions. As we argued, dominant grammar represents “the reciprocal monitoring, reciprocal teaching, and reciprocal ‘censorship’” of discourse practices. This whole complex of actions and reactions comes together to create a grammatical conformism, to establish norms or “judgments of correctness and incorrectness” (Gramsci, 1985, p. 180). Immanent grammar, on the other hand, represents the framework that structures our everyday discursive practices; it is the grammar inherent in language itself, by which one speaks according to grammar without knowing it. The number of immanent or spontaneous grammars is incalculable and, theoretically, “one can say that each person has a grammar of his own” (p. 180). In our view, OWS’s effort can be understood as awareness-based political intervention against the language in dominance. Consequently, the different resignification strategies put forward by the movement show a clear emphasis on the discursive and ideological aspects of power relations, linking alternative linguistic practices to a given conception of the world. The movement thus introduces a “meta-politics frame” (Fuster Morell, 2012) that carries with it the repositioning of particular places and communication practices against, but in relation to, their original contexts—thus demystifying their society’s common sense. Organizing Without Leaders A third, ethically based characteristic of OWS is its refusal to embrace a static ideology as a way to prevent the sclerotization of the movement and thus settling for more-conventional political objectives. Such a rejection also represented, for the movement, a direct engagement with a materialist argument: in other words, Occupiers rejected the systematizing function of existing ideologies, seen as an abstraction of real concrete life. Instead, they considered real life as inhabited by complex contradictions linked to people’s material concerns. As one participant in the occupation observed: “as we grow and change, our forms of organization necessarily change as well. New structures are constantly being explored, so that we may create the most open, participatory and democratic space possible” (Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 9). One direct implication of not being explicitly tied to any specific ideology is the fact that Occupiers conceived the organization of their group as leaderless and structure-less. As Gautney (2011) observes, traditionally leftist social movements used to aspire to become or function as a political party. In this context, their internal debates were mostly limited to the degree of centralization or decentralization and whether such a party should aspire to revolutionary or reformist objectives. By contrast, OWS incorporated an

Occupy Wall Street  67 anarchist and Marxist autonomist component that rejected the traditional aspirations of a social movement (Gitlin, 2012). Through their organizing strategies, Occupiers modeled their objective to create an alternative community that “eliminates hierarchy, bosses, managers, and pay differential […]. The goal is to be more participatory and more horizontal” (Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 10). This form of organization translated into the rejection of what Lenin (1987, p. 311) defined as ‘bureaucratic centralism’ i.e., having a bureaucratic apparatus replacing the democratic functioning of a group. However, Occupiers’ refusal to embrace the structured and hierarchic model of the political party was not only based on autonomic and anarchic principles; it also had an important experiential component: for these protesters, recent history had demonstrated that conventional politics consistently failed to represent the concrete needs of the people who elect their representatives. This critique leads to a refusal of a politics from within capable of addressing the space where civil society and state meet—what we later refer to as integral struggle. As OWS organizer Yotam Marom indicated in an interview: We need to recognize that the institutions that govern our lives really do have power, but we don’t necessarily need to participate in them according to their rules. I think Occupy Wall Street’s role is to step in the way of those processes to prevent them from using that power. (Klein & Marom, 2012, 5) The refusal of forms of conventional political organization is also symptomatic of Occupiers’ preferred forms for discussion, deliberation, and decision-making. In this sense, OWS replaced the logic and dynamics that characterize traditional political parties with what Kauffman calls the “­theology of consensus” (in Taylor  & Gessen, 2012). In his piece published in Occupy Gazette, Kauffman asserted that OWS was inspired by the Quaker form of deliberation and consequently adopted an organization that, through general assemblies, aimed at two united but distinct ­objectives: unanimity and unity. ‘Unanimity’ and ‘unity’ materialize as “a process through which groups come to agreement without voting” (2012, p. 12), which implies that instead of voting each line of a given program, the assembly refines the text until everyone finds it acceptable. Occupiers also adopted a so-called ‘spoke council’ in order to enable an “ongoing operational coordination and decision making” (Kauffman, 2012, p. 11). The ‘spoke council’ represented an instrument of a confederated direct democracy according to which each discussion sub-group designates one ‘spoke person’ to sit in a circle with other spokes. “Spoke” people are not representative, but rather mouthpieces for their subgroups. The group’s attempt to operationalize the concept of ‘horizontal communication’ (Cardoso, 2004) is also related to its forms of organization

68  Occupy Wall Street rejecting hierarchy. While ‘unanimity’ and ‘unity’ and spoke council address the dynamics of interpersonal communication, the idea of ‘horizontality’ aims at democratizing mediated communications. This kind of communication implies the production of messages through inexpensive and popularly available means, thus rejecting mainstream media, corporate media, and their tendency to concentrate broadcasting power in a few hands. Conversely, horizontal communication allows a symmetric exchange of information and knowledge that links many to many as opposed to one to many. OWS embraced the kind of communicative practices that have been described with different terms, such as ‘alternative media’ (Atton, 2002), ‘­citizens’ media’ (Rodriguez, 2002), or ‘radical media’ (Downing, 2001). While emphasizing different aspects, the common denominator in this vocabulary is the intention to not reproduce asymmetrical social relation via communicative practices. OWS’s official webpages provided many examples of “how to occupy” media by combining technologies, techniques, and platforms such as M ­ umble, Open Space Technology, and Facebook. As the section “quick guide for a revolution” asserts: The net is an instant and unlimited space where millions of people can meet and organize, uniting countries and cultures, creating connections that would be impossible otherwise. The net is the only democratic, horizontal and decentralized space where huge powers are weaker than the sum of the citizens. (Quick guide for a revolution, 2012, p. 12) What emerges clearly from this passage is that the act of communication for OWS goes beyond a transmission model (Carey, 1989) and becomes what Charland (1987) defines as a constitutive rhetoric, which contributes to constituting or re-negotiating the identity of the movement and the link each individual member establishes with the whole collectivity. Accordingly, the individual and the collective voices are given the same weight. Moreover, as we will discuss more in detail in Chapter 6 in relation to Indignados and Podemos, OWS performed a vernacular rhetoric (Ono  & Sloop, 1992), a kind of discourse that aimed at negotiating the identity of a given social group vis-à-vis an established social order and dominant discourses. From this point of view, OWS utilized vernacular rhetoric as a vehicle of a marginalized public sphere (Hauser, 1999). In relation to our previous discussion on common sense, the Gramscian understanding of vernacularism represents another aspect of the terrain where a given group develops, at different degrees of elaboration, its own spontaneous conception of the world with self-liberating potentials (Gencarella, 2010). With the intention of developing such a constitutive link between communication and a sense of community, Occupiers also exported their perspective through the creation of numerous spaces for expression, such as

Occupy Wall Street  69 the micro-blogging service “wearethe99percent.tumblr.com,” where every member of the ‘99%’ was invited to create a speech act describing his/her own “Story of resignation” (Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 27). Each singular voice here was not meant to stand alone as a particular experience, but to join the chorus of the 99% of the people. As already reiterated, through this tumbler, the movement called attention to common sense as the priority of real life activity, which continually experiments and corrects itself in order to cope with material ­constrictions—such as student loans or health care expenses. As one participant claimed through the Facebook page of “Occupy Boston,” for Occupiers “the process is the message” (in Gitlin, 2012). Thus, through a reformulation of the famous quote by Marshall McLuhan (i.e., the medium is the message), the accent moved to how the ideas of OWS, instead of being fixated by abstract theorization such as particular ideologies, were embedded in lived experience (Gitlin, 2012).

Integral State, Integral Struggle On October 9, 2011, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, speaking at Zuccotti Park, offered the following reflection: So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in ­Siberia. He knew censors would read his mail, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom—war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink. (in Taylor & Gessen, 2012, p. 67) Through his “red ink” metaphor, Žižek effectively described the capability of a social movement to create what Bitzer (1968) would define as a rhetori­ cal situation, according to which the speaker and the audience are united by a common concern and context. According to the idea of the rhetorical situation, rhetoric operates as a mode of action that should have the ability to not just articulate the words ‘freedom’ and ‘social change,’ but also to envision their actualization. But can words alone revolutionize an established system? Gramsci used Cuoco’s example of how the attempted Republican Revolution in 1799

70  Occupy Wall Street Naples nose-dived because an elite group of intellectuals lectured about the French Revolution ideals to the poor, local peasantry. On this occasion, and despite the rhetorical power of the French motto “Liberté, egalité, fraternité ou la Mort,” the mantra could not prevent the people from taking sides with the only authority guaranteeing their daily bread—the old regime. In our view, the anecdote of traditional intellectuals not being capable of bridging the wide gap between the Enlightenment’s political ideas and the material conditions that informed the desires and aspirations of the people indicates that a rhetorical situation is successful when rhetoric is capable of mediating between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ factors, between struggle and structure (Aune, 1994). Drawing a parallel between the 1799 failed attempt and OWS’s context through the idea of the rhetorical situation, in our view, OWS’s “red ink” represents a powerful rhetorically based means that was necessary, but not sufficient for the kind of social change the movement wanted to achieve. Ultimately, OWS’s symbolic and material disrupting of space, its lack of structure, leaderless organization, or its refusal of conventional politics constituted adequate features of an ideal “true democracy,” rather than sufficient means to achieve it. Next, and drawing on a dialectical understanding of the relationship between state and civil society, we explain why these strategies were limited and stress the importance of cathartically engaging the whole of society in an ‘integral struggle’ against the ‘integral state.’ Integral State As already mentioned, OWS rejected the state and the institutional politics affiliated with it as an antagonist model of structuration, as well as of hierarchical and asymmetric power relations, which could be synthetized in the various aspects and institutions of the state. However, the rejection of state as a model of social organization should be distinguished from the refusal to fight against it. In this sense, our goal in this section is to argue in favor of a turn towards a perspective that considers an expansive understanding of the state and acknowledges its significant role in both reproducing hegemony and providing the conditions of possibility for counter-hegemony. More specifically, we argue that, as part of our dialectical approach, the notion of the ‘integral state’ may serve as a corrector for a currently powerful narrative that tends to diminish the agency of the state and therefore makes its contribution to the reproduction of a given social formation essentially invisible (Briziarelli, 2011). Based on the previous examination of OWS, we argue that such a narrative not only informed the movement’s self-­understanding—in refusing for instance a hierarchical social organization or a dominant common sense—but also is conveyed by much of the academic commentary on ‘new’ social movements (e.g., Esping-Andersen, 1991; Harvey, 2005; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994, 1997; Castells, 1996).

Occupy Wall Street  71 As we discussed in the book’s introduction, the push back against state-­ centric accounts is also intimately associated with widespread claims that we are living in a ‘post-hegemony’ social ecology (Yúdice, 1995; M ­ oreiras, 2001; ­Williams, 2002; Hardt & Negri, 2000; Day, 2005; Lash, 2007; Thoburn, 2007; Beasley-Murray, 2010; Foust, 2010). Thus, the perspective regarding the alleged decline of the state frequently originates from broader statements on power and social organization that consider essential traits of the Gramscian social historical context—such as class, state, political parties, Fordism—as being extinguished. In fact, the deserting of a perspective revolving around the state represents the logical consequence of a ‘new’ approach to social struggle, as it rests on the assumption of a social reality in which power is diffused, immaterial, and discursively constructed. As Day (2005) argues, most contemporary social movements operate in a non-hegemonic framework that goes beneath and beyond the state boundaries. In Day’s view, many of these movements—informed by the anarchist tradition—reject the state-centric ‘classical logic of hegemony’ (p. 14) according to which in order to create an alternative social order a given movement must seize state’s power. While we acknowledge that the state can no longer be considered as the sole locus of power in many contemporary societies, we also consider it an indispensable element in the reproduction of socio-economic relations in a given social formation. Thus, despite the neoliberal rhetoric that depicts the state as a neutral observer and guarantor of the self-corrective mechanism of the market, the Hegelian night watchman (Durst, 2005), we p ­ refer to conceptualize the state as operating both internally and externally to maintain the interests of ruling classes. Accordingly, we are convinced that, even in a globalized world characterized by an increasing internationalization of civil society and increasing supra national governance (O’Siochru & Girard, 2002), any movement seeking radical social transformation, especially when expressing the needs of a subordinate group, should always be involved in a confrontation with capital and its most powerful ally: the state, or more precisely in Gramscian terms, the ‘integral state’ (1971, p. 199). As we discussed in chapters 2 and 3, a predominant characteristic of the Gramscian approach is the dilution of hypostatic categories—i.e., abstractions that treat social reality as being constructed by sealed compartments— into fluid social processes. For example, language, praxis, and common sense are all caught in the tension between ‘unity and difference’ and ‘stability and movement.’ Correspondingly, Gramsci does not treat the state as a reified or crystallized set of institutions, but as a constellation of social relations that constantly navigate permeable social boundaries: Usually this [the state] is understood as a political society (i.e. the dictatorship of coercive apparatus to bring the mass of people into conformity with the type of production and economy dominant at any

72  Occupy Wall Street given moment) and not as an equilibrium between political and civil society. (1971, p. 54) As the passage indicates, within Gramsci’s dialectical conceptualization of social reality, the link between state and civil society must be simultaneously understood as unity and distinction. Hence, by the idea of ‘integral state’ he conceives at the same time the broadening of the sphere of the state over that of civil society, and the broadening of the sphere of civil society over the state. Historically, whereas the unity and the mutual integration of those two provinces is more observable when a given class reaches hegemonic dominance, their distinction becomes more defined when such hegemony is in crisis. Thus, while acknowledging the distance between the three case studies examined in this book, we also want to stress the common theme of how the 2008 global economic crisis manifested in all three cases as a historically situated organic crisis, which in turns implies a hegemony crisis. Therefore, the notion of integral state is consequently linked to the organic integration of both civil and political society, as well as, as we discussed in Chapter 2, to the integral perspective that dialectically links false oppositions such as the sphere of coercion—i.e., the state—and the sphere of consent, i.e., civil society: The historical unity is realized in the State, and their history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States. But it would be wrong to think that this unity is simply juridical and political (though such forms of unity do have their importance too, and not in a purely formal sense); the fundamental historical unity, concretely, results from the organic relations between State or political society and “civil society.” (1971, p. 52) In this excerpt, Gramsci proposes his integral approach as a way to empirically identify analytic categories such as ‘state’ and civil society. In fact, the “historical unity” he refers to expresses the idea of how those two institutions organically develop as interdependent. Gramsci’s idea of the integral state derived from historical shifts that in modern capitalist societies modified the relations between State and Civil Society. He discussed these shifts by using the metaphor of a war of maneuver and war of position, which we think can help us make sense of OWS’s political agency, as well as its limits. Whereas rapid movements of troops in a single frontal attack against the enemy characterize the war of maneuver, the war of position implicates a relatively much slower dynamic, with “troops who dig and fortify relatively fixed lines of trenches” (1971, p. 238). The warfare images are used to demonstrate that the state cannot be considered an empty shell of civil society. Rather, “the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 244).

Occupy Wall Street  73 The idea of the integral state can help us problematize the way O ­ ccupiers indexed their understanding of power relations and, consequently, decided to act upon them. First of all, we argue that OWS activists implicitly ­appropriated—and at the same time reduced to a stand-alone strategy—the idea of a ‘war of position.’ In other words, their actions imply a notion of struggle as operating solely at the level of civil society, as exemplified by their normative and ethical drives. In our view, this understanding translated into an inefficient—or at least insufficient—set of strategies to transform society as a whole. The idea of a frontal attack, in Gramsci’s view, was inadequate because it failed to include civil society as a battleground for hegemony in Western societies—an understanding that Occupiers’ practices as discussed above certainly echo. However, we argue that, in their laudable attempt to transform society, these protesters ended up underestimating the coercive function of the state in reproducing hegemony, as it was assumed that the terrain for rhetorical action was solely grounded in civil society. While the war of position implies a slow but steady positioning inside the social and political field of a given country, such a position needs to be combined with a frontal attack against the state. The opportunity for such a move is especially ripe when hegemony faces crisis, and a given social order is no longer able to produce consent, thus opening up to social protest and frustration, as in the case of OWS. As Zompetti (2012) argues, both strategies are historically situated initiatives that aspire to create critical consciousness and show the internal contradictions of hegemony. However, they are not interchangeable, because the positioning ultimately serves the purpose of moving against the state. In our view, the shortcoming in articulating a struggle at the level of the integral state reveals an incomplete catharsis, as OWS failed to link the ethi­ cal and normative core of its ‘counter spectacle’ to the political economic sphere. Thus, while achieving a discourse potentially effective as a political synthesis (e.g., “We are the 99%”), the group lacked a stronger reference to what Gramsci defines as the moment of necessity in the cathartic process, which is the sphere in which political consciousness emerges out of particularistic economic interests. Conversely, OWS jumped straight to the ethical elaboration without providing a mediating link between that moment and the sphere of particularistic interests of the average American citizen. This cathartic process could have sublated OWS’s struggle at the terrain of the integral state, by combining war of maneuver and war of position—a move that, as we will see, was more evident in the case of Podemos. At that level, the intense labor of criticism and raising of consciousness carried out as a war of position could have been capitalized for OWS’s politic maneuvering against the state, seeking to seize power, by forming a political party. Instead, the struggle for a better society was constantly reduced to battle within civil society, thus eliminating the goal of aspiring to control the state. In other words, Occupiers created their war of position within civil society,

74  Occupy Wall Street as if the winning of consent at this level could on its own produce the radical transformation the movement aspired to. This is clearly exemplified by the group’s reticence to intervene in conventional politics, in contrast to the other two movements we discuss later in the book. Integral Struggle Based on an understanding of hegemony as a combination of a force moment exercised mostly on the terrain of the state, and a consent moment mostly exercised on the terrain of civil society, (Gramsci, 1971; Martínez Guillem & Briziarelli, 2012), we argue that radical transformation needs to be intrinsically tied to the establishment of an alternative hegemonic order, which in turn implies a political engagement with the integral state. In other words, a social movement such as OWS, willing to unite “99%” of the people under its envisioning of a different world, thus “daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers greater possibility of equality” (Principles of solidarity, 2011, §3), entails not simply winning the ethical consent of 99% of the people, but also being able to mobilize them in terms of economic interests through a translation of their ethical/social project into a vision capable of resonating with vast segments of society and therefore of creating a collective will. The resulting collective will can thus engage in the kinds of actions necessary to conduct an “intellectual and moral reform” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 132). Such actions should translate into the political power needed to win and reshape the link between civil society and the state. Even though OWS demonstrates, through many of its official statements, a willingness to engage in this kind of political renovation, the lack of specific political initiatives that can facilitate the movement’s access to a hegemonic position in society situates the movement in an intermediate stage (Gramsci, 1971). According to Gramsci, a subaltern group such as OWS develops through three main stages. In the first stage, a determinate group forms itself without a clear self-understanding and then develops an awareness of its own existence, like a corporation, or an association. In the second stage, a movement becomes aware of the existence of a wider field of interests and that there are others who share these interests with them—and will continue to share them into the imaginable future. In such a situation, there exists a particular sense of solidarity that is mostly based on shared economic interests, but not on a common worldview. Lastly, he envisions a third stage in which the associates of the movement act concretely to seize power and realize the construction of their alternative hegemony. We would argue that OWS was only able to reach an intermediate stage, and not a ‘hegemonic’ stage, as the latter would imply a passage to political class-consciousness, or in other words, a universalization of its interests to the rest of the society. As we previously mentioned, the hegemonic stage would imply a translation of the current vision of OWS into a vision,

Occupy Wall Street  75 a political and economic program capable of gathering social forces and therefore set the basis for what Gramsci defines as collective will. Only this catharsis of ethical principles into effective political ones would allow OWS to envision an integral struggle that would combine war of position and war of maneuver, or in other words an intervention at the terrain of the integral state. In line with Gramsci’s argument, we propose that a political organization could articulate the pluralist and radical democratic project that, according to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), characterizes many social movements nowadays, thus mediating the competing discourses and identities internal to a given group such as OWS. More concretely, a party could mediate, for instance, between the leaderless and structure-less associational forms of the movement (Gitlin, 2012) and the centralized and hierarchized forms of trade unions such as USW and AFL-CIO—arguably the biggest allies of OWS. As we will see in our other two case studies, while the option of forming a political party cannot be considered as a universal formula, but only a historically situated solution, what the experience of Movimento Cinque Stelle and Podemos seems to indicate is that parties are still effective social bodies to expand the social basis of a given political project. As Callinicos (2004) observes, such a party should not be considered the agent of social change but a mediator, a purveyor of revolutionary ­consciousness. A political party represents the materialization of an integral struggle, as it could integrate civil society and state, articulating the plural and different interests of individuals operating within civil society into one collective subject within the sphere of the state. Thus, by condensing a collective will out of the great masses, a political party growing out of OWS could help advance this project from the “economic” towards the “­hegemonic” stage. As we previously mentioned, the incompleteness of this project can be examined from different perspectives: on the one hand, there was a failed translation of an alternative common sense (the counter spectacle) into good sense; on the other, the movement failed to transition from a war of position into a war of maneuver as a way to ‘seize power’ in the opportunistic moment of hegemony crisis triggered by the 2008 Great Recession—­ therefore neglecting to articulate the struggle at the level of the integral state. For Gramsci, there are two moments in such a passage that are worth mentioning in relation to OWS. First, the group operates by channeling the diffused antagonism against a specific social formation into specific themes and political subjects—such as the ones of OWS. Such a moment is characterized by a fragmentary and episodic nature, subject to the constraints given by the political arena provided by the dominant group. In the second moment, the unstable nature of such a collective will is successively transcended, and the movement embraces a “state spirit” (Nardis and Caruso, 2011). This does not imply the mimesis of the whole morphology of the state but, like a state, it aims at elaborating a long-term plan to stabilize

76  Occupy Wall Street the social relations Occupiers want to change. The presence of a state spirit is a condition of stability of the collective will, necessary for overcoming the fragmented and reactive initiative of the masses, the 99%. This necessary condition, we argue, was not taken into account in the different practices and idea(l)s put forward by OWS.

The Question of an Incomplete Translation Within the Gramscian framework that we introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, substantial social/political change occurs only when objective conditions— the particular configuration of social relations operating in a given society in a given époque—meet subjective conditions—i.e., the formation and intervention of particular political subjects and organizations (Gramsci, 1971). Following such an assumption, in this chapter we examined the social scenario in which OWS emerged—the current crisis in the West—and the particular practices that defined the subjective intervention of this social movement. The general lesson we draw from our analysis is that such an intersection of historical circumstances does not automatically produce a political transformation that would lead to more equal societies. As we discussed in the introduction of the book, on the one hand, the so-called 2007–08 Great Recession does not necessarily need to be considered as a catastrophic crisis of capitalism. Instead, it could be understood in a capitalist framework of reproduction of the conditions that allow this political economic regime to keep functioning. On the other hand, not all kinds of intervention by groups such as OWS can facilitate change. As we tried to show throughout our analysis, this group fell into the idealist trap of assuming that once an idea such as “occupy,” (or antagonism against the 1%) is conceived, simply by virtue of its justness, goodness, and elaboration, it will spread around and become a reality. However, there is a remarkable difference between the rationality of an idea and its concrete historical outcomes. As Gramsci put it: Clear ideas are not enough! That is an Enlightenment belief. The elaboration and diffusion of a critical consciousness cannot be simply limited to a simple theoretical enunciation of ‘clear’ methodological principles. It requires a complex combination of deduction and induction, identification and distinction, positive demonstration and destruction. (1991, p. 127) As Aune (2013) claims, rhetoric becomes a powerful tool to generate the condition for the construction of an alternative hegemony when it functions as a mediation in the contradictory relationship between social structure and social struggles. In other words, rhetoric must negotiate the structural possibilities and politically organized human action that produce an

Occupy Wall Street  77 assessment of the limitation of the available means of persuasion. Those limits are historically situated and consist of “the presence of opponents, as well as structural and contingent historical factors,” which, in turn “will cause rhetorical moments” that make a given movement “move forward, grow, or die” (p. 15). In this sense, with the discussion in this chapter we have tried to problematize the relationship between OWS’s goal to radically transform society and the concrete terrain in which those goals should be fought for—or what Smucker (2014) refers to as ‘strategic’ versus ‘pre-figurative politics.’ The protesters participating in the OWS movement lacked a consistent engagement with the crucial question of the (in)effectiveness of their own actions, refusing to explore the concrete relationship between what the movement represented and the society it wanted to change. From the integral perspective expounded in Chapters 2 and 3, OWS failed to develop an integral struggle, combining both war of position and war of maneuver, which in our view represents the most effective form of counter-hegemony. From a rhetorical point of view, an integral struggle would have implied a complete catharsis, a dialectical translation of the normative visions advocated by OWS into a viable political and economic project capable of creating a collective will out of distinct social segments. As the spectacle of capitalism keeps re-enacting, more and more people are finding themselves excluded from basic rights and full participation in their societies. In this context, it seems imperative to develop viable alternative ways of social organization. Undoubtedly, OWS and other similar initiatives throughout the globe need to be credited for exposing the dangerous naturalization of the status quo or the spectacle of capitalism. However, and in spite of—or maybe due to—these accomplishments, one should still question these groups’ logic of intervention in social practices. In this sense, as Hanna Arendt (1958) so strongly stressed, the political cannot be traded for the social, in so much as the public sphere of the politi­ cal arena cannot be traded or exchanged for the sphere of private interests. Following the integral perspective we advance in this book, a successful struggle should be capable of translating its project into multiple levels, moments, and of course, multiple languages.

5 Movimento Cinque Stelle Dialectics of Passive Revolution

One of the key aspects of the Gramscian framework we are trying to revive in this book is the need to historicize particular practices—i.e., place them in their ‘here’ and ‘now’—while at the same time examining the possibilities to go beyond specific contexts in order to maintain a balance between contingency and broader, long-term historical processes. In this context, we were drawn to Gramsci’s notion of ‘passive revolution’ as a combination of reproductive (what Gramsci called regressive) and productive (what Gramsci called progressive) dynamics that lead to prevalent conservative outcomes at the political level (Gramsci, 1971). Within our overall approach to the social movements we study here, revisiting concepts such as integral state, passive revolution, and national popular front through the lens of dialectical translation allows us to put them in a conversation with other important notions such as war of position and war of maneuver, populism, or vernacular common sense, while at same time qualifying these. In the case of Movimento Cinque Stelle (here and after M5S), our discussion of passive revolution is aimed at showing the tension between the potential to effectively politicize increasingly alienated sectors of society, while limiting their participation through an autocratic organization of decision-making. As in the case of the analysis of OWS and Indignados/Podemos’ practices, and in reference to Gramsci’s concept of translation, we are particularly interested in the translating relationship among materiality, structural tendencies and constraints, and human praxis, and how those dynamics contribute to making a movement move in communicative terms. In the case of M5S, our analysis shows that there is a consistent shifting back and forth between progressive mobilization of people and regressive aspects of a populist and charismatic leadership; between street and institutional politics; between online and offline politics; and finally between movement and party politics. Operationalizing the Gramscian concept of passive revolution to discuss M5S allows us to show how its discourses reflect such a fluidity, as well as the group’s particular historically determined nature: it is, at the same time, the product and political-ethical agent of a crisis that, in the Italian case, is both contingent and continuous and reveals passive revolutionary elements at both levels. Accordingly, our analysis will first show how the Italian ­crisis is organic to the whole social order, revealing internal contradictions

Movimento Cinque Stelle  79 that constitute the conditions of possibility for M5S’s specific discourse to emerge and succeed, thus contextualizing the group in a scenario of continuous passive revolution. Second, in this general scenario, we show how the contingency of the still-active economic crisis undermined the consent to traditional political forces and created for M5S what Gramsci defines as a prospect of “Cesarismo,” i.e., an opportunistic intervention of a political subject that is able to take advantage of a situation of stall. In our close textual analysis of M5S’s rhetoric we identify two distinct and interrelated ideologically inflected discourses: first, Savonarolismo, a term we use to highlight how M5S’ leader Beppe Grillo is presented as a both charismatic and apocalyptic prophet; second, neo-Americanismo, an ideology that draws on a mix of technological progressive hypsterism and conservative politics and interacts with the general political economic context of post-Fordism. Then, we introduce the concept of national populism to critique how these ideas facilitate a deviation from the Gramscian national popular front into a more populist dimension that contradictorily combines popular mobilization with a form of political involvement diminished by Grillo’s overwhelming leadership and the goal to integrate people at the mere economical level. In our view, the concept of passive revolution explains and expresses the ambivalence of the discourses informing M5S as a project. In this sense, as we shall see, the analysis proposed in this chapter stands in specular ways in relation to the chapter dedicated to Indignados/Podemos. In fact, in both we emphasize different aspects and different outcomes of social movements that share the objective of mobilizing the masses and involving them in the political process. As we discuss in Chapter 6, Indignados/Podemos more clearly embraces a national popular project. However, in the case of M5S explored here, the group’s practices tend towards what we define as national populism—a term not used by Gramsci but coined by us in order to describe a project that is dialectically embedded in a passive revolution. In order to advance our analysis, we first provide a brief account of M5S’s origin and trajectory. Second, as per other cases studied in this book, we discuss passive revolution as a way to understand the complex scenario of an organic crisis and its long-term development. This contextualization implies inserting M5S into the larger narrative of a series of failed political projects characterizing the historical trajectory of Italian society. Third, we analyze M5S’s discourses as they emerge in the speeches given by its leader, Beppe Grillo, as well as in the movement’s programmatic documents, and we assess the profound tensions that inhabit this political initiative as they manifest themselves in its multiple and competing rhetorics.

The Rising of Five Stars Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Stars Movement) is an Italian political party first founded as a movement by Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio on October 4, 2009. The name “Five Stars” represents the five constitutive

80  Movimento Cinque Stelle points of the group’s political proposal: first, public a­ dministration of water and prevention from its privatization; second, sustainable growth and development, which involves the political economic idea of “degrowth” as reduction of production and consumption to more sustainable levels; third, sustainable transport, which involves greener and more efficient means of public transportation; fourth, the reduction of fossil fuels consumption and implementation of the use of renewable energy; fifth, connectivity, which mainly involves increasing and facilitating a universal access to the internet (Grillo, 2010a). M5S started as a grassroots protest organization that developed outside the traditional channels of Italian political communication, as the credentials of its two leaders show. On the one hand, Grillo began his career as a ­popular satirist-comedian, becoming the compound agent for a diffused sense of frustration against the crisis and its management by the Italian politicians. Casaleggio, on the other hand, began as an information and communication technology entrepreneur and has been providing the movement with an array of technological platforms, such as the website and blog ­Beppegrillo. it, as well as the technological utopianist ­perspective ­centered around the Internet as a general and normative metaphor of c­ ontemporary Western societies. The combination of new practices of association, discussion, and deliberation enhanced by web 2.0 technologies, as well as, discussed later, the rhetoric of political novelty and popular involvement in the Italian socioeconomic and political context of crisis, have contributed to the undeniable success of M5S. In fact, after its remarkable accomplishment at the national elections in February 2013, securing 160 seats in the Parliament and the Senate combined, M5S can be arguably considered one of the most significant phenomena in the last decade of Italian politics. M5S was, from the beginning, distinctively capable of bridging online and off-line worlds—a novelty in the Italian political scenario (Vignati, 2013). As Lanfrey (2011) observes, through the online platform Meet up—a social networking portal that facilitates the constitution and development of groups of people sharing similar interests—the movement was able to create an environment in which people of fairly diverse demographics could ‘meet’ and deliberate about issues of common interest. Through these channels, M5S claimed to give voice to ordinary citizens, the people that could not be voiced in the framework of traditional Italian politics and its corrupted class of politicians. Importantly, this politicization of previously alienated sectors of the Italian society went hand in hand with the amplifying of autocratic aspects of the movement: in less than three years, Grillo’s blog Beppegrillo.it has become both a personal page and the platform for the movement as a whole, and it is currently the most viewed site in Italy (Blogitalia.it, 2015). In his founding statement, Grillo maintained that his intention was not to replicate the failed experience of past political parties but to introduce

Movimento Cinque Stelle  81 a completely novel project. Thus, instead of founding a political party, Grillo proposed a movement, a social body that, due to its fluidity, could more effectively give voice and power to ordinary people. Grillo suggested that only a movement could function as the flexible instrument of direct ­democracy: “the parties are dead. I do not want to found ‘a party,’ an apparatus, a structure of intermediation. Rather I want to create a Movement with a program” (beppegrillo.it). However, the progressive and undisputable mediatic and political accomplishment of the movement inevitably led to the question, both inside and outside of M5S, of whether and how it had to interact with institutional politics. A central dilemma consisted of whether it should operate from outside institutional politics, as a movement supporting existing parties, or from the inside, as a new kind of political party that would attempt to change the “intellectual and moral life” (Gramsci, 1975, Q10, §10) of the country. In 2008, the group addressed this dilemma by supporting and sponsoring independent lists in several cities across Italy during local elections. According to Grillo’s blog, those local candidates could run with the movement’s endorsement provided that they did not belong to any political party, did not have a history of criminal records, were available to serve only one term, and were residents in the same geographical area in which they were running as candidates. Thus, candidates differently positioned in the ideological spectrum were grouped together under the tent of M5S. The 2008 local political success of the movement propelled a process of internal consolidation that produced the constituting manifesto called the “No Statute,” which was published on December 2009 and contained seven main articles. The “No Statute” concentrated leadership in Grillo, deployed the label ‘movement’ as opposed to ‘political party,’ and enhanced the idea of a true democracy via online platforms. Shortly after the constitution of the movement, M5S also published a programmatic document of 15 pages divided into seven sections, on state/ citizens, energy, information, economy, transport, health, and education. The overarching theme of the document expressed how the increasing access to Internet and broadband coverage would bring a social amelioration at different levels, such as encouraging government transparency (e.g., laws approved and scrutinized by city councils), enhancing the pluralism of information (no subsidies for newspapers, limit of media ownership concentration, one state channel for the state broadcaster), improving the free market (abolition of monopolies of telecommunications and energy), and defending universal health care and social benefits. After a moderate success at the 2010 and 2011 regional/local elections, in the 2012 local elections M5S was able to place its candidates as mayors in some major cities such as Parma. After that election, in national opinion polls M5S scored consistently between 15% and 20%, thus representing the second national force, after the Democratic Party and ahead of the People of Freedom (Beppegrillo.it, 2012). As the scope and the nature of M5S’s

82  Movimento Cinque Stelle activities evolved, the 2008 “Non Statute” also evolved into the “Statute of 2012.” This document included some significant revisions geared at a ­further level of organization of the party through a hierarchical structure and internal membership control. This reorganizing proved to be effective, as after the national election of 2013, the political group reached 25.5% of votes in the chamber of deputies and 23.9% in the Senate. Similarly, after the 2014 European Election, M5S received 21.5% of the votes, which translated into 17 members of the European Parliament who joined the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy. However, in the recent regional elections of Spring 2015, M5S has reduced its electoral consent, receiving an average of 19% of votes, although it still conserves its position as the second most voted party (Rubino & Sgherza, 2015). After this brief tracing of the M5S trajectory, we now turn to our broader contextualization of the movement in a scenario of crises at two united but distinct historical levels: a deeper continuous one, tied to the historical development of Italy as a nation state, and a contingent/conjunctural one, associated with the recent global economic crisis. In order to make this analytic description, we draw on the Gramscian notion of passive revolution.

A Continuous Passive Revolution The social and historical context that produced M5S exemplifies almost literally the case of an organic crisis that has to do with the general social organization of Italy, which precedes the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and can be traced back to the constitution of the Italian state. In order to account for crises seen as endemic to the reproduction of a given social order, Gramsci introduced the concept of passive revolution. As Morton (2007) notices, the idea of passive revolution should be understood in the historically specific dialectics between revolution and restoration that, due to its unstable equilibrium, can manifest in different forms. For instance, in Quaderni, there are at least two emphases in Gramsci’s discussion of the term. The first one, textually scattered in several fragments, makes reference to a revolution without popular participation, or a “revolution from above”: a social and political transformation carried out by an elite reform that draws on foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base. The second emphasis described passive revolution as a conservative ­political project linked to relative mobilization from below: The fact that ‘progress’ occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses—a reaction consisting of ‘restorations’ that agree to some part of the popular demands and are therefore ‘progressive restorations’, or ‘revolutions-restorations’, or even ‘passive revolutions.’ (1975, Q8, §25)

Movimento Cinque Stelle  83 In Gramsci’s view, authority crises are, in the end, crises of the hegemony of the ruling class, which can be seen as symptoms of a chronic problem. The Italian Risorgimento would be an example of a progressive restoration, whereas the American Fordist model would be an example of a revolution-restoration. Both were responses to the economic crisis of 1929, and they show how in Northern America and Europe capitalism restructured itself differently. In both cases, the restructuration entailed a strong link between political and civil society and the emergence of the integral state. Both examples can be explained through an understanding of passive revolution as a compromise, a revolution partially failed and partially fulfilled, which tends to not radically alter the structure of power and its functional social organization. Thus, from this perspective, passive revolution implies the recognition that even when the bourgeois class ceases its revolutionary function, it can still reproduce its models by a less entrepreneurial or revolutionary attitude, which is still effective in producing significant social and political transformation, therefore still securing its hegemony. In Gramsci’s view, the Italian social and political history, arguably more than that of other countries in the West, could be reduced to a series of passive revolutions. For instance, the incomplete realization of Biennio Rosso’s working class rebellious initiative in Northern Italy (1919–20) partly explains the reactionary emergence of Fascism. While his analysis stops before the demise of Fascism, one can detect the same dynamic later in history. The framework of passive revolutions can, in fact, be applied beyond the historical context of Gramsci (Briziarelli, 2014). In this sense, post-1945 Italian history is inhabited by another series of passive revolutions, such as the transition to the Republican era in 1947 or the 1955–1965 economic boom. The case of the economic growth that modernized Italy during 1950s–1960s is an exemplary one. At the political-economic level, the ruling class wasted the opportunity represented by the economic boom and the new post-Fascist constitution to suture the lacunas affecting the Italian nation state since the institution of its Constitution. Instead of socializing the increased wealth, Italy chose the venue that Salvati (1972, p. 1) defined as “repressive development,” a development boosted by increased crude extraction of value from the worker, by augmenting working hours and keeping pay at the lowest level in all of Europe. Along the same lines, in many ways, the transition from the First to the Second Republic—between 1992 and 1997—was no different from the transition from Fascism to the First Republic. Despite the dominant rhetoric of the end of the old regime after the corruption scandals and the major turnover after the 1994 election, the Second Republic can be interpreted as another example of passive revolution (Anderson, 2009; della Loggia, 1993; Di Nucci & della Loggia, 2003) and more specifically, as the most colossal instance of ‘political trasformismo.’ This was the concept used by Gramsci to describe the tendency of political subjects of the defeated party to be

84  Movimento Cinque Stelle incorporated into the winning one, i.e., another process by which the new and the old become intermingled. Arguably, the development of the so-called Second Republic inaugurated the stage in which the most recent events, such as the emergence of M5S, can find a Gramscian explanation. In fact, the profound discontent that allowed M5S’s discourse to be so well received can be explained by a process that gradually alienated most parts of civil society from the political process. Most notably, there was a growing frustration with the incapability of the political class to lead Italy out of a 20-year-long economic stagnation. This frustration was enhanced by a resurgence of cases of political corruption and the high instability of the government. In correspondence to the economic crisis, the current crisis clearly emerged as a crisis of political representation in terms of state institutions that caused a disarticulation of the political and civil society, as well as a consistent distrust of the citizenry with regards to the political class and the political party politics. In Gramsci’s terms: At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. […] When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’ (1975, Q13, §23) Indeed, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados/Podemos, and M5S all emerged in a particular moment in which the crisis had become organic in the sense of showing the dysfunctionality of the system beyond the merely economic. In this context, exacerbation of the economic crisis coincided with a popular frustration with the leading political class and a moral indignation about the exiguity of citizens’ rights, corruption, and political opportunism. The 2008 economic and authority crisis represented a contingent aggravation or, in other words, a latent and continuous issue, which in turn created the chance for what Gramsci (1971, p. 206) defines as a Cesarist opportunity for M5S. This would be a specific kind of political ­opportunism, which frequently goes hand in hand with passive revolutions (Cox, 1983). ­Cesarism is thus an opportunistic intervention of a third social force in a moment of political stall: Cesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction. When the ­progressive force A struggles with the reactionary force B, not only may A defeat B or B defeat A, but it may happen that neither A nor B defeats the other—that they bleed each other mutually and then a third force C intervenes from outside, subjugating what is left of both A and B. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 463)

Movimento Cinque Stelle  85 From this Gramscian reading, M5S emerges as the third social force between the Democratic party’s incapability to find a credible leadership and a ­credible political program and the Freedom Party whose leader, Silvio ­Berlusconi, experienced a serious loss of credibility after his recent conviction and forced stepping down in the middle of the financial crisis in 2011. In line with the argument introduced in Chapter 3 about the need to historicize a given ‘text’ in its ‘context,’ we have provided here a brief account of the social, historical, and political context in which M5S emerged. While the Great Recession was a circumstantial crisis, conjunctural in the Gramscian sense, the analysis just provided reveals how, in the Italian case, the current crisis is more structural, organic. Accordingly, in the next section we explain how those social and political circumstances translate into a series of rhetorical practices in M5S’s discourses that make leverage on charismatic leadership—what we call Savonarolismo—neo-Americanismo, and national populism.

Rhetorically Translating M5S’s Passive Revolution: Savonarolismo, Neo-Americanismo, and National Populism The narrative of passive revolutions just discussed is meant to describe a social/political reality in which, to paraphrase Marx, indeed people make history but not at all under the conditions of their own making. Actually, in the Italian scenario defined by the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, the agency of people seems even more relative, as the tendency towards passive revolution has consistently created a crisis of authority, which is also a crisis of production and of political consent. It is indeed popular frustration that, as in the case of Berlusconi in the early 1990s and more recently Grillo’s leadership of M5S, has produced Cesarismo as well as opportunities for charismatic authority and populism. As we will also argue in the analysis of Podemos’ rhetoric, we are convinced that the examination of M5S’s discursive practices can constitute one particularly effective way to capture the fluidity, the nebulosity, and the inherently transitional nature of this political group. In fact, in both cases, one main way this initiative was able to intervene in the political map and gain remarkable political consent can be understood as the ability to rhetorically define a terrain on which the popular frustration could become political praxis. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, from a Gramscian perspective we understand the agency of those groups as an effort of linguistic and conceptual translation: from the spontaneity of popular common sense into a more articulate philosophy, a cathartic translation of economic interests into ethical and political ones. In order to make sense of how communication mediates the particular social and political circumstances in which M5S operates, in this section we analyze two specific ideological discourses that inform and are reproduced through M5S’s rhetoric—Savonarolismo and Neo-Americanismo—as well

86  Movimento Cinque Stelle as how they are inserted in a broader narrative of National-Populism. ­Savonarolismo consists of an interesting combination of indignation, the felt need of moral redemption contextualized in times of a perceived-to-be catastrophic crisis that allegedly justified the prophetic leadership of Beppe Grillo. From this perspective, people live surrounded by conspiracies and predatory and ruthless political class members that need to be purified or purged. Neo-Americanismo, in its turn, represents a Gramscian reading that tries to make sense of M5S’s distinctive technological utopianism, which is funded on liberalism, libertarianism, and technological determinism. Similar to what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) define as ‘Californian Ideology,’ M5S stands out for its faith in web 2.0 media’s capability to bring about a digital revolution. A renewed version of Americanismo in Gramsci’s reflections, this discourse draws on an ideology that maintains that a specific organization of labor, combined with specific technology, can both create wealth and emancipate workers. Finally, we link these elements to a broader theme, national populism, which differs from Gramsci’s national popular front in that the intellectual leadership and popular mobilization are present but also highly unbalanced in a vertically stratified manner. In fact, the intellectual component in M5S’s case leads the popular component, rather than interacting with it—a dynamic exemplified by the physical and metaphorical stage on which Grillo addresses M5S members as spectators during political meetings. From the point of view established by this discourse, the intellectual leader, Grillo, appears to be reifying M5S supporters as the ‘people,’ interpellating them but de facto leaving them outside most d ­ ecision-making ­processes.

Savonarolismo, or the Prophet of Catastrophism As Tanda (2013) claims, it is impossible to evaluate the communicative practices of M5S without considering the pivotal role of Beppe Grillo in shaping the movement and communicating its messages, whether we consider him its ‘leader,’ its ‘megaphone,’ or just its ‘representative.’ The rhetorical centrality of Grillo is evident in a number of aspects. First of all, we need to consider the fact that all communication within and from M5S passes through Beppe Grillo’s blog, such as the forums of discussion and the web 2.0 platform Meet Up. Second, a crucial campaigning mechanism takes place when Grillo acts as an orator, comedian, and showman during M5S public events. On these occasions, the rhetorical effectiveness is consistently guaranteed by three elements: first, there is Grillo performing on the stage speaking, singing, and playing instruments; second, there are the spectators facing him in front of the stage, echoing Grillo’s words and shouting and applauding; finally, in the background, we find the political candidates standing behind Grillo like

Movimento Cinque Stelle  87 a fairly passive version of a Greek Chorus, almost as a scenography, only sporadically intervening when interpellated by Grillo. However, the preponderance of Grillo in M5S’s discourse implies more than a simple question of his number of interventions as opposed to those of the rest of the movement’s participants; it also has to do with how he depicts himself and how such a depiction materializes in M5S’s discourse by powerfully resonating with important cultural icons of Italian society. In this sense, in a society in which Roman Catholicism still dominates the social imaginary, Grillo describes himself as a ‘Franciscan,’ a follower of Saint Francis’ revolutionary take on the establishment, ethics of frugality, and incorruption. During the European Tour on May 5, 2014, he claimed: I don’t want power, if I wanted power I would have ran as a candidate. We could have accepted 42 millions of state funding for the campaign and we gave them up. The M5S elected candidates instead reduced their salary to 50% and donated the rest to an initiative to help small-mid firms. We said it, we have done it. That is what drives them crazy, they found out that there are good people who do things for the others. It’s nice to do things for the other, what the hell, we were born in October 4th 2009, the same as St. Francis’ birthday. Pope Bergoglio signed up for M5S because it runs by the same words of St Francis, the sense of community, not the European Union but the European Community! We got a public debt and we all share it. (YouTube, May 5, 2014) The Franciscan theme in Italy is generally understood as a message of renovation, sobriety, and moral integrity: As Grillo states,” [M5S] is a Franciscan movement because it’s frugal” (YouTube, Jan. 9, 2013). More importantly, in our view, Grillo mixes this reference with another iconic and contested figure of the Catholic imagery, Saint Girolamo Savonarola—the Dominican preacher who, in the 15th century, fought against moral corruption and tyrannical ruling, and in 1494 led the popular government of Florence after the overthrow of the De Medici family. This is a character that Gramsci discussed in order to address the dichotomy between two facets of the Renaissance: the prophetic and ultra-idealist Savonarola, and the allegedly hyper-pragmatist Machiavelli. For Gramsci, Savonarola was too anchored in the politics of the “ought to be.” Grillo’s behavior, with the constant raising of his voice to the degree of shouting, the putting forth of predictions on the future of Italy, or the incitation to purify politics, appears, in our view, as neo-Savonarola. Like Savonarola, Grillo preaches in times of crisis through a rhetoric of catastrophism and by pointing out the need of a radical moral reform. Like Savonarola, Grillo thinks that parallel and consequent to the radical nature of the crisis in Italy, an equally radical reformation is needed. Like Savonarola, Grillo incorporates a sense of prophetism: he was a prophet in the past, like

88  Movimento Cinque Stelle when he predicted the crack of the multinational corporation Parmalat, or when predicting the end of current Italian politics: We live in a delirium: look at gas ducts coming here from Azerbaijan, useless bridges that take roads nowhere, oranges produced in Sicily coming to us from Spain. Something bad will happen soon. We need a shock, Renzi [the current Italian Prime Minister] is destroying Italy fast, he should do it even faster, so that we can show what Italian politics look like. Then, we will take this country and we will put good people in power. (Grillo, 2014) Like Savonarola, Grillo sees evil conspirations everywhere: the ­ Italian political elite, international finance, or secret masonries. It is in this ­ Savonaralist rhetoric that Grillo acquires the ethos of moral superiority with regards to the so-called ‘Casta,’ a name borrowed from a journalistic essay by Rizzo and Stella (2007) to refer to the political class. As he puts it, “We are disinfectant for politics, we are an organ of democratic control” (YouTube, June 7, 2013). In this context, Grillo rhetorically inserts the idea of people’s rage and the need for ventilation against politicians through his notion of ‘digital spitting’ (Chiusi, 2014), which represents the symbolic outcome of a popular trial against the ruling elite. Through his ‘spitting’ mode of discourse, Grillo inserts a way of speaking that is not simply vernacular, but rather a caricature of everyday language. It is flamboyantly aggressive with other politicians, who are addressed by offensive nicknames: former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi becomes the Psiconano (psycho-dwarf); Democratic Party leader Pierluigi Bersani leader becomes a ‘zombie’ or Gargamel (the villain in the Smurfs cartoon); former Prime Minister Mario Monti becomes a nearly dead rigor-Montis, and current prime Minister Matteo Renzi is Ebetino of Firenze, the Little Fool of Florence (Il Giornale, 2012). Through this terminology, Grillo is at the same time capitalizing on a satirical style developed during his years as a comedian and providing a rhetoric of renewal that ideally functions as a blunt reality check. The Savoranolist aspect of Grillo’s rhetoric principally emerges when he is on stage, when his political role intercepts the pre-existing one of comedian and satirist and when, in many ways, he continues the longstanding tradition of political performative art such as the one exemplified by Aristophanes (Lazar, 2007). The result is a moralized version of a phenomenon that seems particularly common in contemporary Western politics of the last decades: the spectacularization of politics, according to which symbolic representation, through semiotic details, often replaces political practical outcomes (Debord, 2011). Indeed, Grillo brings a vaudevillian spectacle aspect to his rhetorical intervention in politics—just like one of his nemeses: Silvio Berlusconi. In

Movimento Cinque Stelle  89 his massive gathering in Rome’s Circo Massimo in October 2014, Grillo provided a perfect example of this rhetorical performance by offering his audience a considerably diverse ensemble of spectacular modes, which mixed segments of jazz singing and comical sketches against the Italian political class, with dramatic moments of denunciations expressed in moral terms. The Savonarolism in Grillo thus consists of a moralized spectacle, a spectacle of the “ought to be.” Equally telling was his performance at the popular TV talk show Porta a Porta, on May 19, 2014, which signaled his return to Italian public ­broadcasting television, RAI, after 21 years of boycott. He inaugurated his interview de facto, mostly appearing as a self-interview, by denouncing “the fake audience attending the show of RAI, which resembles Italian people: i.e. present at the show but not allowed to intervene.” The talk show host, Bruno Vespa, kept patronizing Grillo by inviting him to calm down, to sit down, and to stop shouting. During this intervention, the M5S’s leader shared a dramatic vision of Italian politics and the need for purification: You mainstream media depict me like a crazy man, like one in ­permanent rage but my rage is good, constructive […] All old ­politicians must go home, they destroyed this country, they corrupted it, it’s organized crime. They spoiled from the left and right the wealth of this country, we don’t accept any more compromises […] We have the merit to have avoided the recrudescence of Fascism, as it’s happening in many areas of Europe by channeling the highest rage in constructive ways. ­(YouTube, May 19, 2014) While Savonarolism, with its message of radical renovation, may convey the sign of a genuine revolutionary message, it also carries traits that may be considered a direct outcome of the context of passive revolutions mentioned earlier. In fact, as Ruggero notices (2012), Grillo—like Berlusconi at the dawn of the Second Republic—presents himself as an outsider and outcast of the system who emphasizes his unequivocal detachment from the logic of the corrupted “ancient regime.” Like Berlusconi, Grillo privileges one-way communication, which is exemplified in his political talks and the sharp division between the orator and his audience. Indeed, as an homo novus (new man) in the tradition of classic Roman politics, Grillo distances himself for what in Italy was considered as the degenerative rhetoric of politicians, politichese, a language that confuses rather than explains and deceives rather than illuminates people. Conversely, Grillo chooses the vernacular, making references to popular culture tropes such as famous TV commercials, soccer slogans, or popular songs. His references try to construct a media-driven (mostly TV-driven) popular common sense that reaches Italians’ consciousness with reference to everyday practices such as washing dishes, cooking, and watching popular TV shows.

90  Movimento Cinque Stelle Grillo’s language is designed to appeal to the popular imagery of a country that arguably approaches a level of national cohesiveness via mediated images. Thus, the product of the intersection of the qualities of Franciscanism and Savonarolism, on the one hand, and this TV mediated common sense, on the other, is a form of populism that sanctifies and ­spectacularizes popular culture and practices, which could be compared to televangelism. As a recent example, we may refer to the event held at Rome’s Circo Massimo Park on October 10, 2014, where Grillo sang and preached his ­political sermons at the same time. Indeed, it is the rhetoric of Savonarolism, placing Grillo in a morally based binary opposition against La Casta, that allowed M5S to seize a Cesarist opportunity in a moment in which an organic crisis of consent and political hegemony placed the two major existing forces in an impasse. Grillo’s is the opportunistic intervention of a political subject who was able to take advantage of a situation of crisis—a move that entailed a rhetoric of catastrophism and salvation. In the end, M5S revolves around the personality of Grillo, who performs like an apocalyptic innovator, prophet, and vernacular orator. In contrast to a general interpretation that legitimizes the movement for its supposedly immediate expression of popular feelings and needs, we argue that he functions as a powerful mediator of politics, the only one able to translate people’s wants and needs into institutionally influential practices.

Neo-Americanismo Tied to the idea of novelty conveyed by Savonarolismo, we find M5S’s rhetoric of neo-Americanismo. This is a discourse that powerfully resonates with the general collective imagery of America as the land of opportunity, especially significant for the Italian migrant but also, in relation to post WWII Italy, a consistent normative term of comparison for the country. Americanismo is a term used by Gramsci to refer to the model of e­ conomic and political development of the United States. In Gramscian terms, the narrative of impact of technology in Grillo’s rhetoric operates as a new kind of Americanism, since Grillo asks and positively answers the same question that Gramsci and many of his contemporary thinkers posed in the 1930s: could America provide a new model of industrialism capable of resisting economic crises (such as the 1929 Great Depression) and at the same time provide a total model of organization for societies, in other words, a hegemonic model? While Gramsci regarded Americanism and Fordism with both relative admiration and serious concerns, interpreting them as ambiguous instruments of a democratization of production and distribution of wealth for hegemonic purposes, Grillo looks at informational capitalism as a positive Neo-Americanismo. In particular, he is interested in the new forms of ­production based on knowledge and information (Castells, 2009; Dyer-Whiteford, 1999), which describe the rising prominence of information and communication technology in producing and extracting value. In

Movimento Cinque Stelle  91 this context, workers create value by producing, distributing, and consuming value (Arvidsson & Colleoni, 2012; Fuchs, 2009). While ‘knowledge workers’ is not a term used by Grillo, the leader of M5S sees the Italian youth as mostly entrepreneurial, media-savvy workers who can revolutionize the Italian economy by creating value, not through producing and transporting commodities, but through ideas and knowledge. Moreover, in many ways for Grillo, the introduction of this new form of Americanismo would imply a long-awaited completion of Italy’s modernization, which means using web 2.0 technologies as social and political tools capable of eliminating the residues of feudalism such as clientelism, corporativism, and collusiveness between private citizens’ interests and matters of public concern. Grillo aspires to rationalize the social demographic composition of Italy by getting rid of La Casta. The main way to intervene in this rigidity of state institutions is through the so-called ‘zero-cost politics.’ This is a term that resonates with possibly the most important themes of the so-called five stars/ points of M5S. In fact, the common theme that links the five points/stars together consists of the broadest possible meaning of a political economic approach to social life, through the wise administration of scarce resources, which explains the recurrence of the notion of ‘sustainability’ (Beppegrillo. it, 2013). For instance, in the name of ‘zero-cost’ politics M5S refused 42 million euros of public financing. It also reduced the monthly salary of its MPs from 14,000 to 3,000 euros. Along similar lines, while not being explicitly enunciated in any of the five points/stars, M5S in its declarations also advocates for a radical reform of the political system towards participatory, direct, Internet-driven, and frugal (zero-cost) democratic processes (D. Mart, 2013). Thus, from the point of view of a sustainable political system, corruption implies not only a moral failure but also a political, economic one. In short, corruption, being highly ineffective and costly, is simply unsustainable. Equally unsustainable, in terms of zero-cost politics for M5S, is ideologically driven politics, because it produces meaningless and endless discussions inside political bodies that M5S rejects, such as the Parliament or traditional political parties. Thus, the group operates through a kind of politics that Quattromani (2014) defines as ‘post-ideological,’ as it goes beyond the traditional ideological division between ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Similarly, Bordignon and Ceccarini (2013) point out how the ideological composition of M5S is continuously shifting. In fact, M5S gathered a variety of voter categories: frustrated electorate with no ideological ties and radical positions against the government, as well as unsatisfied segments of both traditional right and left (Corbetta, 2013; Corbetta & Gualmini, 2013). These themes in M5S are also tied to the so-called Californian ideology, a term that highlights how the ascent of information and communication technologies associated to Silicon Valley has been combined with American neoliberal ideology, thus producing a hybrid ideological mix of left and right

92  Movimento Cinque Stelle principles (Barbrook & Cameron, 1995). Those principles are united by technological determinism, as well as the idea of a globalized world characterized by radical individualism, libertarianism, and an ­anti-state ­ideology. The proponents of Californian ideology tend to believe in a postindustrial, knowledge-based economy and the emergence of a new kind of sociability based on network communities. This kind of ideology seems to inform M5S’s discourse in peculiar ways. In fact, while Savonarolism implied a level of populism, based on popular humbleness, vernacular modes, and a commonsensical genuineness of people, neo-Americanismo incorporates a selective component, since it is limited to a much more specific demographic: young, highly qualified in terms of education, and living, in most cases, with precarious working conditions. Accordingly, neo-Americanismo does not leverage on popular sagaciousness, but rather on arguments of technocratic superiority: the youth are better prepared compared to the traditional politician because they can take advantage of the technological innovations brought by the web and web 2.0 environments. Neo-Americanismo consistently reproduces the opposition between old and new but in different terms. It produces an opposition between the secretive machinations of the ancient regime and the new, mediatically visible, genuinely democratic ‘rete’ (the internet). This kind of rhetoric appears indeed very much embedded in M5S’s emphasis on the elective affinities between social media and social movements (Bartlett, Forio, Litler, & McDonnell, 2013) and on how across Europe—and similarly to OWS and Indignados/ Podemos—the movement has been able to challenge major political parties with social media presence as a way to recruit new supporters, release messages, organize events, and even formulate policies. In the many speeches Grillo has given since the beginning of his career as a leader of M5S, he consistently talks about the power of the Internet “in revolutionizing our lives” (YouTube, May 19, 2014). In an interview given while Grillo was still developing his political ideas (Grillo and Casaleggio, 2014) he stated that “the very concept of net is revolutionary, the greatest revolution in human history, the Internet as ‘shared knowledge.’” This sharing and exchange of ideas, according to Grillo, can lead to the radical reformation of the existing system in terms of the social network as well as the management of energies. The net thus becomes a metaphor for a more efficient way of living, which involves decreasing the consumption of energy but maintaining adequate services. Grillo, without necessarily making explicit reference to it, echoes McLuhan‘s (2001) argument that the hyper connected global village has a “global brain.” For him, and thanks to the Internet, all sorts of mediations of social life—such as political parties or mass media—will disappear, and the net user will be able to interact directly with the net service. As Grillo puts it, “You will gather information only from sources you trust, today you cannot trust anymore newspapers and TV networks” (Grillo and Casaleggio, 2014).

Movimento Cinque Stelle  93 In their book Siamo in Guerra (We are at war) (2011) Grillo and Casaleggio reiterate the same idea by arguing that “the collective intelligence of Internet runs against traditional political parties” (p. 1). Moreover, the Internet, like Grillo himself, is treated in this text as the embodiment of Savonarolism, and thus depicted as “Franciscan,” and “anti-capitalist,” allowing people to gather any kind of information, “just like a genie responding to any inquiry or desire” (p. 2). The Internet, in this view, is a powerful redemptive force that traditional media and traditional power cannot resist. A telling example for the authors is Wikileaks, which, according to them, allowed people to access truth by a ‘mouse click.’ Thus, the leaders of M5S introduced a technological utopianist intellectual argument in favor of a collective intelligence that could emancipate civil society from mediating powers such as the state. As Grillo puts it, the “energy of the future is the collective intelligence as we need to make ideas and not commodities circulate, which then will be channeled by the online network” (p. 4). All in all, Grillo considers the Internet the trigger of a digital ­revolution that has already started in the United States: “I have been in America, ­everything is digital, they study by playing. In America they are already at the level of classroom in which walls are made of pixels” (YouTube, 2013). In the end, neo-Americanismo stands as the liberal realization of the free market against a monopolistic kind of economy. In this sense, the Internet constitutes the main propeller of such a liberalization. As Grillo states: Internet is different: new jobs, 10% increasing of Large band ­connection would increase the GDP of 1,3 %. They are afraid of it because la Casta knows that this model would get rid of the logics that allow them to prosper. (Grillo, 2013) In a party in which 80% of its members possess a higher education degree (Ordaz, 2015b), and are below 30 years old and media literate, M5S becomes the cure against the gerontocracy of La Casta: Nobody represents us, wake up, stop watching TV. Become journalists, you just need the web and the camera. With the net we get rid off of inter-mediation. Without information we are subjects to them: dwarfs, sluts, ballerinas. We live in a world of perceptions not information: we are subjects of propaganda. With the new media we are all journalists, we can fight mainstream media. Obama emerged from the networks, he came from the bottom side of society. (Youtube, 2014) However, while neo-Americanismo represents an important argument against La Casta, its solution to return political power to the people seems to ­predominantly revolve around the transformation of traditional workers into

94  Movimento Cinque Stelle ‘knowledge’ workers, thus privileging an integration into the current c­ apitalist form, qua informational capitalism, rather than an ­informational development of democracy. In this sense, neo-Americanismo could be ­interpreted through the frame of a passive revolution because it e­ ncompasses the tendency of capitalist countries to sufficiently involve the forces of ­production in political economic re-structurations without necessarily improving their conditions or integrating them into the political process (Losurdo, 1997). As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, a passive revolution appears as the combination of progressive and regressive elements. On the one hand, Grillo uses neo-Americanismo to call attention to a new productive organization that could ameliorate Italy’s economy, sociability, and the way people produce and exchange information, which in turn could revolutionize a way of doing politics. On the other, it is not clear what the political implications of this economic vision look like. In other words, how can neo-Americanismo integrate people democratically? Next, we consider and expand on this question.

National Populism While Savonarolism and neo-Americanismo can be easily identified as stand-alone discourses, they are also frequently combined and synthetized into a larger narrative, which we define as national populism. By national populism we mean to describe a derivative kind of the Gramscian concept of national popular. As we explain in more detail in the Indignados/Podemos chapter, by national popular Gramsci understands a political project that comprises both popular mobilization and intellectual organization. The objective of national popular is to create a collective will and eventually a new hegemonic regime. As Gramsci put it: “Any formation of a national-­ popular collective is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life” (1971, p. 132). In relation to the national popular, we take national populism as one specific manifestation of passive revolution. The core logic of passive revolutions is to revolutionize some aspects of a given social formation—such as its political structure or the productive organization—in order to maintain or restore the unstable power of the ruling group. In the case of national populism, the element of passivity derives from the fact that M5S is capable of integrating some interest of the subordinate groups, but at the same time alienating its constituency from important aspects of decision-making. While M5S cannot be properly defined as acting as a ruling group, the party seems to have internalized the history of ‘continuous passive revolution’ as a way of doing politics. In fact in M5S’s practices, political integration is consistently mediated by two aspects, which de facto maintain its constituency in a condition of subordinance: on the one hand, the autocratic power of the leader Beppe Grillo we detected in Savonarolismo, and on the other, the will to integrate people as ‘knowledge workers’ in a neoliberal system of exploitation we detected in neo-Americanismo.

Movimento Cinque Stelle  95 National populism comprises, first of all, the Savonaralist leader, who possesses prophetic talents and promises immediate politics but also, as the M5S statutes reveal, concentrates every decision under his supervision. For M5S, immediate politics translates into an invitation to “shut the ­parliament down, shut down the senate” (Cruccu, 2013) as “the Parliament is a tomb of the second republic. […] The members of parliament do not represent anyone” (Grillo, 2013; Buzzanca, 2013). Equally unnecessary in terms of the mediation of politics are traditional political parties that, in Grillo’s view, represent a historic failure of representative democracy much like the Parliament (Beppegrillo.it, 2013). For M5S, political parties provide constant evidence of their real, self-interested, nature. A telling instance would be M5S’s unsuccessful attempt, in early February 2015, to pass an anti-corruption law at the Parliament, which did not receive the support of the main parties. When narrating these events, Cioffi, the M5S leader at the senate, wrote in Beppe Grillo’s blog: We need to distrust these political parties who yesterday applauded the President of the Republic’s speech against corruption and today decided to not act against it by this vote on the anti corruption package. The country cannot wait anymore as corruption costs the country 13 billion euros, 0,8 of GdP. (F.Q., 2015) Another great mediation that M5S fiercely rejects is represented by ­mainstream media and the journalists who allegedly have ruined the country, thus standing between the people and their legitimate power. As Grillo puts it: [M]ost Italians live like in a gigantic Truman show, almost entirely due to Italian journalists, besides few honorable exceptions. There is currently a war declared against reality according to which mystifications, illusions and lies are consistently created by the means of information. (Huffington Post.it, April 4, 2013) Particularly interesting are the so-called Vaffanculo days (Fuck off days), politi­ cal campaign meetings that incite people to show their rage against La Casta (Beppegrillo.it, 2007). This practice is one more example of the broad category of digital spitting, which occurs during V-days. In this context, swearing has the value of ventilation, as well as rhetorically conveying ‘things as they are,’ and is thus free of the pomposity and deceiving elements of political language. However, these specific rejections of mediating parties and strategies of ‘empowerment’ are embedded in a macro organization that, in the end, privileges hierarchy and concentrates most of the decision power in a single person. Thus, while Grillo rejects any forms of mediation of politics in the name of direct, immediate democracy de facto, he replaces those intermediary bodies with another, more overwhelming mediation: his undisputed power to translate the people’s wants and needs into the institutional realm (Mello, 2013).

96  Movimento Cinque Stelle This tendency is most evident in the 2009 No Statute: in this text, on the one hand, Grillo claims that web 2.0 Meet Up and ‘civil lists’ are designed to give voice to people “outside the associational relations of political parties and without the mediation of representational or directional organisms” (www.Beppegrillo.it, 2009); on the other, according to the first three articles of the No Statute, M5S institutionally and indisputably revolves around BeppeGrIllo.it. While the “Statute of 2012” modified some important ­features of M5S, it still left the autocratic power of Grillo unvaried. Immediate politics also implies neo-Americanismo and the mediation of global capitalism. From this point of view, neo-Americanismo can be considered an ideological terrain on which M5S actors implicitly rationalize informational capitalism and knowledge work. As Candeias claims (2011, p. 1), [N]eoliberal rule has pushed forward the globalization and internationalization of production, culture and consumption, as well as the information technological thrust and the scientification of production, by including the knowledge of the immediate producers, and has enforced the personal responsibility and economic emancipation of women. (p. 2) As we previously mentioned, with zero-cost politics, Grillo aims at what Gramsci, describing the sentiments behind Americanismo, defines as “rationalization of the demographic composition” of America (1971, p. 280). Such a rationalization, then and today, is propelled by the liberal ideological assumption that the capitalist model of production can also serve as a model of social and political organization. Thus, the zero-cost politics implied by neo-Americanismo could be pushed to its logical limits as the liberal utopia of reducing state’s intervention to its minimum form, in order to leave civil society to self-regulate itself via rational market forces. Thus, the regressive aspect we notice in neo-Americanismo must be found in the idea of replacing traditional politics with an informational political economy. However, the idea of integrating M5S’s constituency through economy rather than politics, in the current context of informational capitalism, implies everything but emancipation. Indeed, with its precarization of labor (Briziarelli, 2014) and over-exploitation of knowledge workers (Fuchs, 2010), the technological utopia, the so-called net revolution, only increases their economic and political subordinance and not their material well-being. National populist ideology also has implications for Grillo’s identity as a peculiar kind of intellectual, both ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘integrated’ (Eco, 2013) and as someone who rejects and celebrates the general implications of later modernity. The apocalyptic kind, represented by postmodernist as well as anti-consumerism intellectuals, are prophets of some kind of digital barbarism that is destroying the cultural and artistic wealth accumulated over centuries. The integrated ones are intellectuals who assume

Movimento Cinque Stelle  97 an apologetic position in relation to the so-called digital revolutions; they support a t­echnological utopianism according to which digital technology will save the world and ameliorate people’s conditions. For us, both aspects are p ­ resent in M5S’s ideological stance towards technology and politics, as Savonarolism and Neo-Americanism exemplify. All in all, while M5S produces passive-revolutionary dynamics—according to which radical changes imply an overall reproduction of the existing hegemony, what we ultimately detect in Savonarolismo and neo-Americanismo, and in their synthesis in national populism, is that M5S is not a mere product/ reflection of the past. In other words, the framing of M5S in the continuous dimension of passive revolutions does not necessarily mean denying its capability to make history or substantially challenge the current hegemonic apparatus. Accordingly, in this chapter we have employed Gramsci to make sense of what in Chapter 2 we defined as the intersection between the humanist and the structuralist sides of Gramsci, between people who make history but not under conditions of their own making. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, hegemony represents at the same time a political project of a specific group, which is inherently unstable because different groups at different degrees may compete to become hegemonic. However, hegemony seems also to be embedded in the way in which a given social formation organizes itself, thus becoming a structural necessity of a given society. In the case of M5S, by applying the concept of passive revolution to make sense of the social context in which M5S emerges and operates, we cast light on structural relations dominating the Italian scenario. On the other hand, we treated M5S as a source of novelty and of a potential alternative hegemony. This combination between humanist and structuralist, as we tried to demonstrate, is particularly evident in the notion of national-­ populism, which asymmetrically synthetizes progressive and regressive forces. As we will see in the next chapter, this dynamic equilibrium can also open space for projects that more clearly lean towards a productive national popular.

6 From Indignados to Podemos Sublating Vernacular Rhetoric into National Popular Rhetoric

On May 15, 2011, more than 100,000 people concentrated in the squares of 54 cities all over Spain under slogans like “No nos representan” (They don’t represent us), “No somos mercancías en manos de políticos y b ­ anqueros” (We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers), or “No es una crisis, es el sistema” (It’s not a crisis, it’s the system). It was the climatic moment after months of on-line activism carried out by different grassroots organizations based in Spain, mostly through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. From then on, what started at the margins of mainstream media received increasing attention from the Spanish and international press, as well as from the leaders of the main political parties in Spain, who were at the time immersed in the campaign for the local elections to be held on May 22. From that moment, Indignados became an official social movement and a major source of inspiration for a series of later protests at the global level. These protests were first organized on October 15, 2011, under the label “Occupy” in places like the US—discussed in Chapter 4—Brazil, Canada, and Australia. Later on, in 2014, some sectors of this movement took a crucial step towards institutionalization through the constitution of Podemos, a political party that, in less than a year, has been able to gain support from more than 20% of the Spanish voting population (Ferrandiz, Camas García, & Sanz Agüero, 2015). In ways similar to those of the other two contexts addressed in this book, the recent political and economic crisis in Spain acted as an “organizing exigence” (Bitzer, 1968, p. 6) expressed at all levels as a Gramscian organic crisis: social, political, and ethical. In this scenario, Podemos emerged out of a state of outrage and despair but also, eventually, of hope that permeated the Indignados movement. As we shall explain, the crisis context has provided the stage on which Podemos exercised its constrains: a logos based on common sense, an anti–La Casta ethos, and a pathos deriving from the construction of la gente, the people. In this chapter we examine Indignados and Podemos as a way to explain the connections between the vernacular and the national popular. First, we place Indignados in the context of the current economic crisis in Spain and examine some of its discursive and organizational practices (e.g., use of

From Indignados to Podemos  99 virtual and physical spaces, horizontal structure, reframing strategies) to argue that, similarly to Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the group mostly aimed at producing, through communication, a collectively shared field of meanings and practices, which the Indignados saw as the primordial condition for their emancipation. Even though, as we also argued in reference to OWS, this kind of vernacular discourse expresses a community’s much-needed self-understanding as a historically situated subject (Ono & Sloop, 1995; Hauser, 1999), we claim that it does not, by itself, go beyond its social boundaries to embrace an alternative and emancipatory hegemonic project. In other words, as we proposed in Chapter 3, a given immanent grammar—even if collectively shared by a group—does not exist in absolute opposition to the hegemonic/­normative one, but in a relation of interdependence, and thus it cannot avoid making reference to it. Therefore, a complete project of emancipation requires a particular group’s language to challenge and ultimately replace the hegemonic one. The process of sublating an immanent grammar—the vernacular—into a dominant one—the national popular—implies broadening a linguistic system and political project towards a commonly shared level. This is, in our view, a fundamental condition of possibility for the creation of a collective will, which entails raising consciousness across social, cultural, and historic boundaries—a project that can be started by, but is not limited to, groups like Indignados. Along these lines, we interpret an array of Podemos’ discourses (their manifesto, their economic program, and some of its leaders’ speeches) as examples of national-popular rhetoric, which aims at representing larger sections of a given social formation rather than its original own c­ ommunity, and therefore has exceeded the necessary stage of self-understanding and self-centrism provided by vernacularism. Thus, whereas in vernacular rhetoric language is primarily understood as a way to express the particular right to existence of a given community/group/movement, national popular rhetoric expresses the discourse aspiring to transform the lived experience of that specific group into generalizable good sense, as the pivotal principle of a new alternative social organization. As we will show in our analysis, Podemos opportunistically moves back and forth inside the dialectical tension between vernacular and national popular dimensions by simultaneously translating ‘common sense’ into a ‘good sense,’ and vice versa. Accordingly, the transition from Indignados to Podemos, from common sense to good sense, and from vernacular to national popular rhetoric is best understood in terms of dialectical translation, an Aufhebung (see Chapter 3) operation that does not absolutely negate the prior term (Indignados, common sense, and vernacular) but incorporates it at another level. In this context, we argue that the fundamental intervention of Podemos can be read as a twofold translation effort: first, cathartically, the party has been able to translate economic interests deriving from the crisis into an

100  From Indignados to Podemos ethical political project; second, through its different rhetorical strategies, Podemos is trying to translate its given commonsensical conception of the world into good sense, an ideology that can significantly broaden its appeal and its audience.

The Spanish Indignados: Reclaiming Privilege Through Vernacularism The name Indignados is taken from the translation of the essay “­Indignez-vous!” (Time for outrage!) by the French philosopher Stephane Hessel, who is considered one of the intellectual referents of the movement. In 2011, ­Hessel—a former French resistance fighter—published a short essay in which he urged the French to become outraged and peacefully protest against the growing gap between the rich and the poor, or the decay of the welfare system, which he presented as two of the many shameful realities of our times (Hessel, 2011). Even though, originally, only 6,000 copies of Hessel’s work were printed in its original French, by the end of 2011, the essay had sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 15 different languages. More than half a million of these copies, in their Spanish, Basque, and Catalan versions, were sold in Spain. Despite their common state of outrage, the Indignados were, from the beginning, aware and even celebratory of what they saw as a healthy ideological heterogeneity, and thus, in a move also identified in our other two case studies, the movement explicitly rejected any kind of political affiliation. As stated in their manifesto, it was the concern about their social and economic surroundings that united these protesters, not necessarily their views on how to best address the problems they identified: Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice. (Movimiento 15M, n.d.) It was thus a combination of ‘feelings’ that first and foremost motivated the Indignados to (re)act, and at the same time created a solid identity for them. This solidification was achieved, first of all, by a series of negative emotions “that were ‘mobilized’ by social movement organizations linked to the 15M (e.g., outrage or indignation),” and second, through a range of “positive emotions that emerged spontaneously during the encounters that took place in the public space” (Perugorría & Tejería, 2013, p. 426). The movement thus manifested the ‘cultural syncretism’ involving affirmation and protest that is characteristic of vernacular discourses

From Indignados to Podemos  101 (Ono & Sloop, 1992). The notion of cultural syncretism as a way to describe the vernacular resonates with Gramsci’s perspective on folklore as a given group’s conception of world and life that stands aside and in competition with other social groups’ vernacularism. In this sense, Indignados exemplifies perfectly the dialectical nature of the vernacular, which builds a sense of a community group’s awareness by both resisting the pressure of the ruling group and at the same time affirming its own identity. Also, and importantly, ­Indignados demonstrated the powerful role of affect as a fundamental element in politics, or as Gramsci (1971) would put it, how knowing and passion are not mutually exclusive but intrinsically related—two points that we develop further below. This variety of voices, as well as the movement’s horizontal structure, is also partly a result of the aggregating process through which separate grassroots organizations came to form a united, but also miscellaneous, front. Some of the groups participating in the “15M” (May 15) demonstrations— as the movement was also labeled in reference to the first official date of protest—were specifically motivated by their refusal to accept an imminent Internet-regulating law (the so-called “ley Sinde”) proposed by the government party at the time, the liberal Spanish Socialist Party PSOE, and supported by the other main political party in Spain, the conservative PP, as well as the Catalan nationalist party, the also conservative CiU. This initiative eventually became the “No les votes” (Don’t vote for them) platform, which proposed not to vote for the three political parties that supported this law. Other organizations that united efforts for this occasion were “Democracia Real Ya” (Real Democracy Now), mainly concerned with the increasing cases of corruption among the political class, and “Anonymous,” the international online-based group organizing collaborative hacktivism initiatives. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests that had spread among some north-African countries months earlier, as well as the “Icelandic revolution” that took place in 2009, what started as a conventional demonstration turned into a series of “acampadas” (camps), built in major Spanish squares such as Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Barcelona’s Plaça Catalunya, and Valencia’s Plaza del Ayuntamiento (which protesters renamed Plaza del 15 de Mayo). In these camps, the indignados quickly organized into different comisiones (committees) in charge of duties such as cocina (cooking), donaciones (donations), and limpieza (cleaning), but also around topics of interest such as economía (economy), inmigración (immigration), acción (action), educación (education), and sanidad (health care). From these different stands, protesters engaged passersby in conversations about what they saw as important issues affecting the Spanish society, as well as possible ways to address them. For example, in the economía stand, members would explain the concept of the “Tobin Tax,” aimed at preventing speculation based on money investment in foreign exchange on a very short-term basis. The participants in the acampadas also held daily

102  From Indignados to Podemos asambleas (assemblies) at 8:00 pm, where they organized, discussed, and voted on particular actions to be taken. The kinds of activities stimulated by Indignados, although eventually reduced in terms of number of participants and size of spaces, still continue today. Thus, members of the different assemblies have ended up creating platforms, associations, co-operatives and political projects amongst other collectives born in the wake of the demonstration, in which they currently participate. Thus tides of citizens, who defend education, the health system and other public services, or anti-eviction groups, are linked to this movement. (Martín Rojo, 2014, p. 624) Indignados and Precarious Privilege The lack of job opportunities that acquired massive proportions after three years of economic crisis had especially dramatic consequences for young and educated Spaniards—a segment of the potentially active population where the rate of unemployment by the time the protests consolidated was over 40% (INE, 2012). Indeed, many Indignados belonged to this sector of the population: 52% were Spaniards between 25 and 34 years of age, and 24% were between 35 and 44 years old. In terms of qualifications, 72% had a bachelor’s degree or higher educational attainment, but even so, 41% of all Indignados were unemployed when they joined the movement (#­indignados, 2011). Another significant characteristic reveals the pervasive use of social media within this group, as 90% of the participants in the 15M demonstrations had a social media account that they used, among other things, to find out information about how to organize the demonstrations as well as, once they were there, “to illustrate—through pictures, banners, links, or videos—[their] social protests on the streets” (García-Jiménez et al., 2014, p. 2544). Importantly, this online activity had, from the beginning, a public and strategic function, and thus The WET [World Extension Team] commission of Acampada Sol (the 15M camp in the Puerta del Sol Square, Madrid) was in fact set up during the first days of the movement with the explicit objective of disseminating and coordinating the indignados movement at the global level. (Perugorría & Tejería, 2013, p. 425) Apart from pointing to new technology as an important element in the production of alternative political practices, the numbers discussed above also suggest the particular (relatively privileged) social extraction of the Indignados. From that standpoint, adherents to this movement saw

From Indignados to Podemos  103 themselves as the main victims of a series of inadequate, elite-favoring measures adopted by the government in order to tackle the crisis without challenging its broader, systemic roots. Loss of purchasing power, an increasingly precarious job market, or the escalation of corruption cases among politicians were among the unacceptable conditions that, according to the manifesto developed by these protesters, called for an ‘ethical revolution’ that could bring about a ‘true democracy,’ guaranteeing ‘basic rights’ for all, such as “the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life” (Movimiento 15M, n.d.). Based on the group’s demographics, therefore, as well as on the excerpts from the manifesto discussed so far, it is probably safe to argue that the Indignados were not a traditional, subaltern-based social movement standing at the margins of a dominant core. Rather, this movement and its accompanying rhetoric and practices emerged at the nexus of the dialectical tension that made it possible for the Indignados, whose ordinary and—until not long ago, unproblematic—condition was a product of the dominant economic system, to be outraged at the consequences of taking the logic of that same system closer to the extreme.1 However, in our view, it is still productive to critique this movement from the perspective of the vernacular, as such critique allows us to highlight the contradictions and possibilities of the discourse of a group that is in the process of reaching a level of self-understating about its position and potential political role in a given society. Thus, the vernacular perspective allows us to explore two very interesting aspects of the link between Indignados and Podemos. First of all, vernacularism helps us expand the perspective from marginalized, disfranchised social sectors to any collective that becomes a group for political purposes in the broad sense, therefore accounting also for practices such as those of Indignados as they emerge in relatively integrated sectors of society. The vernacular optic on Indignados leads us to complicate the idea of the ‘subaltern’ by replacing it with the Gramscian notion of ‘united front’ as a bloc of heterogeneous force that goes beyond ideological sectarianism in order to forge a common view and a common front. Second, our treatment of the vernacular becomes a useful lens through which we can better understand the dialectical dynamic that concerns a group such as Indignados and its ramification into Podemos. While Indignados’ usage of vernacularism was functional to its solidification as an organized and cohesive social actor, it also produced the need to go beyond it, as expressed by Podemos’ national popular rhetoric, in order to completely fulfill and bring to its ultimate end the emancipatory vision of vernacularism.

Indignados and Vernacular Practices The Spanish Indignados embodied the frustrations, desires, and motivations of a particular, generation-bound segment of the Spanish middle

104  From Indignados to Podemos class. Accordingly, they enjoyed an unprecedented amount of support— compared to, for example, the labor movements—from most of the ­Spanish ­population: in 2011, 76% of Spaniards declared themselves to be in agreement with the movement’s general manifesto, and only 7% positioned themselves against it. Moreover, liberal international outlets such as The Economist expressed their sympathy for the Indignados’ cause and demonstration methods, calling them “Europe’s best-behaved protest movement” in explicit contrast to other EU countries such as Greece, thus stating that “well-mannered rage is [Indignados’] selling point. This is not Athens” (Europe’s most earnest protesters, 2011). In our view, it was through the combination of their predominantly integrated social position, together with a series of vernacular communicative practices, that this movement managed to create a persuasive image of a “superhero against injustice” for itself and a vast portion of Spanish civil society. This “framing of injustice […] provided a common language in which activists from different movements, and persons with no previous political participation, could communicate and find common ground” (Perugorría & Tejería, 2013, p. 431). As mentioned above, Indignados is a culturally syncretic movement in the sense that its participants did not entirely construct their identity as a reaction/opposition to institutional rhetoric and practices, but they also were able to develop, more than any of the groups studied in this book, affirming discourses of empowerment, hope, and possibilities. This, in our view, represents the successful outcome of the group’s war of position, a fundamental condition of possibility for Podemos, which was later able to effectively synthesize it with a war of maneuver. In fact, as we will argue below, while Podemos can be credited for dialectically translating common sense into good sense, Indignados should be credited for having interlaced multiple common senses—deriving from multiple experiences of the organic crisis—into a shared common sense. At the same time, through their different practices—such as occupying emblematic public spaces—and non-hierarchical ways of organizing and distributing messages, participants in the Indignados movement were able to create a climate of ‘enthusiasm and joy,’ affective emotions that “can engender trust and solidarity, and thus form a solid basis for collective identity and more persistent engagement with the movement” (­Perugorria  & Tejería,  2013, p. 433). Indignados thus embodied the constitutive role of ‘passionate politics’ as a fundamental cognitive category, as well as an “immediate impulse to action which springs from the ‘permanent and organic soil’ of economic soil” but supersedes it (Gramsci, 1975, p. 1022). From this perspective, the narrative that we recount in this chapter concerning Indignados and Podemos describes the cathartic translation of immediate and passionate impulses to act into more elaborated/mediated strategies. Part of the sense of empowerment and affirmation that permeated the Indignados movement stemmed from the possibilities that different and

From Indignados to Podemos  105 alternative media outlets provided for the consistent dissemination of information that did not find a space in elite media outlets such as the main Spanish newspapers and television channels. In these alternative spaces, participants in the movement were able to expose and celebrate the impact of their actions by, for example, sharing pictures and videos that captured the massive participation in demonstrations all over Spain. This virtual kind of support interacted with the literal ‘being together’ provided by the physical spaces in different plazas to create a climate of openness, direct participation, and possibilities. As Martín Rojo points out, the I­ndignados engaged in insurgent practices in the sense that they “ensure[d] participants’ access to the production of discourses, and put into circulation new forms of participation, authorship, agency and inclusiveness” (2014, p. 626). From this perspective, Indignados differs in important ways from the Italian M5S in the sense that, whereas M5S’s constituencies crystallized around an already given and established technological platform revolving around Beppe Grillo, in the Indignados’ case, the virtually driven practices organically emerged out of the movement, and not the other way around. Together with the affirming rhetoric that interacts with a radical change in the formal aspects of organization and activism as discussed above, ­Indignados also exhibit a willingness to appropriate and reframe the language of traditional social movements, and of conventional politics more broadly, in the attempt to validate their own community and values. Through these re-framings and appropriations of particular terms from and for politics, Indignados display another crucial characteristic of vernacular discourse: the pastiche (see Ono & Sloop, 1995). Thus, the movement rejected those terms that suggested a rigid understanding of politics and society, such as ‘ideology.’ Instead, they embodied a more grounded, issue-oriented approach to activism, mobilizing against concrete realities such as evictions, repressive laws, or lack of access to the job market. This concreteness allowed Indignados to connect with the reality of people’s lives beyond abstract idea(l)s. A concrete outcome of this self-reflexive voicing of the predominant separation of ideology and experience has to do with the linguistic practices and more specifically the signage that accompanied Indignados’ occupation of squares. Thus, instead of embracing recognizable banners or flags that would signal affiliation with traditional political parties, unions, or broader ideologies such as Marxism or communism, the Indignados engaged in “individualisation and customization of signs” (Martín Rojo, 2014, p. 633) as a way to express their motivations and goals. The only references beyond the specific needs and wants of those present in the square were aimed at connecting Indignados with what were perceived as similar initiatives throughout the globe. Thus, banners in Greek or Arab announcing solidarity with other ‘occupiers’ were present in different Spanish squares (Martín Rojo, 2014), thus amplifying the feelings of empowerment and being together beyond national borders.

106  From Indignados to Podemos Vernacular Struggle or Struggle for Vernacularity? In most scholarly accounts of the Indignados, such as those briefly reviewed here, the different interpretive analyses are often accompanied by an overall reading of the movement and its practices as an end in itself, where transforming “the discourses of contemporary social movements, not only in terms of their content, but also in the way they are produced and how they circulate” (Martín Rojo, 2014, p. 625) is read as a regeneration of politics in itself, and not a means towards it. Whereas we agree with this diagnosis in the sense that our analysis identified these same priorities in the movement, we would like to depart from the celebratory tone with which this is often stated in academic works, as thus from the unproblematic embracement of the vernacular. In other words, based on our discussion in the previous chapters, we claim that in order to achieve its ultimate goal, vernacularism needs to transcend itself via an integral as well as expansive project of hegemony. Our critique of the Indignados movement, as a complement to our critiques of OWS and M5S, is thus aimed at developing a framework that can account for the reproductive elements inherent in social dynamics, but also leaves space for social transformation. Within such framework, and following Gramsci (1971), the different practices we identified here could be seen as a first step towards a ‘war of position.’ As we explained in Chapter 3, this term, developed in juxtaposition to ‘war of maneuver,’ is a bellic metaphor used by Gramsci to argue that a frontal attack against the ruling institutions would not work in Western realities. However, in contrast to our discussion of Occupy in Chapter 4, where we highlighted the reduction of this movement’s strategies to a politics of positioning, the limits of the war of position of Indignados are being superseded by a new political party, namely Podemos, and its timely combination of Indignados’ agency with a war of maneuver during a period of weakening of hegemony.

Podemos: Sublating the Vernacular into National Popular In March of 2014, Podemos constituted itself as a Spanish political party, mainly with the impulse of a group of intellectuals and activists—many of whom participated in the Indignados movement—and with the goal of catalyzing the mixed and productive emotions stirred in the previous years into a political project. The chosen name, Podemos (We can), signals the willingness to capitalize on especially the sense of empowerment emerging from virtual and physical plazas as a way to promote action beyond the occupation of spaces and into the Spanish parliamentary system. Podemos publicizes itself as social, political, and economic project designed as an alternative to the dominant landscape of austerity policies. It thus aims at constructing a social pact against poverty and social exclusion

From Indignados to Podemos  107 by addressing issues such as social inequality, the private debt of families, and reforming taxation in order to redistribute wealth across society. Within only a few months of its constitution, the newly created group gained considerable media attention after its surprising success at the 2014 European Elections, as it obtained 1.25 million votes and five seats in the European Parliament. In June 2015, only a few months before the general national elections in Spain, several political opinion polls considered Podemos to be the possible winning candidate (El País, 2015). In this regard, working with Gramsci’s assumption that people’s praxis becomes a powerful historical force only when objective social conditions intercept subjective communicative interventions, we would like to explore the favorable rhetori­cal situation formed by the organic crisis in Spain and Podemos’s strategic relationship with it. First, we focus on the Gramscian concept of national popular as providing an account of how rhetoric can be utilized as a hegemonic asset to re-organize dominant social relations. For Gramsci, the national and the popular elements are not synonyms but actually distinct aspects united in a dialectical relationship. He used the national polemically to incite traditional apolitical and book learning intellectuals to function organically in (i.e., attached to) a social group, such as a nation or a class. The popular element, on the other hand, refers to the intellectual and practical need to involve people in this political project. Thus, the idea of national popular combines the necessary social and historical conditions to mobilize subordinate sectors of society and the intervention of intellectuals organic to these groups to help compact them into a historic bloc, as well as systematize their commonsensical views. Both elements, i.e., ‘intellectual’ and ‘popular,’ go beyond their own limits in the national popular synthesis. On the one hand, the goal is to elevate popular common sense from being “spontaneous philosophy” (Gramsci, 1971 p. 422) and “chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions” (1971, p. 422), into a revolutionary “good sense” (1971, p. 323). On the other, as we mentioned in Chapter 3, the intellectual becomes a rhetorical instrument as a “constructor, organizer, permanent persuader” (1971, p. 5). In this sense, the concept of national popular for Gramsci expresses the rhetorical synthesis between people’s capability to both feel via pathos and understand via logos: The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know ­without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned  […]. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and ­people-nation. (1971, p. 418) Through such a dialectical unity, the national popular constitutes a powerful rhetoric of identification (Charland, 1987) that compacts elements, such as intellectual and common sense discourse, into the same project.

108  From Indignados to Podemos In the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘organic’ intellectual and from ‘common’ to ‘good’ sense, Gramsci envisions a plan for subaltern classes to develop their social struggle as well as their need to develop a particular kind of consciousness. Such a plan, as mentioned before, involves the objective of not simply countering existing hegemony but replacing it entirely. He notices how almost systemically any movement emerging from the lower strata tends to be characterized by the absence of what he calls ‘state spirit,’ or the preoccupation with producing long-lasting changes that can establish an alternative hegemonic order: “the subaltern classes, by definition are not united and cannot unite until they are able to “become a ‘state’” (1971, p. 52). Gramsci believed that a struggle of a determinate social group should always aspire to extend its victory beyond the boundaries of its class and make itself a ‘state,’ thus reaching political hegemony, the condition for the formation of a collective will (Golding, 1992). This so-called state’s spirit consists of reaching a level of historical awareness and historical effectiveness of a given social group that, as we saw with the vernacular rhetoric of Indignados—and to a certain extent, Occupy Wall Street—aims at producing through communication a collectively shared field of meanings and practices, as the primordial condition for its emancipation. However, while vernacular discourse expresses a community’s self-understanding as a historically situated subject (Hauser, 1999), national popular rhetoric refers to the phase when such a community goes beyond its social boundaries and embraces a hegemonic project. In this sense, and while appreciative of Indignados’ vernacular project of capturing transitional, extemporaneous, subaltern, unstructured, and non-institutional rhetorical practices, our analysis of Podemos tries to interpret the rhetoric of another transitional moment. In Gramscian terms, that moment consists of a social movement’s move from a negative to a positive hegemonic level. Such a passage, we argue, involves dealing with a question of power ‘constructively’ rather than defensively, thus moving from ‘resisting oppression,’ towards ways to actively ‘assist liberation.’ Thus, in juxtaposition to vernacular rhetoric and the practices associated with the Indignados social movement, we define a national popular rhetoric as the rhetoric of a movement in the process of constituting itself as ‘collective will,’ i.e., as a leader of alliances among different social groups. This process aims at representing larger sections of a given social formation rather than its original own community and therefore has exceeded the necessary stage of self-understanding and self-centrism provided by vernacularism that we identified in the Indignados discourse. Whereas in the vernacular rhetoric and practices of Indignados language and place are primarily understood as a way to express the particular right to existence of a given community/group/movement, national popular rhetoric expresses the discourse aspiring to transform the lived experience of that specific group into generalizable common sense, as the pivotal principle of a new alternative social organization.

From Indignados to Podemos  109 As we show in our discussion of Podemos, the national popular translates into a discourse that, instead of asserting a community’s idiosyncrasies as a legitimate and particular way of living, assumes that in its ‘particular’ there is a ‘general’ that can be extended to the rest of society, in order to “establish the conditions for its own existence as universal principles and as a worldview” (Gramsci, 1995, p. 353). As a consequence, national popular moves beyond a particular location in the civil society, and towards the expansive area that links civil society and the state: the Gramscian ‘integral state’ (1971, p. 267). This implies combining the war of position strategies that predominate in Indignados with a timely war of maneuver aimed at the state in a context of organic crisis and its consequent weakening of hegemony. The analysis of Podemos through this lens also requires considering rhetoric in materialist terms. According to Artz and Murphy (2000) and Cloud (2009), this entails understanding the efficacy of a rhetorical situation as a result of a constant interception of a given rhetorical practice with the limits and possibilities provided by the social relations that contain it in any given historic moment. Similarly, Gramsci argued that significant social/political phenomena take place only when the particular configuration of social relations operating in a given society in a given époque meets the formation and intervention of particular political subjects and organizations. This represented Gramsci’s way to navigate between voluntarist and determinist senses of historical agency (1995, p. 15). There is a significant analogy, with all the necessary historicist qualifications, between Gramsci’s examination of post-war democratic crisis and the current political-economic downturn in Spain. In both cases, besides the economic recession, the main parallel critical issues seem to be linked to the difficulty of generating political consent, the persistent criticism against the political class, the fear of populism, and the skepticism towards the parliamentary system. Moreover, through Gramsci we can justify a parallelism between the two cases by pointing to a quintessential characteristic of capitalism: its development has been a “continuous crisis, i.e. a very rapid movement of elements which balance and check each other out” (1971, p. 428). Thus, crises should be understood as systemic, recurrent, and fluid phenomena rather than catastrophic collapses of the capitalist system that, when severe, become ‘organic’ (1971, p. 210) and may weaken the link between state and civil society. Undeniably, in the case of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government, the crisis became ‘organic’ in the sense that the state was not capable of harmonizing the conflictive and diverse interests of civil society, which caused in turn a crisis of the principle of authority and hegemony, as the very existence of mass mobilizations such as the ones generated by Indignados and Podemos confirm. From a point of view of hegemony as both force and consent, the difficulty of the Spanish government to generate sufficient consensus can be seen as a crisis of hegemony, which is exemplified

110  From Indignados to Podemos by several legal provisions. One of these is the 2012 “Reforma Laboral” (Labor Reform), which consisted of a substantial decrease in workers’ rights, as well as an impoverishment of their negotiation capabilities at the level of contract bargaining. The State’s relative incapability to generate broad consent is also exemplified by the approval of austerity, neo-liberal driven measures such as the further privatization of the public sector, together with significant cuts to public spending in key areas such as education and health care. More recently, in 2015, the government passed a new law named “Ley de ­Seguridad C ­ iudadana” (Citizen’s Security Law)—tellingly dubbed “Ley Mordaza” (Gag Law) by the political opposition (Garea, 2015)—which de facto prevents citizens from exercising basic rights such as public manifestation of dissent, or documenting police practices through amateur videos, and has been strongly criticized by organizations such as Amnesty International (Amnesty International, 2015; Minder, 2015). Such a retreat to a pre-hegemonic kind of power obstructs what G ­ ramsci calls the ideological process of defusing social tensions. When such a mechanism does not operate, as in the Spanish case during the crisis, contradictory phenomena take place. On the one hand, this situation can facilitate the emergence of authoritarian political configurations—as we saw in the case of M5S; on the other, the lack of effectively mediating worldviews increases the chances for the emergence of new conceptions of the world—­ ideologies—as in the case of Podemos. The disputed decision to move from non-institutional to institutional politics through the foundation of a new political party represents a new ‘synthesis’ in Podemos when compared to the movement in which it originated, namely Indignados. While the Indignados movement represented a reactive and negative moment of hegemony, mainly antagonizing the existing power through resistance, “Podemos wants to become majority” (iniciativadebate.org, 2015) in the Gramscian terrain of both civil society and the state, i.e., Gramsci’s integral state. Podemos’ agency at the level of the integral state explains its ambivalent nature, which comprises the official form of a political party and the content of a grassroots movement. As a party, Podemos aspires to politically represent and mediate the interests of its constituencies; as a movement, it aspires to build a direct democracy environment that actually defies institutional politics; as a party, it has equipped itself with an organizational structure meant to organize action as a coordinated social body; as a movement, Podemos is continuously and fluidly shaped by constant discussion, local assemblies, and the preponderance of horizontal communication among citizens. The origins of Podemos are thus to be found in the exigence defined by the context of the recent organic crisis and the consequent social mobilization of people. Those initiatives provided a rhetorically oriented “intense labor of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses

From Indignados to Podemos  111 of men [and women]” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12). In this context, ­Indignados’ war of position paved the way for Podemos’ entrance onto the political scene—a war of maneuver against the state—by generating a sustained ­critique of the traditional political class, which had been accused of being corrupted and of leading the country towards unnecessary hardships. In rhetorical terms, the crisis in Spain (and the way it was dealt with) ultimately created an exigence and a sense of urgency that was capably addressed by Podemos in the following ways: first, through an ethos based on a cathartic moral reform against a corrupted Casta (a term that, like M5S, they borrow from Rizzo and Stella to refer to the ruling political class); second, through a logos based on the celebration of sentido común (common sense); and third, through a pathos that builds on the construction of la gente (the people). While the three rhetorical elements are indissolubly linked, for the sake of exposition we will try to analytically isolate significant aspects of each, while emphasizing how they all consistently synthesize the national and the popular.

A National Popular Ethos: La Casta The moral and political authority of Podemos mainly derives from its general capability to semiotically dispute any possible sign of association with La Casta. As Podemos’ leader, Pablo Iglesias, puts it: La Casta consists of a fundamental component of the political class that runs the country; it is a sort of a servant of the powerful economic subjects such as the banks and big firms. These are people not representing the citizens but servants of financial capital. La Casta is a minority that rules against the majority’s interests, living in a shameful condition of privilege. (2014e) With the appropriation of the trope of ‘La Casta,’ Podemos rhetorically exemplifies a dynamic sense of (dialectical) translation, which not only tries to sublate common sense into good sense, but also goes the other way around: it opportunistically translates good sense into more commonsensical notions in order to enhance rhetorical effectiveness. In fact, while, as Marxist intellectuals, Iglesias, Monedero, and Errejón use class analysis in their theoretical reflections (Errejón, Espansadin, & Iglesias, 2005; Iglesias 2009, 2011, 2013; Errejón, 2014, 2015; Monedero, 2011, 2012, 2013), in their public interventions they introduce the term La Casta in order to avoid too much ideological sectarism and the risk of being assimilated into a communist party but also as a way to transpose the structural logic of a class analysis into a more accessible message. Thus, Podemos’ ethos derives from the relational logic of class analysis because Podemos’ constituencies compose themselves as a social, subordinate group in so far as La Casta composes itself as a ruling group.

112  From Indignados to Podemos Thus, the (im)moral action of one ‘class’ leads to the composition of another that Podemos intends to represent, while at the same time interacting with it in dialectical ways. In this sense, Podemos exemplifies the “organization which embodies the best, most conscious part” of a given class/group (Gramsci, in Fiori, 1973, p. 195) because “parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify and universalize them” (Gramsci, in ­Donaldson, 2008, p. 22). Thus, as we shall see in the case of sentido común, (common sense) while Podemos relationally becomes more cohesive in ethical and political ways in opposition to La Casta—which provides Podemos with one of its main reasons of existence—the party actively shapes and compacts its constituency by sublating its common sensical views into a politically oriented good sense. Based on such understanding, Podemos does not compete with La Casta, but it rather intends to eradicate it, as it morally and politically failed its own people. In this regard, the ethical superiority of Podemos as alter of La Casta is rhetorically constructed by producing binary oppositions, as the party clearly exposes in its Manifesto (Podemos.info, 2014): “fraternity and solidarity” against “egoism and greediness”; “public spending to ease social inequalities” against “austerity policy”; “transparency” against “corruption”; popular “jeans and shirt” against institutional “suit and tie”; “rational and commonsensical arguments” against “politicians’ fuzziness.” In this de facto mythical confrontation (Barthes, 1972) the apparent demise of the Spanish political class under Podemos’ pressure is used to establish a teleological narrative that depicts the former as an inherently regressive force doomed to be overcome by history: The fact that the forces of the regime are so worried about us means that we are getting it right. La Casta is realizing that the bargain is ending and because of that they react agonizingly. I expected more tactic intelligence from them, instead they insult us, defame us and shout at us instead of using arguments. Such a behavior must be considered as the past for this country because it’s necessary to build something new based on common sense, respect and political responsibility. (Iglesias, 2014e) Indeed, Podemos uses the mythological fight against La Casta as a Gramscian modern Prince—the revolutionary political party—that builds a political ideology with mixed fantasies in order to “create collective will and arouse people to action” (Morera, 2011, p. 242).2 In many ways, La Casta represents an empirical reality connotated by the social fantasies of a collective subjectivity with a homogenous character, homogenous interests, and homogeneous behavior. Such essentializations as well as substantiation of La Casta, as we already mentioned, relationally facilitate the composition of an anti-La Casta class.

From Indignados to Podemos  113 In the fight against such an oligarchic regime, both elements of national and popular gain definition. On the one hand, intellectuals and academic professors such as Podemos’ leaders, Pablo Iglesias together with Juan ­Carlos Monedero and Íñigo Errejón, present themselves as organic elements in the public struggle. Those organic intellectuals could be considered as capitalizing on the myth of La Casta in two main ways. First, as we previously mentioned, the social myth of La Casta is constructed around the moral confrontation of two ‘totalities’ (i.e., Podemos and La Casta), and the ethos deriving from such struggle provides cohesive force to the internal structure of the party—for which La Casta becomes a sort of existential enemy. Second, the mythical struggle between Podemos and La Casta can also be framed at the level of the rhetorical confrontation between two distinct intellectuals organic to different groups: the activist professors and the politicians—the servants of the economic and finance elite. In such confrontations, frequently facilitated by the media (such as political talk shows), Podemos’ representatives gain authority through more grounded arguments that place them closer to ‘the people.’ On the other, as we develop below, two key aspects of the popular element, i.e., common sense and the construction of a people, derive from the opposition to La Casta, framed as a ruling minority. As Gramsci (1971, p. 332) would put it, Podemos’ ethos intends to “construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass,” and its force, as we just mentioned, also derives from the capability to engage the binary opposition between Podemos and La Casta at the mythological level.

A National Popular Logos: El Sentido Común In a letter preceding the foundation of Podemos, a group of Spanish intellectuals urged people to “convert indignation into political change” (Tratarde. org, 01/09/2014). It was an exhortation to transform the rage and frustrations about existing conditions into a new common sense, or sentido común, that could only be produced by the citizenry because: When normal people, with normal needs and normal lives assume that politics is not about privileged people with suits but a question of everyday life, then politics becomes a question of popular common sense and things can change […] the common sense is what turns a social majority of people into a political majority and the key is to orient popular common sense toward change. (Iglesias, 2014c) Sentido común rhetoric represents another manifestation of the synthesis of national and popular elements: it implies the intellectual translation into political terms of the expression of immediate material needs of everyday

114  From Indignados to Podemos life of normal people. An example of intellectual mediation of common sense, as we discuss in more detail below, is provided by Podemos’ usage of web 2.0 technologies in order to provide a platform of discussion and significantly increase the participatory democratic process. Echoing Marx’s concept of general intellect (1974), Podemos advances the discourse of a collective effort that generates a communal knowledge. A paradigmatic example of this dynamic is Plaza Podemos (Podemos’ Square), a highly interactive web platform created to host debates. Plaza Podemos welds together the binarism of a larger community whose discourse is approaching national levels—and the vernacular discourse of a smaller, localized community. In other words, Plaza Podemos constitutes a space that emerges from the particularity of a specific community but aims at a national commonality. It is a kind of public sphere in which people of different demographics, levels of instruction, and geographical areas are working together in order to create open documents, regulations, and policies for the newly founded political party. In this virtual arena, there are currently close to 100 discussions engaging with important questions such as how to incorporate ecological or gender issues into the program, the importance of secularizing politics, or whether Podemos should abide by any specific ideology. Plaza Podemos thus inherits from the Indignados movement a participatory method for developing the electoral program, which is then elaborated by a team of intellectuals defined as ‘synthesizers.’ The logic that links the ‘synthesizers’ and plain members follows the principle that Gramsci defined as ‘democratic centralism’: A continual adaptation of the organization to the real movement, a matching of thrusts from below with orders from above, a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience. (1971 p. 189) Plaza Podemos also constitutes a Deweyian (1927) kind of public that converges on particular issues and aims at establishing an unconstrained arena for rational critical discourse that, in a context of ideological liquidity, unites people with “peace and bread rather than ideological factionism” (Iglesias, 2014). As one member of Podemos claims: Podemos replaced the ideologically based positioning such as left and right of the old 1978 regime with the “common sense” of the people dialectically opposed against La Casta. Now the diffused feeling consists of saying “I am not left or right but I am citizen and I have rights to education, health, home a job.” With Podemos we replaced ideology with common sense. (Garzón, 2014)

From Indignados to Podemos  115 In this sense, sentido común is seen as popular and intellectual enlightenment, thus mirroring Podemos’ larger goal of presenting itself as a kind of enlightenment force that aims at replacing “Darkness and ignorance of the ancien régime with social justice and progress” (Iglesias, 2014d). Another way in which Podemos rhetorically mediates sentido común is through tertulia política, which in Spanish refers to the idea of a community of people meeting for political discussions. Thus, the two main frontmen of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias and Juan Carlos Monedero, gained public attention with the web/TV shows called La Tuerka and Fort Apache, which denounced the Troika policy, the deeply rooted corruption, the housing bubble and how it was managed by the government, and the incredible disparity between bank and regular people bailouts. Podemos’ (partially forced) preference for audio-visual media as a campaign tool as opposed to the daily press—due to the controlling of the latter by mainstream political parties—reveals a commitment to vernacularism and common sense but also an important message about their national popular program. Thus, whereas traditionally in Spain the daily press, “la prensa diaria,” is characterized by low readership and is fairly elitist on both content and linguistic forms (Lozano, 2013), Podemos engages its audience via traditionally more popular media such as TV and the Internet. In this sense, Fort Apache and La Tuerka represent two forms of tertulia política that use mediation to promise a kind of passionate immediacy. In fact, in a political environment in which La Casta seems to be removed from the people as well as highly conditioned by its particularistic interests, Podemos promises an immediate mediation of politics: vernacular, fraternal, anti-elitist. The introduction of a such a new language in La Tuerka is also linked to the intellectual project of what Gramsci defines as ‘integral journalism,’ which “is not only intended to satisfy the immediate needs of its public but intended to create and develop those needs in order to extend gradually the area of interests of its public” (1975, Q.24, 1§). Integral journalism is a pedagogic project capitalizing on the commonsensical standpoint of the ‘masses,’ but also raising theoretical awareness so that the “the public find the difference in the apparent identity and identity behind apparent difference” (1975, Q.24, §4). In a context where Spain’s politics, Europe’s politics, or global politics seem exceedingly far away, ethereal like the financial economy that has led Spanish people to this crisis, Podemos appears proximate and locally and grassy rooted via its local assemblies, tools like Plaza Podemos, as its capability to re-unite under its project many local initiatives that had organically risen during the first years of the crisis. Podemos speaks a language that capitalizes on the social proximity of citizenry, which is understood as a civic dimension that surpasses particularism by sharing common circumstances rather than pushing the social distance among different ­communities/ audience as well as that from power and authority. Hence, Podemos’ rhetoric of sentido común is a promise of substantiation of the national popular to

116  From Indignados to Podemos the extent that it mediates between, on the one hand, the ‘spontaneism’ that for Gramsci characterizes popular insurrections, and on the other, the theoretical consciousness and reflective leadership of its organic intellectuals.

A National Popular Pathos: La Gente While the anti-La Casta rhetoric already mentioned provides a powerful emotional appeal for Podemos’ followers, in this section we would like to focus on one significant productive outcome of that pathetic aspect: the definition of la gente, the people. In this sense, as different commentators highlight (­Fernández-Albertos, 2014) one distinctive trait of Podemos is its constituency. First of all, along with frustrated voters of the institutional left, this new party has re-appropriated a section of the electorate abandoned by traditional parties: the absentees. This specific portion of society is the one most painfully experiencing the precariousness of working conditions, unemployment, and general frustration of not being able to reach generational expectations on well-being. This is a demographic under 40 years old, allegedly a-politicized precarious workers or the unemployed. In fact, Podemos’ slogans such as “When was the last time you voted with excitement?” (Iglesias, 2014b) reveal its objective to target the dis-enchanted portion of voters that prefer abstention. However, the rhetorically pathetic intervention of Podemos goes well beyond appealing to its audience’s emotions, thus embodying the productive power of populism. For Laclau (2005) the construction of a people is the most noticeable outcome of populism and the political operation par excellence. As we noticed in our discussion of La Casta, that process inevitably tends to simplify the social and political field in mythical ways, which is reduced to the confrontation of two factions: the people—mobilized and organized by Podemos—and the institutionalized other, i.e., La Casta. Thus, in this particular case, the merit of Podemos consists of having discursively constructed not only a ‘people,’ but also its political ‘interlocutor’ (Podemos) and its political alter (La Casta). As explained by Iglesias: There are two groups, the ones above us who live in prosperity and the one below. The one below needs to be aware of his/her condition, otherwise we are all screwed. Democracy cannot be exercised only every 4 years, with a voting slip. Democracy needs to be practiced and be fought for because they are not going to give us anything for free. You can’t think they will take “selfies” with you, talk to you from a podium like this and will give democracy for free. That is not democracy. Democracy depends on the people, you, going on the streets defending your political power. The power is on the people’s hands. If we the people do not exercise it, others will exercise for us and there is no democracy. (Iglesias, 2014d)

From Indignados to Podemos  117 In fact, the discursive leverage on ‘fraternity,’ the catalyzed and polarized antagonism against La Casta, and the ‘solidarity’ among “decent ordinary citizens” (Iglesias, 2014) has created a powerful sense of identity among the people gathered around Podemos (Charland, 1987). In this sense, the almost obsessive reference to “La Casta” rhetorically serves as a “negative bonding” (Sennett, 1980), which refers to the mechanism of interpellating a rejected presence, such as La Casta, in order to capitalize on that antagonism as a cohesive factor: “By knowing them, we know what we want” (p. 28). Every time Podemos’ members name “La Casta,” they actually invoke themselves while also providing a wording to whomever has developed frustration against the currently ruling political class. Thus, the rhetoric of Podemos focuses on a Burkean sense of identification (1969) but without neglecting persuasion, as the addressing of La Casta is intended to mobilize Podemos’ on-lookers rather than La Casta itself: “We need to become a people and, as a people we need to become aware of our power” (Iglesias, 2014). In our view, both negative bonding and identification rhetorically express the Gramscian transition of Podemos from a negative to a positive hegemonic moment, which is required to translate the work of social criticism initiated by Indignados into a political initiative aiming at seizing power. In fact, instead of complying with the language and modus operandi of the Spanish political class, the group instrumentalizes them in order to expand its social basis and thus eventually replace La Casta. Podemos, as the converser of the people, is capable of elaborating on popular images, needs and emotions—as Iglesias exemplifies by the way he opens his interventions by saying “we like to dream,” “dreaming is b ­ eautiful” (Iglesias, 2014d), or arguing that “the Spanish people need to be treated with respect and be appreciated for the insights derived by their common sense” (Iglesias, 2014d). The term ‘gente’ is invoked by Podemos as an agent of Kantian publicity, a public that is mobilized for matters of public concerns (Gusfield, 1981). This represents the rationale that supports the post-ideological and post-class appeal to the people. This is in our view symptomatic of a hegemonic project that trades the immediate vantage of ideological sectarianism for a possible future much larger social body, which reflects Podemos’ goal of becoming the expression of collective will. Overall, Podemos uses its national popular rhetoric in order to address its own public (the vernacular moment) but also to organize it into a political force, to elaborate its W ­ eltanschauung,3 and to extend its social/political project to the entire society (national-popular moment).

Sí se puede Our recounting of the Indignados/Podemos trajectory in Spain is ultimately about a positive narrative of dialectical translations. In fact, while, for instance, the Indignados phenomenon can be seen as a reaction against the

118  From Indignados to Podemos shrinking of the space of privilege, which in the current economic landscape has left out many young Spaniards who—at least until recently—never questioned their place in it, such an initiative was more than ‘reactive,’ as it implied the constructive synthesis of a generalized common sense about the Spanish crisis, which by solidifying discontent in the movement represented a formidable war of position against hegemony. Such a war of position, by translating multiple worldviews into a relatively consistent one, paved the way for Podemos’ translation. This translation consisted of sublating Indignados’ generalized common sense into a political good sense that we rhetorically defined as national popular discourse. Ultimately, in kairic times of hegemony crisis, Podemos’ national popular rhetoric, synthetizing the spontaneity of people’s actions, and the conscious leadership of intellectuals, enabled the group to initiate its war of maneuver against the state. In this context, the framework proposed in this book helped us explore the historic-specific circumstances in which the intervention of Podemos could provide the adequate language and develop the necessary sociological imagination to go beyond the apparent historical necessity of capitalism and its hegemonic establishment in Spain. In this sense, we showed how rhetoric becomes a powerful historical force not simply by the voluntarism and eloquence of the orator, but when such an interposition meets a socially and historically determined context. Thus, if Podemos provided a vocabulary of motives to the Spanish crisis, Gramsci, via an emancipatory understanding of hegemony and the concept of national popular, provided the theoretical vocabulary for us to understand the multilevel struggle of this political formation, combining national and popular elements. Accordingly, in its project to establish an alternative political hegemony, Podemos rhetorically goes beyond its vernacular idiosyncrasies in order to propagate its worldviews and actively shape social organization by working on what Gramsci defines as the integral state, at the intersection of the state and civil society. In the end, what emerges from such an illustration is an account of a political force that, in a global scenario of political stall of the left, via a populist pathos, a morally polarizing ethos, and a common-sense logos has shown the possibilities that lie in successfully understanding and feeling political struggle.

Notes 1. In this sense, we could characterize the Indignados as a ‘new’ social movement because of its timing, but we should also keep in mind that it contains important ‘old’ elements such as a focus on economic concerns in detriment of identity or lifestyle. 2. Gramsci envisions the revolutionary party as a qualitatively new form of politi­ cal associationism operating in the profoundly changed scenario of post-1929 crisis and fascist Italy, which functions through the combination of the goal of reaching a political unity of its members and the goal of maintaining a pluralism

From Indignados to Podemos  119 of views. The modern prince becomes a social myth, a “myth-prince” (1971, p. 129) to the degree that it personifies “an organism, a social element, in which the becoming concrete of collective will, partially recognized and affirmed in action, has already begun (1971, p. 129).This collective body has a mythical character because the modern prince associates to the political organization an immediate metaphor that draws on the collective imagery of a given community, like the one mentioned by Gramsci exemplified by immediate and imminent acts of a condottiero, a mythical military leader. However, such a metaphorical and mythical aspect for Gramsci must be superseded because it excessively relies on spontaneity and immediacy of action. Conversely, the party/modern prince mostly functions through the principle of political mediation: between different groups allied into a united front, different political economic interests, different worldviews. As in Marx’s theses, the modern prince educates and is educated by the people supporting him, thus establishing dialectical pedagogy consisting of continuous exchange from one sphere to the other (Thomas, 2010). From this point of view, the mythical rhetoric of La Casta appears as a reification that defines the party as a political process, and relationally treats it as more of a hypostatic product. Thus, in the name of a genuine national popular project, the very discourse that constituted national popular rhetoric must keep transcending itself for further elaborations of its good sense. In our view, this entails gradually increasing the complexity of the public conversation in order to avoid mythical binary oppositions and therefore decrease the mediation between ‘popular spontaneism’ and ‘intellectual theoretical consciousness.’ 3. By Weltanschauung, Gramsci intends an organized worldview potentially capable of translating into political praxis. The assumption is that human activity is embodied in a given expression of the world that acquires historical validity by being operationalized in political praxis.

7 A Dialectical Image

Reviving Gramscian Cultural Studies As intellectual workers, we are both active and passive historic expressions of a particular social group in a particular sociocultural context. In this sense, in many ways this book was motivated by a desire to provide significance to a period in which our personal and public lives were abruptly monopolized by the organic crisis that affected both the countries in which we were born and where we spent a considerable portion of our lives and the place where we earned our postgraduate degrees and currently work. From our perspective, the crisis was not some abstract, distant entity, but a very real phenomenon that affected us personally in important ways. Among other circumstances, we faced unemployment and debt, trying to live through the frustrations of those social circumstances that denied us a condition of material comfort that we took for granted, having embraced the teleologi­ cal narrative of progressive social amelioration. We were thus implicated witnesses of the way an economic downturn became a political and social impasse in which dominant forms of understanding sociability, expressing discontent, and doing politics were confronted with emergent ones. However, to verbalize that experience proved more difficult than we expected because deeds frequently run faster than words. This represents one of the reasons we turned to Gramsci, a master in turning clumsy and heavy words into svelt and fluid elements of lived life, a way of thinking that is expedited by dialectics. At the same time, as we discussed in Chapter 2, we also felt constrained by dominant approaches to Gramsci that, in communication, are predominantly mediated by a specific ramification of cultural studies. Such an approach, while advocating intervention, privileged accounts of power relations, and ultimately of social relations, that left little or no place for radical change (Martínez Guillem, 2013). While Gramsci’s writings certainly leave room for interpretation—due to the fragmentary style of the Quaderni, hard prison conditions, censorship, and last but not least, a convoluted writing style (Anderson, 1976)—we felt that neither an overly post-structuralist Gramsci, mostly concentrating on symbolic, discursive, and ideological levels, nor an overtly culturalist Gramsci, concentrating mostly on human creative activity, provided an adequate representation of what we consider two key aspects of his work.

A Dialectical Image  121 First, we see in Gramsci’s body of work a dialectical sense of history that keeps in check both the perils and possibilities of human praxis. Second, we want to stress that any approach building on his thought should not neglect the fact that Gramsci was indeed a Marxist thinker who desired a revolutionary change as opposed to passive revolutions and reformism, and that such a radical project requires dealing constructively with hegemony and the question of power. Both assumptions could be synthetized into a critical realist stance ­(Callinicos, 2006) that assumes that if one digs deep enough into reality, one finds relatively stable ground for both semantics and praxis. This represents in our view the paradigmatic condition of the possibility of intellectual agency that we defined as ‘translation’—understood both in horizontal and vertical terms. ‘Horizontally,’ as a historicist and political-practical method, translating assumes a degree of translatability between different phenomena. ‘Vertically’ refers to the possibility of dialectically translating, as supersession or sublation, from one level of elaboration and coherence to a superior one. Thus, even though in Chapter 2 we located this study as theoretically and methodologically anchored in cultural studies and communication, our analyses showed that it also departs in important ways from some of the dominant assumptions and practices that animate much contemporary scholarship within this line of research. As a contribution to the general cultural studies project, the different chapters sought to explore “the articulations between everyday life and the formations of power” through “context specific theory/analysis of how contexts are made, unmade, and remade as structures of power and domination” (Grossberg, 1998, p. 68). However, we also tried to go beyond critiques of domination to incorporate a ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ perspective that would allow us to highlight how the current crisis conjuncture in the West has created ­opportunities for different kinds of revolutions. One of these, as Hall (2011) provocatively pointed out in one of his last writings, is a ‘neoliberal revolution,’ “constructed around the ideas and cultural practices of commodification and individualism” (p. 722) and fed through well-known tropes such as austerity, cuts, privatization, and debt. Another, parallel one, as we tried to show throughout this book, is a ­‘commons revolution’ that speaks of basic human needs, rights, inequalities, and injustice, capitalizing on the fact that “there is as yet no overwhelming majority appetite for the neo-liberal project” (Hall, 2011, p. 723). As ideologies, they both contain contradictory elements, and in negotiating these, communication practices and their impact, both enabled and constrained by the social relations in which they take place, play a crucial role. The use of ‘revolution’ as a descriptor of the current political and ­economic landscape, as well as relative alternatives to it, is meant to ­de-­hypostatize the term away from a romanticized picture of struggle on the streets, and towards an emphasis on ‘deep structural change,’ “sometimes

122  A Dialectical Image peaceful or largely peaceful, and sometimes boisterous, very fluid, and with deep ruptures” (Hall, 2013, p. 22). Calling these revolutions is also our way to highlight the inertial aspects of social change without, of course, reducing it to them. In other words, our interest is in how the crisis has created the necessary conditions for changing fundamental principles, thus “re-­defining the political, social and economic models and the governing strategies” (Hall, 2011, p. 708). These are the conditions at the basis of both neoliberalism and the movements that we studied, which explains why their ideological components may sometimes be combined, as our analysis of M5S and its passive revolution most notably exemplified. Following an integral perspective that positions practices such as social movements as ‘structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1996), we argued for an approach that avoids seeing Occupy Wall Street, Movimento Cinque Stelle, and Indignados/Podemos as mere reflections of bigger, more primary dynamics, while still seeing them as part of the economy, institutions, or public policy. This is, in sum, our proposal for a revived Gramscian cultural studies that works through the dialectical tensions between the (post)structural and the cultural as a way to address societal dynamics more holistically and more politically. Building on these assumptions, our study aimed to contribute to a ­“radical” version of cultural studies that “offers a method of reading and thus deconstructing cultural hegemony, thus enlarging the realms of freedom and imagination” (Agger, 1992, p. 55). An important step towards this goal, as Agger (p. 39) puts it, is to locate the practice of cultural studies “within the frame of a total social theory” that allows us to put together the institutional and everyday aspects of cultural practices, united into a political project. Adhering to these general principles, in this study we tried to explain the conditions under which (some) civic forms of organization contribute to a specific cultural mosaic made of consonant and dissonant meanings, and characterized by constant tension. This allowed us to map the residual, dominant, and emergent ways—to borrow from Raymond Williams—in which crisis, communication, and social change are associated and dissociated in contemporary Western realities. As we discussed in Chapter 2, a cultural studies lens would seem to provide adequate tools for a necessary link among power relations, everydayness, and cultural practices, or in other words, between ‘structure’ and ‘struggle’ (Aune, 1994). In a context dominated by elitist understandings of ‘Culture,’ the first generation of what became to be known as ‘cultural studies’ fostered a necessary move away from the cultural center and towards its margins (Hoggart, 1957; Thompson, 1963; Williams, 1958). In a way, the culture of interest for these groundbreaking studies was inevitably the culture of the subaltern, identified by these scholars mainly through class analysis, although not necessarily through class politics. It is therefore not surprising to observe that, when examining the different agents in the social (re)production of societies, the cultural studies project

A Dialectical Image  123 continued its tradition of bringing to the academic light ­(non-­dominant) identities—and the different practices associated with them—as worthy of discussion in their own terms. However, within this framework, the ­emphasis on the need to incorporate relations of domination and subordination into cultural critique, together with a defining impulse to validate the study of everyday practices, gradually opened the door to an overemphasis on ‘cultural’ practices as exclusively linked to the margins of society and, at the same time, as inevitably containing the seeds of resistance (Eagleton, 2003). Within particular embracements of a post-structuralist framework, the general cultural studies goal of incorporating power relations and human praxis into a critique of culture aimed at the emancipation of oppressed groups progressively evolved into a view that tends to see culture as first and foremost a ‘floating signifier’ whose significations are constantly negotiated and appropriated ad infinitum. Cultural critique, in this context, becomes “a way of connecting fragments, linking differences” (Johnson et al., 2004, p. 36), with little or no overall normative ground.1 As a way to both affirm and contest different uses and abuses of culture or, as Hall (1992) put it, to account for both its necessary displacement and embeddedness, we turned to Gramsci’s framework as a kind of cultural studies avant la lettre. Gramsci groundbreakingly provided an understanding of cultural practices away from disciplinary divisions of labor and their subsequent limitations, thus combining anthropological, sociological, and linguistic understandings of human activity—including rituals, works of art, or discursive practices. In the process, he legitimized the study of cultural praxis as a fundamental element of social (re)production—a contradictory product and facilitator of different power relations, an inherently unfinished project that is constantly changing and, in so doing, provides a fertile ground where new possibilities for social organization can be explored. This is how, in our view, cultural studies was, from the beginning, a ‘Gramscian’ project. However, as we explained in Chapter 2, and mainly through Stuart Hall’s efforts to counterbalance a perceived-as-­idealist, culturalist bias in most cultural studies research, certain elements of Gramsci’s framework were progressively put at the service of an emphasis on difference and discursive possibilities. Eventually, we would argue, this has led to a somewhat ironic situation in which a so-called ‘Gramscian cultural studies’ is seen as “centred on the concepts of ideology, consciousness, and the winning of consent (i.e., a version of culture centred on meaning and representations)” (Barker, 2012, p. 484; see also Bennet, 1998). In this selective view, ‘Gramscian cultural studies’ has become synonymous with a ‘politics of articulation’ that is “overtly and overly discursive so that cultural politics is seen as operating primarily at the level of language and ideology,” explicitly opposed to a ‘dense materialism’ supposedly embodied by ­Foucaultian views, and “concentrated on textual analysis and celebrations of ­marginality” (Barker, 2012, p. 484).

124  A Dialectical Image As we hope to have made clear through our in-depth engagement with Gramsci’s body of work and its potential translations, even though we can trace and explain their origins, we strongly disagree with such reductive characterizations of a ‘Gramscian’ perspective. In this context, an important part of our project involved reviving Gramscian cultural studies, which for us meant reconnecting Gramsci with the philosophy of praxis. We see this as a renovated Marxist perspective, both concrete and general, from which cultural criticism is inevitably tied to historical materialist principles at the service of a very specific revolutionary project: to account for and critique the material conditions under which particular practices (do not) emerge, as well as to explore how these practices may in turn set the ground for the reproduction and/or challenging of those conditions.

Transversally Translating One of the main assumptions informing this study—although not the only one—is that culture and communication are part of the material production of society. Under this view, cultural systems and their meanings are made up of multiple practices, and this makes them inherently contradictory. As ­Williams explained, culture is “both traditional and creative; […] both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings” (1958, p. 75). As a result of this intrinsic, unbalanced tension between the societal and the individual, the conventional and the original, certain cultural practices may be systematically enabled, while others are precluded— and this process privileges the experiences and needs of some people over others. However, and importantly, this same permanent friction also allows for the existence of emergent cultural elements and communicative practices, which often times end up being incorporated into a given hegemonic system but are also capable of disrupting and even transforming it. In order to account for these complex dynamics, and more specifically, for how they manifest themselves through (discursive) practices related to social mobilization, we found it necessary to examine a fairly broad and diverse array of texts that could help us put together the common and the individual aspects of culture and communication, which we tried to capture through a constant back and forth movement between the current conditions of ‘crisis,’ and their relationship to both institutional and non-­institutional dimensions. The careful examination of the texts selected and the contradictory elements found allowed us to both apply and rework Gramscian terms such as ‘integral state,’ ‘passive revolution,’ and ‘national popular’ in dialectical terms. It also enabled an exploration of how particular practices—horizontal organization, populist leadership, or commonsensical rhetoric—mimicked and departed from the others, thus contributing to the continuous activity and adjusting of culture. In contrast to dominant uses of a ‘Gramscian framework’ in cultural studies in communication, we proposed here a perspective that, in alignment

A Dialectical Image  125 with a broader materialist and dialectical framework, would treat power dynamics, and more specifically hegemony, more relationally. In other words, we were interested in exploring the ways particular social groups, defined by specific political economic interests as well as specific worldviews, could come to expand their historically and socially determined raison d’être beyond the social relations that generated them and into the terrain of both civil and political society. This is a description of hegemonic processes2 that, in our view, provides both an understanding of how a ruling group retains its leadership and dominance, but also of how a ruled group can emancipate itself from its condition of subalternity and potentially become socially and culturally hegemonic. A key element in this endeavor is the combination of, on the one hand, our ‘integral’ reading of Gramsci’s project as a whole, and on the other, a more specific exploration of the mutually influential relationship between Gramsci and communication. As explained in Chapter 3, a communicative perspective on Gramsci helped us highlight the relational nature of his thought. Thus, we used a logic that links text and context, particular and general, to push against an over-emphasis on particular concepts in the Gramscian system of thought—most notably hegemony—as stand-alone, self-containing categories. Conversely, acknowledging the porous and mobile boundaries that surround Gramsci’s key concepts, as well as their tendency to create constellations that are constantly reconfiguring, we understood ideas—such as hegemony—as key ‘texts’ in larger contexts, which could not be understood without making reference to other concepts such as ‘united front,’ ‘national popular,’ ‘passive revolution,’ ‘integral state,’ ‘immanent/dominant grammar,’ ‘catharsis,’ ‘translation,’ and ‘dialectics.’ In this book we tried to navigate an important series of tensions present in Gramsci’s writings and to dialectically incorporate them throughout our discussion: first, a tension between the historicity of human events and a level of structural boundaries that create historic tendencies, patterns, and dominant factors of social causation; second, a tension between the historical determination of ‘difference’ and the historical determination of ‘unity,’ and finally, a tension between social and historical factors that generate both production of (social) change and re-production of (social) sameness. We traversed those tensions not by rejecting them, but rather by incorporating them into an integral approach that could take into account the contradictory ways in which people make history by means of ‘praxis,’ which in our view implies the need to accommodate the historical immanence and ‘difference’ of people’s actions, together with the existence of a deeper and relative sense of structural unity. Ultimately, our goal when using a Gramscian framework was to illuminate three different social and historical contexts, thus stressing the need for a historically situated analysis and the possibility of assuming how a global event such as the 2008 economic crisis could create similar phenomena, such as the consequent organic crisis and the emergence of social movements across very different scenarios.

126  A Dialectical Image This leads us to the concept of translation, which for us goes beyond the literal linguistic transposition of meanings towards a way to trace homological relations in different societies. Throughout this book, we have used the notion of translation to address at least two intertwined but distinct practices of politically involved intellectuals. First of all, we use the term to describe a primarily ‘horizontal’ kind of translation, a historicist method, based on a historical materialist approach (Boothmann, 2010) that establishes a level of reciprocal translatability, thus operating by moving meanings across different systems of thought, different social and cultural formations, and different historical circumstances, as in the case of our empirical studies. Translatability at this ‘horizontal’ level implies following the Marxian hermeneutics of suspicion that claims that beneath and behind the surface of social phenomena, apparently being characterized by multiplicity, diversity, and contradictoriness, lie causal forces that reduce them to basic dynamics. From this perspective, seeking translatable meanings and phenomena means being able to reduce (Frosini, 2010) the complexity of each social formation into the similar development of structural forces. However, based on our discussion in Chapter 2 about ‘history making,’ the reducibility and translatability of phenomena find their limit in the irreducibility of human praxis, which, while contained and limited in structured social relations, also reacts upon them in creative and even subversive ways. The three social formations examined here—USA, Italy, and Spain—­ provide important instances of this reducibility/irreducibility tension. On the one hand, one could say that both the transformation of the economic crisis into a crisis of hegemony—i.e., an organic crisis—and the generation of the conditions of possibility for OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos to emerge may indicate that those societies possibly share, to a certain degree, a similar social development. Due to cutbacks caused by the economic downturn and its impact on governmental budget for institutions and practices that normally secure the organic relation between structure and super-­structures—such as education, welfare state, and entertainment— the crisis crudely showed in those societies basic social contradictions, consequently limiting the capability of the hegemony to create consent and producing opportunity for social protest. On the other hand, as we describe in more detail below, at the level of strategies, outcomes, and political objectives, OWS, M5S, and Indignados/ Podemos are not easily reducible to one another. From this point of view, one should consider how such an organic crisis did not impact the three countries in the same way and with the same intensity. For instance, as we noticed in Chapter 5, the contingent passive revolution that allowed for the emergence of M5S must be contextualized in a pre-existing scenario of continuous passive revolution. By contrast, in the other two cases the downturn was more explosive and intense, especially in Spain. A second important use of translation is a dialectical one, operating vertically. With this deployment of translation, we mainly refer to how

A Dialectical Image  127 intellectuals can function organically in a social movement by facilitating the complex process of political development and self-emancipation of a given subordinate group via a hegemonic project. In the elucidation of three cases, we focused on two examples of this process. First, we looked at how OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos have cathartically translated particularistic economic interests of people who felt disenfranchised by the organic crisis into a collectively shared ethical and political project. In this case, catharsis exemplifies a particular kind of Aufhebung focused on elevating the sphere of ‘necessity’ of economy into an ideologically mediated sphere of ‘freedom.’ The second example of dialectical translation we offered in this book was particularly exemplified by Podemos’ national popular project being capable of dialectically sublating ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense,’ through increasingly higher levels of elaboration, systematization, and purification of a given conception of the world. This kind of intellectual labor, mainly elucidated in the rhetorical practices of the group, conceptually involves two distinct movements: first, it supersedes the contradictions of a given level of elaboration of a worldview without necessarily canceling them; second, it aims at synthesizing the multifarious character of an immanent point of view into a unitary one that can represent a collective will. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, while dialectical logic permeates both horizontal and vertical translation—because they both assume reality to be a highly integrated and interrelated system of social relations—they also emphasize different aspects. On the one hand, horizontal translation implies dialectic in so far as it seeks a mediating link between two apparently ­unrelated elements, such as two words in different languages, two concepts in different philosophical systems, or two social phenomena in different social spheres. On the other hand, vertical translation combines dialectics with telos, thus assuming a normative and pragmatic sense of direction for political agency expressed by the concept of synthesis. In other words, vertical translation sublates the mediating link between different conceptions of the world into a combined vision. In our view, this represents a formidable agency, especially for (but not limited to) the intellectual, who translates difference into a dialectical unity, thus providing the terrain in which a collective will and united front can be built.

Mapping Crisis, Communication, and Change The different insights put forward in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are informed by and also build on the theoretical/practical assumptions introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, namely the need to advance an integral view of societal dynamics and the important role that reviving Gramsci’s body of work can play in this task. Such a view should engage in a critique of human activity that prominently features communicative practices and proceeds

128  A Dialectical Image alongside the analyses of structural pressures. Here we join other ­scholarly voices (e.g., Adamson, 2014; Aune, 1994; Eagleton, 2003; Johnson et al., 2004; Thomas, 2010; Williams, 1977) in arguing that this constitutes a crucial step in our quest to better understand the power relations embedded in cultural practices such as the ones we chose to examine in this book, as well as the alternative possibilities that the present social conditions necessarily enable. The analyses put forward in the different chapters reveal that, first of all, the different social movements and political parties that recently emerged in the contexts examined rely on a selective incorporation of progressive and regressive elements. In the case of OWS, this meant an embracement of a corporatist rhetoric that did not exceed the boundaries of the group. In the case of M5S, what emerged was a national populist approach that alienated its constituencies. As for Indignados and Podemos, we found an expanding effort to incorporate la gente, together with an often-simplified binary opposition between these “people” and La Casta. In this sense, and as a whole, our three case studies present different degrees of accomplishments of a positive hegemonic project. For instance, we argue that, while the US-based movement Occupy Wall Street was able to produce a powerful synthetic rhetoric such as “We are the 99%,” capable in its mitigated form of class analysis of potentially extending its struggle beyond the original social boundaries, ultimately it fell short because it positioned its struggle only in the terrain of civil society, thus neglecting the need for an integral struggle against the integral state, the social space where private and public institutions strategically meet. The Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle more effectively approached the integral state. Furthermore, M5S created the rhetorical basis of a national popular movement, one that could mobilize the masses and different politi­ cal subjects at the same time, but it has not been able to sustain it, thus de-generating into a national populist, rather than popular, phenomenon characterized by regressive aspects typical of Cesarism and a passive revolution. The Spanish groups Indignados and Podemos constitute, in our view, the most positive experience and the most exemplary case. While not completely exorcising the risks implied by a populist strategy, Podemos, we argue, is successfully seeking hegemony via a discourse that evolves from vernacular to national popular rhetoric. However, as briefly mentioned earlier, the historic uniqueness of each of the three cases examined in this work is juxtaposed with a consistent detection, at different degrees, of dialectics between rupture and change in the activities of OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos. While M5S’s passive revolution and national populism certainly stand out more than the other two cases for such a dialectical dynamic, in a smaller portion the same logic can be identified in OWS and Indignados/Podemos. In the case of OWS, and in spite of the positive outcomes of its war of position mentioned above, the incompleteness of its project to ­translate

A Dialectical Image  129 an ethical project into a political economic one de facto functioned as ­inoculating mainstream politics. In other words, by means of OWS, there has been an incorporation of ‘radical’ elements into US mainstream politics without a fundamental change of the logic of power behind it. On the other hand, even in the case of Podemos, which we examined in this book in the most optimistic and enthusiastic terms, the populist strategies of capitalizing on social myths such as the titanic confrontation between Podemos and La Casta risk to transform its undisputable merit to have translated Indignados’ common sense into good sense, into a regressive catechism for its social bases. It is in these dynamics that we can most clearly observe the dialectical relationship between different cultural forces, as well as the room for possibility that they may create. Thus, even though the practices we analyzed can be seen as presenting significant alternative starting points, it is also important to keep in mind the relatively privileged position from which these articulations emerge. Thus, these groups’ motivations to promote a society where everybody can have access to what they consider basic rights are neither necessarily altruistic nor completely tactical. In fact, they stem from what these protesters see as legitimate aspirations to be an empowered social group, aspirations that were made possible by the same system they are now opposing. In this sense, these movements could be seen as partly self-centered and reactionary, as it is the loss of a series of taken-for-granted privileges that mostly informs their unrest, pushing them to look for alternate frameworks. Almost three decades ago, Spivak (1988) asked whether the subaltern could speak. In many ways, this book provides a qualified answer to that question by claiming that the condition of social in-betweeners, i.e., in between privileged and unprivileged, integrated and marginalized, placed the social actors of OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos in a position of being able to speak and find a place in the public sphere. In fact, citizenship status, a relatively high level of education, social and cultural capital ­frequently inherited from their families, and familiarity with communication technologies provided these groups with chances and channels to express their political views in fairly remarkable ways. However, social liminality also manifested itself in different degrees and different ways across the three cases. The position of marginality/integration of OWS, for instance, in relation to the rest of society could be considered more ideologically removed compared to M5S, which mostly represents a jobless and precariously employed youth who claims an honest change to make Italy succeed economically in the 21st century. The aspiration of this representative segment of M5S voters cannot really be linked to the hope of radical transformation of society, but rather to a purification that really embodies the conservative logic of a passive revolution: change things so that they can remain the same—a good, stable job, and an overall comfortable life. In the case of Indignados and Podemos, the (im)possibilities of ­privilege for cultural transformation were perhaps the most apparent. In this context,

130  A Dialectical Image it may be possible to argue that it was, first of all, Indignados’ advantaged position as full members of their societies, with what Gramsci would call a ‘certain level of historico-political culture,’ that allowed them to ­convincingly question and eventually rethink a system that, until recently, had ‘naturally’ positioned them in a space of privilege. When trying to make sense of Indignados and Podemos, then, it becomes necessary to rethink privilege as not only a product of/reproducer of the current social order, but as a fundamentally dialectical construct, constantly developing in relation to dominant/residual and emergent practices. Under this view, it is important to examine our case studies as contradictory elements within their particular hegemonic systems. As Michael Billig, paraphrasing Gramsci, writes, “the mass of humanity […] does not have a consistent, unified notion of the world. Instead, their thinking is filled by diverse and contradictory bits and pieces of common-sense […] the Babel, somewhere in the din of its speaking voices, contains the rhetorical seeds of its own transcendence” (1997, p. 226). In this sense, Indignados/Podemos stands in between the concrete demand for a materially comfortable life of M5S and the pre-figurative politics of OWS. Certainly, a commonality to all three groups that in part explains their success in setting the social, cultural, and political agenda of their respective countries, derives from this liminal position between marginality and integration. By being at the borders of acceptability, they were able to function as a gate though which, on the one hand, radical messages normally located outside of the mainstream could get in, and on the other hand, messages within the mainstream could be radicalized outside of it. Where is it, then, that we can find a solid enough ground for emergent models of social organization to develop and be heard? To what kinds of practices should we scholars bring our—and others’—attention in order to account for how change may happen? In our view, it is only through turning our theoretical and analytical look towards those more integrated sectors of civil society that we can begin to intervene in these processes. This means, first of all, engaging the bias—in some ways inevitable—in most approaches in communication and cultural studies that usually puts an emphasis solely on historically marginalized groups as inevitable agents of change. We need more critiques of how “otherness, however conceived, tends to be seen as subversive, oppositional, and productive of new forms of agency and politics,” more critiques that ask whether “every de-­centeredness is necessarily resistant, oppositional, or marginal” (Shome, 2003, p. 42). In a parallel move, we need to start incorporating more systematically those segments of society that are not traditionally considered the most representative of subordinate groups as, symbolically and semiotically, they are seen as insufficiently marginal and subaltern. A cultural studies framework should thus incorporate the whole of ­society as the site where the reproduction, but also the transformation, of a ­particular set of necessary conditions takes place. In other words, an analysis

A Dialectical Image  131 aimed at highlighting possibilities for different, more egalitarian societies needs to be able to explore not only how the center (partly) defines itself by how it constructs its peripheries, but also the extent to which tensions among different sectors of this center uncover alternative starting points for a radical rethinking of societal relations. Recognizing the sometimes-inertial character of the actions that may lead to change, however, does not make initiatives like the ones studied in this book less valuable; it simply situates them as examples of how the nowadays prevailing experiences of precarious privilege in Western countries may help to open new cultural spaces and how the emergent is often the inevitable consequence of the intersections among people’s praxes (Sartre, 1968). On the other hand, seeing new possibilities as necessarily stemming from selective processes that are “experienced, built into our living” ­(Williams, 2005, p. 39) points to both the promise and the difficulty of undoing dominant cultural forces, as these new meanings and practices can be easily incorporated and adjusted to support—or at least not contradict— the values and interests of particular groups.

Social Movements in Movement As we give the finishing touches to this manuscript, the circumstances around the three movements we examined here continue to evolve, ‘moving’ on both predictable and unpredictable paths and prompting us to reflect on the arguments exposed here, as well as ways to rethink crisis, communication, and change. The history making praxis of OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos incessantly unfolds as we write, thus naturally exceeding the nature mortelike account of social movements this book inevitably provides. However, if it is true, as Walter Benjamin (2002, p. 476) claims, that “history decays into images” and images frequently decay into books and treatises, we are convinced that reviving Gramsci has provided us with the tools to make this image a little bit more dialectical and consequently more alive. OWS is, for instance, very much alive and possibly ‘kicking,’ despite the police dismantling of its encampments in many US cities. In this sense, while the account provided in Chapter 4 examines Occupy in the apogee of its parable—from its emergence through its prominence and finally to its declining curve since 2012, after the initial shock post dis-occupations, the group fragmented and reorganized in many initiatives revolving around several focused issues. Those include the environmental impact of fracking, workers’ minimum wage, and student debt. An important initiative deriving from the Occupy experience is ‘99% Spring,’ which consists of a coalition of liberal left organizations led by Moveon.org, including Greenpeace, AFL-CIO, Code-Pink, and Global Exchange. ‘99% Spring’ aims at training people in the politics of protest and non-violent direct action, especially when dealing with public officials and corporations. One of these is the initiative ‘Shareholder Spring,’

132  A Dialectical Image according to which participants mobilize to disrupt shareholder meetings of big ­multinational corporations such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo. However, and perhaps more importantly, OWS’s impact can also be appreciated at the level of shaping the political language and agenda of the current US presidential campaign for the 2016 elections, which provides even more significance to its war of position. A recent article in the magazine The Atlantic (Levitin, 2015) stated that OWS should be credited for having raised consciousness in the sphere of institutional politics on themes such as inequality, unfair distribution of income, and identity politics, which in turn provided a clear course of action for radical reform. According to Levitin, thanks to OWS current potential US presidential candidates such as Clinton, Bush, Rubio, and Cruz cannot avoid including in their speeches critical rapprochements to the wealthiest 1%, or to the need to regulate financial capital. Another recent article in the Washington Post (Toles, 2015) provocatively states that “the leaderless, agenda-less amorphous blob that camped out in New York and Washington and various other cities before disappearing without a trace had become a symbol of how not to achieve political change. Until it won.” For Toles, while Occupiers were constrained in producing any radical change by the existing structural constrains, they gained traction because they effectively pointed out the major contradictions of US society. Moreover, just as OWS has been capable of promoting primordial class analysis—implied by the 99% and 1% rhetoric—it also succeeded in endorsing, at the level of collective imagery, an anti-corporate aesthetic of doing politics that blatantly acknowledges the increasing dominance of global financial capital and the corruption of powerful lobbies in Washington DC—thus normalizing a discourse that, prior to the OWS experience, could only be attributed to marginal radical groups. Perhaps the most concrete outcome of OWS’s war of position is found in the political strength of the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders. OWS, as well as many of the movements/initiatives that spread out of it, have recently openly declared their support for Sanders through an official declaration launched via “peopelforbernie.org.” Through its ethereal presence in the public sphere, OWS is thus changing important features of the US political scenario. In the meantime, as the second political force in Italy, M5S is certainly much more present both in mainstream politics and media coverage, but paradoxically enough, it is drifting towards political marginality. In fact, as we finish this concluding chapter, M5S continues to exemplify its spectacular politics style by making provocative statements on the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the European Union, asking for border controls within Europe, or to transform Italian refugee centers into prison camps (Gjerji, 2015). At the same time, the party is trying to contain the slow but steady loss of consent, while Beppe Grillo, the loud ‘Savonarolist Prophet,’ has just been condemned for defaming a university professor in his blog.

A Dialectical Image  133 After the regional elections in spring 2015, M5S remains the second political force behind the Democratic Party, but it has also lost 4% of votes since its stunning performance in the 2013 national elections. According to many commentators, there are at least two issues affecting M5S’s impasse. First of all, the party has received much criticism for the way Beppe Grillo deals with internal dissent, which has frequently turned into anti-­democratic executive decisions to expel the dissenting members—as in the case of members Giovanni Favia and Federica Salsi, who problematized the lack of internal democracy (Dirani, 2012). Following this trend, 18 parliamentary members and 18 senators have either given up their political affiliation or been expelled in antidemocratic fashion since 2013. A second issue has to do with the chance that M5S had to form a leading coalition with the Democratic Party, which would have guaranteed its significant role in policy making. M5S, however, refused this option and was thus relegated to an unpredictable component of the opposition. While Grillo has repeatedly framed this decision as a political position dictated by the uncompromising will to not negotiate with La Casta, commentators such as the editor of the newspaper La Repubblica cynically observed that M5S wants to revolutionize the entire political system in order to replace it with its dictatorship (Scalfari, 2015). Other analysts (e.g., De Masi, cited in Orduaz, 2015) claim that Beppe Grillo has lost momentum and currently acts more as a threat to the fragile stability of the government led by Matteo Renzi, rather than as a legitimate candidate to lead the country. As for Podemos, its municipal power in Spain is currently on the rise after the recent local elections, which witnessed the materialization of different popular governments agglutinating citizen platforms and emergent parties such as Podemos. Two of these—Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comú— are currently in charge of the country’s most economically and politically significant cities. These initiatives, which Podemos enthusiastically labels the ‘mayoralties of change’ in an attempt to incorporate them into its broader discourses, have already started to implement legal measures that heavily resonate with the Indignados’ main demands back in 2011. Some of these include fining banks that retain unused property, paralyzing all evictions, or dedicating significantly more budget to social issues. The translation we narrated in Chapter 6 of a negative, mostly ­oppositional series of feelings and activities into a more positive, institutionally based set of actions through the mediation of Podemos is mostly exemplified in Barcelona’s new mayor, Ana Colau, who participated in the Indignados’ protests, co-founded the related group PAH (Platform for those affected by Mortgages), and was even arrested during a bank occupation as part of an anti-eviction protest in 2013. Today, she is part of the institutions that seemed so distant and indifferent only four years ago. Based on this successful trajectory, Podemos’ leaders are exploring similarly viable popular options for the upcoming national elections in ­ November 2015. One of these contemplates presenting what are called

134  A Dialectical Image candidaturas conjuntas, joint candidacies, or candidaturas de unidad popular, popular unity candidacies, at the regional level, which would incorporate members of different political parties—such as Podemos, Izquierda Unida, and Equo—citizen platforms such as Ahora en Común, and social movement representatives. For the moment, a similar initiative at the national level has been discarded. Interestingly, but not surprisingly from the point of view adopted in this book, a major point of contention standing in the way of these alliances is the specific name that would appear on the ballots. As a way to capitalize on its rhetorical accomplishments as discussed in Chapter 6, Podemos is reluctant to give up its brand, arguing that it is the main ‘signifier’ of the ‘will for change’ (de Blas, 2015). This position is backed up by the fact that, among all the possible candidates to join these popular unity candidacies, Podemos clearly accumulates the majority of vote intention. Next, we self-reflexively contextualize our discussion into the broader geopolitical scenario, considering the role the supra-national level may play in the examination of our three social movements.

A More Integral View Recent events around these and other cultural/economic/political contexts studied in this book prompt us to address a series of possible limits to our discussion. In this sense, and in line with Thomas’ project (2010), throughout these pages we tried to extrapolate and apply a Gramscian method of analysis, based on the historicization and contextualization of praxis. Such an approach leads us to discuss what we consider are valuable points of the so-called ‘post-hegemony’ or Autonomist literature that we identified in the Introduction. While we hope we demonstrated the continuous relevance of a Gramscian ‘hegemonic’ framework, we cannot deny that the context in which OWS, M5S, and Indignados/Podemos continue to develop is considerably different compared to the specific scenario examined by Gramsci. One of the reasons, then, for the current popularity of a ‘post’ perspective with regards to hegemony derives from its provision of particularly useful conceptual tools for understanding what is being defined as global post-Fordist and post-­ industrial capitalism. Negri (1991) for example maintains that contemporary capitalism has overcome many of the boundaries that traditionally constrained it. He advances the notion of ‘social factory’ to describe how productive practices have come to encompass almost every sphere of social life, thus allowing for the emergence of new modalities of working and new modalities of dealing with working issues. While in Gramsci, the mobilization against capital always aims at the creation of a united front of workers and ultimately the building of an alternative hegemony, from the Autonomist perspective the socialization of labor in all aspects of social life creates multiple sites of

A Dialectical Image  135 struggle. Each site, requiring its own specific approach, is not recomposed under a single ideology but remains highly heterogeneous and inhabited by contradictions (Guattari and Negri, 1990). According to Autonomist Marxism, another boundary that current ­capitalism has overcome is Fordism, the state-centered mode of production and social organization described by Gramsci. Following this argument, technical, organizational, and spatial restructuring has inaugurated a general re-structuration defined as post-Fordism, which operates at the global level. Such a re-organization started a process of dis-articulation between state and capitalism propelled by the transition from fixed to flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1991), which was accelerated by global finance and the development of electronic means of communication. These globalized developments of capitalism facilitated the emergence of supranational social actors such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, United Nations, transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and regional free trade markets such as NAFTA and MERCOSUR, as well as political actors such as the so-called Troika—the tripartite committee led by the European Commission (Eurogroup) with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. By managing, approving, and controlling loans given to countries in financial trouble, this committee demonstrates how global capital can forcefully interfere in the politics of a given nation. A dramatic example of this kind of power arose during the summer of 2015, with the so-called ‘Grexit’ crisis. The vicissitudes around the Greek political party Syriza importantly resonated with the general narrative of our three cases, and thus we would like to incorporate some self-reflexive considerations about the crisis in this conclusive section. In late January 2015, Alex Tsipras became the Prime Minister of Greece, winning the election with a party named the Coalition of the Radical Left, also known as Syriza. In the summer of the same year, after a dramatic confrontation and subsequent defeat against the Troika, in which Syriza intended to negotiate more favorable terms to face its debit crisis, repay its loans, and ask for more money to boost Greece’s economy, Tsipras resigned and called for national elections to be held on September 20, 2015. While handing in his resignation could be understood as a way to consolidate ­Tsipras’ power internally, the inability of Syriza to approve any of the ­measures demanded by the majority of Greeks—such as refusing to accept the ‘deal’ offered by the Troika—also demonstrated how the power of international finance and governance could overwhelm its mandate, therefore jeopardizing any internal national-popular project. The moral of the story revolving around Syriza, with its de facto submission to the Troika phalanx, indicates the urgency of expanding the integral approach proposed here to a framework that incorporates supra-national factors. However, at the same time, the case of Syriza clearly shows a context in which the argument against state-centric hegemony should be qualified.

136  A Dialectical Image First of all, Greece, in terms of territory, population size, GDP, and political presence in international scenarios could be considered a weaker player, and thus at the geo-political level, it may be more susceptible to exterior forces. Furthermore, the dramatic crisis pushed back Greece’s status and image to that of an underdeveloped country (Lewis, 2012). In this sense, its situation in terms of the size of financial loans and the size of the public debt/ GDP ratio could also be considered exceptional. In other words, we would argue that Greece was already structurally dependent and exposed to supranational powers, which certainly politically aggravated its position due to the anti-establishment and leftist positions of Syriza. Still, we think the question of the supra nation-state level is an i­mportant one, and thus we briefly indicate here what could be a possible route for further developing our integral approach along such lines.3 In a recent article, Jessop (2006) proposed a spatial understanding of Gramsci that ­distinguishes between place, space, and scales. In Gramsci, place refers to the everyday life site of “direct interactions among relevant social forces” (p.  424), which is exemplified by the role of the factory in shaping hegemony in Americanismo and Fordismo or the different circumstances that shaped the political position, in Italy, of northern urban working class and southern rural peasantry (Gramsci, 1971). Space, for Gramsci, consists of “the socially produced grids and horizons of social life. It offers a whole series of strategically selective possibilities to develop social relations that stretch over space and time” (Jessop, 2006, p. 426) such as the space that unites and distinguishes state and civil society, and the space created by social divisions of labor (Gramsci, 1971). While place constitutes the immediate scenario where social relations operate, space is in itself a product of social relations. Space, like history, is global, and thus, if “history is always world history” (1971, p. 182), spatial relations are always global, linking local place and space to the whole global system. Hence, states are not self-contained realities but local, relatively more crystallized clusters of a complex interconnected system. From this point of view, we point here to the need to incorporate our integral system into an organic analysis of the integrated spatial gradation that combines local, regional, state, and supra-state dimensions. Gramsci’s discussion of space already foresees the idea of scale as a hierarchy of levels that connects local, regional, national, and global and is understood as highly interconnected realities connecting the individual level of constitution of subjectivities to transcontinental phenomena such as Americanismo. Each level is organically connected to the other one. As Jessop observes, “A crucial issue in the analysis of scale is the relative dominance of different scales of economic, political, intellectual and moral life” (p. 429), which implies examining the power organizations such as the Troika or the WTO, at certain international spatial scales, are able to ­exercise over ­organizations such as a state at a different scale.

A Dialectical Image  137 Applying this spatial approach to our analysis means to continually ­ ualify and historicize our examination in order to establish the relations q of force in each case. For instance, when Gramsci criticized the weakness of an Italian state that was not capable of “making Italians,” he argued that, in the scale of political power, the region’s level mattered more than the state. In the same way, one could say that in the political power scale of Greece, the supranational dimension was dominating. On the contrary, while we recognize the utility and necessity of carrying out an analysis at all levels, we could safely argue that, in the case of Italy and Spain, the international level was not as dominant as in the Greek case. As for the US context, the specific historical circumstances in which OWS began provides a qualification of its ‘scale’ of operations. In fact, OWS was by far the most internationalist of the movements considered here, translating the global sentiments of the ‘Arab Spring’ and Indignados into an American discourse, as the icon of Wall street exemplified. However, it is interesting to notice how such an internationalism possibly prevented the group from allying with other domestic forces and forming a stronger front. Thus, the analysis of struggles for national hegemony cannot be confined to the national scale, but needs to closely examine the articulation and, indeed, interpenetration, of the local, regional, national, and supranational scales. In our cases, the supranational level was not neglected, but rather expressed by the global economic crisis, which translated similarly in each country. Each of the three movements we studied represents a distinct manifestation of this process. We did not take a national state dimension as necessarily pre-given in the analysis of our movements. On the contrary, we tried to evaluate in the scale of social activism, in a context of time and length constraints on our study, which level could be more significant. Still, we were aware that, spatially, the state level is necessarily and organically integrated into the regional, local, and supranational levels and that such a scale is historically determined as well. Clearly in the recent case of Greece, the supranational level was overwhelmingly dominant, but in the case of Spain, Italy, and certainly the US—due to the less dramatic repercussion of the crisis, and a less disputed political position of their government—the level of dominance of the international scale is much more relative. In our final section, we move to the discussion of other factors that have certainly circumscribed the scope of our analysis, which have to do with the intersection of history and our biographic elements.

Organicity and Für ewig? With this book, our goal was to intervene in the conversation in Gramscian studies by advancing a specific as well as a general objective. Specifically, we treated Gramsci as the theorizer of critical conjunctures, which entailed studying the historically determined intersection of times of crisis and

138  A Dialectical Image communicative oriented praxis that brings both revolution and restoration. Generally, we took the chance of studying communicative action in times of crisis as a way to address the broader perspective of Gramsci’s understanding of history, which led us to a constructive critique of how Gramsci has been received in cultural studies approaches to communication. As previously mentioned, the result of this undertaking could be represented as a dialectical image that tries to capture how, in a reality characterized by contradictions, people make their history as both productive actors and produced subjects, since their praxis frequently crystallizes in relatively stable institutions, structures that are perceived as external forces acting above and beyond human agency, thus showing the indissoluble link between how we make history and how history makes us. As socially and historically positioned authors, we cannot avoid taking the considerations produced in this book as a moment of self-reflection about our condition as intellectuals integrated inside the academic system. We will start with a sort of anecdote: a few months ago, one of the pillars of Podemos’ intelligentsia, Juan Carlos Monedero, left the party’s leadership in order to return to his vocational profession as a politically involved critical scholar. We experienced that moment with unsettling feelings, recognizing in Monedero’s decision many of our own motivations to play this particular role and, at the same time sensing a sort of betrayal to class ‘organicity,’ political commitment, and the very much fetishized notion of ‘intervention.’ As a way to productively work with these tensions, we recall here an often-cited portion of a letter by Gramsci to his sister-in-law Tatiana, in which he expressed the following plan: I am tormented (this is, I think a phenomenon proper of prisoners) by this idea: that I should do something “für ewig”, according to the complex conception of Goethe, that I remember tormented our Pascoli very much. Ultimately, I would like, according to a pre-established plan, to occupy myself. (1995, p. 56) In this passage, Gramsci aspires to a study that could last forever (“für ewig”) and deals with the tension that haunts the critical intellectual and his/her level of organicity, which implies the contradictory condition of proximity and distance. Thus, as in the image of the permanent translator mediating different languages, systems of thought, and historical circumstances, the intellectual must be proximate and immerge him/herself into everyday practices. At the same time, intellectuals need the necessary distance in order to go beyond the apparent and contingent differences, capturing that common substratum that allows for ‘translatability.’ In the cases we examined, this dilemma translated into the irreducibly ambiguous relations that intellectuals entertain with popular conceptions of the world that we define as ‘common sense.’ This is because, while those who intend to function as

A Dialectical Image  139 organic intellectuals must feel politics through common sense, they also need to dialectically supersede this common sense. Thus, as we observed, the intellectually informed struggle of the three movements analyzed in this book goes beyond ‘commonality.’ As Gramsci put it, common sense must be “educated and depurated” (1971, p. 357) because “in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in “language,” there is contained a specific conception of the world, one that moves on the second level, which is that of awareness and criticism (1971, p. 323). Consequently, contradictorily enough, in order for intellectuals to act organically, we require some degree of traditional intellectualism, as we must alienate ourselves from the continuous, thunderous flow of history. In a powerful passage about the critical agency of intellectuals, Adorno (1967) explained that: To anyone in the habit of thinking with his ears, the words ‘cultural criticism’ (Kulturkritik) […] are a flagrant contradiction. The cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represents unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage. Yet he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior. (p. 19) In academia, this conundrum translates into the distance that frequently allows us to produce ‘difference,’ which, when published, becomes incorporated into the very system that has created the object of cultural and social criticism. It is a Faustian curse, caught between many tensions, such as the need of a critical stance and the need to transform theory into political action; or the need to preserve the normative trust and spontaneity of the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and the need to embrace the organized and institutional politics of political party. We wish we could provide some sort of psychological closure for the existential dilemmas exposed here with which many of our readers active in academia possibly identify. But we cannot, and we prefer leaving the last word to Stuart Hall who, recalling the original political vocation of British Cultural Studies (1992), nostalgically described our condition: The problem about the concept of the organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and we can hardly tell now, where that historic movement was to be found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope […] that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that kind of relationship, if such a conjuncture ever appeared. (p. 282) Still, conjunctures happen.

140  A Dialectical Image

Notes 1. As Eagleton (2003) points out, this view of culture as “free-floating” is a misleading metaphor based on the false assumption that culture was once “firmly-­ anchored” (p. 57). For him, this categorical reversal may carry with it a dangerous assumption that “moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions,” (p. 57) thus complicating the inclusion of a normative thrust in cultural critique. A similar kind of reflexive move, as we pointed out, has taken leading figures in cultural studies approaches to communication, such as Lawrence Grossberg, to voice the need to abandon ‘culture’ as a heuristic category of analysis. 2. Communication scholars who have operationalized Gramsci’s thought, especially his understanding of hegemony, have mostly approached it as a designation for social and cultural stability and domination (McKerrow, 1989; Biesecker, 1989; Condit, 1994; Deluca, 1999; Cloud, 2006). In respect to that tendency, there have been fewer calls for closer consideration of hegemony in relation to human agency in the process of social change (Aune, 1994, 2013; Zompetti, 1997, 2012). As we mentioned in Chapters 2, 3, and 6, in this book we have tried to develop an alternative to the prevailing reading of the concept of hegemony to show its productiveness in the analysis of the rhetoric of an emerging political formation. 3. Clearly the Greek case would have constituted a great addition to our study, although time limitations prevented us from developing a more complete ­analysis. Similarly, in relation to our consideration in terms of a ‘more integral framework’ that links the local and the global, it would be interesting to test the applicability of our framework to more diverse geopolitical contexts. For instance, considering the fact that intellectual leaders of Podemos such as ­Iglesias and Errejón developed their political strategies by studying Latin ­American politics, thus monitoring the political process of countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela, it would be valuable to try to apply our framework to social movements in Latin America. Equally productive would be to analyze the anti-austerity 2012 Quebec student protest, also known as Red Square movement, in order to closely examine its capability to expand to worker unions and left wing political parties. In this sense, considering the affinities between the Quebecois movement and Occupy Wall Street (Jochems, Melanie, & Millette, 2013), it would be useful to compare and contrast the two initiatives, which would enrich our discussion of themes such as the contemporary (and highly disputed) function of the political party and the idea of creating a network of alliances among different social initiatives.

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Index

Adorno, T. 52, 139 Althusser, L. 25 Americanism 79, 85–6, 90–97, 13 Anderson, P. 26, 35, 83, 120 Artz, L. 109 Autonomy, see also Autonomist Marxism 1, 16, 67, 134–35 Bartoli, M. 38–9; 41 base and superstructure 6, 30–2, 51, 54, 64 Bitzer, L. 69, 98 Boothman, D. 38, 51, 59, 12 Bourdieu, P. 122 British cultural studies 20, 139 Callinicos, A. 75, 121 Capitalism 1, 4–6, 8, 15, 63–5, 76–7, 83, 90, 94, 96, 109, 118, 134 Carlucci A. 46 catharsis 8, 13, 16, 25, 30, 35, 38, 50, 54–5, 63, 73, 75, 77, 125, 127, 134 Catholicism 87 civil society 3, 7, 13–4, 19, 20, 25–6, 51–2, 60, 67, 70–5, 83–4, 93, 96, 104, 109, 110, 118, 128, 130 class 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 16, 19, 23–4, 26, 28–31, 34, 36, 39, 42–3, 46, 49, 52–3, 55, 57, 64, 71–2, 74, 80, 82–84, 86–8, 93, 101, 105–12, 117, 122, 128, 132, 136, 138 Cloud, D. 8, 16, 21, 27, 31, 109, 140 coercion 20, 72 collective will 35, 57, 74–7, 94, 99, 108, 112, 117, 119, 127 common sense 14, 34–5, 50, 55–9, 63–6, 68–71, 75, 78, 85, 89–80, 98–9, 104, 107–08, 111–18, 127, 129–30, 138–39 Communism 15–6, 105

Communist party (Italian) 1, 16, 111 conception of the world 34–6, 41–43, 47, 50, 52–6, 58, 66, 68, 100–01, 107, 110, 127, 138 conformism (linguistic) 47, 66 consciousness 73–6, 89, 99, 108, 116, 119, 123, 132 consent 6, 15, 20, 27, 61, 72–4, 79, 82, 85, 90, 109–10, 123, 126, 132 contradictions 4, 6, 34, 50, 54, 66, 73, 78, 103, 126–7, 132, 135, 138–39 Cox, R. 84 Crehan, K. 29 crisis; see also organic crisis 1–19, 32, 37, 50, 60, 64, 72–3, 75–6, 78–80, 82–7, 90, 92, 98–9, 102–04, 107, 109–11, 115, 118, 120–27, 131–32, 135–39 critique 8, 10, 12, 18–22, 26–27, 29, 31, 34–5, 40–1, 65–7, 79, 103, 106, 111, 121, 123–4, 127, 130, 132 critical/cultural i, 22, 31, 40, 57 Croce, B. 40–1 culture 10, 12, 18–21, 23, 24, 27–34, 38–9, 46, 48, 53, 65, 68, 89–90, 96, 103, 110, 1224, 130, 132; bourgeois 27–28; popular 23, 89–90 Day, R. 1–2, 71 De Mauro, T. 10, 37–8, democracy 4, 8, 61–2, 67, 70, 81–2, 94–5, 101, 103, 110, 116 democratic centralism 114 dialect 49, 53, 55 dialectics 2, 4, 6, 8, 10–11, 13–4, 18–20, 23–8, 31–5, 37–8, 40, 44–8, 50–60, 63, 70, 72, 77–9, 90, 99, 101, 103–4, 107, 111–2, 114, 117, 119–130, 138–139

160 Index discourse 8, 14, 16, 20, 26, 31, 34, 38, 41, 43, 53, 59, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 73, 75, 78–80, 84–88, 90, 92, 94, 99–100, 103, 106–09, 114, 118–19, 128, 132–3, 137 education 27, 41, 58, 62, 81, 92–3, 101–03, 110, 114, 126, 129 Enlightenment 70, 76, 115, Esperanto 44, 47–8 ethical-political 3, 9, 54–5, 70, 100 Fascism 83, 89 folklore 43, 45, 101 Fordism 71, 79, 90, 135–36; see also Americanism Foucault, M. 25, 123 freedom 8, 10, 19, 21, 30, 33, 37, 44, 54, 57, 69, 81–2, 85, 122, 127 French revolution 52, 70 Frosini, F. 38, 51, 54–5, 59, 126 Gerratana, V. 37–8 globalization 2, 15, 96 grammar 10, 47, 48–9, 66, 12; immanent 48–9, 51, 66, 99; normative 41, 44, 47, 49, 57–8; spontaneous 40, 66 Greene, R.W. 8, 16 Grossberg, L. 20–1, 25, 31, 121, 140 Hall, S. 10, 12, 17–9, 21–9, 31–3, 35, 37, 55, 58, 121–23, 139 Hardt, M. 2, 15–6, 71 Hauser, J. 68, 99, 108 Hegel, G. W. F. 37, 71 hegemony 1–4, 6, 8–9, 12–6, 18–9, 22, 24, 26–7, 29–30, 32, 34–5, 48–9, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 63, 70–7, 83, 90, 97, 106, 108–10, 118, 121–2, 125–26, 128, 134–37 historic bloc 22, 60, 107 historicism 2, 63 humanism 24–25 idealism 34, 39, 52 identity politics 7, 132 ideology 16, 18–9, 24–30, 33–6, 39, 41–3, 56–8, 60, 63, 65–6, 79, 86, 91–2, 96, 100, 105, 112, 114, 123, 135 immanence 125 Indignados 3, 6, 11, 13–4, 19, 49–50, 56–7, 68, 78–9, 84, 92, 94, 98–114, 117–8, 122, 126–31, 133–34, 137 individualism 92, 121

intellectuals 11, 52, 70, 96, 106–7, 111, 113–4, 118, 126–27, 138–9; organic 11, 13, 17, 53, 56, 113, 116, 139; traditional 17, 70 Internationalism 137 Ives, P. 2, 10, 38, 49, 52 Jacobinism 52 Jessop, B. 136 journalism 58, 115 labor 4, 8, 39, 73, 86, 96, 104, 110, 123, 127, 134, 136 Laclau, E. 8, 16, 21, 25, 26, 32, 75, 116 language 10, 13, 22, 31, 34, 35, 37–55, 57–59, 65–6, 69, 71, 77, 88–90, 95, 99–100, 104–05, 108, 115, 117–18, 123, 127, 132, 138–39 Lenin, V. 38, 67 Liberalism 86, 122 Lo Piparo, F. 10, 38, 40 Machiavelli, N. 87 Marx, K. 2, 5, 23, 38–9, 114, 119 Marxism 16, 19, 21–3, 24, 27–30, 38, 42, 58–9, 62, 64, 67, 85, 105, 111, 121, 124, 126; Autonomist 16, 134–5 metaphor 42, 44–8, 52, 69, 72, 80, 86, 92, 106, 119, 140 Morton, A. 2, 82 Mouffe, C. 8, 16–7, 26, 32, 75 Movimento Cinque Stelle/M5S i, 3, 13–14, 50, 52, 56, 58, 78–85, 87, 89–97, 105–6, 110–1 122, 126–34 national popular 13–14, 26, 35, 49, 52, 55, 58, 78–9, 82, 86, 94, 97–9, 103, 106–09, 111, 113, 115–19, 123, 125, 127–8, 135 nation-state 15, 82–3, 136 Negri, A. 2, 15, 16, 71, 134–135 Neo-grammarians 40–41 Occupy Wall Street 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 19, 43, 56, 60–8, 76, 84, 98, 99, 104–105, 108, 122, 128, 131, 138 Ono, K. 68, 99–101, 105 organic crisis 3, 6, 9, 11–12, 15, 19, 50, 72, 79, 82, 90, 98, 104, 107, 109–10, 120, 125–27 passive revolution 14, 35, 52, 58, 78–79, 82–85, 89, 94, 97, 121–22, 124–26, 128–29

Index  161 philosophy of praxis 2, 18–9, 23, 34, 44, 54, 58, 124 Podemos 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 19, 49–50, 56–57, 68, 73, 75, 78–9, 84–5, 92, 94, 98–119, 122, 126–31, 134, 138 political society 15, 71, 72, 125 post-Fordism 79, 135 post-hegemony 2, 8–9, 12, 16, 71, 134 prestige 38–9, 44

state 1, 5–7, 12–14, 20, 26, 48, 51, 60, 67, 70–6, 78, 81–2, 84, 87, 91–3, 96, 98, 100, 108–11, 118; integral 15, 60, 69, 70, 72–5, 83, 118, 124–25, 128, 135–37; welfare 5, 126 structuralism 24 subaltern 7, 11, 42–3, 49, 57, 64, 74, 103, 108, 122, 125, 129–30 subjectivity 16, 19, 112

reification 4, 119 restoration 82–3, 138 revolution 1, 3, 14, 28, 35, 40, 52, 55, 58, 66, 68–70, 75, 78–9, 82–7, 89, 91–4, 96–7, 101, 103, 107, 112, 118, 121–22, 124–26, 128–9, 133, 138 Risorgimento 83 Rosiello, L. 38–9, 45

Thomas, P. 3, 35, 56, 119, 128, 134 translatability 31, 35, 38, 50–53, 59, 121, 126, 138 translation 13, 19–23, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 42, 44, 47, 50–60, 63, 74–8, 85, 99–100, 104, 111, 113, 117–18, 121, 124–27, 133, 142

Saussure, F. 45–49, 58 Savonarola, G. 87–88 science 20, 38, 40, 55 semantics 41, 46, 121 Sloop, J. 68, 99, 101, 105 Socialist Party 101 social movements i, 3, 6–8, 12, 16, 19, 25–6, 32, 38; 50, 66, 71, 75, 78–9, 92, 105–06, 122, 125, 128, 131, 134; new 7–8, 16, 70 social formation 14, 24, 42, 44, 52, 54–5, 59, 70–1, 75, 94, 97, 99, 108, 126 speech 79, 92, 95, 99, 132 spontaneism 53, 116, 119

united front 3, 11, 14, 55, 103, 119, 125, 127, 134 vernacular 13–4, 26, 38, 49, 68, 78, 88–90, 92, 98–106, 108, 114–15, 117–18, 128 Volosinov, V. N. 39, 48, 58 war of position 14, 60, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 104, 106, 109, 111, 118, 128, 132; of maneuver 14, 60, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 104, 106, 109, 111, 118 Williams, R. 2, 10, 12, 18–9, 21, 24, 27, 28–34, 37, 43, 58, 71, 118, 122, 124, 128, 131 Zompetti, J. 10, 27, 64, 73, 140