Hegemony and Praxis in Caribbean Popular Culture
 

W. F. Santiago-Valles
Western Michigan University

            In a recent paper, about the interactions between Caribbean popular movements and the global information system, I discussed the work of Sistren (from Jamaica), Red Thread (from Guyana) and SPEAR (from Belize). It will appear soon in an anthology, edited by Drs. Lee Artz, and Yahya Kamalipour. The small collectives discussed in that paper can be considered praxis initiatives preceding crises of hegemony.

            In this article I will explain how these terms, praxis and hegemony are used here, and give some reasons to consult a case study that is the point of comparison for popular movements in Caribbean cultural history. That case study is The Black Jacobins (1963) by C.L.R. James. The first point that will be made in this article is that praxis is the maximum mediation in the process of understanding the complexity and connections between the parts of a totality, that praxis allows us to examine communication processes from the perspective of the interactions between mass and popular cultures.

            The second point being that placing culture in the context of power inequities (which was the former mission of Cultural Studies) suggest that the initiative is with the popular movements interpreting reality through their own collective interest. Mass culture is a reaction to that loss of cultural leadership and active consent, as are measures to discipline daily life such as the global factory (or salaried slavery), the elimination of public spaces, and the destruction of merchandise/machinery. .

            In this article I will define praxis and hegemony or cultural leadership, while referring to the points made by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins about popular initiatives to which globalization has been then and now a historic reaction (whether in the reorganization of work, information distribution, or war). As the concepts are presented, contemporary examples from some autonomous interpretation of the Caribbean context (among the popular sectors whose initiatives inform the reactions of mass culture) will also be provided.

                        In 1926 Gramsci used hegemony to mean the system of alliances that served as the social basis for direct democracy, as the consent organized to replace representative government. Later in the Prison Notebooks the same author referred to hegemony as the promotion of shared interest which form the basis of consent to the existing order. Such bases for consent are reproduced by social relations, institutions, and ideas connected by groups of intellectuals. The material bases for this ongoing negotiation is the meeting of basic needs in exchange for active consent, and it operates as a more advanced form of social control. The shared assumptions or common sense of the governing alliance are organized by the same world view that inform those mass culture institutions restraining the  popular initiatives.    

Mass Culture and Cultural Leadership

            The first means of access to a definition of hegemony is the relation between the products of mass culture and cultural leadership. This relation includes mass production, mass media, and the extension of the market's logic to politics and culture as expressions of power inequities. As the alliance of dominant classes attempts to represent the interests of the whole society, they seek support for those relations of inequality which organize daily experience. In this context, obtaining the active consent of the dominated expresses the exercise of power over sectors which lack cultural autonomy, trying to make sense of the existing social relations with the dominant justifications. As a means of clarifying the contrast between an apparent negotiation and the conflicts between opposing social forces, the State can be a point of departure since the production of active consent for the governing ideas during crises of accumulation takes place under the State’s coercive shadow.

            During the 1930s in the Caribbean region, those governing ideas went hand in hand with imperial industrialization and the legacy of slavery. Those were also the conditions under which the cultural autonomy of the popular sectors had survived. The understanding of themselves represented in their everyday practices, denied the dominant "common sense" compliant collaborators or associates. Practices which insisted in challenging unquestioned premises, which located the slave trade as the cultural origin of the region's history, could hardly have been negotiated in a social compromise whose function was to present the industrial investors and the colonial administration as guardians of the common good.[i] This was the context and goal of C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938, 1963).

            The second point about the production of active consent is that the coalitions formed against the governing ideas are often based on long term solutions to the material conflicts in which the allies become subjects. These groups do not become social movements by internalizing that governing rationality, but by creating alliances which can transform the relations of power (Gramsci, 1985, p.41).

            This was the case with a group called Red Thread which brought together working class Guyanese women of African and South Asia origins in an embroidery project for economic self-reliance, networked with other women’s groups across the Caribbean and set up an exchange program with one of them (named Sistren) in Jamaica to learn techniques used to promote discussions about daily life, investigated the cultural history of the symbols suited for the embroidery work, published life histories of women working in the sugar industry, put together a women’s labor research team for popular education, organized a academic seminar on development, sponsored a health workshop, published inexpensive school text books in their printing shop, started a feeding program, had a radio serial on domestic violence, published a newspaper, and worked with indigenous peoples to start small businesses in the interior of the country (Andaiye, 2000). Sistren in Jamaica was a natural choice in the search for mentors in the Anglophone Caribbean. This group included working class women, theatre workers and university professors in Jamaica who had been working on turning oral histories into plays that provoked audience participation for over ten years when Red Thread started. 

            What makes the discussion about culture relevant here is that those relations of power are maintained through a combination of coercion and consensus.s.[ii]  When popular movements are accumulating allies, or retreating in an orderly fashion, it is most important for them to question the ways of thinking and acting which do not represent the majorities' interests. They challenge these representations not as neutral ideas, but rather drawing attention to the social history in which "reason" and "logic" have complemented the use of force to suppress initiatives of the popular alliance.

            According to Michael Ryan, "force" should be used in discussions about cultural leadership in order to express the interaction between the stability created by a popular consensus around its own social project, and the forces organized against it (Ryan, 1989, pp.8-10).  The question this raises for the popular movements is whether a counter-force should precede or succeed another strategic consensus.[iii] This was one of the points examined by the writer in The Black Jacobins.

            According to Agustín Cueva the answer might be in understanding how conditions of exploitation in the colonies served to subsidize the consensus reached in the imperial centers, under the cultural leadership of the governing alliance (Cueva, 1984, pp.31-37).  I agree. The instances of cultural and economic participation which European and North American workers received during the first third of the 20^th century would hardly have been undertaken at an economic loss to those who profited from the business of the country. How then was a consensus financed?  If profits extracted from the colonies were a source of funds, then the material conditions for government by consensus in Europe and North America depended on a colonial empire governed by the coercive forces of the State. The latter could support conditions of exploitation while missionaries, school teachers, plantation administrators and commercial media gave the colonial empires ethical and intellectual leadership against the cultural autonomy of the popular in the occupied territories.[iv] Since flag independence everything has changed so that nothing changes.

            Thus domination is not reduced to the passive acceptance of working conditions, it also includes negotiations in which the State attempts to limit the citizenry to the market's authority. Mass culture is the systematic representation of those social relations, their industrial distribution and the appropriation of popular culture forms to do so. The study of the technologies used to circulate information does not necessarily provide the kind of access into cultural histories which is possible through the study of the appropriation of popular forms. Reconstructed as merchandise to produce a justification of market logic, the results can give people in the field of communication access to conflicts between ways of representing collective experience.

            Andreas Huyssen has called these efforts to regiment daily life through the institutions of mass culture, a "system of secondary exploitation." (Huyssen, 1986, p.15)  Attempts to actualize experiences of solidarity should be considered in light of those mass culture efforts to deny any other reference to those challenging authority.[v]

            The institutions of mass culture can rearrange the original representations of popular experiences, but the result cannot produce an understanding of that community's awareness.  Historical experience is "reduced" to the options in the official representations: obedience or confrontation, solving the causes of the conflict is not considered. As a space where the relations between these forces is expressed, J. Martín Barbero and Armand Mattelart consider mass culture a site of social conflict.(Martín Barbero, 1987a, p.48; Mattelart, 1983, p.24) The conditions in which culture is produced and consumed as merchandise generates individuals who are the consequence of domination, who cannot create an organized initiative. But the analysis of a group or movement should consider how they came to understand the social relations that underlie the consumption of mass culture, and how that understanding was communicated.[vi]

            The institutions which reproduce the sectorial interests of the governing alliance as representations of the "common good" are instrumental in the exercise of power. This is the context for the struggle between cultures, between codes of competence and cognition. When the dominated become aware of these restrictions, they still need another way of thinking and acting to propose methods of social change. Such a representation of collective interests is constructed in projects of effective participation that affect the daily lives of the conscious sectors of society.[vii]

Meaning and Knowledge

            The second concept connecting hegemony and praxis is the relation between the extraction of information (from the context) to produce meaning and the knowledge created through injection of tension to produce possibilities for change. The latter could also be described as generating the crises or conjunctures that explain totality. In order to include the social subjects in their interactions with the context, my emphasis is on the relations between the parts. In this way the attention given to cultural practices in the daily life of the subjects can be linked to the relations of force. Even when they are both social productions, what is perceived as reality by passive observers who extract information and active subjects who inject tension may not be the same. For the active subjects it was not a matter of choosing between the social acts which produced a new situation and the extraction of information. A combination of the two was needed to establish the relations between the empowering changes to daily life and the State. It was not always easy for the small groups of activist-intellectuals to figure out what their role could be in such an empowering strategy. Some did the historical research, yet, according to Jesús Ibáñez, what was required was a representation of totality that used the extracted information to design social actions that could alter the balance of forces. (Ibáñez, 1991) The small groups and the popular movements needed to generate a "conversation" which produced information about reality and developed possibilities for change. They would become subjects as they asked and discovered that knowledge and power were related to questioning everything about the whole.[viii]

            In Belize the Society for the Promotion of Education and Research (SPEAR) provides a contemporary example similar to Red Thread (Guyana) and Sistren (Jamaica). After providing research and education support for the social movements during the 1970s, SPEAR has expanded its activities to address the social consequences of globalization: stalled economic growth, state mandated austerity, and increased economic hardships for the new poor among urban unemployed youth and women. In addition to doing advocacy work for economic development, social justice and participatory democracy SPEAR has been supporting popular praxis efforts both among urban and rural workers, as well as among the new poor. That support work includes a weekly radio and television talk show where popular movements discuss issues of mutual interest. The support work also includes producing several documentaries to encourage debates about alternative futures for the nation. Most importantly SPEAR has provided cultural leadership through self-empowerment emerging from participatory action research (Vernon, 2000). As with Red Thread, SPEAR’s efforts exemplify the ethic of self-emancipation among the Black Jacobins whose initiatives forced the State to reorganize an earlier version of globalism.

            In societies organized by relations of inequality there are several ways to produce reality and represent the manners in which it is experienced.  What survives in the interpretation are the associations with the historical memories, unleashed by the context in which the exchange of symbols took place. This production of meaning by active subjects is what redefines processes of communication as cultural practices. (Ibáñez, 1985, p.86) 

            To define how the production of knowledge will be used here, I will consider briefly how social events can be registered. As mentioned above, they can be represented within a historical context. That representation can be interpreted in several ways: within the dominant codes of logic and rationality or against those codes, or by confronting them from another ethical ground outside the dominant truth systems. What still remains as a central issue is the process of confirming which of those interpretations is a more accurate expression of the way reality is experienced. There are means of corroborating which confirm the premises of the existing order. But there are other means of validation which compel the State to throw up evidence that contradicts those premises, revealing the relations between the daily life of the popular sectors and the totality.[ix]

            The popular sectors need a way of explaining totality as a product of social relations that have been changed in the past, and can be changed again. The small praxis groups can help the social movements recognize and analyze their historical relations with all the existing institutions: identifying conflicts within the components of the official truth system, pointing out ethical inconsistencies, demonstrating the limitations of their common premise, raising awareness about holistic critiques and desires which have been excluded through combined institutional efforts. Gathering information to design social actions that will transform all the institutions is necessarily a collective cultural analysis. This includes evaluating the social actions as well, since they are also part of the totality. (Guattari, 1984, p.32, 38, 40; Loureau, 1981, p.176, 182)  Both in the case of popular movements and collectives of activist-intellectuals, this combined strategy is used to consciously produce something new by transforming all the social institutions.

            According to N. García Canclini, to know is not to add facts as they appear, but to understand the relations which give those facts meaning within an explanation of the whole society. (García Canclini, 1988, p.483) This is the activity that the groups which exercise power would like to restrict, in order to control the conversation among the social forces. It is insufficient for the dominated to respond by generalizing continued doubt as to the interpretations produced within the logic of the market and this is why Ibáñez (1985) suggests an independent verification of the holistic explanations proposed, as a measure against the monopolies of culture.[x] 

Praxis

            The third concept is praxis, which refers to the mediation that through critical reflection links theory and social actions (of mobilized consciousness to transform power relations). A social force can only be overturned by its equal, and a theory becomes a social force if sectors of the population recognize it as an account of their situation. Praxis is the social capacity to work out the continuity between reality and possibility as a new understanding of the whole society. Praxis is also the process of confirming the limitations of the previous understanding and discovering conflicts at the gaps between what is and could be. A praxis process verifies both the inclusion of conflicting interests and causal relations (in which the subordinate seize the initiative), and their analysis against the grain of the logic proposed by commercial media. This praxis of the popular movements should inform the critical analysis of media globalization, as the latter complements the continued private ownership of unpaid labor generated by coercive relations on an international scale.

            Though the abstract analysis of the parts (such as re-colonization or re-enslavement) is not a substitute for direct action, praxis is the necessary reflection about how theories which had been applied before could be useful in the present. What is new today and worth examining is not globalization but the increased awareness of the connections between social inequality, the redefinition of the national/regional, and events around the world, among groups previously working in relative isolation.  The historical evaluation of applied theory qualifies as praxis, in the sense that it will be used here, when recuperated examples illustrate how the conscious separation from dominant values is connected to the discovery of a new common purpose and shared mindfulness.

            Social subjects are constituted through their conscious efforts to transform the relations of power. That process includes a critique of the premises which are validated by the industrial production and consumption of merchandise.

            For those in the process of becoming historical subjects, the perception of reality occurs through this acquired understanding of totality. A conscious practice that recognizes the historical connections between all the social institutions organizing daily life, includes a critique of the representations it uses. Praxis is the ongoing evaluation of the way those representations are used, and the social decision to use them in the interest of self-emancipation.[xi]

            The definition of praxis brings us to one of the central issues emerging from this theoretical reflection that requires further research. How is an understanding of totality, which is autonomous of the dominant logic, acquired by groups which can become a social force? One of the ways is by putting their previous understanding in the context of social history, to find excluded versions, causal relations and an inventory of conflicting interests. This social epistemology combines knowing and doing, taking collective action and evaluating the changes both to the subjects and the context. It is the appropriating of the cultural tools needed to solve the causes of social conflict instead of negotiating its representations. As an autonomous understanding, praxis is the result of the communication between subjects whose combined efforts deal with the causes daily and permanently.[xii] Throughout the Caribbean the counter hegemony which offers hope for a human-centered future emerges from groups like SPEAR and Red Thread whose initiatives strengthen exchanges between popular movements. It is from such dialogic exchanges between organized groups that inclusive representations are crafted, with layered registers based on shared experiences connecting collective memories with opportunities for direct participation. The new global technologies designed to discipline the initiatives of the social movements also facilitate the communication (without intermediaries) between communities of resistance across the Caribbean Diaspora. Those present and future conversations take place in a world that, according to Ras Mutabaruka, still needs much rearranging.  

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