To what Extent Thatcherism was Hegemonic - Essay Example

Running Head: Thatcherism To what extent Thatcherism was hegemonic of the of the Introduction: London is a city that historically has always been both integral to the identity of Englishness, as well as a city with its own fiercely independent culture. This tension lies at the heart of the ideology that underpins British national identity. In order to stabilise national identity, London is often subsumed into larger narratives of identity. Yet in the Thatcherism period when the ideology of nationalism was being mobilised to obscure the function of divisive economic and social policy, London became the site of literary resistance. The work of Ian Sinclair used London as both the location and substance for a critique of Thatcherism. In what follows I want to explore his novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings as a text that uses the city as the site of opposition, as the locale for a critique of dominant ideology (John Corner and Sylvia Harvey, 1991: p. 11.) Thatcherism, Economic Rationalism and Hegemonic Nationalism As many commentators have observed, the period of Thatcher's rule was one in which monetarist policies of enterprise and the manipulation of the nation's history went hand in hand. This relationship transformed a number of elements of English national identity. Gone was the post-war optimism in which Britain embraced a far more egalitarian form of social organisation. As John Corner and Sylvia Harvey assert of Thatcherism: "Freedom and independence derive not from civil rights but from choices exercised in the market (Perry Anderson, "The Figures of Descent", 1992, p. 184.) The sovereignty that matters is not that of king or queen, the lord or the white man, but the sovereignty of the consumer within the marketplace. Massive levels of personal debt and widespread unemployment marked this perceived sovereignty of the consumer. Indeed, as Raphael Samuels suggests, Thatcher's rhetoric managed to effectively obfuscate the fact that her government's policies led to a drastic rise in household debt, from 8 per cent at the beginning of her Prime Minister ship to 14 per cent by its conclusion. In 1983 close to 30 per cent of the London population were living, or in danger of living, below the poverty line. The inner city areas in particular suffered from high unemployment and substandard housing amid the proliferation of the modern movement's tower block public housing. Many commentators as necessary to slim the bloated government running costs and spiralling national production under Labour regarded the economic policies of Thatcherism. Yet as Perry Anderson has argued, Thatcherism economic record was based on luck as much as effective management. Thatcherism claimed that the Union movement was crippling British production, responsible for a downturn in productivity. Its draconian treatment of Union's in the miner's strike of 1984/5 was therefore portrayed as an economic necessity (Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century, 2002. p. 222.) Antonio Gramsci's concept of Hegemony Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting (Gramsci, Antonio (1971). The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow 'economic-corporate' interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a 'historic bloc', taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the base (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,1971). Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to Christianity, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience (Jay, Martin (1986). Marxism and Totality). For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force. A Historiography of Place As explained earlier, Thatcherism constructed a large, national historical edifice upon which to mount its ideology. Sinclair's response is to place history in the local, yet that local cannot be a site of memory, Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire. To turn to physical sites, as a writer like Peter Ackroyd often does, is to return to a mode of demoralisation that suggests history is embodied in abstract and isolated locales, that it is to be preserved, rather than to be actively explored. As Sinclair acerbically remarks in Rodinsky's Room: "blue plaques induce guilt, forcing us to remember those who might prefer to be forgotten. But we can't allow it. We want to hold them there, in place, to give meaning to our own temporary existence." This form of demoralisations can be aligned with the explosion of institutionalised material history under Thatcherism in which history shifted from being an active and collective social construction, to being the product of consumerised cultural enclaves, such as the non-publicly funded museums that proliferated in the period. In order to challenge both the monolithic histories of nationalism and the macro-hermetic narrative of institutionalised and commodified material history; Sinclair developed a historiography of place. For Sinclair history is not an abstract series of events, dates and places, but something than is embodied in the urban landscape: "So it's all there in the breath of the stones. There is geology of time! We can take the bricks in our hands: as we grasp them, we enter it. The dead moment only exists as we live it now (Jorg-Louis Borges, 1992: p.viii) " History is therefore about a form of historical consciousness, of entering into the urban landscape conscious that the past surrounds you. That sense of place is part of a much larger web of historical energy that permeates the city: "Southwark holds its time, with the City, with Whitechapel, with Clarkenwell, holds the memory of what it was: it is possible to walk back into the previous, as an event, still true to this moment." As Sinclair suggested in Lud Heat, there are certain lines of influence in the city, the result of certain events and personages that have inhabited it. Yet unlike site-specific memory they cannot be tied down, with the lines of influence being constantly altered, as the city is being constantly re-worked and altered by the passage of time. In this vision London is the locale for a history that through its resistance to monolithic or hermetic meaning is able to outline a new form of historiography and historical consciousness. The central historical period and event examined in the novel, the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, function as an example of both an instance of the failure of empirical historiography, and an instance of this alternative form of historical consciousness that Sinclair attempts to align with London. The events of the Jack the Ripper crimes function in the novel as symbolic of the failure of rationalising historical investigation. While the crimes remain unsolved, the desire for historical closure grows ever greater. Yet for Sinclair the only mode of closure is that of deliverance, that can only come through an understanding of place. The central locale in the novel is the area around Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with a range of forces imbuing it with a meaning that raises the area above the reduction to economics that was so vital to Thatcherism and Victorian England. One such force, along with the Whitechapel slayings, are the Ratcliff Highway murders: "The staked heart of John Williams, the Ratcliff Highway Murderer, beats evenly at the quadrivium, at peace, from the shunting of the work ethic, connected in a mysterious and unspoken thread to the recently scoured white stone blocks of St George in the East." Here this alternative, occult concept of history works to create networks of meaning that are fluid and ambiguous, seated in a form of urban subjectivity. As the narrator asserts: "we have got to imagine some stupendous whole wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-exists, which, passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us." This theory of a historical consciousness emerges in opposition to the constructed hegemonic nationalism of Thatcherism historiography, possessing the potentiality to critique Thatcherism ideology by undermining not only its histories, but also the discursive structures upon which they are constructed (Margaret Thatcher, 1987..) Conclusion: Thatcherism as a hegemonic project, Stuart Hall points out that discourse theory provides insight both into the ways in which Thatcherism was constructed as a discourse from a combination of disparate ideological strands and into the ways in which this discourse was engaged in a hegemonic project. However, discourse analysis has rarely been applied in empirical study of the spread of the ideas and values of Thatcherism. The findings of attitude surveys indicate the failure of Thatcherism to produce radical social and cultural change. This paper presents textually oriented discourse analysis as an alternative way of understanding the spread of Thatcherism to that of attitude surveys. Research applying the approach demonstrates the continuing use of elements of Thatch rite discourse across the Conservative party and Labour party and hence the lasting impact of Thatcherism in spite of its failure to become hegemonic. References John Corner and Sylvia Harvey "Introduction: Great Britain Limited" in Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (eds.). London: Routledge, 1991: p. 11. Raphael Samuels, "Mrs Thatcher and Victorian Values" Theatres of Memory, Volume II Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. Verso: London, 1998: pp. 341-3. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People, London, Penguin, 2002. p. 222. Perry Anderson, "The Figures of Descent" English Questions. London: Verso, 1992, p. 184. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988: p. 8. Iain Sinclair, Radon Daughters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994: p. 126. Eric Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism. London: Routledge, 1997: p. 122. Margaret Thatcher, as quoted in James Walvin, Victorian Values: A Companion to the Grenada Television Series, London, Andre Deautsch, 1987. Jorg-Louis Borges, as quoted in the introduction to Hanif Kureishi, London Kills Me: Three Screenplays and Four Essays. London: Penguin, 1992: p. viii. Margaret Thatcher, as quoted in Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism. London: Routledge, 1997: p. 96. Patrick Wright, On Living, p. 186. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000: p. 1. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 2002: p. 215. Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson, The Verbals. London: Worple Press, 2003. Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room. London: Granta, 1997: p. 6. Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. London: Paladin, 1988, p. 112 Ellice Hopkins, as quoted in Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. London: Book Club Associates, 1976: p. 208. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, ISBN 0-85315-280-2, p.lxxxix. Bottomore, Tom (1992). The Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0631180826.' Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. ISBN 071780397X.' Jay, Martin (1986). Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. University of California Press. ISBN 0520057422.' Read More