Popular, Plebeian, Subaltern. EP Thompson Plebeian culture - Alabarces Culura Popular en Agregntina

Last week as part of the Argentine CARLA meeting we discussed reading on the notion of the plebeian and the popular, to get a better sense of the conceptual engagement for the project.  Particularly we aim to define the intersections of race and popular en Argentina.

We read the classic by EP Thompson on patrician society and plebeian culture, and Alabarces and Rodrigues on popular culture. Interestingly the day before I was at a part of a live stream by Santoro and Saborido in relation to May 1st, and the visual image of workers in 1940s-50 graphic illustration. I will comment on the three.

EP Thompson's article is so productive and detailed, had not read him for a really long time, and was surprised to enjoy after coming back to his work. Of course, there is a fundamental critique to make in regards to the evolutionist perspective on the culture and politics of plebeians in the 18th century that for him is a "path" only into a real class consciousness, only to come in the 19th century.

And yet Thompson cannot avoid his excitement about the cultural forms and also the potency of the plebeian culture. He is also quick to highlight that there is intention and volution and clarity fo action in plebeian movements when for example during food riots in UK peasants take over the town centre, free the prisoners in jail, and collectively demand for food. So the question about what they "lack" in regards to a real full consciousness would be party or union organizing. And here is where subaltern studies and autonomist lines will jump to highlight this as purely political action, a subaltern form of politics, that redefines the field itself, or a completely independent movement of radical autonomy.

So what Thompson says is that the 18th century is a very interesting moment in regards to power. While previous moments the authority of aristocracy was stronger and received more adherence, we are in a context in which such power is being critiqued, yet not fully undone. Ruling class has the economic power and the military force (which for EPT comes 1st) yet culture is key to mantain order too (even if it comes 2nd) Withing the Gramscian coercion-consent diad, this is a moment in which coercion is still very alive, yet he argues it can not be the only form of power or otherwise too costly and exhausting.

So what are the transitional elements for him:
1. From customary work (personal interactions, work in the house/workshop) to work discipline.
2.  Enlargement of the economic sector that is (relatively) independent from the gentry. this produces consumers as well as producers, exchanges between relatively equal people. Extension of trades. 
3.  Labour becomes relatively independent from gentry: from favors (ie sleeping in somebody's barn) to paid exchanges.

One problem is though that a nondisciplined + independent workforce is prone to regular insubordination.


How is then some consent achieved? He recognizes that at the time legitimacy of patrician society is crumbling, new professions, trades and town people see gentry as lazy, corrupt, not productive, and they mock their existence. Yet some degree of legitimacy is kept through Theatrical enactment of an aristocratic life that separates gentry from common people. This theatrical enactment is exactly a point of mockery in the common people, yet effective enough. Examples are the daily enactment of distinction [my terminology] and the ritual nature of hunting [ritual is EP Thompson's term].

The separation in temporal and behind the doors, fences of the castles. [Interestingly EPT talks about time but not space (pre spaciality moment).] yet this separation is also a condition for a mutual interdependence and mirroring effect. "the illusion of paternalism is too fragile to risk sustained exposure." The spiritual dimension is still linked with the ruling class yet this power is crumbling. Church had lost the power over the leisure time of the plebe, EPT claims, and yet I wonder if the Church ever aimed to have a complete control over it, whether if the licenses are not part of the way the authority is built. Thus puritanism may not be just a reaction but rather a distinct formation.

 Saturday evening and Sunday mornings become moments of socialization, pleasure, as well as festivities on idle agricultural times. There is a tolerance by the gentry of the enjoyment fo peasants. Thus the culture of luxury and excess of the gentry is mirrored and allowed in a culture of enjoyment by commons. 

p395 Plebs is not a working class. There is a lack of consistency, consciousness, self-definition and clear objectives. In sum, Plebeian and patrician is a mutually dependent, permissive society where pleasures are allowed as a form of maintaining political legitimacy. This resonates with arguments of recent work by Santoro of Peronism as a political and cultural form of the excess instead of a puritan restrain. Peronism as saturated fat, choripan, gaseosa instead of just water. there is a sense of enjoyment of not giving away that possibility, never. There is no demand for a sacrifice that was present in both liberal, for example, US rhetoric and culture of the worker, a viril self-restrained superman, or the soviet disciplined subject sacrificing for the revolution. Peronism is different: it is enjoyment, luxury for the people, not satisfaction of a need but a joyful excess. This may be a point in the tension with the elites / upper class that cannot tolerate the joy of the masses. 


What is an example of plebeian action: riots, revolts. As mentioned before EPT is in admiration of the power he sees in the archive written by the aristocracy. The reports saying "all of a sudden the town saw a mob demanding..." Gentry gets caught by surprise, is taken by the potency of a mob. He highlights the:  anonymity, spontaneity, and the deliberate nature of the mob.
 

The riots are not by trade, which shows that is not just about the specific relationships, but a larger consciousness o a social position. In the food riots, there is a common consciousness and ideology " a unified beast as aristocracy shows" yet this is different than a class consciousness. P398 long discussion on how s not class consciousness yet. "pre-political infancy of class" there is an anticipation of class attitudes and organization, fleeting expressions of solidarity.  This is an immanent working-class "whose evolution is retarded by a sense of the futility of transcending the situation." The mob is integrated by primitive rebels.

3 characteristics of popular action are:
1. Anonymous position of the critique. The deference is performed.
2.  Counter theatre. Theatre of sedition towards patrician society.
3. Mob is created in direct action yet with clear direction, discipline, has clear objectives voiced as specific demands to patrician, negotiate as a body.

The mob is a symptom is a sign of the weak state. 

In this sense the plebeian culture is a "backward" pre institutional, pre bureaucracy and rationalization. The mechanism of power is not the one Weber would describe in the rationalization but rather based on licence, performance, interdependence and mirror images. For EPT this is as he names it as a transition only. What later others will highlight is that it is a form of politics in itself.

- Potency of the performance and mirror relations. "Raw" interrelation between gentry / plebeian. 
- Potency of the undiscipline + un-institutionalized.
- There is will yet not a long term plan.

Alabarces likewise has a "negative" in the sense of critical take on plebeian culture.For him the plebeian culture is that when the elite incorporates the forms of the lower classes and mimcs them (here the emphasis is turn upside down in relation to EPT) yet all the cirtical and transformative power of popular culture is washed away. They are specifically talking about the state of culture in 1990s Argentina, where ruling classes dance cumbia, because is fun but no longer threatening to the political order, where they can accept a "negro" president because he has power and because they are comfortable in the distance they have with him, aristocracy always being confidently  white and long term in power.

Thus for Alabarces and Rodriguez a cultural analysis is still a critically political analysis. They suggest 3 necessary moves of all and any popular culture analysis:
1. Regard Class  
2. Distance from populism
3. always regard culture as political.
 
Thus while now culture becomes a field of analysis in which intellectual is participant, a shift that implied the reference to "gente" instead of "pueblo," there is still a need to repoliticize analysis. For example, what is the range of choice when turning channels if all TV is more or less in a same range of the political debate.

Symbolic inequalities is generated not only in the access to cultural goods,
but : in the conditions of production. How is discourse and in what conditions is it produced.

Who accesses voice and the power to represent. What happens when representation I achieved, and a subaltern culture enters the field of the visible, but only to become "more of the same." It cancels all radical critique and does not transfer the conditions of production to the subaltern, but appropriates it.
In this sense, for the authors, plebeian culture is a form of conservative populism with no connection to radical Latin American culture.  

This is another negative take on the plebeian. interestingly it implies a positive valuation to populism in the Latin American Left tradition, and in tension to more recent uses of populism in the English and the US European intellectual circles, which use it to refer to the conservative turns as a result of uneducated, resentful working classes falling for demagogic governments.

- I need to go back to Alabarces but did not find a systematic definition of popular culture in neither of the texts.  This is probably part of the critique that more recently Adamovsky is making to the notion f populism, even when thes two ar very different. 

- Both have negative takes on plebeian, EPT as simplified, infant form of class consciousness, Alabarces as a corrupted form of popular culture.

- Both highlight the direct link that plebeian culture makes between elites and lower classes, the irreverent nature of plebeian culture seems to also breed the political subordination instead of challenging it.

- Both seem to highlight that there is no explicit pedagogy or morality but rather an enjoyment contained in the production and consumption of plebeian culture.

An implication is that there is not mediated rationality, but an affective existence of culture, it is not for itself but it is. Plebeian culture is thus not a class conscious but is also not unconscious or preconscious either but an assertion of enjoyment, consumption, vitality. Yet I would say while is not necessarily conservative, is also not per se transgressive. Is non-programatic. It is closer to the non-warranties.
    
I can't avoid thinking of this conversation by Sztulwark / Horowicz. where they describe the link between an irreverent nature of plebeian politics and the more organic, party / election  mediated nature of popular. Yet there is again no warranty that plebeian will be revolutionary,  or that it will take the possibilities for a change or that is will not end promote coservative undemocratic processes. Ie During Allende government plebeian mob asks for the Congress to be disiolved, for the government to stop mechanisms to defend democratic institutions agianst the coop.