The Problem of "The Narrative"

and why it's a bunch of crap

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, imprisoned by Mussolini, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci recorded his observations about the world in his prison notebooks. Because the principal record of his thoughts comes from a decade of jottings, reading Gramsci is like eating thumbtacks while experiencing a migraine. There’s no clean thread; he didn’t organize the manuscript of his life’s work with a thesis at the top that he then supported with the ordered deployment of logical, fact-centered examples. But the meditation that emerged in Gramsci’s notebooks was about power — it was an examination of the way he’d come to be imprisoned. How does a Mussolini dominate a society and organize a system of repression?

Gramsci’s answer was about culture, about the way that people think about the world and discuss it together. He didn’t invent the term hegemony, but he filled it with new substance. He argued — this is a distillation of a decade of meanderings in notebooks — that power doesn’t just work through domination and force, but through the operation of symbols. He answered the question Etienne de La Boetie asked in The Politics of Obedience: Why do people put up with domination by one ordinary man when they could neutralize his apparent power by withdrawing their obedience?

The idea, then — which has substance and worth, but stand by — is that we consent to being dominated because of the cultural hegemony of the dominant system: because we live in the context of a daily parade of symbols that tell us the dominant system is correct, worthy of support and obedience. Church, family, media: messaging systems that tell us to stay in our lane, to submit, to take power as legitimate. We mostly submit not because men with guns will come kick us in the face if we don’t, but because we absorb the endlessly reinforced message that our submission is correct. Power is backed by a mesh of symbols and stories. The narrative tells you how to live.

Taking Gramsci’s football and running with it, generations of leftists have pursued the idea that cultural expression is a key to power: You hold the right symbols in front of society’s mass face, and push away the wrong symbols, and you can drive that society like a bus. The long march through the institutions gives leftists the control of the narrative-making systems — media, academia, the administrative state — and then boom, power: power through narrative.

In a famous example of this idea presented for practice, Herbert Marcuse argued that the “tolerance” of a supposedly free and open society is just a way the idiotic masses chant their brainwashing: “Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters.” The solution, he wrote, was to weight the scale with the liberation of making people shut up:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left...The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs…When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed) — it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness.

The joke about Woke discourse — shut up, they explained — is the reality of Woke discourse.

In a more recent example that demonstrates the extraordinary clumsiness of the presumption by its dumbest practitioners, the UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff has argued that the key to political power is the control of the way language activates neural gateways — by which he just means that you should change the way you describe things so people think about them correctly. It’s problematically pro-life to say to a friend, relaying news of a miscarriage, “Did you hear? Melissa lost her baby.” Instead, being good cadre, you say, “Did you hear? Melissa lost her fetus.” Then people can’t think of abortion as something that involves babies anymore, and problem solved.

And so we have a political left — accepting at face value the idea that corporate media and the like are “left” in practice rather than as a performance, but that’s an argument for another time — that has absorbed a century of theory which foregrounds the role of narrative in the organization of power. Declaration is determinative; if you deploy a symbol, it operates.

This is how a gaggle of idiots on MSNBC declare that Winsome Sears….

…is a white supremacist:

Jewish Deplorable @TrumpJew2

MSNBC guest on @WinsomeSears: “There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.”

…or Paul Krugman announces, repeatedly and forcefully, that inflation is over, that inflation isn’t real, that inflation is transitory, that STOP TALKING ABOUT INFLATION, these are not the droids you are looking for. But then this happens:

Madison @prolife_madison

I put up price tags at the store I work at. Here are some price increases I’ve seen so far

They do this useless thing because they’ve been trained in this performance. They’re deploying symbols after a century of high-profile theorizing about the determinative power of symbols. Look mom, I’m doing a hegemony!

And the idea isn’t false: symbols matter, and the cultural world we live in shapes our ability to perceive and discuss events. But not like this, you idiots.