WILLIAM ROSEBERRY Hegemony and the Language of Contention In soliciting papers for this volume, the editors pointed to two paradig- matic bodies of scholarship that should inform our understandings of “everyday forms of state formation”. James Scott's work on a wide variety of forms, acts, and “arts" of popular resistance to dominant orders (see especially 1976, 1985, 1990), and Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's study (1985) of a specific dominant order—the formation of the English state, seen as a centuries-long process of economic transformation, politi- cal extension and construction, and cultural revolution that formed both “the state” and particular kinds of social and political subjects. The authors’ task was to consider the relevance of these projects, developed and applied to other world areas (Southeast Asia and England), for an understanding of Mexican state formation and popular culture. While the editors of this volume clearly intended for us to consider Scott and Corrigan and Sayer's works in relation to each other, to think about how we might simultaneously examine the formation of orders of domination and forms of resistance, it is also apparent that many of the contributors have followed Alan Knight's lead in placing the works and perspectives in partial opposition to each other—the “moral economy" of the peasantry and other subordinate groups as opposed to “the great arch” of the triumphal state Although it might be helpful to examine the various ways in which each of these bodies of work speak to each other, | simply wish to point out that each of their founding metaphors is taken from the work of E. P. Thompson. Scott took Thompson's references to the “moral economy” of the poor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England (1963, 1971) as central image and starting point for his own theoretical model of peasant consciousness in the face of capitalist expansion and the formation of| The Language of Contention 356 colonial states (Scott 1976). Corrigan and Sayer, in turn, take Thompson's critique of orthodox Marxist understandings of “the bourgeois revolution” as a challenge for their study of the formation of the English state (Thompson [1965] 1978a). Rather than locating "the" revolution at 2 single upheaval in the mid-seventeenth century, Thompson wrote of 2 long and particular history of statemaking and capitalist transformation. challenging Marxists to abandon readymade historical and political scripts and explore the historical formation of particular capitalist civili- zations. For Thompson, the image of a “great arch” is both architectural (a towering and solid structure of bricks) and temporal (an arch of time during which the structure is built and through which it takes its dimen- sions and form). Both senses matter to Corrigan and Sayer: to write the history of the bourgeois revolution in England one had to write of a great arch spanning nine centuries Continuing the attempt to relate the works of Scott and Corrigan and Sayer in our understanding of Mexican state formation and popular culture, let us consider a third Thompsonian metaphor: the “field of force." Thompson proposes the image in his essay “"Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?" (1978b), in which he” specifically addresses the problem of popular culture within relations of domination, arguing, “What must concern us is the polarization of antag- onistic interests and the corresponding dialectic of culture” (ibid. 150). In describing a field of force, he provides a suggestive image, in which an electrical current magnetized a plate covered with iron filings. The filings, which were evenly distributed, arranged themselves at one pole or the other, while in between those filings which remained in place aligned themselves sketchily as if directed towards opposing attractive poles. This is very much how I see eighteenth-century society, with, for many purposes, the crowd at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other, and until late in the century, the professional and merchant groups bound by lines of magnetic dependency to the rulers, or on occasion hiding their faces in common action with the crowd (ibid.: 151) As he turns his understanding of such a field toward the analysis of popular or plebeian culture, Thompson suggests that its “coherence arises less from any inherent cognitive structure than from the particular field of force and sociological oppositions peculiar to eighteenth-century society, to be blunt, the discrete and fragmented elements of older patterns of thought become integrated by class” (ibid.: 156) This metaphor carries certain obvious but important problems. First, the magnetic field is bipolar, and most of the social situations with which xWilliam Roseberry 357 we are familiar are infinitely more complex, with multiple sites of domina- tion or forms and elements of popular experience. Because the field is bipolar, the patterns of the iron filings are symmetrical, again in ways that “the dominant" and “the popular" can never be. Finally, the image is static, for new filings fit quickly and easily within a preexisting pattern and field of force, without necessarily altering the pattern and with no effect on the field itself. Each of these problems is related to one or another of the metaphor's strengths: the image draws our attention to a wider field of tension and force, to the importance of placing elements of “the domi- nant” or “the popular” within that field, but its very clarity becomes a problem when we move from a two-dimensional template to the multidi- mensional world of the social, political, and cultural Let us, then, move to that multidimensional world, and attempt to understand social fields of force in more complex and processual terms. Are there additional and related concepts that can serve as suggestive guides? One concept that appears in several papers in this volume is the Gramscian understanding of hegemony. It is interesting that, given the editors’ attempt to confront the works of Scott and Corrigan and Sayer, none of these authors is especially sympathetic to the concept. Scott, in particular, has registered the most vigorous criticisms, especially in Weap- ons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) Challenging those theorists who understand hegemony as “ideological consensus,” Scott stresses the lack of consensus in social situations of domination. The dominated know they are dominated, they know by whom and how, far from consenting to that domination, they initiate all sorts of subtle ways of living with, talking about, resisting, undermining, and confronting the unequal and power-laden worlds in which they live Corrigan and Sayer are also impatient with notions of “ideological con- sensus," but they approach their criticism from the other pole of the field of force. The power of the state, in their view, rests not so much on the consent of its subjects but with the state's regulative and coercive forms and agencies, which define and create certain kinds of subjects and identities while denying, ruling out, other kinds of subjects and identities Moreover, the state accomplishes this not simply through its police and armies but through its offices and routines, its taxing, licensing, and registering procedures and papers. These are two powerful criticisms, from which ideas of "ideological consent’ cannot easily recover. There is more to Gramsci and his use of the idea of hegemony, however, than the concept of consent appropri- ated by political scientists and criticized (forcefully and correctly) byThe Language of Contention 358 Scott, Corrigan, and Sayer. For one thing, Gramsci understood and emphasized, more clearly than did his interpreters, the complex unity of coercion and consent in situations of domination. Hegemony was a more material and political concept in Gramsci's usage than it has since become. For another thing, Gramsci well understood the fragility of hegemony Indeed, one of the most interesting sections in the Selections from the Prisom’ Notebooks ([1929-35] 1971) is his “Notes on Italian History,” an analysis and interpretation of the failure of the Piedmont bourgeoisie to form 2 nation-state, their failure to form a bloc that could rule, through force and consent. Let us return to the field of force and inquire whether a more material. political, and problematic concept of hegemony aids in understanding the complex and dynamic relations between the dominant and popular or between state formation and everyday forms of action. Let us explore __ hegemony not as a finished and monolithic ideological formation but as 2 ~ problematic, contested, political process of domination and struggle Gramsci begins his notes on Italian history with some observations concerning the history (and the study of the history) of “ruling” and “subaltern” classes. “The historical unity of the ruling classes," he writes, is realised 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 simply juridical and political (though such forms of unity do have their importance too, and not ina purely formal sense); the fundamental historical unity, concretely, results from the organic relations between State or politi- cal society and “civil society" ([1929-35] 1971:52) The “subaltern classes," on the other hand, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a"State". their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States, Hence it is necessary to study: (1) the objective formation of the subaltern groups, by the de- velopments and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic pro- »+ duction, their quantitative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time; (2) their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own, and the consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposition, renovation.or neo-formation, (3) the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them; (4) the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of aWilliam Roseberry 359 limited and partial character; (5) those new formations which assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; (6) those formations which assert the integral autonomy, . . . etc. (ibid.) Let us consider several features of Gramsci's introductory comments that bear emphasis as we consider hegemonic processes. First, for both the ruling and the subaltern classes Gramsci implies plurality or diversity; unity is for them a political and cultural problem. Throughout his discus- ” sion, his emphasis is on the plural, on classes and groups Second, though the passage seems to imply that the unity of the tuling classes is unproblematic through their control of the state, Gramsci then proceeds in his "Notes" to examine the failure of the Piedmont bourgeoisie to unite with other regionally based dominant groups or to forge a unified ruling bloc that could control (or create) a state. He is, then, pointing to a problematic relationship. Unity requires control of the state (the subaltern classes, “by definition,” are not unified because they are not the state), but control of the state by the ruling classes is not assumed. Such control is at once juridical and political (as we might ordinarily understand "the history of States and of groups of States"), and moral and cultural (as we consider the complex tensions among ruling groups and between ruling and subaltern groups in the relations between state and civil society). Any study of state formation should, in this formulation, also be a study of cultural revolution (see Corrigan and Sayer 1985) Third, if we render the history of ruling groups and of states and groups of states as problematic, then an array of questions similar to those posed by Gramsci of subaltern classes needs to be considered. That is, we need to consider their “objective” formation in the economic sphere— the movements, developments, and transformations in production and distribution, and their social and demographic distribution in space and time. We also (not then) need to study their social and cultural relations with other groups—other “ruling” groups within and beyond their region or sphere of influence; subaltern groups within and beyond their region. What associations or organizations of kinship, ethnicity, religion, region, or nation bind or divide them? We also (not then) need to investigate their political associations and organizations, and the political institu- tions, laws, routines, and orders they confront, create, and attempt to control, As we consider such questions, the complexity of the field of force becomes clear. In addition to sectoral differentiation among distinct class fractions, based on different positions and roles within accumulation processes, Gramsci draws our attention to spatial differentiation, to theThe Language of Contention 360 uneven and unequal development of social powers in regional spaces. His consideration of the failures of state formation and hegemony in the Italian peninsula begins with the difficulties imposed by regionally dis- tinct fields of force. Fourth, we need to ask the same questions of the subaltern classes, in their relationships to the dominant groups and political institutions Fifth, it is worth noting that Gramsci does not assume that subaltern groups are captured or immobilized by some sort of ideological con- sensus. At one point he raises the question of their group origins “in pre- existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and aims they conserve fora time," and he also considers the possibility of "their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations’; but in neither case is Gramsci’s observation static or definitive. Rather, active or passive affilia- tion and the preservation of mentalities are placed within a dynamic range of actions, positions, and possibilities, a range that includes the formation of new organizations and institutions, the pressing of claims, the assertion of autonomy. This range is understandable solely in terms of (1) a field of force that connects the ruling and subaltern in "the organic relations between State or political society and ‘civil society," and (2) a hegemonic process (see Mallon, this volume, Roseberry and O'Brien 1991). Gramsci's criteria and questions clearly imply a temporal dimension without necessarily leading to a teleology. Sixth, the relations between ruling and subaltern groups are charac- terized by contention, struggle, and argument. Far from assuming that the subaltern passively accept their fate, Gramsci clearly envisions a much more active and confrontational subaltern population than many of his interpreters have assumed. Nevertheless, he places action and confronta- tion within the formations, institutions, and organizations of the state and civil society in which subordinate populations live. Subaltem groups and classes carry the "mentality, ideology, and aims" of preexisting social groups, they “affiliate” with preexisting political organizations as they attempt to press their own claims, they create new organizations within a preexisting social and political “framework,” and so on. Thus while Gram- sci does not see subordinate populations as the deluded and passive captives of the state, neither does he see their activities and organizations as autonomous expressions of a subaltern politics and culture. Like ple- beian culture in eighteenth-century England, they exist within and are shaped by the field of force. This is the way hegemony works. | propose that we use the concept not to understand consent but to understand struggle; the ways in whichWilliam Roseberry 361 the words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and move- ments used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand, con- front, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself, What hegemony constructs, then, is nota shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders character- ized by domination That common material and meaningful framework is, in part, discur- sive: a common language or way of talking about social relationships that sets out the central terms around which and in terms of which contesta- tion and struggle can occur. Consider, for example, Daniel Nugent and Ana Alonso's examination, in their chapter in this volume, of Nami- quipans refusal of an ¢ido grant because the institution of the ¢ido carried with it a certain set of subordinate relations to the central state and denied a prior set of relations between Namiquipans and the central state, and between Namiquipans and the land. Consider as well the conflict Terri Koreck discusses in a recent essay concerning the naming of the commu- nity where she did her work (1991). Each name—Cuchillo Parado, Veintecinco de Marzo, and Nuestra Sefiora de las Begonias—expresses different interests and histories, different visions of community and na- tion. The state claims the power to name; to create and print maps with state-sanctioned labels, Community residents can recognize the right but refuse the name, among themselves. In both cases, villagers resist words; but the words signal and express material social, economic, and political relationships and powers. Struggle and resistance concern these powers (Namiquipans reject a certain kind of relationship with the state in their access to land). The state is able to impose certain words—to state, to name, to label. The state is not (necessarily) able to force villagers to accept or use those names. Namiquipans refuse the ido label and thereby call up an earlier history of fierce autonomy. Koreck's villagers continue to refer to Cuchillo Parado and thereby attempt to refuse a certain kind of relationship with the state. In James Scott's terms, both use a “hidden transcript" with which to talk about their domination. But both public and hidden transcripts are intimately intertwined. They exist within a com- mon discursive framework that grants both Cuchillo Parado and Veinte- cinco de Marzo meaning. Clearly, some imposed words and institutions carry more power, and contention over them carries more of a threat to a dominant order, than others. We might assume, for example, that a community's rejection of the central institution of the state's new agrarian order presents more of a #ee The Language of Contention 362 challenge than a village's continued use of a name like Cuchillo Parado. We might imagine that neither the central nor the local state has much reason to worry over what the villagers call themselves as long as "Veinte- cinco de Marzo" is uniformly named in state records and registries, and as long as maps “accurately” place the pueblo in relation to others in a homogeneously configured space. To the extent that the different names call up different histories (as they do here), however, points of conflict and challenge may emerge In neither Namiquipa nor Cuchillo Parado, however, have the vil- lagers autonomously chosen the particular issue over which they will struggle; the issue, and the argument over names and institutional forms, ~& was presented by the projects of a homogenizing state. Nor, for that matter, did “the state" choose this particular terrain for contention Nugent and Alonso capture nicely the surprise of the representatives of the Comisién Nacional Agraria at Namiquipans' refusal to accept the state's generous offer of land and protection. The points of contention, the “words’—and the whole material history of powers, forces, and contradictions that the words inadequately express—over which a cen- tralizing state and a local village might struggle are determined by the hegemonic process itself. Once they appear, regardless of the conscious intent of the state functionaries or villagers who first use them, they may seem to call up and call into question the whole structure of domination. Nugent and Alonso, for example, usefully discuss the apparent intentions of the agrarianists in Mexico City in the 1920s A key point about the agrarian reform process . . . is that it was profoundly distant from the communities and people whose lives it was designed to reorder. The distance was physical, social, and rhetorical. CNA meetings took place in Mexico City, far from the affected communities. They were attended not by peasants but by members of the CNA—lawyers, bureau- crats, schoolteachers, and politicians, few of whom had risen through the ranks of the popular movements. They articulated the norms of the agrarian reform in edicts, proclamations, fact-finding rulings issued in state-con- trolled publications, and a host of internal memoranda circulated within the cNaand the CLas. The language of the agrarian reform was laden with legal niceties and technicalities, and invocations of a national pairia few peasants could relate to (Katz 1988d; Anderson 1983). The language was stripped of local references recognizable to the beneficiaries of the land redistributions, their respective communities, their patrias chicas—landscapes impregnated with generations of work, struggle, and meaning—were reduced to or recast as so-and-so many hectares of such-and-such a category of land for this-and- that type of use (this volume, p. 228-29)William Roseberry 363 Attention to such political and discursive processes and projects can illuminate many aspects of a complexly structured field of force. Within the central state, these aspects would include the intentions and struggles of agrarianists as they attempted to reform “the" agrarian structure, and their attempts to build and incorporate a following in the countryside; in local fields (Yucatin, Morelos, and Chihuahua, say), relevant aspects might be the differential and (for the agrarianists) surprising reception of their central reforms and structures. Beginning with the 1926 rejection of an gjido in Namiquipa, then, the analysis can move in various directions— “inward” toward the examination of differential social relations in Nami- quipa, “outward” toward the exploration of regional and central political spaces—as it maps overlapping structures and processes of domination. It may, in short, take a particular object of contention or a point of failure in the establishment of a common discursive framework to examine each of the levels Florencia Mallon points to in her model of hegemonic pro- cesses Conceptualizing such process in terms of the necessity of construct- ing a common discursive framework allows us to examine both the power and the fragility of a particular order of domination. Let us consider, first, the power. "States,” Corrigan and Sayer argue, state, the arcane rituals of a court of law, the formulae of royal assent to an Act of Parliament, visits of school inspectors, are all statements. They define, in great detail, acceptable forms and images of social activity and individual and collective identity, they regulate . .. much ... . of social life. In this sense “che State” never stops talking. Out of the vast range of human social capacities—possible ways in which social life could be lived—state activities more or less forcibly “encourage” some whilst suppressing, marginalizing, eroding, undermining others, Schooling for instance comes to stand for education, policing for order, voting for political participation. Fundamental social classifications, like age and gender, are enshrined in law, embedded in institutions, rou- tinized in administrative procedures and symbolized in rituals of state. Certain forms of activity are given the official seal of approval, others are situated beyond the pale. This has cumulative, and enormous, cultural consequences; consequences for how people identi themselves and. their “place” in the world (1985-3, 4). We see this in our examples from Chihuahua, in which the central state claims the power, through its administrative registers, institutes, and bureaus, to make maps and to impose uniform, centralized institutions on a heterogeneous countryside. We can also see how forms and languagesOOOO The Language of Contention 364 of protest or resistance must adopt the forms and languages of domination in order to be registered or heard. "Y venimos a contradecir" is a powerful statement of community solidarity and opposition, but to be effective it is { addressed to the proper colonial authorities, it follows (ritualistically) the proper forms of address and order of presentation, and it is registered in the proper colonial offices. It recognizes and addresses power even as it protests it; or it decries the abuse or misuse of power, implicitly recogniz- ing a legitimate use of the same power. To the extent that a dominant * order establishes such legitimate forms of procedure, to the extent that it establishes not consent but prescribed forms for expressing both accep- tance and discontent, it has established a common discursive framework. The problematic and fragile character of such frameworks must be stressed, however. Beginning with the linguistic level, common discursive frameworks, “a common language or way of talking about social relation- ships,” are historically quite rare and have never been achieved in Mexico Indeed, sociolinguists are increasingly drawn to the analysis of bilingual situations in which subordinate and dominant groups interact. They examine the various contexts in which “languages of solidarity" might be used by subordinate groups (see, e.g., Gal 1987; J. Hill 1985, Woolard 1985). At this level alone, then, hegemonic processes may break down. (This, too, provides an important entry point for the analysis of hege- monic processes; an examination of a state's language policies—its at- tempts to promote or enforce cultural and linguistic assimilation through a common, "national" language, or, alternatively, its promotion or protec- tion of bi- or multilingual institutes, practices, and literatures. In each case, the examination of state and stated rationales for the policies, and of the tensions and struggles the policies address, can illuminate much wider political and cultural tensions.) We can, however, explore the fragility of discursive frameworks at other levels as well. Let us return, for example, to Corrigan and Sayer's discussion of the ways in which “states . . . state." The forms of regulation and routine to which Corrigan and Sayer allude depend on an extremely dense, centralized, and effective state. This, too, has been rare in Mexico, despite the intentions, projects, and claims of the state and its officials in various periods. Witness, for example, Romana Falc6n’s assessment of local rule through the Porfirian jefes politicos. Brief reference to two other essays in this volume reinforces the point: Rockwell's analysis of rural schooling in Tlaxcala, with its complex tensions between central aims and directives and the efforts of local elites and teachers to serve and satisfy village needs and demands; and Mallon’ examination of the conflictsWilliam Roseberry 365 between the central state and local politicos in the sierra de Puebla and elsewhere, stressing how the language, aims, and projects of liberalism receive particular inflections as they are inserted in regional and local * class relations and political alliances Each case reveals ways in which the state, which never stops talking, has no audience; or rather, has a number of audiences who hear different things; and who, in repeating what the state says to still other audiences, change the words, tones, inflections, and meanings. Hardly, it would seem, a common discursive framework. Of what use, then, are analyses of hegemony, or, as | would prefer, a “hegemonic process’? Remember that the primary architect of the con- cept used it partly to understand the failure of the Piedmont bourgeoisie to lead and form a unified nation-state. The concepts value for Gramsci in this particular event lay in its illumination of lines of weakness and cleavage, of alliances unformed and class fractions unable to make their particular interests appear to be the interests of a wider collectivity. In using the concept of hegemony in Mexico, I do not claim that we will suddenly discover a similar failure. If we conceive a hegemonic process and common discursive framework as (unarticulated but necessary) state projects rather than state achievements, however, we can advance our under- standing of “popular culture” and “state formation” in relation to each other. We may understand that relationship first and most obviously at those points at which the common discursive framework breaks down: where, for example, national holidays are disregarded and locally signifi- cant days or places (the birthday of a local hero, the site of a burial or battle, the boundary markers of an old land grant) are marked or revered, where, in other words, the language and precepts of liberalism are given regional inflections It would be wrong, however, to place these points of rupture—or the problematic relationship between the talking state and the distracted audience—into a simple power model that proposes an opposition be- tween “the dominant" and "the subordinate” or “the state” and “the popu- lar.” The field of force is much more complex, as the laws, dictates, programs, and procedures of the central state are applied in particular regions, each of which is characterized by distinct patterns of inequality and domination, which in turn are the uniquely configured social prod- ucts of historical processes that include prior relations and tensions of center and locality. The particular merit of this understanding of hegemonic process,The Language of Contention 366 then, is that it aids in drawing a more complex map of a field of force. By focusing attention on points of rupture, areas where a common discursive framework cannot be achieved, it serves as a point of entry into the analysis of a process of domination that shapes both "the state" and “popular culture." This is also, it should be said, the particular merit of the essays in this volume. In their attempt to place popular culture in relation to state formation, these chapters challenge received understandings of each. Popular culture, in these essays, is no timeless repository of authen- tic and egalitarian traditional values; the state is no machine, manufactur- ing consent. Linking the two, and shaping each, is a multidimensional and © dynamic field of force.