The Homeric and Peasant worlds in Modernism

This earlier post was about how the contrast of the Modern and traditional is internal to Modernism, the way in which Modernist thought and literature is defined by this contrast, and by the acute awareness of this contrast. 

There are at least two spectres or even fantasies of the pre-modern that Modernism conjures in order to then weigh and measure what Modernity has lost. On the one hand, there is, as in Heidegger, the peasant world of handing-down, of intuitively meaningful labour, of know-how and in-dwelling. On the other hand, there is the Homeric world.

In both cases, the peasant life-world, and the Homeric, there is not simply a world but corresponding artistic forms. The forms presuppose that world and cannot survive without it:

In the art works of a pre-industrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist's raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the first time. […] The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. The writer uses them, but he does not need to demonstrate their meaning beforehand: in the language of Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation.

Thus, Fredric Jameson’s lucid paraphrase of Lukacs. Somesuch world is the lost object of desire for various Modern writers and thinkers. A world wherein the material “needs no mediation”, where there is a continuity between environment and expression. Here is Yeats on the peasanty of the West of Ireland:

Those poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. […]. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us. A peasant had then but to stand in his own door and think of his sweetheart and of his sorrow, and take from the scene about him and from the common events of his life types and symbols, and behold, if chance was a little kind, he had made a poem to humble generations of the proud.

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community, bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of their own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action.

For Yeats, for Lukacs, or whomever, this world entails a certain form of art wherein there is no rift between the world and the required imaginative resources. Things have an “immediate meaning". It is obvious in Yeats that the image of the peasant world is also a reverse portrait of the Modern and its “heterogeneous ugliness”, and, more exactly, an outline of what is lacking to the Modern writer or artist: that taken-for-grantedness, that meaning immanent in the everyday.

Needless to say that this world frequently overlaps with the Homeric. In Yeats, the overlap is explicit. Reviewing Douglas Hyde’s collection of Irish folk tales, Y writes:

Here at last is a universe where all is large and intense enough to almost satisfy the emotions of man. Certainly, such stories are not a criticism of life but rather an extension, thereby much more closely resembling Homer than that last and most admirable phase [sic] of the “inspiring book,” a social drama by Henrik Ibsen. They are as existence and not a thought and make our world of tea tables seem but a shabby penumbra.

Elsewhere Yeats writes that “A description in the Illiad or the Odyssey […] is the swift and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by life.” Observation is not intercepted by problems of expression, choice of subject matter, problems of style and so on. The task of the poet is a given without being enforced. Freedom and necessity are not yet opposites. 

Here is Hegel on the world presupposed by the Homeric epic:  

everything is domestic, in everything the man has present before his eyes the power of his arm, the skill of his hand, the cleverness of his own spirit, or a result of his courage and bravery. In this way alone have the means of satisfaction not been degraded to a purely external matter; we see their living origin itself and the living consciousness of the value which man puts on them because in them he has things not dead or killed by custom, but his own closest productions.

Hegel offers us a compelling description of this lost world and its literary corollaries. In the world of Homer there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium – Sight is not sovereign, touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” is not just ‘memorize’. The physical world is the best picture of the mental, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by an abstract plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours. Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. “Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.” What the epic simile seems to do – as here- is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some thing, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.

This is the great “mirage” of the Homeric world as we find it in Hegel, at a time when “traditional” German society faced the incursions of industrial mechanisation:

Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires

The question is not simply whether these invocations and depictions – of the peasant and Homeric worlds - are accurate, whether the Homeric world or the peasant world is indeed one of “immediate meaning”, of concrete comparison rather than abstract measure. Rather, what we should ask is how these invocations function within the discourse of Modernity and Modernism. Both the Homeric and the Peasant life-world are certainly images of what has been lost. In other words they are attempts to “figure out” everything that is absent from and in the Modern. The Modern is depicted in reverse, as it were, through its exact opposite.

Thus in Yeats, for example, the Peasant world – the bard has simply to “stretch out his hands” to find fit subject matter, and the means of expression are collective and handed down - is contrasted with the considerable labour and deliberation confronting the Modern artist, for whom the world has lost it’s taken-for-grantedness, both in terms of the content and means of expression. This loss, and the consequent affects of lamentation and melancholy are of course inherent in much Modernism.

But both the peasant world and the Homeric are also solutions for the modern artist. Again, the example of Synge, who comes to the ‘countryside’ from - in retreat from -the metropolis. He finds in “peasant dialect” a response to the question of literary language which confronts metropolitan writers. This is what T.S. Eliot says about Synge’s language – that he discovered in peasant ‘dialect’ a language that was already ‘literary’, that didn’t have to be made so by all kinds of estrangement techniques, refreshingly different from the modish present but having the stored energy of tradition. Of course, if we ask for whom was it literary, the answer is the Modern writer and his-her audience. Synge’s own formulation was that “style comes from the shock of new material”. Style – that very modern category, the signature of some unique subjectivity, the antithesis of the older collective forms – is now developed in the encounter with the older forms. Consciousness is “shocked” by some foreign material that impinges on and agitates it. But the foreign material is the Old rather than the contemporary.  The older life-worlds, the Homeric or the peasant environment, act as the spurs or catalysts to create style in its peculiarly modern sense. 

The Modern-Traditional Contrast within Modernism

I’ve been thinking about the contrast, in Modernism (not just art but also philosophy) between the Modern and the Traditional, and the various ways in which this contrast is internal and vital. Fredric Jameson’s point is that whereas post-modernism has forgotten or moved beyond this contrast, Modernism is not only aware of but also creatively preoccupied with it either as an explicit theme or implicit framework. That is, without this contrast, Modernism wouldn't be Modernism. 

Two poles of this contrast can be marked by the names Baudelaire and Heidegger. In Heidegger, the premodern immersion of the peasant life world is very much the ‘starting point’, in relation to which other modes of being can be judged defective or inauthentic; by contrast, with Baudelaire, it is the utterly artificial, kaleidoscopic and hurried city, an environ of speeds and simulacra, which is the inaugural and default life-world. (Nature, we remember, is in Baudelaire typically repellent).

Much Modernist thought and literature is a balance and dialogue between these two worlds, something like what Walter Benjamin called a “dialectical image”. Emblematically, Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree – evoking the 'remote' West of Ireland - is inspired by a cheap window display in a London shop.What this also involves is a distinction between two corresponding forms of “immersion”. One the one hand:

A premodern artisan or farmer, following his traditional way of life, is immersed in his daily involvement with ready-at-hand objects that are included in his world (Zizek)

 

One the other hand the ‘immersion’ of the modern city dweller. The latter of course is ‘immersed’ in an alienated and phantasmagorical world - it has been fabricated by powers not his own, he possesses no ‘know-how’ of the objects which surround him, and where shop signs and advertising hang like magical regalia.

The former immersion is poetic or epic, whereas the latter is represented as the inauthentic “flow of das Mann”.  The latter – in much Modernist thought and literature - requires a hyper ‘proud and apart’ individual, who must rebuff the surrounding world if he is to retain any subjective freedom. Simultaneously, the “immersion” of the traditional artisan or farmer is coveted or at least invoked with nostalgia.

I wonder, then, if there are at least two types of Modernist, two different directions of thought and feeling: those who have come from a traditional mode of life to the city and experienced the shattering existential and experiential corollaries; and those who, starting out in the modern and metropolitan, then gravitate to the pre-modern, the traditional?

The Movements of Consciousness as a Literary Theme; Hegel and Others

I’ve been curious about the following question, although I expect it’s very well researched and theorised: At what point in (literary) history does the movement of consciousness, the activities of the mind, become a principle theme of a literary work, as in, for example, the examination of memory and temporal awareness in Proust. When I posed this question (on Twitter) the name of Defoe was suggested, and the link between the Protestant examination of conscience and the examination of consciousness. The latter at some point breaking free from the former.

I’d like to think briefly and at a slightly oblique angle about this issue via a number of things Hegel discusses in his Lectures on Aesthetics, from 1818.

 One place to start might be Hegel’s contrast between older symbolic art and modern art. “Symbolic” art, as Hegel defines it, starts out with some external shape (i.e., as met with in the external world) and through this strains towards an articulation of Spirit. Thus, Hegel on Egyptian art:

Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push itself forward, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape, because it must still remain confused and associated with what is other than itself.

This is in some respects the exact opposite of modern art which begins in spirit and then seeks embodiment in external form. So, in one we move from external form to Spirit; in the other from inner Spirit to external form.

More specifically, for Hegel, modern art is characterised by a kind of surplus of spirit over external shape, consciousness over material, the discovered freedom of spirit attempting to find some object adequate to itself:

The standpoint of most recent times, the peculiarity of which we may find in the fact that the artist’s subjective skill surmounts his material and its production because he is no longer dominated by the given conditions of a range of content and form already inherently determined in advance, but retains entirely within his own power and choice both the subject matter and the way of presenting it.

There is always something nomadic and dissatisfied about the modern artist, searching for some adequate object or material. One thinks of Yeats: “I sought for a subject and sought for it in vain.” Yeats resents the contingency of modern art, i.e., having no natural subject. But in some sense, the very notion of ‘subject matter’ implies a division between an artist on the one hand, and a range of potential objects on the other. It is this very division, Hegel implies, which did not previously exist, at least in the same form. There is in Yeats, certainly, the longing for and coveting of a ‘necessary’ art, an art fully part of a pre-modern tradition or form of life. (Nationalism perhaps offers the spectre of such a “necessary art”).  

For Hegel, the artist tries a number of ways to lend shape and form to this disembodied consciousness, such as the adoption, on a purely aesthetic level, of “past world views” and the symbolic arsenal of now superannuated or devalued religions. But this cannot work, for these materials are now only the externalised objects of aesthetic appreciation rather than the very medium of “innermost belief”.  

 It is for this reason that the modern artist “turns inward”. What defines the modern artist, says Hegel, is that the ‘necessary substance’ of his art is now (what we would call) the movements of his consciousness as such – i.e., the material or subject matter is selected in so far as it ‘serves’ those movements. Nature, for example in the Romantics, is commandeered by the artist as a metaphorical ‘picture’ of the artist’s mind. The Modern emphasis on Style, as the signature of a particular individual consciousness, although emerging after Hegel, can certainly be seen in these terms. In lieu of traditional objects, the artist's own Stylistic signature becomes object like, something he or she works on and perfects.  

However, Art, freed from necessary content, dwindles to a brittle subjective inwardness:

If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity. [..] it now feels a craving for the solid and substantial.

And so the point about the modern artist is that when art does become pre-occupied with the movement of consciousness and seeks only to objectify this movement it also begins to yearn for something else, for some jagged piece of Chaos, some Otherness, the Outside of consciousness. There is a passage in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value where he remarks (vis a vis apples) how everything becomes a metaphor (a “picture”) for his own thought, but he says this with a certain weariness, chagrin even, as if he wanted to find in the world something other than his own thought. And there is certainly a similar weariness in Yeats. “Another emblem there!” is both triumphant and exasperated, as if he would like to discover in nature something other than the mind’s emblem book.

And so what this Modern consciousness craves is not confirmation, but resistance, something foreign which might ‘reawaken’ and galvanise-into-being the tired involuted subject. We are back to J.M Synge’s contention that “style comes from the shock of new material”. Before Synge follows Yeats’s advice and goes to the Aran isles, he was precisely one such modern artist:

Synge in 1898 was a dilettante, self-consciously cherishing his `impressions,' at his most imitative when he tried hardest to express his own reactions. Yeats’s recollection of Synge's early work gives us an acute image of his failings: `I have but a vague impression, as of a man trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing upon the window.' Synge at this stage was indeed a prisoner of his own self-consciousness, and the window had to be shattered before he could develop into a creative artist.

The “new material” that shocked him into style was of course the peasantry of the West of Ireland, and their rude unselfconscious speech. Other Modern writers and artists similarly gravitated to traditional forms in order to thicken their Style, to deliver a creative rebuff to their Modern mind. Some sought shock in the “insistent jerky nearness” of the Modern city, or introduced foreign elements via mathematical abstraction, chance, and-or arbitrary rules (Oulipo).

Self-Consciousness and Tradition in Literary Modernism (part 2)

This [see here] is the key duality for much modernism. For the modern artist, the sensuous object is valuable only in so far as it ‘recalls’ the inwardness of the observer, the sensuous thing is confiscated by a self-aware perceiver for purposes of “self-expression”. But there’s also the awareness of an Other meaning, stubborn, elusive, ‘behind’ but perhaps more substantial than this ‘theatrical’ surface, a more “immediate” way of relating to the world. This can in turn lead in two directions: a self-conscious aestheticism, delighting in the autonomy of images and words; or a desire to somehow access Life in its unsymbolised state. In some case the two are somehow combined. Yeats is one such.

What the passage from Yeats (see here) also returns us to is the question of the symbolic. The Meaning which Howard extracts from his experience arises through the absence of the meaning it has for the inhabitants. Once again, the symbolic meaning is “raised” on an absence in the object of perception. This is what Fredric Jameson says about the symbolic mode:

Whatever the merits of symbolic and symbolizing modes.. their presence in the work always stands as an indication that that the immediate meaning of objects has disappeared: the process would not arise in the first place if objects had not already become problematical in their very nature

By having recourse to it [symbolism] the writer implies that some original, objective meaning in objects is henceforth inaccessible to him, that he must invent a new and fictive one to conceal this basic absence, this basic silence of things

What is also interesting here is that whilst the passage from John Sherman, formally enacts the doubling of consciousness, the turning of consciousness in on itself, the whole passage, in its entirety, is also a kind of doubling. That is, this fictional passage is a thinly-disguised doubling of Yeats’s own experience as articulated elsewhere:

When was a child I had only to climb the hill behind the house to see the long, blue, ragged bills flowing along the Southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even the merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills.

Whereas in John Sherman the attitude is one of petulance and condescension, here there is a more frustrated longing. But in each case, there is the same awareness of a Meaning attached to the environment which the Other possesses first. The modern spectator is a belated arrival. But it is this very “loss of meaning,” the sense that something signifies without being able to lay claim to what, that is the source of literary or aesthetic invention. W.J. McCormack glosses the passage as follows:

For those for whom the hills automatically had mythological references, those who needed no dictionary to decode place names, there was little sense of any creative discovery in the landscape. But to Yeats it was precisely the barrier, which he came to recognise between his childhood experience and those obvious meanings, which generated a poetic significance.

Once again, we have the sense that “poetic significance,” symbolism, aesthetic experience itself, arises out of some perceived deficit in experience. What Yeats has ‘lost’ is a kind of knowledge that comes from belonging. Him and Lady Gregory can of course, as they did, collect and collate folk lore, but no amount of quantitative anthropological data can compensate or fill in the absence of that basic belonging, and the meaning that comes from habitation. As such the collector or collator of folk tales and mythology always goes away empty handed. What then happens, because of that, is that the ragged hills then turn into Symbols of melancholy and desolation.

Self-Consciousness and Tradition in Literary Modernism: Yeats and Others

“It was this search for a tradition that urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the country people..” (Yeats)

One constitutive feature of literary modernism is the combination of a modern consciousness, steeped in the experience of Modernity, nonetheless fascinated by the still existing presence of pre-modern, traditional life-worlds. These traditional forms of life, often vestigial, are then seen as the proper material or content for a writing which remains, in its form, definitively modern.

There is an early, and little read novella by Yeats, which illustrated some of these tensions.

John Sherman explores – inter alia - the situation of a Modern character (Howard) who visits and discovers himself in tantalising proximity to the world of rurality and storytelling. The following passage is from near the beginning:

There was scarcely any one abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an old woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate’s Iocum tenens, made a low curtsey.The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil. His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by the stars [My emphasis].

We can note the curious punctuation here, which duplicates and deepens the sense of slow deliberation which is the content of the sentence.  “He repeated, to himself,” differs from “he repeated to himself” by that extra level of self-awareness, that second arrest of thought which is also the underlined realisation of solitude. Consciousness is arrested not simply by the object perceived but by its own movements, consciousness thickens to become its own object. To “repeat” a meditation is actually to turn it into the thing meditated on. And to repeat a statement is also to winnow it of substance, as when, through countless repetition, we turn a word to pure sound, so that nothing is left but the pure inward intelligence, the "I" as the negation of every particular content. Note also the peculiar following line: “were plated with silver by the stars”. His ‘meditations’ are as it were ‘repeated’ in silver, re-glossed and doubled by stellar light. This very image is therefore itself the emblem of self-reflection. The passage continues: 

[..]         Yes; he felt now quite contented with the. world. Amidst his enjoyment of the shadows and the river — a veritable festival of silence — was mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light of a neighbouring gas-jet ‘flickering faintly on his refined form and nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed — if there had been any to witness — a being of a different kind to the inhabitants — at once rough and conventional — of this half-deserted town. Between these two feelings - the unworldly and the worldly - tossed a leaping wave of perfect enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most the beauty of these shadows and this river? To him who had read much, seen operas and plays, known religious ex­periences, and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not to those who dwelt upon its borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine. Some meaning surely it must have! [My Emph.]

To be ‘pleasantly conscious’ is to discover pleasure in the sheer fact of being conscious, presumably in so far as this elevates you above the perceivable content and corroborates your own ‘positional superiority’ with regard to it. (“Pleasantly conscious” might also be a definition of “smug”.) This is consciousness halting, inspecting its every movement and tremor; every perception of an object turns (as it were 180 degrees) back upon the perceiving subject. What has turned the perceiving subject back upon himself is in part the knowledge of his ec-centricity, that he is in some sense excluded from the scene he witnesses, that he brings to it a cultural luggage and range of reference not shared by the inhabitants themselves. Specifically, there is the crucial awareness of a meaning from which he, the alien point of view, is excluded – some meaning surely it must have! Note the clear suggestion of frustration, as the understanding bumps up against a stubborn lack. It’s condescending of course - these people are too sightless to see or be grateful for the beauty of their surroundings -  yet also petulant and defeated. There is the nagging unease that another and more real Meaning lies behind what he can perceive.

The exclamation is however, misconceived. It is not so much that this world must have for its inhabitants a meaning, comparable but different from his own (a “different perspective”). Rather it is an altogether different kind of “meaning”. The Other already owns and inhabits – in an ingrained and unconscious way - this world that he merely savours and appreciates (aesthetically). It is this realisation which then hollows out his perceptions, as if there were a missing but more real dimension to what is in his field of vision, a dimension which flattens out his perceptions to delicate sensations and mirror images rather then 3-dimensional and taken-for-granted experiences. This is clear in “…did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders”.  The object itself is, as it were, jettisoned and replaced by what it “raises” or imaginatively summons which is then taken to be its true importance. Thus it does not ‘mean’ something for the inhabitants in the sense that whereas for Howard it ‘calls to mind’ certain literary images, for them it ‘calls to mind’ something else that he can only guess at. What is peculiar to the observer is precisely the habit of relating to things for what they ‘call to mind’. And this form of subjectivity is the point of cultural difference. What Howard’s understanding bumps up against, therefore, is not simply a different content but an altogether dissimilar form (of subjectivity). It is not simply that the Other ‘has’ different values, beliefs etc, but the very ‘having’ is different. 

[part two here:]

Gramsci and Gove: Thinking vs Signalling

My copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks was bought in Oxford in 1989 from a second hand shop on Broad Street. The inside cover bears the previous owner’s stamp. It's a distinctive double-barrelled forename. Prior to writing this blog post I googled him. He’s now the vice president of a major financial services company. I was briefly reminded what the political philosopher Raymond Guess says about his own employment:

I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change.

And so to Michael Gove and his citation of Gramsci.

Gove and Gramsci. Its almost a category error to put them in the same sentence. On the one hand, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, imprisoned by the fascist powers that be, having to write half in code to escape the censors. On the other, a member of the British ruling party, with the ear of the capitalist press at his disposal. The member of a party which has been, historically, home to the scions of wealth and privilege. Gramsci the thinker and philosopher in the service of the working class and the overthrow of the existing order. Gove, the servant of the ruling class, his “ideas” merely the handmaidens of political strategy, rhetorical shells to be fired at the real or imagined opposition.

So then It made me laugh to see that Gove had cited Gramsci in his speech on Education. Gramsci and Jade Goody. Gove, Gramsci and Goody. Just for the alliterative flourish.

Here’s part of what Gove had to say:

Antonio Gramsci was a powerful critic of the power structures of his time which entrenched the dominance of traditional elites in Italian life.

And one of the greatest concerns he had was that one – increasingly fashionable – ideology which was being sold in Twenties and Thirties Italy as progressive – would only end up reinforcing the inequalities and injustices he hated.

The ideology he so feared in inter-war Italy was what we have come to call – with tragic inappropriateness – progressive education.

Progressive educational theory stressed the importance of children following their own instincts, rather than being taught. It sought to replace an emphasis on acquiring knowledge in traditional subjects with a new stress on children following where their curiosity led them. And that was usually away from outdated practices such as reading, writing and arithmetic.

So, there are two things to pick out here. “the entrenched dominance of political elites”; “fashionable” educational ideologies versus praise for traditional models.

Let’s start with the latter, but also provide some context. Gramsci is writing in prison and under conditions of censorship. He avoids any terminology which is overtly Marxist. Thus, he refers to “fundamental social groups” rather than classes, and “the philosophy of praxis” rather than Marxism. Marx himself is the “founder of the philosophy of praxis”. There is no awareness of this in Gove’s piece. This is an unfortunate and crucial absence. For regarding education, the editors of the Prison Notebooks write: “The apparently ‘conservative’ eulogy of the old curriculum in fact often represents a device which allowed Gramsci to circumvent the prison censor, by disguising the future (ideal system) as the past in order to criticise the present”. This circumvention, this subterfuge, can be seen, perhaps, in what Gramsci says about learning Latin.

 In the eight years of the lycée the entire history of the real language is studied, after it has been photographed in one abstract moment in the form of grammar. It is studied from Ennius (or rather from the words of the fragments of the 12 tablets) right up to Phaedrus and the Christian writers in Latin: a historical process is analysed from its source until its death in time, or seeming death—since we know that Italian, with which Latin is continually contrasted in school, is modern Latin. […] Thus the child discovers that the grammar and the vocabulary of Phaedrus are not those of Cicero, nor those of Plautus, nor of Lactantius or Tertullian, and that the same nexus of sounds does not have the same meaning in different periods and for different authors. Latin and Italian are continually compared; but each word is a concept, a symbol, which takes on different shades of meaning according to the period and the writer in each of the two languages under comparison. The child studies the literary history of the books written in that language, the political history, the achievements of the men who spoke that language. His education is determined by the whole of this organic complex, by the fact that in a purely literal sense he has followed that itinerary, and passed through those various stages. He has plunged into history and acquired a historicizing understanding of the world and of life, which becomes a second—nearly spontaneous—nature, since it is not inculcated pedantically with an openly educational intention.

Thus, what interests Gramsci about the teaching and learning of Latin is that it inculcates also an Historical sense, the awareness that “rules” are not eternal, that everything is in a state of ongoing change, that the present itself, therefore, is fully part of that same history and thus subject to change and transformation. The child discovers that meanings are not fixed and immobile but they shift and move with history itself, and also that these linguistic changes are themselves related to political history, that they are not autonomous developments but part of a complex whole. This “historicizing understanding” is a necessary component of revolutionary consciousness. And so it is that the teaching of Latin as Gramsci describes it is a kind of shadow or classical double of the Marxist understanding of history, for which the imperative is constantly to historicize, to disturb the a-historical appearance of the present.

It is, moreover, the case that what Gramsci is opposing in the present is narrowly vocational education, which confines people to certain specialisms and occludes that more general and humanistic education which is a precondition of critical thinking:

The tendency today is to abolish every type of schooling that is “disinterested” (not serving immediate interests) or formative [..] Instead, there is a steady growth of specialised vocational schools, in which the pupil’s destiny and future activity are determined in advance.

Given that, in the present age, universities are increasingly required to serve the economy, are made accountable to the world of business, and humanities departments are being shut down, it is clear I think where the relevance of Gramsci’s analysis resides.

The goal of Gramsci’s analysis is not, in any case, to arrive at the ideal educational model, which would be suited to any situation or context. His overall goal is the emancipation of the working class, and his thoughts about education are determined by that goal. That is, the educational model and methods he advocates, in so far as he advocates them, are those deemed to help bring about that goal, they are instrumental rather than ideal.

Regarding “traditional elites”, there is little mention of elites in Gramsci. Or rather there is a very specific sense which Gove seems culpably unaware of, ie the intellectual and cultural vanguard of a particular class. Gramsci is interested in elites as fractions of classes, those who effectively “lead” the class and, for example, define and perpetuate its ideology. 

It of course true that Gove is seemingly unaware of all this, that his comments are pretty much beside the point as an explication of Gramsci. But there is little point also in refuting Gove, or dismissing his jejune "analysis", for the simple reason that his comments on Gramsci are not to be understood as an argument with intellectual content. Gove is engaged in political signalling of a kind that Gramsci would have understood only too well. So any refutation of Gove can only be a prelude to addressing this signalling. 

Gove, Gramsci and Goody, united by little more than an alliterative flourish. 

It is clear firstly that Jade Goody is there to signify an “anti-elitist” familiarity with pop culture, an absence of snootiness. This in turn is a pre-emptive strike against how the Conservatives are perceived. But the Gramsci reference is no less a signal. It is also of course, about flashing the “anti-elitist” badge, hence the reference to Gramsci’s opposition to “entrenched elites”. But this in turn is intelligible via a long-standing Conservative trope of being somehow, in certain respects, more Labour than Labour. Thus we find already in Theresa May, the attempt to self-anoint the Tory party as the true party of the working class, the party that truly enables working class opportunity and so on. Gove and others, similarly, advertise themselves as somehow representing the “people” as against some nebulous “elite” or chimerical “establishment”. And this despite the fact that two thirds of the cabinet are privately educated; that both Johnson and Cummings are Oxford educated and from wealthy and “well-connected” backgrounds; that Johnson himself, from his own mouth, has no objection whatever to elitism and elites; that these same people enjoy the consistent support and patronage of the press barons (The Conservatives failed to deny that Gove re-entered the cabinet in 2017 as a Murdoch place-man); that like many elites, the current government operates partly through cronyism - the handing out of contracts, peerages and positions to mates and benefactors.

But what has happened recently is that this actual elite, which can be easily defined, has been replaced in popular discourse (I mean the discourse of right-wing politicians and their media emissaries) by a kind of pseudo or pretend elite consisting of people who live in metropolises and eat avocados and drink coffee.  This has little to do with the actual elite, the actual “establishment”, consisting of individuals like Mogg and Johnson, born into privilege, with a sense of entitlement, of self-exceptionalism, whose slogan at Eton was “effortless superiority”.. none of which is of much interest to a press obsessed with middle-class latte drinkers from Islington.

It’s in this context we should see Gove’s otherwise unremarkable reference to Gramsci. Nor is it only an “anti-elite” signal. There is also a larger trope suggesting the Conservatives, despite their name and history, are the innovators, the fresh thinkers. The reference to Gramsci signals a “daringly unconventional” move, a “thinking outside the box” move, an “unexpected originality of thought” and so forth. This trope of course relates to the previous one, for the idea is to represent Labour as the party of inertia, backward thinking, intellectual closure. The Conservatives, or their key personnel, put on the costume of rebels or mavericks pushing against the entrenched, the “liberal-left” status quo. Again, despite the fact that the essential mission of the Conservative party is to consolidate a system which has been in place, in various incarnations, for centuries. So it is that the party born out of organised labour and other workers organisations is represented as the part of the establishment, whilst the party born of wealth and privilege is represented as the party of the “people”. As in much ideology, the world is turned upside down. All of this Gramsci himself would have understood only too well.