Gramsci and Derrida in New Cross

DERRIDA and GRAMSCI in NEW CROSS

Within the space of a year and a half, I have attended two graduation ceremonies at Goldsmiths College, in New Cross, South-East London. Both featured the same son, bagging a BA and then an MA.

It was “déjà vu”, in a nice way, as the people involved were much the same, from the officiating academics to the graduates – overwhelmingly, at the second February occasion, MA students like my son (MA results are announced pretty late in the calendar year). So I spent less time spectating the ceremony and admiring the hall (originally built for the Royal Naval School for officers’ children in the mid nineteenth century) and more time studying the Graduation Programme: especially the academic subject categories of the graduates: both exceedingly diverse and often bewildering  (“MSc Computer Games and Entertainment”? An easy butt for fogey-ish jeers).

At least most subject descriptions were more or less comprehensible. However, I got stuck on one: “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”. The sub-parts, “Socio”, “cultural” and “linguistics” I could fairly well understand. But the compound? That stumped me.

Later, I looked up the course on the Goldsmiths website. Aha:

“The MA develops your understanding of historical and contemporary debates in (socio)linguistics and discourse analysis and enhances your analytic and linguistic skills by introducing different approaches to the analysis of written and spoken language use from a range of everyday and institutional contexts.”

So, briefly and humbly ( and with the benefit of a bit more superficial research): the way social status and cultural backgrounds shape language, written and spoken; and, vice-versa, the way language usage shapes ( confirms, advances or hinders) social status and cultural cohesion and understanding.

( In certain academic spheres it is always safe to assert that, if factor A shapes B, B repays the compliment to A.)

Learning all this enlightened me retrospectively. For I had noticed that, whilst not all graduates chose to attend the ceremony, they were all listed in the Programme. Most subjects produced a patchy number of students on the day. The one exception was “MA Sociocultural Linguistics”, the attainers of which, so far as I could tell, had all pitched up.

I have a theory about why this should be so. It is that the degree ceremony is a pre-eminent occasion for fertile S-c L analysis, and no self-respecting S-c L graduate should miss it.

The ceremony was not just about the shaping power of language (always remembering the vice-versa). You could say that the oratory and flummery are designed to cement a certain self-confident cultural identity. But this would be a soft hit. A much more interesting take was suggested by the history and “discourse” of the morning’s recipient of an Honorary Goldsmiths Fellowship, Green Gartside.

I confess that I didn’t know of him. He founded a long-lasting New Romantic band, “Scritti Politti”. So said the Programme, which also noted that he is a “theorist” of some sort.

When he gave his acceptance speech, much more was revealed (including what I now take to be the clinching reason for the attendance of the S-c L cohort). Gartside is a proud auto-didact, who fell in with the European left-wing political and structuralist philosophers, especially Gramsci and Derrida. Gramsci’s “Scritti Polittici” ( Political Writings) gave the band its name, although the second Italian word was deliberately butchered in the interests of modish snappishness ( Discuss, MA class).

I am not a scholar of either Scritti Politti or Gartside, so I don’t know where Derrida fits in. Gartside did say that, being a lonely auto-didact, he didn’t know how to pronounce “Derrida”. So when he (pretentiously? Aptly? Playfully?) referenced him in a song, he pronounced the name “De-reed-a”. This solecism, he said, was greeted with rapture by Deridda-savvy critics: what an exquisite, playful, Deconstructionist move, worthy of the master himself! “Correct” pronunciation is a flexible fraud…

Fired up by this, I have taken to wondering (doubtless along with the S-c L graduates) about the deeper semantics of the degree ceremony. I was unable to make a lot of sense of the various robes and headgear sported by the University dignitaries, which seem to have raided from the props department of costume dramas set across many different centuries. Pride of place goes to the emerald green baggy Tudor cap worn by one academic.

More interesting are the modern compromises which some students make with the traditional graduation cap and gown, which, of course, derive from medieval Christian clerical dress. Especially ironic ( or should I say redolent with deep and interesting contradiction and/or accommodation) is the sight of women Muslim graduates wearing the mortarboard cap perched on top of an Islamic headscarf.

But the most striking of the “constructed” appearances was not academic at all. The three lord mayors of the local boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bromley were there in all their mayoral finery: robes and, especially, large chains of office. Bromley is Tory-controlled, a haven for grammar schools, and it mayor is white, middle aged man, as in days gone by most mayors were. The other two, by contrast, were a man of, seemingly, Afro-Caribbean descent and a woman of Asian descent.

“Chains”, in the past, would have indicated a far different status for Afro-Caribbeans.  What do mayoral chains, worn by such a man and woman represent now? An optimistic multicultural society?  Perhaps; but Gartside’s hero, Gramsci, would probably say, however, that the mayors were unwittingly illustrating “bourgeois hegemony”: the ability, in Gramsci’s Marxist analysis, of the ruling class to set the cultural norms of a society, and keep those norms biased in its favour; so that successive generations of the “oppressed” are signed up to the bourgeois social and economic narrative and bourgeois institutions.

On that reading, the mayoral chain still signifies a subtle bondage. As Gramsci’s influential forerunner might  have said: “Mayors of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.

February 2015