Redefining Resistance: Counterhegemony, the Repressive Hypothesis and the Case of Arabic Modernism

Abstract

Literary modernism, despite the apocalyptic proclamations issued by many of its seminal practitioners, has now the status of a defunct artistic movement, an outmoded phase of Western culture, universally regarded as a failure in its broader cultural aims, and often subject to scorn and ridicule in respect of the revolutionary claims associated with it. Nevertheless, literary modernism and the debates surrounding it have played a key role in the evolution of ideas about counterhegemony in the twentieth century. The claim that hegemonic structures operate at the level of the psyche lay at the basis of the assault upon the bourgeois social order of early twentieth-century Europe mounted by avant-garde groups and other modernist practitioners, whose politics ranged from the extreme left to the extreme right.¹ In the Arabic context, where modernist techniques took root after World War II, modernism was and continues to be associated with the overturning of the traditional order and its values. Through the course of the twentieth century, modernist ideology has interacted with social theories, from the Weberian to the structuralist, in pressing the view that subjectivity is shaped by structures of domination.

I don’t give a shit about dying, when you’re into revolution you have to die, and you can’t be a revolution unless you’re willing to die.

Artie Sternlicht, hippie rebel in E. L. Doctorow

The Book of Daniel