Tim Watson

Columbia University
tw22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu

 

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Volume 1. Ed. Joseph Buttigieg. Trans. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

 

Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

Holub, Renate. Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

No self-respecting piece of work on Antonio Gramsci can fail to mention his famous letter of March 19, 1927 to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, in which he announces his desire to “accomplish something fur ewig [for eternity]” Letters 79). If Gramsci had been able to peer into the future and see the kind of work being carried out in his name in the Anglo-American academy over sixty years later, one wonders whether he wouldn’t have had second thoughts about that phrase.

 

Although Gramsci thought that cultural change tended to take place gradually rather than through “explosions” Prison Notebooks 129), it is hard to imagine what other word to use when surveying the proliferation of material around the figure of Gramsci in the last few years. From so-called “radical democracy” to subaltern studies to cultural studies, Gramsci’s name is evoked, his writings are endlessly analyzed, his legacy is contested (see, for example, Laclau and Mouffe; Golding; Chatterjee; Hall, Hard Road; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler). The sheer volume of work, and its engagement across a wide range of fields and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, are no doubt testimony to the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s insights; they also suggest, however, that there is now a Gramsci industry–that within the academic market Gramsci represents significant currency, and writers (and publishers) are cashing in.

 

Given the institutional politics and economics governing the contemporary academy, these two observations (Gramsci as theoretical model, Gramsci as cultural capital) are inseparable; in this respect Gramsci is no different from other leading (dirigente, to use Gramsci’s own terminology) theorists: Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and the rest. Attempts to isolate and distill the essence of the “real” Gramsci (that which transcends the brash commercialism of the academic marketplace) can never be innocent or disinterested. Indeed, to dismiss the institutional economy within which one operates serves only to consolidate its regulatory mechanisms, its hegemony (so to speak). What follows is an attempt to address not the question “Who or what is the real Gramsci?” but rather the question “Why and in what ways have Gramsci’s writings enabled and generated so much intellectual work, insightful and mediocre?” Such a question is itself, of course, partly an effect of the Gramsci industry.

 

The subtitle to Renate Holub’s book, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (in the Routledge “Critics of the Twentieth Century” series), indicates some of the reasons why Gramsci has so much political and cultural purchase in the contemporary academy. It also reveals some of the ideological choices involved in the business of reading Gramsci: the book would undoubtedly not have made it this far if it had been called “Antonio Gramsci: Dead Sardinian Communist Militant,” for instance. If we unpack some of the assumptions behind Holub’s title we will find that Gramsci can be mobilized to the extent that he seems to offer political solutions to the predicament of postmodernism (figured as decentering, arbitrary, “merely” discursive), while at the same time appearing to surpass vulgar Marxist economism and historicism. To put it crudely, he is sufficiently Marxist to challenge postmodernism, and sufficiently postmodernist to combat Marxism. Shuttling between the two, the Gramscian writer enjoys great flexibility and space for critique, innoculated against the “worst excesses” of both systems of thought; the question remains, however, whether, in this “interregnum,” Gramsci can be used in this way without “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear[ing]” (Gramsci, Selections 276).

 

Gramsci and “Us”

 

Holub’s book is another “Introduction to Gramsci,” and as such, in an already crowded field, it has to differentiate itself and be seen to be offering something new and creative. Thus, she proposes to study Gramsci in the “context of literary criticism, and in the context of Marxist aesthetics” (7). “Until recently,” she observes, “the Gramscian critical community showed little interest in his literary critiques and his aesthetics” (4). In this way Holub carves out a space for herself in the contest over “a text [the Prison Notebooks] held zealously captive by the knights of the Gramscian Grail” (38). These knights (who are not identified) have thus far insisted on “emphasiz[ing] his place in the history of Western Marxism, [and] examin[ing] his conceptual apparatus in the context of political and social theory” (20); Holub prefers instead to build on the pioneering work of Giuliano Manacorda, who reads Gramsci as “speaking of the literary conditions of political possibility, correcting the image of a political Gramsci in favour of a Gramsci whose literary, aesthetic and linguistic interests give shape and form to his political interests” (38).

 

I do not mean to imply that such a reading of Gramsci is necessarily illegitimate; literary and culturalist readings of Gramsci are possible because there is evidence for them in his writings. (To cite a passage which Holub does not mention: “Every new civilization, as such … has always expressed itself in literary form before expressing itself in the life of the state. Indeed its literary expression has been the means with which it has created the intellectual and moral conditions for its expression in the legislature and the state” [Gramsci Cultural Writings, 117].) I am not interested in “correcting” the image of Gramsci which Holub propagates–even if one may question why, if “primarily he was a militant, [and] a critical and pragmatic one, to boot” (39)–she seems so irritated by those who choose to engage with Gramsci on that terrain. My concern here, rather, is how Gramsci works to legitimate a political project in Holub’s text, and the way in which, as the book progresses, the figure of Gramsci comes to be evacuated of almost all substance, so that “Gramsci” becomes a kind of cipher, merely a vehicle for addressing a contemporary crisis.

 

If Holub had stuck to the analysis of Gramsci in relation to Frankfurt School critical theory, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bloch which makes up the first half of the book, things might have been fine. Comparing Gramsci’s and these various theorists’ responses to modernity–rationalization, technologization, the culture industry–is an important task, and one which has for the most part not been undertaken up to now. Holub does indeed begin to demonstrate “the ways in which Gramsci’s work displays homologies with many pivotal twentieth-century ways of theorizing” (9).¹

 

But one gets the impression, reading Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, that the teleology of the book dictates that these discussions are entered into primarily as a pretext to get us into the present. Gramsci as modernist is interesting precisely to the extent that he can also be characterized as a postmodernist avant la lettre, as it were: “To deal with Gramsci, loosely, in the context of Frankfurt School critical theory, in the context of modernism, is apposite. It helps to examine the contours of Gramsci’s non-modernism as well, the ways in which he goes beyond modernism, and the possible applicability of some of his terms for a postmodern agenda” (14).

 

Thus there are multiple references to Gramsci’s “anticipatory sensibility to very complex cultural and social transformations” (10), or to the way in which “he begins to problematize, long before Edward Said and contemporary theories of progressive anthropology, the predominant Eurocentricity in disciplines and knowledge” (15). In his emphasis on “the materiality of language” Gramsci “surpasses the modernism of the Frankfurt School and aligns himself with or anticipates theoretical concerns which should become prominent in the second half of the twentieth century” (116); Gramsci’s linguistic theory represents “an advance over Volosinov’s” because it “anticipates a theoretical model” which can deal with “gender, race and geography rather than merely with class” (140).

 

The problem for Holub, however, is that these claims for Gramsci’s predictive capacity become increasingly removed from Gramsci’s writings themselves–unsurprisingly, perhaps, given their rootedness in 1920s and 30s Italian political culture. Hence the tortuous prose in the following passage, in which the reader is called on precisely to “reconstruct” Gramsci’s work in order to bring him up to date: “There are . . . some elements in his reading of Dante that lend themselves, due to their semiological and structuralist components, to reconstructing a version of Gramsci’s theory of the subject which brings him into the vicinity of other major twentieth century critics [here she mentions Merleau-Ponty, Volosinov, Barthes]” (119). At a certain point, Holub ceases to rely on the substance of Gramsci’s thought almost entirely, turning him into a methodological rather than a political model:

 

What we, living in a western nation-state at the end of the twentieth century, can adopt from Gramsci, I think, is not so much the results of his analysis, culminating in his particular theory of the intellectual. What we can examine are his ways of viewing and doing analysis, and amend or transform them for the political needs of our time.(171)

 

“We” Westerners emerge as a collectivity at this moment in the book, in contrast to the people of “Central and South America,” whose “socio-political and economic constellations . . . are at this point to some extent not dissimilar to those of Italy in the first few decades of this century,” and who thus can potentially make use of the substance of Gramsci’s work (171). We do theory, they do politics.² The “non- western world” remains undifferentiated and apparently unknowable for Holub (even the reference to Latin America has no specificity); its role is to provide the grounds for auto-critique, and thus for identity, for “us” (the first person plural is insistently present in the final pages of Holub’s text): “Our resistance to power, our critical thinking, must take into account our relation, as western intellectuals, to the non-western developing world, our position, that is, as producers and disseminators of knowledge, and meaning” (182).

 

It is undoubtedly the case that Western intellectuals need to be more attentive to their positionality and privilege vis-a-vis the Third World, and it is perhaps appropriate that a reading of Gramsci should stimulate such reflections, given his emphasis on uneven development, both within the European nation-state and through the operations of imperialism. The suspicion remains, however, that even as the locus of resistance shifts to the periphery, the Western intellectual retains for himself or herself the role of understanding, judging and representing that resistance.

 

Perhaps it is proper for us, as critical intellectuals and arbiters of hope, and stationed in the intellectual power apparatuses of the west, to seek out these impulses for democratic change, to receive the messages that meet us from these [`developing'] worlds, and translate them, by way of our theoretical tools, for ours.(189-90)

 

Such a position cannot avoid producing the “developing world” as raw material for the consolidation of “our” Western subjectivity; or, as Holub herself puts it, “the necessity of the `inferior other’ in the structuration of identity” (15). Thus Gramsci, stretched almost to the vanishing point by the end of this book, can be mobilized to legitimate the continuation of intellectual and political work in the Western academy, at a time when it is perceived to be under threat. Holub’s intervention, via the figure of Gramsci, can be read as an attempt to shore up the precarious but nonetheless powerful position of Western intellectuals “as mediators between the needs and desires of developing cultures, and the mandarins of our establishments” (189).

 

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

 

If such a reading of Holub’s work seems uncharitable, then I must have been infected by the deep cynicism underlying David Harris’s survey of British cultural studies, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. These effects, according to Harris, have been mostly deleterious; the energy of the “early rebellion” of British Gramscians has been “institutionalised and acedemicised” since then, so that the impetus for most current work in the field comes from the need to “found a research programme or school or centre, to engage in a little academic politics” (15). Thus, while Stuart Hall (or, rather, “the ubiquitous Stuart Hall” [xv]) argues that the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) demonstrated “heterodoxy and openness,” Harris contends that “beneath this pluralism lies a deeper conformity to a continuing project–the development and defence of gramscianism” (7), and that

 

this tendency is linked to the academic context of the production of these works: briefly, it is conventional in academic writing to conduct a debate with rivals before allowing the chosen theorist to emerge as the person most likely to synthesise the offerings, make sense of the debates, or offer some suitably pleasurable resolution and closure. This underlying narrative structure . . . might be called `academic realism.'(8)

 

Harris promises to share with us readers the “tricks of the trade” in this academic game (2), as he demonstrates to us the unity and continuity underlying “the specific twists and turns of the debates” within British cultural studies (8). If this is a survey work, intended primarily as a teaching tool (“I am especially interested in the student audience” [3]), then it is at least up front about its non-neutrality in the face of its subject matter. There is little doubt in Harris’s mind that in the trajectory charted by his title, the British Gramscians have taken part in a “demoralised flight from serious politics” (190) into the coziness of academic tenure and complacency.

 

Such cynicism is by no means entirely misplaced– although one might wonder at its motivation; given the hegemony currently enjoyed by “British cultural studies,” there is no doubt notoriety to be gained by attacking it. CCCS’s work in the seventies and early eighties did indeed demonstrate “the astonishing tendency for the figure of Gramsci to keep coming to the fore, as a leading theorist and guide, as a source of specific pieces or concepts which guide analysis, or less specifically as a kind of model of good practice, able always to `teach a lesson’, keep the faith, and see off rivals” (7-8). Later on, what Harris calls “gramscianism” certainly did seem to offer, as I suggested above, “a kind of `middle ground’ between fully floating discursive politics and more orthodox class politics” (45). Or, as the ubiquitous Stuart Hall put it, in the discussion period following his paper “The Toad in the Garden”: “Gramsci is where I stopped in the headlong rush into structuralism and theoreticism. At a certain point I stumbled over Gramsci, and I said, `Here and no further!'” (Hall “Discussion,” 69).³

 

But while academic and institutional pressures are undoubtedly a major factor in the reproduction and dissemination of any theoretical or political movement, such a movement is never reducible to those pressures. At times, Harris’s book ceases to be a sustained critique of a critical tradition, and drifts into academic point-scoring. Harris focuses on the ways in which Gramsci has served as a bulwark against threatening theoretical tendencies; what he fails to acknowledge is that such defensiveness does not preclude (indeed it may have actually facilitated) the production of important intellectual work. As an example, let me focus briefly on Harris’s reading of Policing the Crisis (96-104).

 

Harris recognizes the complexity and openness of the now classic 1978 study of the ways in which “moral panics” about crime serve to consolidate hegemonic state power: “there seems to be no stage-managed `discovery’ here [in Policing], at least, no premature reduction of the `complex unity’ to some easy slogan about hegemony” (102). However, this very complexity constitutes a problem for Harris: “the piece can look like a conventionally `balanced’ academic piece, riddled with cautious qualifications and reservations” (102).⁴ Some readers may recognize a trick of the trade in operation here in Harris’s text, viz. “a common academic desire to want it both ways” (102). Harris is suspicious of the authors of Policing when they claim to have “just moved, under the pressure of their own argument, from one level of analysis to the other as their discoveries unfolded,” arguing instead that “the authors had known for some while where they were going” (103); so does this mean that there is a stage-managed discovery after all?

 

While it is true that Harris could hardly be expected to “do justice” to a densely argued and expansive 400-page book in a short summary, nevertheless I think that Harris is enacting his own kind of closure when he argues that, of the possible audiences for Policing the Crisis, “it seems that `academics’ have received the most attention: all those asides and interventions in debates between different authors (and all those careful qualifications and reservations) are for them” (98). This is too easy a dismissal of a complex text–the mobilization of the idea of “academic realism,” if pushed far enough, can cease to be a revealing insight into the strategies which produce a discursive formation, and can become instead an alibi for failing to engage with the substance of that discourse.

 

We should be thankful to Harris for sharing his inside knowledge of the constraints and conventions of “academic realism,” not least because it will allow his student audience to decode his own strategies. Although “gramscianism” makes some sense as a concept in the context of British cultural studies through the mid-eighties, as the field has become more dispersed and contested (and as the prominence of Gramsci himself as a theorist has waned–the only field in which that could be said to be happening– “Largely . . . Gramsci now exists as a kind of source for handy and stylish quotes, phrases or metaphors” [191]), it makes less and less sense to talk of “gramscianism.” The question arises, then, to what extent the term functions primarily within the economy of Harris’s own text in order to hold his academic realist narrative together, particularly when it can encompass such writers as “[Robert] Hewison [who] is not a gramscian or a semiotician, in so far as it is possible to tell from his books, but . . . is clearly an informed critic, and, with the aid of a few specific concepts and a parachute for them, . . . could become a full gramscian should he so desire” (158). The wit and acerbity here will doubtless endear Harris to his student audience, but in the end one fears that it will encourage the dismissal of what, after all, is “one of the few critical traditions British academic life possesses” (6).

 

Gramsci’s Corpus

 

When it comes to writing about Gramsci, the academic realism which Harris anatomizes is almost always supplemented with a dose of tragic melodrama. Gramsci’s premature death in the Quisisana clinic in Rome in 1937, when he was finally freed from his prison sentence but physically incapable of leaving the prison hospital; his heroic struggle to defy the words of the chief prosecutor at his trial–“we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years”–by writing his prison notebooks, battling ill health and the inevitable lack of resources while incarcerated: among the ranks of Marxist martyrs only Rosa Luxemburg comes close to Antonio Gramsci.

 

Gramsci’s biography, however, does not merely add that all-important romantic frisson to an otherwise dry academic discourse. His early death means that the body of his later work–the prison notebooks–remains unfinished, sketchy, provisional, and must therefore be actively reconstructed in the process of reading. The usual give and take of scholarly interpretation becomes, in the context of Gramsci studies, an unusually intense tussle over the Gramsci corpus. Gramsci died intestate, as it were; his legacy–the body of his writings–has been contested, sometimes bitterly, ever since.

 

The publication, finally, of a definitive English translation of the full text of the prison notebooks will not lay this conflict to rest. In the introduction to the first volume of what will eventually be a five or six volume edition of Gramsci’s prison writings, the editor, Joseph Buttigieg, himself acknowledges this fact:

 

The Gramscian editor, scholar, or commentator, then, feels compelled . . . to stitch [the pieces of Gramsci's text] together. Sometimes this operation of reconstruction is carried out responsibly, that is, with a critical awareness of its limitations. At other times, however, this operation is carried out with the misguided belief that one can actually reconstruct not just Gramsci's thought but Gramsci himself. . . . It would be futile to think that one can put an end to this game. Even the most conscientiously accurate and complete reproduction of Gramsci's manuscript will not settle the polemics, or still the urge to reconstruct the `true' Gramsci."(62-63)

 

However, English-speaking readers will now have a much better grasp of the sheer volume of material which must be sifted through in order to produce the nuggets of Gramscian gold with which we are all so familiar: hegemony, state and civil society, war of maneuver and war of position, passive revolution, the organic intellectual.

 

This new translation is based on the standard Italian edition of the Quaderni del carcere edited by Valentino Gerratana, except that the meticulously detailed textual apparatus appears in the same volume as the relevant text, rather than being reserved for a separate, final volume. A pedant would bemoan a number of typos and other proofreading errors which sit badly with the scholarliness of the enterprise; nevertheless, readers can only be grateful to Buttigieg and Columbia University Press (who are also publishing a complete English edition of Gramsci’s prison letters) for their endeavors.

 

The Buttigieg edition will not supplant the previous translated selections from Gramsci’s prison writings Selections, Cultural Writings), if only because its price and bulk will preclude its use as a teaching text for the most part. However, Buttigieg is right to say that its appeal will not be limited “only to the most scrupulous readers and assiduous researchers” (xix). Even a cursory reading of the “recondite materials” (xix) of Gramsci’s first two notebooks (translated in this volume) will provide the necessary innoculation against the worst excesses of the Gramsci industry: both the tendency to smooth out Gramsci’s writings in the search for a coherent philosophy, and the tendency to treat Gramsci’s text as so disjunctive as to be open to almost any interpretation.

 

The publication of this new translation would not have been possible without the support of a large Italian bank (whose generosity makes a pointed contrast with the “modest” assistance Buttigieg received from the NEH [xxi]). But the whole project is also clearly an effect of the Gramsci industry. A positive effect, and one for which we can be grateful–even if it means another decade of dubious “gramscianisms” and another generation of scholars claiming to be Gramsci’s postmodern heirs.

 

Notes

 

1. Both Holub and Harris make the point that theorists who write about Gramsci, or use his work, have consistently foreclosed or even dismissed critical theory (see Harris 15-16). Although I do not have the space to do more than gesture at a possible new direction here, I think a fruitful place to start might be a discussion of the issues raised by the striking similarity in imagery of Gramsci’s reference to Italian poet Alfieri having his servants tie him to his chair (so that he would have the self-discipline to work Prison Notebooks 236]), and Adorno and Horkheimer’s reference to Odysseus having himself tied to the mast (so that he might have pleasure from the Sirens’ song) while stopping the ears of his sailors, so that they could continue to labor for him (Adorno and Horkheimer 58-60).

 

2. Although a discussion of Laclau and Mouffe is beyond the scope of this paper, I would contend that a structurally similar argument fatally disables Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In the section “Equivalence and Difference,” they locate the logic of equivalence in the Third World, where “imperialist exploitation and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of domination” produce “the division of the political space into [only] two fields” (131); they call this the realm of the “popular,” which they set against the “democratic,” associated with “advanced industrial societies” characterized by complexity and the logic of difference (130). Thus a surreptitious hierarchical account emerges, in which the Third World is parasitic on the West, the site of “hegemony”: “It is clear that the fundamental concept is that of `democratic struggle,’ and that popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures” (137).

 

3. On Stuart Hall’s use of Gramsci, in the context of Gramsci’s reception in Britain more generally, see David Forgacs, “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review 176 (July- August 1989): 83-84.

 

4. The authors themselves, by contrast, worry in their introduction that “academics will find it Policing] too unbalanced, too committed” Policing ix).

Works Cited

 

• Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1991.
• Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?. London: Zed, 1985.
• Golding, Sue. Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. & trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Trans. William Beolhower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison. Ed. & trans. Lynne Lawner. New York: Noonday, 1989.
• Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
• Hall, Stuart. “Discussion: The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
• Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978
• Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1985.