Study Notes and Questions (Q1)
We will devote part of Monday’s class to the “Notes on the Southern
Question,” and to a discussion/description of the 33 notebooks. You should
start, in the meantime, reading Notebook 1 (Q1), which we’ll tackle on
Wednesday. To guide you through the reading of Q1, here are some
(hopefully useful) notes.
On March 19, 1927, while in jail and awaiting for his trial, Gramsci writes a
letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht:
My life is wasted in complete monotony. Even studying is much more
difficult than it would seem.… I am nagged (this is typical of
prisoners) by this idea: that I should do something “für ewig”,
according to a complex conception of Goethe’s, which I remember
once tormented our Pascoli a lot. In short, I would like, according to a
pre-established plan, to study intensely and systematically some
subject that would absorb me and centralize my inner life… I have
thought of four topics so far…: 1st, a study of the formation of the
public spirit in Italy in the last century; in other words, a study of
Italian intellectuals… 2nd, a study of comparative linguistics, no
less!…. 3rd, a study of Pirandello’s theater and of the transformation
of Italian theatrical taste that Pirandello represented and helped to
bring about. 4th, an essay on serialized novels and popular taste in
literature…. What do you think of all this? After all, if one looks
closely, there is a some coherence among these four topics: the creative
popular spirit, in its different phases and degrees of development, lies
equally at the basis of all of them.
In regard to this letter, I will have something to say, and discuss with you,
on Monday. For now, let’s stick to the facts: Gramsci starts writing his first
notebook on February 8, 1929. Take a look at the “Main Topics” around
which Gramsci intends to organize his prison writings. You may want to
compare them to the ones listed in his letter to Tatiana and see if you too,
like Gramsci, can see “ some coherence” among all of them. Of course: good
luck with that!
As comparisons go, also take a close look at notes 43, 44 and 48, all written
between February and March 1930. In these notes, the concept of
“hegemony,” deployed already in the “Letter to Comintern” and the
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“Southern Question,” reappears. Does it acquire now any new valence?
Consider especially note 48: “The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the
now classic terrain of the parliamentary regime” (“L’esercizio ‘normale’
dell’egemonia nel terreno divenuto classico del regime parlamentare”). It opens
one of the (many) dialectical oppositions through which Gramsci likes to
work: here, normal (hegemony) vs. “’crisis of the principle of authority,’
‘dissolution of the parliamentary regime’” (“‘crisi del principio di autorità’ —
‘dissoluzione del regime parlamentare’”). What does “hegemony” mean at this
stage of the prison writings?
Of crucial importance is note 47, also from February or March 1930. In those
precise months, the Communist Party is trying to reconstitute a clandestine
“internal center”, the centro interno, in Italy. It is therefore essential for
Gramsci to understand what the PC’s antagonist — the Fascist State —
truly is and how it operates. In short: by 1930, the regime has become
increasingly concerned with reaching wide popular consensus — a
consensus that, once the parliament has been rendered de facto inoperative,
can no longer be reached through the “normal” political negotiations
among parties promoting different (class) interests and agreeing on a
“common” national interest. Consensus has to be reached through different
means. Some examples: in 1929, in a predominantly Catholic country, the
Fascist government has settled its old territorial disputes with the papacy
by recognizing Vatican City as an independent sovereign state under the
pope (until then “prisoner in the Vatican”), and by making Catholicism
Italy’s State religion. Fascism also intensifies its attempts to penetrate and
control both the publishing industry (through direct economic support,
literary prizes, and the launching or promoting of academic and popular
journals), and the universities (through ad hoc funding of specific projects of
“national interest” and with the establishment of the Royal Academy of
Italy in 1929). It is in this context that Gramsci starts developing one of his
most original and consequential concepts: that of the “integral State”
(without using those words yet). What is the relation between “State” and
“civil society” (all the private institutions such as the Church, the school,
the university, the publishing industry…)? How does this relation bear on
the notion of “hegemony”? And what is the role of intellectuals in such
relation?
Note 47, takes us back to note 44, which we can read now as some sort of
blueprint for any strategy the clandestine PC may want to adopt. Gramsci’s
suggestion — explicit already in the note’s title: “Political class leadership
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before and after assuming government power” is quite simple: a class (or
any group) needs to be capable of “leading” other classes or groups before it
can acquire power. What are the theoretical implications of such an
argument? Also pay attention to one more dialectical opposition: leading/
dominant (dirigente/dominante).
Theoretically connected to note 44, notes 62 and 150 may start signaling an
early moment in Gramsci when the relation between economy and
ideology, base and superstructure, become increasingly complicated. We
said something on the topic last Wednesday. If needed, please do an
internet search (Wikipedia, AI, or whatever) on the relation base/
superstructure; and, while you are at it, also search “Risorgimento” if you
are not familiar with it.
Keep in mind that these are only some of the possible topics that we will
want to discuss. Bring your own questions in class or post them on the blog
page.
I’m certain our discussion will take-up (at least some!) of my following questions given the content of the study note, but one of the concepts I found myself returning to is the notion of consent. In the broadest terms: What is the specific relationship between consent and hegemony at this stage in Gramsci’s thought?
On a more granular level, I’m curious about the relationship between Gramsci’s concept of leading (p. 136), “organized” v. “vague and generic” v. “permanently organized” consent (p. 153; 155), and the southern question (p. 134). I think the dynamic between these concepts in Q1 is especially interesting when compared to “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” where Gramsci writes: “The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that is succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist here, this means to the extent that is succeeds in *gaining the consent of the broad present masses*” (p. 173, emphasis mine).
In reading the Italian, I found myself drawn to Gramsci’s repetition of words like “meccanico”, “meccanicismo”, and “meccanicamente”. For example, in note 53 (Maurrasianism and syndicalism), he uses the words to refer to Maurras’ nationalist/syndicalist ideology. In my understanding, Maurras for Gramsci comes from an intellectual class that would seek to impose “natural” positivistic laws onto an understanding of history. See note 49 (“Organic centralism” and Maurras’ doctrines): “The principle of ‘organic centralism’ is ‘co-optation’ around a ‘possessor of the truth,’ someone ‘enlightened by reason’ who has discovered the ‘natural’ laws, etc. (The laws of mechanics and mathematics function as an intellectual motor; the metaphor replaces historical thought.)”
In note 48, Gramsci says that, “Before politics for [Maurras] there is always ‘political abstraction,’ the complete acceptance of a most detailed ‘ideological’ program which anticipates all the particulars, as in utopias, which requires a determinate conception not of history but of the history of France and Europe, that is, a determinate hermeneutics” (159). He then observes that this kind of ideological unity leads to the creation of linguistic “jargon” (gergo). I am interested in continuing to pay attention to Gramsci’s (almost always) derisive use of the word “meccanico” in the Notebooks. It is interesting to see how it already invades the structure of language for Gramsci through the production of jargon.
(N.b. Gramsci notes that “the language of the people remains the dialect backed by an Italianizing slang (“gergo”) which consists, for the most part, in a *mechanical* translation of the dialect” in Note 73. Clearly mechanism has philosophical, historiographical, political, and linguistic valences for Gramsci).
Q2 is in large part a repository for bibliographical references and annotations which Gramsci keeps from 1929 to 1933. The notebook also collects notes that Gramsci, apparently, could not fit in the other notebooks — because of a lack of space, or because of topic? Many are about national Italian history — but written with the awareness that national problems are inseparable from global politics. If you have not done so already, find on any internet resource some basic information on “Risorgimento” and on “Italian fascism.”
Q2 presents several problems regarding the dating and chronology of the notes. This is the case of the important note 75, which, in fact, Gianni Francioni and Giuseppe Cospito re-number for the National Edition as note 76, and divide into two parts: the first composed around February 1929 (before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression), and the second in 1930. I suppose you can tell, when reading the note, that its first part is concerned with an imminent financial crisis, while the second part dwells more on its consequences.
Needless to say, the Great Depression seemed to prove, in the doxa of the time, two things: for Fascist Italy, relatively untouched by the crisis, it was proof of the end of “Americanism” and the beginning of fascist Italy’s world hegemony; for vulgar economic determinism (that “mechanical” conception of history we touched upon on Wednesday), the crisis was to preannounce the imminent collapse of the capitalist order. It also goes without saying, Gramsci never believed in either of those two things — his attention focuses instead on the role of “elites” and the politics of “charisma” that prevent a crisis to reach its “catastrophic” endpoint.
We have already mentioned, if *en passant*, Gramsci’s distinction between “hegemony” and “crisis of hegemony” or “crisis of authority” — moments of crisis, in other words, when a “normal” exercise of hegemony gives way to an intensification of social conflicts. During these moments, hegemony often relies on force (Hegel’s “police,” State might, etc.). But there are other strategies through which the crisis can be contained and the “catastrophe” of the entire system avoided — and we can start reading the *Prison Notebooks* as a treatise on the ways in which capitalism survives its crises (in Q8 we will see almost a taxonomy of the different crises). Its strategies of containment include “passive revolution” (Q1§44; Q1§150; Q2§22); “charismatic” dictatorships (Q2§75); racial politics (Q2§45); and colonialism (Q2§52).
Regarding Q2§75: in case anyone wants to look at it, I will attach (or send) Michels’ article, which occasions Gramsci’s reflections on the “charismatic leader.” As it is clear from the note, Gramsci also knew Max Weber “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority.” I will also provide it.
Other notes that could be of interest: Q2§116-117 begins developing the idea of a “cosmopolitan” (rather than “national” function of Italian intellectuals. I am not sure there is much to discuss yet, but take notice. Of interest in the context of what we discussed on Wednesday (civil society as being part of the State) is note Q2§150 “What is the police”? Maybe we can take the question literally: what is the police? To what measure the functions of the police are executed in the “‘private’ fabric of the State”? Does civil society has executive, legislative, and judicial functions?
For Wednesday, after Labor Day, it would be great if each of you could bring one note (or one group of notes) from Notebook 1 and/or Notebook 2 to discuss it for 5-10 minutes. Do use the blog to alert us all of what you would like to discuss.
I’m interested in Gramsci gathering his thoughts on nationalism in Notebook 2, perhaps around the question, what forms a national consciousness?
In 25, Gramsci discusses the role of a small group of intellectuals who “plunder” Maurras to define what is initially a heterogeneous Italian nationalist movement. He mentions two inputs: a kind of crude “populist xenophobia” and “syndicalist importation into nationalism.”
In 51, Gramsci is critiquing Giovanni Pascoli, in particular La grande proletaria si e mossa – something like, “the great proletarian nation has mobilized,” in which Pascoli “transposes” the notion of class onto nations (296).
We have two examples of nationalist appropriation of socialism in which class antagonism is displaced into nationalist antagonism (out: the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; in: the poverty of Italy against the capitalist nations), and this frame provides an account for Italian colonization – Italy must pursue national expansion to overcome Italian poverty (“we are an exploited nation”).
How is Gramsci working out the ways in which the nation is produced? Maybe you found other notes to add or complicate the two above?
I’m interested in using the tension between unity and autonomy Gramsci takes up earlier in Q2 as a lens to think about his focus on geopolitics, global hegemony, and colonialism throughout the notebook. I’m especially curious about the dynamics of hegemonic struggles *among* states (e.g. note 16) and international cooperation *between* states (e.g. note 21).
As Gramsci describes in note 48, the “major difficulty in maintaining the balance between autonomy and unity presents itself, naturally, in foreign policy” (p. 292). How does this unity-autonomy tension—the “need of the national economies to go beyond their national borders without losing their national character” and the agreements, strategies, and conflicts that develop to this end (p. 351)—manifest beyond the context of the Dominions and the British Empire, about which the reflections in note 48 were developed? Related to this broader question about how hegemony operates on the international scale, how does unity-autonomy tension stoke or discipline counter-hegemony formation (e.g. reflections on Ethiopia on p. 296 v. reflections on the Philippines on p. 265)?
In last Wednesday’s class, we discussed how Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks can be read as a concrete strategy by which the ‘classe dirigente’ could effectively organize and create leading consensus in the increasingly authoritarian Italian context. So while in Q2§75 Gramsci relates the concept of “charismatic leadership” (through interlocutors Michels and Weber) onto the case of Mussolini’s absolute rule over the ‘classe dominante’, I wonder if Gramsci’s reflections on the role of ‘charisma’ or ‘spirit’ could in turn also be read as a strategy for resistance by the ‘classe dirigente’.
More specifically, the brazen political assassination of socialist and anti-fascist Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 has long been interpreted as the watershed moment that marked Mussolini’s shift into outright authoritarianism. Crucially, however, this tragic episode also sewed the first symbolic seeds of the foremost rhetorical paradigm of Italy’s antifascist resistance—that of the role of sacrifice and martyrdom in overcoming Mussolini’s regime. Following his own death, Gramsci too would become yet another modern martyr of the Italian Resistance. Ultimately, the deaths of Matteotti, Gramsci, and countless other resisters were ultimately leveraged as a rallying cry against an unjust regime.
So, my question is: In the same way that Mussolini functioned as the charismatic leader of the ‘classe dominante’, could antifascist martyrs be read as the charismatic leaders of the ‘classe dirigente’? In the same way that the mission of the charismatic leader of the ‘classe dominante’ is accomplished via their role as the *living* embodiment of their party’s realized ideals, is the mission of the charismatic leaders of the ‘classe dirigente’ instead accomplished via their role as the *sacrificial* embodiment of the as-yet-unrealized ideals for which they lost their lives? And how, if at all, could this relate to our earlier discussions of Gramsci’s advocacy of “temporary” sacrifice in overcoming an exploitative system?
I am interested by two aspects of Gramsci’s discussion of nationalism and inter-state (and colonial) relations in note 48 of Q2.
First, Gramsci’s assessment of the function of nationalist movements appears more nuanced here than elsewhere. Whereas elsewhere Gramsci seems to describe deliberate slippage from “proletariat” to “people” (see note 47 and, as Melissa points out, notes 51-2), here he notes that in the imperial periphery assertions of peoplehood are constitutive of movements against capital: “the national and nationalist movements which are partly a reaction to the workers’ movement (in advance capitalist countries) and partly a movement against capitalism spurred by the workers’ movement: India, blacks, Chinese, etc.” (p. 291). I am reminded here of our earlier conversation regarding Gramsci’s focus on the translatability of concepts.
Second, in his discussion of the British Empire, Gramsci seems to identify foreign policy as a unique sphere of political action. Foreign policy, Gramsci writes, “requires a quickness of mind and a unity of will” (p. 292). Are there indications elsewhere that Gramsci understands inter-state relations as imposing different demands from domestic politics? What implications might this have for our understanding of relations of hegemony among states as opposed to within them?
I am interested in a couple of curiosities I encountered towards the end of Q1 and in Q2.
Towards the end of Q1 (notes 74, 91, 101, and, tangentially, 141), Gramsci annotates current publications regarding the “strapaese” and “stracitta'” or “super-country” and “super-city”. Papini, a constant figure in Q1, lies at the inception of the “strapaese” movement which was essentially nationalist in motivation and idealized rural life. I am hoping to discuss further the strapaese movement and consider how it relates to Gramsci’s approach to a more pragmatic and materially rigorous understanding of folklore up to this point in the notebooks. Perhaps Q1N89 could be of some use here in which he considers Crocioni’s book on Italian folklore (“It seems to me that until now folklore has been studied (in fact, until now, there has only been the collection of raw material) as a ‘picturesque’ element. It ought to be studied as a ‘conception of the world’ of particular social strata which are untouched by modern currents of thought.” (186).
Secondly, I am interested in this heading “passato e presente” that Gramsci first mentions in a couple notes (“possono servire per Passato e presente”, Q2N92; “Si potrebbe collocare in rubrica in Passato e Presente” Q2N95) and then incorporates as headings to a couple of stray observations towards the end of Q2 on the consumption of salt (Q2N141), the rehabilitation of the Bourbons of Naples (Q2N144), and Italian immigration to the Congo (Q2N146). I am seeing that there is also a note from the end of Q1, Note 156, titled “Past and Present” that is, if anything, opaque to my mind. What can we make of this category of “Past and Present” up to this point in the Notebooks?
Preparatory Notes for Notebook 3
Having finished the pages of the First Notebook in May 1930 (the Second
Notebook remains open as a repository for annotated bibliographies),
Gramsci immediately begins to fill Notebook 3, also a miscellany. In the
same month, he is also putting together, in Notebook 4 (to be discussed
next week), his first attempt at a “special” notebook. Also in the same
month of May 1930, Gramsci starts using a notebook (Notebook A, omitted
in Gerratana’s and Buttigieg’s editions) to translate texts by Marx contained
in a German anthology he has in prison: the Theses on Feuerbach and the
Preface to Critique of Political Economy (texts that he already knew before
his arrest). We may expect Q3 and Q4 to be influenced by these two texts.
English translation of the Theses can be found here: .
For the Preface, you can look here:
We will begin our Monday class by going back, with Lindsey, to note 75
from notebook 2 — a note explicitly devoted to the “charismatic leader,”
but in fact also addressing the so-called “theory of the elites” (Mosca,
Pareto…). For the rest of the class, I would like to touch on a few issues:
1. The emergence of the reflection on “subaltern groups,” largely
connected to the historical and political problem of the peasantry. You
may want to read these notes keeping in mind the “Notes on the
Southern Question” — but also keep in mind, going back to last class,
Gramsci’s concern with “strapaese,” “common sense,” and folklore in
general. A particularly interesting note seems to me Q3§18, where
Gramsci sees a fundamental difference between subalternity in the
pre-modern State and subalternity in the modern State (i.e. the
post-1789 parliamentary State). Most of the notes on the topic (with
the addition of more notes from notebooks 9, 13, and 19, will be
rewritten and elaborated in 1934, in the “special” Notebook 25, “On
the Margins of History: History of the Subaltern Social Groups.”
2. Among the myriad of themes Gramsci explores in his miscellaneous
notebooks, there is one he keeps returning on: the “political question
of intellectuals.” Trying to find an answer to the defeat of the workers’
movement in Italy (and in Europe) after the “Red Two-Years” of
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strikes and occupations, notes 42 and 44 point an accusatory finger
not against Mussolini, but rather against Socialist leaders: the party’s
intellectuals have revealed themselves unable to understand, and
therefore direct, the “spontaneous” rebellions of the masses. The
result of this inability on the part of (socialist) intellectuals is that the
masses have detached from them, to the point that Gramsci can
register (Q3§44) “phenomena of mass betrayal and desertion” that
evoke in him the memory of Aesop’s fable of the beaver (Q3§42). We
should discuss the role that “spontaneity” plays in Gramsci’s
understanding of politics. We should also notice that, in lamenting the
absence of any organic relationship between leaders and led (dirigenti
e diretti), a paradigm shift emerges that had not until now come to
light with the necessary clarity, even though it had already been
glimpsed in the “Notes on the Southern Question”: the revolutionary
unity of the working masses is no longer “spontaneously”
presupposed, nor is it a given of the “objective material conditions.”
Instead, it is the product of political intervention, and of the action
exerted within (if not from above) the masses by intellectual groups.
This is where the importance of their political function lies, as the
“Notes on the Southern Question” had already anticipated:
organization and mediation.
3. Related to the previous point: notice the emergence of a new
dialectical binary in note 48: spontaneity/conscious leadership.
4. If we have time (and Gramsci does teach us optimism after all), we
could also track the emergence of the expression “national-popular”
— also in some notes on literature and “Brescianism.”
On Wednesday, we can begin with each of you bringing one note (or a set of
notes) to the attention of the class. As always, the discussion does not need
to be exhaustive, and you can use your time to pose questions and
problems without having to come up with answers and solutions.
In note 48 (pg. 49), Gramsci discusses spontaneity versus conscious leadership. He writes, “every “spontaneous” movement is indirectly demonstrated by the fact that there exist currents and groups that uphold spontaneity as a method. In this regard, one must distinguish between purely “ideological” elements and elements of practical activity, between scholars who maintain that spontaneity is the immanent [and objective] “method” of the historical process and political adventurers who uphold spontaneity as the political” method.” He goes onto explain the unity of spontaneity and conscious leadership as the real political action of the subaltern classes. How do we understand spontaneity as a method? Is it the systematic education of conditions that catalyze mass action? What is the difference between an understanding of spontaneity as a historical method and as a political one?
I would like to highlight Note 76, which feels like a note that has been a long-time coming at this point in the Notebooks and is the product of concerted research/thought by Gramsci regarding the relationship between language, hegemony, and intellectual culture (specifically the strange and unique case of Italy with “dialects” vs. standardized Italian, whose dynamics he sees presaged by that of il “mediolatino” with the “volgari” Latins). I say it feels a long-time coming because it feels particularly well-developed and is also related to a number of previous notes on topics such as: “dialects” and the Language Question, the Medieval communes, the caste-based nature of intellectual culture. A couple of key points Gramsci makes in this note:
“I volgari sono scritti quando il popolo reprende importanza” (“Vernaculars are written when the people regain importance”) (354/73).
“After a brief interval (the freedom of the communes) during which intellectuals of popular (bourgeois) class origins flourished, the intellectual function was reabsorbed into the traditional caste where the individual members came from the people but where the character of the caste prevailed over their origins. In other words, it is not the case than an entire stratum of the population creates its own intellectuals when it attains power (which is what happened in the fourteenth century); rather a traditionally selected body assimilates single individuals into its cadres (the typical example of this is the ecclesiastical structure).” (74).
I noticed in the Italian the introduction of a new descriptor deployed mainly derisively in a similar manner to “meccanic(o)/(amente)” which is “libresc(o)/(amente)” meaning “bookish(ly)”. This new descriptor has its opposite in the term “vivente” or “living”. In Q3N33, Gramsci says:
“Therefore the great politician has to be “very learned,” that is, he should have maximum “knowledge” of the components of contemporary life; he should know them not “bookishly,” as “erudition,” but in a “living” way, as the concrete substance of political “intuition” (nevertheless, if they are to become the living substance of his “intuition,” he also needs to learn them “bookishly”).
The bookish language is of course related to the erudite language of the scholars (clergy and then humanist intellectuals: le Tre corone-Dante, Boccacio, and Petrarch-whose written Florentine became the model for standardized Italian). Gramsci’s observation in Note 76 that the syntax of this written, erudite Florentine is still rooted in Latin and therefore detached from spoken Florentine is super important!
Here, I also would like to expand a bit upon the ideas of Bergson in relation to Gramsci (thus far). I have here two quotes from Bergson’s Matter and Memory which I think are highly relevant to Gramsci’s ideas and perhaps integral to understanding the growing rubric of “Past and Present”. Maybe there is a way of seeing Gramsci’s understanding of historiography v. spontaneity (to which we could maybe apply the binaries of meccanico/organico and libresco/vivente) as a translation of Bergson’s memory and perception? Notice Gramsci’s above use of “intuizione” (intuition). Intuition for Bergson is where, in lived reality, pure memory (unextended, spiritual) and pure perception (extended, sensori-motor, material) meet.
“In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; and the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns toward the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful.” (Matter and Memory 168-9)
“For, that a recollection should reappear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.” (153)
I am interested in Gramsci’s discussion of the contrast between the French and Italian historical traditions in Q3§82. As a result of the antagonistic relationship of one successive governmental form to the next, Gramsci writes that the subject of French history necessarily became the people-nation. Consequently, “an interdependence and close connection between people-nation and intellectuals” is nurtured in France. In Italy, on the other hand, the people-nation was nowhere to be found, and so history had to act as “propaganda,” to “create national unity—that is, the nation—from the outside, going against tradition.” The product of this creative project, in Gramsci’s analysis, is a separation (“estrange”[ment]) of the intellectual class from the people. I have two main questions in relation to this line of argumentation. First, Gramsci equates the nation with national unity. What is this unity? In what aspects of culture/politics/etc. is it to be produced? Second, I remain intrigued by the balancing act Gramsci expects intellectuals to undertake. We see in Q3§48 that the spontaneity of subaltern classes does not exist; it requires education by the intellectual class. At what point does this necessary education by the intellectual class cross the line to become an outside creation, separate from the nation-people?
I’m picking up on this topic: “Q3§18, where Gramsci sees a fundamental difference between subalternity in the pre-modern State and subalternity in the modern State (i.e. the
post-1789 parliamentary State).”
Gramsci explains that pre-modern subordinate groups, such as the plebes of ancient Rome, were able to establish their own institutions, governance, and organizations within and alongside the dominant class structure (he calls this “two governments”) because the pre-modern state was composite and decentralized. In the modern state, the subaltern is integrated into the state – through education, art, popular culture, journalism, political parties – making a sustained project of counter-hegemonic institution building difficult, and requiring different strategies.
In Notebook 3, Gramsci is interested (I think?) in collecting and analyzing historical examples of these strategies. Here are a few I found.
1. “Spontaneous” revolution (the constant ferment of the South), which doesn’t sustain revolutionary change without a strong political party, bridged by intellectuals and educated through popular culture, which can harness and organize their power.
2. Saint-Simonites and Comte’s positivist churches – they resemble a counter-hegemonic project (ritual, ethical instruction, practices) and get into popular culture via novels but ultimately are mired in paternalism and fail to organize the people toward autonomy.
3. Lazzaretti/utopianism –Foster a “spirit of cleavage” and an aspiration for an alternative social order. They also offer a language to critique the past. Lazzaretti’s movement produced a local communal economic practice, mixing utopian socialism with Christian dogmas (motto: “The Republic-Kingdom of God”). But ultimately, Lazzaretti’s movement failed when he was assassinated (charismatic leader). Gramsci is also critical of utopian writing becoming a literary substitute for organizing.
I’m curious whether Gramsci thinks these are simply failed attempts at hegemony (and possibly warnings), or whether these types of counter-hegemonic resistance/alternative movements can contribute to the sustained, autonomous, national-popular political project Gramsci sees as the ultimate goal. Could elements of these movements contribute to moving subalterns toward political autonomy?
There are three notes I would like to explore in this week’s seminar. First, I am interested in Gramsci’s critique of the “subversive” and the related category of the “starvelings” in §46. These concepts seem particularly relevant to understanding what Gramsci describes as the necessarily defensive posture of subaltern groups, which in the case of the “subversive,” involves self-definition through negation. I am also struck by Gramsci’s noticeably extensive use of quotation marks in this passage—a grammatical choice that we have repeatedly seen to be quite revealing. What work are the quotations (e.g. “people,” “mines,” “contriving,” “luxury”) doing in this note?
My second question concerns §60 and §61. The transition between these sections made me curious about the relationship between regimes of social reproduction and the “starvelings,” the “subversive,” and the failure of the older generation to “guide the younger generation” (p. 59). Gramsci suggests that this failure is “partly an expression of the crisis of the institution of the family and of the new situation of women in society” (p. 59). First, I would like to gain greater historical context about the changes Gramsci is describing in §61. Second—and more substantively—I am curious about the role of social reproduction as (1) a potential force for the education of spontaneity and (2) related to the lumpen-esque “makeshift life on the edges of the rural underworld” inhabited by the starvelings (p. 45).
I am particularly interested in Gramsci’s discussion of literature and the press, and in the role of print media in cultivating historical consciousness. He makes an observation in §37 that “Italian Catholicism is sterile in the literary field, as in the other fields of culture”—that there are very few Catholic writers in Italy, especially in poetry and the novel. What does this lack of literary production suggest for the peasant masses in Italy, and what role does it play in establishing hegemony? Later, in §49 he writes, “The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the only one. Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence public opinion belongs to it…” Gramsci then expounds upon what he names the spirit of cleavage—the acquisition of one’s historical identity—as a feat of complex ideological work essential to combatting the fortifications of the ruling class. I am interested in discussing this in class and the relationship of the press in cultivating this “spirit of cleavage”.
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 4
Notebook 4 is written between May 1930 and September 1932. Its structure
presents a tighter organization than previous notebooks (although it is not
to be considered a “special,” i.e. mono-thematic, notebook).
The opening section of the notebook (notes 1-48), titled “Notes on
Philosophy,” seems to respond to two events. The first is the much
publicized keynote lecture that Benedetto Croce gives at the Congress of
Philosophy held in Oxford on September 1930 — a lecture in which Croce
famously argues that Marxism is not a philosophy but, rather, a “naïve
sociologism” built on the conceptual premises of “vulgar materialism.” The
second is the Soviet Union’s turn towards Stalinist autocracy — a turn
accompanied by Stalin proclaiming the doctrine of “socialism in one
country” as official Soviet policy. This means for Gramsci, both at a political
and at a personal level, that the Soviet Union is no longer interested in a
communist international, and that the fate of communism (and communists)
in Italy (including those in prison) is no longer a Soviet concern.
Notes 1-48 seem to translate this feeling of betrayal into a new theoretical
problematic: What is Marxism? The target of Gramsci’s criticism is here
Nikolai Bukharin — a close ally of Stalin. His Historical Materialism: A
System of Sociology (1921) — a “manual” for mass education, promoted by
the PCUS — had been in fact one of the main targets of Croce’s critique of
Marxism. Gramsci does agree with Croce: Bukharin’s manual expresses a
vulgar materialism that certainly cannot be worth the label of
“philosophy”; but, at the same time, it has little to do with Marxism, which
Gramsci starts conceptualizing as an “original” philosophy coinciding
neither with materialism (i.e. Bukharin) nor with idealism (Croce). These
notes consequently begin a more intentional reconsideration of the relation
between base (material conditions) and superstructure (ideal formations).
Note 37 may be particularly worth discussing.
Having concluded the first series of the “Notes on Philosophy (materialism
and idealism)” with note 48, Gramsci uses the remaining space of Notebook
4 to draft a series of notes all in some way connected to the first and longest
of these, Q4§49 titled “Gli intellettuali” (The Intellectuals). This is a note of
great importance for the elaboration of Gramsci’s concept of the intellectual
(which we have in part discussed already) and for the distinction,
established here, between traditional and organic intellectuals. Note 49 is
2
also important for the discussion of Taylorism. I would postpone a
thorough discussion of Taylorism for now, and just register Gramsci’s
attention to the issues of technological (un-)employment and relative
surplus value (i.e., falling wages because of machines and robotics taking
the place of living labor) in a series of notes concerning the intellectuals.
On Monday, we should return, with Melissa, to Q3§18, and, with Lily, to
Q3§46 and the question of “subversivism.” For the rest of our class, I would
like to reconstruct the debate over Bukharin’s “manual,” culminating in
Benedetto Croce’s Oxford lecture.
For the Wednesday seminar, there are several interesting notes in this
notebook: Q4§33 goes back to the problematic relation between intellectuals
and masses (i.e., party organization); Q4§35 gives us Gramsci’s definition of
“ideology”; Q4§40 dwells on the definition of Marxism as “historicism”…
Please keep bringing one note (or a set of notes) to the attention of the class.
As always, the discussion does not need to be exhaustive, and you can use
your time to pose questions and problems without having to come up with
answers and solutions.
I was very interested in the recurring theme of language structuring thought permeates many of the notes in Notebook 4. Most notably, Gramsci spends multiple notes delineating various misunderstandings of “material”/”materialism” and “science” produce invalid arguments and “conceptions of the world”. In Note 41, Gramsci repudiates the notion that science (and here I think he means both the scientific method and knowledge (scienza)) should and could “prove the objectivity of the real”. The external world is only available to humans through the use of their senses. The sensory realm thus becomes understanding which turns into knowledge (this note clearly connects to note 33 on knowing-understanding-feeling). “[W]hat matters most is not the objectivity of the real but the human being who elaborates these methods, these material instruments that rectify the sensory organs, these logical instruments of discrimination–in other words, culture, the conception of the world, the relation between man and reality” (190). So culture, of which language is a part, mediates the relation between humans and reality.
The next note (42) sees Gramsci explore the idea of “translatability” of ideas in scientific language. I am not fully sure what to make of Gramsci’s stance in relation to translatability, he seems a bit ambivalent. Is the implication that historical materialism reveals these equivalencies in thought (despite differences in language use) and that through dialectical thought, *actually* new ideas (a new conception of the world) can develop?
N.b. in Note 33 (which I know we will discuss) – the Italian “Il De Man studia i sentimenti poplari, non “con-sente” con essi per guidarli e condurli a una catarsi di civilta’ moderna” is translated in the English as “De Man studies the sentiments of the people; he does not empathize with them to guide them and lead them to a catharsis of modern civilization”. The Italian construction “con-sente” meaning “feeling with” is interesting to note after our earlier discussion of consensus in Gramsci. To what extent does this “feeling with” which implies a bilateral movement of feeling influence the understanding and knowledge of the leading intellectual?
Given Gramsci’s preeminent interest in Notebook 4 for with the organization of culture, I was particularly intrigued by his brief reference to the figure of the artisan. In note 52 on Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci discusses artisans in contrast to the stark division between intellectual and manual labor represented by the figures of Dante’s scribe or the Taylorized worker. For Gramsci, the artisan represents the culmination of the worker’s humanity and spirituality achieved via ‘productive creation’ wherein “the worker’s individuality was wholly reflected in the object created and the link between art and labor was still very strong” (216).
But in much the same way that Gramsci is probing the question of the autonomous class position of intellectuals, I am interested in the structural precarity of the class position of the artisan. As neither a member of the manual proletariat nor an owner of the modes of industrial production, the artisan is instead a skilled, self-contained mode of production operable at the local community level. To that end, I would like to pose the question of whether the artisan can be conceived as part of an intellectual class, and if so what role the artisan might then play in the organization of culture? Through their creation of alternative modes of production, are artisans effectively counter-hegemonic?
I would like to discuss the following quotation from §49, where Gramsci elaborates the differing positions of the urban and rural intellectual: “The attitude of the peasant toward the [rural] intellectual is twofold: he admires the social position of the intellectual and, in general, the position of the state employee, but he sometimes feigns to disdain it… It is impossible to understand anything about the peasants without taking into consideration their effective subordination to the intellectuals and without grasping the fact that every development of the peasant masses to a certain extent is linked to and depends on the movements of the intellectuals.” Firstly, I find it interesting that Gramsci makes a distinction between the functions of urban and rural intellectuals; while the task of the former is closely tied to industry, standardized, the task of the latter is that of bringing the peasant masses into contact with administration, and thus of greater political importance. I also find it curious that Gramsci employs the word ‘subordination’ here to describe the relationship between the peasant masses and intellectuals. We have previously established in class that Gramsci believed the organic intellectual was necessary to organize their social class and to build hegemony—taking each individual’s intellectual activity as a point of departure—but that the intellectual also risks becoming abstracted from the peasant masses through co-optation.
Earlier in the same note, writing on the emergence of intellectuals in France, Gramsci again employs the language of subordination: “When in 1789 a new social group surfaced politically in history, it was already fully equipped for all its social functions, and therefore it fought for total domination of the nation. It did not have to make any essential compromises with the old classes; instead, it subordinated them to itself.” Does Gramsci always use the terms of subordination and domination to describe the project of hegemony? To what extent does this feeling of subordination (and, it seems, envy) limit the project of conscientization for the peasant masses? May it be at all mitigated?
I am also interested in Gramsci’s discussion in §52 of what he terms the ‘passive residue’ of the social forms throughout history as related to the “absence of traditions” in the United States. It seems to me that an intellectual who represents the subaltern classes, though seeking to change their world and establish hegemony, is simultaneously a product of their social relations. I am curious about the relationship between tradition and what Gramsci perceives as the possibility for transformation.
I wonder if in Q4§33 we might see the beginnings of some sort of more concrete articulation of what “national unity” means for Gramsci (a question we raised in relation to Q3§82). Here it looks like national unity may consist in the shared feeling-understanding-knowing of the intellectuals and the people. Of course, we should tread with caution given that Gramsci is relating the contents of De Man’s work, and it isn’t entirely clear to me to what extent the former endorses the assessment of the latter (“his [De Man’s] stance is that of the folklore scholar who is always afraid that modernity will destroy the object of his study. On the other hand, his book does reflect, pedantically, a real need: the need to get to know the sentiments of the people and not to regard them as something negligible and inert within the movement of history”).
I’m interested in the dynamic between work, education, and humanism that emerges in Q4. Through these concepts, I want to pose a broader question about Gramsci’s reorientation of analysis toward relations of production and the role of work and education in (1) simultaneously producing and reflecting these relations and (2) fundamentally contesting the subject(s) implicated in them.
A useful place to ground this conversation is notes §52 and §55. In the latter, Gramsci describes elementary education as hinging on “the concept and the reality of work, because it is work that grafts the social order…onto the natural order” (p. 226). The dominant “concept and reality of work” influencing the modern vocational schools Gramsci critiques in §55 (and elsewhere) challenges the kind of humanist conception of labor he articulates in §52 (specifically, p. 216). He describes the Taylorist struggle against “this form of humanity” as working “to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique in history, a new type of worker and of man” (pp. 215 & 216). This notion of forging a new type of “man” makes me wonder: What role do relations of production play in constructing the very subjects they implicate? And—crucially for Gramsci’s thought writ large—what are the uses and limits of humanism in contestations over the subject, processes of subjectification, and relations of production?
I am interested in discussing note 38 from notebook 4. It’s a relatively long note, but I wanted to bring out the concept of theoretical syndicalism. “In the case of theoretical syndicalism, the matter is more complicated: it is undeniable that in it, the independence and autonomy of the subaltern group that it claims to give voice to are in fact sacrificed to the intellectual hegemony of the dominant group, since theoretical syndicalism is an aspect of laissez-faire liberalism justified with some statements derived from historical materialism.” Earlier, he specifies that the case of theoretical syndicalism is unique because it has to do with a subaltern group that cannot ever become dominant. I’m curious as to what the significance of this term is and what function theoretical syndicalists serve when thinking about hegemonic alliances.
I am wondering what Gramsci understands to be the “symptoms” of national disintegration. In Q5§126, Gramsci challenges understanding of pre-1914 France was one of substantial divisions, exemplified by the “multiplicity of parties, the multiplicity of nonindependent newspapers, the multiplicity of parliamentary factions, the sectarianism and the ferocity of politico-parliamentary struggles and of the polemics in the press.” These divisions, Gramsci insists, existed only at the “upper echelons of the political hierarchy, not at the base.” Moreover, these divisions generated an arena for competitive selection of competent leaders. So, if we cannot look to formal divisions, how then might we “diagnose” an ongoing disintegration?
A minor thread that emerged for me in Q5 is Gramsci’s attention to civil and religious ceremonies. Three notes seem particularly relevant here: §51, §58, and §70. In §51, Gramsci discusses the “Monday ceremony” held in Chinese schools, offices, and military bases. We shift from this nationalistic, civil ritual to a religious ritual in §58. Described by Gramsci as the Catholic church’s attempt to “strengthen itself in the modern age,” families become obligated to have their children receive first communion at age seven (p. 317). Of this change, Gramsci writes: “It is easy to understand the psychological impact that the ceremonial trappings of first communion must have on seven-year-old children” (p. 317). Finally, the religious and the national come together in §70, where Gramsci observes that “when the state, in the course of its activities, has a need for religious ceremonies, it resolves that such ceremonies must be ‘Catholic’” (p. 329).
Considering these notes alongside one other, I’m curious to discuss: What are the political uses of ceremony? I’m especially interested thinking about this question alongside (1) Gramsci’s reflections on performance and theater in Q4 and (2) our discussion of Gramsci’s concern with subversivism, the aestheticization of politics, and political spectacle during our Q3 seminar.
Building off of these points Lily, I was similarly intrigued by Gramsci’s discussion of the ‘Monday ceremony’ and found myself comparing it to Gramsci’s earlier §32 on Ugo Foscolo’s poem ‘I sepolcri.’ In this note Gramsci shifts his attention to physical monuments as a means “for exalting the glories of the nation. The ‘nation’ is not the people, nor is it the past that continues in the ‘people’; it is, rather, the ensemble of material objects that recall the past” (296) and goes on to describe such monuments as distortions “precisely because [they] have become a purely decorative, external, and rhetorical motif” (296).
Alongside your considerations of the political uses of ceremony, I wonder if we could relate this discussion to the political uses of monuments as well. Both are top-down processes of consolidating a hegemonic image of nation, yet whereas ceremony does so through ritual means, monuments do so through material means. They are also frequently deployed in order to mutually reinforce the other i.e. monuments serving as loci for political ritual, as well as ceremonies enlivening otherwise inert monumental forms.
I am sure we will discuss Note 127 at length since it ends with Gramsci’s famous translation of Machiavelli’s Prince to the modern political party. At the danger of sounding like a crank regarding Bergson… I do find it interesting that Gramsci quotes Bergson at length (three separate quotes from “Creative Evolution”) just before he draws the comparison between the Prince and the party in order to define “intuition” in politics as opposed to “the art of politics”. As I understand it, he sees this intuition at play in Machiavelli: “Machiavelli wrote books of ‘ immediate political action’; he did not write a utopia that yearns for a ready-made state, with all its functions and components already in perfect order” (p. 378). I would also like to discuss the difference Gramsci draws out between Machiavelli’s “neohumanism” which he directly identifies with “philosophy of praxis” as opposed to his contemporaries’ “humanism” which I think he aligns with this idealistic “art of politics” that is detached from the due to its cosmopolitanism. I think this is also related to the “negative popular-national character of Italian literature” that receives some attention in Q5 (notes 38-39 on bureaucratic literature in Italy leading into a critique of skepticism and note 94 on Thovez’s poetry of form v. poetry of content). Sorry this involves a lot of notes but I am trying to make some connections here which began to emerge for me in Notebook 5!
I am interested in returning to the question of nationalism and national character as it pertains to §55, where Gramsci discusses the role of the papacy in Italy’s historical cosmopolitan function. What distinguishes for Gramsci a national character that lends unity to a revolutionary movement versus one that gives way to fascism? Does the former risk devolving into the latter, and if so, what thus becomes the role of the intellectual? I am also interested in Gramsci’s thoughts about a national literature and popular folklore (§156) throughout this notebook as forms of fostering collectivity.
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 6
Written between late 1930 and 1932 (see dates below), Q6 could be read as “the crisis notebook.” As mentioned already in the context of Notebook 4 (written at the same time as Notebook 6), on June 15, 1930, Gennaro Gramsci, sent by Togliatti, had visited Antonio in jail. From Gennaro, Antonio Gramsci learns that the party is in shambles: its leaders are in exile in Lyon, London and Moscow; and from exile, the Togliatti wing of the party has expelled all the proponents (Gramsci himself was one) of the United Front, id est the necessity to create alliance with all the anti-fascist forces, even anti-communist ones. From Gennaro, Antonio also learns that similar expulsions have happened at the level of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: the internal conflicts that Gramsci had mentioned in the letter of 1926 that we read at the beginning of the semester have been solved by Stalin with the expulsion from the Central Committee, in 1927, of Trotsky, Zinovieff, and eleven other opposition leaders. In short, it is for Gramsci a crisis of trust in both the PCI and the PCUS.Notebook 6 is perhaps the place where most of the anxieties raised by the conversation with Gennaro find their place in the form of several reflections on “crises.”
Unsurprisingly, Gramsci keeps thinking about “the party” (for instance, §84). But it is the concept of “crisis,” and “organic crisis” in particular, that becomes a main concern. As mentioned in previous classes, crisis is for Gramsci a *permanent* feature of the modern, parliamentary State (i.e., of the capitalist system that is the “base” of that State): the progressive representation and emancipation of all citizens (universal rights, etc.), meets an insurmountable structural limit in, for instance, private property. In addition, politics (expressed in the territorial sovereignty of the national State) and economy (the tendency of capital to expand globally) are permanently at odds within the horizon of modernity. Fascism, in Gramsci’s reading, is then a way for hegemonic forces (bourgeois capital) to become dominant, so as to survive the crisis until a new hegemony can be re-established. Fascism is in short, in Gramsci’s language, a “passive revolution.”
Since Gramsci has already insisted that language is “an integral conception of the world,” we might want consider the possible implications of Gramsci’s linguistic choices here: why does Gramsci uses the language of “crisis,” and not the arguably more orthodox (in Marxist terms) language of “contradictions”?
Back to crises, what different forms do they take in the notebooks that we have read so far? What makes the survival of a social form possible *despite* crises? How was the “feudal crisis” of the Middle Ages solved? And how are “modern” crises different?…
**Q6§9** – Verga and Manzoni are not exactly Brescianists. Still, Gramsci poses here a very interesting question (and a rather Lukácsean one at that) regarding, so to speak, the politics of the narrative point of view. The note echoes previous discussions on science and objective reality — but with a twist on realism in the arts. The note may be worth discussing, especially in light of Soviet realism. Looking also at other notes, what is the relation that Gramsci establishes between arts and culture? What does he mean by those two words?
**Q6§10 and Q6§82** – Structure/superstructure; economy/politics; State/civil society… The context of these notes is a diatribe — published in *Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica* in 1930 — between liberal economist Luigi Einaudi (much influenced by Benedetto Croce in his economic thinking), and fascist economist Ugo Spirito (*nomina nomina sunt*), a follower of Giovanni Gentile. What is at stake in the diatribe is a different conception of the relation between the individual and the state (or, *mutatis mutandis*, between civil society and political society). As a liberal economist, Einaudi opposes any form of state-run economic planning: a free market should be autonomous from the State; the latter should interfere as little as possible with the self-regulating mechanisms of the market; the State should have a merely supervisory function, and limit as little as possible private enterprise….
Spirito was in Italy one of the main theorists of fascist corporatism (please do a Wikipedia search on this topic). For Spirito, corporatism (and in a larger sense, a State-run programmed economy) was the only way for Italian businesses to compete in an increasingly complex global market; it was also, as he wrote in “La riforma della scienza economica e il concetto di Stato” (“The reform of economic science and the concept of the State”), the *actual* synthesis of State and civil society:
> L’immedesimazione assoluta della vita dello Stato con quella dell’individuo dà il criterio preciso della riforma della scienza economica
> [The absolute identification of the life of the State with that of the individual gives the precise criterion for the reform of economic science].
Accordingly, in “I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa” (“Fundamental Principles of Corporative Economy”), liberalism (i.e., “classical economy”) is the target of Spirito’s critique:
> la scienza economica si è voluta ostinare in questo assurdo, di considerare l’individuo senza lo Stato e non è potuta giungere che a risultati mediocrissimi: le sue soluzioni sono, in fondo, tutte negative, e si riassumono sostanzialmente nel dogma della libera concorrenza. Il quale, se ben si riflette, vuole dire solo che la scienza si rimette all’arbitrio degli individui, e che la soluzione più perfetta del problema economico è quella che scaturisce dal cozzo indisciplinato di tutti gli infiniti interessi particolari. Allo Stato la scienza dice: non fare; all’individuo: fa’ quel che ti pare. Questa, l’essenza dell’economia classica…
> [Economic science, has persisted in the absurdity of considering the individual without the State, could only achieve very mediocre results: its solutions are, after all, all negative, and are summarized substantially in the dogma of free competition. Which, if we reflect well, only means that science is left to the will of individuals, and that the most perfect solution to the economic problem is the one that comes from the undisciplined clash of all the various special interests. At that this Science can tell the State is: don’t do; and all it can say to the individual is: do whatever you want. This, in sum, is the essence of classical economy…]
In “Se esista, storicamente, la pretesa repugnanza degli economisti verso il concetto dello Stato produttore” (“Whether the alleged repugnance of economists towards the concept of the producing State is historically true”), the liberal Einaudi denies that Spirito’s characterization of “classical economy” is correct at all: to begin, liberalism, according to Einaudi, *does not* deny the role of the State in the regulation of a free market. For instance, “free markets,” Einaudi argues, are always regulated by the State (lawyers and notaries for sales; currency regulation, etc.); and he calls liberalism, in fact, a *political* program (“un programma politico”). What Einaudi refutes is the *identification* of the State with the market, which means to say, of civil and political societies.
The Einaudi-Spirito querelle than helps Gramsci clarify the relation of State and civil society that Q1§47 (“Hegel and associations”) had touched upon.
**Q6§86 and Q6§ 87** – I’m not sure these are in fact good notes for class discussion, since Guicciardini (if not Machiavelli) is not a very recognizable name outside of Italian studies. I wonder, however, if, besides our knowledge of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, we could focus on the two different configurations of the State that Gramsci attaches to the two proper names: How, on the basis of these two different morphological forms that the State can take, does note 87 redefine “hegemony”?
**Q6§43, Q6§100, Q6§123, Q6§156** In Q5§86, Gramsci was thinking about “the relative low political importance of workers (la relativa scarsa importanza politica degli operai)” in the specific morphology of financial capitalism. In several notes of notebook 6 (for instance 100, 101, 123…) Gramsci seems to go back to the topic while talking of “parasitical” forms of capitalism (rent, lending, etc.). But in this notes there is a potential allusion to yet one more reason why workers may lose “political importance”: technological unemployment.
**Q6§138 and Q6§155** – the question of the “reciprocal siege [assedio reciproco]” (to be tied with the “war of position”) begins concerning Gramsci more and more, starting with these two notes. What do the war metaphors signify (let’s not forget that “hegemonic” and “subaltern” also belong, originally, to military jargon)? How does this notion of a “reciprocal siege” modify, yet again, Gramsci’s understanding of the functioning of “hegemony”? Also, the expression “war of position,” borrowed yet again from military language, appears as early as in Q1§133, which presents already an *analogy* between military and political tactics. In Q6, the expression becomes a more full-fledged hint at a political *strategy*. We need to start discussing this relation between political and military tactics/strategies.
Dating of Q6 notes:
§§ 1 – 40 : November-December 1 930 §§ 12-40
§§ 41-85: December 1930-March 1931
§§ 86-134: March-August 1931
§§ 135-142: August 1931
§§ 143-163: October-November 1931
§§ 164-202: November-December 1931
§§ 203-211: December 1931-January 1932
One potential point of interest I noticed in my reading of Notebook 6 is the development of Gramsci’s thought regarding the practice of politics within versus among states. Here I am thinking of the contrast between Q6§86 and Q2§48. Two differences stick out to me in particular. First, in Q6§86, Gramsci seems to suggest that relations among states do not constitute “politics” properly understood. The absence of a role for “the will”—and a seemingly related incapacity of any one state actor to singularly alter the prevailing equilibrium—undergirds this differentiation. While Gramsci certainly identifies the international and the domestic as fundamentally different zones of action in Q2§48, the suggestion that internal activities alone are properly “political” seems, to me, new. That being said, it is unclear to me on initial reading of Q6§86 the extent to which Gramsci’s analysis here pertains specifically to diplomacy as a professional practice or international relations writ-large.
Second, I am struck by the reversal in Gramsci’s analysis of centralized will from Q2§48 to Q6§86. In Q2§48, it is foreign policy—not internal politics—that necessitates “a quickness of mind and a unity of will.” Then, in Q6§86: “in the internal relations of a state, the situation is incomparably more favorable to initiative from the center, to a will to command.” How might we account for this development in Gramsci’s thought? My initial intuition would be that this reflects Gramsci’s ongoing theorization of Caesarism.
One of the main questions that arose for me while reading Notebook 6 is what exactly constitutes “good” aesthetics for Gramsci and if art and literature has revolutionary potential. He of course spends many notes criticizing Italy’s lack of “national-popular” literature and different forms of utopian novels, Catholic literature, novels written by and for detached intellectuals, etc. (which he does in this notebook as well). But in Notebook 6, he seems to take a positive view of a few authors.
Note 26 is strange as he begins with the familiar rubric “I nipotini de padre Bresciania: Pirandello” and then immediately says that “quite the contrary, Pirandello does not belong to this category of writers”. But he sees Pirandello’s work as more “intellectual and moral” than “artistic” – Pirandello’s theater seems to be didactic for Gramsci in that it his characters embody the dialectic.
He spends Note 29 criticizing literature written about writers rather than about “the living man” and “lived life”. Note 62, he valorizes the theater as an art that can become “an activity in continuous development” due to its dependence on the collective of actors, director, and spectators. In Note 168, he seems to express an ambivalence towards the educational potential of the genre of worker and peasant novels: “a social impulse, directed toward one goal, achieves its opposite” (I think he says something similar about Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” in Notebook 5) (126). But he also valorizes the “lyrical” quality of Dostoevsky (N108) and the popularity of Carlo Goldoni due to his use of “popular language” (N153).
One of the most interesting notes on this topic for me is note 208, on the possibility of “translating” Giovagnoli’s “Spartaco” into “modern language”. It is clear that language which he calls the “material of art” in an earlier note is integral to Gramsci’s understanding of good art/literature, this “vivente” versus “meccanico” duality reappears. But his attitude towards its educational potential still feels ambivalent. And what is the difference between “artistic” and “lyrical” writing versus “cultural” writing?
Coming in extremely last minute…. I’m also interested in popular literature and the relationship between chivalry/feudalism literature and utopian/political literature. Is Don Quixote a sort of hinge? See §157 and §28.
This week, a minor point that stood out to me while reading was Gramsci’s distinction between “conjuncture” and “situation” in §130. Tracing the origins of the word, Gramsci explains that conjuncture refers to “the ensemble of the immediate and transitory peculiarities of the economic situation,” which are themselves “the most fundamental and enduring characteristics of the situation” (p. 105). As such, the study of conjuncture relates “to immediate politics, to ‘tactics’ [and agitation],” while the study of situation relates “to ‘strategy’ and to propaganda, etc.” (p. 105).
I’m interested in this distinction because I think it brings together several important threads from Q6 that we discussed on Monday. How might the concepts of “conjuncture” and “situation”—and their resonance with Gramsci’s distinction between wars of maneuver and position—help us think about (1) the temporality of crises and (2) the latent political possibilities they contain?
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 7
According to Fabio Frosini (La religione dell’uomo moderno), the seventh
notebook (November 1930 – December 1932) is where Gramsci begins “the
process of assimilation of religion to the philosophy of praxis.” For
Gramsci, religion is not primarily a set of theological beliefs. It is a
conception of the world (concezione del mondo) that produces specific forms
of behavior. Religion, in short, is an important level of social reproduction,
and that makes it political through and through. Several threads concerning
religion run through the Prison Notebooks:
•religion as a layer of common sense;
•the Catholic Church as a model of hegemony;
•the Church as a political actor in civil society, and as an unwilling
participant in political society (cf. Catholic Action and the formation of
Catholic parties such as Sturzo’s Popular Party);
•Reformation versus Renaissance and Counter-Reformation.
In 1845, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write in the Holy Family of the
reciprocal conversion of the formulae of the French Revolution in German
political thought:
If Herr Edgar [I.e., Edgar Bauer, a Young Left Hegelian] compares
French equality with German “self-consciousness” for an instant, he
will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract
thought, what the former says in French, that is, in the language of
politics and of thoughtful observation. Self-consciousness is man’s
equality with himself in pure thought. Equality is man’s consciousness
of himself in the element of practice, i.e., man’s consciousness of other
men as his equals and man’s attitude to other men as his equals.
Starting from Marx and Engels’s thesis on the reciprocal “conversion” of
French politics into German philosophy, of practical into abstract language,
Gramsci develops his own theory of “translatability” throughout the
notebooks. Translatability has become one of the most discussed concepts
in Gramscian studies; see, among others, André Tosel, “Philosophie
marxiste et traductibilité des langages et des pratiques”; Derek Boothman,
“Translatability between Paradigms”; and Giuseppe Cospito, “Traducibilità
2
dei linguaggi scientifici.” Q7§2 returns to the concept. What valences does
the term “translation” acquire in Gramsci?
Q7§10 and Q7§16 return to the question of the “war of position.” The
locution had appeared, in its ordinary military sense, in Q1§133 (a note
titled “Military Art and Art of Politics”). In the following note, which
touches on Gandhi’s anti-colonial resistance, the “war of position” is
described as one tactic available to a subaltern force facing a well-organized
hegemonic one (here, the British occupation army). That subaltern force
starts as a “defeated army… disarmed and dispersed”; notice the familiar
vocabulary of “dispersion” and “disaggregation” Gramsci uses for
subaltern groups. Q6§138 returns once more to war of position versus war
of maneuver. Deciding when to use one and when the other, Gramsci
writes, is “the most important postwar problem of political theory; it is also
the most difficult problem to solve correctly.” Q6§155 adds that a correct
assessment requires understanding “the nature of the state (in the full
sense: dictatorship + hegemony).” Note that Q6§138 explicitly connects the
war of position to the struggle for hegemony, which is also a struggle to
“disperse” and “disaggregate” the opposition:
The war of position calls on enormous masses of people to make huge
sacrifices; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is
required and hence a more “interventionist” kind of government that
will engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and
ensure, once and for all, the “impossibility” of internal disintegration
by putting in place controls of all kinds—political, administrative, etc.,
reinforcement of the hegemonic positions of the dominant group, etc.
All of this indicates that the culminating phase of the politico-
historical situation has begun, for, in politics, once the “war of
position” is won, it is definitively decisive. In politics, in other words,
the war of maneuver drags on as long as the positions being won are
not decisive and the resources of hegemony and the state are not fully
mobilized. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have
lost their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts
to siege warfare—compact, difficult, requiring exceptional abilities of
patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is reciprocal….
The notes on the war of position in Notebook 7 bring us back to the issue
Lily raised last week: Gramsci’s attempt to distinguish tactics from strategy.
3
•Does the discussion in Notebook 7 add anything new?
•In the art of war, a “position” is a trench, a fortification, a nucleus of
resistance. What are the “positions” in political struggle?
•Can we read §16 alongside the notes on the expansion and
strengthening of “bureaucratic apparatuses” in the “modern” state?
Q7§16 is at the center of a controversy, begun with the publication of Perry
Anderson’s “The Antinomies of Gramsci,” which was mentioned in a
previous class. For replies to Anderson, see Gianni Francioni’s L’officina
gramsciana or Peter Thomas’ The Gramscian Moment. Notice Gramsci’s use of
“East” and “West” in this note, which seems to have troubled Anderson. On
this antinomy, Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s once observed (in Gramsci. Um
estudo sobre su pensamento politico): “we must be clear about a possible
misunderstanding: Gramsci did not attribute a social formation the
definition ‘Western’ based on geographical criteria, but on historical ones.”
So, what do “East” and “West” mean here?
More broadly, considerthe role spatial categories play in Gramsci’s thought
(on the topic, see for instance Ekers, Michael, Gillian Hart et al. Gramsci:
Space, Nature, Politics). Take for instance Q4§41:
I remember a statement by Bertrand Russell: one can imagine on earth,
even in the absence of man, not Glasgow or London but two points on
the surface of the earth, one of which is farther north and the other
farther south (or something similar; it is to be found in a short
philosophical work by Russell, translated as part of the small scientific
series published by Sonzogno).’ But, in the absence of man, what
would be the meaning of north and south, and “point,” and “surface,”
and “earth”? Aren’t these words necessarily linked to man, his needs,
his life, his activity? In the absence of human activity, which creates all
values, including scientific values, what would “objectivity” be? Chaos,
or nothingness, emptiness— if one can even say this much, for if one
were really to imagine that man did not exist, it would be impossible
to imagine language and thought. In historical materialism thought
cannot be separated from being, man from nature, activity (history)
from matter, subject from object: such a separation would be a fall into
empty talk, meaningless abstraction.
4
Q7§12 offers many points for discussion. Pay attention to the question of
“conformism,” which often surprises readers in Gramsci seminars, and to
how it relates to Caesarism.
•Does mass politics abolish the need for a charismatic leader?
•Does charisma transfer onto collective entities such as the party?
•Alberto Burgio (Il sistema in movimento), speaks, à propos of this note,
of “caesarism without a Caesar”. What are the implications of this shift
from one individual to parties or party-like formations?
•What does Gramsci mean by “party”?
Q7§20; §21 §24 §25 Gramsci already returns to the notion of “historic bloc”
in Q7§1. To avoid misunderstandings, which abound, note that for Gramsci
the historic bloc is the synthesis of a society’s economic base with its
political, cultural, and ideological life into a hegemonic unity. It usually
requires an alliance of different social groups, but an alliance is not in itself
a historic bloc; on its own, it would be a united front. The concept helps
explain why capitalist rule in the West proved so stable even through crises.
Power was not concentrated in a single locus that could be stormed, as in
Russia in 1917, but spread across a dense network of consent. Consider how
the historic bloc relates to:
•the war of position;
•the integral state;
•the by-now-abandoned question of the relation between base and
superstructure.
Q7§34 We will discuss Americanism and Fordism later in the semester. For
now, consider how Fordism appears to Gramsci as the practical realization
of Taylor’s “theory.” It is a mode of production (the assembly line)
combined with a wage policy (“high wages”). Together they select a
workforce able to sustain an unusually high pace and intensity of work,
which in turn yields extraordinary surplus value, a “monopoly of
initiative.”
•What are the limits of Fordism?
•Is the “tendential law” of the falling rate of profit “discovered by
Marx” one of them?
•Or is Fordism precisely capital’s way of containing the crisis that law
generates?
5
Q7§35 This note, on “human nature,” continues a reflection Gramsci began
(at least) in Q4§8:
The basic innovation introduced by Marx into the science of politics
and of history, in comparison with that of Machiavelli, is the
demonstration that “human nature,” fixed and immutable, does not
exist and that therefore, the concrete content (as well as the logical
formulation?) of political science must be conceived as a historically
developing organism.
Q7§35 goes further, making human nature coincide with human history, a
motif Gramsci takes from Vico as much as from Marx. His reflections move
ever more decisively under the sign of the primacy of history and politics
(“absolute historicism”), and hence of the industriousness of civil
humankind as it grapples with the concrete dramas of social life. History
and politics become collective self-creation (praxis). There is no human
nature apart from history, since humankind is the ever-unfinished product
of its own actions and its own errors. It is the only living form in constant
change. It exists within a world that is itself caught up in the same plastic
movement of transformation, through its interchange with the human
species and its progressive humanization. For that humanization Gramsci
uses the Weberian term “rationalization.”
Q7§80 connects to our discussion of crises that drag on rather than ending
in “catastrophe.” The note describes a situation in which a hegemony, here
capitalist hegemony, is in crisis, yet the antagonistic forces have been
unable to reorganize the social “disorder” the crisis produces. Note what I
take to be the very first cause Gramsci gives for the crisis of capitalist
hegemony. It is the explosion of mass society: the passage into activity of
great popular masses previously excluded from politics and passive. In
short, the popular masses have irrupted onto the political scene.
Study Notes and Questions (Q1)
We will devote part of Monday’s class to the “Notes on the Southern
Question,” and to a discussion/description of the 33 notebooks. You should
start, in the meantime, reading Notebook 1 (Q1), which we’ll tackle on
Wednesday. To guide you through the reading of Q1, here are some
(hopefully useful) notes.
On March 19, 1927, while in jail and awaiting for his trial, Gramsci writes a
letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht:
My life is wasted in complete monotony. Even studying is much more
difficult than it would seem.… I am nagged (this is typical of
prisoners) by this idea: that I should do something “für ewig”,
according to a complex conception of Goethe’s, which I remember
once tormented our Pascoli a lot. In short, I would like, according to a
pre-established plan, to study intensely and systematically some
subject that would absorb me and centralize my inner life… I have
thought of four topics so far…: 1st, a study of the formation of the
public spirit in Italy in the last century; in other words, a study of
Italian intellectuals… 2nd, a study of comparative linguistics, no
less!…. 3rd, a study of Pirandello’s theater and of the transformation
of Italian theatrical taste that Pirandello represented and helped to
bring about. 4th, an essay on serialized novels and popular taste in
literature…. What do you think of all this? After all, if one looks
closely, there is a some coherence among these four topics: the creative
popular spirit, in its different phases and degrees of development, lies
equally at the basis of all of them.
In regard to this letter, I will have something to say, and discuss with you,
on Monday. For now, let’s stick to the facts: Gramsci starts writing his first
notebook on February 8, 1929. Take a look at the “Main Topics” around
which Gramsci intends to organize his prison writings. You may want to
compare them to the ones listed in his letter to Tatiana and see if you too,
like Gramsci, can see “ some coherence” among all of them. Of course: good
luck with that!
As comparisons go, also take a close look at notes 43, 44 and 48, all written
between February and March 1930. In these notes, the concept of
“hegemony,” deployed already in the “Letter to Comintern” and the
2
“Southern Question,” reappears. Does it acquire now any new valence?
Consider especially note 48: “The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the
now classic terrain of the parliamentary regime” (“L’esercizio ‘normale’
dell’egemonia nel terreno divenuto classico del regime parlamentare”). It opens
one of the (many) dialectical oppositions through which Gramsci likes to
work: here, normal (hegemony) vs. “’crisis of the principle of authority,’
‘dissolution of the parliamentary regime’” (“‘crisi del principio di autorità’ —
‘dissoluzione del regime parlamentare’”). What does “hegemony” mean at this
stage of the prison writings?
Of crucial importance is note 47, also from February or March 1930. In those
precise months, the Communist Party is trying to reconstitute a clandestine
“internal center”, the centro interno, in Italy. It is therefore essential for
Gramsci to understand what the PC’s antagonist — the Fascist State —
truly is and how it operates. In short: by 1930, the regime has become
increasingly concerned with reaching wide popular consensus — a
consensus that, once the parliament has been rendered de facto inoperative,
can no longer be reached through the “normal” political negotiations
among parties promoting different (class) interests and agreeing on a
“common” national interest. Consensus has to be reached through different
means. Some examples: in 1929, in a predominantly Catholic country, the
Fascist government has settled its old territorial disputes with the papacy
by recognizing Vatican City as an independent sovereign state under the
pope (until then “prisoner in the Vatican”), and by making Catholicism
Italy’s State religion. Fascism also intensifies its attempts to penetrate and
control both the publishing industry (through direct economic support,
literary prizes, and the launching or promoting of academic and popular
journals), and the universities (through ad hoc funding of specific projects of
“national interest” and with the establishment of the Royal Academy of
Italy in 1929). It is in this context that Gramsci starts developing one of his
most original and consequential concepts: that of the “integral State”
(without using those words yet). What is the relation between “State” and
“civil society” (all the private institutions such as the Church, the school,
the university, the publishing industry…)? How does this relation bear on
the notion of “hegemony”? And what is the role of intellectuals in such
relation?
Note 47, takes us back to note 44, which we can read now as some sort of
blueprint for any strategy the clandestine PC may want to adopt. Gramsci’s
suggestion — explicit already in the note’s title: “Political class leadership
3
before and after assuming government power” is quite simple: a class (or
any group) needs to be capable of “leading” other classes or groups before it
can acquire power. What are the theoretical implications of such an
argument? Also pay attention to one more dialectical opposition: leading/
dominant (dirigente/dominante).
Theoretically connected to note 44, notes 62 and 150 may start signaling an
early moment in Gramsci when the relation between economy and
ideology, base and superstructure, become increasingly complicated. We
said something on the topic last Wednesday. If needed, please do an
internet search (Wikipedia, AI, or whatever) on the relation base/
superstructure; and, while you are at it, also search “Risorgimento” if you
are not familiar with it.
Keep in mind that these are only some of the possible topics that we will
want to discuss. Bring your own questions in class or post them on the blog
page.
I’m certain our discussion will take-up (at least some!) of my following questions given the content of the study note, but one of the concepts I found myself returning to is the notion of consent. In the broadest terms: What is the specific relationship between consent and hegemony at this stage in Gramsci’s thought?
On a more granular level, I’m curious about the relationship between Gramsci’s concept of leading (p. 136), “organized” v. “vague and generic” v. “permanently organized” consent (p. 153; 155), and the southern question (p. 134). I think the dynamic between these concepts in Q1 is especially interesting when compared to “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” where Gramsci writes: “The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that is succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist here, this means to the extent that is succeeds in *gaining the consent of the broad present masses*” (p. 173, emphasis mine).
In reading the Italian, I found myself drawn to Gramsci’s repetition of words like “meccanico”, “meccanicismo”, and “meccanicamente”. For example, in note 53 (Maurrasianism and syndicalism), he uses the words to refer to Maurras’ nationalist/syndicalist ideology. In my understanding, Maurras for Gramsci comes from an intellectual class that would seek to impose “natural” positivistic laws onto an understanding of history. See note 49 (“Organic centralism” and Maurras’ doctrines): “The principle of ‘organic centralism’ is ‘co-optation’ around a ‘possessor of the truth,’ someone ‘enlightened by reason’ who has discovered the ‘natural’ laws, etc. (The laws of mechanics and mathematics function as an intellectual motor; the metaphor replaces historical thought.)”
In note 48, Gramsci says that, “Before politics for [Maurras] there is always ‘political abstraction,’ the complete acceptance of a most detailed ‘ideological’ program which anticipates all the particulars, as in utopias, which requires a determinate conception not of history but of the history of France and Europe, that is, a determinate hermeneutics” (159). He then observes that this kind of ideological unity leads to the creation of linguistic “jargon” (gergo). I am interested in continuing to pay attention to Gramsci’s (almost always) derisive use of the word “meccanico” in the Notebooks. It is interesting to see how it already invades the structure of language for Gramsci through the production of jargon.
(N.b. Gramsci notes that “the language of the people remains the dialect backed by an Italianizing slang (“gergo”) which consists, for the most part, in a *mechanical* translation of the dialect” in Note 73. Clearly mechanism has philosophical, historiographical, political, and linguistic valences for Gramsci).
## Preparatory Notes and Questions for Q2
Q2 is in large part a repository for bibliographical references and annotations which Gramsci keeps from 1929 to 1933. The notebook also collects notes that Gramsci, apparently, could not fit in the other notebooks — because of a lack of space, or because of topic? Many are about national Italian history — but written with the awareness that national problems are inseparable from global politics. If you have not done so already, find on any internet resource some basic information on “Risorgimento” and on “Italian fascism.”
Q2 presents several problems regarding the dating and chronology of the notes. This is the case of the important note 75, which, in fact, Gianni Francioni and Giuseppe Cospito re-number for the National Edition as note 76, and divide into two parts: the first composed around February 1929 (before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression), and the second in 1930. I suppose you can tell, when reading the note, that its first part is concerned with an imminent financial crisis, while the second part dwells more on its consequences.
Needless to say, the Great Depression seemed to prove, in the doxa of the time, two things: for Fascist Italy, relatively untouched by the crisis, it was proof of the end of “Americanism” and the beginning of fascist Italy’s world hegemony; for vulgar economic determinism (that “mechanical” conception of history we touched upon on Wednesday), the crisis was to preannounce the imminent collapse of the capitalist order. It also goes without saying, Gramsci never believed in either of those two things — his attention focuses instead on the role of “elites” and the politics of “charisma” that prevent a crisis to reach its “catastrophic” endpoint.
We have already mentioned, if *en passant*, Gramsci’s distinction between “hegemony” and “crisis of hegemony” or “crisis of authority” — moments of crisis, in other words, when a “normal” exercise of hegemony gives way to an intensification of social conflicts. During these moments, hegemony often relies on force (Hegel’s “police,” State might, etc.). But there are other strategies through which the crisis can be contained and the “catastrophe” of the entire system avoided — and we can start reading the *Prison Notebooks* as a treatise on the ways in which capitalism survives its crises (in Q8 we will see almost a taxonomy of the different crises). Its strategies of containment include “passive revolution” (Q1§44; Q1§150; Q2§22); “charismatic” dictatorships (Q2§75); racial politics (Q2§45); and colonialism (Q2§52).
Regarding Q2§75: in case anyone wants to look at it, I will attach (or send) Michels’ article, which occasions Gramsci’s reflections on the “charismatic leader.” As it is clear from the note, Gramsci also knew Max Weber “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority.” I will also provide it.
Other notes that could be of interest: Q2§116-117 begins developing the idea of a “cosmopolitan” (rather than “national” function of Italian intellectuals. I am not sure there is much to discuss yet, but take notice. Of interest in the context of what we discussed on Wednesday (civil society as being part of the State) is note Q2§150 “What is the police”? Maybe we can take the question literally: what is the police? To what measure the functions of the police are executed in the “‘private’ fabric of the State”? Does civil society has executive, legislative, and judicial functions?
For Wednesday, after Labor Day, it would be great if each of you could bring one note (or one group of notes) from Notebook 1 and/or Notebook 2 to discuss it for 5-10 minutes. Do use the blog to alert us all of what you would like to discuss.
Michels’ and Weber’s essays have links at the top of this page
I’m interested in Gramsci gathering his thoughts on nationalism in Notebook 2, perhaps around the question, what forms a national consciousness?
In 25, Gramsci discusses the role of a small group of intellectuals who “plunder” Maurras to define what is initially a heterogeneous Italian nationalist movement. He mentions two inputs: a kind of crude “populist xenophobia” and “syndicalist importation into nationalism.”
In 51, Gramsci is critiquing Giovanni Pascoli, in particular La grande proletaria si e mossa – something like, “the great proletarian nation has mobilized,” in which Pascoli “transposes” the notion of class onto nations (296).
We have two examples of nationalist appropriation of socialism in which class antagonism is displaced into nationalist antagonism (out: the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; in: the poverty of Italy against the capitalist nations), and this frame provides an account for Italian colonization – Italy must pursue national expansion to overcome Italian poverty (“we are an exploited nation”).
How is Gramsci working out the ways in which the nation is produced? Maybe you found other notes to add or complicate the two above?
I’m interested in using the tension between unity and autonomy Gramsci takes up earlier in Q2 as a lens to think about his focus on geopolitics, global hegemony, and colonialism throughout the notebook. I’m especially curious about the dynamics of hegemonic struggles *among* states (e.g. note 16) and international cooperation *between* states (e.g. note 21).
As Gramsci describes in note 48, the “major difficulty in maintaining the balance between autonomy and unity presents itself, naturally, in foreign policy” (p. 292). How does this unity-autonomy tension—the “need of the national economies to go beyond their national borders without losing their national character” and the agreements, strategies, and conflicts that develop to this end (p. 351)—manifest beyond the context of the Dominions and the British Empire, about which the reflections in note 48 were developed? Related to this broader question about how hegemony operates on the international scale, how does unity-autonomy tension stoke or discipline counter-hegemony formation (e.g. reflections on Ethiopia on p. 296 v. reflections on the Philippines on p. 265)?
In last Wednesday’s class, we discussed how Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks can be read as a concrete strategy by which the ‘classe dirigente’ could effectively organize and create leading consensus in the increasingly authoritarian Italian context. So while in Q2§75 Gramsci relates the concept of “charismatic leadership” (through interlocutors Michels and Weber) onto the case of Mussolini’s absolute rule over the ‘classe dominante’, I wonder if Gramsci’s reflections on the role of ‘charisma’ or ‘spirit’ could in turn also be read as a strategy for resistance by the ‘classe dirigente’.
More specifically, the brazen political assassination of socialist and anti-fascist Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 has long been interpreted as the watershed moment that marked Mussolini’s shift into outright authoritarianism. Crucially, however, this tragic episode also sewed the first symbolic seeds of the foremost rhetorical paradigm of Italy’s antifascist resistance—that of the role of sacrifice and martyrdom in overcoming Mussolini’s regime. Following his own death, Gramsci too would become yet another modern martyr of the Italian Resistance. Ultimately, the deaths of Matteotti, Gramsci, and countless other resisters were ultimately leveraged as a rallying cry against an unjust regime.
So, my question is: In the same way that Mussolini functioned as the charismatic leader of the ‘classe dominante’, could antifascist martyrs be read as the charismatic leaders of the ‘classe dirigente’? In the same way that the mission of the charismatic leader of the ‘classe dominante’ is accomplished via their role as the *living* embodiment of their party’s realized ideals, is the mission of the charismatic leaders of the ‘classe dirigente’ instead accomplished via their role as the *sacrificial* embodiment of the as-yet-unrealized ideals for which they lost their lives? And how, if at all, could this relate to our earlier discussions of Gramsci’s advocacy of “temporary” sacrifice in overcoming an exploitative system?
I am interested by two aspects of Gramsci’s discussion of nationalism and inter-state (and colonial) relations in note 48 of Q2.
First, Gramsci’s assessment of the function of nationalist movements appears more nuanced here than elsewhere. Whereas elsewhere Gramsci seems to describe deliberate slippage from “proletariat” to “people” (see note 47 and, as Melissa points out, notes 51-2), here he notes that in the imperial periphery assertions of peoplehood are constitutive of movements against capital: “the national and nationalist movements which are partly a reaction to the workers’ movement (in advance capitalist countries) and partly a movement against capitalism spurred by the workers’ movement: India, blacks, Chinese, etc.” (p. 291). I am reminded here of our earlier conversation regarding Gramsci’s focus on the translatability of concepts.
Second, in his discussion of the British Empire, Gramsci seems to identify foreign policy as a unique sphere of political action. Foreign policy, Gramsci writes, “requires a quickness of mind and a unity of will” (p. 292). Are there indications elsewhere that Gramsci understands inter-state relations as imposing different demands from domestic politics? What implications might this have for our understanding of relations of hegemony among states as opposed to within them?
I am interested in a couple of curiosities I encountered towards the end of Q1 and in Q2.
Towards the end of Q1 (notes 74, 91, 101, and, tangentially, 141), Gramsci annotates current publications regarding the “strapaese” and “stracitta'” or “super-country” and “super-city”. Papini, a constant figure in Q1, lies at the inception of the “strapaese” movement which was essentially nationalist in motivation and idealized rural life. I am hoping to discuss further the strapaese movement and consider how it relates to Gramsci’s approach to a more pragmatic and materially rigorous understanding of folklore up to this point in the notebooks. Perhaps Q1N89 could be of some use here in which he considers Crocioni’s book on Italian folklore (“It seems to me that until now folklore has been studied (in fact, until now, there has only been the collection of raw material) as a ‘picturesque’ element. It ought to be studied as a ‘conception of the world’ of particular social strata which are untouched by modern currents of thought.” (186).
Secondly, I am interested in this heading “passato e presente” that Gramsci first mentions in a couple notes (“possono servire per Passato e presente”, Q2N92; “Si potrebbe collocare in rubrica in Passato e Presente” Q2N95) and then incorporates as headings to a couple of stray observations towards the end of Q2 on the consumption of salt (Q2N141), the rehabilitation of the Bourbons of Naples (Q2N144), and Italian immigration to the Congo (Q2N146). I am seeing that there is also a note from the end of Q1, Note 156, titled “Past and Present” that is, if anything, opaque to my mind. What can we make of this category of “Past and Present” up to this point in the Notebooks?
Preparatory Notes for Notebook 3
Having finished the pages of the First Notebook in May 1930 (the Second
Notebook remains open as a repository for annotated bibliographies),
Gramsci immediately begins to fill Notebook 3, also a miscellany. In the
same month, he is also putting together, in Notebook 4 (to be discussed
next week), his first attempt at a “special” notebook. Also in the same
month of May 1930, Gramsci starts using a notebook (Notebook A, omitted
in Gerratana’s and Buttigieg’s editions) to translate texts by Marx contained
in a German anthology he has in prison: the Theses on Feuerbach and the
Preface to Critique of Political Economy (texts that he already knew before
his arrest). We may expect Q3 and Q4 to be influenced by these two texts.
English translation of the Theses can be found here: .
For the Preface, you can look here:
We will begin our Monday class by going back, with Lindsey, to note 75
from notebook 2 — a note explicitly devoted to the “charismatic leader,”
but in fact also addressing the so-called “theory of the elites” (Mosca,
Pareto…). For the rest of the class, I would like to touch on a few issues:
1. The emergence of the reflection on “subaltern groups,” largely
connected to the historical and political problem of the peasantry. You
may want to read these notes keeping in mind the “Notes on the
Southern Question” — but also keep in mind, going back to last class,
Gramsci’s concern with “strapaese,” “common sense,” and folklore in
general. A particularly interesting note seems to me Q3§18, where
Gramsci sees a fundamental difference between subalternity in the
pre-modern State and subalternity in the modern State (i.e. the
post-1789 parliamentary State). Most of the notes on the topic (with
the addition of more notes from notebooks 9, 13, and 19, will be
rewritten and elaborated in 1934, in the “special” Notebook 25, “On
the Margins of History: History of the Subaltern Social Groups.”
2. Among the myriad of themes Gramsci explores in his miscellaneous
notebooks, there is one he keeps returning on: the “political question
of intellectuals.” Trying to find an answer to the defeat of the workers’
movement in Italy (and in Europe) after the “Red Two-Years” of
2
strikes and occupations, notes 42 and 44 point an accusatory finger
not against Mussolini, but rather against Socialist leaders: the party’s
intellectuals have revealed themselves unable to understand, and
therefore direct, the “spontaneous” rebellions of the masses. The
result of this inability on the part of (socialist) intellectuals is that the
masses have detached from them, to the point that Gramsci can
register (Q3§44) “phenomena of mass betrayal and desertion” that
evoke in him the memory of Aesop’s fable of the beaver (Q3§42). We
should discuss the role that “spontaneity” plays in Gramsci’s
understanding of politics. We should also notice that, in lamenting the
absence of any organic relationship between leaders and led (dirigenti
e diretti), a paradigm shift emerges that had not until now come to
light with the necessary clarity, even though it had already been
glimpsed in the “Notes on the Southern Question”: the revolutionary
unity of the working masses is no longer “spontaneously”
presupposed, nor is it a given of the “objective material conditions.”
Instead, it is the product of political intervention, and of the action
exerted within (if not from above) the masses by intellectual groups.
This is where the importance of their political function lies, as the
“Notes on the Southern Question” had already anticipated:
organization and mediation.
3. Related to the previous point: notice the emergence of a new
dialectical binary in note 48: spontaneity/conscious leadership.
4. If we have time (and Gramsci does teach us optimism after all), we
could also track the emergence of the expression “national-popular”
— also in some notes on literature and “Brescianism.”
On Wednesday, we can begin with each of you bringing one note (or a set of
notes) to the attention of the class. As always, the discussion does not need
to be exhaustive, and you can use your time to pose questions and
problems without having to come up with answers and solutions.
In note 48 (pg. 49), Gramsci discusses spontaneity versus conscious leadership. He writes, “every “spontaneous” movement is indirectly demonstrated by the fact that there exist currents and groups that uphold spontaneity as a method. In this regard, one must distinguish between purely “ideological” elements and elements of practical activity, between scholars who maintain that spontaneity is the immanent [and objective] “method” of the historical process and political adventurers who uphold spontaneity as the political” method.” He goes onto explain the unity of spontaneity and conscious leadership as the real political action of the subaltern classes. How do we understand spontaneity as a method? Is it the systematic education of conditions that catalyze mass action? What is the difference between an understanding of spontaneity as a historical method and as a political one?
I would like to highlight Note 76, which feels like a note that has been a long-time coming at this point in the Notebooks and is the product of concerted research/thought by Gramsci regarding the relationship between language, hegemony, and intellectual culture (specifically the strange and unique case of Italy with “dialects” vs. standardized Italian, whose dynamics he sees presaged by that of il “mediolatino” with the “volgari” Latins). I say it feels a long-time coming because it feels particularly well-developed and is also related to a number of previous notes on topics such as: “dialects” and the Language Question, the Medieval communes, the caste-based nature of intellectual culture. A couple of key points Gramsci makes in this note:
“I volgari sono scritti quando il popolo reprende importanza” (“Vernaculars are written when the people regain importance”) (354/73).
“After a brief interval (the freedom of the communes) during which intellectuals of popular (bourgeois) class origins flourished, the intellectual function was reabsorbed into the traditional caste where the individual members came from the people but where the character of the caste prevailed over their origins. In other words, it is not the case than an entire stratum of the population creates its own intellectuals when it attains power (which is what happened in the fourteenth century); rather a traditionally selected body assimilates single individuals into its cadres (the typical example of this is the ecclesiastical structure).” (74).
I noticed in the Italian the introduction of a new descriptor deployed mainly derisively in a similar manner to “meccanic(o)/(amente)” which is “libresc(o)/(amente)” meaning “bookish(ly)”. This new descriptor has its opposite in the term “vivente” or “living”. In Q3N33, Gramsci says:
“Therefore the great politician has to be “very learned,” that is, he should have maximum “knowledge” of the components of contemporary life; he should know them not “bookishly,” as “erudition,” but in a “living” way, as the concrete substance of political “intuition” (nevertheless, if they are to become the living substance of his “intuition,” he also needs to learn them “bookishly”).
The bookish language is of course related to the erudite language of the scholars (clergy and then humanist intellectuals: le Tre corone-Dante, Boccacio, and Petrarch-whose written Florentine became the model for standardized Italian). Gramsci’s observation in Note 76 that the syntax of this written, erudite Florentine is still rooted in Latin and therefore detached from spoken Florentine is super important!
Here, I also would like to expand a bit upon the ideas of Bergson in relation to Gramsci (thus far). I have here two quotes from Bergson’s Matter and Memory which I think are highly relevant to Gramsci’s ideas and perhaps integral to understanding the growing rubric of “Past and Present”. Maybe there is a way of seeing Gramsci’s understanding of historiography v. spontaneity (to which we could maybe apply the binaries of meccanico/organico and libresco/vivente) as a translation of Bergson’s memory and perception? Notice Gramsci’s above use of “intuizione” (intuition). Intuition for Bergson is where, in lived reality, pure memory (unextended, spiritual) and pure perception (extended, sensori-motor, material) meet.
“In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; and the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns toward the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful.” (Matter and Memory 168-9)
“For, that a recollection should reappear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.” (153)
I am interested in Gramsci’s discussion of the contrast between the French and Italian historical traditions in Q3§82. As a result of the antagonistic relationship of one successive governmental form to the next, Gramsci writes that the subject of French history necessarily became the people-nation. Consequently, “an interdependence and close connection between people-nation and intellectuals” is nurtured in France. In Italy, on the other hand, the people-nation was nowhere to be found, and so history had to act as “propaganda,” to “create national unity—that is, the nation—from the outside, going against tradition.” The product of this creative project, in Gramsci’s analysis, is a separation (“estrange”[ment]) of the intellectual class from the people. I have two main questions in relation to this line of argumentation. First, Gramsci equates the nation with national unity. What is this unity? In what aspects of culture/politics/etc. is it to be produced? Second, I remain intrigued by the balancing act Gramsci expects intellectuals to undertake. We see in Q3§48 that the spontaneity of subaltern classes does not exist; it requires education by the intellectual class. At what point does this necessary education by the intellectual class cross the line to become an outside creation, separate from the nation-people?
I’m picking up on this topic: “Q3§18, where Gramsci sees a fundamental difference between subalternity in the pre-modern State and subalternity in the modern State (i.e. the
post-1789 parliamentary State).”
Gramsci explains that pre-modern subordinate groups, such as the plebes of ancient Rome, were able to establish their own institutions, governance, and organizations within and alongside the dominant class structure (he calls this “two governments”) because the pre-modern state was composite and decentralized. In the modern state, the subaltern is integrated into the state – through education, art, popular culture, journalism, political parties – making a sustained project of counter-hegemonic institution building difficult, and requiring different strategies.
In Notebook 3, Gramsci is interested (I think?) in collecting and analyzing historical examples of these strategies. Here are a few I found.
1. “Spontaneous” revolution (the constant ferment of the South), which doesn’t sustain revolutionary change without a strong political party, bridged by intellectuals and educated through popular culture, which can harness and organize their power.
2. Saint-Simonites and Comte’s positivist churches – they resemble a counter-hegemonic project (ritual, ethical instruction, practices) and get into popular culture via novels but ultimately are mired in paternalism and fail to organize the people toward autonomy.
3. Lazzaretti/utopianism –Foster a “spirit of cleavage” and an aspiration for an alternative social order. They also offer a language to critique the past. Lazzaretti’s movement produced a local communal economic practice, mixing utopian socialism with Christian dogmas (motto: “The Republic-Kingdom of God”). But ultimately, Lazzaretti’s movement failed when he was assassinated (charismatic leader). Gramsci is also critical of utopian writing becoming a literary substitute for organizing.
I’m curious whether Gramsci thinks these are simply failed attempts at hegemony (and possibly warnings), or whether these types of counter-hegemonic resistance/alternative movements can contribute to the sustained, autonomous, national-popular political project Gramsci sees as the ultimate goal. Could elements of these movements contribute to moving subalterns toward political autonomy?
There are three notes I would like to explore in this week’s seminar. First, I am interested in Gramsci’s critique of the “subversive” and the related category of the “starvelings” in §46. These concepts seem particularly relevant to understanding what Gramsci describes as the necessarily defensive posture of subaltern groups, which in the case of the “subversive,” involves self-definition through negation. I am also struck by Gramsci’s noticeably extensive use of quotation marks in this passage—a grammatical choice that we have repeatedly seen to be quite revealing. What work are the quotations (e.g. “people,” “mines,” “contriving,” “luxury”) doing in this note?
My second question concerns §60 and §61. The transition between these sections made me curious about the relationship between regimes of social reproduction and the “starvelings,” the “subversive,” and the failure of the older generation to “guide the younger generation” (p. 59). Gramsci suggests that this failure is “partly an expression of the crisis of the institution of the family and of the new situation of women in society” (p. 59). First, I would like to gain greater historical context about the changes Gramsci is describing in §61. Second—and more substantively—I am curious about the role of social reproduction as (1) a potential force for the education of spontaneity and (2) related to the lumpen-esque “makeshift life on the edges of the rural underworld” inhabited by the starvelings (p. 45).
I am particularly interested in Gramsci’s discussion of literature and the press, and in the role of print media in cultivating historical consciousness. He makes an observation in §37 that “Italian Catholicism is sterile in the literary field, as in the other fields of culture”—that there are very few Catholic writers in Italy, especially in poetry and the novel. What does this lack of literary production suggest for the peasant masses in Italy, and what role does it play in establishing hegemony? Later, in §49 he writes, “The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the only one. Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence public opinion belongs to it…” Gramsci then expounds upon what he names the spirit of cleavage—the acquisition of one’s historical identity—as a feat of complex ideological work essential to combatting the fortifications of the ruling class. I am interested in discussing this in class and the relationship of the press in cultivating this “spirit of cleavage”.
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 4
Notebook 4 is written between May 1930 and September 1932. Its structure
presents a tighter organization than previous notebooks (although it is not
to be considered a “special,” i.e. mono-thematic, notebook).
The opening section of the notebook (notes 1-48), titled “Notes on
Philosophy,” seems to respond to two events. The first is the much
publicized keynote lecture that Benedetto Croce gives at the Congress of
Philosophy held in Oxford on September 1930 — a lecture in which Croce
famously argues that Marxism is not a philosophy but, rather, a “naïve
sociologism” built on the conceptual premises of “vulgar materialism.” The
second is the Soviet Union’s turn towards Stalinist autocracy — a turn
accompanied by Stalin proclaiming the doctrine of “socialism in one
country” as official Soviet policy. This means for Gramsci, both at a political
and at a personal level, that the Soviet Union is no longer interested in a
communist international, and that the fate of communism (and communists)
in Italy (including those in prison) is no longer a Soviet concern.
Notes 1-48 seem to translate this feeling of betrayal into a new theoretical
problematic: What is Marxism? The target of Gramsci’s criticism is here
Nikolai Bukharin — a close ally of Stalin. His Historical Materialism: A
System of Sociology (1921) — a “manual” for mass education, promoted by
the PCUS — had been in fact one of the main targets of Croce’s critique of
Marxism. Gramsci does agree with Croce: Bukharin’s manual expresses a
vulgar materialism that certainly cannot be worth the label of
“philosophy”; but, at the same time, it has little to do with Marxism, which
Gramsci starts conceptualizing as an “original” philosophy coinciding
neither with materialism (i.e. Bukharin) nor with idealism (Croce). These
notes consequently begin a more intentional reconsideration of the relation
between base (material conditions) and superstructure (ideal formations).
Note 37 may be particularly worth discussing.
Having concluded the first series of the “Notes on Philosophy (materialism
and idealism)” with note 48, Gramsci uses the remaining space of Notebook
4 to draft a series of notes all in some way connected to the first and longest
of these, Q4§49 titled “Gli intellettuali” (The Intellectuals). This is a note of
great importance for the elaboration of Gramsci’s concept of the intellectual
(which we have in part discussed already) and for the distinction,
established here, between traditional and organic intellectuals. Note 49 is
2
also important for the discussion of Taylorism. I would postpone a
thorough discussion of Taylorism for now, and just register Gramsci’s
attention to the issues of technological (un-)employment and relative
surplus value (i.e., falling wages because of machines and robotics taking
the place of living labor) in a series of notes concerning the intellectuals.
On Monday, we should return, with Melissa, to Q3§18, and, with Lily, to
Q3§46 and the question of “subversivism.” For the rest of our class, I would
like to reconstruct the debate over Bukharin’s “manual,” culminating in
Benedetto Croce’s Oxford lecture.
For the Wednesday seminar, there are several interesting notes in this
notebook: Q4§33 goes back to the problematic relation between intellectuals
and masses (i.e., party organization); Q4§35 gives us Gramsci’s definition of
“ideology”; Q4§40 dwells on the definition of Marxism as “historicism”…
Please keep bringing one note (or a set of notes) to the attention of the class.
As always, the discussion does not need to be exhaustive, and you can use
your time to pose questions and problems without having to come up with
answers and solutions.
I was very interested in the recurring theme of language structuring thought permeates many of the notes in Notebook 4. Most notably, Gramsci spends multiple notes delineating various misunderstandings of “material”/”materialism” and “science” produce invalid arguments and “conceptions of the world”. In Note 41, Gramsci repudiates the notion that science (and here I think he means both the scientific method and knowledge (scienza)) should and could “prove the objectivity of the real”. The external world is only available to humans through the use of their senses. The sensory realm thus becomes understanding which turns into knowledge (this note clearly connects to note 33 on knowing-understanding-feeling). “[W]hat matters most is not the objectivity of the real but the human being who elaborates these methods, these material instruments that rectify the sensory organs, these logical instruments of discrimination–in other words, culture, the conception of the world, the relation between man and reality” (190). So culture, of which language is a part, mediates the relation between humans and reality.
The next note (42) sees Gramsci explore the idea of “translatability” of ideas in scientific language. I am not fully sure what to make of Gramsci’s stance in relation to translatability, he seems a bit ambivalent. Is the implication that historical materialism reveals these equivalencies in thought (despite differences in language use) and that through dialectical thought, *actually* new ideas (a new conception of the world) can develop?
N.b. in Note 33 (which I know we will discuss) – the Italian “Il De Man studia i sentimenti poplari, non “con-sente” con essi per guidarli e condurli a una catarsi di civilta’ moderna” is translated in the English as “De Man studies the sentiments of the people; he does not empathize with them to guide them and lead them to a catharsis of modern civilization”. The Italian construction “con-sente” meaning “feeling with” is interesting to note after our earlier discussion of consensus in Gramsci. To what extent does this “feeling with” which implies a bilateral movement of feeling influence the understanding and knowledge of the leading intellectual?
Given Gramsci’s preeminent interest in Notebook 4 for with the organization of culture, I was particularly intrigued by his brief reference to the figure of the artisan. In note 52 on Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci discusses artisans in contrast to the stark division between intellectual and manual labor represented by the figures of Dante’s scribe or the Taylorized worker. For Gramsci, the artisan represents the culmination of the worker’s humanity and spirituality achieved via ‘productive creation’ wherein “the worker’s individuality was wholly reflected in the object created and the link between art and labor was still very strong” (216).
But in much the same way that Gramsci is probing the question of the autonomous class position of intellectuals, I am interested in the structural precarity of the class position of the artisan. As neither a member of the manual proletariat nor an owner of the modes of industrial production, the artisan is instead a skilled, self-contained mode of production operable at the local community level. To that end, I would like to pose the question of whether the artisan can be conceived as part of an intellectual class, and if so what role the artisan might then play in the organization of culture? Through their creation of alternative modes of production, are artisans effectively counter-hegemonic?
I would like to discuss the following quotation from §49, where Gramsci elaborates the differing positions of the urban and rural intellectual: “The attitude of the peasant toward the [rural] intellectual is twofold: he admires the social position of the intellectual and, in general, the position of the state employee, but he sometimes feigns to disdain it… It is impossible to understand anything about the peasants without taking into consideration their effective subordination to the intellectuals and without grasping the fact that every development of the peasant masses to a certain extent is linked to and depends on the movements of the intellectuals.” Firstly, I find it interesting that Gramsci makes a distinction between the functions of urban and rural intellectuals; while the task of the former is closely tied to industry, standardized, the task of the latter is that of bringing the peasant masses into contact with administration, and thus of greater political importance. I also find it curious that Gramsci employs the word ‘subordination’ here to describe the relationship between the peasant masses and intellectuals. We have previously established in class that Gramsci believed the organic intellectual was necessary to organize their social class and to build hegemony—taking each individual’s intellectual activity as a point of departure—but that the intellectual also risks becoming abstracted from the peasant masses through co-optation.
Earlier in the same note, writing on the emergence of intellectuals in France, Gramsci again employs the language of subordination: “When in 1789 a new social group surfaced politically in history, it was already fully equipped for all its social functions, and therefore it fought for total domination of the nation. It did not have to make any essential compromises with the old classes; instead, it subordinated them to itself.” Does Gramsci always use the terms of subordination and domination to describe the project of hegemony? To what extent does this feeling of subordination (and, it seems, envy) limit the project of conscientization for the peasant masses? May it be at all mitigated?
I am also interested in Gramsci’s discussion in §52 of what he terms the ‘passive residue’ of the social forms throughout history as related to the “absence of traditions” in the United States. It seems to me that an intellectual who represents the subaltern classes, though seeking to change their world and establish hegemony, is simultaneously a product of their social relations. I am curious about the relationship between tradition and what Gramsci perceives as the possibility for transformation.
I wonder if in Q4§33 we might see the beginnings of some sort of more concrete articulation of what “national unity” means for Gramsci (a question we raised in relation to Q3§82). Here it looks like national unity may consist in the shared feeling-understanding-knowing of the intellectuals and the people. Of course, we should tread with caution given that Gramsci is relating the contents of De Man’s work, and it isn’t entirely clear to me to what extent the former endorses the assessment of the latter (“his [De Man’s] stance is that of the folklore scholar who is always afraid that modernity will destroy the object of his study. On the other hand, his book does reflect, pedantically, a real need: the need to get to know the sentiments of the people and not to regard them as something negligible and inert within the movement of history”).
I’m interested in the dynamic between work, education, and humanism that emerges in Q4. Through these concepts, I want to pose a broader question about Gramsci’s reorientation of analysis toward relations of production and the role of work and education in (1) simultaneously producing and reflecting these relations and (2) fundamentally contesting the subject(s) implicated in them.
A useful place to ground this conversation is notes §52 and §55. In the latter, Gramsci describes elementary education as hinging on “the concept and the reality of work, because it is work that grafts the social order…onto the natural order” (p. 226). The dominant “concept and reality of work” influencing the modern vocational schools Gramsci critiques in §55 (and elsewhere) challenges the kind of humanist conception of labor he articulates in §52 (specifically, p. 216). He describes the Taylorist struggle against “this form of humanity” as working “to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique in history, a new type of worker and of man” (pp. 215 & 216). This notion of forging a new type of “man” makes me wonder: What role do relations of production play in constructing the very subjects they implicate? And—crucially for Gramsci’s thought writ large—what are the uses and limits of humanism in contestations over the subject, processes of subjectification, and relations of production?
I am interested in discussing note 38 from notebook 4. It’s a relatively long note, but I wanted to bring out the concept of theoretical syndicalism. “In the case of theoretical syndicalism, the matter is more complicated: it is undeniable that in it, the independence and autonomy of the subaltern group that it claims to give voice to are in fact sacrificed to the intellectual hegemony of the dominant group, since theoretical syndicalism is an aspect of laissez-faire liberalism justified with some statements derived from historical materialism.” Earlier, he specifies that the case of theoretical syndicalism is unique because it has to do with a subaltern group that cannot ever become dominant. I’m curious as to what the significance of this term is and what function theoretical syndicalists serve when thinking about hegemonic alliances.
I am wondering what Gramsci understands to be the “symptoms” of national disintegration. In Q5§126, Gramsci challenges understanding of pre-1914 France was one of substantial divisions, exemplified by the “multiplicity of parties, the multiplicity of nonindependent newspapers, the multiplicity of parliamentary factions, the sectarianism and the ferocity of politico-parliamentary struggles and of the polemics in the press.” These divisions, Gramsci insists, existed only at the “upper echelons of the political hierarchy, not at the base.” Moreover, these divisions generated an arena for competitive selection of competent leaders. So, if we cannot look to formal divisions, how then might we “diagnose” an ongoing disintegration?
A minor thread that emerged for me in Q5 is Gramsci’s attention to civil and religious ceremonies. Three notes seem particularly relevant here: §51, §58, and §70. In §51, Gramsci discusses the “Monday ceremony” held in Chinese schools, offices, and military bases. We shift from this nationalistic, civil ritual to a religious ritual in §58. Described by Gramsci as the Catholic church’s attempt to “strengthen itself in the modern age,” families become obligated to have their children receive first communion at age seven (p. 317). Of this change, Gramsci writes: “It is easy to understand the psychological impact that the ceremonial trappings of first communion must have on seven-year-old children” (p. 317). Finally, the religious and the national come together in §70, where Gramsci observes that “when the state, in the course of its activities, has a need for religious ceremonies, it resolves that such ceremonies must be ‘Catholic’” (p. 329).
Considering these notes alongside one other, I’m curious to discuss: What are the political uses of ceremony? I’m especially interested thinking about this question alongside (1) Gramsci’s reflections on performance and theater in Q4 and (2) our discussion of Gramsci’s concern with subversivism, the aestheticization of politics, and political spectacle during our Q3 seminar.
Building off of these points Lily, I was similarly intrigued by Gramsci’s discussion of the ‘Monday ceremony’ and found myself comparing it to Gramsci’s earlier §32 on Ugo Foscolo’s poem ‘I sepolcri.’ In this note Gramsci shifts his attention to physical monuments as a means “for exalting the glories of the nation. The ‘nation’ is not the people, nor is it the past that continues in the ‘people’; it is, rather, the ensemble of material objects that recall the past” (296) and goes on to describe such monuments as distortions “precisely because [they] have become a purely decorative, external, and rhetorical motif” (296).
Alongside your considerations of the political uses of ceremony, I wonder if we could relate this discussion to the political uses of monuments as well. Both are top-down processes of consolidating a hegemonic image of nation, yet whereas ceremony does so through ritual means, monuments do so through material means. They are also frequently deployed in order to mutually reinforce the other i.e. monuments serving as loci for political ritual, as well as ceremonies enlivening otherwise inert monumental forms.
I am sure we will discuss Note 127 at length since it ends with Gramsci’s famous translation of Machiavelli’s Prince to the modern political party. At the danger of sounding like a crank regarding Bergson… I do find it interesting that Gramsci quotes Bergson at length (three separate quotes from “Creative Evolution”) just before he draws the comparison between the Prince and the party in order to define “intuition” in politics as opposed to “the art of politics”. As I understand it, he sees this intuition at play in Machiavelli: “Machiavelli wrote books of ‘ immediate political action’; he did not write a utopia that yearns for a ready-made state, with all its functions and components already in perfect order” (p. 378). I would also like to discuss the difference Gramsci draws out between Machiavelli’s “neohumanism” which he directly identifies with “philosophy of praxis” as opposed to his contemporaries’ “humanism” which I think he aligns with this idealistic “art of politics” that is detached from the due to its cosmopolitanism. I think this is also related to the “negative popular-national character of Italian literature” that receives some attention in Q5 (notes 38-39 on bureaucratic literature in Italy leading into a critique of skepticism and note 94 on Thovez’s poetry of form v. poetry of content). Sorry this involves a lot of notes but I am trying to make some connections here which began to emerge for me in Notebook 5!
I am interested in returning to the question of nationalism and national character as it pertains to §55, where Gramsci discusses the role of the papacy in Italy’s historical cosmopolitan function. What distinguishes for Gramsci a national character that lends unity to a revolutionary movement versus one that gives way to fascism? Does the former risk devolving into the latter, and if so, what thus becomes the role of the intellectual? I am also interested in Gramsci’s thoughts about a national literature and popular folklore (§156) throughout this notebook as forms of fostering collectivity.
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 6
Written between late 1930 and 1932 (see dates below), Q6 could be read as “the crisis notebook.” As mentioned already in the context of Notebook 4 (written at the same time as Notebook 6), on June 15, 1930, Gennaro Gramsci, sent by Togliatti, had visited Antonio in jail. From Gennaro, Antonio Gramsci learns that the party is in shambles: its leaders are in exile in Lyon, London and Moscow; and from exile, the Togliatti wing of the party has expelled all the proponents (Gramsci himself was one) of the United Front, id est the necessity to create alliance with all the anti-fascist forces, even anti-communist ones. From Gennaro, Antonio also learns that similar expulsions have happened at the level of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: the internal conflicts that Gramsci had mentioned in the letter of 1926 that we read at the beginning of the semester have been solved by Stalin with the expulsion from the Central Committee, in 1927, of Trotsky, Zinovieff, and eleven other opposition leaders. In short, it is for Gramsci a crisis of trust in both the PCI and the PCUS.Notebook 6 is perhaps the place where most of the anxieties raised by the conversation with Gennaro find their place in the form of several reflections on “crises.”
Unsurprisingly, Gramsci keeps thinking about “the party” (for instance, §84). But it is the concept of “crisis,” and “organic crisis” in particular, that becomes a main concern. As mentioned in previous classes, crisis is for Gramsci a *permanent* feature of the modern, parliamentary State (i.e., of the capitalist system that is the “base” of that State): the progressive representation and emancipation of all citizens (universal rights, etc.), meets an insurmountable structural limit in, for instance, private property. In addition, politics (expressed in the territorial sovereignty of the national State) and economy (the tendency of capital to expand globally) are permanently at odds within the horizon of modernity. Fascism, in Gramsci’s reading, is then a way for hegemonic forces (bourgeois capital) to become dominant, so as to survive the crisis until a new hegemony can be re-established. Fascism is in short, in Gramsci’s language, a “passive revolution.”
Since Gramsci has already insisted that language is “an integral conception of the world,” we might want consider the possible implications of Gramsci’s linguistic choices here: why does Gramsci uses the language of “crisis,” and not the arguably more orthodox (in Marxist terms) language of “contradictions”?
Back to crises, what different forms do they take in the notebooks that we have read so far? What makes the survival of a social form possible *despite* crises? How was the “feudal crisis” of the Middle Ages solved? And how are “modern” crises different?…
**Q6§9** – Verga and Manzoni are not exactly Brescianists. Still, Gramsci poses here a very interesting question (and a rather Lukácsean one at that) regarding, so to speak, the politics of the narrative point of view. The note echoes previous discussions on science and objective reality — but with a twist on realism in the arts. The note may be worth discussing, especially in light of Soviet realism. Looking also at other notes, what is the relation that Gramsci establishes between arts and culture? What does he mean by those two words?
**Q6§10 and Q6§82** – Structure/superstructure; economy/politics; State/civil society… The context of these notes is a diatribe — published in *Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica* in 1930 — between liberal economist Luigi Einaudi (much influenced by Benedetto Croce in his economic thinking), and fascist economist Ugo Spirito (*nomina nomina sunt*), a follower of Giovanni Gentile. What is at stake in the diatribe is a different conception of the relation between the individual and the state (or, *mutatis mutandis*, between civil society and political society). As a liberal economist, Einaudi opposes any form of state-run economic planning: a free market should be autonomous from the State; the latter should interfere as little as possible with the self-regulating mechanisms of the market; the State should have a merely supervisory function, and limit as little as possible private enterprise….
Spirito was in Italy one of the main theorists of fascist corporatism (please do a Wikipedia search on this topic). For Spirito, corporatism (and in a larger sense, a State-run programmed economy) was the only way for Italian businesses to compete in an increasingly complex global market; it was also, as he wrote in “La riforma della scienza economica e il concetto di Stato” (“The reform of economic science and the concept of the State”), the *actual* synthesis of State and civil society:
> L’immedesimazione assoluta della vita dello Stato con quella dell’individuo dà il criterio preciso della riforma della scienza economica
> [The absolute identification of the life of the State with that of the individual gives the precise criterion for the reform of economic science].
Accordingly, in “I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa” (“Fundamental Principles of Corporative Economy”), liberalism (i.e., “classical economy”) is the target of Spirito’s critique:
> la scienza economica si è voluta ostinare in questo assurdo, di considerare l’individuo senza lo Stato e non è potuta giungere che a risultati mediocrissimi: le sue soluzioni sono, in fondo, tutte negative, e si riassumono sostanzialmente nel dogma della libera concorrenza. Il quale, se ben si riflette, vuole dire solo che la scienza si rimette all’arbitrio degli individui, e che la soluzione più perfetta del problema economico è quella che scaturisce dal cozzo indisciplinato di tutti gli infiniti interessi particolari. Allo Stato la scienza dice: non fare; all’individuo: fa’ quel che ti pare. Questa, l’essenza dell’economia classica…
> [Economic science, has persisted in the absurdity of considering the individual without the State, could only achieve very mediocre results: its solutions are, after all, all negative, and are summarized substantially in the dogma of free competition. Which, if we reflect well, only means that science is left to the will of individuals, and that the most perfect solution to the economic problem is the one that comes from the undisciplined clash of all the various special interests. At that this Science can tell the State is: don’t do; and all it can say to the individual is: do whatever you want. This, in sum, is the essence of classical economy…]
In “Se esista, storicamente, la pretesa repugnanza degli economisti verso il concetto dello Stato produttore” (“Whether the alleged repugnance of economists towards the concept of the producing State is historically true”), the liberal Einaudi denies that Spirito’s characterization of “classical economy” is correct at all: to begin, liberalism, according to Einaudi, *does not* deny the role of the State in the regulation of a free market. For instance, “free markets,” Einaudi argues, are always regulated by the State (lawyers and notaries for sales; currency regulation, etc.); and he calls liberalism, in fact, a *political* program (“un programma politico”). What Einaudi refutes is the *identification* of the State with the market, which means to say, of civil and political societies.
The Einaudi-Spirito querelle than helps Gramsci clarify the relation of State and civil society that Q1§47 (“Hegel and associations”) had touched upon.
**Q6§86 and Q6§ 87** – I’m not sure these are in fact good notes for class discussion, since Guicciardini (if not Machiavelli) is not a very recognizable name outside of Italian studies. I wonder, however, if, besides our knowledge of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, we could focus on the two different configurations of the State that Gramsci attaches to the two proper names: How, on the basis of these two different morphological forms that the State can take, does note 87 redefine “hegemony”?
**Q6§43, Q6§100, Q6§123, Q6§156** In Q5§86, Gramsci was thinking about “the relative low political importance of workers (la relativa scarsa importanza politica degli operai)” in the specific morphology of financial capitalism. In several notes of notebook 6 (for instance 100, 101, 123…) Gramsci seems to go back to the topic while talking of “parasitical” forms of capitalism (rent, lending, etc.). But in this notes there is a potential allusion to yet one more reason why workers may lose “political importance”: technological unemployment.
**Q6§138 and Q6§155** – the question of the “reciprocal siege [assedio reciproco]” (to be tied with the “war of position”) begins concerning Gramsci more and more, starting with these two notes. What do the war metaphors signify (let’s not forget that “hegemonic” and “subaltern” also belong, originally, to military jargon)? How does this notion of a “reciprocal siege” modify, yet again, Gramsci’s understanding of the functioning of “hegemony”? Also, the expression “war of position,” borrowed yet again from military language, appears as early as in Q1§133, which presents already an *analogy* between military and political tactics. In Q6, the expression becomes a more full-fledged hint at a political *strategy*. We need to start discussing this relation between political and military tactics/strategies.
Dating of Q6 notes:
§§ 1 – 40 : November-December 1 930 §§ 12-40
§§ 41-85: December 1930-March 1931
§§ 86-134: March-August 1931
§§ 135-142: August 1931
§§ 143-163: October-November 1931
§§ 164-202: November-December 1931
§§ 203-211: December 1931-January 1932
One potential point of interest I noticed in my reading of Notebook 6 is the development of Gramsci’s thought regarding the practice of politics within versus among states. Here I am thinking of the contrast between Q6§86 and Q2§48. Two differences stick out to me in particular. First, in Q6§86, Gramsci seems to suggest that relations among states do not constitute “politics” properly understood. The absence of a role for “the will”—and a seemingly related incapacity of any one state actor to singularly alter the prevailing equilibrium—undergirds this differentiation. While Gramsci certainly identifies the international and the domestic as fundamentally different zones of action in Q2§48, the suggestion that internal activities alone are properly “political” seems, to me, new. That being said, it is unclear to me on initial reading of Q6§86 the extent to which Gramsci’s analysis here pertains specifically to diplomacy as a professional practice or international relations writ-large.
Second, I am struck by the reversal in Gramsci’s analysis of centralized will from Q2§48 to Q6§86. In Q2§48, it is foreign policy—not internal politics—that necessitates “a quickness of mind and a unity of will.” Then, in Q6§86: “in the internal relations of a state, the situation is incomparably more favorable to initiative from the center, to a will to command.” How might we account for this development in Gramsci’s thought? My initial intuition would be that this reflects Gramsci’s ongoing theorization of Caesarism.
One of the main questions that arose for me while reading Notebook 6 is what exactly constitutes “good” aesthetics for Gramsci and if art and literature has revolutionary potential. He of course spends many notes criticizing Italy’s lack of “national-popular” literature and different forms of utopian novels, Catholic literature, novels written by and for detached intellectuals, etc. (which he does in this notebook as well). But in Notebook 6, he seems to take a positive view of a few authors.
Note 26 is strange as he begins with the familiar rubric “I nipotini de padre Bresciania: Pirandello” and then immediately says that “quite the contrary, Pirandello does not belong to this category of writers”. But he sees Pirandello’s work as more “intellectual and moral” than “artistic” – Pirandello’s theater seems to be didactic for Gramsci in that it his characters embody the dialectic.
He spends Note 29 criticizing literature written about writers rather than about “the living man” and “lived life”. Note 62, he valorizes the theater as an art that can become “an activity in continuous development” due to its dependence on the collective of actors, director, and spectators. In Note 168, he seems to express an ambivalence towards the educational potential of the genre of worker and peasant novels: “a social impulse, directed toward one goal, achieves its opposite” (I think he says something similar about Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” in Notebook 5) (126). But he also valorizes the “lyrical” quality of Dostoevsky (N108) and the popularity of Carlo Goldoni due to his use of “popular language” (N153).
One of the most interesting notes on this topic for me is note 208, on the possibility of “translating” Giovagnoli’s “Spartaco” into “modern language”. It is clear that language which he calls the “material of art” in an earlier note is integral to Gramsci’s understanding of good art/literature, this “vivente” versus “meccanico” duality reappears. But his attitude towards its educational potential still feels ambivalent. And what is the difference between “artistic” and “lyrical” writing versus “cultural” writing?
Coming in extremely last minute…. I’m also interested in popular literature and the relationship between chivalry/feudalism literature and utopian/political literature. Is Don Quixote a sort of hinge? See §157 and §28.
This week, a minor point that stood out to me while reading was Gramsci’s distinction between “conjuncture” and “situation” in §130. Tracing the origins of the word, Gramsci explains that conjuncture refers to “the ensemble of the immediate and transitory peculiarities of the economic situation,” which are themselves “the most fundamental and enduring characteristics of the situation” (p. 105). As such, the study of conjuncture relates “to immediate politics, to ‘tactics’ [and agitation],” while the study of situation relates “to ‘strategy’ and to propaganda, etc.” (p. 105).
I’m interested in this distinction because I think it brings together several important threads from Q6 that we discussed on Monday. How might the concepts of “conjuncture” and “situation”—and their resonance with Gramsci’s distinction between wars of maneuver and position—help us think about (1) the temporality of crises and (2) the latent political possibilities they contain?
Preparatory Notes for class discussion – Notebook 7
According to Fabio Frosini (La religione dell’uomo moderno), the seventh
notebook (November 1930 – December 1932) is where Gramsci begins “the
process of assimilation of religion to the philosophy of praxis.” For
Gramsci, religion is not primarily a set of theological beliefs. It is a
conception of the world (concezione del mondo) that produces specific forms
of behavior. Religion, in short, is an important level of social reproduction,
and that makes it political through and through. Several threads concerning
religion run through the Prison Notebooks:
•religion as a layer of common sense;
•the Catholic Church as a model of hegemony;
•the Church as a political actor in civil society, and as an unwilling
participant in political society (cf. Catholic Action and the formation of
Catholic parties such as Sturzo’s Popular Party);
•Reformation versus Renaissance and Counter-Reformation.
In 1845, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write in the Holy Family of the
reciprocal conversion of the formulae of the French Revolution in German
political thought:
If Herr Edgar [I.e., Edgar Bauer, a Young Left Hegelian] compares
French equality with German “self-consciousness” for an instant, he
will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract
thought, what the former says in French, that is, in the language of
politics and of thoughtful observation. Self-consciousness is man’s
equality with himself in pure thought. Equality is man’s consciousness
of himself in the element of practice, i.e., man’s consciousness of other
men as his equals and man’s attitude to other men as his equals.
Starting from Marx and Engels’s thesis on the reciprocal “conversion” of
French politics into German philosophy, of practical into abstract language,
Gramsci develops his own theory of “translatability” throughout the
notebooks. Translatability has become one of the most discussed concepts
in Gramscian studies; see, among others, André Tosel, “Philosophie
marxiste et traductibilité des langages et des pratiques”; Derek Boothman,
“Translatability between Paradigms”; and Giuseppe Cospito, “Traducibilità
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dei linguaggi scientifici.” Q7§2 returns to the concept. What valences does
the term “translation” acquire in Gramsci?
Q7§10 and Q7§16 return to the question of the “war of position.” The
locution had appeared, in its ordinary military sense, in Q1§133 (a note
titled “Military Art and Art of Politics”). In the following note, which
touches on Gandhi’s anti-colonial resistance, the “war of position” is
described as one tactic available to a subaltern force facing a well-organized
hegemonic one (here, the British occupation army). That subaltern force
starts as a “defeated army… disarmed and dispersed”; notice the familiar
vocabulary of “dispersion” and “disaggregation” Gramsci uses for
subaltern groups. Q6§138 returns once more to war of position versus war
of maneuver. Deciding when to use one and when the other, Gramsci
writes, is “the most important postwar problem of political theory; it is also
the most difficult problem to solve correctly.” Q6§155 adds that a correct
assessment requires understanding “the nature of the state (in the full
sense: dictatorship + hegemony).” Note that Q6§138 explicitly connects the
war of position to the struggle for hegemony, which is also a struggle to
“disperse” and “disaggregate” the opposition:
The war of position calls on enormous masses of people to make huge
sacrifices; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is
required and hence a more “interventionist” kind of government that
will engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and
ensure, once and for all, the “impossibility” of internal disintegration
by putting in place controls of all kinds—political, administrative, etc.,
reinforcement of the hegemonic positions of the dominant group, etc.
All of this indicates that the culminating phase of the politico-
historical situation has begun, for, in politics, once the “war of
position” is won, it is definitively decisive. In politics, in other words,
the war of maneuver drags on as long as the positions being won are
not decisive and the resources of hegemony and the state are not fully
mobilized. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have
lost their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts
to siege warfare—compact, difficult, requiring exceptional abilities of
patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is reciprocal….
The notes on the war of position in Notebook 7 bring us back to the issue
Lily raised last week: Gramsci’s attempt to distinguish tactics from strategy.
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•Does the discussion in Notebook 7 add anything new?
•In the art of war, a “position” is a trench, a fortification, a nucleus of
resistance. What are the “positions” in political struggle?
•Can we read §16 alongside the notes on the expansion and
strengthening of “bureaucratic apparatuses” in the “modern” state?
Q7§16 is at the center of a controversy, begun with the publication of Perry
Anderson’s “The Antinomies of Gramsci,” which was mentioned in a
previous class. For replies to Anderson, see Gianni Francioni’s L’officina
gramsciana or Peter Thomas’ The Gramscian Moment. Notice Gramsci’s use of
“East” and “West” in this note, which seems to have troubled Anderson. On
this antinomy, Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s once observed (in Gramsci. Um
estudo sobre su pensamento politico): “we must be clear about a possible
misunderstanding: Gramsci did not attribute a social formation the
definition ‘Western’ based on geographical criteria, but on historical ones.”
So, what do “East” and “West” mean here?
More broadly, considerthe role spatial categories play in Gramsci’s thought
(on the topic, see for instance Ekers, Michael, Gillian Hart et al. Gramsci:
Space, Nature, Politics). Take for instance Q4§41:
I remember a statement by Bertrand Russell: one can imagine on earth,
even in the absence of man, not Glasgow or London but two points on
the surface of the earth, one of which is farther north and the other
farther south (or something similar; it is to be found in a short
philosophical work by Russell, translated as part of the small scientific
series published by Sonzogno).’ But, in the absence of man, what
would be the meaning of north and south, and “point,” and “surface,”
and “earth”? Aren’t these words necessarily linked to man, his needs,
his life, his activity? In the absence of human activity, which creates all
values, including scientific values, what would “objectivity” be? Chaos,
or nothingness, emptiness— if one can even say this much, for if one
were really to imagine that man did not exist, it would be impossible
to imagine language and thought. In historical materialism thought
cannot be separated from being, man from nature, activity (history)
from matter, subject from object: such a separation would be a fall into
empty talk, meaningless abstraction.
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Q7§12 offers many points for discussion. Pay attention to the question of
“conformism,” which often surprises readers in Gramsci seminars, and to
how it relates to Caesarism.
•Does mass politics abolish the need for a charismatic leader?
•Does charisma transfer onto collective entities such as the party?
•Alberto Burgio (Il sistema in movimento), speaks, à propos of this note,
of “caesarism without a Caesar”. What are the implications of this shift
from one individual to parties or party-like formations?
•What does Gramsci mean by “party”?
Q7§20; §21 §24 §25 Gramsci already returns to the notion of “historic bloc”
in Q7§1. To avoid misunderstandings, which abound, note that for Gramsci
the historic bloc is the synthesis of a society’s economic base with its
political, cultural, and ideological life into a hegemonic unity. It usually
requires an alliance of different social groups, but an alliance is not in itself
a historic bloc; on its own, it would be a united front. The concept helps
explain why capitalist rule in the West proved so stable even through crises.
Power was not concentrated in a single locus that could be stormed, as in
Russia in 1917, but spread across a dense network of consent. Consider how
the historic bloc relates to:
•the war of position;
•the integral state;
•the by-now-abandoned question of the relation between base and
superstructure.
Q7§34 We will discuss Americanism and Fordism later in the semester. For
now, consider how Fordism appears to Gramsci as the practical realization
of Taylor’s “theory.” It is a mode of production (the assembly line)
combined with a wage policy (“high wages”). Together they select a
workforce able to sustain an unusually high pace and intensity of work,
which in turn yields extraordinary surplus value, a “monopoly of
initiative.”
•What are the limits of Fordism?
•Is the “tendential law” of the falling rate of profit “discovered by
Marx” one of them?
•Or is Fordism precisely capital’s way of containing the crisis that law
generates?
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Q7§35 This note, on “human nature,” continues a reflection Gramsci began
(at least) in Q4§8:
The basic innovation introduced by Marx into the science of politics
and of history, in comparison with that of Machiavelli, is the
demonstration that “human nature,” fixed and immutable, does not
exist and that therefore, the concrete content (as well as the logical
formulation?) of political science must be conceived as a historically
developing organism.
Q7§35 goes further, making human nature coincide with human history, a
motif Gramsci takes from Vico as much as from Marx. His reflections move
ever more decisively under the sign of the primacy of history and politics
(“absolute historicism”), and hence of the industriousness of civil
humankind as it grapples with the concrete dramas of social life. History
and politics become collective self-creation (praxis). There is no human
nature apart from history, since humankind is the ever-unfinished product
of its own actions and its own errors. It is the only living form in constant
change. It exists within a world that is itself caught up in the same plastic
movement of transformation, through its interchange with the human
species and its progressive humanization. For that humanization Gramsci
uses the Weberian term “rationalization.”
Q7§80 connects to our discussion of crises that drag on rather than ending
in “catastrophe.” The note describes a situation in which a hegemony, here
capitalist hegemony, is in crisis, yet the antagonistic forces have been
unable to reorganize the social “disorder” the crisis produces. Note what I
take to be the very first cause Gramsci gives for the crisis of capitalist
hegemony. It is the explosion of mass society: the passage into activity of
great popular masses previously excluded from politics and passive. In
short, the popular masses have irrupted onto the political scene.