Gramsci

Space, Nature, Politics

Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer, Alex Loftus, Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer, Alex Loftus

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444339703, 9781444339710
• eBook ISBN: 9781118295601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This unique collection is the first to bring attention to Antonio Gramsci's work within geographical debates. Presenting a substantially different reading to Gramsci scholarship, the collection forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory.

• Offers the first sustained attempt to foreground Antonio Gramsci's work within geographical debates
• Demonstrates how Gramsci articulates a rich spatial sensibility whilst developing a distinctive approach to geographical questions
• Presents a substantially different reading of Gramsci from dominant post-Marxist perspectives, as well as more recent anarchist and post-anarchist critiques
• Builds on the emergence of Gramsci scholarship in recent years, taking this forward through studies across multiple continents, and asking how his writings might engage with and animate political movements today
• Forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory, building on Gramsci's innovative philosophy of praxis

 

Part I

Space

2

Traveling with Gramsci

The Spatiality of Passive Revolution

Adam David Morton

The fragmented process of state formation and hegemony in the Italian peninsula – conditions that were themselves imposed by regionally distinct social contestations over territory – prompted consideration of the interactive and uneven development of state power within the critical consciousness of Antonio Gramsci.¹ In a letter addressed to the Fourth World Congress of the Third International (November 20, 1922), Gramsci highlighted such conditions by stating:

The Italian bourgeoisie succeeded in organising its state not so much through its own intrinsic strength, as through being favoured in its victory over the feudal and semi-feudal classes by a whole series of circumstances of an international character (Napoleon III’s policy in 1852–60; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; France’s defeat at Sedan and the development of the German Empire after this event). (SPWII 129)

It can therefore be comfortably asserted that “Gramsci draws our attention to spatial differentiation, to the uneven and unequal development of social powers in regional spaces” (Roseberry 1994: 359–360). Perhaps following earlier commentary by Edward Soja (1989: 89–90), Bob Jessop’s admonition to recover the spatial and geographical sense of Gramsci’s reflections on state power is salutary. Championing Gramsci as a spatial theorist, Jessop (2006: 29; 2008: 103) notably includes the theory of passive revolution within a register of spatial metaphors that have been influential in tackling the historical and geographical ­conditions of state power. While this register of spatial metaphors is recognized as influential, however, direct analytical engagement with the spatiality of passive revolution is obviated on the basis that Gramsci’s interest lay more “in the actual rather than metaphorical spatiality of social relations and practices, in their spatial conditioning, and in the relevance of social relations and practices to spatial issues” (Jessop 2006: 29–30; 2008: 103; emphases added). Perhaps this neglect of passive ­revolution (there is but one textual consideration of the term in State Theory) has come at the expense of a privileging of the form of the capitalist type of state, and thus “consolidated capitalist societies,” ­analyzed principally through what are regarded as the “three major themes” in Gramsci’s work: hegemony, historic bloc (sic), and the role of intellectuals (Jessop 1982: 142–152; 1990: 212–213; 2002: 5–6; 2008: 10). The corollary is that Jessop affirms in relation to spatial metaphors such as passive revolution that “it would be misleading to focus exclusively on these … for this would divert attention from Gramsci’s less obvious but more significant analyses of the inherent spatiality as well as temporality of social relations” (Jessop 2006: 27; 2008: 101).

What this reveals, however, is the drawing of an artificial binary line between spatial metaphors, in this case the notion of passive revolution, and the actuality of space, place, and scale relations when addressing the geographical conditions of Gramsci’s interest in state power. This partitioning is highly problematic given the originality of Gramsci’s approach to language and metaphor as dimensions where social distinctions would become expressed. Gramsci therefore puts forward a completely different dialectical unity of conceptual metaphor and social relations that eschews division:

A study of the cultural–linguistic origin of a metaphor used to indicate a concept or a newly discovered relationship can help towards the better understanding of the concept itself, in as much as it gets related back to the historically determined cultural world from which it sprang, just as such a study is useful to define the limit of the metaphor itself, stopping it in other words from becoming prosaic and mechanical. (Q11, §50; FSPN 315; emphasis added)²

My argument is that the spatiality of passive revolution was not simply a metaphor but was constitutive of the actuality of spatial social relations and practices of state power in Italy. In the form of the spatiality of the Risorgimento and subsequent state formation process in Italy, the circumstance of passive revolution reflects the actual geographical and historical conditioning of the state as a social relation within an interstate system. The practices of passive revolution are therefore directly related to the spatial conditioning of the fractured process of state formation in Italy. In sum, passive revolution was not simply a spatial metaphor but was, more concretely, an emergent spatialization strategy that structured and shaped state power in Italy. Building on his counsel to the Comintern cited earlier, Gramsci himself elaborates the conditions of passive revolution as “controversies arising in the period of the formation of the Italian nation and of the struggle for political and territorial unity … The sum of these problems reflects the laborious emergence of a modern Italian nation, impeded by a balance of internal and international forces” (Q21, §11; SCW 199). As a consequence, little room remains for a Delphic treatment of the general problems and peculiar conditions of state formation pertaining to passive revolution. Reducing it to a spatial metaphor would commit this slip and remove the general problems and peculiar conditions of passive revolution from substantive analysis. After all, the class origins of state formation linked to the spatial strategy of passive revolution were embedded within a set of concrete social–political problems in Italy connecting questions about the role of a unifying national language; the relationship between art and politics; the question of national literature; and the problem of hegemony through intellectual and moral reformation. As a result the treatment of passive revolution warrants “a precise historical perspective” that can additionally emphasize problems of state formation that are “still current and alive today” (Q21, §11; SCW 199). It is therefore necessary to pose the problem of passive revolution in “historico-political terms” rather than reducing it to a metaphor (Q15, §25; SPN 113). After all, concordant with Neil Smith, if space is reduced to a metaphor, its materiality is unrealized and then it becomes difficult to understand the mutuality of material and metaphorical space. “Whatever the power of spatial metaphors to reveal especially the fragmented unity of the contemporary world, they work precisely by reinforcing the deadness of space and therefore by denying us the spatial concepts appropriate for analysing that world” (Smith 2008[1984]: 224). My argument is that the theory and strategy of passive revolution both mandate the critique of metaphor and can be understood in part through metaphor in order to reveal the geographical expressions of the contradiction of capital.

This chapter will address specific features of the powerful geographical and spatial sense of passive revolution, in the first instance, by examining Edward Said’s assertion that Gramsci “created in his work an essentially geographical, territorial apprehension of human history and society” (2001[1995]: 464). For Said, Gramsci produced a certain type of critical consciousness that was geographical and spatial in its fundamental coordinates. Elements of this critical consciousness will then be examined in the second division of the argument, which will embark on producing a specific reading of passive revolution to assert the wider spatial and geographical relevance of the concept and its conditions (see Morton 2007a). The argument will then conclude with a set of extended ­reflections on the specific problem of what happens to a theory when it moves from one place to another. As a result, it further engages with Said but on this occasion with his deliberations on “traveling theory”: the extent to which theory is a response to specific social and historical situations or whether, as it develops out of a situation, theory can travel to gain wider acceptance without becoming rigidified or codified (Said 1983, 2001[1994]). It is argued that there is a critical consciousness within Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis that embodies a spatial sense of locating or situating theory within specific circumstances while opening it up to different concrete instances that lie outside the original historical context of theory. The point of theory therefore is to travel, but not in the literal sense. This is a negative mode of applying theory whereby theory loses its critical power and insurrectionary force. An alternative mode of “transgressive theory” offers the potential to connect actively to different locales, sites, situations without becoming overgeneralizing or trans­historical. It is contended that Gramsci’s analysis of spatial and geo­graphical power relations, carried through his theorization of passive revolution, stands precisely as a powerful and positive example of traveling theory. It is concluded that recognizing such a positive mode of traveling theory – or deliberating on the possibilities opened up by traveling with Gramsci to alternative situations – can raise new and meaningful reflections about historical and contemporary conditions of passive revolution, state formation, and state power in capitalist modernity (Morton 2011).

Critical Consciousness and the Philosophy of Praxis

When the state comes to play an inordinate role in securing processes of primitive accumulation, relations in civil society including culture, ideas, and language tend to be dominated by state power. The result is a statifying tendency to hasten “hothouse fashion” the conditions of capitalist development.³ This process was fundamental to the peculiarities of uneven and combined development as well as additional statified forms of development on a world scale considered by Leon Trotsky (1979[1938]: 782–794). In his consideration, “capitalism seemed to be an offspring of the state” (Trotsky 2004[1919]: 173). Conditions of passive revolution are similarly marked when “a state which, even though it had limitations as a power, ‘led’ the group which should have been ‘leading’” (Q15, §59; SPN 105). This characteristic feature of passive revolution is elevated by Said as a central feature of one of the geographical and spatial sensi­tivities of Gramsci’s critical consciousness. At the same time, according to Said, Gramsci is programmatically opposed to this homogenizing ­tendency of state power, the statifying tendency to equalize and ­mediatize social development, or “what we can call the temporalizing and ­homological function by which the whole problem of specificity, locality, and/or identity is reformulated so as to make equivalence” (2001[1995]: 466). The manner in which the modern state comes to impose on society and space animated Henri Lefebvre who similarly noted how “the modern state is consolidating on a world scale … imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures irrespective of political ideology, historical background, or the class origins of those in power” (1991: 23). Yet with Gramsci, through a direct focus on situated complexities and uneven and discontinuous geographical areas, the spatiality of the Risorgimento was grasped through the theory of passive revolution.⁴

In the concrete framework of Italian social relations, this could be the only solution whereby to develop the productive forces of industry under the direction of the traditional ruling classes, in competition with the more advanced industrial formations of countries which monopolise raw materials and have accumulated massive capital sums. (Q10I, §9; SPN 118–120)

Rather than an inventory of spatial metaphors, Gramsci deployed a programmatic and politically strategic terminology to address the social contest over territory and space that characterized Italian state formation. This included the conditions of spatiality between town and country, spaces of backwardness linking regions within the social order of state formation, and place-bound patterns of development all constitutive of the conditions of passive revolution. These terms of reference of the spatiality of uneven geographical development and state power in conditions of passive revolution pervade Gramsci’s analysis in:

• his writings on the southern question and the problem of peninsular development linked to the dominance of the Piedmontese-Italian state over the agrarian south (SPWII 441–462; Morton 2010);
• those documents, of which Gramsci was a central author and architect, that came to be known as the “Lyon Theses,” a collection of positional statements on the “united front” tactics developed to tackle fascism (SPWII 340–375); and
• the Prison Notebooks themselves on the historical task of forging a communist party that could establish the role of the “Modern Prince” (Q13, §§1–40; SPN 125–205).

Gramsci’s critical consciousness was therefore inserted within a strategic problematic of contesting state power that produced “a critical and geographical rather than an encyclopaedic or totalising normative or systematic terminology” (Said 2001[1995]: 467).

This focus on issues of strategy was emblematic of the philosophy of praxis that was based on “neither idealistic nor materialistic ‘monism,’ neither ‘Matter’ nor ‘Spirit,’ but rather ‘historical materialism,’ that is to say concrete human activity” (Q4, §37; PNII 176–177). The result was less a temporal fixing of relations within categories and more a prismatic expression of spatial and geographical relations in their constant flux and unevenness that grasped the identity of contraries. For Said, “an understanding of the historical-social world is so spatially grasped by Gramsci as to highlight the instabilities induced by constant change, movement, volatility” (2001[1995]: 468). Hence a need to both historicize (put in historical perspective) and spatialize (identify the changing geographical practices) that inform world politics (Agnew 2001: 29). How are these contradictions of uneven geographical development ­spatially grasped within the conditions and theory of passive revolution?

Passive Revolution and the Spatiality of the Risorgimento

“Capitalism is a world historical phenomenon and its uneven development,” Gramsci argued, “means that individual nations cannot be at the same level of economic development at the same time” (SPWI 69). Gramsci understood issues of uneven and combined development across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history as a series of passive revolutions (Morton 2005, 2010). To be precise, the theory of passive revolution refers to how “restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals” (Q10II, §61; SPN 115). Passive revolution, then, is a further expression of the statified element of development.

Initially developed to explain the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian national liberation that culminated in the political unification of the country in 1860–61, the notion of passive revolution was expanded to encompass a whole series of other historical phenomena (for critical reception see Davis 1979, 1994; Morris 1997; Schneider 1998; Ghosh 2001). In the case of Italy, the “passive” aspect refers to the restrictive form of hegemony that emerged out of the Risorgimento because of the failure of potential “Jacobins” in the Pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise page
• Antipode Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations of Works by Antonio Gramsci
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Framings
• Introduction
• Part I: Space
• Part II: Nature
• Part III: Politics
• Conclusion
• Index