Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment

David Kreps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409460862
• eBook ISBN: 9781317124986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible. With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers' work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings. A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, communication and media studies, and contemporary philosophy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

David Kreps

In this introduction, by way of presenting a review of the scant pre-existing literature I have been able to find which considers the work of Gramsci and Foucault together, I attempt firstly to set out a conceptual framework by which the reader may see what is common among the papers in this volume – which makes it valid to call these papers a meaningful collection, and thereby to call each paper a chapter; and secondly, in exploring the tensions between Gramsci and Foucault, I attempt a discussion of what are the kinds of differences among the chapters that make it interesting to collect them together. Lastly, I offer a brief explanation of each chapter, and how it contributes to that picture.

The Three Camps

The few already published journal articles, book sections and chapters on Foucault or Gramsci that consider the two writers together, or mention the other writer in passing, are to be found across a range of disciplines, including feminist philosophy and human geography, along with the more obvious radical political theory and cultural studies. Joan Cocks (1989), a feminist philosopher, puts forward the primary argument of much of this volume, that taken together (although quite how remains the core of the discussion) Foucault’s and Gramsci’s sociological insights present something of more value than either of them taken in isolation. As she says:

There are [between Gramsci and Foucault] certain striking thematic repetitions, certain similar analytical obsessions – certain ways, too, in which their arguments and insights are reciprocally illuminating. What is flawed in each argument alone, moreover, is improved by the selective combination of the arguments together. For in some cases there is too great a faith in subjective agency, in others too great an emphasis on objective determination. Some defend an overly centrist strategy of resistance, others an overly localist one. In certain arguments we find a naïve esteem for a final harmony in social relations, and in others, a hypertrophied sensitivity to the possibilities of repression in any collective way of life. (Cocks 1989: 26)

In other words, Foucault’s attention to the micro-levels of power over individual bodies and Gramsci’s attention to the macro-level of institutions, classes and societies offer a broader and deeper picture when considered together.

Jane Kenway (1990) makes the same assertion, suggesting a ‘poststructuralist reading of Gramsci’ (Kenway 1990: 172) makes a good adjunct to Foucault’s work, and that the two writers’ oeuvres should be considered complementary, although she makes no attempt to combine them. Indeed – combining the two seems to be something no-one has attempted, pointing out, when it is considered, the fundamental dissonances between their approaches that would prevent such a synthesis. Inconsistencies within the Prison Notebooks, and the gradual development and shifts of Foucault’s thought over the course of his career, moreover, render both these ‘oeuvres’ quite diffuse in places, on such critical issues as Gramsci’s definition of hegemony – which is never definitive – and the freedom of the individual to escape disciplination, which in the early Foucault appears negligible, but later appears possible but only through individual – and sometimes counterintuitive – effort. Combining such diffuse oeuvres seems, from certain perspectives, quite impossible. Finally, as human geographers, Ekers and Loftus (2008), put it, ‘what was often a fiercely anti-Marxist stance on Foucault’s part’ (2008: 698), and the fact that the poststructuralist turn of the 1960s quite simply post-dates Gramsci’s death and is therefore absent in his work, present, for many authors, fundamental oppositions between the two.

Thus, Marxist Norman Geras (1990) points out, forcefully, that there is simply no possibility of combining the work of the two thinkers, because the way Foucault uses the concept, in particular, of hegemony, is expressive of a totally different standpoint to that of Gramsci. Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead (2005) meanwhile, attacks the whole notion of hegemony, from a Foucauldian perspective. Arguably, however, as Olssen (2006) points out, Geras’s objections seem to stem from a standpoint that simply does not accept the fundamental premises of poststructuralism, preferring the objective certainties of classical Marxism. Day (2005), in a similar vein, seems overly determined to deconstruct everything to the level of the individual (as indeed Foucault arguably did) without the possibility of any collectivity. Barnett (2005) views attempts to use the two thinkers together – at least in the considerations of human geographers – as ‘theoretically clumsy, and politically confused’ (Ekers and Loftus 2008: 699). Is it, as Barnett would have it, that ‘Marxist and Foucauldian approaches imply different models of the nature of explanatory concepts; different models of causality and determination; different models of social relations and agency; and different normative understandings of political power’ (Barnett, 2005: 8). Or is it merely that the two thinkers focused upon differing aspects of a wider picture that do not exclude each other? Does Foucault’s concentration upon the micro-politics in society that add up to and constitute the central figure of the State undermine and discount, or complement and mirror Gramsci’s concentration on the hegemonic reach of that centre out into the minutiae of social relations? Or is it, as Scott Lash (2007) argues, that ‘power over’, in contemporary society, has simply become post-hegemonic, and that the more Foucauldian conception of ‘power from within’ is now the only game in town.

Attempts at combination aside, there are, nonetheless, many examples of authors using the two together to address a range of concerns: in human geography (Larner 2000; 2003; Peet 2001; Sparke 2006; Watts 2003; Ekers and Loftus 2008), in feminism (Mercer 1980; Cocks 1989; Kenway 1990; Harstock 1990), and in critical thinking (Driver 1985; Smart 1985 and 1999; Barrett 1991; Burchell et al. 1991; Marsden 1999; Torfing 1999; Morera 2000; Ives 2004; Stoddart 2005; Olssen 2006; Jessop 2007), along, no doubt, with other areas this author has no knowledge of.

Marxist scholar Paul Ives (2004) sees many points of contact between the two – particularly between the notion of ‘grammars’ and of ‘discourse’. As he points out,

in a way that is closer to Foucault’s analysis of power, Gramsci’s notion of spontaneous grammar shows how political influence works at the micro level and how even those who seem to have little power, working-class children for example, exert their dominance over peasant or immigrant children by making fun of the way they speak. Even the benign form of correcting someone’s grammar or asking for clarification is not free of power relations or politics. (Ives 2004: 143)

Granting Gramsci, in this way, insight into where Foucault would later take the consideration of the micro-level of power relations, chimes with a range of literature in which, as Ekers and Loftus argue, citing Chantal Mouffe (1979), ‘Gramsci approached many of the theoretical concerns that were to become central to Foucault’s oeuvre’ (Ekers and Loftus 2008: 699).

Yet, if Gramsci’s thought in some ways tentatively prefigured where Foucault would later flesh out detailed analysis, as Radhakrishnan (1990) suggests, Gramsci’s thought elsewhere seems to complete, in advance, some of the gaps left in Foucault’s later analysis. Radhakrishnan argues that Foucault’s attention to the micro-level of politics stems from his critique of his own position as a European intellectual, and that without direct experience of the ‘subjugated knowledges’ he interrogates he cannot conceive the macro-political necessity of leadership. Gramsci’s earlier concentration on the relationship between the individual and the group, therefore, provides the very theoretical foundation upon which such leadership can be created in a way that evades the pitfalls Foucault describes.

Combinations, then, at least of specific elements of each thinker’s ideas, do appear in the literature. The noted neo-Gramscian Stephen Gill (2003) has drawn substantially on Foucauldian notions of panopticism to develop his new concepts of disciplinary neo-liberalism. Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire is conceived as more of a Foucauldian discursive formation than an old European imperialist power, yet it exerts thoroughly Gramscian hegemonic dominance, for all that that dominance may be in a more theoretical form of rulership than Gramsci may have envisaged. Indeed, ‘the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xv).

Most strikingly of all, perhaps, the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1982; 1985; 1987), and that of Jacob Torfing (1999) present for us a very enlightening combination of the two great thinkers. Accepting the decentring of the subject in poststructuralism and the notion that ‘Discourse theory abandons the notion of a true or perfect definition together with a conception of social identities as rooted in pregiven essences’ (Torfing 1999: 3), Laclau and Mouffe undertake an updating of Gramsci’s thought into the poststructuralist mode. ‘The essentialist remnant in Gramsci, which made him insist on the privileged position of the fundamental classes in hegemonic struggles, is removed’ by this update, ‘thereby allowing Laclau and Mouffe to reformulate the concept of hegemony’ (Torfing 1999: 13). This reconceptualizing of hegemony as a discursive phenomenon, allows Laclau and Mouffe to redefine it:

Hegemony is no longer to be conceived of in terms of the unification of political forces around a set of paradigmatic interests that are constituted elsewhere. Rather, hegemony involves the articulation of social identities in the context of social antagonism. As in the work of Derrida, the articulation of identity is taken to be conditioned by the deconstruction of the very notion of structure, which reveals the discursive, and thus the contingent, character of all social identities. (Torfing 1999: 14)

From this review of the literature that considers Foucault and Gramsci together, then, three camps emerge: (i) the Marxists for whom Foucault’s conception of power ignores historical realities – such as ‘the fundamental classes’; (ii) the poststructuralists for whom Foucault’s nominalism, or ‘sociological singularism’ as Olssen (2006) puts it, precludes any totalizing theoretic such as Gramsci’s – and for whom the ‘fundamental classes’ do not exist; and (iii) those for whom these differences constitute the site of complementarity between the two writers. In this third camp, there seems little evidence of any genuine attempt to combine the theories of the two, without in some shape or form granting one or the other the upper hand – Radhakrishnan to Gramsi; Laclau, Mouffe and Torfing to Foucault – in some fundamental respect.

It seems, then, from the literature, that there are fundamental differences between the two thinkers that have prevented, beyond the few papers cited above, much discussion between them: they exist in separate worlds – incompatible ones, if Geras (1990) or Day (2005) are to be believed – and many scholars seem either to belong to one or the other. From a classical Marxist perspective, Foucault’s use of such terms as hegemony sets up inescapable inconsistencies; from a poststructuralist perspective, the totalizing – and scientistic – approach of Marxist historical materialism completely fails to appreciate the far more nuanced, pervasive understanding of power as situated in discursive contexts. The consequence has been a form of parallel and exclusive paradigm conflict between divergent camps within radical thought that has undoubtedly been detrimental to the broader aims of both sides of the divide: social change.

But it is also clear that there are ample areas in which the two writers complement one another, and, as Olssen in particular points out, they ‘present a more powerful perspective on social structure taken together than each does on his own’ (Olssen 2006: 116). I would like, then, at this point, to put forward a notion of my own concerning the possibility of combining the works of the two thinkers that has thus far – if my searches of the literature have been sufficiently exhaustive – failed at least to appear in print. It strikes me that, beyond the linguistic and poststructuralist turns which knock down the essentialism to which Gramsci, in the 1930s, remained true, there is a further ‘turn’ that similarly post-dates Foucault’s lifetime, and which has brought the worlds of poststructuralism and scientific materialism into a new and strikingly innovative confluence: the ‘complexity turn’ (Urry 2005). I have devoted the final chapter of this volume to a more thorough treatment of this idea, and refer the reader there for more detail. For now, let me briefly introduce it.

As Kaufmann asserts, the fundamental problem with scientific materialist thought (in its reductionist mode), is that to represent a complex system (as opposed to one that is merely complicated) one must, of necessity, reproduce the system in its entirety. The representation, usually something like an algorithm – the ‘shortest description’ which can capture the essential elements of a system – can only capture the entirety of a complex system, because a complex system is already its own shortest description, (Kaufmann 1995: 22). Thus – if human society can be considered as a complex system, as indeed many sociologists are now beginning to do – Foucault’s exclusive attention to the micro-level is indeed justified. Yet with the help of Kaufmann’s theories, and those of others working in the field of complexity, it may be possible to evince what he describes as ‘generic lawlike behaviours’ in these systems that may be not dissimilar to those attempted by Gramsci. I refer the reader to my concluding chapter, in this volume, for a fuller explication of this potential combination.

Introduction to Each Chapter in this Collection

It should be said that none of the chapters in this collection could be considered to fall into the first or second of the above ‘three camps’. Yet in the third camp – those for whom the differences constitute the site of complementarity between the two writers – any attempt to combine the theories of the two seems inevitably to in some shape or form grant one or the other the upper hand. This collection proves little different, although the chapters have been ordered thematically rather than in terms of their preference for a Gramscian Foucauldianism, or a Foucauldian Gramscianism.

The collection begins with Alex Demirović, who examines the relation between discourse and reality, as exposed through the differing but related positions of Foucault and Gramsci on truth. While for both writers, ‘truths are understood as historically relative practices which nevertheless determine the subsequent social and intellectual processes’, Foucault, Demirović asserts, concentrates upon the ethics of truth, and how subjectivities and identities derive their underpinnings from the multiple layers of discourses where truths are created and deployed in networks of power relations. Gramsci, meanwhile, concentrates upon the politics of a truth that is provisional and transient, and how it is marshalled by the institutions of power and deployed for the dominance of the subaltern; for Gramsci the overriding importance is to speak the truth in politics, for all that it may be a provisional one. Demirović looks ultimately to the potential synergy of the two writers’ oeuvres from which ‘a politics and ethics of truth emerges, through which truth itself – its very status and power – can be changed’.

Next Ngai-Ling Sum considers what Gramsci termed the regularities of the determined market and their relation to the state in its integral sense, alongside what Foucault called liberal and neo-liberal economic rationality and their relation to governmentality and statecraft. Gramscianizing Foucault, and working towards the potential contribution of Gramsci and Foucault to the development of the emerging agenda of cultural political economy, Sum presents six ‘discursively selective’ moments in the production of hegemonies – a heuristic schema to help in locating social relations within meaning-making. He then illustrates this schema by applying it to discourses on ‘competitiveness’, seeking ultimately to both governmentalize Gramsci and Gramscianize Foucault.

Then Marcus Schulzke seeks a Gramscian interpretation of Foucault’s theory of power that helps it avoid making resistance either impossible or pointless. Through Gramsci’s theory of hegemony he offers in this chapter a clearer explanation of the agent, tactics, and goals of resistance – in particular through the political party. As he points out,

Those who attempt to derive theories of resistance from Foucault offer strong explanations of how power can be mobilized by ordinary people, but they offer insufficient accounts of how individuals can ever hope to rise above the multiple sources of power acting on them to the extent that they can carry out acts of resistance.

In this chapter, using the ideas of Gramsci, Schulzke helps to map a route by which this cul-de-sac might fruitfully be escaped – specifically through the social tool of education.

Then Jean-Paul Gagnon focuses on education and democracy, suggesting that Gramscian and Foucauldian theory support a democracy focused on citizen-experts who actively resist power. Citizens, he asserts, require expert knowledge, and this knowledge ‘should be about diluting power’. They must also understand their ‘role as selves in dialectic to the role of citizen’. This expertise, it is hoped, ‘will allow for an emanci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Politics of Truth: For a Different Way of Life
• 3 Rethinking the Gramsci–Foucault Interface: A Cultural Political Economy Interpretation Oriented to Discourses of Competitiveness
• 4 Power and Resistance: Linking Gramsci and Foucault
• 5 Building a Gramsci–Foucault Axis of Democracy
• 6 Subalternity In and Out of Time, In and Out of History
• 7 The Passive Revolution of Spiritual Politics: Gramsci and Foucault on Modernity, Transition and Religion
• 8 Post-Neoliberal Regional Integration in Latin America: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA)
• 9 The Hegemony of Psychology: The Practice and Teaching of Paediatrics in Post-Invasion Iraq
• 10 The Complexity of Social Systems: Could Hegemony Emerge from the Micro-Politics of the Individual?
• Index