Antonio Gramsci

Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism

Renate Holub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134976744
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist positions on the postmodern left.
Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory.

Part I
INTRODUCTION

1
Gramsci and critical theories: towards a ‘differential pragmatics’

MARXISM AND MODERNISM

Gramsci had been in prison for almost eight years when Lukács, in 1934, published two essays which are crucial for understanding the state of Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s. The first, entitled ‘Art and Objective Truth’, displays the epistemological foundations of Lukács' aesthetic theory. ¹ And the second focuses on what he calls the ‘greatness and decline’ of expressionism. ² At issue in this latter essay were those cultural, artistic and literary forces which Lukács considered as having taken part in the rise of fascism, and not in its prevention. Expressionism he counted among such forces. For this reason, Lukács also polemicized against expressionism, as a form of modernism, in a famous essay entitled ‘Let's Talk Realism Now’, published in 1937, which would incite an unprecedented international debate (in the west) on the problem of realism and modernism among the left intelligentsia. ³ By that time Gramsci was, after eleven years in fascist prisons, no longer in a fit state to argue his case. ⁴ So when against the background of fascist cultural politics exiled intellectuals like Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, but also Walter Benjamin and many others, obliged Lukács to undertake a critical review of his verdict on expressionism, Gramsci was not among the interlocutors. Nor was he there when one of the largest international writers' conventions in defence of democratic culture took place in Paris in 1935 and when the anti-fascist popular cultural front was put into effect. ⁵ So when the realism/expressionism/modernism debate, as a response to the challenges of fascism, confronted the question of what kind of literature and art constituted an authentic antifascist politicality, and what kind of political status to assign to modernist art, when that debate raged among orthodox and unorthodox Marxists alike, Gramsci did not take part in it and could not have taken part. And conversely, hardly known to anyone in the mid-1930s, Gramsci's contemporary writings were on precisely the same topics that preoccupied the participants in the realism/modernism debate. Like many of his contemporaries, Gramsci investigated, inter alia, in his notes written in prison, what constituted fascist and anti-fascist art, what kind of literature to support or reject in the class struggle, or to admit to a democratic cultural canon. Many of Gramsci's theoretical concerns indeed coincide with general questions of ideology and Marxist aesthetics, in particular as these have been addressed by one of the major protagonists in the realism/modernism debate: Georg Lukács. ⁶ In that Lukács is not only a pivotal figure in the context of the realism/modernism debate, but also one of the major Marxist aestheticians of our century, I have chosen to dedicate chapter 2 of this book to a comparative analysis of Gramsci and Lukács on Marxist aesthetics. At issue are their respective approaches to problems of realism on the basis of their reading of one of the major nineteenth-century Italian writers and novelists, Alessandro Manzoni.

To deal with Lukács and Gramsci in a literary context, rather than from the point of view of political or social theory, was particularly fascinating to me for a variety of reasons. Until recently, the Gramsci critical community showed little interest in his literary critiques and his aesthetics, not finding it particularly profitable, in light of the apparently fragmentary character of Gramsci's notes on aesthetics, to look at his stature as critic of the twentieth century. ⁷ As a result, it had become commonplace to deal with Gramsci, when evoked in conjunction with a major Marxist aesthetician such as Lukács, quite paradoxically, not in the context of literary criticism or aesthetics. Rather, when Gramsci does turn up in Lukács' company, usually it is in a context that addresses their pioneering work in the realm of western Marxism. There is surely good reason for understanding Gramsci in such a way. He was, after all, a major political activist around World War I, and one of the leaders of the Italian working-class movement in the early and mid-1920s, until his arrest in November 1926. Moreover, much of his work, whether it stems from his pre-prison years, or the research he pursued in prison, does indeed deal with questions of political and social Marxism. Against the background of the Russian revolution of 1917 and its European aftermath, the revolutions that failed in the west, Gramsci attempted, like many contemporary theorists, to correct Marxist dogma and strategy; particularly the kind of dogma which had been handed down by the Second International, a scientific and positivist form of Marxism, and a cognate view of history, which required, from Gramsci's perspective, a good deal of rethinking in light of the unprecedented historical developments unsettling the world around World War I. Historical realities called into question the orthodox theories of the Second International, with its understanding of historical change in terms of an economic determinism, where changes in the economic base would inexorably determine changes in the superstructure. The events of the Russian revolution, taking place, so to speak, before their historical time, and the failure of the revolutions in the west, not taking place, as expected, at their appointed time, required new approaches to politics, society and even history. The narrative of an evolutionary, natural, predestined trajectory of history within which one form of society (capitalism) would necessarily, without significant superstructural and ideological intervention, change into another form of society (socialism), had run its course. A new narrative awaited its turn. Like many critical theorists and political activists of his era, Gramsci contributed to the production of that narrative. He critically confronted the fact that the economic crisis situations in the various western countries had not led to a political crisis, as Marx had predicted. Rather, power and authority were still retained by the state and capitalism, in spite of the massive social and ideological upheavals currently taking place. The revolution, predicted for countries with more advanced capitalist economic formations, had not in fact arrived on time. Yet in Russia, in a country which was economically backward by most accounts and not ready, so it was reckoned, for massive economic transformations, a revolution had taken place. There was, as a result, much to rethink and reconsider in Marxist theory and strategy, from questions of the dialectic to theories of ideology, culture and the state. In Gramsci's work, the rethinking of these formidable historical events led to the conceptualization of key notions with which his texts were subsequently identified. I am referring to his notions of political and civil society, hegemony, as well as counter-hegemony, and, closely related to these two, his idea of the ‘intellectual’. This latter notion is sometimes referred to as that of the ‘organic intellectual’. I will rephrase it as ‘critical specialist/non-specialist’, for reasons explained in chapter 6.

Gramsci's concepts in general resist ready definition. Tending always to examine and interrogate phenomena from multiple points of view, from divergent angles and different sites, and in general in slow motion, his concepts, designed to grasp some of the complexities present in social processes, are as manysided and multiple as ways of seeing. I will, therefore, introduce only provisionally here some of what Gramsci's notions, such as hegemony and counter-hegemony, can embody. Hegemony is a concept that helps to explain, on the one hand, how state apparatuses, or political society—supported by and supporting a specific economic group-can coerce, via its institutions of law, police, army and prisons, the various strata of society into consenting to the status quo. On the other hand, and more importantly, hegemony is a concept that helps us to understand not only the ways in which a predominant economic group coercively uses the state apparatuses of political society in the preservation of the status quo, but also how and where political society and, above all, civil society, with its institutions ranging from education, religion and the family to the microstructures of the practices of everyday life, contribute to the production of meaning and values which in turn produce, direct and maintain the ‘spontaneous’ consent of the various strata of society to that same status quo. ⁸ In this sense hegemony is related to both civil society and political society, and, in the last analysis, also to the economic sphere. And Gramsci's concept of the ‘intellectual’, which equally resists definition, is a way for Gramsci to begin to conceptualize, not perhaps primarily the production, but the directed reproduction and dissemination of an effective hegemony, a differentiated yet also directive and value-laden channelling of the production of meaning or signification. A counter-hegemony would, as a result, also depend on intellectual activities. These would produce, reproduce and disseminate values and meanings attached to a conception of the world attentive to democratic principles and the dignity of humankind.

With the invention of these concepts, Gramsci collaborates in the theoretical project of Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s who had witnessed the Russian revolution and its European aftermath, taking place despite and against the arguments of Marx's Capital. In this sense his text is indeed representative, along with those of Korsch and Lukács, of early western Marxism. It is not my intention in this book, however, to reinforce the received image of Gramsci as co-founder of western Marxism, legitimate though it is, or to probe deeply into Gramsci's political or social theory, his particular version of Marxism, that is. For one thing, there is plenty of good material on this issue already available. ⁹ And if I am not mistaken, this approach to Gramsci continues to be successfully pursued. ¹⁰ Rather, what attracts me more is to place Gramsci next to Lukács in the context of literary criticism, and in the context of Marxist aesthetics. This procedure has some advantages. It does not prevent me, on the one hand, from pointing to the many themes and interests Lukács and Gramsci share: their political, historical, biographical experiences, their emphasis on the superstructural rather than the infrastructural, their understanding of ideology, their attempts to come to terms with the rapidly diminishing revolutionary potential of western capitalism, their invention of new concepts with which to challenge that diminution. On the other hand, it is precisely by placing these two theorists not in a political but rather in a literary context, by analysing their approach to literary texts, that I can point to the differences which they display when it comes to their respective conceptions of the world. The life-world in which both thinkers are immersed, consciously or unconsciously, is structured by modernity. What I see inscribed in their critical analysis of a literary text is, to be sure, among other things, their respective understanding of modernity, their coming to terms, whether acknowledged or not, with the effects of technological modernization on the structure of the social, familial and, above all, cultural world. What I see emerging from their perspectives on modernity is not a view which would unproblematically settle them on common ground within the received category of western Marxism. What I see, and what I will discuss in chapter 2, is a significant differential that unsettles Gramsci's otherwise substantial affinities with Lukács. The Gramsci who emerges from my notes is not a supporter of Lukács' realism as it evolves during the realism/modernism debate, but rather a supporter of Lukács' opponents, of those intellectuals who supported modernism. Among these, as we will see, I count Brecht and Bloch.

That Lukács is not particularly fond of modernism can hardly be news to readers of his books. It is his trademark, so to speak, one that has cost him influence, credibility and theoretical force, in spite of his almost unmatched erudition, his clarity of style, his pre-eminent place in twentieth-century thought. ¹¹ His controversial narrative is well known: attentive to epistemological models that are capable of accounting for all the parts in the whole, he rejects a vision of the world that finds delight in fragments rather than totality, in gaps rather than relations, in multiplicities of viewpoint rather than objectivity and truth. It is according to this standard that literary works are judged. What matters for Lukács is the totality the text evokes: the totality of relations in reality, between the economic base and the superstructure, the totality of relations of historical forces, including the contradictory character of these relations, which a particular historical moment contains. Realism is the name of that mode of evocation, and of that mode of representation. In so far as Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed re-creates the fate of two lovers whose story mirrors the peculiar state of affairs of an uncentralized and fragmented Italy, that author pays his dues, whether consciously or not, to the requirements of realism, as Balzac, Tolstoy and others had done in the nineteenth century at the height of the development of the bourgeois novel. And in so far as twentieth-century writers such as Thomas Mann reproduce in literature, in the cultural and super-structural sphere, the mirror image of the decline of a once powerful class, the bourgeoisie, they also meet the requirement of realism. Authentic literature, the kind that ought to take its place in the canon, is that which reproduces the essentials of reality, which for Lukács, in the twentieth century, means the decline of capitalism and the class that carried it forward, the bourgeoisie, and by inference. and of necessity, the rise of an emergent world historical class, the proletariat. It is this kind of realism which Lukács pursues, as he rejects modernist literature and art. Modernism is, in his view, incapable of artistically reproducing the total view of the tensions and contradictions accompanying the teleologically necessary transformation from one society to another. What should count, then, as exemplary texts, in cultural politics, are not modernist texts, but those that adhere to the standards of realism. Or rather, what do count, for Lukács, as we shall see, are not primarily the readers, but mostly the writers of realist texts. The readers disappear somewhere near the horizon of Lukács' aesthetic expectations.

Now it is precisely when it comes to the reader, to the importance of the reception of a work of art as opposed to its production, that Lukács and Gramsci chiefly differ, and Gramsci and other modernists meet. Though Gramsci too expects the writer to show colours and take a stand in the world historical drama—Manzoni's condescending attitude towards the powerless, the marginalized, the poor, the subaltern classes indubitably bespeaks his partiality for those in power-the issue is not ultimately for him whether or not to put Manzoni on the cultural heritage list. Attentive, in many pages of his Prison Notebooks, to how much was read and by whom, running, so to speak, a ‘private market research institute’ from his prison cell that statistically discerns the modes of consumption of a stratified reading public, Gramsci observed that Manzoni had not been read by the disadvantaged social classes anyhow. What people read instead were serial novels, trivial literature, popular novels, detective novels, and a lot of kitsch, forms of cultural consumption which no doubt play a role, so Gramsci reasoned, in the psychosymbolic economy of the reader, in the production of social signification and in the reproduction of ‘spontaneous’ consent to the status quo. So understanding why people read what they read was ultimately of more importance to Gramsci than what Manzoni had to say and how he said it. It is here that Lukács and Gramsci differ most sharply. In an era that increasingly facilitates the reproducibility of literary and cultural texts, and thus the mobilization of systems of signification in the individual act of reading, Lukács' concern with a realistic, denotative depiction of reality, with its positing of a consuming rather than a meaning-producing reader, seems outdated, not ahead of but behind the times. So when Gramsci turns, in contradistinction to Lukács, not to the realism of the past but to the modernism of the present, to the reproducibility of cultural texts, then he intuits, contrary to Lukács, some of the powers emerging from the interstices of modern technologies. And when he reflects on the double-edged nature of these powers, when he intuits potentials and dangers alike in the gradual technologization and industrialization of culture, when he senses possibilities of manipulation and domination of the cultural sphere, the production and control of needs and desires designed for consumption of specific cultural and ideological goods, then Gramsci reveals an awareness of the complexity of modern reality which by far transcends Lukács' notion of realism.

So in my reading of Gramsci's treatment of realism in the context of Marxist aesthetics, I stress those theoretical assumptions which he does not share with Lukács. What I suggest is that his texts evolve against a background or a structure of concerns which he has in common not with Lukács, but with other major critical theorists of the twentieth century. Among these I count Brecht and Bloch, as well as Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, but also the linguist and philosopher Vološinov, and the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty. At issue then, in chapters 3, 4 and 5, are the ways in which Gramsci's work displays homologies with many pivotal twentieth-century ways of theorizing. When Gramsci relates the problems of realism and modernism to transformations in the structure of the modern life-world, when he examines phenomena related to the production and effect of the industrialization of culture, when he studies the production of meaning and signification in a linguistic and phenomenological framework that in some ways anticipates a combination of structural linguistics and a kind of phenomenological critical theory, when he stakes out a critical practice which is suggestive in terms of a contemporary critical theory, in terms of what I would like to call a ‘differential pragmatics’, then he exceeds many concerns of received Marxism. He also goes beyond the way in which Lukács aesthetically and culturally confronted the immediate advent of fascism.

While Gramsci's contemporaries did not know what theoretical problems he addressed in his Prison Notebooks, he likewise did not know what theoretical problems they were addressing. Many of Gramsci's concepts replay the realist/modernist drama, enacted by Lukács on the one hand and by supporters of modernism on the other. Yet it is not only because Gramsci addresses—against Lukács-‘problems of modernism in the context of modernity’ that I engage in a discussion of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School in chapters 3 and 4. It is also because of Gramsci's mode of approaching these ‘problems of modernism and modernity’, his way of posing questions and problematizing issues of technologization, that I have chosen to discuss Gramsci in conjunction with the Frankfurt School. For the way in which Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks of the 1930s, analyses cultural problems of modernism, reflects an anticipatory sensibility to very complex cultural and social transformations. It also reflects his flexibility when it comes to adjusting old concepts, and experimenting with and inventing new ones, in order to begin to grasp new social and political realities. Both aspects of Gramsci's critical theory, his sensitivity to nascent social and cultural realities, and the unrivalled flexibility with which he adjusts, amends, transforms and reinvents conceptual frameworks, experimenting with ways of seeing in order conceptually to arrange new phenomena, need to go on record. So do the parallels not only between Gramsci's critical theory and many of the 1930s modernist theories of the Frankfurt School of the pre-war period, but also and in particular between some of Gramsci's ideas and some of those critical theories which would move to centre stage in the theoretical drama of the twentieth century, though not until the post-war period.

The polemics between Lukács and Brecht, on the one hand, and between Lukács and Bloch, on the other hand, were surely occasioned by fascism's inexorable seizure of political and cultural power. They simultaneously reveal, however, an awareness, to...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• 1: GRAMSCI AND CRITICAL THEORIES: TOWARDS A ‘DIFFERENTIAL PRAGMATICS’
• PART II: FROM REALISM TO MODERNISM
• 2: TO REALISM FAREWELL: GRAMSCI, LUKáCS AND MARXIST AESTHETIC
• 3: THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF CULTURE: GRAMSCI WITH BENJAMIN, BRECHT AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
• 4: GRAMSCI'S THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: BETWEEN ALIENATION, REIFICATION AND BLOCH's ‘PRINCIPLE OF HOPE’
• 5: PHENOMENOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, HEGEMONY
• PART III: BEYOND THE MODERN, BEYOND THE POSTMODERN
• 6: GRAMSCI'S INTELLECTUAL AND THE AGE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
• 7: IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: GRAMSCI, FEMINISM, FOUCAULT
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY