Thinking Conjuncturally: The Gramscian Turn in Cultural Studies

 

Antonio Gramsci

Italian Thinker and Militant Political Activist

Imprisoned by Mussolini

Prison Notebooks

Hegemony, Hegemonic Politics, Ideology, the state

Gramsci and Marxism

Made available in English by the 1960s

Anti –reductionist thinker

Economic determinism/ economism : economic foundations of society as the only determining structure

Focus on historical specificity

Hegemony

“Succeeds in creating a system of alliance which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state (which) means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the board masses”(Notes on the Southern Question 1926).

A hegemonic Social structure consisting of more than one socio-economic category which is formed through a series of alliances in which one group take a position of leadership

Historic bloc and the ruling class

Leadership

Leadership vs domination

State and Civil Society

State in classical Marxism: Coercive

For Gramsci, state is not merely an administrative or coercive apparatus, it is also educative and formative.

Every state “is ethical in as much as one its most important Functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level type) Which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class

Ethical, cultural, moral

The state exercises a moral and educative relationship

Wins the consent of the people

War of manoeuvre and war of position

Gramsci and ideology

Ideology in classical Marxism: the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas; False consciousness

The unified ideological subject

Ideology: a conception of the world any Philosophy, Which becomes a cultural movement, a ‘religion; a ‘faith ‘that has produced a form of practical activity or will in which a philosophy is contained as an implicit theoretical ‘premise’’

Philosophy and organic ideologies;

Organic ideologies “organize human masses and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.”

Ideology: Philosophy as well as common sense

Historical effectivity of philosophy

Common sense important?  Taken for granted, traditional wisdom

It is where worldviews take shape

“Every philosophical current leaves behind a sediment of common sense “; this is the document of   its historical effectiveness. Common Sense is not rigid and immobile but it is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, that is as a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at given place and time”

Transforming common sense into a political theory requires cultural and ideological struggle.

The struggle for hegemony: a Struggle of political hegemonies and of opposing directions, first in the ethical filed and then in that of politics proper

National –popular collective will

The absence of popular national cultural in lately of his time

Gramsci and the Subject of ideology

Ideology and plurality of subject positions

“Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history   ……and intuitions of a future philosophy.

Fragmentary and contradictory conception of consciousness as against “False consciousness”

There is no single dominant ideology

Gramsci and ideological Struggle

How does Gramsci look at ideological change?

Not through a substitution of one ideology by the other e

Through articulation and disarticulation

Policing the Crisis conjectural analysis  

PTC was a response to events concerning the robbery and injury of a man in Birmingham by three boys of mixed ethnic backgrounds. They were given long, exemplary sentences (twenty years, in one case). However, these events were not used to illustrate a pre-existing theoretical argument.