Author Archives: Syndicated User

Notas a Esferas II (2004) de Peter Sloterdijk

Posted on by

Capítulos 1 y 2 de Esferas II (2004) Peter Sloterdijk [continuación]

“Las esferas son, por decirlo así, consifugraciones capaces de aprender, sistemas de inmunidad en ejercicio y recetáculos con parecedes recientes” (188). Esa es una de las definiciones que Peter Sloterdijk da a las esferas en el contexto de la macroesferología a desarrollarse en el segundo tomo de Esferas. Con esta definición, Sloterdijk direcciona su proyecto esferológico hacia el exterior. Si el primer tomo se ocupo de la condición del individuo, el segundo se ocupará de la relación del individuo con su exterior inmediato y absoluto: la macroesferología será la reflexión de las precondiciones de la política como una expansión de lo micro hacia lo macro. El motor de esta expansión se da por “la vacuna de la muerte” (189). Esto es que a esa terrible, pero también admirable, fuerza que los seres humanos tienen para superar la muerte del otro indispensable y llenar su hueco, es la única fuerza que permite afirmar la existencia del individuo. 

Al mundo de los “unos”, de los individuos, sólo se puede ingresar una vez que uno “queda marcado por la desaparición del otro insustituible” (190). Sólo en la medida que otro(s) muere(n) es que el sujeto individual existe. Para Sloterdijk, entonces, a diferencia de Lacan, “el yo no surge por un reflejo especular ilusorio [sino que] adopta, primero, una figura autorreferente por la anticipación de orfandad y viudedad; se afirma a sí mismo en tanto abandonado y abandonante” (193). El individuo es un ser que se balancea entre traicionar a su ser amado muerto con el olvido, o traicionar al mundo y serle fiel en el loco amor hacia el prójimo insustituible. La elección fundamental de la existencia, por tanto, está entre estos dos polos. Mientras la muerte loca del amor aísla a la pareja en un cobijo inmanente, siempre habrá un tercero que vuelva a confrontarse a la decisión: para parar la hemorragia, entonces, hay que trabajar el duelo, o como diría Sloterdijk, darle al duelo un “esfuerzo psíquico por llegar a un compromiso entre muertos y el deseo de mantenerlos en otra forma de proximidad, pero ‘allí’” (201). El duelo, como el deseo, no se pueden detener, sólo se pueden relocalizar. El ser humano vive en constante fuga, en movimiento hacia el éxodo, o hacia la distancia segura de sus muertos más amados y sus prójimos vivos más necesarios. 

Si la muerte es el motor de la vida y de las uniones, ¿por qué los muros circulares de las civilizaciones antiguas pueden evocar un “imperativo de forma existencial” (230)? Sloterdijk busca enlazar el proyecto microesferológico con el macro. Si en la “procreación” del individuo, el útero presenta el primer “estar-ahí” con la entidad placentaria, el mundo social, por extensión es la búsqueda desaforada de ese muro perdido, esa pared de carne que sostuvo al cuerpo antes de que el cuerpo se figurara a sí mismo fuera del vientre. La muerte sólo puede ser entendida a distancia y el trabajo del duelo como la lucha constante de estar dispuesto a mover el lugar del sujeto en relación de sus muertos y de sus vivos, ¿por qué empeñarse, entonces, en traer a todas partes al primer muerto radical y sacrificado (placenta)? Sloterdijk retomara el principio del espacio no como la emergencia de los objetos sobre la vida humana, sino como la transferencia de los cuerpos en su empeño por buscar la placenta perdida. De todos los elementos, el que mejor se asemeja al corazón de la madre es el fuego, pues éste aviva el reposicionamiento de los cuerpos en círculos alrededor de éste. Como el fuego abre la posibilidad de socialización y de solidaridad, también el fuego abre los delirios y los complejos de quienes nunca lo han visto porque los cuerpos en círculos de quienes los anteceden nunca les han permitido verlo. Años después de Sloterdijk y su esferología, Mariana Enríquez narrara estos complejos de Prometeo. Sólo en los círculos los seres persisten, el problema, claro está, es que aquello fuera de estos círculos, en realidad, nunca ha sido extraño a la parte más interna de los círculos. El fuego que cura la soledad, también es el fuego que señaló la expulsión primigenia de los expulsados que a las afueras del círculo buscan huir de su destino: ser muros de carne para cimentar un nuevo anillo del expansivo apetito del fuego y sus adoradores.

Notas a Esferas II (2004) de Peter Sloterdijk

Posted on by

Prefacio. Esferas II (2004) Peter Sloterdijk [continuación]

La larga introducción del tomo dos de Esferas de Peter Sloterdijk deja claro cuál es el rol de las macroesferas relacionadas con las microesferas. De la segunda a la primera se tiene que los seres humanos son, como el Atlas, “seres-no-punto-medio”. Esto quiere decir que el ser, al menos en su concepción clásica —según Sloterdijk—, se sabe siempre “exhalado e influido por el aliento de un centro supremo sin poder confundirse con él mismo” (117). De ahí que, como los filósofos que contemplaban la sphaira, descritos en las primeras páginas de la introducción, los seres humanos, episujetos, puedan concebirse no sólo “como una recepción pasiva de estímulos provenientes del centro, sino que ha de dejarse introducir en el proyecto central activamente como una especia de co-espontaneidad inteligente” (126). Desde esta perspectiva, como espontáneas fueron las microesferas y como éstas sólo se empeñaban en el mantenimiento de su ambiente subjetivo, también las macroesferas serán formaciones ambientales espontáneas. Si en lo micro es sujeto buscaba su cobijo, en lo macro sólo vendrá la extensión del primero. 

En ese punto ambivalente que ocupa el ser humano, las tensiones son regla. ¿Cómo hacer que lo micro se vuelva macro sin convertirse en un Atlas poderoso, pero sufriente, condenado a nunca poder levantar la mirada pero capaz de llevar en los hombros el peso del mundo? “Lo que era esfuerzo recalcitrante se convierte en impulso servicial” (133), y con esto, se tiene que aquello cargado por el Atlas, en realidad nunca descansó en sus hombros, sino que por la fuerza centrípeta de la macroesfera-mundo y su omnipotente poder central toda exterioridad se difumina (141). Bajo este esquema, “el ser, como la casa, no pierde nada” porque cada individuo que lleve el peso del mundo, en realidad puede incluirse en el perímetro de la esfera (142). Sólo desde este lugar se vuelven “discernibles satisfacción y coerción” (142). Por otra parte, Sloterdijk olvida que en esa misma distancia lo que satisface y casa coerción también sostiene y así también puede atar. El ser se intoxica de su soporte (sostén) y su horizonte se vuelve dependencia, adicción.

Sloterdijk entiende que las macroesferas consisten en una “relación vibrante en la que los cuerpos se aglutinan y se ven superados por esa relación” (173). La esfera sería una constelación de afectos, un fuego que atrae palomillas, existencia inmanente en la relación y muerte en caso de desbalancear la delicada distancia entre el aleteo y las llamas. Al final, como las palomillas, los seres humanos no saben muy bien qué hacer con esa fuerza que los atrae alrededor de un centro esférico. No podemos hablar de eso que nos mueve, ni tampoco producirlo. A estos procesos los precede una capacidad imaginativa, una necesidad por la imagen como índice de nuestras carencias y ausencias (177). Por eso es que, según Sloterdijk, nuestra historia sólo puede ser comprendida como “historia exitosa de excitabilidad nerviosa creciente y de auto-estímulos lujuriantes mediados de símbolos”, y así, “las líneas de éxitos de esas historias resaltan ante un trasfondo de fatalidades selectivas implacables, en las que la regla es el exterminio y el fracaso” (180). La macroesfera, entonces, tiene sobre todo una labor en oposición a la muerte, pero ¿habrá que confiar que estas esferas en expansión deban siempre intentar vencer a nuestra regla general (exterminio y fracaso)? 

The Rise of the Meritocracy

Posted on by

Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy is a strange little book, more akin to a dystopian novel than to a work of sociology (though of course all dystopian novels encode some kind of critique of contemporary society). Published in 1958 but set in 2034, it purports to be a work of historical sociology tracing not just the rise of meritocracy, a term that Young coins here, over the long period from 1870 to 2033, but also its crisis. There may be much that Young’s futurology gets wrong, but surely one thing he gets very right is the prediction that some day meritocrats would face a populist backlash that could even end in violence. (In a note to the book’s final sentence we learn that its narrator has died amid the disturbances, and that this is therefore a posthumous publication.) Have we not seen something of that in the events at the US Capitol a couple of days ago? If anything, Young’s dystopian future has come to fruition a decade or so earlier than he anticipated, in 2021 rather than in 2034.

Yet the difference between Young’s critique of meritocracy and the rejection of expertise that characterises not only Trumpism but also (say) Brexit and COVID denialism is that whereas the current populist insurgency is firmly aligned with right-wing politics, often viciously chauvinist and nationalist, by contrast Young imagines meritocracy to be brought down by a fundamentally left-wing (even feminist) protest against its anti-egalitarian injustices. (We are told that the narrator dies at a public meeting at Peterloo, in clear resonance with the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which the army repressed a crowd gathered to demand that parliamentary representation be democratized.) It is a sign of the distance between our times and Young’s that it is hard to imagine today the struggle against meritocracy to be a progressive cause, so much has the erstwhile left tied itself to its banners.

The particulars of Young’s futurology also (naturally enough) reflect his own British post-war context more than they resonate with today’s political or social realities. For instance, he envisages the continued relevance of state planning, and can hardly imagine the ways in which the market has effectively supplanted the state in so many areas of life. So although he recognizes that meritocracy means that the school and university become ever more the key institutions of social reproduction (think of that uber-meritocrat Tony Blair’s famous slogan, “Education, education, education”), and even predicts both the exhaustion of the comprehensive system and the increasing prevalence of testing at every younger ages, he somewhat bizarrely foresees the withering away of the private sector where what we have instead seen has been the wholesale marketization of public education as schooling has been firmly painted as a private rather than a public good.

At the same time, though Young no doubt correctly envisages the declining relevance of the House of Commons, as meritocracy eats away at democracy, he (perhaps fancifully) portrays the House of Lords taking its place at the center of the parliamentary system, missing the rise of the executive and the triumph of various forms of presidentialism even in notionally parliamentary democracies such as the UK (and again, Blair and Blairism are no doubt paradigmatic here).

Yet for all its failings, and perhaps because of as much as despite its somewhat quaint air, it is worth returning to Young, not least to shock us out of the meritocratic “common sense” that grips us. Merit, which Young defines here as a combination of intelligence and effort, is firmly entrenched as a supreme virtue not only on the left but also, in the form of a valorization of entrepreneurialism, on the right. It is the shibboleth of our times, so much so that few believe it can be questioned: they assume that arguments against meritocracy can only be framed in terms of the fact that “equality of opportunity” has yet to be achieved by many (minorities, women, the poor, or whoever), and so what is needed is for merit to be more, rather than less, perfectly recognized and rewarded. But Young’s dystopia is in fact a fully realized meritocracy: he takes aim at the ideal itself, rather than the obstacles that lie in its path; he is against equality of opportunity, which he opposes in the name of the rather more radical notion of equality, plain and simple.

It is in the nature of any book that goes so against the grain of prevalent common sense that it is misread and misunderstood. In later years, Young felt the need to add a supplementary introduction, in his own voice rather than that of his narrator, to point out that he was arguing against rather than in favour of meritocracy, a point that the satirical tone also perhaps obscures much as some readers apparently felt that Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (which argued that the eighteenth-century Irish could alleviate their economic woes by selling their children as food for the rich) was somehow a serious proposition. Yet the term that he coined is still almost universally presented as utopian model rather than, as here, dystopian warning.

It is also in the nature of the book’s satirical genre that Young’s alternative to meritocracy is seldom articulated. But it is here, and it comes in the form of a Manifesto that is imagined to have been published in the early 2000s, and which deserves to be quoted at length:

The classless society would be one which both possessed and acted upon plural values. Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry-driver with unusual skill at growing roses? The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure, but to develop his own special capacities for living a rich life. (159)

This is the firmly egalitarian left-wing critique of meritocracy, and it should surely be revived.

Afropessimism

Posted on by

wilderson_afropessimismFrank Wilderson’s much-heralded new book, Afropessimism, is uneven, inconsistent, frequently repetitive and frustrating, even off-putting. At the end of it all, I’m not sure I liked it much. But it is also often compelling and definitely an important statement, a manifesto of sorts, that should be read by anyone involved in critical theory or political movements today. Indeed, its faults and rough edges are part of the point. This is not a book that seeks to win friends. Quite the opposite: Wilderson notes without apology that it is “common for most people to feel like they’d been mugged by Afropessimism” (328). This is a book that aims to take you by surprise and leave you reeling on the ground, even (especially) if you thought yourself an ally of progressive anti-racist politics.

What is Afropessimism? It can perhaps most easily be contrasted (as it is throughout this book) with identity politics such as feminism. If feminism has been defined as “the radical notion that women are human beings,” Afropessimism is the perhaps still more radical notion that Blacks are not human. More precisely, Blacks are “the foil of Humanity” (13). It is their exclusion from the Human, effected through constant, gratuitous violence, that enables the constitution of Humanity as such that is thus parasitical on a Blackness that it both requires and refuses: “just as economic production is parasitic on the labor power of the working class, the production of Human capacity is parasitic on the flesh of the Slave, the Black” (192). Hence, where the aim of feminism (or, say, LGBTQ politics) is to reclaim a humanity denied to women (or lesbians, gays, etc.), Afropessimism by contrast refuses a humanity that it sees as inherently “unethical” (333) because of its dependency on anti-Black violence. Hence, indeed, Afropessimism is cast not simply in contrast to identity politics but also against them, as well as against any other notionally progressive movement (Marxism, postcolonialism, or whatever) for which the Human is taken for granted or even upheld as the terrain or object of its struggle. The “pessimism” of Afropessimism, then, surely arises in part because (it claims) Blacks will be perpetually disappointed if not betrayed by their would-be allies on the Left. And the mugging that it delivers hits hardest at those (Black or non-Black) invested in a solidarity politics that it claims is at best impossible, at worst damaging to any prospect of Black liberation.

What is Black liberation? Wilderson spends much more time describing what it is not than what it is. As he puts it, “Afropessimism has no prescriptive gesture.” In so far as it envisages a future, it is quite literally apocalyptic: “The end of our suffering signals the end of the Human, the end of [the] world” (331). This is, Wilderson admits, “a program of complete disorder” (250). But Blacks can welcome the end of the world because whereas (say) women or “non-Black people of color [. . .] have something to salvage,” Blacks by contrast “have nothing to lose” (176). Moreover, Wilderson adds that “The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, Gee whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all” (250). As such, liberation seems to involve an affirmation of the Real, not far distant (despite the reference here to the “faux-politics of Deleuze” [183]) from the untamed expression of desiring-production championed by schizoanalysis.

So Afropessimism is not entirely novel, however much it breaks (at time abruptly) from many of the assumed verities of identity politics or the mainstream left, even in its “intersectionalist” guise. It has much in common with at least one strain of Subaltern Studies (à la Spivak, for instance), as well as with the approach that some of us have been advancing in terms of “posthegemony” and “infrapolitics” and the like. Wilderson certainly has no truck with the Gramscian conceptions of hegemony and civil society, but he returns to them repeatedly as they encapsulate all that he finds wrong with so much of what passes for progressive thinking and leftist political strategy today: “coalitions and social movements [. . .] bound up in the solicitation of hegemony [. . .] ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners [. . .] but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks” (222-3). For Wilderson, political analysis and strategy alike must move beyond the confines of a hegemony theory that only makes things worse, blind as it is to the constituent violence that grounds hegemony itself, seared into Black flesh before the play of either consent or coercion can kick in. Where Afropessimism most strikingly breaks from Subaltern Studies or posthegemony, however, is precisely in that it is Black flesh that is at issue. Here, the excluded subaltern position is explicitly and specifically (and uniquely) coded as Black. Women, gays, the indigenous, the working class (and so on) are never, for Wilderson, subaltern in this sense, as they always have something at stake in the struggle for hegemony. For Blacks, by contrast, what is as stake is hegemony itself, which is only thinkable on the basis of their a priori exclusion from civil society tout court.

It is this assertion that is no doubt one of the most controversial among the many incendiary positions that Wilderson stakes out. Indeed, he chronicles at length the fall-out of one occasion in which he made this argument about Black singularity, at a conference in Berlin where all hell broke loose after he gave a paper on Afropessimism. We can agree that there is something at best distasteful about what he calls an “oppression Olympics” in which injustices would be compared and measured. To use Wilderson’s terms, there is no analogy between (say) the genocide that was the transatlantic slave trade and the genocide that was the European Holocaust. The two histories are incomparable. Indeed, Wilderson would argue that anti-black violence is not even historical; it is what grounds historical narrative without fully being registered by it. Yet, on the one hand, it is undeniable that the slave trade is also historical; its trace can be found even in the historical record that can never do it justice. And, on the other hand, there is something about the Holocaust (and not just the Holocaust) that also both subtends and escapes narrative rationality. In other words, we may accept Wilderson’s analytic distinction between a “contingent” violence that is subject to the logic of hegemony, and an “absolute” or “gratuitous” violence inflicted upon those constitutively excluded from that logic, without necessarily agreeing that only Blacks suffer gratuitous violence, or that the violence inflicted on other social groups is always and inevitably contingent.

Take for instance the post-conquest treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or more generally colonial violence. Addressing the “Native American genocide,” Wilderson acknowledges that “there are pre-logical or libidinal elements to the murder of eighteen million people–to be sure. But,” he continues, “land acquisition and usurpation give the genocide a kind of coherence and reasonableness” (219; emphasis added). Here that qualification that this is only “a kind of” reasonableness is doing a lot of work, and elsewhere even such qualification is absent as when (only a few pages later) Wilderson posits that “I know that I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason, some contingent transgression” (225; emphasis in the original). This is all too close to saying that such violence is indeed reasonable (or at least, that it has its reasons), when surely in fact there is always something in colonial violence–and likewise in the violence of anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, and so on–that exceeds or undermines any possible reason. Conversely, it is surely also true that reasons have been adduced to justify slavery, however rephrehensible those reasons may be, mere figleaves for motivations grounded in what Wilderson denotes as “libidinal economy,” but without them there would never have been debates between slavers and abolitionists; without them, the tireless campaigning of someone like Fredrick Douglass would have been literally senseless.

In Wilderson’s book, the argument that Blacks are not (simply) the foil of Humanity is put most eloquently by the author’s mother, and her critique goes unanswered when she tells her son that “she wasn’t anybody’s slave, and that even when our ancestors were slaves they were Human beings” (329). Wilderson’s response is an uneasy joke (with reference to his white wife, “’Being Human isn’t anything to aspire to,’ I said. ‘Just ask Alice’” [329]). A better rejoinder might have been the observation that they weren’t simply Human beings, and that Afropessimism is interested in operationalizing the gap between Human and Black. But one would have to add that, as the old feminist slogan indicates, such a gap between Human and non-Human traverses many social groups, and perhaps ultimately all of us in one way or another. And to say this is not to assert any false equivalence, any reactionary equalization along the lines of “All Lives Matter.” On the contrary: the gap between any violence to which I may potentially be subject and the violence of slavery (whether historical or ongoing) is incommensurable. But as is attested by Wilderson’s own frequent recourse in this book to autobiographical stories (of his childhood in Minnesota, of a breakdown in Berkeley, or of his experiences in South Africa, for instance), the trace of that incommensurability is to be found in narrative, in history, even if it also always subverts and escapes them.

In short, Wilderson concedes all too much to hegemony, as though it fully (and implicitly without remainder) explained all other forms of oppression and violence that are not anti-Black violence. And at the same time, he could do more to think through the relationship, however contingent, between the anti- or non- (post?) hegemonic position that he ascribes to Blackness and the discursive procedures, his own included, by which that position is both acknowledged and inevitably disavowed. This may win no more friends, but it might suggest a theory of friendship (fleeting or otherwise) that could suggest paths to common programs without the mystifications of solidarity.

Pre-Prison Writings III

Posted on by

gramsci_pre-prison-writingsOf this final selection from Antonio Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, there is no doubt that the most interest text is the final one, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” a manuscript left incomplete as he was still working on it when he was arrested, tried, and thrown into a fascist jail in 1926. It is here, at last, that Gramsci first pays sustained attention to some of the themes and concepts that will be at the center of his reflections in the celebrated Prison Notebooks, not least the role of intellectuals and the concept of hegemony.

The term “hegemony” appears previously in this collection, but sparsely indeed. It crops up first in a passing mention to “the hegemonic positions of the reformists within the great trade-union organization” in an article on “Our Union Policy” of 1923 (250). It reappears in a piece the following year on “The Mezzogiorno and Fascism” (with a reference to “the Piedmontese and Northern governing hegemony” [261]), and then somewhat more insistently in Gramsci’s “Letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party” of late 1926, where we are told that what is at stake in internal debates in Moscow is “the doctrine of the hegemony of the proletariat” (312). This last formulation, in an intervention into squabbles in the wake of the death of Lenin, between Stalin’s faction on the one hand and Trostky’s group on the other (Gramsci sides with Stalin), may well be an indication of the concept’s provenance in Lenin’s use of the term “gegemoniya.” In any case, what is clear is that both here and elsewhere (the rather more two-volume Lawrence and Wishart collection, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 and Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926 has other instances, including one dating back to 1918, though one would have to check the Italian original; the three-volume Scritti politici has no mention of “egemonia” or “egemonico” before 1920) Gramsci is far from making the concept his own. It is only with “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” that he even attempts a definition and begins to develop the concept further.

Again, this is not to say that something like the seeds of Gramsci’s own “doctrine” of hegemony are not evident already, even before it has received that name. I have noted his interest in the article “Two Revolutions” in an articulation between populist revolt and working-class self-determination. And a slightly different take on the problem of the relationship between politics and economics can be glimpsed in his observation, in “A Study of the Italian Situation” of 1926, that:

Politics is always one step behind–or many steps behind–economics. The State observation is far more resistant than it is often possible to believe; and at times of crisis, it is far more capable of organizing forces loyal to the regime than the depth of the crisis might lead one to suppose. This is especially true of the most important capitalist States. (297)

Indeed, here we surely get an indication of what will motivate the development of hegemony theory. For this is an analysis premised on defeat. We are no longer in the heady days of the Turin factory occupations of the beginning of the decade. In fact, in the intervening years Fascism has come to power, apparently aided and abetted by the “reformists” and Social Democrats who are the main targets of Gramsci’s critique in these articles. The situation is Italy is precarious at best. Not to mention the fact that (as his letter to the Russians indicates, but also judging from his appraisal of developments in England and elsewhere) events internationally no longer seem to be going the way of the Communist Revolution. Gramsci still fervently believes that the objective conditions are ripe for change, but he has to address the series of setbacks that the working-class movement has suffered year on year. And as others, too, will later discover, the notion of “hegemony” seems to offer solace and hope in such troubled times.

Hence, in “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” Gramsci provides his first attempt at defining and elaborating on the concept of hegemony:

The Turin Communists had raised, in concrete terms, the question of the “hegemony of the proletariat”: in other words, the question of the social basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the workers’ State. For the proletariat to become the ruling, the dominant class, it must succeed in creating a system of class alliances which allow it to mobilize the majority of the population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, within the real class relations that exist here, this means succeeding in obtaining the consent of the broad peasant masses” (316).

Seeking this consent, Gramsci goes on to explain, will mean confronting the “Southern question” (the relationship between Italy’s industrial north and its still broadly agrarian south) as well as the Vatican (the role of the church).

For the Italian proletariat, then, winning over the majority of the peasant masses means taking on board these two questions, from a social point of view; understanding the class needs they represent; incorporating these needs into its revolutionary transitional programme; and incorporating them among the objectives for which it is struggling. (316)

Here, then, hegemony is envisaged as a project that entails overcoming long-standing social divisions: between North and South, city and countryside, worker and peasant. The project’s success would also mean acknowledging a diversity of positions and perspectives, albeit then translating them into the idiom of class. But perhaps above all it is a matter of adopting “a social point of view” as a means of establishing the “social basis” for the new, socialist state and the dictatorship of the proletariat that will usher it in. That dictatorship will involve the elimination of the peasantry (just as much as it involves the elimination of the bourgeoisie), but for now a “transitional programme” is envisaged, for which the perspective, needs, and objectives of the peasantry are to be acknowledged.

As Gramsci continues to explore and develop this conception of hegemony, he increasingly associates it with the role and social function of the “intellectual,” a social group to which he had paid little attention hitherto. At present, in this truncated, unfinished text, this is a category that is rather amorphous; it includes civil servants and school teachers, as well as writers and priests. What they have in common is their mediating function: “the Southern peasant,” for instance, “is linked to the great landowner through the mediation of the intellectual” (330). And while Gramsci continues to identify “the urban proletariat as the modern protagonist of Italian history and hence also of the Southern question” (334), he is beginning to come to conclusion that the working class is perhaps not yet ready for revolution. For “the proletariat, as a class, is short of organizing elements; it does not have its own layer of intellectuals and it will only be able to form such a stratum, very slowly and laboriously, after the conquest of State power” (336). It is then just as Gramsci’s pen runs out (the text trails off a paragraph later) that he stumbles across a key paradox, even Catch 22: the working class will only be able to produce its own intellectuals (and so, hegemony) after the capture of state power; and yet the state will not be captured, as the previous five years seem to have shown, without the contribution of intellectuals to the labor of hegemony.

We will see whether the concept of hegemony survives this contradiction in the subsequent phase of Gramsci’s writing, the Prison Notebooks, or whether in some sense the unfinished “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” is both high-water mark and dead-end for hegemony thinking.

“Patriarchy: From the Margins to the Center”

Posted on by

Cross-posted to Virtual Koerner’s.

It has been observed that the higher up a corporate hierarchy you look, the more likely it is you will find a psychopath. Indeed, in an article in Forbes (of all places) we read that “Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.” The same article also reports that “the top four career choices for psychopaths are CEO, attorney, media personality and salesperson.” In other words, there is a congruence between psychopathic personality traits and some of the key institutions of contemporary society: business, the Law, the media, and commerce. So much for psychopathy being an “antisocial” disorder. It is part of the very fabric of the world we live in.

segato_guerraIn her chapter, “Patriarchy: From the Margins to the Center” (from La guerra contra las mujeres [2017]), Rita Segato goes further. We are all trained to be psychopaths now, she tells us, as part of a “pedagogy of cruelty” that is the “nursery for psychopathic personalities that are valorized by the spirit of the age and functional for this apocalyptic phase of capitalism” (102). Segato presents a brief reading of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange to make her point, though what she sees as “most extraordinary” about the film is that the shock with which it was received when it came out (in 1971) now seems to have almost totally dissipated. What was once taken as itself an almost psychopathic assault on the viewer’s senses is now just another movie; this shift in our sensibility is “a clear indication [. . .] of the naturalization of the psychopathic personality and of violence” (102). The narcissistic “ultra-violence” of the gang of dandies that the film portrays is now fully incorporated within the social order that it once seemed to threaten.

For Segato, moreover, this psychopathic violence to which we are increasingly inured is ultimately gender violence: it both establishes and is grounded upon what she elsewhere terms a “mandate of masculinity” by which masculine identity and at the same time both the public sphere and the state is inscribed on and at the expense of women’s bodies. Moreover, all this is folded into a “decolonial” perspective that does not claim that indigenous social structure were free of sexism or patriarchy, but which argues that Western modernity transformed what were once gender relations characterized by reciprocity into a binary system from which empathy is absent and woman are treated as things on which male narcissism inscribes itself.

In short, Segato offers a grand theory of human society and epochal history, at the root of which is (almost) always and everywhere violence against women. As she puts it: “Buried down below, at the foundation, at the foot of the pyramid, sustaining the entire edifice, a woman’s body” (97). As even the reference to a pyramid suggests, confirmed by the frequent invocation of diverse folktales and origin narratives from wildly different contexts, all this adds up to a kind of mythic anthropology that (for all the glancing citations of contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler) has a nineteenth-century feel to it. Indeed, there is a tension between the universalizing gestures on the one hand (an appeal to transhistorical ways of knowing and being), and the attempt to periodize and draw out specificities and differences on the other. Are we all psychopaths now, or is there something psychopathic inherent to modernity? At times, Segato seems to want to have it both ways. Equally, I’m not particularly convinced by her calls to feminine (and indigenous) empathy and reciprocity as modes of resistance to the increasingly violent structure of everyday life, not least because (despite her protests otherwise) all this does indeed sound very much like a form of essentialism.

For me, the parts of Segato’s analysis are very much more interesting and provocative than the whole. I don’t think that we need buy into the (quasi) cosmic unity of her over-arching vision to appreciate the very important ways in which she contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of gender violence, for instance, not least in her specific studies of cases such as the femicides in Northern Mexico. Even if we see society less as a pyramid (with its base and superstructure) and more as a network or web, Segato’s analyses help us see in new ways how everything is connected, both to ensure the reproduction of forms of domination across many axes, and to offer hope that local resistances can have broad and unexpected repercussions throughout the system. The center has permeated the margins: there are few if any spaces of refuge, and certainly no pre-lapsarian community to which one might fantasize a return. But at the same time, the margins continue to haunt the center: multiplicity is everywhere.

“Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego”

Posted on by

Cross-posted to Virtual Koerner’s.

enriquez_last-cosas-que-perdimosFemininity is all too often defined by the image (and so by the male gaze). Women are reduced to appearance, and judged in terms of the extent to which they measure up to some mythical ideal. Mariana Enríquez’s short story, “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (“Things We Lost in the Fire”), presents a surreal and disturbing counter-mythology that explores what happens when that image is subject to attack, not least by women themselves.

It all starts with a woman who is compelled to support herself by begging on the Buenos Aires subway, after a jealous husband inflicts on her horrific burns that destroy her arms and face, leaving her with only one eye and a slit for a mouth, her lips burnt off. As she seeks contributions from subway passengers, she tells her story: that her husband threw alcohol on her face while she was asleep, setting her alight to “ruin” her, so she wouldn’t belong to anybody else. In the hospital, when everyone expected her to die and she couldn’t speak for herself, he said that she had done this to herself, a tragic accident after a fight. Now that she has recovered her voice, the woman on the subway reclaims her narrative and names the perpetrator. She knows, however, that she will never recover her appearance; her image was lost in the fire.

But perhaps it doesn’t all start there. As another character comments later, referring to a history of witch-hunts but also much more, “They’ve always burned women, they’ve been burning us for four centuries!” No doubt this is why the woman on the subway’s story starts to resonate so much with others.

First, it inspires copy-cat crimes: a model, who seems truly to incarnate that idealized image of femininity, is burnt by her footballer boyfriend in much the same way that the woman on the subway had been attacked. And he, too, blames her for what happened. As if it is only in death (the model does not survive her injuries) that women are granted agency, much like the famous if perhaps apocryphal witch-trials by water, in which only the drowned were presumed innocent.

Then, as Enríquez’s story progresses, small groups of Argentine women start to reclaim their agency while still alive, albeit by anticipating the torture inflicted on them by men. They begin to set light to themselves. Some do so alone, perhaps intending suicide. But, in the face of official disapproval, others form shadowy networks of “Burning Women” to aid and abet ritual ceremonies of self-immolation, complete with clandestine hospitals to ensure recovery thereafter. Because the point is to survive, and to put that survival on display. As one woman puts it: “They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die: we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

The notion here is a kind of immunization: if women burn themselves, then they also rid themselves of the idealized image, the fetish that justifies men burning them. Moreover, they show that they cannot be reduced to appearances, albeit by paradoxically revelling in the way in which their new, “monstrous” appearance repels the male gaze. As the woman from the subway puts it, “Men are going to have to get used to us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don’t die. And wouldn’t that be nice? A new kind of beauty.” Laying claim to deformity, they challenge the gendered scopic regime of representation and power.

Yet this sacrificial logic is disturbing, and not only to men. The story is told from the perspective of a young woman, Silvina, whose mother is one of the first to throw herself into the campaign. It ends as she overhears her mother and a friend talking about her as a possible candidate for a burning: “Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire.” Here, the vision is (almost literally) of the Revolution eating its children, of a new image that ends up as horrific and coercive as the old one. The “ideal world of men and monsters” is no more (or perhaps no less) ideal than our own.

There are obvious resonances here with debates over the tactics of militant groups during Argentina’s Dirty War. There is also an explicit comparison to anorexia, which is also as much a self-destructive as a subversive mode of (re)claiming female agency. Perhaps, too, we might think of our contemporary immunological paradigm, and the price we are called upon to pay to confront all manner of diseases (metaphorical and otherwise). Fire both purifies and corrupts. Without nostalgia, and without any easy judgements, Enríquez compels us to think in new ways about what gets lost when we turn the tools that oppress us into weapons for liberation.

Pre-Prison Writings II

Posted on by

gramsci_pre-prison-writingsThe Gramsci of these pre-prison writings would probably surprise readers whose acquaintance with Gramsci’s thought is only casual, however much they may quote one of two of his bon mots (“pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will”; “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”) or even however much they deploy the concepts associated with him, from “hegemony” to the “subaltern” or the notion of “organic intellectuals” and so on. In fact, it may well turn out that the vast majority of those who quote Gramsci are casual acquaintances at best, who might be unpleasantly surprised if they were ever to read a little more. This in itself need not of course damn either Gramsci or even those concepts. As I suggested previously, it is hard to see Gramsci as a particularly systematic thinker (which is not to say that he didn’t see himself as such), and maybe that’s a good thing, too. We could take what we want from him, without having to buy into everything else that might come with it. Indeed, at this point perhaps that’s the only way to read Gramsci productively: selectively, unfaithfully, even treacherously. Rather than trying to reconstruct “what Gramsci thought” by careful attention to history or philology (this is the approach of many of the faithful few careful readers of his work), he merits rather something of a smash and grab raid. Or, as Deleuze famously said of his critiques of the philosophical tradition (Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, etc.), it would be a matter of taking him “from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.”

The biggest surprise in this early Gramsci is, I think, his emphatic economic determinism. It may be that this shouldn’t surprise us… he is a Marxist, after all! But given especially that our Gramsci is so much shaped by cultural studies and particularly by Laclau and Mouffe, who explicitly champion him for going the farthest (if not, for them, far enough) in renouncing all determinisms–this, they tell us in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is the basis of their theorization of hegemony, whose history they chart in terms of a tendency to renounce the priority of the economic–the bluntness here of Gramsci’s economism is surely a bit of a shock.

At the outset of his essay “The Factory Council” (of June, 1920), for instance, Gramsci gives us what is essentially a version of Marxism 101, which is worth quoting at length:

The proletarian revolution is not the arbitrary act of an organization that declares itself to be revolutionary, or of a system of organizations that declare themselves to be revolutionary. The proletarian revolution is an extremely long-term historical process that manifests itself in the emergence and development of certain productive forces (which we may sum up by the term “proletariat”) within a certain historical context (which we may sum up by the terms “regime of private property, capitalist mode of production, factory system, organization of society in a democratic-parliamentary State”). At a certain point in this process, the new productive forces are no longer able to develop or organize themselves in an autonomous fashion within the official framework of the human community of the time. It is in this phase that the revolutionary act occurs. This consists in a violent effort to smash apart this existing framework and to destroy the entire apparatus of economic and political power within which the revolutionary productive forces had been trapped. It consists in a violent effort to shatter the machinery of the bourgeois State and to construct a new kind of State within whose framework the newly liberated productive forces can develop and expand; whose organization provides them with strong defences and the necessary and sufficient arms to eliminate their enemies. (163)

There is not much of the “war of position” or the struggle for “hegemony” on the terrain of “civil society” to be found here! And again, I wonder how many of today’s “Gramscians” would happily sign up to this description of the revolutionary process (if indeed they would sign up to any notion of revolution), which Gramsci simply presents as established fact.

As for politics, Gramsci similarly gives us what he himself describes as a “fundamental (and elementary) canon of historical materialism,” that “Any form of political power can only be historically conceived and justified as the juridical apparatus of a real economic power” (168). “Real” power is always and only economic. It is, to use Marx’s famous formula in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the base or “real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” The economic is primary; the political is very much secondary. Hence (back to Gramsci) “the revolutionary process takes place on the terrain of production, in the factory” (164). The revolution will not come about by political decree: “Communism as a system of new social relations [. . .] cannot be introduced by legislative or administrative means” (177). There is little if any room for any autonomy of the political.

Indeed, any political organization may call itself Communist or revolutionary all it likes, but so long as its activity is not premised on the economic base, specifically what is going on in the factory (as the most advanced expression of material forces), it hinders rather than furthers the goal of real social change. This, then, is the point at which Gramsci breaks from the Italian Socialist Party, as he criticizes all such organizations–even “revolutionary” organizations–that “have grown up on the terrain of bourgeois democracy and political liberty, as affirmation and developments of this political liberty” (164). Here, “the traditional structure of the Socialist Party is no different from that of any other party which has grown up on the terrain of liberal democracy” (174). It is, as such, overly invested in politics, in that its “lifeblood” is “the desire to win a majority in the popular assemblies [. . .] and to win this majority by the method that is proper to democracy–by reeling off generic and muddled policies to the electorate (and swearing to put them in practice at all costs)” (174-5). Politics, in short, is part of the problem; the effort to win over an electorate is a distraction from the real matter at hand. It is retrograde and even barbaric: “The Assembly[,] the form of political association that corresponds to the State based on territorial boundaries [. . .] is a continuation of the arrangements of the barbaric peoples who expressed their sovereignty by beating their pikes on the ground and howling” (175). If anything, any true revolution will be a revolution against politics, certainly against any politics that is not immediately rooted in the economic and material base.

Gramsci’s position thus far seems far from what is usually taken to be the struggle for what will become known as “hegemony” (a term that Gramsci is still not using at this stage), which tends to be identified not only in practice with the construction of electoral coalitions but also in theory with political autonomy and what Louis Althusser will come to describe (in part, following what he saw as Gramsci’s lead) as “overdetermination.”

In fact, the revolutionary process that Gramsci describes here often (if intermittently) has more in common with posthegemony than hegemony. Beneath consciousness and evading representation, it develops “in the darkness of the factory and in the darkness of the minds of the countless multitudes [delle moltitudini sterminate] that capitalism subjects to its laws. The process is not something that can be controlled or documented at this stage” (164). It comprises, moreover, “feelings, desires, habits, the stirrings of initiative and a new way of life [i sentimenti, le velleità, le abitudini, i germi di iniziativa e di costume]” (164). Affect, habit, multitude. Almost all the elements are here. Moreover, “initiative” in the essays of this period tends to replace the notion of “spirit” that, in his earlier writings, indicated the expansive movement of something like constituent power.

In fact, Gramsci refers explicitly to a constituent impulse in an article on “Two Revolutions” that is perhaps the most interesting piece in the collection so far, and which also contains the germ of what will come to be a theory of hegemony. For it is here that the Communist Party is described as something more than an appendage to forms of organization that arise, quasi-organically, within the factory. Here, indeed, the party’s role is to bind together the “two revolutions” of this article’s title. The first of these revolutions is political, or even anti-political in that its energies are directly primarily against political institutions. It “tends to be prevalently anarchic and destructive in character: to take the form of a blind explosion of rage, a tremendous outpouring of furious undirected passions” (169). But it is not solely destructive: it may lead to a “constituent assembly”; “it may go so far as to create soviets, the autonomous political organization of the proletariat and the other oppressed classes” (169). Yet this is not enough. For this merely political revolution is not yet the Communist revolution, whose shape is determined by the relations and conditions of production. It is this second revolution that establishes the factory (not the assembly) as “the basic unit of the new State” and “build[s] the new State in a way that reflects the industrial relations of the factory system” (170). And it is then the Party’s role to articulate these two revolutionary impulses, the political and the economic: to “create the conditions in which the revolution as destruction of the bourgeois State can be identified with the proletarian revolution, the revolution that is to expropriate the expropriators and initiate the development of a new order in the relations of production and distribution” (171). And surely this then is the struggle for what will become known as hegemony, the project to “create the conditions in which the proletarian revolution may be identified with the popular revolt against the bourgeois State” (171). Neither strictly speaking political, nor the direct emanation of economic forces, it is the role of the Party as would-be hegemonic power to bind economics to politics.

I will leave to one side how faithfully this is later transcribed or translated in the early work of Laclau (in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory) into an articulation between the “people-power bloc contradiction” and the more properly economic contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. But suffice it to say that the necessity for this articulation reveals a problem in the basic assumptions of the base-superstructure model that Gramsci otherwise never questions. For the Party, and its hegemonic project, appears as a supplement that does not derive fully from the economic processes inherent to the new forms of organization within the factory system. Gramsci can neither live with determinism nor can he relinquish it. Ultimately, Laclau’s path will be to drop any priority of the economic, to usher in a vision of the world in which everything is politics (and all politics is one modality or other of popular revolt). But surely there are other options.

If we are to recover a posthegemonic Gramsci, perhaps a first step would be to refuse the dichotomy that he asserts between politics and economics. After all, it is only because he sees such a stark distinction between the “two revolutions” he describes that he feels the need to call upon the Party to suture that gap. But it may be even more to the point to observe that the “feelings, desires, habits, the stirrings of initiative and a new way of life” are neither fully political nor fully economic, though they may be both the consequence and condition of politics and economics alike.

The Plague

Posted on by

camus_the-plagueIn Albert Camus’s celebrated novel of a plague outbreak, he tells us that at a certain point, the citizens of the afflicted North African town of Oran turn to reading. Specifically, they show a “remarkable interest” in “prophecies of all descriptions. [. . .] The local printing firms were quick to realize the profit to be made by pandering to this new craze and printed large numbers of the prophecies that had been going round in manuscript.” But there is not enough material to satisfy demand, and so after searching “in the municipal archives for all the mental pabulum of the kind available in old chronicles,” they turn to “journalists to write up forecasts” that are devoured eagerly to find literary clues to their personal fates.

Some predictions were based on far-fetched arithmetical calculations [. . .] Others made comparisons with the great pestilences of former times [. . .] and claimed to deduce conclusions bearing on the present calamity. But our most popular prophets were undoubtedly those who in an apocalyptic jargon had announced sequences of events, any one of which might be construed as applicable to the present state of affairs and was abstruse enough to admit of almost any interpretation. (221-222)

Much the same could perhaps be said of The Plague itself, which surely admits of many possible interpretations and is often enough read as an allegory of the German Occupation of France. Plague does, after all, make for a fine metaphor. Even in Camus’s own text, we see how pestilence is made to signify by those affected by it, not least in the fiery sermon delivered by a Jesuit priest, Father Paneloux, as the fever begins to take hold. “Plague,” the priest tells his congregation, “is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor” (95). Yet as the disease progresses, Paneloux somewhat backs down from his certainty as to what it all means. A second sermon, we are told, “display[s] more uneasiness than power” (229). Perhaps sometimes a plague is simply a plague, and brings with it no great moral lessons or truths.

Indeed, by the end of the novel the narrator’s main worry is how fleeting any such lessons may be, as he observes a population, finally liberated from the epidemic, now prepared to

den[y], in the teeth of the evidence, that we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies [. . .]. In short, they denied that we had ever been that hag-ridden populace a part of which was daily fed into a furnace and went up in oily fumes, while the rest, in shackled impotence, waited their turn. (297-298)

The real problem, in other words, is that the trauma is all too easily forgotten, that it is a text that frays or is soon invisible. Hence the narrator’s impulse to write everything down, to draw on his experience as well as the documents left him by others, “so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (308). Yet it is not clear whether people’s propensity to amnesia, to forgetting what they have been through, is one of these admirable qualities (a sign of resilience?) or a fault that the text has therefore to rectify.

A similar ambivalence shrouds then the main characteristic imputed to the citizens of Oran, and perhaps to humans more generally: the fact that they are creatures of habit. For it is part and parcel of the way in which the town is described from the outset as unremarkable, ordinary, and frankly mediocre in every way (“a thoroughly negative place” [3]), that in it “everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” (4). Such routines both hide and are a symptom of “the banality of the town’s appearance and of life in it. But you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits” (5). People don’t think, perhaps they do not even really fully live, dedicated as they are to “fritter[ing] away at card-tables, in cafés and in small talk what time is left for living” (4). So a plague, whose first consequence is to disrupt those habits, might even be welcomed (in theory at least) as an opportunity for reflection, for awakening and seeing what life could be about when faced with the possibility of its extinction. Indeed, for Camus (but surely not only Camus) the question raised by pestilence is precisely the question of existence, of what it means to be human in the here and now when the promise, or threat, of transcendence wavers in the face of calamity.

Yet ultimately, in a book that struggles to shake off the religious vocabulary that it purports to reject, if there is salvation it is to be found in the repetition that constitutes habit. No wonder, as Camus famously argues elsewhere, we should imagine Sisyphus happy, for what is a man endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill but an image of a creature defined by his habits? Likewise, here, the doctor who attends to the plague victims and the others that help him with the task do so not out of any great ideological conviction or faith, least of all out of any illusion that they are making much of an impact against the implacable foe that is the disease. In the end, after all, the plague disappears because it is imagined to have ended of its own accord, “leaving as unaccountably as it had come. [. . .] It had, so to speak, achieved its purpose” (271). Nor, we are told repeatedly, can we regard those who choose to fight it as heroes: “there’s no question of heroism in all this” the doctor says at one point. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is–common decency” (163). As for “those who enrolled in the ‘sanitary squads,’ as they were called, [they] had, indeed, no great merit in doing as they did, since they knew it was the only thing to do” (132). The plague itself, rather than being any great spectacle or event, is also a habit–if it means anything, it is simply “the same thing over and over and over again” (161)–and yet it can and should be confronted by a sort of counter-routine, a sense of obligation that is almost unwilled and unconscious. Hence if there is any “saintliness” (and the novel rather doubts that there is), it can only be “an aggregate of habits” (118).

We are now, of course, in 2020 learning new habits. And let us hope that one day we will have forgotten many of them. One I personally rather like is the custom of applause, of making a noise of some sort, every evening (here in Vancouver) at 7pm, in tribute to the health workers and other key workers, often underpaid and long overlooked, who are going about their jobs in the midst of the pandemic. It is rightly pointed out that that, indeed, is what they are doing: simply what they have to do. And that the applause is ritual without much meaning. But if we learn anything from Camus’s depiction of the plague, it is that such habits may be part of what is quietly admirable, and should not be so readily despised.

Pre-Prison Writings I

Posted on by

Cross-posted to Infrapolitical Deconstruction.

Antonio Gramsci’s reputation on the Left, the academic Left at least, is surprisingly solid and enduring, especially when compared to other figures within Western Marxism (Lukács? Adorno? Althusser?) who may once have been much cited but who are now marginal tastes at best. Other names that have similarly withstood the vagaries of time and the fickleness of fashion are perhaps Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, and what Gramsci shares with them (Benjamin in particular) is the fact that his writing is quite varied and even fragmentary, permitting a wide range of interpretations and re-readings in different circumstances and for diverse purposes. Indeed, famously this is particularly the case for Gramsci: his most important and influential work by far is the Prison Notebooks, an unfinished textual labyrinth of historical investigation and political creativity produced under the extreme conditions of incarceration and fascist censorship, that was not published until after his death and has still not been fully translated into English. From this cauldron of often ambiguous and sometimes obscure enquiry, many Gramscis or Gramscianisms have subsequently been reconstructed, informing bodies of thought and activism as diverse as the Eurocommunism of the 1970s, Anglo-American Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently a “neo-Communism” that pledges, at times more convincingly than others, to employ philological tools to be more faithful to the supposedly systematic character of Gramsci’s original thought. But it is in the nature of the form in which that thought has come down to us that there is much room for dispute and divergence.

gramsci_pre-prison-writingsSome claim, especially in reaction to the version of Gramsci popular in Cultural Studies (for which a term such as “hegemony” can come to mean both everything and nothing), or to his “post-Marxist” appropriation by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, that turning to his pre-prison writings reveals the truer, more pragmatic and political, essence of an unadulterated Gramscianism. And no doubt Gramsci was at vastly more liberty to speak and write his mind before he was arrested and imprisoned by Mussolini’s police and judicial apparatus. Moreover, for the most part these comprise texts that were published, often in venues over which Gramsci had some measure of editorial control, and that as such appeared in something like finished form. It is here that we can read Gramsci the organizer and agitator, the Leninist Gramsci who threw his support behind both the Russian Revolution and the Turin Factory Council movement that sprung up in its wake.

Yet these early texts hardly resolve the Gramscian enigma. For one thing, it is evident that Gramsci’s restless mind was continually developing, experimenting, and trying out new ideas even (perhaps especially) once it was locked up in a prison cell. We have no reason to assume that he thought the same way about things in 1929 as he did in 1919. For another, this corpus is no less fragmentary than the Prison Notebooks, consisting as it does on the whole of short pieces written to a deadline on topical debates for the socialist press. If anything, prison gave Gramsci the freedom to work more consistently and coherently on the key concepts and underlying concerns that mattered to him. Finally, it is not as though censorship and, perhaps above all, self-censorship did not shape and constrain these articles that he knew would see the light of day, by contrast to the long labour of the notebooks that had no immediate audience. After all, throughout this period from 1914 to 1926, Gramsci was quite self-consciously (and unabashedly) engaged in a project of what he himself would call propaganda.

Take for instance Gramsci’s paean to the Bolshevik state, published as “The Price of History” in June 1919. Here he tells us that “The Russian communists are a first-class ruling elite. [. . .] Lenin has revealed himself as the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe [. . .] a man whose vast brain can dominate all those social energies, throughout the world, which can be turned to the benefit of the revolution” (92). Hence “the State formed by the Soviets has become the State of the entire Russian people” thanks to “the assiduous and never-ending work of propaganda, elucidation and education carried out by the exceptional men of the Russian Communist movement, directed by the lucid and unstoppable will of the master of them, Nikolai Lenin” (93-94). In short, “Russia is where history is; Russia is where life is” (95). Yet for all that this article manifests Gramsci’s undoubtedly heartfelt belief in the priority of state-building (“A revolution is a genuine revolution [. . .] only when it is embodied in some kind of State” [92]), one does not have to be an egregiously suspicious reader to wonder whether the hyperbole understandably directed to praise of the leaders of the first successful workers’ revolution might not extend also to the subsequent affirmation that “Society can only exist in the form of a State” (93). What, after all, has happened here to the Gramsci who is famously the champion of organizations of “civil” society, relatively autonomous from or even hostile to the state apparatus?

That other Gramsci, of what we might in shorthand call “society against the state” is indeed visible in these writings. Perhaps most interestingly, he can be found for example in a piece entitled “Socialism and Italy” in which he condemns “liberals, conservatives, clerics, radicals, republicans, nationalists, reformists” (27) as being, precisely, creatures of the state but not of society, or at least not of the Italian nation. Indeed, he offers here a hint of a counter-history of Italian nation formation, not as a process driven by Cavour and the Piedmontese bourgeoisie (who established a relationship to the Italian South that still remained, Gramsci repeats several times, “colonial”), but as the product of Italian socialism: over the course of what he calls a “plebeian Renaissance,” “Italy has become a political unity, because a part of its populace has united around an idea, a single programme. And socialism, socialism alone, was able to provide this idea and this programme” (28, 29). In other words, there is society despite the state, and in the face of the state’s resolute provincialism and particularism. This is “the history of the Italian people [that] has yet to be written–its secret, its spiritual history” (28). And maybe this is the history of the Russian people (and the Russian revolution) that also has yet to be written, even by Gramsci himself.

Again, none of this is to deny the strong statist tendency within Gramsci’s thought. There is no doubt at all that he saw the political objective of the working class movement in terms of the construction of (to borrow the title of the journal he co-founded in 1919) a “new order” premised on a new state guided by the Communist Party that he would also end up co-founding. As he put it even when he was, previously, a member of the Socialist Party of Italy, “The Party is a State in potentia, which is gradually maturing: a rival to the bourgeois State, which is seeking, through its daily struggle with this enemy, and through the development of its own internal dialectic, to create the organs it needs to overcome and absorb its opponent” (4). This is what will later be cast as the struggle for hegemony.

And yet there is also a tension here evident even in the thought of this early, manifestly Leninist, Gramsci. It is a tension perhaps best characterized in terms of two concepts that he continually employs that are both perhaps dissonant to our contemporary ears: “spirit” and “discipline.” As a party man, Gramsci is a great believer in discipline, which is a function of political leadership and education. Italians above all, he tells us in the few pieces that are dedicated to what we would now recognize as “culture” (articles on sport, for instance, and drugs), are a disorderly lot. Their preference for card games, for example, full of “shouting, fists slamming on the table and often in the faces of opponents,” reveals a country that is “backward economically, politically and spiritually” (73, 74). And yet it is precisely this spiritedness that indicates an alternative (and maybe posthegemonic) history, far from the rigidity and farcicalness of the state form. For sure, in Gramsci’s view, these “disorderly and chaotic energies must be given a permanent form and discipline” (97). But without them, without spirit, Italy is nothing.