Comments on: Gramsci alert!

By: garrilla

garrilla — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:26:42 +0000

I would teach Gramsci with reference to ‘New Times’ which was a Marxism Today project from October 1988 – http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm – which will show the complexity of Gramscis’s view in the hands of modern readers. You can then dip in through the Note Books, Cultural Writings and the Little Prince as you take a look at ‘eopochal’ shift in the world, its politics etc.

By: MeganCk

MeganCk — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:22:32 +0000

We read Crehan’s book, and parts of the prison diaries for my MA theory class (as well as some Williams). I thought Crehan’s book was really excellent at interpreting his work, it had lots of primary source examples as well. Crehan really brought it alive for me, and I had no formal background in marxist thought.

By: Carl Dyke

Carl Dyke — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:56:21 +0000

Come to think of it, it might be helpful to us to know why you’re unsympathetic to Gramsci given that you admit having little exposure to his thought. What “Gramsci” is that, then? If you can’t fix this about yourself, would it be possible to not poison your students on him with your seal of disapproval? Or maybe best just to leave him off the syllabus? I’m just sayin’.

By: Carl Dyke

Carl Dyke — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:27:29 +0000

Rex, you might take a look at Selections from Cultural Writings. Amazon.com will let you peek at the table of contents.

It’s true Gramsci never wrote anything self-contained and pithy like the Manifesto or Politics as a Vocation, but everyone knows you’re not even in the game with Marx until you’ve read the 18th Brumaire, the Grundrisse, and at least vol. 1 of Capital (not to mention Hegel’s Logic, if you listen to Lenin). And what kind of Weber is it without Science as a Vocation, Protestant Ethic or Economy and Society? Eh.

Gramsci was a journalist, so there’s a lot of local daily crap with gold nuggets here and there. Then he was a party guy and pretty busy with party stuff. Then the Fascists sent him to prison and he got a chance to write about everything he always wanted to write about, but he got sick and died and never had a chance to pull it all together. Plus he was at heart a pretty good ethnographer so a lot of what he wrote is actually really minute observations of apparent trivia with only rare and brief but brilliant excursions into conceptual linkage and generalization.

The Cultural Writings are good because they’d show your students him doing this, and it’s a good thing for them to learn how to do; and it’s not obviously bogged down with a lot of the communist politics that are so remote to them. Yet they’re really about the microphysics of cultural power, of course, aka hegemony.

If you want to tie in with the subaltern studies line you could always use The Southern Question, which is mostly completed, pretty brief, and comes in a nicely edited standalone volume.

By: JP

JP — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:35:58 +0000

Yeah, but that’s hardly his fault, is it? Dude was in prison or dying or dead between 35 and 46.

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:26:29 +0000

Or the first big chunk of German Ideology. The point is just that you can give someone a reasonable overview of Marx as a thinker by having them actually READ MARX, which appears not to be true of Gramsci.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:30:22 +0000

I personally think the Communist Manifesto is a horrible choice for teaching Marx… although perhaps the section in Capital on commodity fetishism might pass muster.

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:51:18 +0000

“it is true that it is hard to select 75 pages which distills his thought – but I think that is true of most important thinkers.”

*cough* communist manifesto *cough* politics as a vocation *cough*… it seems to me that Marx, Durkheim, and Weber each consciously produced 75 page works designed to do exactly that, or at least try to approximate the complexity of their arguments in about that amount of space.

It sounds like Gramsci suffers from a bit of what O’Farrell says Foucault suffers from — there is quite a bit of difference between the historical reception and use of Gramsci by scholars, on the one hand, and the technical historical literature on Gramsci on the other? I think it is telling that Gramsci is a theorist who, like Palm Olive, you must soak in, while simultaneously it sounds like the vast majority of ‘Gramsci-inspired’ work that scholars do is actually ‘Gramsci as filtered through this or that secondary source’. But whatever — I’m not particularly sympathetic to his work and perhaps that is what is coming through here…

By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:35:50 +0000

Not at all Rex. If you take the time to read the best Gramsci analysis you will find broad consensus about much of what he had to say, although the nature of the publication of his work into English has been an inhibiting factor. However it is true that it is hard to select 75 pages which distills his thought – but I think that is true of most important thinkers. In fact, I’d argue that there is probably more agreement as to the general thrust of Gramsci’s argument than there is for other thinkers, such as Freud, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, etc.

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:58:44 +0000

So basically while Gramsci has inspired others, his own work is more or less indigestible, and those inspired by him pretty much take liberties with his thought?

By: JP

JP — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:32:59 +0000

I would go with Stuart Hall as a model for what it might look like. Also I’ve been using a piece by Tony Bennett:

Bennett, Tony (1981.) Antonio Gramsci. In Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader. Tony Bennett, Graham Martin, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott, eds. Pp. 191-218. London: Batsford.

By: BJG

BJG — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:03:37 +0000

The Kate Crehan volume (mentioned in Kerim’s post above) is the only commentator I’ve read on Gramsci. It’s been a while, but I remember it being an approachable text. She has quite a lot on critiquing Williams, who she argues has bequeathed an easily grasped but not very nuanced anthropological idea of Gramsci which she refers to as “Gramsci-Lite”. It might work as a contrast – extract from Williams, counter extract from Crehan etc?

By: Kerim

Kerim — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:27:58 +0000

From the title of the post, I originally thought you were alerting people to the fact that huge chunks of Gramsci’s writings have been pulled from the internet. From Marxists.org:

“All the texts listed below have been published with the kind permission of the translator/copyright holder. However, Lawrence & Wishart, who have published collections of translations by Quintin Hoare, the most prolific Gramsci translator, claim that Hoare gave the MIA permission in contravention of his contract with them, and consequently, in January 2008, Lawrence & Wishart requested the M.I.A. to withdraw the Hoare translations. The Marxists Internet Archive always strives to work in a spirit of cooperation with publishers, so as a result, only those translations done by Mitchell Abidor and M Carley under the Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) licence, for marxists.org are provided below.”

By: Kerim

Kerim — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:52:19 +0000

I don’t much care for William’s take on Gramsci. I think Mutually occluded’s suggestion of the Modern Prince collection (especially the Southern Question) is a good one. Its very hard to pick just a few pages of Gramsci since his prison notebooks are so scattered. Also, it serves the purpose of emphasizing the political-historical grounding of Gramsci which I think gets lost in Williams emphasis on “culture.”

The introductions to each section of “Selections from the Prison Notebook” do a solid job and are worth assigning as if they were a single article (together with the book intro).

My favorite secondary source on Gramsci is:

Salamini, Leonardo. 1981. The Sociology of Political Praxis. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

I think this is the single best general introduction to Gramsci that I’ve read. Very readable too.

If you had more time I’d also recommend:

Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: Univ of Toronto Press.

I’m writing a piece about this book at the very moment…

And this one might also be appropriate for your class:

Crehan, Kate. 2002. Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. University of California Press.

By: mutually occluded

mutually occluded — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:53:21 +0000

Gramsci’s “The Modern Prince” is an excellent essay/work, a Machiavellia-inspired analysis of the state, hegemony, and the intelligentsia. See the edition “The Modern Prince and Other Writings,” which includes his well-known “The Southern Question,” on poverty and ‘the South’.