Culture, Power & Image Poli 110DA 20

Culture, Power & ImagePoli 110DA 20 State = Political Society + Civil Society

Antonio Gramsci • 1891-1937 • Founding member, Communist Party of Italy • 1924: Elected to Parliament • 1926: Fascist gov’t enacts emergency powers after a (supposed) assassination attempt on Mussolini • Gramsci imprisoned despite parliamentary immunity • Prosecutor: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning!” • Sickens & dies in prison, 1937 • Prison Notebooks • Hegemony • Absolute Historicism • Intellectuals

Absolute Historicism • “The basic innovation introduced by the philosophy of praxis [Marxist theory] into the science of politics and of history is the demonstration that there is not abstract ‘human nature’, fixed an immutable (a concept which certainly derives from religious and transcendentalist thought), but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations...” (133)

Nature & Contingency • “One of the commonest totems is the belief about everything that exists, that it is ‘natural’ and that it should exist, that it could not do otherwise than exist, and that however badly one’s attempts at reform may go they will not stop life from going on, since the traditional forces will continue to operate and precisely will keep life going on.” (157)

Common Sense & Hegemony • “What is practice for the fundamental [hegemonic] class becomes ‘rationality’ and speculation for its intellectuals (it is on the basis of these historical relations that all modern idealism is to be explained).” (116) • The State as absolute (117)

Intellectuals • Intellectuals are not an independent class • Each social class generates its own intellectuals • The intellectuals of the historically-progressive class exercise such intellectual attraction that “they end up by subjugating the intellectuals of other social groups; they thereby create a system of solidarity between all the intellectuals, with bonds of a psychological nature (vanity, etc.) and often of a caste character (technico-juridical, corporate, etc.)” (60)

“The most important element is undoubtedly one whose character is determined not by reason but by faith. But faith in whom, or in what? In particular in the social group to which he belongs, in so far as in a diffuse way it thinks as he does. The man of the people thinks that so many like-thinking people can’t be wrong, not so radically, as the man he is arguing against would like him to believe.” • Maybe he cannot himself refute the man’s arguments, but he is sure that someone in his group could (339)

Class War on the Psychic Plane • “The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups... it leads kindred and allied groups.” (57)

Hegemony • “The fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic...” (161)

Free trade (capitalism) is “based on a distinction between political society and civil society” • Presented as organic, natural, but in fact is only methodological • Economic activity belongs to civil society, and the State must not intervene • But laissez-faire is a form of ‘regulation’, “introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts.” (160)

State and Society • “In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks...” (238) • This varies between states, and “this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.”

“Every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for deployment, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes.” (258)

“The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense,” but there are many others, including so-called private initiatives. (258) • “The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent” (259)

“One might say that State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected on the armour of coercion.” • “It is possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical State or civil society) make their appearance.” (263)

Revolution • Crisis of authority = crisis of hegemony • i.e. a crisis of the State • Happens either: because the ruling class has failed in a major political undertaking in which it has requested or compelled mass compliance • Or: Huge masses (peasants, petit-bourgeois intellectuals) move suddenly from political passivity to activity, putting forward demands which add up to a revolution (210)

Counter-hegemony • “The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilization.” (133) • “Any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or wicked, only insofar as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or oppose it.” (133) • The modern Prince must be a party (129)

“Specific necessities can be deduced... for any cultural movement which aimed to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world in general: 1. Never tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality

2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element. This means working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset.” (340) • “Mass adhesion or non-adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking.” (341) • The parties recruit intellectuals from the working mass, and are thus the “crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, take place” (335)

Knowledge and Hegemony • “The realisation of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact.” (365-366)

“Structure and superstructures form an ‘historical bloc.’” • Discordant ensemble of superstructures reflects discordant ensemble of social relations. • Only a totalitarian system of ideologies gives a rational reflection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis.” (366)

“If a social group is formed which is 100% homogenous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist 100% for this revolutionising: that is that the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real.” (366) • But what if it is not a group, but everyone that is ‘100% homogenous on the level of ideology’?

Culture, Power & Image Poli 110DA 20