Date: Sat, 13 Aug 1994 17:26:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nick Lawrence <V121NQND-AT-ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Re: Althusser and Gramsci


Thanks to Jon for his clarifying remarks on Gramsci and the degradation of 
cultural studies. A few points:

As with Althusser, I think Gramsci himself allows the extension 
and extrapolation of his terms. His conception of civil society is notoriously 
fuzzy; sometimes he defines it as the "political and cultural hegemony of a 
social group over the entire society," sometimes as the opposite of political 
society, sometimes as the sphere of economic activity, sometimes as the State 
itself. The constraints of the prison context in which G wrote contributed to 
the codedness of his notes and hence the ease with which readers have broadened 
the applicability of his terms.

But civil society is clearly for G a site of political struggle. You argue that 
the Brum School substituted for "civil society" as privileged site-of-struggle
the more amorphous Williamsian notion of culture. And the problem with this in 
your view is that the specificity of the political dimension in G's hegemony 
gets lost, giving way to lazy celebratory readings of counterhegemonic culture.

I'm entirely in sympathy with your distaste for pollyannaish readings of 
resistance, but to simply reinstate the State as the focus of either cultural
analysis or left politics generally seems problematic. Gramsci's State isn't
our State, etc. There are, as you hint, "material" reasons why a culturalized
notion of counterhegemonic practice should prove attractive to post-New Leftists
--the increasing prominence of cultural matters in political affairs of state; 
the inescapable mediatization of politics; the globalization of mass cultural
markets. A measure of the distance traveled since 1930 might suggest itself in
considering Gramsci's response to the rise of Berlusconi.

Perhaps this is where I should introduce myself to this list. I'm about halfway
toward a PhD in English at the University at Buffalo, within the culturally
amorphous subprogram known as Poetics, and do work on modern poetry's 
connections between ideas of agency, ideology, aesthetics, and the public 
sphere, all under the umbrella of a focus on reading as culturally constitutive 
activity. My "period" is split, schizophrenically, according to modernity's two 
jagged bookends: first half of the nineteenth century and second half of the 
twentieth. I'm always interested when people are moving from one place to 
another in their studies, which is why I'd like to hear more about shifts such 
as Jon's evolving anticulturalist stance within cult stud.

Nick


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