I thought that I would rescue another older paper and put it up on the blog. In this case, its an essay about Gramsci and he work of Chakrabarty that I wrote for a class on Gramsci about seventeen years ago. At this point, I'd probably write a far different paper, being far more skeptical of Chakrabarty at this point in my life and far more sympathetic with the work of Gramsci. Because of that, I'm going to leave the essay as it is and I've made no edits to the essay as it was originally written.
There has been a considerable
transformation in the word subaltern from the time that Gramsci first
appropriated it to the manner that it is deployed within current theoretical
methodology. A movement that redeploys
the word from one indicates a certain type of subordinate officer to one that
implies a connection to a complex series of hierarchical relationships. There is an interesting genealogical project
implicit in that statement, in which one can move from Gramsci to Guha in a
similar manner in which one can move from Gramsci to Mouffe. However I’m interested in something else, in
circling back in order to use the concepts which Gramsci set into motion. Instead of using Gramsci to read the
subaltern studies collective, let’s read Gramsci through the subaltern studies
collective. In a sense, this means
examining Gramsci as individual coming from the margins (the south) of a
marginal country (Italy). This is also a country that it was still ‘immature
Italy’ with ‘no capital to import’[1],
but also had sections of the elite strata that saw Imperialism as the tool to
get it out of the crises that it was in, that is between the discontinuous
development between the industrial north and agrarian south. To put this another way, it would be valuable
to look at Gramsci as a subaltern thinker working with the tools of European
modernity.
What do I mean by this? Gramsci spends a considerable time analyzing
Italian historical development. This can
be seen most prominently within the groups of fragments gathered under the
rubric of “Notes on Italian History”, and “The Modern Prince”, as well as some
of the writing under “State and Civil Society.”
These historical writings can also be supplemented with some of the
notes contained within Selections from
Cultural Writings.
We need to look at the way the
Gramsci deploys the tools of modern European thought. Gramsci is engaged in a certain type of historicism
common to both liberalism and Marxism.
This historicism in Gramsci’s hand is highly complex and differentiated,
but nonetheless is caught within a certain type of thinking in regards to the
nation-state. In effect, the manner in
which the model of the nation that is exemplified by France, and a lesser
extent, England and Germany. When one
does that, it is clear that Italy simply cannot live up to those expectations.
A central trope of those writings is
one of inadequacy. The text return again
and again to a sense of lacking in Italian politics, culture, and even in the
classes themselves. The specter of the
Jacobins and the French popular novel loom heavily over Gramsci’s understanding
of Italian history, and it (Italian history) can never quite live up to what is
expected of it.
Interestingly enough, Dipesh
Chakrabarty sees the same phenomenon within Indian history within the first
essay contained in Provincializing Europe. “The tendency to read Indian history in terms
of a lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into “inadequacy”
is obvious in these excerpts. As a trope
it is ancient, going back to the beginnings of colonial rule in India. The British conquered and represented the
diversity of Indian pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a
medieval period to modernity. The terms
have changed with time. The medieval was
once called “despotic” and the modern “the rule of law.” “Feudal/capitalist has been a later variant.”[2]
Why bring up this seemingly
tangential comment about Chakrabarty’s reading of a series of readings of
Indian history? It is important because
in many ways, the two so far apart, stand together in one sense, in the sense
that both are countries recently decolonized through revolutions seen by many
of the parties involved as incomplete.
Just as Antonio Gramsci describes the Risorgimento as a passive
revolution, one can find the same analysis of Post-colonial India with
Guha. Also the process of decolonization
placed both nations in positions of periphery within the global capitalist
order. But this global positioning which
is so emphasized within the realm of subaltern studies thought (and most
postcolonial thought) is pushed to the periphery. The nation’s failures tend to be internalized
rather than seen within structural terms.
Within “Notes on Italian History”,
these tropes can be seen within the comparisons between the Action Party and
the Jacobins. By in large, this is a
trope of failure and lack. The axis of
this failure can be seen on the grounds of two overlapping binaries,
1)North/South 2)Urban/Rural. In both
cases, the Jacobins succeeded where the action party failed. There is an element that is recognized. An element out of control of the actors, but
Gramsci de-emphasizes this and returns continually to the trope of the Action
Party failing to recognize what should have been so apparent.
This becomes clear in his descriptions of both the
Jacobins and the members of the Action Party.
Let’s begin with the Jacobins. “For not only did they organize a
bourgeois government, i.e. make the bourgeoisie the dominant class—they did
more. They created the bourgeois state,
made the bourgeoisie into the leading, hegemonic class of the nation, in other
words gave the new state a permanent basis and created the compact modern
French nation.”[3] This
occurred because the Jacobins understood the need to form an alliance with the
masses of the peasantry. They put in
place the necessary agrarian reforms, and in response, the peasantry recognized
the hegemony of Paris.
Compare this
with the comments on the Action Party.
“The southern peasant wanted land, and Crispi, who did not want to (or
could not) give it to him in Italy itself, who had no wish go in for “economic
Jacobinism”, conjured up the mirage of colonial lands to be exploited. Crispi’s imperialism was passionate,
oratorical, without any economic or financial basis.”[4] Similarly Garibaldi is shown to deliberately
ignore the evidence for the southern peasant’s desire for land.
The Action Party is repeatedly marked by this
failure. It is incapable of seeing the
basis of a bourgeois revolution within the alliance with the agrarian bloc in
the south. It refused or was incapable
of seeing beyond what Gramsci referred to as ‘economic-corporate’
interests. This was the problem of the
communes of the renaissance, and it reappeared in the Risorgimento. In both cases, “the same narrow egoism
prevented a rapid and vigorous revolution like the French one.”[5]
One can put this simply. The Action Party never had a significant platform. “The Action Party lacked even a concrete
program of government. In essence it was
always, more than anything else, an agitational and propagandist body…”[6]
It never moved beyond the simple emotional desire for independence now. Exceptions such as Piscane were only notable
in that they marked the continual poverty of the cycles of Action Party
leadership. Even when the Action Party
came to power in 1870 and 1876, there was no significant change in the
substance of national policy.
In reality,
the function of the Action Party was in fact a subordinate one to the
Moderates. As Gramsci puts this, “The
Moderates continued to lead the Action Party even after 1870 and 1876, and
so-called “transformism” was only the parliamentary expression of this action
of intellectual, moral and political hegemony.”[7]
Despite the expressed by the leadership of the Action Party towards the Moderates,
it was the moderates who dictated the terms of the discussion. That discussion was built on an automatic
exclusion of the great masses of the peasantry that made up the vast majority
of the southern part of the nation.
Given the failure for this alliance
to manifest itself, we are left with the alliance created by the
Moderates. “Out of the Action Party and
the Moderates, which represented the real “subjective forces” of the
Risorgimento? Without a shadow of doubt
it was the moderates, precisely because they were also aware of the role of the
Action Party: thanks to this awareness, their “subjectivity” was a superior and
more decisive quality. In Victor
Emmanuel’s crude, sergeant-major’s expression “we’ve got the Action Party in
our pocket” there is more historico-political sense than in all Mazzini.”[8] It was their hegemonic block that was the
successful one, the block of the aristocracy and the landowners, but it was one
that, “made the people nation into an instrument, into an object, they degraded
it. And therein lies the greatest and
most contemptible demagogy…”[9]
This ties in with the deep-seated
problems with the bourgeois class within Italy.
As has been said repeatedly, it was incapable of becoming the leading
class. It creates a situation in which
the Italian nation can be a ‘bastard.’
It can only function as a deeply flawed creation. Within the creature known as Italy there are
perhaps even two nations, the south and the north with only a common enemy, the
dominance of Austria at the time. The trope of India returns once again, after
all, in both cases isn’t the form of the nation defined from primarily from
without, from the pressures of foreign domination rather than from an internal
pressure.
“To pose the question in such a way
would have meant asserting in advance an incurable “national” rift—a rift so
serious that not even a federalist solution would have been able to heal
it. It would have meant asserting the
existence of separate nations, between which all that could have been achieved
was a diplomatic-military alliance against the common enemy, Austria.”[10]
The only reason that the “nation”
holds together is the “weak position of the Southern urban forces in relation
to the rural forces, an unfavorable relation that sometimes took the form of a literal
subjugation to the countryside.”[11] This places the southern urban forces in an
almost semi-colonial position in its alliance to the northern urban forces.
Gramsci
introduces an interesting concept. The
examination of the party can act as an examination of the nation of the whole
from as certain perspective. On
understanding that view, the failure and successes of the two parties in the
Risorgimento come to mean something else than particular failures of
individuals, instead they become somewhat symptomatic of the problems of the
nation itself.
The siting of the location of this
moment of inadequacy continually moves backwards in time within Italian history
to the Renaissance. An interesting event
occurs there. There is a radical
separation between what the Renaissance does for the rest of Europe in a
progressive function for the construction of the nation state, and a regressive
one with the vantage point of Italy.
“This claim can be accepted if one
distinguishes within the movement of the Renaissance the break which occurred
between Humanism and the national life which had gradually formed after the
year 1000, if one considers Humanism as a progressive process for the educated
‘cosmopolitan’ classes but regressive from the point of view of Italian
history.”[12]
This is the moment in which Europe
moves forward through the Reformation to the nation-state, and Italy,
ultimately, winds up somewhere very different.
It is clear that Gramsci sees this clearly within negative terms. He like Machiavelli before him lays the
primary blame upon the papacy. This is a
legitimate claim. They controlled the
educational system and directed towards their own interests. Those interests were one clearly defined
around countering the reformation that defined much of the rest of Europe
rather than the issues internal to Italy itself. It also has tied its interests in with the
forces of the moderate party, that is the landowners and aristocracy, and
perhaps more significantly, ties to the former controlling nation of Austria. After all, the papacy continues to make
claims towards a universal empire that is clearly dead. And all of Italy is clearly educated under
the legacy of that empire.
The notion of inadequacy is
traversed in a quite interesting manner within some of the initial questions
posed within “People, Nation, and Culture”.
They are as follows, “’Why is Italian literature not popular in Italy…
2.) is there an Italian theatre… which should be connected with the other
question concerning the greater or lesser vitality of theatre in dialect and in
standard Italian? 3)the question of the
national language as set forth by Alessandro Manzoni; 4) whether there has been an Italian
romanticism? 5) is it necessary to provoke a religious reformation like the
Protestant one? In other words, was the
absence of broad and profound religious struggles… a cause of progress or
regression? 6)were Humanism and the
Renaissance progressive or regressive?
7)the unpopularity of the Risorgimento or the indifference of the masses
towards the struggle for independence and national unity; 8) the political non-involvement of the
Italian people, expressed in the phases ‘rebellionism’, ‘subversism’ and a
primitive and elementary ‘anti-statism’; 9) the non existence of a popular
literature in a strict sense….”[13]
Implicit within these questions, and
the answers that that follow is an implicit problematic. That problematic consists in examining the
reasons for Italy failing to become a nation.
It is the same question implicit within Guha’s book, Dominance without Hegemony. It isn’t that remarkable that Gramsci uses
that precise formulation in his description of the Risorgimento and Piedmont’s
function. “It is one of the cases in
which these groups have the function of “domination” without that of
“leadership”: dictatorship without hegemony.”[14] It isn’t the comparison that is the most
interesting thing; after all, all that proves is that Gramsci’s formula
works. No what is interesting is the
thread common to both of them. That
lack, where in both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are incapable of
creating the national popular.
In the case of Italy, the trope of
France is significant. We are introduced
it through the issue of the Jacobins, the issues of literature, etc. I think that it is interesting that not only
do the bourgeois force fail because of cosmopolitanism, but also do the
subaltern forces. “Culturally speaking,
they are interested in a past that is more French than Italian. They use French metaphors and cultural
references in their language and thought.”[15]
After all without an authentic national-popular tradition, aren’t they more
interested in questions of French history, French culture, etc.? Aren’t the failures implicit in the final
questions, present precisely because of this unlabelled cosmopolitanism?
The question of literature is an
essential one. Once again, Gramsci’s
questions are cogent. “The so-called
‘artistic’ ‘national’ literature is not popular in Italy. Whose fault is it? That of the public, which does not read? That of the critics, who are not able to
present and extol literary values to the public? That of the newspapers, which publish the old
Count of Monte Crisco instead of serializing the ‘modern Italian novel’? But why does the public not read in Italy,
when in other countries it does?
Besides, is it true that in Italy nobody reads? Would it not be more accurate to state the
problem in this way: why does the Italian public read foreign literature and
non-popular, instead of reading its own?…
What is the meaning of the fact that the Italian people prefer to read
foreign writers?”[16]
It
seems to be the crux of the situation, one where the intellectuals and the
people are radically separated. “After
the sixteenth century, in other words, the separation between the intellectuals
and the people, which underlies these notes and which has been of such
importance for modern Italian political and cultural history, becomes radical.”[17] There seem to be two reasons for this
separation. The first is the legacy of
the Holy Roman Empire. Intellectuals
tied their interests to the cosmopolitan empire rather than the nation-people. The second is more implicit. The years of occupation by foreign powers
have enfolded Italy’s intellectuals within the projects of their nations.
This separation is by in large
driven by contempt on the part of intellectuals towards the subaltern forces of
the nation. This can be seen in ‘the
anti-democratic attitude of Brescianist writers’, whose writing ‘is the form of
opposition to any national-popular movement and is determined by the
economic-corporate caste spirit, of medieval and feudal origin.”[18] But it can also be seen in the writings of
Manzoni, who is genuinely interested in following Tolstoy’s lead in writing
literature of a national-popular nature.
He is incapable of presenting subaltern characters with any sense of
inner life. Unlike Tolstoy, it is the
nobles who have a deep spiritual inner life, and give answers for the questions
posed within the book.
The question of romanticism looms
over this discussion. It isn’t an idle
one for Gramsci. “In this sense,
romanticism precedes, accompanies, sanctions and develops that entire European
movement which took its name from the French Revolution. Romanticism is the literary aspect, the
aspect of feeling of this movement; it is more a question of feeling than of
literature, since the literary aspect was only a part of feeling which pervaded
all of life… And in this specific sense
romanticism has never existed in Italy.
Its manifestations have been at best minimal, very sporadic and in any
case of a purely literary nature.”[19]
This separation creates the
conditions in which Italian readers find their needs met through foreign
writers. “It means that they undergo the
moral and intellectual hegemony of foreign intellectuals, that they feel more
closely related to foreign intellectuals than to ‘domestic’ ones, that there is
no national intellectual and moral bloc, either hierarchical or, still less,
egalitarian.”[20] In very different circumstances, and with
different effects, Chakrabarty touches upon the same phenomena, “Faced with the task of analyzing
developments or social practices in modern India, few if any Indian social
scientists or social scientists of India would argue seriously with, say, the
thirteenth century logician Gangesa or with the grammarian and linguistic
philosopher Bartrihari… Sad though it
is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual
traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now
only matters of historical research for most—perhaps all—modern social
scientists in the region. They treat
these traditions as truly dead, as history.”[21]
In terms of popular literature,
Gramsci’s analysis of the day seems to be accurate, fairly systematic, and
honest in presenting a lack within Italian society. But it seems that within a country with such
high levels of illiteracy, other forms of medium would perhaps be better at
capturing this national-popular sense.
Gramsci refers to the national conscious as “operatic”, but never
discusses what that term entails. Also
Gramsci never gives due respect to the national popular form of opera, which he
recognizes as a popular form, but never explores the production of a national
popular that say, Verdi is involved in.
These forms are recognized as being important, and Gramsci points out
that the ‘public’s choice in music includes “Verdi, Puccini, and Mascagni, who
naturally do not have counterparts in literature.”
Gramsci dismisses opera as a
national popular form in an interesting way.
“’Verbal’ expression has a strictly national-popular-cultural character:
a poem by Goethe, in the original, can only be understood and fully relived by
a German (or by one who has ‘become German’).
Dante can only be understood and relived by an educated Italian,
etc. But a statue by Michelangelo, a
piece of music by Verdi or a painting by Raphael can be understood almost
immediately by anyone in the world, even by the non-cosmopolitan, even if they
have not gone beyond the narrow circle of a province in their own country.”[22]
One can quibble whether one needs
the ability to translate non-verbal forms of communication or not, but I think
that a more significant problem would be missed. Operas have words. As a matter of fact, most operas are
constructed with fairly simple language, and fairly simple plot lines. Verdi used this medium to express nationalist
themes around the Risorgimento, and these productions were extremely popular in
Italy. They may be explicitly referring to European themes as Gramsci remarks
in the later section on popular literature, but are easily decoded to describe
the situation in Italy. One wonders if
one could find other forms of connection with the national-popular in Italy if
one looked outside of the narrow confines of ‘popular literature’ (which was
apparently not particularly popular, nor very good literature).
Obviously, in a practical functional
sense, having a language that operates like ‘Esperanto’ is not going to lead to
a particularly functional nation. But
ultimately, in looking at the attempt to produce the national-popular one has
to make do with what one has, and literature clearly wasn’t the answer.
Although this question of the
national language is one that cannot be easily dismissed, Gramsci criticizes
Croce precisely on this point. His
solution would functionally disallow the participation of the subaltern forces
of the nation, purely by the inability to communicate within the discussions
that matter. Although Gramsci seems to
ignore other alternative ideological forums to focusing and uniting the
subaltern classes, his emphasis on functional literacy, or to write a “lively,
expressive and at the same time sober and measured prose”[23]
as Gramsci puts it, is not an unimportant goal, especially within the European
system. However in these cases, it may
have to wait until after the revolution is completed for it to be universally
implemented.
One finds another strangely
contrarian thread within Gramsci’s writing.
At the same time in which we are repeatedly introduced to the theme of
France as the nation par excellence, we find another thread emphasizing its
current bankruptcy. Jaures and Zola were
the last to speak for the people.
Gramsci seems to sense the crisis that the popular front government is
about to head to. He clearly states that
the French form of the nation state has seen its time. Clearly this is meant to indicate the
collapse of the bourgeoisie and perhaps the rise of a new Rome of modernity,
Moscow.
But there seems to be recognition of
possibilities within Italian society.
Gramsci sees the drive for cosmopolitanism within the Italian people,
even when it manifests itself in clearly utopian (in the negative sense)
projects such as Esperanto. This drive
and desire can lead to a new form of cosmopolitanism, one that is truly
revolutionary.
But it isn’t persistent return to a
stagist conceptualization of history that throws Gramsci’s ideas into a spiral. One can find sections within Gramsci where he
recognizes that history always resides in its particulars, but those
particulars must go through the nation-state form. But the particularities of Italian history,
like the particularities of Indian history can never live up to the
expectations of this particular historicism.
It’s not surprising that those
engaged in postcolonial studies would take Gramsci on with such
enthusiasm. Perry Anderson is correct in
part by claiming Gramsci for ‘Western Marxism.”
One can find elements (and important elements at that!) within his work,
particularly the ideas contained within “State and Civil Society.” But there is another side to Gramsci, a side
that is dealing with situations very similar to that of many postcolonial
nations. Admittedly, there are Marxist
works that deal with these issue on the colonial side of matters much more
explicitly from colonial powers, Gramsci’s work for the most part has an
expansive, open feeling that they lack.
It is this side of Gramsci that becomes relevant to the postcolonial,
the one who can grasp the problems within much more direct and focused terms.
The question of the colonies goes
back as far as Marx himself. What is
perhaps more significant is that Gramsci deals with the ramification of foreign
domination much more directly. Questions
that are for Marx and Lenin quite abstract, are for Gramsci the questions that
he must confront directly in day to day life in Italian life to accomplish
anything. They act as a painful sore,
one that is addressed with considerable emotional and intellectual intensity.
Europe, in Chakrabarty’s sense,
still reigns supreme within Gramsci’s work.
The inadequacy that is apparent in the dwelling on France’s
national-popular formation represents that Europe. This doesn’t change appreciably if one reads
‘France’ and ‘Jacobin’ as code words for ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘Bolshevik Party’.
However, in the clarity and
minuteness of Gramsci’s analysis, as well as the multiplicity of perspectives
that he brings in, alternatives exist.
Gramsci is particularly unforgiving to any easy solution to the problem
of the unity of Italy, whether presented by his friends or enemies. It is this continual demand that keeps him
out of the ranks of those who would place the map of any other location onto Italy.
Clearly, Gramsci makes the most of
the tools available to him. It would be
useless to criticize him for the limitations that were not in his control. But if we look at the issue differently,
perhaps in a strange sense, by pushing historicism to its limits, we can see
beyond them to other possibilities of understanding history.
Nevertheless, there must be limit
put upon this. For as much value Gramsci
can have, there are limits as well. One
suspects that the following description of Italian life would have
significantly different coloring from Guha or Chakrabarty.
“’The act for the act’s sake’,
struggle for the sake of struggle, etc., and especially mean, petty
individualism, which is anyway merely an arbitrary satisfying of passing whims,
etc. (In reality, the question is still
that of Italian “apoliticism”, which takes on these various picturesque and
bizarre forms.”[24]
It’s at moments such as this that
one wishes that another thinker would pick up and analyze these “bizarre”
behaviors. Gramsci feels comfortable to
dismiss them out of hand, and to a certain extent, Gramsci’s rebellion is
limited to a group of easily recognized behaviors, that are ‘cosmopolitan’ and
‘European’ in themselves. Ultimately,
they may provide interesting answers to political questions, even if they don’t
move directly to the revolution. This is
not the matter of dismissing Gramsci or polemicizing against him, rather it is
a matter of incorporating aspects of his ideas into a different problematic
that can better deal with the ambiguous postcolonial world that we live in.
[1] Antonio
Gramsci, Selections From the Prison
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New
York: International Publishers, 1971), 68.
[2] Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 32.
[3] Gramsci,
Selections From the Prison Notebooks,
79.
[4] Ibid.,
67-68.
[5] Ibid.,
54.
[6] Ibid.,
62.
[7] Ibid.,
58.
[8] Ibid.,
113.
[9] Ibid.,
90.
[10]
Gramsci, Selections From the Prison
Notebooks, 99.
[11] Ibid.,
99.
[12] Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural
Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William
Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1985), 220.
[13]
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural
Writings, 200-201.
[14]
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, 106.
[15]
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural
Writings, 216.
[16]
Ibid.,209.
[17] Ibid.,
216-217.
[18]
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural
Writings, .
[19] Ibid.,
205.
[20] Ibid.,
209.
[21]
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe,
5-6.
[22]
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural
Writings, 122.
[23] Ibid.,
204
[24]
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 147.
