Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy, policy and institutions in Gramsci

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been largely overlooked by scholars, provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. Together they enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these notes, I then answer the question of whether they amount to a theory of cultural policy.

Keywords:

• Gramsci
• theory of cultural policy
• cultural institutions

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Richard Johnson and Anne Showstack Sassoon for their penetrating comments and insightful advice. I am grateful to Steve Chibnall for his encouragement and help. Jeff Hill and Tim O’Sullivan have had the patience of discussing some of the ideas in their early stages. Birgit Friedrich has kindly helped me in the challenging task of reading Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s article in German.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, when discussing Gramsci’s writings, I provide references to the page numbers of the available English translations. When more than one translation is available, I reference the older most widespread anthology. References to the Italian critical edition of the prison notebooks (Q) are added in parenthesis; they also allow a rapid location of the notes (although not of the page numbers) in the first three volumes so far published of the English critical edition of the prison notebooks (PN). Where no published translations are available, translations are my own. A list of abbreviations of editions and anthologies of Gramsci's writings cited in this article is provided with the list of references. Concordance tables of the anthologies of English translations with the Italian critical edition of the prison notebooks are available at http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/concordance_table/index.html. For the dates of Gramsci’s prison notes, I refer to Francioni (1984a).

2. The notebook was titled Literary Criticism (Critica letteraria). It was published as part of an anthology of Gramsci’s cultural writings under the title Literature and national life (Letteratura e vita nazionale). This was the fifth of a series of six thematic volumes of Gramsci’s prison notebooks published with editorial coordination by the Italian Communist Party between 1948 and 1951.

3. All translations from Bobbio’s work are my own.

4. The inherent sexism of the statement is in the original. Arguably, Bobbio’s position in this article came to coincide with the reversal, by western Marxism, of the Stalinist understanding of politics as above intellectuals (see Buci-Glucksmann 1980 [1975], p. 15). In any case, it is worth noting that Bobbio went well beyond Benedetto Croce’s separation between culture and politics. On Croce’s justification of such separation see ‘Introduction’ to Section II in SCW (p. 89).

5. ‘[I]t seems to me imprudent to persist in the propaganda of those volumes that is being made in the Communist Party press, as if they contained a new philosophy and a new culture that Italians should adopt. There is still some good sense in the brains of our people, who ask which new philosophy and new culture could Gramsci ever give, even supposing that he adopted the Marxist premise that thought is nothing else than the practical interest of the different social classes, and that therefore the point is not to understand the world but change it’ (Croce 1949, my translation).

6. On the accusations of Zhdanovism, see Liguori (1982).

7. While in SPN and PN Gramsci’s original expression ‘politica culturale’ is translated as ‘cultural policy’ (see, for example, SPN 263 and 341, and PN3 126), in CW it is translated as ‘cultural politics’. The Italian language, however, has only one word for ‘politics’ and ‘policy’ (‘politica’), and therefore the meaning cannot be determined independently of a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s use of the concept.

8. See my discussion in Part I.

9. Paladini Musitelli (1998) has considered Gramsci’s investigations into the nature and function of literature in a modern industrial system of cultural production, re-evaluating Gramsci’s notes on the cultural industries against earlier Italian critics who considered them as a mere adjustment to the allegedly degraded taste of the popular publics. However, although the concept of cultural policy has appeared in the title of her paper, it is neither mentioned in the text, nor in what seems a later expanded version (Paladini Musitelli 2009).

10. Nevertheless, Sassoon (1987 [1980]) had mentioned Gramsci’s historical interest in the cultural policies of different regimes as means ‘to expand the social basis of consent’ (p. xiii).

11. Haug referred to Gramsci’s note in CW 122 (Q 23, 7, 2193).

12. Gramsci defined the concept of ‘integral state’ synthetically as ‘State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony armoured by coercion’ (SPN 263 (Q 6, 88, 763–764)), where ‘political society’ was the state as traditionally understood (i.e. as governmental function). The first successful example of a modern, integral state was for Gramsci the French state produced by the Jacobins after the French Revolution (Sassoon, 1987 [1980], p. 150), while after 1870 the model tended to be found in a less successful, ‘passive’ form of gradual evolution towards social welfare as a response by the ‘interventionist’ state to the birth of mass political parties and working-class organisations – an evolution that had started with Disraeli’s social reform acts of 1875 in Britain and Bismarck’s reforms of 1883 in Germany (SPN 262 (Q 26, 6, 2302)) and had been widely imitated in Europe. The theory of the integral state is considered fundamental for conceptualising the socialist society of the future as consisting of a state without the state traditionally understood as coercion. ‘In a doctrine of the State which conceives the latter as tendentially capable of withering away and of being subsumed into regulated society, the argument is a fundamental one. 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’ (SPN 263 (Q 6, 88, 763–764)). The integral state of advanced capitalism, however, made it possible for the proletariat to start a qualitative transformation of politics already in bourgeois society through the work of intellectuals and a range of working-class institutions, particularly the political party (Sassoon, 1987 [1980], pp. 131–132).

13. The term ‘special notebook’ is normally used to refer to Gramsci’s thematic notebooks, in which, from 1932, he started to systematise, in second draft, some of the notes he had previously written.

14. The first draft of this note (Q 17, 38), lacked the adjective ‘integral’, which only appeared in the second draft.

15. In the pre-prison definition, discussed in Part II, culture was ‘organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; (…) the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations’ (PW1 11; SP 18).

16. In his essay, De Sanctis also clarified that the creation of a new national culture was not the responsibility of a minister of education, but Gramsci did not pick up this point, arguably because, as we have seen in Part II, he ascribed a fundamental role to the public education system.

17. In CW, ‘Right’ is given as translation of Gramsci’s original ‘destra storica’, which referred specifically to the political right in power in the 16 years (1860–1876) during which the Italian unification was realised.

18. From the perspective of today’s concept of multiculturalism, the idea of a nationwide culture might be considered questionable; however, Gramsci's emphasis was on overcoming the limitations of localism and provincialism, which could undermine mass political mobilisation.

19. It does not seem just coincidental that Gramsci clarified, in the first note of this notebook, that ‘returning to De Sanctis’ did not mean ‘“to return” mechanically to those concepts on art and literature that De Sanctis developed’. CW 92 (Q 23, 1, 2185).

20. Gramsci’s discussion of the emerging social group clearly referred to the proletariat, but was expressed in terms of a scheme valid in general, arguably beyond his time, for any fundamental social group.

21. This was in fact part of the general theory of hegemony as enunciated by Gramsci in SPN 57–58 (Q 19, 24, 2010–2011).

22. The study of the ‘situation’ was, in Gramsci, the study of long-term, ‘organic’ social transformations and was linked to questions of ‘strategy’ and ‘propaganda’ (whereas the study of the ‘conjuncture’ was the study of economic fluctuations and was linked to questions of ‘tactics’ and ‘agitation’). See SPN 177, Note 79 (Q 6, 130, 797). For a detailed discussion of Gramsci’s analysis of the relations of force, see Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]), pp. 71–91), Sassoon, (1987 [1980], pp. 184–187) and Francioni (1984, pp. 184–186).

23. For a broader interpretation of this and the following passages, see Sassoon, (1987 [1980], pp. 133–134).

24. In this note, SPN translates Gramsci’s original ‘piano culturale’ (‘cultural plan’) as ‘cultural policy’. However, arguably ‘cultural plan’ should be understood as a particular element of cultural policy; as we will see, Gramsci used the expression ‘politica culturale’ (‘cultural policy’) to refer to a much broader phenomenon.

25. See my discussion of Gramsci’s relationship with the Russian Proletkult movement in Part II. See also Note 29.

26. Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]) has emphasised the fact, already highlighted by Althusser, that Gramsci referred to cultural organisations and institutions as being part of the ‘hegemonic apparatus’ (p. 48). More specifically, Gramsci used the concept of ‘hegemonic apparatus’ to mean the ‘cultural and intellectual organisation’ of the hegemonic group (FS 17 (Q 6, 87, 763)) or the prevailing organisations and political parties of the hegemonic group (SPN 264 (Q 6, 136, 800)). According to Francioni (1984), however, the concept of hegemonic apparatus was later generalised by Gramsci as a consequence of his ‘theoretical turn’ in the late 1930, when the problems of hegemony and of hegemonic apparatus became key elements within his theory of the integral state.

27. The concept of ‘modern society’ in the prison notebooks seems to refer, in a general sense, to a society characterised by the existence of an hegemonic relationship: ‘of hegemony, in other words of democracy in the modern sense’ (FS 154 (Q 14, 56, 1715)).

28. My translation. In FS, Gramsci’s original verb ‘svuotare’ (to empty, to drain) has been translated as ‘to clear’, which however seems to have a slightly different meaning, especially in the context of this note.

29. Gramsci would later write of the need ‘to destroy one hegemony and create another as a necessary moment of the overturning praxis’ (FS 395 (Q 10-II, 41-XII, 1369)).

30. See Note 27.

31. This tactic was put forward by Gramsci amongst his comrades in Turi’s prison under the slogan of a struggle for a constituent assembly. See Buci-Glucksmann (1980 [1975]) where this tactic is analysed in the context of Gramsci’s critique of economism (pp. 237–290).

32. The adjective ‘belletristic’ (‘belletristica’ in the original) referred to the French expression ‘belles-lettres’(‘fine letters’).

33. Although the passage discussed here appears in a grouping of notes in second draft, it is a new fragment that does not appear in earlier notes.

34. The verb ‘must’ is underlined in Gramsci’s handwritten original (see A 68). Gramsci had already analysed the theatre industry, in his early writings, as an exploitative cultural business in Italy. On Gramsci’s early work as theatre critic in Turin, see Davico Bonino (1972) and Dombroski (1986), as well as the anthology of Gramsci’s articles in CW 54–86.

35. Despite its control over cultural institutions with censorship measures and corporatist organisation of production, the fascist state continued, as the Italian liberal state had done before it, to deny direct regular state funding to theatres (but see Scarpellini 1989).

36. In this article, I adopt the method used by Francioni (1984) for distinguishing between specific discussions and the extraction of general concepts in Gramsci’s prison notebooks. According to Francioni, by analysing historical phenomena which presented similarities with contemporary ones that he wished to interpret, Gramsci constructed an ‘analogic model’ to test hypotheses that could then be extracted as general categories of political science and applied to the analysis of contemporary phenomena on the grounds of the isomorphism of the laws governing the two processes; for Francioni, this was the method used by Gramsci to construct the concept of hegemony (p. 177).

37. A discussion of Gramsci’s notes on journalism falls outside the scope of this essay. For an introduction and anthology of relevant notes, see CW 386–425.

38. In CW 122, Gramsci’s original word ‘neolalismo’ is translated as ‘neology’, which would be re-translated, in Italian, as ‘neologismo’. However, Gramsci’s mention of the pathological element confirms that he did not refer to ‘neologismo’, which is the outcome of the normal creation of new words in a language, but to the Italian medical term ‘neolalìa’, which refers to a ‘disorder of expression that is characteristic of paranoid dementia, by which, in language, neologisms prevail over the words of the common language’ (‘Neolalìa’, in Vocabolario Treccani della lingua italiana, online edition, accessed 25 July 2011, my translation).

39. In the quotation, I have replaced the translated word ‘neology’ with Gramsci’s original ‘neolalismo’. See Note 38.

40. This could be seen as one of the ways in which Gramsci’s studies in linguistics constituted a general paradigm for understanding the role of culture in social relations. For analyses of how Gramsci’s studies in linguistics constituted a basis from which he developed his particular understanding of the concept of hegemony, see Lo Piparo (1979) and Ives (1997, 2004).

41. For a broader analysis of Gramsci’s critique of spontaneism, see Sassoon (1987 [1980]), p. 133.

42. In CW, Gramsci’s original expression ‘politica di cultura’ is translated as ‘cultural politics’, the same term used for Gramsci’s expression ‘politica culturale’, but no explanation is given for this choice. Yet, the fact that Gramsci used two different expressions within the same note should be taken to mean that in this particular case he felt the need to express two different concepts. Given that the Italian verb ‘stabilire’ used by Gramsci in this passage means ‘organise in a definitive way, establish, constitute’ (Devoto and Oli 2011), ‘politica di cultura’ should be understood as a normative concept, rather than as a merely analytical one as ‘cultural politics’ (see Note 7). As a consequence, it should be translated with a normative concept distinct from the general concept of ‘cultural policy’.

43. CW translates Gramsci’s expression ‘politica culturale-nazionale’ as ‘national-cultural politics’. However, there is little doubt that Gramsci here meant ‘policy’ rather than ‘politics’.

44. On the links between transformations in language and culture in Gramsci, see Ives (2005).

45. However, it seems that for Gramsci there was a fundamental difference between the creation of a new culture and the creation of new art. Although the arts were part of culture, they could not be a direct object of cultural policy-making because new art was (and should be) an organic consequence of the establishment of a new culture (or civilisation): ‘art is always tied to a definite culture or civilisation and (…) by fighting to reform culture one comes to modify the “content” of art and works to create a new art, not from the outside (by professing a didactic, moralistic or prescriptive art) but from deep within’ (CW 201 (Q 21, 1, 2109)).

46. See Note 7.

47. In the quotation, I have replaced the translated expression ‘cultural politics’ with Gramsci’s original ‘politica culturale’.

48. It is possible to argue that what is understood as cultural policy in today’s cultural policy studies (i.e. cultural action by the state traditionally understood, or political society), to which Gramsci referred as ‘the cultural policy of governments’, for Gramsci was typical of bourgeois society, while in socialist society it constituted a phase that only lasted until the coercive element of the state withered away by being absorbed by civil society. With the concept of cultural policy without further specification, in fact, Gramsci seemed to understand the broader phenomenon within the integral state, encompassing the development of cultural institutions, strategies, policies and plans.

49. Civil society ‘operates without “sanctions” or compulsory “obligations”, but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.’ (SPN 242 (Q 13, 7, 1566)).

50. Harvey’s critical analysis of the neoliberal restructuring of the relationship between state and civil society draws on some of Gramsci’s concepts and seems influenced by Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and of the integral state.

51. As we have seen in Part I, Gramsci’s theory of cultural policy has been construed by the Australian school of cultural policy studies as in antithesis to a ‘governmentality’ theoretical model extrapolated from Foucault, on the basis of the alleged compatibility of the governmentality model with a reformist–technocratic conception of cultural policy and with a neoliberal conception of the governmental function. It is not within the scope of this article to carry out a critique of the ‘governmentality’ model of cultural policy studies. However, to avoid a misunderstanding of Gramsci’s theory of cultural policy as a consequence of a comparison with what is in fact a particular interpretation of Foucault, it is perhaps useful to point out that such an interpretation is open to question, as Foucault seemed critical of the neoliberal strengthening of the governmental function. Significant similarities as well as differences between Gramsci’s and Foucault’s understanding of issues of ideology and culture have been noted (see, for example, Ives, (2004), pp. 138–144). In relation to questions of cultural policy, the idea, put forward through the allegedly Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ model, that from the eighteenth century the government started to be seen as ‘acting on the social’ seems compatible with Gramsci’s theory of the integral state.

52. In support of this argument see Buttigieg (2005).