Post-hegemony and Gramsci: a bridge too far?

Abstract

This article expands upon the theory of post-hegemony so as to maintain the multitude as an operative political category alongside the State. Ironically, it does so by returning to Antonio Gramsci. It argues that the multitude – or, for Gramsci ‘civil society’ – is constitutive of statal politics in two specific ways: (1) the multitude as a constitutive outside or alterity that the State carries; and (2) constitutive in its positivity, as a productive immanence that affects the social field from which the State is drawn. This relationship of constituent participation – not representation – is demonstrated by investigating changes in politics-as-usual in Venezuela.

Keywords:

• Gramsci
• post-hegemony
• hegemony
• the State
• multitude
• civil society

Notes

1. The term ‘enwrap’ here derives from the Italian involucro. Over the years this has been translated as ‘husk’ (1971, p. 268), or ‘shell’ (2007, pp. 310, Q8§130). However, it is this enwrapping translation that best demonstrates how civil society, political society and the State are not – to use Morton's (2013, p. 133) apt term – ‘ontologically exterior’ to one another, but enwrapped within each other.