Social Scientist

Gramsci-Theory-Translation-Reading: "Loose notes and jottings for a group of essays on the history of intellectuals" Author(s): Pier Paolo Frassinelli Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 38, No. 5/6 (May-June 2010), pp. 35-48 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27866709 . Accessed: 15/01/2012 15:05
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"Loose

Gramsci-Theory-Translation-Reading:

notes and jottings for a group of essays on the history of intellectuals"

Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished by this circulation of ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, themovement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity. Having said that, however, one should go on to specify the kinds of

movement

that are possible, in order to ask whether by virtue of having moved from one place and time to another an idea or theory gains or loses in strength, and whether a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for another period and situation.

Said, "Traveling Theory" p.226

nels, tends to lose its cutting edge as a result of being abstracted from its originating circumstances and designated areas of intervention. Said looks, in particular, at what happens to Georg Lukacs' analysis of the phenomenon of reificationwhen it is transplanted, via Lucien Goldmann's reading in Le dieu cach?, from the insurrectionary con text of theHungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 to Parisian academic circles in the 1950s. In his discussion, Said shows, first,how Lukacs' - "a universal fate theorisation of a supposedly universal phenomenon era dominated by commodity fetish afflictingall aspects of life in an in factbe interpreted as a political and theoretical should ism" (230) interventionwithin a specific political situation; and, second, how a out of a determinate historical con powerful theory,which emerges when it is appropriated out of context risksnot only getting juncture, tamed, but can also become what Said, quoting Raymond Williams, calls a "methodological trap": that is, a dogmatic reduction resulting in a theoretical overstatement. For Said, however, the problem with Lukacs and, in the second is that the part of the essay,with Michel Foucault's analysis of power, was already there in the original in Lukacs* pos methodological trap iting reification as "totally dominant" and in Foucault's slogan "power is everywhere" - and was onlymade more visible when theirdisciples

essay "Traveling Theory", Edward Said considers how theory, as it travels from one historical period and situation to another, and especially when it circulates through academic chan In his much-cited

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read these pronouncements as the ultimate truth about social reality.This is one of Said's recognisable stances: his humanist scepticism towards avant garde versions of theory that favour abstraction and specialised idiolects at the expense ofworldliness and communication. But it is not a matter here of tak ing Said as a theoreticalmodel, not in the leastbecause thiswould go radically against the grain of his highly idiosyncratic intellectual demeanour. Rather, I

vo

^ oo >

10have started bymentioning his discussion of travelling theorybecause itoffers a useful point of entry to look at some important elements of Antonio Gram sci's elaboration, in thePrison Notebooks, and theirpresent significance. ~ Like Said, I am mostly interestedhere in protocols of reading: in how we measure and address what Said describes as "the distance between theory then

and now, there and here, [... ] the encounter of theorywith resistances to it" (247). And the first thing that isworth noting, in relation to the Prison Note books as "travelling theory", is that the original sin - i.e., the sin of "theoretical overtotalization" (246) - that Said finds in Lukacs and Foucault is definitely not one that can be attributed to Gramsci's programmatically incomplete, cryptic (so as to circumvent the attentions of the prison authorities) and open-ended work.2 Conceived as a deferred conversation with a distant or,

as it turned out to be, posthumous reader, theNotebooks systematically draw attention to theirprovisional status and to the non-generalizable character of their observations. Throughout the only partially revisedmanuscript, Gram

and the issues addressed examined inmuch more depth. Thus, for instance, at the beginning ofNotebook 8, Gramsci writes: - likememoranda - of these kinds of notes (1) Provisional character and jottings. (2) They result in independent essays but not in a compre hensive organic work. (3) There can be no distinction yet between what

sci keeps reminding himself and the (very much) hypothetical reader that his remarks would require to be checked, the bibliographical references verified

would end up being the "text" and what should be the "notes". (4) These notes often consist of assertions that have not been verified, thatmay be called "rough firstdrafts"; after further study, some of themmay be

discarded, and it might even be the case that the opposite ofwhat they assertwill be shown to be true (PrisonNotebooks, vol. 3, 231)3

3?

"Gramsci's prison writings acquired the status of a text, in a certain sense, - a text over which he had no control and which his first only posthumously

As these and similar advisory notes,4 as well as the structure of theNote books indicate, the thirty-threenotebooks that Gramsci managed to smug gle out of his jail cell were not conceived as a publishable manuscript or a text enjoying definitive status. Joseph Buttgieg has accordingly noted that

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editors tried to 'normalize'" ("The Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci's Work in Progress" 41). It follows that the text of theNotebooks "was not passively landed down' but had to be actively constructed by his successors through a labour of assembly, rearrangement, annotation and (outside Italy) transla tion: processes which all involve interpretation and judgement" (Forgacs 71 ).5 It also follows that reading Gramsci presents peculiar difficulties,which are comparable to those Gramsci himself outlines, with reference toMarx's opus,

in the first entry of his "Notes on Philosophy", where he describes the "pre liminary philological work [that] has to be done" in order to "study the birth of a conception of theworld which has never been systematically expounded by its founder". Gramsci remarks that this task "has to be carried out with the most scrupulous accuracy, scientifichonesty and intellectual loyaltyand with out any preconceptions, apriorism or parti pns" (Selections from thePrison Notebooks 382) - that is,without doing what Gramsci elsewhere suggestively describes as "importuning the text",which iswhat happens when you make it saymore than it actually does in order tomake the textfit a preconceived thesis (quoted in Buttgieg, "The Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci's Work in Progress" 38). Therefore, if we want to remain faithful to Gramsci's

leftbehind as expressions of both the system of thought that pro duced them and the historic-political conjuncture which theywere originally meant to analyse and intervene in. Gramsci

own method, reading theNotebooks should involve a "preliminary detailed philological work" aimed decoding and interpretingthe textual fragments that

In the next section of this essay, I will undertake this task by looking at Gramsci's "Loose notes and jottings for a group of essays on the history of 12, their genesis and their position in the devel of Gramsci's thought. I will then conclude, in the final section, by opment discussing some aspects of the recent debate surrounding Gramsci's con intellectuals" in Notebook

what is dated about his reading of Gramsci today is not a matter of critiquing but rather, in line with his own radical historicism, of verifying elaboration, what aspects of his work are still useful to us, and which ones have, on the unreadable or a "political non-starter" (Forgacs contrary, become effectively in order to come to termswith the historical and political distance that 87)
separates our from Gramsci's world.

contribution to contemporary radical theory and politics ismethodological: revising Said's cautionary warning against turning context specific theoretical perspectives into absolute truths about social life, I argue that a productive

ceptualisation of the intellectual and its significance today. Looking at some of the recent critiques and revisions of Gramsci's elaboration, I will make themodest, but inmy view important claim thatGramsci's most significant

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"Loose notes and jottings for a group of essays on the history of intellectu
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so to

As we approach Gramsci's "loose notes and jottings for a group of essays on the history of intellectuals", the "preliminary philological work [that] has to be done" sends us back to the letterto his sister in law Tatiana ("Tania") dated 1019 March 1927, inwhich Gramsci sketches the first outline of his research

project:

So I'd like to set up a plan for the intense and systematic study of some thatwould absorb and concentrate my inner life.Four ideas have o subject > come tome so far, and this is a sure sign that I haven't been able to get started.One is research on the history of Italian intellectuals, their ori gins and groupings in relation to cultural events, theirvarious modes of major lines of thinking, and so on. Naturally, I could only sketch out the

this highly appealing argument, given the impossibility of obtaining the immense amount ofmaterial necessary. Do you remember that short,

superficial essay ofmine about southern Italy and the importance of B. Croce? Well, I'd like to elaborate the thesis I only touched on then,from a "disinterested" point of view, f?r ewig [forever]. (Lettersfrom Prison, vol. 1, 83) The "short, superficial essay ofmine" mentioned in the letter is "Alcuni temi della questione meridionale" ("Some Aspects of the Southern Ques the unfinished article that he was writing before his arrest, and which tion"), represents the crucial link between Gramsci's pre-prison writings and the
Notebooks.

The issues addressed in this essay and many of the formulations that Gramsci proposes are, unmistakably, classic Marxist ones. The problem pos ited by the "Southern Question" for Gramsci corresponds to the canonical Leninist question of the "'hegemony of the proletariat': i.e., of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of theworkers' State". "The proletariat", Gramsci explains, "can become the leading [dirigente]and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which al lows it tomobilize themajority of theworking population against capitalism and the bourgeois State" (443). However, as Said has noted, thenew departure

3g

with "the specific development of Italian history": "In Italy, in the real class

kacs' History and Class Consciusness by grasping social history in "territorial, spatial, geographical" terms (Culture and Imperialism 56-57). In addressing Gramsci's overriding concern is in fact general questions of political strategy,

represented by the essay lies in how itdisplaces the problematic of temporality thathad dominated theHegelian Marxist traditionwhich culminates with Lu

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question in general"' (443). Starting with this observation, Gramsci then outlines the stratifications,divisions and conflicts that define the social and political landscape of southern Italy.He describes the Italian south as a "great agrarian bloc" marked by social disintegration and "made up of three social layers": "the great amorphous, disintegrated mass of the peasantry; the intel

relations which exist there, this [proletarian hegemony] means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. But the peasant question is determined in Italy; it is not the 'peasant and agrarian

aspirations and needs" because they are politically subjected to the hegemony of the big landowners through themediation of the "great intellectuals" (454). Hence Gramsci's emphasis on the reactionary function performed by the as Benedetto Croce, who align "cosmopolitan" southern intellectuals such themselves with the tradition of European culture, and who are thus respon sible for providing a deterritorialised intellectual model that contributes to more generally, separate Southern intellectuals from the peasant masses and, local society and culture. Gramsci's outline prefigures some of the fundamental theses concern will be elaborated in ing the role of intellectuals inmodern societies, which and towhich Gramsci's international reputation as a political theNotebooks, theorist is associated. As Marcus Green notes: The significance of Gramsci's analysis in "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" is thathe becomes aware of the integral function that intellec tuals perform in political leadership: theyprovide a noncoercive element on itsown. of consent in political domination that the state cannot fulfil a noncoercive reinforcement of the state That is, intellectuals provide

lectuals of the petty and medium rural bourgeoisie; and the big landowners and great intellectuals". Looking at the political dynamics that traverse this composite social bloc, Gramsci observes that "Southern peasants are in per petual ferment,but [...] incapable of giving a centralized expression to their

which in his later elaboration Gramsci would call the "organic intellectual": Industry has produced a new typeof intellectual: the technical organizer,

Gramsci introduces the crucial opposition between the element of continuity thatdefines the greatmajority of southern intellectuals,who swell the ranks of most part a reaction the state bureaucracy and the clergy, and who are for the emer ary product of the rural bourgeoisie, and the novelty represented by the gence, in developed capitalist societies, of "a particular type of intellectual"

formations in a determined social and historical, unevenly developed context. This theoretical situatedness is furtherunderscored by the passages inwhich

and the power and authority of dominant groups. (4) is also important to note here is thatGramsci's most general and abstract formulations are arrived at through an analysis of specific intellectual What

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of intellectual which has prevailed, with all its characteristics of order and intellectual discipline. In the countries, on the other hand, where so agriculture still plays a considerable or even preponderant role, the old 10 type has remained predominant. It provides the bulk of the State per sonnel; and locally too, in the villages and littlecountry towns, ithas the ^ function of intermediarybetween the peasant and the administration in bo _ general. In Southern Italy this type predominates, with all its character > istic features. (454-55) It is through this distinction between a new and a traditional type of intel lectual that the link - which sends us straight to theNotebooks - ismade be tween Gramsci's expanded conception of the intellectual and his theorization

2 the specialist in applied science. In the societies where the economic forces have developed in a capitalist direction, to the point where they have absorbed the greater part of national activity, it is this second type

of hegemony. As Gramsci explains in the letter to Tatiana that Imentioned before, his original plan was towork on "a study of Italian intellectuals, their origins, their groupings in accordance with cultural currents, and their varia tions of thinking, etc." (Letters from Prison, vol. 1, 83). Gramsci would return on the topic in another letter to his sister in lawwritten four years later, when his work on the Prison Notebooks was well under way: "the research I have done on intellectuals is very broad [...], I greatly amplify the idea ofwhat an intellectual is and do not confinemyself to the current notion that refersonly to the preeminent intellectuals". Gramsci furtherexplains that this amplified notion of the intellectual isdirectly connected to an expanded definition of the state as a balance between "political society" - the "coercive apparatus meant to mold the popular mass in accordance with the type of production and - and "civil economy at a given moment" society", which forGramsci cor to "the hegemony of a social group over the entire national society", responds

and which is also the sphere within which intellectuals operate (Lettersfrom Prison, vol. 2, 66-67). But Gramsci doesn't stop there: his amplified idea ofwhat an intellectual iswill eventually lead him, inNotebook 12, to redefine the category intellec tual altogether and, finally, to relativise the opposition between intellectuals and non intellectuals: When one distinguishes between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, one is referringin realityonly to the immediate social function of the profes sional category of the intellectuals, that is,one has inmind the direction inwhich their specific professional activity isweighted, whether towards

This means intellectual elaboration or towardsmuscular-nervous effort. that although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non because non-intellectuals do not exist. [...] There is no hu 40 intellectuals,

Gramsci-Theory-Translation-Reading

from thePrison Notebooks 9) As readers of Gramsci will know, the statement "non-intellectuals do not exist" - i.e., everyone is an intellectual- is one of the of Notebooks. leitmotifs the This forGramsci doesn't mean - as inmany a brand of philosophical ideal ism,from Immanuel Kant to Benedetto Croce - that philosophizing or pure intellectual speculation represent a higher development ofwhat can be found in a latent form in every individual's spontaneous spirituality.For Gramsci, all social subjects are intellectuals not in asmuch as theyhave certain intellectual or spiritual "instincts",which as a radical historicist he posits as "a primitive

man activityfrom which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. (Selections

and elementary historical acquisition" (Selections from thePrison Notebooks 199), but because of the intellectual investment involved in the activities that they perform in society; investmentwhose differentdegree of specificityand specialization is a historical product of the polarization between "manual"

and "intellectual" activitieswithin that social division of labour which Marx and Engels had seen as lying at the root of the development of class society " (see Baratta, Lo 'spirito popolare creativo'" 107-8; and Frassinella "A Note on Intellectual Labor"). Again, much as he reaches a high level of abstraction, forGramsci these categories originate from the observation of specific historical and social

developments: from the conditions of the peasants in the rural south to his analysis, in the famous pages on "Americanism and Fordism", of the condi tions of industrialworking class in the north of Italy,which are based on his

appeared in an article, titled "The Communist Party", published in L'Ordine Nuovo in September 1920:

early experiences with theweekly V Ordine Nuovo and the organization of the Factory Councils in Turin. A first elaboration of this theme had in fact

Surely the very fact that theworker stillmanages to think, even when he is reduced to operating in complete ignorance of how or why of his

nization, which liberates energies that are produced by the conflict between proletarian creativity and the boredom and monotony induced by the condi

Communist Party. (Selectionsfrom Political Writings 1910-1920 333). Here Gramsci describes themiracle of the collective proletarian subjectiv ity expressed by the Communist Party as a paradoxical outcome of mecha

ideas, by struggling against fatigue, against boredom and themonotony of a job that strives tomechanize and so kill his against inner life- thismiracle is organized in the Communist Party, in the will to struggle and the revolutionary creativity that are expressed in the

practical activity, is a miracle? This miracle of the worker who takes charge each day of his own intellectual autonomy and his own freedom to handle

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thePrison Notebooks 8). Even in themost extrememodern manifestation of what Marx had described as the process throughwhich, in capitalist produc tion, "labor loses all its characteristics of art", or "skill", to become "more and more abstract and irrelevant, [... ]more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, [...] activity pure and simple, regardless of its form" (Grundrisse 297), labour remains an activity that cannot be performed without the involvement of a "minimum" of intellectual investment.And for Gramsci, as Giorgio Baratta has noted in a fine essay, this "minimum" is in fact quite a lot. For it allows him towork out one of the central political theses of the Prison Notebooks, which is that of the elaboration of a theoretical and practical model of intervention towards a mass intellectual development: The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists [... ] in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous efforttowards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that themuscular-nervous effortitself,in so faras it is an element of a general which is perpetually innovating the physical and social practical activity, world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world. (Selectionsfrom thePrison Notebooks 9) Hence Gramsci's distinction between "traditional" types of intellectuals men of letters,philosophers, artists- and a new type of "organic" intellectual activity that through its active participation in practical lifebecomes a direc tive and organizing element in the struggle for hegemony - that is, inwhat

Notebook 12, commenting on theTaylorist "mechanization of theworker" in mass industrial production, Gramsci observes that in fact "purelymechanical labor does not exist and [...] even Taylor's phrase of the 'trained gorilla' is a metaphor to indicate a limit in a certain direction: in everyphysical work, even themost degraded and mechanical, there exists aminimum of technical quali fication, that is, a minimum of creative intellectual activity" (Selectionsfrom

tions of labour.When Gramsci returns to this question in theNotebooks, the change of emphasis is significant, in thathe now sees this irrepressible creativ ity as a product of the practical activity involved in physical work itself. In

42

lesce in a couterhegemonic struggle that culminates in the "war of position", whose ultimate end forhim remains the conquest and transformation of capi talist state,but which he no longer sees as subsumable under the single process ?f a political upheaval leading to the overthrow and replacement of the exist

Gramsci unequivocally identifies, throughout theNotebooks, as the struggle "in which a new conception of society is not only presented in politics but throughout the superstructural realms of ideology, culture, philosophy, lit erature" (Green 22). For Gramsci, political and cultural activities in these diverse realms coa

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ing state apparatus.6 In the prison writings, Gramsci's political elaboration was marked by the historical defeat represented by the ascendancy of fascism and the failed proletarian insurrections of 1919-21. In tryingtomake sense of and respond to these events,Gramsci's reflections focus first and foremost on the necessary, long termpreparatory work for successfulworking class seizure of state power. For Gramsci this includes the creation of a new stratum of

bourgeois hegemony and ideology in order to affirm the national leadership of theworking class and its allies.Many of the key terms ofGramsci's political lexicon - from "war of position" to "national-popular", which respectively name the political strategyand the cultural and political movement required as a pre-condition for a successful revolutionary rupture thus indicate a shift from spontaneist, insurrectionary positions thatwere prevalent in the early days of the Italian Communist Party, towards an emphasis on the patient ag wage the struggle for the successful gregation of forces that could effectively
achievement of state power. There and Here

organic intellectuals and the absorption of traditional intellectuals from the opposing class, which is part of the process of disarticulating and supplanting

Then

and

Now,

without paying close attention to the specificityof the unevenly developed and divided Italian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Conversely, as we reread these notes today,we must take stock of the appearance of new

Inmy necessarily compressed outline, I have tried to show that it should not be possible, inprinciple, to read Gramsci's notes on the history of intellectuals

by the theoretical and political crisis ofMarxist-Leninism and the demise of the Soviet bloc. In other words, such a reading calls for a reconceptualisation, on the one hand, of intellectual labour, and on the other, of the relation be tween intellectuals, politics and the state. Obviously, I do not have space here to undertake such a task,but Iwould still like to indicate some of the issues related to Gramsci's writings that have

current dynamics of uneven development; the growing marginalization of most parts of theworld; and, not least, the changed traditional intellectuals in situation that distance us from Gramsci, which on the left ismarked political

forms of flexible, or post-Fordist organization of labour, the related trans formations in the social composition ofworking class, and the emergence of radically new forms of "affective" and "immaterial" labour (Lazzarato); the

been raised by current debates in cultural and political theory. My firstobser vation with respect to this, is that notwithstanding the scholarly activity that continues to surround Gramsci's writings,7 his perceived political relevance to the newest forms of radical activism and political organisation - from the in Seattle, Genoa and

mass demonstrations against capitalist globalisation

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World Social Forum - is many other parts of theworld to the formation of the rapidly declining. Few concepts aremore antithetical to the political practice of the newest social movements

10 ^ ?

vo

than Gramsci's notion of hegemony as the condition of possibility for the attainment of state power. As texts such as JohnHolloway's Changing theWorld without Taking Power or Richard J.F. New Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Day's significantlytitledbook Gramsci is est Social Movements to thesemovements illustrate, the new wave of struggles that has given rise is for themost part waged and theorised in the name

oo

> of the state apparatus as a political goal. It is thus not surprising thatGram sci's conception of the intellectual has also been subjected to radical critiques based on the rejection of the role of the organic intellectual in the subaltern's

of decentralised, horizontal, polycentric, community and affinityoriented perspectives thathave more or less antirely abandoned the idea of the control

mediated by the revolutionary party, towards national hegemony. In struggle, their recent Commonwealth, for instance,Miachael Hardt and Antonio Negri no place forvanguards succinctly state that in today's radical politics "there is

simply accepting or rejecting them as the horizons of today's radical theory and politics (a debate for another occasion). For now, Iwill just acknowledge that these critiques indicate a significant shift in radical political thought and are practice that has radically changed theways inwhich Gramsci's writings read. Yet, this does not need to result in a facile dismissal of Gramsci being as a "dated" thinker and political theorist: not in the least because some of the new theorisations of intellectual and immaterial labour that have been elaborated in the same political milieus that I have justmentioned seem to a new present an implicit expansion and revision of Gramsci's categories for
"post-Taylorist" scenario.

[... ] or even intellectuals organic to the forces of progress in the Gramscian sense" (118). a Looking at these and similar positions, it is not matter here of either

by putting subjectivity towork both in the activation of productive coopera tion and in the production of the 'cultural' contents of commodities" (142). For Lazzarato, this translates into the tendential overcoming of the division between manual and intellectual labour, whose theoretical genealogy he traces back toMikhail Bakhtin, who, we are reminded, "defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between 'material labor and intellectual labor' 44

According toMaurizio Lazzarato's influential discussion, if the Taylorist was "not paid to think", approach to production had decreed that theworker of labour increasingly demands workers' participation to todaymanagement the planning and creation of the commodity and the production process. As Lazzarato puts it, "the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely

and demonstrates how creativity is a social process" ( 146). Gramsci's relevance

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here should be obvious. Indeed, shouldn't Gramsci's writings also be included in this genealogy? Moreover, wouldn't an historical reading of Gramsci help

loristworld, too often bypass? (See, as a significant case in point, the silence Michael Hardt and on, or, at best, the cursory treatment of these dynamics in Antonio Negri's recent Commonwealth, where immaterial production is as serted to hold an hegemonic position within the global economy). This brings us back to the question of reading,which ends themetonymi

the need to pay close attention to those spatial and geographical dynamics of uneven development that recent theories of immaterial labour, which they (implicitly or explicitly) associate with amore or less homogeneous post-Tay

us to analyse the phased development which, throughmany ruptures but also continuities, has led to the formation of what Lazzarato calls "mass intellec wouldn't a reading of Gramsci remind us of tuality"?And, most importantly,

cal chain inmy title. My claim is simply that ifany lesson is to be learned from Gramsci today, thismust be extrapolated from a historical and philologically grounded reading of his work. As we approach theNotebooks, it is thus im

portant to note the acute methodological self-consciousness that reflects the historicist imperative thatpervades Gramsci's elaboration. I startedwith Said's argument about travelling theory and theway a theory is abused when it is read and appropriated without paying attention to the distance between the circumstances of itsoriginal elaboration and those that should determine and contextualise our use of it,between there and here, then and now. As history

moves

and social reality changes, categories must also change and theories need to be verified and revised in the light of the new reality. Some theories travelbetter than others, and there is no doubt that there is a lot to inGramsci that is no longer "readable" in terms of the here and now. But perhaps the lesson - thematerialist lesson thatwe can still learn from Gramsci is about a reading and writing practice that, in his own words, "'translates' the ele

ments of historical life into theoretical language, but not vice versa" (Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, 56).

Pier

Paolo

Frassinelli campus.

teaches

literature and

cultural

studies

at Monash

University,

South Africa

Notes 1 A

2009. Migration of Theory", Johannesburg, (in) Transit.Theory andMigration /

version

of this essay

was

originally

presented

at a workshop

titled "Writing

45

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me to revise itfor Iwould like to thankProfessor Anil Bhatti for encouraging

publication and Ulrike Kistner for her comments.

structure the of Prison Notebooks 2 Joseph Buttgieg has noted thatthe fragmentary which Gramsci was writing, conditions in isnot simply the resultof thedifficult but is also strictly related to the "complicated and determinedly antidogmatic, of processes of thought which [the Notebooks] are a recordand an nontotalizing
expression" ("The Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci's Work in Progress" 38).

O Z 00 m >

Prison Notebooks, I provide thedetails of theEnglish 3 For quotations from the

translation used: Prison

3 volumes published thus far of JosephA. Buttgieg's unabridged edition; or Nowell Selectionsfrom thePrison Notebooks forQuintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith's abridged edition. 4 See for instance, Notebook 4, Paragraph 16,or thebeginningofNotebook 11. are with "translation" by nomeans unique to 5 It isworth noting thattheproblems The first editionsof thetext. unabridged,"critical" Italianedition foreignlanguage of the notebooks, reproducingthe original order of themanuscript,was only published in 1975 (Quaderni dal carcere.Edizione critica).This editionreplaced whose what until thenhad been considered the"official"editionof thenotebooks, had been supervisedby the ItalianCommunist Party leaderPalmiro publication Togliatti,who worked on it in collaborationwith Felice Platone. Although the
omissions Gramsci's in this edition were

Notebooks,

followed

by

the volume

number,

for the

in that,for the sake of readability,it thematicallyreorganisedand rearranged - materialismo storico disciplinarygrid: itpresenteda volume on philosophy // e lafilosofia di Benedetto Croce [Historical Materialism and thePhilosophy
on history // Risorgimento - one on literature on and National Life]', a volume [Literature e sullo Stato moderno sulla politica [Notes on 89-94 and so on (see Modenti Modern the State], original text so as to make the various part fit into a recognisable

minimal,

editorial

interventions

were

significant

a volume Croce]', of Benedetto e vita nazionale Letteratura Note sul Machiavelli, politics Machiavelli, on Politics and?n

and 182n. 21). The "criticaledition"published in 1975undoes thissuperimposed the division and returns textto itsoriginalform includingthedivision between B (one version), and C (revisedversion). Even this important A texts (first draft), work of restoration, however, is unlikely to representthe final word on the
text. Giorgio Baratta, for instance, of Gramsci's appropriate mode of presentation the critical edition represents a fundamental has noted that although development in Gramsci text, and is thus mostly of interest studies, it is not an easily readable to a relatively audience small readership made that a more accessible of scholars edition and specialists, potentially could reach. Singling

but not to the

wider

out for praise Quintin Hoare and GeoffreyNowell Smith's abridged English edition,which for all its faults succeeded inwidely disseminatingGramsci's work of thoughtin theEnglish speakingworld, Baratta suggests thata similar
"translation" or, as he puts it, "democratic philology" is now required in Italian (Le rose e i quaderni 6 I have 226-29).

in further detail. no space here to discuss Gramsci's concept of hegemony contra interpretations of Gramsci's that It is important to note, however, thought as a radical version of that have rewritten and sanitized his notion of hegemony

46

the Laclau andMouffe, 65-71) throughout liberalpluralism (see, for instance,

Gramsci-Theory-Translation-Reading

Notebooks Gramsci explicitlyargues thatforhim hegemony is a Leninist concept

(see, for instance, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 357).

fl>"

7 Beside the ongoing translation the of Notebooks, see, for instance,the special issue of the journalPostcolonial Studies on The Subaltern and thePopular or
volumes such

which Gramsci is revisitedand reinterpreted the light the recentdebates in in of

postcolonial and cultural studies.

as Gramsci,

Said

il postcoloniale,

edited

by

Iain Chambers,

in

o_ o ~n 3 ZD CD

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