Editors’ Introduction

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In this issue

we continue RM's longstanding engagement with the work of Antonio Gramsci. Contemporary Gramsci scholars—those who work with and on the categories and modes of analysis pioneered by Gramsci—have demonstrated across our pages the significance of Gramsci's contributions to opening up and rethinking the Marxist tradition and to analyzing the changing modalities of social reality. Now, especially, when Marxian ideas are receiving a new hearing and increased attention, and when the capitalist system (and not just one or another aspect of contemporary politics or economics) is being interrogated and called into question—when “the old is dying but the new cannot be born” and thus “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”—Gramsci's ideas acquire increased relevance. We are therefore pleased to offer a symposium on Peter Ives's recent book, Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School.

Jacinda Swanson considers Ives's book to perform two main roles: on one hand, it fills a gap in Gramscian scholarship, by providing a thorough explanation of Gramsci's approach to language and comparing it to other Marxist theories, such as those of the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School; on the other hand, precisely because language is central to both philosophy and politics, Ives provides an “illuminating” and “accessible” introduction to many of Gramsci's key concepts, including the notion of hegemony. Swanson credits Ives with piecing together Gramsci's scattered and fragmentary comments on the topic and, in doing so, producing a Marxian approach to language that rejects and moves beyond a “mirror of nature” conception of epistemology. She draws particular attention both to Ives's useful discussion of the differences between “good/progressive” and “bad/regressive” forms of hegemony, which yields important insights for democratic theory and theories of social movements, and his forceful critique of Juumlrgen Habermas's conceptions of language and politics (in a manner reminiscent of Gramsci's critique of Benedetto Croce and Nikolai Bukharin). She also poses a series of questions, for Ives and Gramsci scholars more generally, concerning a wide variety of topics: Gramsci's position on the issue of faith and the role it plays in even progressive forms of hegemony; the possibility of achieving political unity in relation to dissent and difference in building a movement to challenge the existing hegemony; the idea of language as a type of labor and the risks incurred by economistic conceptions of social practice; and, finally, whether Gramsci manages to conceptualize political agency in a manner that avoids the problems associated with both liberal voluntarism and structuralist determinism. It is precisely because Ives's treatment of Gramsci's approach to language provokes such questions that it makes a compelling case for incorporating Gramsci's work into the study of politics in the United States, which would make political science “less complicit with the economic, political, and cultural status quo.”

Stefano Selenu also praises Ives for combining a scholarly discussion of Gramsci's linguistic theory with a more general contribution to contemporary debates in philosophy and political science. He singles out Ives's use of the term “vernacular materialism” (in a play on “vulgar materialism”) as a way both of demonstrating—contra such figures as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Michel Foucault—that language is central to Marxism and of putting Gramsci into dialogue with a wide variety of other thinkers—from Alessandro Manzoni and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli through Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In addition, Selenu seeks to problematize Ives's views on three topics: the political significance of Gramsci's claim that Sardinian is a language, the idea that languages develop through cultural and linguistic conflicts, and Gramsci's conception of meaning and metaphor. On the first point, Selenu emphasizes Gramsci's positive recognition of Sardinian—as language and not dialect—as part of the Sardist critical experience and an “anti-imperialist instance of social justice, democracy and pluralism.” On the second, he interprets Gramsci's insistence on the idea that innovations in language occur through the interference of different cultures as including conflict (in the manner depicted by Ives) but also “non-hostile exchanges,” since languages (like cultures and social groups) are “not closed structures.” And, third, Selenu expresses his concern that Ives exaggerates the extent to which meaning is produced only within language, thus missing Gramsci's interest in how meaning is produced by “complex interactions among linguistic forms as well as among 'words and things' in space and time.” Thus, Selenu concludes, Gramsci presumed both a distinction and interdependence between (linguistic) words and (extra-linguistic) things in order to account for the manner in which “human beings linguistically act and produce meaning in society.”

P. Kerim Friedman, for his part, draws attention to Ives's treatment of the Gramscian notion of hegemony as not only a sociological but also an ethical and moral concept, one that encompasses such terms as organic intellectual, spontaneous philosophy, and progressive hegemony. Friedman agrees with Ives in that, while these devices may sound utopian, Gramsci utilized them in a “resolutely anti-utopian” manner. Thus, for example, Gramsci supported the emergence of a unified Italian language, instead of imposing either a specific dialect (like Tuscan) or a universal language (like Esperanto), as an organic process, one that takes place “from the bottom upwards.” In Friedman's view, Gramsci's conception of hegemony, in which organic intellectuals work out the tensions between spontaneous and normative grammars, has a strong resemblance to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the habitus. They are, in one sense, quite similar: both hegemony and habitus comprise spontaneous and normative grammars as well as the interaction between them. Thus, the two terms—hegemony and habitus—are often used interchangeably. But, Friedman argues, the terms are not the same: while Bourdieu's theory of the habitus relies on the institutionalization of dominant cultural and linguistic forms, and thus the forces of social reproduction, Gramsci emphasizes the process of their institutionalization, and thus the way alliances between classes are created and how changes in prevailing norms take place. What this means is that, in comparison to Gramsci, Bourdieu fails to analyze either how the dominant culture comes to be institutionalized or the role played by organic (as opposed to traditional) intellectuals. At the same time, Friedman seeks to demonstrate that Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital provides a useful addendum to Gramsci “by elaborating the hidden mechanisms through which the legitimacy of hegemonic forms are inculcated in the habitus.” It then becomes possible to distinguish two terms Gramsci used almost synonymously—prestige and hegemony—and, with the aid of Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, to understand how the prestige accorded to an existing normative grammar can serve “to undermine efforts to bring about a progressive hegemony.”

In his rejoinder, Ives explains that his work on Gramsci's linguistic writings is an attempt to address Marxists' general lack of engagement with language as a political issue and seeming ceding of the topic to poststructuralists. He then takes up the key points raised by his interlocutors in this symposium. While Ives finds a great deal of overlap between Gramsci and Bourdieu, especially in the latter's analysis of “how mutual communication and dialogue can...disguise inequitable social relations of production,” he is less convinced by the strict demarcation Friedman draws between prestige and hegemony. He expresses a worry that such a distinction may undermine the “complexity of forms of hegemony” on which Gramsci focused. As for Swanson's concern about Gramsci's seemingly benign treatment of faith, Ives interprets Gramsci as carrying out a radical rethinking of the faith/reason dichotomy. Instead of substituting faith with trust (in order to avoid the “dangerous” resonances of fanatical or evangelical faith), Ives expresses his appreciation for the way Gramsci's approach leads to other important themes, such as how the existing “common sense” can be turned into the “good sense” of the philosophy of praxis and how, in refusing an individualistic notion of rationality, it becomes possible to understand political movements as collective projects that seek to transform common sense and culture. Finally, Ives engages with Selenu's insistence on clearly distinguishing closely related concepts—for example, between interference and conflict, and dialects and languages. Ives argues that retaining the former runs the risk of accepting a “pluralist liberal ideology where cultural interaction is evacuated of political relevance or power dynamics,” while the latter does serve to avoid the mistake (even if not the approach adopted by Gramsci) of flattening out the relation between languages and dialects, a crucial point in our age of so-called global English as it exists in tension with “World Englishes.” In any case, Ives reminds us, the path that Gramsci may have taken in his conceptual development “should not dictate the best path for us,” confronting hegemony in a very different conjuncture.

On 6 February 2006, a decade and a half after reunification, the German state initiated the demolition of Berlin's Palace of the Republic, a building that had housed the East German parliament as well as two large auditoriums, art galleries, a theatre, restaurants, and a bowling alley. According to Joseacute Mariacutea Duraacuten, in his contribution to the art/iculations series, the campaign to justify taking down the Palace concealed the actual ideological and economic reasons for the demolition. The International Commission of Experts explained, in its final report in 2002, that the area surrounding the Palace should be transformed to call attention to its historical meaning and the new use of the area as a place of “culture, communication and understanding.” Later, in 2006, an exhibition platform on site dramatized to visitors the benefits—for the environment and the city—of “dismantling, not demolishing” the Palace. Duraacuten, however, found other interests and projects at work in the demolition. He borrows from David Harvey's notion of monopoly rent associated with the commodification of culture and calls attention to the way private capital awaits the “public development of the area in order to secure its profitable use.” He also notes the way the Commission, in proposing the idea of replacing the Palace with a new Humboldt-Forum, endeavored to interpellate visitors as particular subjects of universal culture that would not be served by the old building. What Duraacuten sees is something quite different: an ideological iconoclasm that is remaking Berlin as the showcase for a new kind of public-private governance and an entrepreneurial entity that can compete for tourist revenues and flows of capital on a global scale. Thus, Duraacuten suggests we move beyond the relatively simple question of whether a particular building should be preserved or not to consider the ways the “symbolic and real space of the relations of production” come to be appropriated, redefined, and produced.

New concepts to describe recent changes in economy and society abound. They include knowledge society, information society, postmodernism, postindustrialism, digital capitalism, and empire. Christian Fuchs finds all of them incomplete and misleading, because they are based on the assumption of “radical novelty or radical conservation” and “fail to grasp the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity” in contemporary capitalism. He prefers, instead, a term such as transnational informational capitalism (or, alternatively, transnational network capitalism and transnational knowledge capitalism). It represents, for Fuchs, the combination of objective and subjective features of contemporary capitalism—the rise of cognitive, communicative, and cooperative forms of labor that reinforce and are reinforced by the emergence of technologies and goods that objectify the processes of cognition, communication, and cooperation. It thus allows him to focus on the ways the production of surplus-value and capital accumulation manifest themselves increasingly in symbolic, “immaterial,” and informational commodities (and associated types of labor) as well as the increasing importance of transnational network organizations that make use of cyberspace and other new computer technologies for global coordination and communication. The result is a society that is not only informational and transnational but also stratified and structured along class lines. Fuchs also claims that the sale of capitalist knowledge-based commodities at prices much higher than their values has become the “central value-theoretic mechanism in the process of accumulating capital.” Our task, according to Fuchs, is to analyze both the changes connected to new media and globalizing networks and the continuing dominance of capitalist structures.

Transnational informational capitalism—or however we choose to refer to contemporary society—also comprises uneven development and diasporic worker communities. This is certainly true in Korea where, after the financial crisis of the late 1990s, and in contrast to the much-publicized image of shared prosperity and ethnic homogeneity, nonwhite migrant workers from other Asian countries have increasingly taken on the “dirty, dangerous, demeaning” jobs that others refuse. Young Min Moon, in collaboration with the artist collective Mixrice, documents and explores the significance of the collective's involvement in a series of critical interventions and collaborative projects—utilizing photographic and media recordings, comics, murals, and texts in the form of exhibitions, publications, theater pieces, and the Web—in Maseok, a town that, until the recent government crackdown, included more than 350 small-scale manufacturing businesses and in excess of 600 migrant workers. They draw attention to various dimensions of the work carried out by Mixrice: their attempt to resist narrow and formulaic media representations (which merely provoke a sympathetic gaze and sensationalist news reports) and, instead, to establish a platform on which the workers themselves become enunciating subjects; the contradictions that emerge from the participation of the members of Mixrice in a dialogic practice, which involves both collaborating with and representing the workers (and runs the risk of taking over the enunciating position on behalf of the workers); and the way the diasporic community—within Maseok and in the workers' home country—comprises conflicting desires and realities. In the end, Moon and Mixrice see the collective operating, in the present juncture of social upheavals and the pro-democracy movement, in the “liminal space between the secular, the social, and the performative.”

The articulation of suggestive parallels and common frames of reference in the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan is a recurring topic in contemporary critical thought, especially with respect to a theory of the subject. Here, John Lutz identifies the theme of misrecognition as one such shared element, insofar as it establishes a relationship among the respective authors' treatments of autonomy, fetishism, and alienation. And while he acknowledges that, in particular, Lacan's ahistorical account of the formation of alienated subjects is inconsistent with Marx's materialist stance, he endeavors to show that Lacan provides a framework for envisioning the difference between capitalist and socialist subjects. Lutz begins with Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, which he interprets as exposing the “mystification of social relations as the basis for a bourgeois conception of autonomy,” which exists in contrast to its socialist alternative. The key, for Lutz, is the idea that Marx's treatment of commodity fetishism emphasizes the value of human autonomy, understood as the “freedom to develop one's potential in multiple self-affirming directions,” which “plays a central role in social and psychological well being.” Thus, in a dialectical fashion, the capitalist commodity form constructs (but ultimately frustrates) the ideal model that can only be realized by the subject of socialism. On Lutz's reading, Freud's notion of fetishism and Lacan's theory of the mirror state exhibit many of the attributes Marx ascribes to commodity fetishism: both produce a psychic structure that places individuals in conflict with their surroundings, such that subjects are alienated with respect to the promise of autonomy and misrecognize the conditions that perpetually undermine autonomy. And while Lutz admits that the recognition that these social conditions are not the products of natural laws would not eliminate the fragmentation of the subject, he sees the demystification of the commodity form as a necessary step in delegitimizing capitalism and creating socialist subjects.

It is not enough to silently read the words on the page. Let “The Rom Arcane” come alive by reading it out loud, with full voice, in horror, even rage. Let the words of Jack Hirschman's poem de-romanticize Naples in a manner similar to the effect of watching Matteo Garrone's recent film Gomorra. But Hirschman goes beyond the images of desperate survival, mounting piles of garbage, and mucky streets—to register the failure of the Left, the savage attacks on immigrant and native gypsies, and the rise of fascist street gangs. And to travel beyond the stench of Naples to the newly erected borders of Palestine and Mexico, where the members of the extended Roma people are subject to violent assaults. That's what happens when the Silvio Berlusconis of the world are permitted to win elections, cut their business deals, and remake their fascist movements into mainstream political parties.

The crisis in Marxism has been variously associated with philosophy (as it was for Louis Althusser) and ideology (as Fredric Jameson has argued). For Tyson E. Lewis, the unsolved problem is actually pedagogy. It has been a concern, he argues, over the entire course of Western Marxism, and finds its clearest expression in Jameson's work. Lewis explains that, for Jameson, pedagogy is a question of form—a way of “historicizing the present” such that students are encouraged to overcome their psychical resistance to Marxism and, especially in the “laborato ry experiment” of graduate studies, to confront texts in relation to their historical situation. It is closely intertwined with Jameson's aesthetics of cognitive mapping, in terms of representing both the existing social totality and the utopian desire for a radically different future. This is important, according to Lewis, because its poses the issue of aesthetic philosophy directly (in a manner reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, a key touchstone for Jameson), thus creating a pedagogy that both demands self-referentiality, “that shows itself showing,” and creates a desire for thinking the new. On the latter point, Lewis opposes analyses of utopian dreaming to Jameson's analysis of utopia in relation to anxiety as “the emotional register of utopia.” But, for Lewis, the lack of emphasis on hope has certain drawbacks, particularly the difficulty of overcoming apathy, burnout, and nihilism among teachers. Still, if pedagogy becomes “overly self-confident and self-congratulatory,” it offers solutions rather than problems. Therefore, Lewis proposes a rethinking of Marxism from within a pedagogical problematic that acknowledges its ultimate impossibility: “the desire to cultivate an impossible perception as well as anxiety at the prospect of glimpsing the impossible.”

The Remarx section is for shorter essays that, in general, focus on current events or the working out of arguments or ideas. We publish two such essays in this issue. In the first, Paul Magee focuses on the role public awareness of climate change played in the November 2007 ousting of John Howard, after more than a decade of neoliberal government in Australia. Magee analyzes Howard's defeat as, at least in part, the product of a contest of metaphors over what is natural: economic and population growth (which underwrote the neoliberal project of export promotion and wealth concentration) versus the destruction of the environment (as a result of climate change and global warming). Magee concludes from this victory that those involved in the New Humanities should relinquish their “assault upon all that claims to be natural” and, instead, ally themselves with science. In his view, “science has become the avant-garde of social change.”

Web 2.0 is exploiting a reserve army of amateurs. That's the evocative argument advanced by Vasilis Kostakis concerning the transformation of the computer industry inaugurated by the new version of the Internet. The netarchists and netocrats who now own the platforms promote the participation of amateurs who produce value for the administrators on a wide variety of sites, including Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and YouTube. The amateur enjoys the pleasures of creation, communication, and socialization while the corporations make huge profits. The alternative, according to Kostakis, might be called Social Contract 2.0, which encompasses new meanings and ways of production (peer production) and ownership (peer ownership) and constitutes “an abstract act of commitment towards the creation of a real sphere of the Commons.”

The deadline is 1 August for sending in proposals for papers and panels for RM2009: New Marxian Times. This gathering, the seventh in the series of international conferences sponsored by RM, will be held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on 5-8 November 2009. The current crises of capitalism are clearly serving both to create new openings for Marxian ideas and to offer new challenges for Marxists and other left-wing scholars, students, and activists to think through and beyond these crises. We therefore encourage participants across the range of disciplines and approaches, from political economy and cultural studies to science and art, to present their work and to come and listen to what others are working on. For further details on submitting proposals and registering for the conference, please visit the RM web site: www.rethinkingmarxism.org.

The Editors

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