Cultural Policy Review of Books by Oliver Bennett

Author:Oliver Bennett [Bennett, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415695473
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13716373
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Antonio Gramsci, Prison notebooks

Paola Merli

Department of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Prison notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci/edited with Introduction by Joseph A. Buttigieg/translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg (the first volume with Antonio Callari), New York, Columbia University Press (vols. I, II and III), 1992, 1996, 2007; 608 pp., 728 pp., 696 pp., hardback, ISBN 978-0-231-060820, 978-0-231-10592-7, 9780-231-13944-1

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are perhaps the most important writings by any Marxist thinker interested in understanding the role of ideological superstructures in political-historical developments. His reflections, however, projected him far beyond Marxism in the effort to develop a philosophy of praxis, i.e. of ‘the relationship between human will (the superstructure) and the economic structure’ (Vol. III, p. 170) free from the influence of positivist philosophy. The notebooks, written in Fascist prisons between 1929 and 1935, started to be published in Italy in 1947, two years after the liberation from Fascist rule and Nazi occupation, and 10 years after Gramsci’s death, and soon became a key influence not just on the political strategy and cultural policies of the Italian Left, but also on intellectuals and scholars worldwide. The bibliography generated by his writings is massive, currently numbering about 15,000 items in 33 languages, spanning a huge range of subjects.1 His theory of ideology ‘anticipated’ Althusser’s ‘conception of ideology as a practice producing subjects’ and Foucault’s view of power as a ‘strategy’ (Mouffe [1979]2002, pp. 313, 315), while still offering a more complex and nuanced elaboration of such concepts. His work inspired some of the most innovative and deep reflections on culture in the twentieth century, and changed the way in which we approach the analysis of culture in a lasting way. His plan to carry out ‘research into the formation of an Italian public spirit in the last century: in other words, research into the nature of Italian intellectuals, their origins, their groupings according to the cultural currents of their time, their diverse modes of thought etc.’ (Gramsci [1927]1988, my emphasis), which resulted in his notes on the history of intellectuals, resonates with Habermas’ later study of the emergence of the bourgeois ‘public sphere’. Although segments from the Prison Notebooks started to be published in English translation in 1957, Gramsci’s work had a major impact on scholarship in English only after the publication of Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s selection in 1971, but soon acquired a key role in the development of Anglo-American Cultural Studies, particularly through the work of Stuart Hall. Edward Said ([1978]1995), who referred to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as ‘cultural leadership’, considered it indispensable to any analysis of Western culture.

Perhaps the only discipline in which Gramsci’s work has tended to be avoided is cultural policy studies, after Tony Bennett’s (1992) warning that the influence of hegemony theory has contributed to making cultural studies not suitable for the study of cultural policy and institutions. This is a pity because the application of Gramscian approaches to the study of this field might well generate just the sort of insights that are needed to invigorate an infant discipline.

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