Abstract
A boom in Gramscian studies is currently underway in the English-speaking world. Joseph Buttigieg’s critical edition of the Prison Notebooks has provoked a ‘return to the text’ and a rejection of the ‘facile and complacent readings’ Perry Anderson once claimed stemmed from interpreting Gramsci’s work on the basis of partial and thematic translations. The fullest expression of this philological approach is Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment (2009), a detailed exegesis of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis which teases out the original implications of ‘absolute historicism, absolute immanence and absolute humanism’ for a progressive (class) politics.
Meanwhile, a more spatial Gramsci has moved from ‘spectral presence’ to centre stage. Gramsci’s rich geographical sensibility, with its considerations of, amongst other things, North and South, Americanism, molecular transformation, ‘supercity’, position and manoeuvre led Edward Said to celebrate his ‘essentially territorial apprehension of human society’, and Bob Jessop to describe him as a spatial theorist for whom social relations’ location in space, place and scale are as absolute and emphatic as their historical specificity.
Michael Ekers and his co-editors’ Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics emerges out of these twin strands of scholarship. It both excavates previously interred aspects of Gramsci’s work and establishes a dialogue between the constitutive political and geographical moments within an overall philosophy of praxis. The section on Nature, for example, establishes the concept’s Gramscian significance through Benedetto Fontana’s typology of its use within the Notebooks before shifting to Abdurazack Karriem’s concrete study of the co-construction of autonomous political activity and agroecology by the Brazilian landless movement, and thence to Alex Loftus’s examination of ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ within environmental thought. Here, as elsewhere in the volume, emphasis is placed on Gramsci’s ‘politics of translation’. If Thomas and Said provide inspiration for this dialectical method, then post-Marxist uses of Gramsci are its target. In particular, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) stands accused of an arid theoreticism which is ‘fundamentally at odds with . . . the philosophy of praxis’ (p. 302).
As this might suggest, the Gramsci represented here is the theorist of subalternity rather than of dominance. Jim Glassman’s chapter argues that Gramsci is too widely read for his observations on working-class accommodation and the failure of revolution, and many of the essays seek to read against the grain of such western Marxist pessimism, finding counter-hegemonic potential in the politics of difference and amongst insurrectionary movements in the Global South. Less attention is paid to the ways in which dominant groups continue to elaborate (expansive?) hegemonic projects nor, despite substantial address to questions of passive revolution, is there much examination of the forms in which current financial and legitimation crises are expressed.
Gramsci’s spatial historicism makes him tricky to use as a general theorist, and the editors stress the problems attendant on both ‘travelling with Gramsci while travelling beyond him’ (p. 31). Some of these extensions of his work lose sight of Gramsci a little, but others, particularly Stefan Kipfer and Gillian Hart in their concluding essay, persuasively outline the ways in which translating Gramsci through autonomist, postcolonial and feminist thought can answer the needs of the current conjuncture. If this is similar to Laclau and Mouffe’s position, the authors are careful to point out that such a new formation has a ‘communist’ centre, ‘provided one does not conceive of communism in desocialized, falsely universalist and merely human terms’ (p. 339).
The editors acknowledge that British cultural geography has already had a Gramscian moment, refracted through the work of Stuart Hall, and Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics strikes out in a different direction, showing only modest interest in culture as expressive practices. I slightly regretted this absence in a volume which otherwise greatly extends and enriches our knowledge of Gramsci and spatial historicism. As if in answer to this absence, the book begins with two ‘framings’ – John Berger’s meditation on Gramsci, place and struggle, ‘How to Live With Stones’, and the cover, a fantastic mural of Gramsci from the Sardinian town of Orgosolo – both of which point to the ways in which the making of place through signification continues to lie at the heart of the war of position.