Here’s the plan:
1/Read the intro to Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy or whatever it’s called
2/Read the relevant Gramsci related to their writing, derived by chasing their footnotes and other recommendations
3/ Discuss both, mainly the Gramsci
4/ Destroy Laclau and Mouffe
Mark and me so far.
Any other takers?
crashcourse666 
Hey, I’m in. Never read any Laclau and Mouffe either but I guess that’s OK.
I think I might be a taker. I’m planning on taking a class that covers Laclau and Mouffe’s piece. Its out of the Philosophy Dept at SJSU which has some really bright teachers. The flyer for the class ironically has the democratic socialist fist holding a flower logo on it.
I always love an excuse to go back over Gramsci, but I’d really like to get a handle on how these folks read Gramsci. I first came up on them while trying to understand a prof I worked with and her post-modern Marxist reformism… the funny things is that she’s writing a book called ‘how to abolish capitalism,’ but the draft she gave out of course has few thoughts to offer on how to do such and it no wonder when capitalism is analyzed as some kind of nebulous web of relationships without a ruling class or proletariat of any sort.
Your name came up in preliminary discussions – I said I thought you were already au fait with Gramsci?
I haven’t read much of his stuff first hand… mostly interpretations as he was so influential on 1960s and 70s Anglo marxists. So really keen to go to the source.
I’d offer to join in, but I think you guys are much more clever than me.
Rob you charmer you. While flattery will get you everywhere, you’re being too modest. Why not join in and if it gets tiresome then pull the plug?
The Tony Gramsci story: or, what happens to nice marxist mamas’ boys. Serio, his marxo-humanism is interesting as are his readings of philosophical klassix, mainly as an illustration of failure. Political power flows out the barrel of a gun, alas.
I can’t wait to see the brawl. Here’s something that could be a little prologue, from Domenico Losurdo, “Fleeing History”:
In 1818, in the midst of the Restoration, when the weakness of the French Revolution appeared obvious, even those who, at the start, had greeted it favourably were preoccupied with distancing themselves from the historical events which began in 1789; it had represented a colossal ambiguity or worse, a shameful betrayal of noble ideals. Byron proceeded this way when he intoned:
But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime…
Must we make this despair our own, limiting ourselves only to replacing the date 1789 by that of 1917 and “the cause of Liberty” with “the cause of Socialism”?
Must communists be ashamed of their history?
The history of persecutions endured by ethnic and religious groups shows us a singular phenomenon. It happens that the victims themselves tend to appropriate the point of view of the oppressors and begin to despise themselves and hate themselves. Selbsthass ou Self-hate, Autophobia, has been studied above all in connection with Jews who for millenia were victims of a systematic campaign of discrimination and defamantion, But something similar is witnessed in the course of the history, also tragic, of black people deported from from their lands, reduced to slavery, subjected to oppression and deprived of their own identity: as a result young African American women, even those blessed with the most splendid beauty, began to desire and to dream of being white or, at least, of seeing their own colour altered and lightened. The victims’ adhesion to the values of the oppressors can go this deep.
The phenomenon of autophobia does not concern only religious and ethnic groups. It can also strike social classes and political parties suffering grave defeats. Above all if the winners, setting aside their most powerful arms or at least relegating them to the second resort, continue their murderous campaign delegated today to the “multimediatic” forces. Among the many problems which afflict the communist movement, that of autophobia, of self hatred, is not the least. Let’s set aside the ex leaders and ex members of the PCI, who sometimes announce that they belonged to this party long in the past without ever having been communists. It’s not by chance that they turn their gazes, with admiration and perhaps envy, toward Clinton who took the opportunity of his reelection to thank God for seeing to it that he was born an American. A subtle form of self hatred is stimulated in all those who had not the luck to be born among the chosen people, the people to whom Providence confided the task to spread throughout the world, by every means available, the ideas and the commodities “made in USA”.
But as I’ve already remarked, it’s best to set aside these ex communists who regret not having been born anglo saxons and liberals and to have been placed by an evil fortune far from the sacred heart of civilisation. Unfortunately, self hatred is also manifest in the ranks of those who, while all the time declaring themselves still communists, reveal themselves to be obsessed by the concern to reaffirm their total estrangement from a past which is simply, for them as for their political adversaries, synonymous with abjection. To the haughty narcissism of the victors, which transfigures their own history, corresponds the self-flagellation of the vanquished.
what’s the deal with laclau? I hate on gramsci (he’s a bad janitor for marxian/hegelian messes), but i like his stuff about the roots of religion and the necessity of philosophy.
Sounds interesting, if I can find any time between work and the outrageous effort involved in having a toddler and an infant in the house. I read H&SS back in undergrad as part of my thesis, and lately have been interested in taking another look, partly because of that wretched book “Gramsci is Dead.” And of course Gramsci himself was pivotal in the development of the early STO take on consciousness and such. So, yeah, I’ll (attempt to) do the reading, but I leave it to others to tell me what I’m supposed to read, after I get through the L&M.
Rob, aren’t you at Cambridge for God’s sake? I’m sure you can keep up – I’ve read your blog.
I found my copy of the Laclau and Mouffe. I’m not totally sure it’s going to be of much use after leafing through today. I’d like to suggest that those of us interested in reading that start now (read the first two chapters) and let’s say we’ll start Gramsci in ten days(ish), that will give us time to chase up references from the Laclau and Mouffe and elsewhere. When Mark first suggested reading Gramsci it was because of interest in the hegemony stuff, which I’ve not read. I’m interested in his stuff on councils and unions, which I’ve read a bit of. What are others interested in? We can bang out a quick topic list, generate reading from there, then cut the reading list to keep it manageable.
I actually graduated from Cambridge a few days ago, though hopefully I’ll be back next year. Also, I am/was only a mere law student and so all my theory stuff is pretty much self-taught (unless that is we start talking about Anglo-American jurisprudence).
Anyway, I guess I’m up for this, I’ve done a fair bit of Gramsci reading, although it’s mostly just direct and I’ve been meaning to at least browse Laclau and Mouffe for a while (although I am pretty much pre-disposed to disagree with them).
Count me in, I guess.
You can read the L&M book through google books – it’s ‘limited preview’ so you start from the top and every time the selection the site gives you runs out, do a search for a string of words on the last page… and it will give you the next few pages.
I don’t think there is anything really ironic about an articulation between democratic socialism and L&M. Hegemony and Socialist strategy (which is actually a redundancy according the the theoretical framework of the book: socialists strategy means building constructing a hegemony). In my circle folks hate on L&M for “reducing” the “material” world to discourse. To me, this doesn’t make any sense. L&M are clear that they are not interested in the ideal/material distinction; rather, things (for example) are only available to reality insofar as they are understandable within the signifying systems we use to, well, orient ourselves in the world. Thus, socialist strategy means first of all, understanding the way reality is structured “like” discourse and like discourse has fundamental basis in rhetorical structures (particularly the tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc.). For them, and this is where i start to cringe a bit, socialism means building a majoritarian political formation organized around a popular antagonism. This is precisely the project of democratic socialism at the level of form. The real problem for me w/ L&M is that from within their system they cannot ground the political content of hegemony. In Laclau’s most recent book, which btw I think is much more interesting, he uses the exact same conceptual formula to describe populism. Which, I think is more accurate to contentless majoritarian politics of their “strategy” than socialism, which for me, has has always had very specific content. I would love to join in on the reading, but, I actually just read HSS and Populist Reason last week as part of my prep for comprehensive exams. If y’all are still working on this after the end of next week, I’m probably in.
A friend once mentioned offhandedly that Laclau had ties to Eurocommunism, can anyone substantiate or give other detail about his political background? I’m kneejerk hostile to him but that’s without having really read him.
For what it’s worth Matt, I disagree with on this: “reality is structured “like” discourse and like discourse has [its] fundamental basis in rhetorical structures.” I’m fine with the like-ness between discourse and everything else (likeness is a relation and so is in one sense always present, though only relatively), and I’m fine with the interpenetration of language and extra-linguistic reality such that the borders are blurry, but I think it’s a step too far to start talking about fundamental bases here. I don’t know that we have to have a fundamental basis (to reality, such that it’s not a relative basis). Plus the real fundamental basis is class struggle – it’s the motor of history. 🙂
take care,
Nate
This stuff about everything resembling systems of signs seems a lot like cod Hegelian idealism to me, standing the world on its head precisely as Marx criticised. Just because our experience of the world is mediated symbolically, doesn’t mean that’s what’s really going on. In the end, it’s all about what happens on the material level – including, but not privileging, semiotics.
Having looked at the Laclau and Mouffe, via Googlebooks, I also don’t think it’s going to be much use as a starting point.
What I said to Nate at the outset was that I took it that the point of reading Gramsci was his concept of hegemony, since it was my cod understanding that that was his Big Idea. I am open to reading other bits too. Let’s get to the Gramsci, I say.