Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism

by Holub,Renate

• ISBN13: 9780415021081
• ISBN10: 0415021081
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-05-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Antonio Gramsciexamines the influential work of the great Italian thinker. Renate Holub seeks to reclaim Gramsci from classical Marxism, and instead places him in the broad European critical context--alongside the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and sociolinguistics. This book points to Gramsci's affinities with the cultural theories inscribed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin). It also establishes affinities between Gramsci's linguistic and phenomenological forms of knowledge. Placing Gramsci in this broader context evokes the immense conceptual and methodological complexity of his work, a complexity Holub discusses in terms of "differential pragmatics." It is this very complexity which is, the author claims, relevant today when constructing our own critical theories. Faced with the transnationalization of capital, the centralization of monetary and economic power, and the decentralization of production processes, acritical theory today must investigate, in the context of information technology, the possibilities of alternative positions to such an order. Gramsci's methodological itineraries are more useful, this book argues, than other critical theories in developing ways of seeing and doing that are commensurate with the complexities of this era.

Table of Contents

Editor's foreword	vii
Acknowledgements	xi
Part I INTRODUCTION
Gramsci and critical theories: towards a `differential pragmatics'	3	(30)
Marxism and modernism
Modernism, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School
Beyond the modern: linguistics and phenomenology
Towards a `differential pragmatics'
Part II FROM REALISM TO MODERNISM
To realism farewell: Gramsci, Lukacs and Marxist aesthetics	33	(36)
Critical practices
Predicaments of history
Gramsci's Manzoni: an intellectual with class
Lukacs' reading of Manzoni
The industrialization of culture: Gramsci with Benjamin, Brecht and the Frankfurt School	69	(24)
Modernist thresholds
Gramsci, Turin and culture industry
Gramsci's theory of consciousness: between alienation, reification and Bloch's `principle of hope'	93	(24)
Objectivity, subjectivity and Gramsci's Pirandello
Subjects of popular culture
Phenomenology, linguistics, hegemony	117	(34)
Between perception and reception: Gramsci's Dante and his readers
Towards a critical theory of active communication: Gramsci and Volosinov
The phenomenology of the prison world: Gramsci and Merleau-Ponty
Part III BEYOND THE MODERN, BEYOND THE POSTMODERN
Gramsci's intellectual and the age of information technology	151	(40)
The adventures of a concept in Gramsci's texts
`Mode of production' and `mode of information'
Between Habermas and Lyotard: Gramsci's intellectual and `differential pragmatics'
In lieu of a conclusion: Gramsci, feminism, Foucault	191	(14)
Notes	205	(28)
Bibliography	233	(10)
Index	243