Lehre

Hegemony and politics of the cultural:
potentials of a critical re-reading of the Gramsci reception in the work of Stuart Hall


My contribution to the conference shall trace back to the theoretic rudiments of cultural studies, which Stuart Hall has enriched greatly with his reception of Antonio Gramsci’s work. I am convinced that this task has not been completed yet. Why do I think so?
On the one hand, while not ignoring its great merits, Hall’s reception of Gramsci is not free from gaps and misconceptions. On the other, the usefulness of Gramsci’s intellectual work for the development of cultural scientific theory seems not yet to be fully exhausted in certain aspects.

With the disclosure of the work of the Italian philosopher, Stuart Hall provided an essential contribution to Gramsci’s continuous impact on the 20th century. Central concepts such as the hegemony, the interdependency of culture and power and the evidently political properties of the cultural, the civil society as site of negotiation of this very politics and, last but not least, the role of the popular culture – all these concepts could not have been developed in this particular form without Gramsci’s theoretic contribution, even though this has time and again been suppressed in the German-speaking area. In Gramsci’s work Hall has rediscovered the interdependency, resulting from a political claim, between theory and politics and in Gramsci he found an unorthodox author standing for a “open Marxism” that has proven so useful for the reorientation of the left in the middle of the century. By way of this, Hall established a tradition of working and dealing with Gramsci, especially in the Anglo-Saxon area, that exists now side by side with the older, philologically highly specialized and more traditional-Marxist oriented school. These two strands do not communicate with each other in a very remarkable manner.

As a scientist of Romance literature and culture I see myself apt to enforce this communication. Since, in my dissertation, I investigate into the feasibility of deriving an “aesthetic theory” from Gramsci and since I would definitely like to disclose them for the cultural studies, I will subject Stuart Hall’s Gramsci reception to a critical revision in terms of perceptions and misconceptions. The theses obtained by this critical review shall be put up for discussion.