Page 34 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 23

This was a critique of his work which the Centre began to develop from its first
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encounter. And the importance of this critique may be indicated by naming
another influential figure —Antonio Gramsci—who provided, for us, very much
the ‘limit case’ of Marxist structuralism and whose work has therefore been
widely influential, in a different way, for the Centre.
Like the structuralists, Gramsci steadfastly resists any attempt neatly to align
cultural and ideological questions with class and economic ones. His work stands
as a prolonged repudiation of any form of reductionism—especially that of
‘economism’: ‘It is the problem of the relations between structure and
superstructure which must be accurately posed and resolved if the forces which are
active in the history of a particular period are to be correctly analysed and the
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relation between them determined.’ This connection and specificity is
elaborated in Gramsci through his extended work on the nature of the state and
civil society in developed capitalist societies; in his discussion of ‘the specificity
of the political’, in his work on ‘national-popular’ cultures and the role and
formation of intellectuals; in his analysis of ‘common sense’ as the ground on
which different organized ideologies intervene; in his emphasis on the practico-
social role which ideologies have in organizing and mobilizing masses of people;
and in the complex notion which he has of what constitutes a ‘class’ formation
and the complex role of class alliances within a historical bloc.
Gramsci brings these ideas together within the framework of the concept of
‘hegemony’, which has played a seminal role in Cultural Studies. This is an
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enlarged and complex idea. In essence, it refers to all those processes whereby a
fundamental social group (Gramsci speaks of alliances of class strata, not of a
unitary and unproblematic ‘ruling class’), which has achieved direction over the
‘decisive economic nucleus’, is able to expand this into a moment of social,
political and cultural leadership and authority throughout civil society and the
state, attempting to unify and reconstruct the social formation around an organic
tendency through a series of ‘national tasks’. Gramsci speaks of this elaboration
of a tendency into a civilization as the ‘passage from the structure to the complex
superstructure’—a formative and connective moment, requiring new kinds and
levels of intervention

in which previously germinated ideologies become ‘party’, come into
confrontation and conflict, until one of them or at least a combination of
them tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself
throughout society—bringing about not only a unison of economic and
political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the
questions around which the struggle rages, not on a corporate but on
a’universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental group
over a series of subordinate groups. 93

Here one finds Gramsci thinking of complex social formations and the relations
between their different aspects in a connective but non-reductionist way.