Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The ... - Indymedia

Introduction 15as always pointing beyond itself, toward that chain of struggles among livingsocial and political forces of which it is only a link, but also as a politicalobject in its own right—something that can be hurled against an advancingenemy, sabotaged by treacherous allies, or conquered by a rival faction.I am not trying to suggest that in a methodological sense political theoryis incompatible with my approach. On the contrary, certain strands ofpolitical theory, even some that are not impossibly distant from the disciplinarymainstream, have articulated similar methodological concerns. I willmention two examples. The first is Richard Ashcraft’s critique of the CambridgeSchool of interpretation. I have already noted that this methodologyis predicated on the importance of the linguistic context. Skinner in particularfocused on what he called “illocutionary force” of a text—that is, whatthe author of the text understood him or herself as doing in writing it. Inprinciple, the notion of illocutionary force could be used to stress texts as aform of conscious political action. But in fact, as Ashcraft argued, behind thesophisticated linguistic theories of the Cambridge School stood an idealistform of reductionism that tended to defuse the political charge of the text. Inthe culmination of his critique of J.G.A. Pocock in particular, Ashcraft states,“This, in practice, amounts to equating politics with ‘the political speech ofsociety’ . . . [which] allows one to interpret the history of political theory as‘a verbal tennis match’; that is, as a struggle over the forms and substance ofpolitical speech.” 30 Political struggle obviously has its deliberative momentsand textual forms, and to this extent, the tasks and problems of textual interpretationare a constitutive part of its study and practice. In what follows,the struggle over the meaning of Gramsci’s notebooks, for example, is animportant matter, and certainly itself a particular moment of political struggle.But the production and interpretation of texts does not exhaust politics,and a reductionism of this sort is as much a failure of self-awareness aboutthe professional deformations peculiar to academia as it is a failure of questionablemethodology. In other words, we might accept as a useful reminderfrom Wittgenstein via Tully and Skinner the notion that “words are deeds.” 31But this should not blind us to the fact that deeds are also, and in fact mostprominently, deeds.Ashcraft also criticized what he perceived to be the disingenuous ambitionsof this methodology to attain a pristine, supra-political “understanding.”He criticized, in other words, the sort of contemplative attitude towardpolitics and fastidiousness toward the perceived banalities of actual politicalstruggle that in fact often conceals a definite political agenda. 32 This is notincompatible with Ashcraft’s other point of criticism, in which the politicaltheorist, or at least a particular kind of political theorist seemed ready to