Newsletter - International Gramsci Society

themselves, and make them less dependent on the gramscians’ own accounts
and agendas.
In an “Author’s Note” that prefaces the book, Harris provides some background
information for those readers who might be unfamiliar with the British academic and leftist
scene. He explains:
Gramscian cultural studies in Britain has been organised around a number of
groups, netweorks or ‘colleges’, both concrete and invisible. This has given it
a consistency and a continuity which has been taken almost for granted by
those of us who have followed the work over the years . . . There are also less
formal groups clustered around particular journals or particular conferences.
He specifically describes the activities and orientations of the folowing groups, institutions,
journals, etc.: the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; the Communist
Party; the New Left; Marxism Today; New Left Review; and the Open University.
In his “Introduction” Harris writes:
I have chosen to focus on the ‘British gramscians’, those writers who stitch
together their stories using Gramsci’s work at strategic moments. Roughly,
anyone who lets Gramsci always, necessarily, have the last word, in any debate
whatsoever, is a gramscian, although I have also further reserved the use of the
term to mean those who use selected concepts based on a reading of Gramsci,
to develop a certain ‘mobility’, to be able to manipulate these concepts,
define them flexibly, and make them refer to a wide range of phenomena, or
use them to endlessly generate a sense of newness, relevance and beginning.
Gramscians vary in terms of how they manage a return to the familiar terrain.
Harris opens his concluding chapter with the following observations:
In the course of this book, I have tried to discuss both the strengths and the
weaknesses of gramscianism. In case the critical focus of the piece has been
misunderstood, let me repeat that gramscian work has opened a number of
areas to critical inspection in a novel and interesting way. It has been
responsible for the emergence of a critical sociology of culture and for the
politicisation of culture, and these developments have generated very
successful academic programmes of research and course construction.
However, to summarise my reservations about the project, there are
also a number of tendencies towards closure in gramscianism too. I still think
of these tendencies in terms of work like Adorno and his attack on ‘identity
thinking’ . . . or Habermas, and his work on the limitations of ‘strategic
communication”. . . Very briefly, gramscianism for me is far too ready to
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