Hegemony and the Philosophy of Praxis

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

After reading Antonio Santucci’s short political biography on Gramsci and after re-reading some of the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by J. Buttigieg), I want to offer a reading of the relation and significance of “hegemony” within what Gramsci conceives of as a “philosophy of praxis”—his name for Marxism. (But I think this was more than a code name to confuse his prison censors and overseers.) This is a different kind of interpretation of hegemony, that I’ve normally assumed in my research. I guess you can say I want to “try on” something else.

At several points in his notes, Gramsci paraphrases Marx from memory: “people become conscious of their social position on the terrain of the superstructures” (Q8 §167, Q4 §15 §38, SPN 365). Within debates of his day, this was one key political point of departure for his efforts to stake out positions and strategies against both “economism” and “voluntarism.” Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Dialectics, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Marxism, The State | 2 Comments

Space, Place, and Gender

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Massey is trying to formulate concepts of space and place (time, too) in terms of social relations, and further to connect these in proper dialectical fashion. “Space must be conceptualized integrally with time; indeed the aim should be to think always in terms of space–time” (2). Within these relations, she recognizes that they are “inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification” (3). Continue reading →

Posted in Gender, Place, Power, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Jacobins of the Black Atlantic

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

In the preface to Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss credits the positive reception of her original article to the “unconventional topologies of time and space that it mapped out” (ix). The analogy with topology—a field in mathematics—is particularly insightful for this week’s readings on the Black Atlantic. Topology is concerned not only with the geometric properties of spaces, but also with how the properties of these spaces are arranged, interconnected and, thereby, transfigured. Topology concerns spaces that shift, stretch, and twist, but without breaks or tears. It is the mind-bending “topologies of time and space”—history and geography—that stand out in CLR James’ masterpiece, The Black Jacobins (the title itself almost says it all), and the supplementary readings. Crying out from these texts is a call for recognizing the dialectic of temporal-spatial topologies as a methodological and political disposition. This connectivity, James would tell us, weaves the fabric of those rare moments and places in which universal yearnings and revolutionary change becomes possible. Continue reading →

Posted in Dialectics, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Violence | 2 Comments

Hegel’s Dialectic and Haiti

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hegel’s dialectic allows us to think and ask questions about the world in ways that encompasses a key set of fluid relations. As I understand it, these are the relations between the ideal and the material, which is implicitly also a relation between people and things (including nature), as in the object worked on by the intellectual and physical labor of the Slave. Another key relation is that among and between people themselves, as in the master-bondsman, an innately social and inter-subjective relation as well as one, as I see it, of power. What’s more, Hegel demands that we grasp these two sets of relations (people-things and people-people) as internally connected to and mediated by each other. Continue reading →

Posted in Dialectics, GWF Hegel, Historical-Geographies, Violence | 1 Comment

Violence of Abstraction

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sayer, Derek. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sayer is clearly having a big argument with Althusserians and others who side with conceptual approaches that speak of levels and/or superstructures and base. His first goal is to convince us that there is no real separation in Marx between these two spheres; he says that the relations are internal, dialectical, and co-constitutive. Properly speaking then, “superstructures” can’t be said to intervene in the “economic structure” of which they are constitutive. Continue reading →

Posted in Marxism, Political Economy, The State | 2 Comments

The German Ideology

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Image of page from the chapter "Feuerbach."

Some thoughts on the German Ideology and Marx’s “Method.”

What most struck me about The German Ideology and the comments regarding On the Jewish Question is how much Marx’s interest in political economy was at least partly provoked by questions or (better put) by a critique of the state—specifically, the state as ideology. And his critique of state ideology will actually help me tie in other readings on the more general topic of Marx’s Dialectical Method.

The book sets out to critique the German Idealists, while providing Marx and Engel’s alternative: a materialist conception of history. The change they are calling for has clear implications for then-prevailing and still-relevant debates about the state. Continue reading →

Posted in Karl Marx, Political Economy, The State | 4 Comments

Machiavelli’s The Prince

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

How to summarize The Prince? It begins by parsing all the different kinds of possible principalities: hereditary, won by force, one by popular elections, etc. His main concern is how Princes can attain and maintain new principalities, the making, unmaking, and maintenance of power. Perhaps this emphasis is what leads some to see in the Prince either a revolutionary manual or an authoritarian blueprint? Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Niccolo Machiavelli, Power, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Machiavelli’s The Prince

Notes on “The German Ideology”

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Marx is moving away from questions of rights and philosophy to the study of political economy and capitalism.

The book has both a political and a philosophical dimension. First, Marx and Engels are railing against German Idealism’s view that consciousness creates the world, that consciousness has an independent existence, and that ideas have instantiations in the world, a view that sees the history of ideas as giving us a history of the world. Ideas, therefore, for the Young Hegelians, would change the world. At the time, they saw German politics as reproducing this notion of ideas changing the world, rather than attacking the conditions that produce the problems in the first place. Continue reading →

Posted in Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, The State | 1 Comment

Imagined Communities

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Anderson is first and foremost trying to account for nationalism from a Marxist perspective, citing for instance the conundrum of internecine strife in the Marxist region of Indochina in the late 1970s. He recognizes the incredible power of nationalism to mobilize solidarities and affinities between strangers and between physically unlike others. The paradox, of course, is that nationalism can conjure solidarities across social-geographic difference, while at the same time creating new divisions and fissures both within and across borders. There’s also the stickler of how it often works in racist ways—a point Anderson problematically underplays. Continue reading →

Posted in Historical Materialism, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, The State | 2 Comments

Notes “On the Jewish Question”

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

We produce a religiosity in the state because of the divide between our position as individuals and community, civil society and politics, everyday reality and the otherworldliness of institutions that govern us. We bring religious consciousness to our existence, and the state remains religious because it addresses our desires for equality, liberty and fraternity in an un-real way. We are divided beings, but treat our legal reality as if it were our true life, but in fact it abstracts from our true life. Continue reading →

Posted in GWF Hegel, Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, The State | Comments Off on Notes “On the Jewish Question”