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This was a draft chapter intended
for a book on major theorists and their implications for (distance) education.
Personally, I have been more influenced by Adorno than by Gramsci, but
Gramsci was the editor's choice. The book never materialised in the end
'To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a...revolutionary act' Gramsci. L'Ordine Nuovo, 1919 (Hoare 1977) Introduction Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) has probably been the most influential of the "western' marxists, certainly in Britain. His work has inspired a whole productive tradition called '(British) Cultural Studies' (or, less commonly, gramscianism), for example, which has led to work in a wide range of fields, from the analysis of youth culture, through media studies, to accounts of modern politics, and work in the 'applied fields' of education, social policy, and community and youth studies. As almost all the commentators have noticed, however, Gramsci's own work was developed in unusual circumstances, in the context of the great struggles in Italian politics in the 1920s and 1930s, a period which began with unprecedented social changes and industrial upheavals associated with the effects of World War 1, saw the rise of the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties, the events of 1917 in Russia, revolutionary upsurges in Hungary and Germany, worker occupations of the Fiat complex in Turin, and the eventual rise of fascism, and which ended in Gramsci's imprisonment and death. Gramsci's famous Prison Notebooks were themselves written under Italian prison regulations, with censorship and without access to a library, which partly accounts for their occasional theoretical lapses, their opacity, the frequent use of euphemism, and the absence of actual concrete referents. Theory and Practice It was once common to long for some sort of unity between theory and practice, of course, and several kinds of unity were pursued. In the social science traditions in which I was trained, 'theory' used to refer to a parsimonious framework of 'deep' underlying principles or axioms about the world, for example, sometimes with a body of more tentative hypotheses generating empirical or other types of research programmes, and also with a body of legitimating beliefs or ideologies about the world and about research itself. One persistent belief among these was that the correct theory would deductively generate a properly grounded practice of some kind. Some versions of social science, often deployed in educational studies, hoped to find some undeniable principles which could be used to develop correct practice - some definitive 'theory' of learning, for example, which could be used to guide course design. More politically radical versions
have seen theory as source of principles to guide a definite interventionist
politics, as did two at least of the 'founding fathers' of European Sociology
(see Crook (1991) on Durkheim and Marx). A number of critics have argued
forcefully that this kind of direct deductive, algorithmic, or even dialectic
link between thought and action is unattainable, at least without a good
deal of special pleading, dogmatism and incoherence, and that even the
attempt to read theory as a template for action is a serious self-misunderstanding.
I first came across this kind of argument in Adorno (1973), but it has
been made more fashionable again in the writings of the 'postmodernists'
like Lyotard (see Dews 1987 for a discussion). ( see
my discussion too ) Instead, far
more fuzzy, fragmented or rhetorical links connect theoretical and practical
discourses or experiences, although these are often glossed in plausible
narratives of science.
Gramscian theory tends to be used
in several linked ways, in my experience. There was indeed a serious and
sustained effort to read Gramsci either 'on his own' or as a wider project
involving other marxists (especially Althusser -- quick
intro ) and certain sociolinguistic
theorists (Levi-Strauss, Barthes and later Volosinov or Pecheux) in order
to lay bare the central crucial concepts and axioms that would form a privileged
base for applied analysis. This sort of work led to the centrality of concepts
like 'hegemony' and its derivatives (hegemonic and counter-hegemonic
struggle,
a way of reading social history as a pattern of settlements and crisis
in an underlying hegemonic struggle, and so on, or, later, the concept
of 'articulation' (and various double articulations), used to explain
the connections between, say, youth cultures and social class (Hall and
Jefferson 1976) (see reading guide), or between
terms (Englishness, social change, racism) in various political discourses
(Hall et al 1978 -- see reading guide --, Hall and
Jacques 1989), or between identity- forming experiences in rapidly changing
urban societies (Hall in Donald and Rattansi 1992).
This sort of effort is detailed in
Harris (1992), and, to cut a long story short, it became increasingly clear
that even this huge and erudite reading exercise could never winnow out
the central concepts in sufficiently rigorous a form. 'Hegemony' was used
in inconsistent ways, according to one set of critics, for example (Jessop
et al 1984), and the concept tended to generate circular, predictable or
sentimental analysis (Rojek 1993). 'Articulation' seemed to apply sometimes
to events and sometimes to discourses about events, and it was unclear
whether its principles were empirical or logical, so to speak (Geras 1988).
More generally, after two decades or so of development, the whole approach
looked exhausted, or, worse, 'closed' (Johnson in Education Group II 1991),
formula-like or 'lazy' (Hall in Donald and Rattansi 1992), or 'banal' (Morris
1988). For me, the work of Bennett and Woollacott in media studies (1987)
illustrates the tensions at the most general level - in their struggle
to grasp the specificities of the effects of (James Bond) films, Bennett
and Woollacott get driven further and further from the old 'centred' readings
that saw Bond as a central figure in hegemonic struggles over class, capitalism
and gender, until it becomes clear that the old concepts simply cannot
be stretched any further ( try Bond file ).
Gramscianism also functioned at another
level, throughout, and, maybe still does so today. Analysts are committed
to writers and their approach not exclusively by the cognitive power of
their concepts, of course, but by certain inspirational, irrational, charismatic
qualities in the work. Many of my students and some colleagues seem to
have been inspired by Gramsci's slogans, rhetoric or personal example.
We all need inspiring examples, but making Gramsci into a figure capable
of speaking to us directly can involve a good deal of creative work too,
often to cut away the original context of much of his work, and to replace
it with a much vaguer sense of application.
It would be naive to insist on some
sort of 'original' reading of Gramsci, of course, but the context of the
work should make one cautious. A senior colleague, for example, would often
admonish me with Gramsci's famous dictum that we should retain a 'pessimism
of the intellect, [an] optimism of the will'. The context for our discussion
was one of local, parochial institutional politics, as I developed a gloomy
analysis of trends in local management, and the slogan served to express
that colleague's support for what might be called 'British activism'. Gramsci
used the phrase in quite different circumstances, though - to encourage
Communist militants to struggle for influence against Socialist delegates
(in Hoare 1978), or earlier, to defend Socialist caution and marxist analysis
against anarchist opportunism (Hoare1977:187). The earlier piece, incidentally,
attributes the famous dictum to a certain Romain Rolland, originally, which
hints at another context.
Gramsci's admonitions to the anarchists
in that piece also seem to apply to the more populist analyses of British
activism: 'To rely solely on the creative capacity of [the]... masses and
not work systematically to organise a great army of disciplined and conscious
elements...- this is complete and utter betrayal of the working class.
It is the beginning of unconscious counter-revolution' (Hoare 1977:189).
We shall return to the idea of revolutionary discipline when discussing
education in more detail. Struggle itself can become an abstract slogan,
if context is ignored. While Gramsci struggled to found and lead a socialist
movement, and, later, a Communist Party that would act as a focus and 'furnace
of faith' for the industrial and political upheavals in Italy, British
gramscians have sometimes referred to their own attempts to secure their
own privileges in universities as 'struggle', doubtless trying to capture
some of the romance and legitimacy of the original. There was also that
theoretical labour referred to above, to found an abstract theory of human
struggle to incorporate the two kinds - an anthropology of 'Struggling
Person', to take its place among other anthropologies (Man the Toolmaker,
Homo Ludens etc.).
Cultural struggle is what intellectuals
do best, of course, and there has long been an interest in playing one's
part in a wider struggle by taking on the central ideologies of the ruling
class at both 'scientific' and 'vulgar' levels, as, indeed, Marx himself
did for much of his life. Yet there is a tendency for cultural struggles
to take on a life on their own, to become the concern of a mere clique
of specialists, for a cultural politics to become a mere politics of culture.
As Gramsci certainly knew, there is a danger that petit bourgeois culture
critics may be judged as having 'raged and foamed because of a newspaper
article, a caricature, a headline....[while]...The masses were spilling
their blood in the streets and squares...' (Hoare 1978:18). Connecting
up these struggles to those of proletarian militants involves more than
just wishful thinking and a way with words, as we shall see in more detail
below.
Gramsci's support for the Communist
Party as one of the major coordinating mechanisms is clear, and this had
to be managed and removed before Gramsci could be seen as a source for
British activism in the absence of a strong CP. This was achieved largely
by emphasising his earlier work with factory councils, or embryonic soviets,
and by endorsing the once-dominant 'Eurocommunist' reading of Gramsci's
legacy in 1960s and 1970s Italy. This kind of political reinterpretation
was accompanied by a good deal of more general academic work to stretch
Gramsci to fit all kinds of subjects and enter all sorts of debates which
he had not addressed himself (such as feminism, media, popular culture,
postmodern critiques), while down-playing some additional areas that seemed
'unfortunate'.
There is no space here to take up
these issues. One of the most 'unfortunate' areas concerns education, so
we can address that in some detail below. Just to allude to the political
issues again, though, consider the effects of restoring some context to
the quote at the head of this paper. Quotes like that one are morale boosters
for radical academics, persuading us that we do matter, we are part of
a wider movement struggling for justice and freedom, that we belong to
a glorious tradition of European enlightenment, and that we can participate
simply by going about our normal business in lectures and seminars. Yet
replacing those innocent dots, for example, gives us:
'To tell the truth, to arrive
together at the truth is a communist and revolutionary act'
Restoring the context still further,
the whole piece in which this quote is embedded, and it is a piece written
by Gramsci and Togliatti, in fact, is about building a network of 'workshops,
socialist clubs, peasant communities' to become 'organs of proletarian
power, replacing the capitalist', learning from the experience of the Russian
soviets. We are really quite far from the warm glow of a pleasantly constructive
sociology seminar in a church college in Devon, or from the radical hopes
of former militants joining an open university. How far would recent support
among gramscians for a 'modernised' British Labour Party square with Gramsci
and Togliatti when it came to 'replacing the capitalist', especially replacing
them with a Communist Party like the Russian one? The context does not
exactly tie up either with the immediate specific interests we all have
in expanding the formal education system and opening access to adult students
while keeping intact our 'closed shop' professional status as pedagogues.
The final sense in which theory has
been used in practice is implied in the discussion above. Gramsci's work
has been elaborated, extended, symptomatically read, synthesised with the
work of other critics, summarised and deployed as an academic text, 'applied'
by academics as a means to develop their particular interests in managing
ideas, constructing syllabi, organising working narratives for students.
The gramscianism that resulted became an extremely successful form of academic
practice, offering precisely the sort of material essential to found a
number of research programmes, and their accompanying graduate institutes
(like the CCCS), centres and publication networks, and, later a spectacular
'teaching object' (the famous Open University course U203)
which fixed the agendas for most of the new 'cultural studies' courses
in the UK system for an entire generation. Ironically, then, gramscianism
founded a new and popular academic field, and this was perhaps its most
lasting achievement, persisting long after its theoretical golden age,
and well past its political sell-by date (the British general election
of 1991 with its fourth consecutive Conservative victory).
The concrete practices of academics
are little studied, however, and certainly the gramscians have been rather
quiet about their own, although we do know of some of the inter-faculty
struggles (sic) involved in the establishment of the CCCS and of U203.
My own work suggests that there is a story to be told here of how the dialectical
concepts or ambiguities in gramscianism slowly shaped themselves into the
familiar codes and conventions of the famous (highly codified) theoretical
polarities of conventional teaching in social science: the old tensions
between 'structure' and 'agency' can be managed nicely by a gramscian insistence
on ' (counter-) hegemonic struggle' as some transcending middle term, for
example. In skilled hands, gramscianism can lay out all the usual options
in introductory social theory and then finally emerge, triumphantly, as
a compelling 'last word', as 'prime knowledge', or as a privileged
underlying grasp of reality, complete with a 'right on' status to appeal
to the idealism of the young.
Gramscians have performed skilled
analysis of, say, media professionals to reveal how the very professional
independence of those groups serves only to strengthen the position
of the dominant groups; Bourdieu's work reveals exactly the same processes
at work among modern educational professionals, of course, but many gramscians
never got that close to home. As a design procedure and as an acceptable
form of critical analysis, gramscianism represents the domestication of
critique in higher education in Britain, in this view, as much as its successful
diffusion (which is how its defenders might see it).
Education
There have been some splendidly critical
'new left'; analyses of British education, of course, (Young and Whitty
1977, Whitty and Young 1976) although few examine university-level education.
The best ones emanate from a phase known as the 'new' sociology of education,
developed in the early 1970s in Britain. Although one element in
that approach consisted of rediscovered marxist work, it was a rather
unfocussed and ecelctic marxism of several different schools, and there
were other elements from other critical sources, including American symbolic
interactionism and social phenomenology, and even from Durkheim (via the
work of Bernstein and Bourdieu).
Gramsci emerged eventually as the
man most likely to organise and synthesise the insights of all the others
while overcoming their flaws and permitting a little British activism.
Hall's 'last word' summary in an authoritiative OU course (E202)
mentioned above, and an editorial in a famous collection of 'new sociology'
pieces (Whitty and Young 19796) end their reviews in gramscianism but Gramsci
was still not the only contender, and a number of difficulties had already
arisen in the 1970s with associating his work directly with British activism.
Entwhistle (1979), for example, had
written an authoritative book based on a close reading of Gramsci's specific
views on education, and had counterposed this reading to those of the 'new
sociologists': Gramsci, it seemed, had long favoured an impeccably conventional
academic education as the best grounding for radicals. Much of the debate,
looking back after nearly twenty years, seems to have arisen in a specific
context itself - the struggle between rival fractions in educational politics,
fighting under the rather vague banners of 'traditionalists' and 'progressives'.
This struggle was never purely a theoretical one, of course, but represented
more general worldviews and belief systems, and some quite specific
professional politics.
Academic analysis often found itself
at odds with the rather polarised and stereotyped positions in the debate,
and sociologists in particular were often simply assumed to be on the 'progressive'
side, even where their actual arguments tried to transcend the ideological
limits of both positions (as in the OU course E282, or in one of
its set texts Sharp and Green 1976). Eventually, radicals did force some
kind of break with progressivism, and found themselves operating with smaller
and smaller fractions of the 'progressive' camp, with the Socialist
Teachers' Alliance, for example, or with local militants in tactical alliances
with other agitational groups. (Education Group II 1991).
Traces of this sort of partisan approach
affected those struggling to be gramscier than thou. British activists,
especially when engaged in a desperate attempt to join with progressive
elements in teacher unions to resist the Thatcher Government's 'new right
offensive' simply had to dismiss the more explicit references to the benefits
of traditional education in Prison Notebooks as 'unfortunate' .
These references seem to be fairly well entangled with the entire Gramsci
project to organise counter-hegemonic struggle, however.
Entwhistle was able to point to many
places in Gramsci's writings where there were grave doubts about the Italian
fascist reforms in education, for example, and went on to suggest connections
between those reforms and certain elements in the British 'progressive'
programme - educating 'whole persons', involving emphasising the emotional
rather than the cognitive or rational; valuing local knowledge and the
immediately relevant rather than the codified academic knowledge of traditional
subject areas, for example. Entwhistle's Gramsci would have none of these
reforms, and expressed grave doubts about the likely conservative outcomes
of them. Emotional rather than cognitive emphases, for example, played
into the hands of fascist views of public opinion as 'essentially
a matter of emotion', (Entwistle 1979:83) while downplaying the cognitive
rational aspects was seen as raising immediate experience over knowledge,
autodidacticism over cultural transmission, 'miracle and mystery' over
reason (Entwistle 1979:84). Serious educational efforts were needed to
provide learners with the cognitive repertoires to liberate themselves,
to winnow out the 'superstition and folklore' in the 'spontaneous philosophy'
of the masses, to grasp and use the superior forms of philosophy currently
in the hands of the bourgeoisie only, to escape the typical 'conception...[of
the world]...imposed by the external environment...by one of the many ...[dominant]...
social groups' (Entwistle 1979:33).
What was needed instead was a programme
of teaching to make academic thought more accessible, via well-educated
teachers thoroughly immersed in an understanding of the cultural contexts
of their work: those educators did indeed need themselves to be educated,
as Marx had argued, educated, that is, in terms of their own social locations
and roles, and educated by contact with the experiences of the proletariat
- but this was not to advocate relativism or a proletarianisation of the
curriculum, but biculturalism. The idea was to expose, sympathetically,
proletarian children to new, superior, more coherent, context-independent
and logical ways of thinking, not to leave the learner as 'the prisoner
of the present' (Entwistle 1979:83).
Entwhistle also reviews Gramsci's
position on adult education specifically, and here, the points about factory
councils and socialist networks, cited briefly above, reappear. The famous
discussions of 'traditional' and 'organic' intellectuals locate intellectuals
firmly in the overall hegemonic struggle, as well as insisting that every
opportunity should be taken to pursue inquiry into current patterns of
work or life on the spot, as it were. There is no support here for the
view that 'education' is exclusively that which goes on in formal
schooling, or in universities, for that matter. Nevertheless, there is
no shrinking from using the term 'intellectual' too, no need for false
modesty, apology or euphemism about intellectual work, no intent to wish
away differences in expertise or to conceal them under a phoney populism
or a 'slippery pronoun'.
Gramsci advocated the recruitment
of organic intellectuals from the working class itself, via a system of
radical vocational education at the factory level, for example: workers
were to learn not just the basic skills and competencies required to do
their particular job, though, but to widen their knowledge of the whole
productive enterprise, and then of the whole social, historical and cultural
context of capitalism itself. This was the 'really useful knowledge' that
lay behind demands for State education in Britain in the past, according
to Johnson (in Hall et al 1980) (see reading guide),
and that some gramscians were to claim to be able to detect as a constant
undercurrent in proletarian resistance to the narrowly vocational education
that the State actually offered. The different conceptions of 'vocational'
education can still be useful in modern debates, of course.
Non-proletarian intellectuals could
also be won over, be engaged in political activity, get committed to working
class hegemony, be prepared to meet and talk to proletarians at Party meetings,
in factory councils, while at work (for those technical intellectuals),
or via journalism. These intellectuals should not abandon their identity
and 'go native', so to speak, but should remain separate and specialised,
but as a vanguard rather than as an elite. And intellectuals and factory
workers alike could share some experiences - both knew of the need for
strong self-discipline and a work ethic, for example.
But the main educational policy issue
still concerns the production of 'organic' proletarian intellectuals, operating
at the more general cultural level, and the extent to which the different
school or higher education systems can be seen to help to generate them.
Gramsci's commitment to marxism as the science of the communist movement,
as the guarantor of the truth of the claim to be marching with the tide
of history, seems to lead him to conceive of organic intellectuals as figures
rather like Marx, or like prominent marxists, or even like himself - able
to take part to some extent at least in learned historical analyses of
bourgeois culture, to penetrate the contradictions of classical economics,
to isolate the dominant historical trends. This seems to lead clearly to
support for a formal education of a decidedly modernist (easily translated
as 'traditional') cast.
Of course, there were problems with
this approach, and we should never forget that the organic unity Gramsci
worked for so hard failed ultimately as a political project compared with
the mystical unities of common blood and destiny in fascism. Radical modernism
has suffered a number of body blows from postmodernists too, of course
in western intellectual circles at least ( leading in Baudrillard's case
to a prediction about the obsolescence of the traditional university, of
course). Entwhistle says that Gramsci himself was well aware of the dangers
of incorporation of any working class intellectuals, of the difficulties
under capitalism of breaking down the status divisions between mental and
manual labour, and. above all of the problematic link between impeccably
academic education and political radicalism - after all, says Entwhistle,
the same school system produced both Antonio Gramsci and his brother (who
became a fascist). Nevertheless, the project remained dedicated to bringing
the fruits of academic education to the cause of the proletariat, and definitely
against any policy of providing separate kinds of education for proletarians
to have access to, whether this takes the form of 'progressive' primary,
(capitalist) vocational education, or the (fascists') new 'Popular Universities',
which were, apparently, 'somewhat like "pedagogical soup kitchens"' (Entwistle
1979:128).
The debate has a number of contemporary
resonances, of course, and the issues are being re-run at the level of
policy. Entwhistle's account seems to me to still serve as a useful source
for my own continuing reservations about British 'progressive' practice,
in terms of debates about widening access in particular. The recent sponsorship
of a version of 'activity' based pedagogy for the new students in
British higher education, for example, has awakened a lot of anxieties
about 'standards' among my colleagues, and particular anxieties about the
future of higher education as critique for me. Some of the proposals seem
to run the risk of turning into precisely what critics of Italian fascism
called '...activity for activity's sake...the apotheosis of immediacy,
of passing impulse, of uncriticised and uncriticisable self-assertion considered
as synonymous with unlimited freedom' (Entwistle 1979:85). Similar echoes
arose for me in the various debates about teacher education in my sector
of higher education, where a rather narrow and uncritical form of vocationalism
threatened the very attempts to introduce an awareness of context Gramsci
saw as so crucial, and where proletarianisation or cultural separatism
lurked as easy options to thwart those of us keen on the bicultural teacher.
The 'vocational turn' in my College's
policy raised similar anxieties. Like Gramsci, and like other critics since
(e.g. I.Bates et al 1984), I supported that sort of vocational education
which prepared students thoroughly for work and also encouraged them to
stand back from their immediate surroundings and explore the system of
the division of labour itself. What seemed to be on offer, though, was
something much more narrow and focused on specific competencies ('skills'
to use the current jargon) and specific occupational requirements. While
we were hardly in a position to hope to produce organic intellectuals,
there seemed little attraction in churning out licensed functionaries.
Finally, I had been attracted to
a marginal educational institution partly by the old radical dream of contacting
more members of the proletariat (or at least the 'respectable' local 'scholarship
person' fraction of them, and some occupationally experienced local adults).
Overall, though, there seemed to be a danger that in the reorganisation,
small colleges like ours would end up as junior colleges in the American
sense, designed to offer a version of higher education to satisfy such
low-status persons, as part of a policy of 'cooling them out' . Gramsci
can even be dragged into service here too, and be made to possess foresight
into later analyses of credentialism as cooling out, as in my own speculations
about the effects of the OU's policy: junior colleges could be seen to
be designed not merely to perpetuate social differences but to 'crystallise
them into Chinese complexities' (Entwistle 1979:94) (we would need to dissociate
ourselves from any political incorrectness in this term, of course)
Nor were these entirely abstract
issues. Like Gramsci, I worried about the education system in a personal
way, in terms of how it affected my own son. With my partner, I was faced
with the difficult analytical problem of trying to decide exactly where
a 'progressive' approach to primary school teaching turned into a laissez-faire
one, where support for local cultures turned into low expectations, how
egalitarianism in practice differed from 'malicious egalitarianism', and
where the difference lay between a concern for 'the whole child' and a
busybody interest in disciplining all the cultural, social and personal
aspects of my child, including his intra- and extra-curricular activities,
in the name of an intolerant and sectional minority belief system.
I worry about similar dilemmas in
my own practice with students, too. Of course, I drew upon a wide range
of more recent critical work to help, as well as just Gramsci, as any modern
critic must, I suggest (below).
Distance Education
I have argued before that the programme
of the UK Open University never clearly enshrined any commitment to radical
change in education or in the wider society (see
file) . The connection of the establishment
of the UKOU to the 'progressive' side of the debate in educational policy
seems to have been almost accidental, it could be argued, established by
the early sponsorship of the Labour Party, and by the early idealism of
a number of founding staff. There were early articles written about the
radical potential of the UKOU, to widen access dramatically, or to broadcast
esoteric academic knowledge to a wide audience, free from the regulatory
activities of bourgeois tutors (Birnbaum in Tunstall 1976). To return to
the dilemmas outlined by Gramsci, it is possible to see some of the excitement
of early radicals in terms of bringing together the lives of students and
workers in the 'organic' unity represented by the part-time adult learner:
I can remember personally the excitement of reading an early application
from a trade union official at Ford Motor Company who was applying to take
a social science course hoping to use his knowledge to take on the bosses'
account of the imperatives of management.
However, we were soon to discover
that the OU was never intended primarily for such students, that, at the
official policy level at least, its commitment to open access was a pragmatic
marketing matter, and that it had even developed an elaborate scheme to
attract and promote the chances of admission of already well-qualified
students (mostly teachers) (Harris 1987). As the teaching system developed,
it also became clear that there were differences between a number of informal
educational systems which were able to involve students in active bicultural
dialogue (in local evening adult education classes, for example, or even
in experimental laboratory situations with keen volunteer learners), and
the much more formally assessed, graded and licensed operations of a full
British university. The former systems had lent a certain credibility to
the hopes of radicals from Raymond Williams to Gordon Pask (respectively),but
the established teaching system seemed to threaten those hopes dramatically.
Student grading and general
policies of credentialism, conforming to established university practice
is still the main issue for me, underlying the many discussions about open-ness
that have arisen since. It is not just that distance education tends to
minimise face-to-face contact, or that the design specifications of the
UKOU tended to be grounded in a didactic model of teaching. Universities
are obliged to grade, to stratify and to license. They achieve this in
an irredeemably conservative manner, using conventions that pose as technical,
neutral and universal, but which really favour those who possess already,
or who are able to acquire certain (bourgeois) cultural predispositions.
These conventions operate even with 'progressive' teaching systems, it
could be argued - I have suggested myself that the widely admired 'deep'
approach to learning seems very like the characteristics of the 'aristocratic-
distant' approach to culture in general described in Bourdieu's work on
'cultural capital': if this is more than a superficial similarity, the
'deep' approach is not the universally good sign of a mature learner, but
the preferred approach of those social groups who are able to naturalise
their judgments as an 'habitus' see
piece on Bourdieu . To return to
Gramsci's observation above - the 'deep' and the 'distant' approaches might
actually still be cognitively or politically superior, in some sense, of
course, and the problem would then become one of both making the approaches
possible for those lacking the initial cultural capital, and balancing
out the possible cynical detachment (or 'strategic' orientation) of the
accomplished learner with the passionate commitment of the political activist.
Neither problem is easy to solve, and the dangers of incorporation or dilution
of even the minority who are intellectually mobile are even more acute
than they were in Gramsci's day.
The fact is that we know much more
about the detailed workings of the education system than we would get from
reading Gramsci alone. Gramsci still encourages critical analysis of the
claims and practices of liberal education. The gramscians have developed
some insightful work in the tradition of critical analysis of overall educational
policy, as was suggested above: the contributors to UE offer a detailed
and plausible account of the growth of Statist notions of 'proper education'
in Britain, for example, in the terms of mature gramscian 'articulation
theory' as different discourses are utilised to form the competing but
still conservative policies of the different political parties and interest
groups. However, there have been other benchmark radical analyses, including
those of Willis, and the feminists who cut their teeth at Birmingham. Interestingly,
the latter analysts have also done most to extend the work away from the
overarching gramscian frameworks of Birmingham orthodoxies, often abandoning
the holy concepts if they proved unworkable, rather than trying to amend,
or stretch them still further).
Concluding Thoughts
There is another option, so far unexplored
in gramscian work - self-analysis and self-criticism, starting with the
immediate context of university education. Is there still any possibility
of using higher education as a 'red base', or are universities irredeemably
bourgeois institutions, serving the same functions whatever the personnel
(just as the State did for Leninists), whatever the student intake or whatever
the teaching technology? If this is so, can the experience of working in
a university be turned into a pedagogic relation in the broad sense defined
by Gramsci - how could non-bourgeois students, for example, be encouraged
to arrive collectively at the truth of the institution - by deconstructing
its myths, perhaps, by laying bare the interests behind its calm neutrality
and its professional expertise (e.g. as in Bourdieu on assessment).
The gramscians have been rather naive here, in my view, as perhaps Gramsci
himself was in underestimating the force of the cultural resources ranged
against him in his (ultimately defeated) struggle with fascism. To return
to the parochial, universities are conservative organisations, not easily
radicalised by piecemeal adjustments to intake policies or to curricula
alone. The Open University showed itself to be fully capable of absorbing
and incorporating a number of radical courses designed with genuine gramscian
intentions. These were made to conform to the existing pedagogy ('academic
realism' -- see the paper in this collection
), and it is possible that the assessment system and other constraints
produced a highly conventional student reaction (see Miller 1996). It is
not enough to argue, as Bennett does, that the institutional aspects overpowered
the course designers,or that there was a necessary adjustment to the 'realities'
of university life. There was no theory of these factors,and no radical
politics based on the theory. Gramscians showed themselves to be adept
at theorising nearly every aspect of contemporary cultural life except
those activities that they pursued themselves.
No organic intellectuals themselves, with no regular contacts with proletarians,
the university branch of the gramscian heritage saw nothing wrong with
their practice, nothing to theorise or to reflect upon: there's was an
unreflected 'good' and the only problem was to make it available. The ruthless
pessimism of critical theory,or the ironic debunking style of postmodernism
will take a critic much further, but these were dismissed out of court
by gramscianism, on the grounds that they were not compatible with the
kind of activist politics they preferred. We know, of course, this
sort of 'activism' serves only to limit theoretical endeavour, to stifle
critique, and, in the end to ban and prohibit discussion. In the absence
of a sufficiently thorough commitment to critique, gramscians will reproduce
the conventional and the authoritarian instead of the truth.
References
Adorno T (1973) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul
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