{"id":67,"date":"2015-09-01T16:14:50","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T16:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kreps.org\/academic\/?p=67"},"modified":"2023-06-01T20:59:50","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T20:59:50","slug":"cultural-political-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kreps.org\/academic\/cultural-political-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Gramsci and Foucault: Hegemony in the Global Episteme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cpe_51\"David presented a paper at the\u00a0Inaugural Conference on Cultural Political Economy<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in Lancaster, held by Bob Jessop – who wrote a review of Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment<\/em><\/a>, for the back cover, and Ngai-Ling Sum, who authored one of the chapters in the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Abstract:\u00a0Gramsci and Foucault: Hegemony in the global episteme.<\/span><\/p>\n

Does Foucault\u2019s concentration upon the micropolitics in society that add up to and constitute (post-national) governmentality undermine and discount, or complement and mirror Gramsci\u2019s concentration on the hegemonic reach of centralised power out into the minutiae of social relations? \u00a0Considering the extant literature, three camps emerge: (i) the Marxists for whom Foucault\u2019s conception of power ignores historical realities \u2013 such as \u2018the\u00a0fundamental classes\u2019; (ii) the poststructuralists for whom Foucault\u2019s nominalism precludes any totalizing theoretic such as Gramsci\u2019s \u2013 and for whom the \u2018fundamental classes\u2019 do not exist; and (iii) those for whom these differences constitute the site of complementarity between the two writers. In this third camp, there seems little evidence of any genuine attempt to combine the theories of the two, without in some shape or form granting one or the other the upper hand in some fundamental respect. \u00a0The finest meeting between the two seems to be Laclau and Mouffe\u2019s updating of Gramsci\u2019s thought into the poststructuralist mode, incorporating an acceptance of the decentring of the subject in poststructuralism, and an abandonment of scientistic essentialism, allowing a re-conception of the notion of hegemony as a discursive phenomenon. \u00a0The implications of this meeting for the philosophical foundations of CPE can be seen in the deployment of consumerism and financialisation to legitimise the neoliberal project \u2013 a new hegemony that is transnational in the distributed sense that neo-Gramscians would describe, at the same time as determining subjectivities through a Foucauldian governmentality of the global episteme.<\/p>\n

Ref:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kreps, D (2015) \u2018Gramsci and Foucault: Hegemony in the Global Episteme\u2019 at\u00a0Inaugural Conference on Cultural Political Economy,\u00a0<\/em>Lancaster, UK, 1st<\/sup>-2nd<\/sup>September 2015<\/p>\n