Page Against The (Culture) Machine

As part of my final look at Gramsci and moving towards critiquing Hegemony alongside the work of Foucault I found an excellent set of slides that help demonstrate the contrasting ideas of the pair. I think they are from a senior lecturer at Salford University called David Kreps who has also written an excellent book on the subject.



http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cperc-conf/files/2015/08/Kreps-Gramsci-Foucault-2015.pdf - accessed on 30/10/15

 Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment, David Kreps (Ed.), (Ashgate,  2015)


"From this review of the literature that considers Foucault and Gramsci together, then, three camps emerge: (i) the Marxists for whom Foucault’s conception of power ignores historical realities – such as ‘the fundamental classes’; (ii) the poststructuralists for whom Foucault’s nominalism, or ‘sociological singularism’ as Olssen (2006) puts it, precludes any totalizing theoretic such as Gramsci’s – and for whom the ‘fundamental classes’ 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 – Radhakrishnan to Gramsi; Laclau, Mouffe and Torfing to Foucault – in some fundamental respect."   (pg 4) 


I haven't managed to read all the book yet however it does clearly articulate the critical framework around the thinking of these two theorists that are so key to my project. It's probably the only book so far that has looked at colliding the doughy base of Gramsci's hegemony with the lavish tomato sauce of Foucault's power discussions  into a somewhat  workable and ultimately tasty ideological pizza of the people! ...perhaps