The Prison Notebooks, for the best part of their existence as a political work, have regularly been interpreted in the same way with regard to their alleged temporal structure. In fact, Western Marxism’s use of Gramsci’s work has been heavily conditioned by the Italian Communist Party’s political use of the notebooks, at least up until the 1970s.1 Gramsci’s thoughts were classified as part of the historicist school of thought, on the basis of the presumed continuity with an Italian tradition that, starting with Francesco De Sanctis, was later developed by Antonio Labriola, and ultimately by Benedetto Croce, and is thus also considered to take in Antonio Gramsci. This historicist school of thought implied a linear, progressive conception of time, in which each historical moment could be broken down and comprehended on the basis of the relationship between its component parts.2 In addition to the political consequences of the aforementioned classification, which was so often reiterated that it became a cliché difficult to negate, the conception of time inherent in these interpretations concealed, for a long time, the much more complex temporal structure of Gramsci’s work. Interest in this topic has re-emerged in recent years, even though it has not been fully formulated as yet.3 The emphasis on the ‘multiple temporal levels’ present in the Prison Notebooks, on the other hand, has often led to the work’s interpre-tation tending in the opposite direction, that is, towards the unreserved valorization of the temporal pluralities present in Gramsci’s works, thus offering an intriguing reading of the notebooks, but possibly one that is a little too audacious given the real content of the work.4
Thus, whosoever wishes to analyse the question of the structure of time in Gramsci must first acknowledge that it is not an easy thing to identify. Together with an understanding of temporality as a plural entity – as in the case of the theory of personality, of linguistic phenomena and of considerations regarding common sense, all questions that will be shortly dealt with here – there is, in fact, a ‘hegemonic temporality’ in the Prison Notebooks that determines these relations in more ways than one, and acts as a type of ‘temporal unifying device’.5 This is not a case merely of one of the many temporal layers that, within a ‘presumed’ unit such as the individual or a language, carries on its battle by trying to impose its own course. In fact, this is also a case of the temporality of that force that, temporarily and not ‘naturally’ of course, prevails over others despite not managing to, or being able to, assimilate them completely. This force not only endeavours to get time to conform to it, as a specific mode if its own prevalence over other temporalities, but at least in part it also over-deter-mines the rules of this struggle. These two forms of temporality – plural temporality that is always struggling to prevail and singular temporality represented by the hegemonic force at the time – are simultaneously and constantly at play in Gramsci’s analysis. In the case of plural temporality, the outcome of the struggle is different each time, from one case to the next; within singular temporality, the upheaval occurs at the beginning of every new age, when the ‘temporal line’ changes and points in another direction.
This dual character of time inherent in the Prison Notebooks reflects the dynamic character of the historical blocs, of the determined market and of the competing organic systems. The dominant bloc that, as we saw when analysing the concept of ‘automatism’ (Chapter 4, section
‘Gramsci’s “sociological operators”’), ‘predominates and “dictates law”’,6 in practice also dictates time. The over-determination of this ‘temporal force’ in relation to the plurality of conflicting times thus needs to be taken into account: the groups governing society fight their war of position with the benefit of this force that over-determines the conflict.
This plurality does not therefore occur in neutral territory, but in a context partially structured by hegemonic time, and this privileged position of the dominant bloc is merely the thing that is at stake here, that is, hegemony: and the establishment of one given time structure is a specific development of this hegemony.
In this regard, Alberto Burgio was the first to point out the difference between the Gramscian concepts of ‘duration’ and of ‘constituting an
epoch’. Burgio identified the dual structure of historical temporality in Gramsci, which sees the continuity of duration interrupted by the intervention of an epoch-making phenomenon.7 However, Burgio appears to situate these two temporalities in succession, on the basis of a linear model that, rather paradoxically, seems to reassemble historical development. The only possible asynchronous movement in this model is represented by the geographical differences that stagger the levels of linear temporality, producing the effect of a ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’, as in the case of French history compared to the histories of the other European nations fighting a battle that had already been won in France by the Revolution.8 However, the dual structure of Gramscian time that we are trying to reconstruct here is based in the Prison Notebooks on the consubstantiality of these temporalities rather than on their consecutiveness, following that relationship between the permanent and the occasional that we have already analysed (Chapter 5, section ‘The political science of crisis’), whereby the two terms are not determined a priori, but are dependent upon the organic system of which they are part.
Duration and epoch thus co-exist as temporal courses. The former is the stage for the imminent struggle between social forces within a system of hegemonic power. The latter is the unequal background in which this struggle is played out. In regard to duration, there are no novelties at the level of overall social organization, but only diverse forms of organization of the system. Constituting an epoch, on the other hand, entails establishing a new civilization, destroying the old automatisms and creating new ones, and modifying the relationship between the occasional and the permanent. However, if the event that constitutes an epoch arises only rarely, this does not mean that the temporality inscribed in an epoch is not present and does not play a decisive role in the epoch’s duration. On the contrary, an epoch manifests itself in every hegemonic conflict, both in the force that at that moment governs the process and in the structure of the battlefield that, at least in part, is determined by this same force. Likewise, while it is true that duration characterizes homogeneous, linear time, and any ripples in that time are relegated to the ranks of the accidental, it is also true that it is impossible to determine the precise moment at which duration becomes epoch;
likewise, it is not possible to determine the moment at which the struggle at the occasional level becomes permanent struggle.9
There are four notes in the Prison Notebooks in which the concept of ‘constituting an epoch’ emerges. These four notes refer, respectively, to four movements: 1) the idea of progress; 2) what Gramsci termed the ‘Dreyfus movement’; 3) Fascism; and 4) Americanism. In Gramsci’s view, only the first of these constitutes an epoch, while the other three are expressions: 2) of ‘movements [that] can have a relatively “progressive”
content’ but are not epoch-making in that ‘They are rendered historically effective by their adversary’s inability to construct, not by an inherent force of their own’;10 3) of political phenomena that seem to take society backwards to an absolutist form, but in reality are only of a ‘“transitory”
character’;11 4) of reorganizations that fail to create a new civilization but simply ‘remasticate the old European culture’.12 While Dreyfusism, Fascism and Americanism do not constitute an epoch but are simply
‘transitory’ moments within the capitalistic epoch, the idea of progress, on the other hand, is epoch-making since it marks the emergence of a new ‘mentality’, of a new ‘relationship […] between society and nature’
that may be rationally interpreted, which means that ‘mankind as a whole is more sure of its future and can conceive “rationally” of plans through which to govern its entire life’.13 This is a revolution in mentality comparable solely with Soviet efforts to construct a ‘new Man’ for a new epoch-making transition.
Adopting a less theoretical, more analytical approach, we shall now render this analysis of Gramsci’s writings concrete by retracing the path followed by this book up to now, this time in regard to the question of temporality: from the theory of personality (the individual) to common sense and language (collective organisms), and the distinction between East and West (society). In this way we can analyse the question of the temporal nature of epochal change, armed with the appropriate tools.