Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This famous sentence from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has been much discussed, much used. Gramsci wrote the sentence in 1930, that is, a year after the Wall Street Crash precipitated the Great Depression, when far right forces were mobilizing in Europe, and when the Italian Communist Party followed the world Communist movement in adopting an ultra-left position predicated on the demise of fascism and a proletarian revolution. That’s obviously a simplified version of a complex historical moment, with bearings on the present moment and the present state of the humanities. The first part of my paper charts the formation of cultural studies, primarily the Birmingham School and principally via the work of Stuart Hall while the second part considers what Hall learned from Gramsci for his understanding of culture, hegemony, and crisis, for rethinking class relations, and, perhaps most famously, the conjuncture. Through Gramsci and Hall, I present a view of crisis in terms of representation and consent: not abstractly but located in history, in the culture of our present moment in Europe and America and the tensions therein. What kind of crises are the humanities facing today? And to what extent can the study of culture as a conjuncture reveal lessons about the world that traditional politics and economics do not? These are the questions I address.