Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Michael Rosino
Guest: Robert F. Carley (Associate Professor of International Affairs, Texas A&M)
Book Discussed: Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019)
Date: September 23, 2025

In this episode, Michael Rosino interviews Robert F. Carley about his book that revisits the relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s political thought, especially on cultural practice, social movements, and racial politics. Together, they explore the intersections of sociology and cultural studies, the concept of ideological contention in activist organizations, and how Gramsci’s theory provides fresh insights for understanding and engaging with contemporary social justice struggles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Purpose of Culture and Tactics

[03:09–07:14]

• Robert Carley’s Background:
  Carley describes his path—PhD training in sociology and cultural studies—leading to a cross-disciplinary approach.
• Book Origins:
  The book grew out of two dissertation chapters—one developing "ideological contention" (critiquing frame alignment in social movement studies), and the other engaging with Gramsci’s writings on subaltern groups, responding to Stuart Hall’s work on race and cultural studies.
• Bridging Social Movement Studies and Cultural Studies:
  Carley positions the book as enabling a dialogue between the more structured, empirical field of social movement studies and the open, meaning-focused field of cultural studies.
  • “Why not social movements?” ([06:56] C) — noting that while subcultures have long been studied, there’s rich insight in applying cultural studies methods to social movements.

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2. Practical Insights for Scholars and Activists

[08:15–14:29]

• Learning Across Disciplines:
  Carley emphasizes the value of making a "detour through Stuart Hall" to rethink the sociological imagination and the connection between theory, politics, and practice.

• Stuart Hall’s Approach:
  Carley paraphrases Ben Carrington and Larry Grossberg, explaining Hall’s method of connecting micro/macro, theory/everyday, grounded in the political moment:

  • “…there's a tension in his work with how he connects the micro to the macro, the everyday to the abstract, and theory to everyday practices. And I think that actually nails it with Hall.” ([09:18] C)

• Theory as Dialogue:
  Emphasizes that theory should be approached as a “conversation”—not just applied, but critically interrogated:

  • “The only theory worth having is the one you have to fight off. Because I see so many people saying, I'm applying so and so's theory. And it's like, well...what's the critical framework through which you're approaching your theory?” ([11:52] C)

• Political Project:
  Stresses theory and practice should align with conscious political projects, not disciplinary boundaries.

  • “It's not a question of we meet. We must stay within the discipline. It's a question of how do I address this problem.” ([12:55] C)

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3. Ideological Contention: Inside Social Movements

[15:56–29:27]

• Defining Ideological Contention:
  Carley describes it as both external (against opponents) and internal (within a movement), critiquing static frame alignment models in social movement theory.
  • “When movements respond to external opponents, there's a contention there. When movements produce a strategy, there's contention within the movement.” ([16:23] C)
• Conflict as Resource:
  Draws on David Graeber and Francesca Polletta, framing internal struggle as a site of “political pleasure” and productive disagreement.
  • “Consensus is conscious. It's reasoned. Differences are a resource because they more broadly inform where it is that you're going to land.” ([18:53] C, Graeber paraphrase)
• Gramsci’s Example:
  Uses Gramsci’s letters and writing post-Factory Council movement to demonstrate the crucial role of respecting the autonomy of different groups in broader coalitions.
  • “The autonomy of different groups participating in a movement had to be respected because they were trying to achieve their goals.” ([21:07] C)
• Organic Relations:
  Gramsci’s term “organic” signals the quality and seriousness of connections among groups—conveying alignment through real (often conflicting) relationships.
• Critiquing “Frame Alignment”:
  Carley critiques frame alignment approaches as too simplistic, noting that they often sidestep the influence of diverse ideologies within organizations.
  • “For me, that means right there that Westby's model cannot pose the question: is an ideology developed from participation in a sustained and organized protest action?” ([24:22] C)
• Turning Findings into Questions:
  Carley reframes findings from the literature as research questions to guide future inquiry into internal struggles, collaboration, and heterogeneity in movements.

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4. Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice

[32:35–45:42]

• Gramsci’s Approach to Race:
  Carley clarifies that Gramsci does not address race systemically, but his concepts offer tools for contemporary analysis.
  • “Gramsci's influence on the study of race should have some limitations given how race was understood during the time that he lived.” ([32:41] C)
• Subaltern Groups and Intersectionality:
  Gramsci's concept of "subaltern" encompasses class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, and language, foreshadowing intersectional analysis.
  • “…subaltern groups is sort of a proto-intersectional approach, right?” ([39:33] C)
• Conjuncture:
  Both Gramsci and Stuart Hall’s use of "conjuncture" helps explain why forms of racism change in response to shifting political and cultural contexts.
  • “…the conjuncture becomes this analytical framework that in many ways tracks the ways that subordination is organized…” ([39:48] C)
• Critique of Pseudo-Science:
  Gramsci’s critique of criminal anthropology (racial pseudo-science) is highlighted as surprisingly contemporary, showing a constructivist and humanist concern for how racism is rationalized.
  • “If you really look at the way that Gramsci did write about race...his critique is alarmingly current.” ([44:07] C)
• Stuart Hall’s Update:
  Stuart Hall’s "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity" is recommended as essential reading, updating Gramsci for modern race analysis.

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5. Carley’s Ongoing Work and New Directions

[46:07–48:44]

• Since Culture and Tactics:
  • Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Revisits the idea of the “conjuncture,” correcting past misreadings of Gramsci.
  • The Cultural Production of Social Movements: Extends previous arguments; reviewed in Social Movement Studies.
  • Distortion Cultural Theory in the Interregnum: In-progress, this book addresses culture’s role in moments of crisis and strategies for sociopolitical response.
• Optimism & Pessimism:
  The host notes that such scholarship remains timely: “A little bit of cynicism, a little bit of optimism—maybe ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,’ as we would say in Gramsci's terms.” ([48:44] D)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Cross-Disciplinary Thinking:
  "The book overall was an attempt to think together or at the same time how social movement studies and cultural studies might talk about social protest and collective action." ([06:18] C)
• On Theory as Struggle:
  “The only theory worth having is the one you have to fight off.” ([11:52] C; quoting Stuart Hall)
• On Organic Relations and Movements:
  “There’s several places in the full notebooks where Gramsci attaches this adjective organic to things… ascribe[s] weight and quality to the kinds of connections made between groups, organizations and ideas.” ([22:40] C)
• On Gramsci and Race:
  “Gramsci gives us a way… through this concept of subaltern, which sets certain things that we study in a particular relation and grounds it within an interpretive and analytical framework.” ([40:40] C)
• On Research Relevance:
  “As long as you're, you're talking about these problems, they're definitely not going to go anywhere, at least I don't worry about that.” ([48:44] D)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 03:09 | Guest introduction—background and book origins | | 07:14 | Host praises bridge between disciplines | | 08:15 | Practical takeaways for scholars/activists | | 09:18 | Stuart Hall's influence and Carrington’s perspective | | 11:52 | “The only theory worth having is the one you have to fight off” | | 15:56 | Introducing “ideological contention” concept | | 18:53 | David Graeber’s “political pleasure” in movement meetings | | 21:07 | Gramsci on the autonomy of groups in coalition | | 24:22 | Critique of frame alignment and Westby’s model | | 29:27 | Re-framing findings as new research questions | | 32:35 | Gramsci’s relevance for race scholarship | | 39:33 | “Subaltern” as proto-intersectionality | | 44:07 | Gramsci’s critique of racial pseudo-science | | 46:07 | Carley’s more recent/forthcoming books | | 48:44 | Optimism and closing remarks |

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Conclusion

This episode provides a profound and accessible examination of how Gramsci’s political concepts—particularly ideological contention and subalternity—remain vital for understanding and transforming contemporary racial politics and collective action. Carley encourages bridging academic disciplines and staying attuned to the tensions, debates, and openness within movements themselves. He champions a critical, dialogical approach to theory and the necessity of contextual, intersectional thinking in contemporary sociological practice.

For anyone interested in the theory and practice of social movements, cultural studies, or the evolving politics of race, Culture and Tactics and the ideas discussed in this episode are essential resources.

Transcript

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[Michael Rossino]

Welcome to the New Books Network in Sociology. I'm your host, Michael Rossino. I'm an Assistant professor of Sociology at Malloy University. I'm joined by Robert F. Carley, Associate professor of International affairs at Texas A and M, also author of the book Culture And Gramsci, Race and the Politics of Practice. Now, as we were setting up this interview, you joked with me that your book is not necessarily new. It was published in 2019. But still, I was really excited to do an episode on your book because I think it's so relevant to scholars and practitioners. In 2025, people are having these kind of conversations about what does social change look like. Resistance, collective action, racial politics. So I think that this book has a lot of renewed relevance right now. So I'm really excited to have you on. So, Robert, welcome to the show.

[Robert F. Carley]

Thank you very much.

[Michael Rossino]

So, just to get started, tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you come to write this book? Give me kind of the backstory here.

[Robert F. Carley]

Okay, sure. So, as you said, I'm an associate professor in international affairs in. At Texas A and M University in College Station, Texas. So my PhD is in sociology, but I was in a PhD program. There's only a handful of them, a standalone PhD program in cultural studies where I took a master's degree from that program. And so the book, in some ways, is embedded in cultural studies, but also sociology. So how I came to write the book was that it emerged from out of two chapters of my dissertation, right. Where in one chapter I develop the concept of ideological contention, and that becomes two chapters in the book. And I do that through a critique of frame alignment approaches. But more pointedly, the sort of substance of ideological contention comes through an engagement with what's described in Gramsci's political writings, the writings before the prison notebooks, particularly his focus on and analysis of the limits and potentials of the ongoing labor movement and after the high point of the factory Council movement in the. That ended in the 1920s. And also another chapter where I focus on Gramsci's writing on and his organizational efforts towards what he refers to as subaltern groups. And I do that to respond to Stuart Hall's intercultural studies, negotiation of their analysis and interpretation of race, racialization and racism, between social science and humanistic approaches. There's a backstory to that, which is when cultural studies emerges, there's a massive tension at the University of Birmingham between the sort of literature department and the sociology department. They don't want it to exist. And one of the things that cultural studies expresses, and one of the reasons I'm interested in it, is it's really sort of a unique approach to thinking about contemporary culture. So I had these two chapters as a foundation, one steeped in the literature on frames in social movement studies, and the other on Gramsci's relationship to cultural studies. In particular to two of Stuart Hall's essays. One of them called Race Articulation in Society Structured and Dominance and the other Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. So the book overall was an attempt to think together or at the same time how social movement studies and cultural studies might talk about social protest and collective action. The thing is, cultural studies is a far more open and conversational field than the sociological study of social movements is. It is and has been always concerned with the relationship between the production of meaning and its association with cultural practices or the relatively autonomous production of meaningful activity in a cultural form. So from out of my engagement with cultural studies scholarship I be. I began, and this is really sort of the originality of the idea. I began to explore the idea of tactics, you know, the organized implementation of social protest strategies as at the same time a meaningful practice, a way of producing culture by enacting something meaningful that is again at the same time a practice, a collectively performed result of collective and conscious planning and is antagonistic and oppositional at the same time. So this was my original departure point. It's also how I came to write the book. I thought it would be useful to inform the study of social movements by looking at it through a cultural studies lens and at the same time bring social movements into the orbit of cultural studies inquiry. And you know, the. The last thing I'll say about this is there was a big period in cultural studies in the 70s where they engaged with the sociological study of subcultures. And they from out of that produced some of it, some of the most sort of famous kind of high points of. Of early cultural studies interpretation and analysis. So my thinking was subcultures are a well known subject of inquiry for cultural studies scholars. Why not social movements?

[Michael Rossino]

Yeah, I really appreciate that about the book. This kind of conversation between fields and disciplines I think is always so stimulating for theory and opening new questions. There's obviously some overlap here with my own work. I'm a sociologist who studies racial politics and it kind of helped me rethink my own understanding because I've definitely read the works of Gramsci, I've read the Stuart hall essays. And making that connection, making it more concrete was really eye opening. So I think off the bat, one of the great things about kind of a more theoretical work is there's a lot of practical insights we can draw from it. So before we really get into the conceptual side, which is going to be fun to dig into, what insights from this book would you like to see implemented by scholars of social movements and racial politics more broadly. What do you think scholars can really take away from this?

[Robert F. Carley]

So I'll say this. I think that. And I continue to think that. I think now, for instance, that I learn more from social movement scholarship and certainly scholarship focused on racial politics.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So I have a somewhat delicate and unassuming approach to the relationship between my work and work in other fields. So I'm going to sort of finesse my response to this question and say something that a large, but maybe select group, but definitely a large one who study race, racism and racialization already know. I've read enough of this to know that they know this and probably in some ways better than I do and have expressed in the book and some, but perhaps fewer, certainly known social movement studies. And so my response is that it's worthwhile to make a detour through Stuart Hall's writing for a number of reasons. And I think, for example, that most famously, a sociologist like Ben Carrington could speak to this better than I could. So I'm just gonna. I'm gonna sort of lean on something that Carrington. Carrington said. Carrington said something about Hall. Like, his analysis produced a new version of the sociological imagination. And he talked about it in three ways. He said there's sort of a cadence or rhythm to the way that hall writes about basically, social issues and social problems that's different from the way that we sort of think about the sociological imagination. You know, made, you know, famous by. By mill. And. And so, you know, there's that idea. But he describes it. And this is the thing that resonated with me in the way that there's a tension in his work with how he connects the micro to the macro, the everyday to the abstract, and theory to everyday practices. And I think that actually nails it with Hall. I think it's a really good description. And then he says that whenever he does this, it's always grounded in attention to the political moment. And then he makes a comment where he says, because Carrington was. Was born and studied in the uk, he says, for many in my generation, it's Hall's perspective and approach that provided a means to do sociological analysis. But then he also says it provides a passionate set of moorings. And I like all of these ideas because I think all of that together really does capture why it's useful to take a detour through Hall. So I also like the idea that there is this version of the sociological imagination we can ascribe to hall, and that in particular, it's open to political projects and theoretical discourse right at the spot where connections are made in the form of tensions.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So a sociology that's not striving for high, high probability in its analysis. It's not doing this through by establishing apparent norms or even progressive ones.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

But it's really sort of a sociological approach that's more in line with what a contemporary cultural studies scholar in the United States who was a student of holes, Larry Grossberg, refers to it as a conversation, the idea of theory as a yes, but or a yes. And in other words, the idea here is that quite literally, it's a collective project, right? You're like someone's adding to you or. Or sort of rebutting what you're saying. And the notion here is that the conversation's trying to arrive at a what about.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right. Like.

[Robert F. Carley]

Like, what about approaching it this way? And in this way, it necessarily invites other disciplines and fields to address a social problem, an issue or a core contradiction, with some consciousness that it is aligned with a political project. So that, to me, is a way of thinking.

[Interviewer/Host]

The.

[Robert F. Carley]

The sociological imagination is made through a dialogue, through questions posed to others, elaborations on responses to those questions, et cetera, while at the same time foregrounding intent, what Carrington refers to as a passionate set of moorings.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

Hall also said something else that I think is necessary to this sort of detour that folks should make. Sociologists, people studying collective behavior, people studying race. The idea that the only theory. I love this, the only theory worth having, is the one you have to fight off. Because I see so many people saying, I'm applying so and so's theory. And it's like, well, you know, there's. What's the critical framework through which you're approaching your theory?

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So the idea here is you don't just apply theory, you criticize it vigorously. And I think that particularly this way of thinking about race, racism, politics, and collective action forces you into a position where you have to repose questions and trust that the theories that have come before you are always partial. They're a part of someone else's project. They. They'll take you a part of the way, but you have to make another detour through theory. So it forces you into contemporary theory. It forces you in some ways to begin to think about the project as a whole as involving the production, involving theoretical production.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Robert F. Carley]

So you make a detour through intellectual traditions in and beyond sociology that inform your work. So the question driving it, it's not a question of we meet. We must stay within the discipline. It's a question of how do I address this problem. Right. And the idea here is that, you know, what informs my work and what informs other theorists is a different version of what is just, what is good, what is fair, when you produce scholarship. And I'm not saying that some sociologists don't already do this. I'm pointing to the idea that when we talk about approaches to race and racism and theories of politics and collective action, Hall's idea, or Carrington's idea of hall as offering a version of the sociological imagination that lives in the tension of where a theory connects to an approach and an approach connects to something.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

You know, that's really sort of the valuable thing there.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

I can say more about this tension, but I don't want to put words in Ben Carrington's mouth. But for me, Hall's concept of articulation in particular is really about acknowledging a structuration that connects economic forces to social relations and saying at the same time that this connection's never entirely secure. And we should look at. We should look to these somewhat autonomous relations which will change every time the connection between social relations and economic forces changes. And that's, I think, what Carrington means by this sort of. This notion of rhythm.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

That's really a different way, kind of almost rhythmically of thinking about society. And hence that's a different imaginary for. For sociology. So that. That's how I'm going to respond.

[Michael Rossino]

Oh, that's great.

[Robert F. Carley]

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[Michael Rossino]

So one big concept from the book, and you mentioned this already, is the concept of ideological contention. So if you could just tell kind of our audience who are interested in these areas, how does ideological contention work? And then if you could also kind of give me some examples of ideological contention, how might it inform activism and organizing?

[Robert F. Carley]

Yeah, so I can, I can talk in some detail about the. The what, you know, what ideological contention is, how it works. I'll say very simply, the way that I thought about ideological contention was when movements respond to external opponents, there's a contention there. When movements produce a strategy, there's contention within the movement. And I felt like that really wasn't captured by various sort of iterations of the framing approach. What's going on inside, Right. We don't ascribe this to leaders or we don't ascribe, like there's no expert within the movement who frames, right. And so I began thinking about that idea. So there's a tension there and from out of those two tensions, right. A sort of agreement about how to sort of, you know, get into the process of, you know, diagnosing, prognosticating, mobilizing, et cetera, right. That sort of we arrive at this. But I wanted to try to dig into that process through basically, you know, a conflict model, I suppose sociologists would call it. But the idea is that that external conflict is responded to inside of a movement and there's internal tension there. And I wanted to sort of get at that. And then I wanted to say there are several outcomes, which is there's an agreement, there's a success. When the sort of strategy becomes concrete, it turns into something, a demonstration. And, you know, looking at different literature generally, we find that there's either sort of an outcome that gives the movement momentum, there's a fractionalization, or there's sort of like a schism in the movement, right? So like, the idea is like there are several different outcomes. I was tasked in writing this with thinking about it sociologically, but at the same time I was also thinking about it through cultural studies. The inspiration for the idea, though, came from Pauletta's book, Freedom is an endless Meeting where, you know, that's precisely what it's focused on, is what's going on inside these meetings. This at around the same time, David Graeber did a TED talk called the Possibility of Political Pride, Pleasure. And he says something like, I like going to meetings. Some are really horrible, but some fill you with an amazing sense of hope and possibility. And then he says, what would it take to have an experience of politics like that one, Right. Which is the possibility of political pleasure. But what he lands on in the talk is this idea of common purpose, trust, you know, the idea that it's all dedicated to solving a problem, but ultimately through a gradually developed process. And that's where the pleasure lies. And he says, when you really dig into it, consensus is conscious. It's reasoned differences are a resource because they more broadly inform where it is that you're going to land. And he refers back to his original fieldwork in I think it was Madagascar, where he says that there are these rhetorical traditions where the performance of the process of getting to consensus lasts like a full day, but it's really entertaining to watch, Right? So he's giving these sort of examples, but the Graeber talk in the Paletta book reminded me of what at core, and this is, I talked about this, but this is what brought me back to Gramsci's political writings after the factory council moment, right? These writings focused on something, but they also expressed something, right? So these sort of two distinctions, what they expressed, like if you go through each, the writings are, you know, they appear in Lordine Nuovo, the journal he edited, the paper he produced. So they appear there. But it's also correspondences with other members of the party, correspondences with people in the Communist International who the relationship was significant, and correspondences with others. And so the idea here is that what you see when you read this is there's a constant, detailed and internal conflict over strategies of how to move the Italian Communist Party forward. So all of the sort of, you know, the case study was in there, basically.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

And the idea here is, when you read it, what you're seeing is Gramsci valorizing the autonomy of potentially allied groups, right. Whether these were broadly wrought, part of the labor movement or anti fascist groups.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So it could be, you know, like a sort of peasant mobilization happening in the Cremona, or it could be the liberal editors of a magazine, I'm translating it called Liberal Revolution. The famous one was Piero Gobetti, right. And he's talking about, like how do we form an alliance and people are disagreeing and then he's disagreeing with the people he's aligned with. And this really was the basis for the idea of ideological contention.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So the idea here is that in Gramsci's case, the autonomy of different groups participating in a movement had to be respected because they were trying to achieve their goals.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

The other idea, too, was that moving forward, they wanted precisely what Graeber described, which was in many ways, this sort of openness to difference.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

Like, you know, and this was sort of written about as well. The strategies of alignment for Gramsci depended upon different sets of outcomes. The mobilization of peasants and veterans in specific regions towards the specific goals. They were trying to achieve their own immediate and future goals. And so the alignment of goals with the Italian Communist Party, but beyond that, the Comintern, the Profintern, the Red Peasants International, all of this is in the political writings. So the idea of holding together these contentious ideological standpoints under, like, a battle standard of communism and anti fascism, for me, really was the place where I could say, I have something here. This is, you know, I'm going to use this as sort of a departure point, this idea that external conflict shapes what shaped what went on inside a movement, which led to further discussion, further desensus and debate, and that then shaped the organization, not just its strategy, but who entered it, what the role was.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

This was exemplified through all of the correspondences. And this really, for me, was important because I began to see its alignment with his later writings between, you know, 29 and, you know, 33, you know, the. The basically what's contained what we famously know as the prison notebooks.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

I also think it's helpful, as far as your question, for activists and organizers to view an organization in this way as like an organism or organic.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

There's a huge. There's several places in the full notebooks where Gramsci attaches this adjective organic to things.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So it's basically a term Gramsci uses to ascribe weight and quality to the kinds of connections made between groups, organizations and ideas.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

Where these were social, these were social organizations like traditional trade unions, syndicalist organizations rooted in industries, political organizations, especially political parties. And he even uses. It's a neutral concept. He uses it to describe capitalist enterprises or the legal and political configurations that militate between labor, private enterprise and the state. Right. So, you know, all of this stuff is informing the idea, and I think all this work illustrates the wealth of vulnerabilities in a concept like Frame alignment in some ways, ideological contention views alignment through conflict in the means through which conflicts are overcome. And that's, that's sort of different from, you know, the way that frames approach or, you know, a framing approach works, right. So it indicates the quality of alignment at an organizational and ideological level, at interrelated levels. And, and in a way that develops sociological theories, especially within the framing tradition, kind of don't do.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

And that by the way, that relationship between ideology and organizational structure, the people who participate in it, in an organization and bring their perspectives to bear upon it as a framework to think differently about the cultural medium or the cultural approach to social movements, it had to take the form of a critique because for me to be able to engage with frame alignment, I had to critique it. What I was saying was different, right? And this is the other part of the development of the idea of ideological contention. So to me, the idea that people bring an ideological perspective into a movement and somehow the contention between their ideological perspective has no bearing on the movement. It becomes like a resource, a symbolic font that's drawn from, to produce a frame or to produce framing actions or whatever the case may be. The idea for me is like how, how are these ideologically, these ideologies drawn on to strategically respond to context and pose solutions, Right. And so, you know, in framing, I feel like sidesteps the question about how the heterogeneity of perspectives within a movement constrains, shapes and produces framing strategies. So to break in, I, I, and I did this during, you know, when I was working on the, the, the chapter in the dissertation that makes its way heavily changed into the book. I reviewed the literature on framing, particularly when it discussed ideology. And I began with that well known article that Benford and Snow contribute to in 1986, I think it is. And I sort of ran it through to the present time when I was working on this project. Along the way I landed on this article by David Westby. He writes it in 2002. He comes up with this concept, ideological salience. And this is how I can break in and make a critique. It's worth mentioning too that Westby in this, in this article, he writes, he has, I think, three case studies. One of them is the Three Mile island nuclear disaster. And he says that ideology wasn't salient in that it just didn't appear, it didn't really have an effect. And I point out in my critique of him in the book that even if practical concerns guided activism, in that case one is then defining themselves and conscious of an oppositional ideology. So it's certainly salient. It just depends on how you frame it or what you consider a variable in the study. So for me, that means right there that Westby's model cannot pose the question is an ideology developed from participation in a sustained and organized protest action. So that sort of dialectical development is not a part of Westview's perspective. And my idea that conflicts external and internal, makes that necessary to understanding this sort of notion of how issues get set in place. So the first point was to use Westby to show the limits to social movements and how they think about the relationship between framing and ideology. But probably the most important thing coming from out of the Westby article is that he lands on his findings. So this is the findings part. He says, these things are significant. They may be significant. And so he finds through his case studies that movements frequently have internal schismatic struggles over ideology, and that various forms of collaboration and movements often engender contentious ideological variants, that there may be differences regarding the primacy of particular aspects of ideology within a movement. And finally, that the movement may march under an eclectic banner of more than a single ideology.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Robert F. Carley]

So these are his findings. And all of this, in many ways, is. Gets flipped by me and turn. Sort of departure points, right? Then he. He goes on to say this. He says, despite an absence of systematic treatment in the literature, there's at least some reason to think that ideological diversity can be important in framing, and that legitimates the notion of ideological contention. It's like it's not in the literature. It's significant. We don't, you know, so this becomes a way for me to say, okay, this is. This is great. Now I have a critique and I have an interesting point, right? So this was sort of a justification and also, you know, clearly a departure point. So I took his findings and I turned them into a series of research questions. I asked, what's the reason for social movement organizations internal struggle over an ideology? Like, let's. Let's find out what the reasons are, right? What is the nature of the struggle? What are the outcomes of these internal contests? If various forms of collaboration often result in contentious ideological variants, how does this occur? And of course, if there is ideological heterogeneity, you know, there are internal differences, but these develop in the social movement organization. People bring them in, but the social movement organization activates the contention. And that to me was like a clear thing. Like, this is there. We know it's there. Let's figure out. Let's try to understand it, right? So, you know, Westfield doesn't answer this question of what's responsible for the differences of interpretation, establishing a more salient ideological position. How do organizations and movements remain unified despite these differences? So, you know, to go back around to it, all of that is clearly there in Gramsci's political writing in 19 between 1920, 1926. So all of that furnishes these questions with direct examples, and that becomes the basis for the concept as a whole.

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[Michael Rossino]

See mintmobile.com I definitely think that that's something that'll resonate strongly with readers regardless of whether they have experience in activism. I think particularly the idea of contention within every organization. Contention around tactics, contention around framing strategies. I think that's like something that will, that will deeply resonate with people who are practitioners in this space. But also maybe more qualitative on the ground observations for ethnographers like myself. That's definitely something that came across very salient as describing a reality of organizing and activism, developing coalitions that I think your book really grounds really well in those kind of struggles. Another thing that I wanted to ask about that I thought was so fascinating is in some ways it's kind of interesting or maybe a twist from, you know, people maybe who aren't super familiar with Hall's writings. Maybe you've only heard Gramsci talked about in this sort of like neo Marxist tradition, which is to think of him as a sort of political theorist of race. You know, I think that wouldn't always occur to people who aren't super ensconced in that kind of, you know, approach to his work. So I was curious if you could talk a little bit about sort of, in some ways, the distinctions and logics of race that set up the terrain for Gramsci were very different than our current conception of race. You have this kind of European racialism that's kind of distinct and in some ways are very similar. So can you speak a little bit to the similarities and distinctions between sort of his environment, his sort of, you know, the sort of racialized social order that he's a part of, maybe the one in a place like the contemporary United States, and how you think those insights can really translate?

[Robert F. Carley]

Yeah, so I'm hearing. I don't know if I'm right about this, but I'm hearing like two questions sort of.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

It's a great question, by the way. So, like, Gramsci's influence on the study of race should have some limitations given how race was understood during the time that he lived.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

And then also, how does Gramsci's. How, how Gramsci informs the framing of race in the book.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

Is that, Is that. Yeah, okay.

[Michael Rossino]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert F. Carley]

Yeah. Cool. Okay. So it's, it's, it's certainly the case that Gramsci does not address race in a systemic way in the stuff that he wrote. And there are comments sort of strewn throughout the full body of his writing on race. I'll talk about this in a bit, but I had a conversation with one of the co. Translators and editors of Gramsci's notebook on subaltern groups, the 25th Notebook, which published pretty recently, I think, like two years ago. And we talked about the fact that it seems like Gramsci talks about race all the time, but it's really hard to find it in his work. I think that. And this is sort of how I'm going to approach the question that there's sort of two ways that Gramsci's kind of indirect and in some cases direct discussion of race is kind of like a break with the way that certainly Marxist thinkers directly engaged with race on the one hand, and then on the other hand, Gramsci's concept of subaltern groups is a really sort of helpful way to think about the alignment of race with other, what sociologists would consider variables, but how they shift contextually.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

And so that I think is really the kind of important takeaway in some ways. I'll just simply say, when I'm using Gramsci to think about race, I'm doing it through the category of subaltern. Groups, or I'm doing it using his approach to the analysis of situations, his distinction between organic movements and conjunctures. And so the notion of the conjuncture becomes really important when thinking about race only because the discussion of race as something that gets instrumentalized by particular groups for political purposes. Right. The question becomes in what ways and how? And so that notion of conjuncture which Gramsci uses is largely what hall adapts in the framework of cultural studies to analyze race. Hall wants to explain why is it that racism or racialization is expressed not just rhetorically or discursively this way, but how is it that it gets reorganized politically in such a way? And for hall, it's really because the conjuncture shifts. And so that sort of. That becomes really sort of key. And I'll just. I'll just say one more thing and then I'll talk a little bit more about this sort of original question. There was a chapter I wrote for this book initially on subaltern groups that I just couldn't get done in time. And I couldn't figure out how to fit it into the book. And it became a article. And then I published it. I re revised it and published it in my most recent book. So there's a. There's this. I sort of addressed the question you posed in a book I just recently published back in 2023 now, I guess, which is called the Cultural Production of Social Movements. And it. It also tries to develop the concept of ideological contention through a new concept I introduced called incipient practice. And so the idea here is to really sort of dig into what's going on inside of a movement and to say something more about it than merely ascriptive or merely applied, but to sort of get at the kind of cultural process of how movements generate ideas and what those ideas, how they actually work, what they really are and how they work. And so I just wanted to sort of mention that because it's. It's something that in some ways I tried to address in the book, but kind of didn't. And I wound up landing on this sort of last chapter I wrote where I do deal with some of the things that you're asking about this chapter called Apparatus Governmentality, where I'm dealing with more contemporary approaches to race, where I'm dealing with some critical race theory frameworks and some approaches to. They're largely postcolonial scholars, not in sociology, but they're not within the framework of. I don't even know how to say it. They're more Sort of anti colonial or deep critics in some ways, sort of hearkening back to a tradition where we would see people like Memmi and certainly Fanon Cabral and others like that. So I think that your more direct question about the insights from. For today's struggle, I can probably talk best about that one. So when we look at contemporary struggles through the lens of Gramsci's concept of subaltern groups, and particularly, like I said, his concept of a conjuncture, where conditions haven't quite yet settled, right? So institutions, social relations, and even meanings can shift, right? Here's a wealth of insights that can emerge from that when we think about social protest demonstrations and the like. In fact, there's a really great book written by Kate Crahan called Gramsci's Common Sense. And it looks at contemporary social movements at the time that she had written it, which to me it's a new book, but I guess now it's maybe almost a decade old. She's looking at the Tea Party, she's looking at Occupy Wall Street. And so she looks at these things through the concept of subaltern groups and other important concepts. Gramsci's notion of senso commune, which gets translated into common sense, and it's sort of known that way. And also Gramsci's concept of intellectuals, which I think is really a valuable concept. But I had mentioned Marcus Green, finally, because we don't have this in English, along with the late Joseph Buttigieg, who started this project of translating all the full 31 notebooks into English, but passed away a few years ago. And so the project's getting reconstituted. There's a group of contemporary Gramsci scholars that's going to try to finish the project. But he and Marcus translated Notebook 25, which is the notebook on subaltern groups. I know Marcus. We had a conversation and he says that when you look really closely at the concept of subaltern groups, it's not restricted to the modern proletariat. It describes the way that relations of class, race, gender, religion, nationalism, I would add languages, as would another Gramsci scholar, Alessandro Carlucci, who also wrote another excellent book, all of these Things I read when I tried to put together culture and tactics, but also, you know, nationalism and colonialism, Internet interact with contemporary conditions of subordination, right? So what I hear in that, and you might hear it too, is intersectionality, right? So subaltern groups is sort of a proto intersectional approach, right? So the conjuncture becomes this analytical framework that in many ways tracks the ways that subordination is organized in relationship to the economic organization of roles in civil society, the role that the state plays in relationship to society through institutions that sort of, you know, prescriptive roles, responsibilities, et cetera.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

So where I'm going with this is. And this is sort of like the best way to address the question is it's not really so much through Gramsci's understanding of race, but the idea that Gramsci gives us a way, right through this concept of subaltern, which sets certain things that we study in a particular relation and grounds it within an interpretive and analytical framework. He gives us a way to think about the relationship between race, domination, private and public life, a way to explain how changes to this relationship, you know, sort of, you know, plot along across time, how space affects it.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

Like through, for example, you know, colorblind ideology, which I address in the book.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

As I said in your last response to me, Bonilla Silva's work and his ethnographic work is just. It's groundbreaking stuff. And so I take his approach as a frame to extend my idea. I'm not really critical of it because I don't think there's much to be critical of there. But the point I'm making and the point that I make when I sort of adopt Bonilla Silva in, and I do this in this chapter I mentioned that winds up in one of my more recent books, is that if we look at it through Gramsche and if we look at it through hall, the question they would ask is, why colorblind racism now and why not some other expression of racism? And I feel like that's really the key thing is this idea that, you know, hall says it, racism is a deeply anti humanistic practice. But the question is, why does it take on the forms it takes at particular moments in time? And hall, using Gramsci, looks at the expression of racism and the process of racialization as conjunctural phenomenon. He wants to understand why it appears the way that it does, in part so that it can be, you know, it can be mobilized against.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Robert F. Carley]

And so that notion of, like, there's a way to mobilize against this. This forms a, an entire part of Hall's writing where he doesn't use the language of collective behavior or social movement studies. But again, to return to Hull, there's a sort of like rich tradition of thinking about the sort of mobilization against certain things, particularly racism in the uk. And I think that's why people like Ben Carrington find him not just valuable, but sort of inaugural to their sociology. And I think it's really there in that marriage of Gramsci's understanding of subaltern groups with a sort of conjunctural analysis, right, that we have a sort of approach to race, maybe not so much a frame for race through. Through Gramsci's work. And I'll just say one more thing, kind of as a one off. If you really look at the way that Gramsci did write about race through his critique of what's known at the time that he lived, I think it was like a criminal anthropology. It was sort of like a pseudo. A pseudo criminological. A social science, right? His critique is alarmingly current. Like, it's like, you know, he's expressing a critique of the analysis of race, right? That's. That suggests like, you know, first of all, these methods are ridiculous and absurd. He even talks about Laurianism in his notebooks. Aquile Lauria was one of these criminal scientists who believed there was a correlation between morality and alphitude. And he's like, come on, like, this isn't. No, this isn't a science. But his critique is its political use. And so in the famous Southern question, the last thing he writes before he gets put in prison, he even accuses a socialist. And many of the criminal anthropologists, these early criminologists, were socialists. He's like, the socialists are really responsible for this sort of racist frame that Italy begins to think about relations between the southern parts and the northern parts through. And so when you look at that stuff, it's hard to not think of Gramsci as constructivist in his approach to race. A brilliant political theorist named Benedetto Fontana who works on Gramsci, says Gramsci was a neo humanist. He was constantly looking at the reconfiguration of the way that not just we framed issues in a humanistic way, but how they affected the way that we thought about, you know, the way we produce our subjectivity, right? And that notion of the idea that we, we sort of are conscious of our own changeability, that we have some handle on our own subjective process. All of that in the framework of race is quite sort of contemporary. And for me, when I dealt with Gramsci, I thought, I can bring these things in at certain points in time because they really are useful. But it really is Stuart hall who updates Gramsci in that article. I mentioned Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. So I think that's probably the best way I could respond to that question.

[Michael Rossino]

Oh, that's. That's Excellent. Yeah, I really appreciate your. Your insights on the work. Thank you so much for joining us. So the book is Culture and Tactics. It's out now. Do you want to say a little bit more about kind of what you're working on now? You mentioned you have maybe some more contemporary books and things in the works for those people that are interested?

[Robert F. Carley]

Sure, I'd love to. So after this book, I wrote a book on Gramsci's concept of the conjuncture called Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy. And the subtitle is Meta Conjuncture. And that's sort of the idea in that book. And that book for me was very important because I went back to the Italian notebooks and found a phrase that was cut out of the translation. Everyone uses the 1971 selections from the prison notebooks. And the omission was like, startling. And it settled a problem in the way that people think about the conjuncture because they believe Gramsci wrote it. And so I say, here's this missing passage. Now let's rethink the conjuncture through this, but also through all the ways it's been written about. And in it I. I create a new way to think about the analysis of sort of contemporary social and political change to the best of my ability. It so. But it was a really enjoyable book to write, and I was sort of impelled to write it by a senior scholar saying to me when I bought it up in a roundtable, the idea for it, before I even thought it was a book, you know, you should do this. And then the book that I just published is the Cultural Production of Social Movements, and it extends some of these ideas. It was, if people are interested. There was a review of it in the latest issue of Social Movement Studies, so you can sort of look and see if it looks like something you might want to pick up or read. And then right now I'm working on a book called Distortion Cultural Theory in the Interregnum, where I'm trying to talk about how do we understand culture and what does it become in a moment of crisis? And is it still sort of an effective way to begin to produce politics or political responses? It's a bit of a departure point for me from the earlier work, but I'm working through more contemporary cultural theorists to try to think about certain strategies that we might hold up as exemplars of ways not just to resist, but to reorganize in a time where the sort of threats we're experiencing are somewhat precedented, somewhat unprecedented. But certainly in terms of the the moment we're in now unfamiliar and so that that book Distortion Fields, I'm, I'm in the I'm I'm sort of two chapters into it and I'm hoping, I'm hoping to have it out in about a year and a half or two years from now. But yeah, probably the moment will have passed after.

[Michael Rossino]

Well yeah, no, I think, I think that as long as you're, you're talking about these problems, they're definitely not going to go anywhere at least I don't worry about that. So a little bit of cynicism, a little bit of opticism maybe pests, optimism as we would say in Gramsci's terms. Well, thank you so much once again for joining us here at the New Books Network. Maybe we can have you on in the future for some of those other books. I really appreciated the conversation.

[Robert F. Carley]

So did I. Thank you so much.

[Michael Rossino]

Thank you.