HEGEMONY AND SHADES OF ACTUALISM IN RAYMOND WILLIAMS

Actualism is a philosophical way of understanding and conceiving existence beyond binaries of origin and end. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as “the philosophical position that everything there is — everything that can in any sense be said to be — exists, or is actual. Put another way, actualism denies that there is any kind of being beyond actual existence; to be is to exist, and to exist is to be actual.” In his essay on the conceptual underpinnings on hegemony, Williams attempts to transcend the views on the topic by Gramsci and others. He addresses the ideas proposed by Gramsci and delineates that in effect “hegemony goes beyond 'ideology'” (109). In other words, the parameters of subordination and mastery can exist beyond the realm of pre-existing notions of its existence.

The formal pattern available for ideology negates the consciousness of hegemony. “Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of 'ideology', nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as 'manipulation' or 'Indoctrination '. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living...” (110). In other words, Williams suggest a myriad of actualist ways through which the discourse of hegemony could be imposed upon the subordinate classes. Williams provides clues to where and how one may experience the hegemonic authority of the dominant classes. He mentions that even in the way one spends energy and conceives notions of identity and self, hegemonic undercurrents exists.

Historic ways of control already exist in popular imagination. However, the new form of control that infiltrate in the abstract and shadow domains of electoral landscape must be evaluated with clarity. This clarity involves cognition and labelling from the part of the subject. In other words, clarity on the premises of reality is crucial in the contextualization of hegemony. According to Williams, domination and subordination exists as taken for granted in the modern landscapes such as “modern areas of 'leisure' and 'private life'. More specifically and more actively than older ideas of domination, with their trivializing explanations of simple 'manipulation', 'corruption', and 'betrayal'”(110). The spectrum of visibility has changed and has impacted in an intense experience of this binary. This intensification and shifting of focus in domination and subordination may even alter permanently the “the whole question of class rul e, and of opposition to it”(110).   

An actualism of political philosophy is in action here. Within this context the pattern of existence of hegemonic systems can take any variant format. However, “[t]he major theoretical problem, with immediate effect on methods of analysis, is to distinguish between alternative and oppositional initiatives and contributions which are made within or against a specific hegemony (which then sets certain Units to them or which can succeed in neutralizing, changing or actually incorporating them) and other kinds of initiative and contribution which are irreducible to the terms of the original or the adaptive hegemony, and are in that sense independent”(114). In other words, when contributions against hegemony are initiated the process of undermining “original or adaptive hegemony” is underway.

Responses and the proliferation in modes of opposition may hinder the hegemonic systems. The proliferation of counter narratives is perhaps what Williams suggests in order to undo the impacts of dominator-subordinate binary.    

WORKS CITED

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Penguin Books, 1991. Print.

Menzel, Christopher, "Actualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition),

Edward N. Zalta (ed.). web . 29 Jul 2015.  <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/actualism/>

A Revaluation of the Totalitarian Scheme of the Gramscian concept of ‘Hegemony

It was Marx who, by his reductionist interpretation of the relationship between base and superstructure as constituting a one-way process, provided succour for Antonio Gramsci to develop the idea of ‘hegemony’ as an active social process articulating the forces of domination and subordination. If ‘hegemony’, in its traditional sense, meant a form of political domination, with Marx, a social dimension got attached to it. However, it was Gramsci who extended its theoretical potentiality so as to mean the social practice of consensus-seeking through veiled forms of coercion. Raymond Williams, in his phenomenal work Marxism and Literature, argues that although Marxist philosophy is largely indebted to Gramsci for the reassessment of a concept which was labouring in epistemological nebulousness, Gramsci overshot the mark by saturating the concept with a totalitarian perspective that made it a blanket term for concepts like ideology, consciousness and superstructure. Williams not only disentangles the concept of hegemony from homologous ones but also rearticulates a whole discourse of social processes that embed hegemonic practices.

Williams states that hegemony is characterized by a mutual osmosis between social, political and cultural forces. Gramsci’s translated writings contain no definite accounts of hegemony. It is more or less clear that he means by it a social process in which a set of people give the tacit consent to the dominant class to rule over them. Though this definition appears too theatrical at first, it will start making sense when we consider the manner in which such consent was extracted. Rather than through the use of direct force which would characterize Gramsci’s conception of political society, hegemony exerts its manipulative potential through ensuring conformity of thought, values, perceptions and judgements to the existing social order. It should necessarily be differentiated from ideology which is more abstract and theoretical. If ideology subsumes only a particular class outlook or world-view, hegemony incorporates the complex ensemble of lived experiences, relationships and activities existing in varying forms of power relations and fluid limits. Ideology is an articulate and systematically expressed system of recognizable beliefs and values that naturalize the existing social order as culturally preeminent and desirable. The multitude of connotations that ideology has engendered is a result of its having been used with undifferentiated reciprocity with the Marxist notions of superstructure. There is a need to distinguish between ideologies that are ineluctable to a certain social structure and those that are arbitrary or willed. Ideology deserves to be recognized as a psycho-sociological force that structures human masses, becoming the terrain on which they move and acquire consciousness of their relative positions. It is interesting to note that Marx obviates the distinction between a particularly puissant political conviction and a material force in his A Contribution to the Critique of Economy in a way analogous to what Louis Althusser does in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Following the Marxian revitalization of ideology, Althusser says:

            I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into his material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which we derive the ideas of that subject...Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus.(158-59)

 Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is an interplay between domination and subversion on an ‘epochal’ scale. It needs to be readjusted to the ‘historical’ scale for it to disengage itself from the blemish of essentialism. While Marx believed that changes in base caused the radical reorganization of the superstructure, Gramsci contends that changing socio-economic circumstances do not of themselves ‘produce’ political changes; they only set the conditions of making such changes possible. Instead, what is crucial in realizing those changes are the degree of consciousness of political radicalism and the mutual combativeness of opposing forces involved. In fact, it is from the point of view of the oscillating tensions of an ideological struggle that the concept of ‘hegemony’ developed.

According to Raymond Williams, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is too simplistic for the following reasons:

1. It has a totalizing reach which obfuscates the inevitable demarcations between related Marxist terminologies.

2. It fails to take stock of on-going processes of socio-political interplay and risks becoming homeostatic.

3. It conceives of only the set forms of domination exercised by the ruling class in place of its modern equivalents of complex social reorganizations.

Williams argues that any static definition of hegemony fails irredeemably to acknowledge it as an on-going social process.It not only a dynamic relation between domination and subordination, but also an interstitial zone that constantly remodifies and reconstitutes itself. Williams argues that the Gramscian model of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony constitute a contradiction as they work contrapuntally to his totalizing definition of 'hegenony.' Williams concludes that there is a risk involved in reducing all political and cultural initiatives to hegemonic practices. Rather what is required is a dissociation of hegemony from an a priori totalitarian perspective. Such a move can validate hegemony as a clearly-defined cultural construct at the same time owning its allegiances to concepts like ideology and superstructure.

Works Cited

Montag, Warren. Louis Althusser. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,                               2003. Print.