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.
