ANTONIO GRAMSCI: HEGEMONY

Criticisms of Gramsci's theory

REFERENCES

OUTLINE:

Raymond Williams:

Towards Cultural

Materialism: Criticism and

Hegemony in Raymond

Williams.

1. Intro & biography held by Navpreet Shallon

2. Cultural hegemony held by Oli

3. Hegemony and the media held by Selezneva Natalia

4. Gramsci on schooling and education held by Rosalyne Magnus-Oyewole

5. Criticisms held by Selezneva Natalia

"A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realised complex of experiences, relationships and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. Its internal structures are highly complex as can readily be seen in my concrete analysis. Moreover (and this is crucial, reminding us of the necessary thrust of the concept(, it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified" (Williams, 1977: 112)

• Gündoğan, E. (2008). Conceptions of Hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s Southern Question and the Prison Notebooks. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. [online] Available from: file:///C:/Users/%D0%BA%D0%B5%D0%B9/Downloads/09e41514870df9963a000000%20(2).pdf [Accessed: 8th March 2015].
• Sherman, T. (2011). Outline and explain Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical project with regards to his revision of Marxist ideas. [online] Available from: https://www.academia.edu/5252822/Antonio_Gramsci_and_Marxism?login=super.tyga2709@yandex.ru&email_was_taken=true&login=super.tyga2709@yandex.ru&email_was_taken=true [Accessed: 8th March 2015].

• Jackson, T. J. (1985). The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and Possibilities. The American Historical Review. [online] Available from: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/lears.pdf [Accessed: 9th March 2015].
• Alcala, V. R. (2010). Towards Cultural Materialism: Criticism and Hegemony in Raymond Williams .[online]Available from: http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/EIUC/article/viewFile/EIUC1010110067A/7631 [Accessed: 9th March 2015].

Hegemony and media

Steven Lukes notion of the 'third face' of power is reminiscent of Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony, he suggests the most dominant group of society can effectively impose their own set of values, norms and ideology upon the masses

Media are the institutions that 'not only reflected and sustained the consensus' but 'helped produce consensus and manufactured consent', acting as an important tool to establish hegemony.

Luke's model could be used to explain why some issues (such as inequality) are not socially constructed as problems and are assumed natural or inevitable by everyone.

'Is it not the supreme and most insidious use of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognition and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?'

(Lukes 1974: 24)

CULTURAL HEGEMONY- According to Gramsci:

CULTURAL HEGEMONY

• Class struggle involves a dialectic relationship of ideas and ideologies, ideas that aid the revolution and also that would prevent it.
• The ruling class has succeeded at persuading the subordinate classes of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values, so the masses assimilate to the ideology of the dominant class.

There are two ways the hegemonic class maintain control:

Coercive control: This is direct violence in order to gain (needed by a state when its degree of hegemonic leadership is low or fractured);


Consensual control: This is when the people voluntarily consent to the cultural norm, and there is a certain ideology directed by those with hegemonic leadership.

This dominant ideology becomes assumed as “common sense”.

"...Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their dominance by securing the 'spontaneous consent' of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus which incorporates both dominant and dominated groups." (Strinati, 1995: 165)

Hegemony and the media

Gramsci on schooling and education

Media is an institution of production, reproduction and transformation of hegemony.

• Spent 11 years imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist scheme
• During this time completed 32 notebooks, almost 3,000 pages
• They got smuggled out of prison and published in Italian after the war, did not find an English language publisher till the 1970s.
• The central guiding theme of notebooks was the development of a new Marxist theory applicable to conditions of advanced capitalism.
• Gramsci became the first marxist theorist to work with the problems if revolutionary change in the 20th century western European society and also the first to identify the importance of the struggle against bourgeois values e.g. Ideological-cultural struggle.

Biography

Schooling played an important part in Gramsci's analysis of modern society. The school system was just one part of the system of ideological hegemony in which individuals were socialised into maintaining the status quo.

He was clear that learning was not something that came easily for the majority of young people. "The individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula" (Gramsci 1971: 35)

1891-1937

• Italian Marxist and politician
• Wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics
• Best known for theory of cultural hegemony
• Describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies.

HEGEMONY AND THE MEDIA

Hegemony suggests that the dominant class controls the class consciousness in a society, it neglects the fact that people are different and people have a different reflective thought capacity and that there are no 'homogeneous human subjects'

A learner had to be active not "a passive and mechanical recipient" The relationship between the pupils psychology and the educational forms must always be active and creative just as the relation of the worker to his tools is active and creative" (Gramsci 1977: 42)

ANTONIO GRAMSCI: HEGEMONY

There was no doubt in his mind that education in modern Italy was one way in which the mass of the population was kept in place. "If our aim is to produce a stratum of intellectuals...from a social group which has not traditinally developed the appropriate attitudes then we have unprecedented difficulties to overcome" (Gramsci 1971: 43)