Hegemony

By Electre Mauche & François Schneider

 The concept of hegemony has been introduced by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher of Marxist background, and developed in the critical thinking tradition as a key concept to understand the contamination of culture, medias and all spheres of the society by power and domination's relationships.

 In Gramsci's thought, power and dominant forces are not limited to the political and institutional spheres, but tend to be diffused and reinforced through all the fields of human societies. Far from being a unilateral process, power and culture design and reinforce each other in a coextensive process, where medias play a crucial role.

 Thus, the concept of hegemony breaks with the idea that culture - as well as taste, education and all the fields related to it - constitutes a neutral, apolitical sphere. In the contrary, culture promotes the narratives, the standards and the norms of the dominants: this way, they introduce them as natural and universal, while giving to structural inequalities and disparities a coherent narrative and acceptable genesis. As a result, society tends to adopt and naturalizes the dominant, hegemonic discourse, and reproduces these narratives and the inequalities they create as an unconscious and often perceived as politically neutral process. This critique of culture has been completed by Bourdieu through the ideas of legitimate culture and reproduction of the elites, while addressing the educational system and its criteria of distinction. Here, the taste – i.e. the good taste -, operates as a powerful tool to discriminate social classes and legitimate the supremacy of the dominants as the result of a natural process of selection.

Usually, the actors of this process of reciprocal institution and reinforcement of power and culture, are not aware of the political implications of the norms they promote. Bourdieu takes the example of teachers, who are usually convinced of the neutral character of their task. Yet, while discriminating good from bad pupils, they use as tool of discrimination the knowledge of the implicit and non-taught codes and values of the middle to upper classes. In the same way, the receptors of this discrimination process rarely tackle it as a political issue, but tend to interiorize and depoliticize the dominant's narrative.

 In this process of diffusion of the hegemonic norms and discourse, needless to say that medias constitute privileged canals. While telling and reporting the news, they reproduce and impose the hegemonic perspective as exclusive, and naturalize dominants' power. Again, this process differs from a monolithic process: it is the place of a mutual and reciprocal institution.

 Hegemony, though, can be opposed by concurrent, counter- discourses, challenging it and deconstructing its mechanisms and narrative patterns. Progress, growth and development hegemonic narratives are challenged by the degrowth theory. It is a debate if the counter narrative of degrowth would be a new hegemony. This brings us to the idea of degrowth as “diversal”.