Page 118 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

discursive work, these cultural institutions, their agents, and their practices have
reshaped the meaning of the public sphere. But the craft of rede fining public
life (in a centripetal direction) never occurs without other influences. It has
had to conquer a symbolic occupied territory, filled and threatened by competing
centrifugal interpretations, in a constant struggle. The study of such cultural
dynamics as cultural fronts permits us to know how our dearest commonalties
and most beloved feelings have been created. Cultural fronts therefore opens up
possibilities for understanding the development and construction of diverse
modes of symbolic convergence and integration.

Hegemony and cultural fronts
When symbolic convergence and integration depend on the discursive work of
a more or less allied social group, in social science we often say that we have a
relative state of hegemony (Fossaert 1983). Whether active or passive, hege-
mony implies the recognition of authority and cultural legitimacy of a certain
group. But the traditional concept of hegemony as it was used by V. I. Lenin
in Russia, and later by Antonio Gramsci in Italy (González 1994), generally has
been applied in a rather limited way and without sufficient theoretical and
methodological connections to the experiences of everyday life; that is, with-
out clear and plausible links to the forces that shape the concrete and actual
meanings of our lives. Thus hegemony has remained a highly abstract concept.
Typically it has been understood as something that happens at the macro-scale
of the nation-state or the world system: all social classes fall under the com-
mand of a certain block of dominants. The concept often has been theorized to
overlap with political domination and economic exploitation.
We need a less confining understanding of hegemony to serve us well. I’m
thinking here more in terms of the way the concept is discussed by Stuart Hall
(1979) and James Lull (1995, 2000), where hegemony is considered not a direct
stimulation of thought or action but a framing of competing definitions of
reality to fit within the dominant class’s range.
This useful concept, hegemony, permits us to analyze how collective social
agents have established historical and specific symbolic relationships with each
other. Hegemony lets us identify the totality of relationships in society from a
cultural perspective; that is, from the point of view of all the representations of
the ‘world’ and ‘life’ that are skillfully elaborated, either by social institutions or
by social agents, in an endless dialogical way. Because the tensional and
dynamic construction of the common meanings that are created between
ordering and dissipating social forces have not been well described, hegemony
has been under-utilized or poorly utilized in empirical accounts of the very
production of life (Bertaux 1977).

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