Page 120 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

the totality of social relations from different but complementary points of view
(Fossaert 1983). Following Fossaert’s elaboration of three dimensions of Karl
Marx’s ideas, if we interrogate a society as a whole based on the way it produces
economic value, then the representation of the totality of relations appears to
be a system of exploitation. We can also analyze society in terms of the ways
power is organized and exercised; then, the society will appear as a system of
domination. Third, when we analyze society by focusing on how that society
creates its ideologies as representations of the world, we observe the totality of
structured social relationships as a system of hegemony. Moreover, economic
value, power, and ideology are dimensions of all social relationships and should
by no means be understood as isolated levels or crystallized stages. Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony (1975) in fact deals well with the specificity of this
complex relation. He was clear that hegemony should not be mistaken for
simple domination (González 1994: 21–53).
Because of its specific ‘signicity’ (Cirese 1984) and the implicit elementally
human potential to create and recreate multiple possible worlds, hegemony
should therefore not be necessarily linked in some rigid way to class domin-
ation and exploitation. The social relations of hegemony, unlike its dialectical
relatives economic exploitation and political domination, imply not just two
human components (exploited in one case, dominant in the other), but a triad
of elements: the hegemonic (centralizing) pole, the subaltern (centralized) or
subordinated pole, and the other (dissipative) possible element in the midst of
an occupied symbolic territory.
In any hegemonic relationship the possibility always exists for a social agent
to become no longer ‘subordinated’ when specific configurations of common
meanings indicate that efficacy over this ‘other’ no longer exists. At the same
time, the ‘other’ status opens a range of possible new configurations of mean-
ing, still not yet ‘hegemonic’ (as another centralizing force), because it has not
yet articulated the collective will of allied social agents or enemies around its
symbolic framing enterprise (Gramsci 1975). Thus, we can think of hegemony
productively as a framed space of possibilities, as an expansive space of multiple
convergences. It should be noted in this regard that hegemony depends not
only on the work of anticipation and elaboration, but also on the potential to
articulate meanings and actions as centrifugal forces in strategies of social
interpretation.
In contrast to crude explanations of social relations that are limited to dis-
courses of political-economic exploitation and domination, hegemony can be
built and destroyed only through communication.

Centralized order and reflexivity

Part of the symbolic efficacy of the sort of hegemony we actually know
and experience resides in the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know
(Maturana and Varela 1992). The opacity of our relations is mainly caused by a

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