Page 405 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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376 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

their station. Hegemony, finally, as Belinda based on hierarchy, exchange value and output
Bozzoli (1991: 2) has argued, is a process, a quotas.
‘moving equilibrium in which spaces are cre- ‘Disoralia’ refers to a pressure, which
ated, fought for and won by those at the arises, from the distortion of symbolic, lin-
bottom from those at the top’. guistic and communicative interaction due to
Both domination and hegemony can exist the command language and practical intent
at the institutional level: this school, this fac- of organizational and civic life.
tory, that church; or can exist at the broadest ‘Degendering’ refers to pressure on cus-
level: the state, between states, across empires. tomary gender roles.
Fourth, social movements arise once the All these pressures, acting in concert,
webs that connect rulers and ruled, the pow- propel people to recoil from them and in that
erless and the powerful, get torn by crises, by process group together with others to refract
violations of expectations, by manifold their force and create communities of mean-
instances that might be intrinsic or extrinsic ing and practices that regulate everyday life.
to the relationship. They sustain themselves In this sense, one has to concur with Bozzoli
as movements by mobilizing the dissonance that ‘consciousness [is] formed within and
and alterity that exists, and coordinate in new against structures, rather than above and
ways the defensive combinations and cultural around them’ (1991: 2).
formations that subsist in ordinary people’s With this elaborate process of conceptual
lives. They sustain themselves better if the distinctions we can trace parameters of expe-
process of coordination involves the mobi- rience and conflict, of accommodation and
lization of physical and symbolic resources. resistance. We can also explore how a chal-
Through the latter they establish new relation- lenge to managements and the apartheid state
ships and a counter-hegemony that begins to subsisted within a ‘symbolic capital’ gener-
challenge dominant norms and institutions. ated by ordinary black workers in Natal in
This should be distinguished from move- the context of their struggles for workers’
ments of revaluation – a radical attempt to rights, democracy and a new communitarian-
impose the imagined old norms. ism. I argue that in the course of trade union
Finally, the crisis and collapse of cultural mobilization, black workers used whatever
formations might lead to anomie, normless- practical and emotive means they had at their
ness and despair. disposal to create a new language and many
Fifth, I would like to posit four related and new images of resistance. In the process, a
yet distinct ‘pressures’ that are crucial in the shifting and volatile ‘discursive formation’ of
genesis of cultural formations. These are class, nation, ethnicity and gendering has
‘alienation’, ‘disvaluation’, ‘disoralia’ and emerged which has helped the threading
‘degendering’. I posit these as substitutes for together of an importantly new ‘horizontal
Marx’s all encompassing concept of alien- comradeship’.
ation or Durkheim’s 1984 anomie, as the More specifically, approximately a thou-
defining psychopathologies of modern times. sand of them participated in the making of
‘Alienation’ still echoes Marx’s argument plays, reviving oral traditions of perform-
that modern capitalism created a world in ance, composed and sung, wrote and told sto-
which workers were alienated from the prod- ries as an aspect of their self-definition. Their
uct of their labour and the work process contribution in turn, has crafted many of
itself, which made them indifferent to the the ways their co-workers understood
priorities of capital and created unique psy- their consciousness-in-the-making. As many
chosocial pressures. of Natal’s workers crowded inside union
‘Disvaluation’ refers to a pressure that offices, halls and then, stadiums, they could
demands of people not reciprocal, morally not but come to touch and be touched by the
grounded relationships but instrumental ones cultural energies around them.