Page 35 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

24 INTRODUCTION

‘Hegemony’ retains its base in the way the productive life of societies is
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organized. But it raises as critical the formative and educative tasks which are
required if this is to become the basis of a profound revision of the whole social
formation—the structures of civil and political life, culture and ideologies. The
important point is that such ‘moments’ assume a different character, have
different degrees of success and provoke qualitative challenges of different kinds
at different times, depending on the definite forms of society, the balance of
contending forces and the historical conjuncture. In this respect Gramsci massively
corrects the ahistorical, highly abstract, formal and theoreticist level at which
structuralist theories tend to operate. His thinking is always historically specific
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and ‘conjunctural’. It is conjunctural in two senses. It is always made specific
to a particular historical phase in specific national societies; but, further, the
concept of hegemony is elaborated specifically in relation to those advanced
capitalist societies in which the institutions of state and civil society have
reached a stage of great complexity, in which the mobilization and consent of the
popular masses is required to secure the ascendancy of a particular tendency and
in which ‘reform’ requires an extended and complex process of struggle, mastery,
compromise and transformation to reshape society to new goals and purposes.
Gramsci’s thinking is thus peculiarly relevant to societies like ours, in which
political and cultural power has been stabilized through the parliamentary and
representative political system, with a complex state structure and a massive
development of the cultural institutions of civil society.
For Gramsci, ‘hegemony’ is never a permanent state of affairs and never
uncontested. He distances himself from both the ‘ruling class/ruling ideas’
propositions of The German Ideology and the functionalist conception of
‘dominant ideology’ in Althusser’s essay. ‘Hegemony’ is always the (temporary)
mastery of a particular theatre of struggle. It marks a shift in the dispositions of
contending forces in a field of struggle and the articulation of that field into a
tendency. Such tendencies do not immediately ‘profit’ a ruling class or a fraction
of capital, but they create the conditions whereby society and the state may be
conformed in a larger sense to certain formative national-historical tasks. Thus
particular outcomes always depend on the balance in the relations of force in any
theatre of struggle and reform. This rids Gramsci’s thinking of any trace of a
necessitarian logic and any temptation to ‘read off’ political and ideological
outcomes from some hypostatized economic base. Its effect is to show how
cultural questions can be linked, in a non-reductionist manner, to other levels: it
enables us to think of societies as complex formations, necessarily contradictory,
always historically specific.
Gramsci, of course, remains within the basic terms of a materialist theory. But
there have been other influences which, in certain areas of our work, have taken
the line of thinking beyond these terms of reference. One may think here of the
difficult but important work stemming from the critique of earlier semiotic
models of language, and of parallel developments based on an appropriation of
psychoanalytic theories. These tendencies may be conveniently represented by