Page 91 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 81
by overt force or ideological compulsion, on a subordinate class, was not
sophisticated enough to match the real complexities of the case. One had also to
see that dominance was accomplished at the unconscious as well as the
conscious level: to see it as a property of the system of relations involved, rather
than as the overt and intentional biases of individuals; and to recognize its play in
the very activity of regulation and exclusion which functioned through language
and discourse before an adequate conception of dominance could be theoretically
secured. Much of this debate revolved around the replacement of all the terms
signifying the external imposition of ideas or total incorporation into ‘ruling
ideas’ by the enlarged concept of ‘hegemony’. Hegemony implied that the
dominance of certain formations was secured, not by ideological compulsion,
but by cultural leadership. It circumscribed all those processes by means of
which a dominant class alliance or ruling bloc, which has effectively secured
mastery over the primary economic processes in society, extends and expands its
mastery over society in such a way that it can transform and re-fashion its ways
of life, its mores and conceptualization, its very form and level of culture and
civilization in a direction which, while not directly paying immediate profits to
the narrow interests of any particular class, favours the development and
expansion of the dominant social and productive system of life as a whole. The
critical point about this conception of ‘leadership’—which was Gramsci’s most
distinguished contribution—is that hegemony is understood as accomplished, not
without the due measure of legal and legitimate compulsion, but principally by
means of winning the active consent of those classes and groups who were
subordinated within it.

From the ‘reflection of consensus’ to the ‘production of consent’

This was a vital issue—and a critical revision. For the weakness of the earlier
Marxist positions lay precisely in their inability to explain the role of the ‘free
consent’ of the governed to the leadership of the governing classes under
capitalism. The great value of pluralist theory was precisely that it included this
element of consent—though it gave to it a highly idealist and power-free gloss or
interpretation. But, especially in formally democratic class societies, of which
the US and Britain are archetypal cases, what had to be explained was exactly
the combination of the maintained rule of powerful classes with the active or
inactive consent of the powerless majority. The ruling-class/ruling-ideas formula
did not go far enough in explaining what was clearly the most stabilizing
element in such societies—consent. ‘Consensus theory’ however, gave an
unproblematic reading to this element—recognizing the aspect of consent, but
having to repress the complementary notions of power and dominance. But
hegemony attempted to provide the outlines, at least, of an explanation of how
power functioned in such societies which held both ends of the chain at once.
The question of ‘leadership’ then, became, not merely a minor qualification to
the theory of ideology, but the principal point of difference between a more and a