Page 107 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

critical theory. His current research preoccupations include mixed media pedagogy
and the integration both of critical thinking into art making, and of critically
inflected art practice into the mainstream.
84 • Associated concepts Bricolage, signs, style, subculture, youth culture.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, Marxism, poststructuralism, structuralism.
• Reading Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New
York: Routledge.

Hegemony The concept of hegemony played a significant part in the development of
cultural studies and was a core concept of the field during the 1970s and 1980s.
According to this theory, there is a strand of meanings within any given culture that
can be called governing or ascendant. The process of making, maintaining and
reproducing this authoritative set of meanings, ideologies and practices has been
called hegemony.
For Gramsci, from whom cultural studies appropriated the term, hegemony
implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of ruling class factions exercises social
authority and leadership over the subordinate classes through a combination of
force and, more importantly, consent. Gramscian concepts proved to be of long-
lasting significance within cultural studies because of the central importance given
to popular culture as a site of ideological struggle. In effect, Gramsci makes
ideological struggle and conflict within civil society the central arena of cultural
politics, with hegemonic analysis the mode of gauging the relevant balance of
forces.
Within Gramscian analysis, a hegemonic bloc never consists of a single socio-
economic category but is formed through a series of alliances in which one group
takes on a position of leadership. Ideology plays a crucial part in allowing this
alliance of groups (originally conceived in class terms) to overcome narrow
economic-corporate interest in favour of ‘National-Popular’ dominance. Thus, ‘a
cultural–social unity’ is achieved through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills and
heterogeneous aims are welded together to form a common conception of the
world. The building, maintenance or subversion of a common conception of the
world is an aspect of ideological struggle involving a transformation of
understanding through criticism of the existing popular ideologies.
Hegemony can be understood in terms of the strategies by which the world-
views and power of ascendant social groups are maintained. However, this has to
be seen in relational terms and as inherently unstable since hegemony is a temporary
settlement and series of alliances between social groups that is won and not given.
Further, it needs to be constantly re-won and re-negotiated so that culture is a
terrain of conflict and struggle over meanings. Hegemony is not a static entity but
is constituted by a series of changing discourses and practices that are intrinsically
bound up with social power. Since hegemony has to be constantly re-made and re-
won, it opens up the possibility of a challenge to it; that is, the making of a counter-
hegemonic bloc of subordinate groups and classes.
Neo-Gramscian hegemony theory has been challenged on the grounds that
Western culture no longer has a dominant centre either in terms of production or