culture and hegemony
...the most important State activities in this sense: but in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end…form[ing] the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.’ (Hoare, Smith 1971: 258) Exactly what these ‘initiatives’ and ‘activities’ actually are is unclear but they seem to designate, in my opinion, the ‘cultural norms’ of a giving society that re-enforce the position of the ruling class or group. According to James C. Scott in his book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, what Gramsci did was to ‘…explain the institutional basis of false consciousness’. (Scott 1985: 315) Scott explains that Gramsci simply expanded on Marx’s notion of ideological domination. That the ‘…ruling class dominates not only the means of physical production but the means of symbolic production as well’. (Ibid: 315) As mentioned above people access the world through the ‘cultural norms’ of their environment in which they are enculturated. If the ruling class in this society has control over the educative structures of cultural knowledge (schools, museums, laws, religion etc…) then people will mature with these ideas as fundamental premises in which thought is accessed. Indeed we learn from Marx that ‘[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’. (Green, Troup 1999: 36) This notion provides a great insight into what extent people actually create their individual reality and to what extent it is already prescribed. As noted above the ruling class will ultimately want to secure its position as the dominant group in society and thus the manufactured ideology will re-enforce the current mode of production. This process is realized through the interactions and activities of people in their everyday life, which take place within ‘structures of power’ constructed by the ruling class. For instance, having to purchase food from the grocery store with a monetary wage earned from selling labour on the job market. Or participating in forms of entertainment that induce a fantasy world through the spectacular, like going to the movies or watching a soccer game. These activities serve to re-enforce the capitalist system and the private ownership of the means of production. This is where the discipline of semiology is particularly insightful. In his work entitled Barthes, Jonathan Culler states that ‘[s]emiology is based on the premise that insofar as human actions and objects have meaning, there must be a system of distinctions and conventions, conscious or unconscious, that generates that meaning’. (Culler 1983: 72) In other words, the ‘cultural norms’ that people are enculturated with through the environment in which they mature creates a system of knowledge whose overt and subtle meanings may be accessed through the deconstruction of this system. It is through this cultural process that many of these meanings are also disguised through the veil of common sense or naturalization. It is the job of the semiologist to interpret signs through this process and reveal their hidden message. Michael Moriarty in his book Roland Barthes, provides a good explanation of the logic of reading messages: ‘a message is read into some substance, custom, attitude that seemed to carry its own justification in terms purely of practical use; and the message thus revealed turns out to be concealing the operation of socio-economic structures that required to be denounced—both because they are concealing their identity and because that identity is inherently exploitative’. (Moriarty 1991: 21) So how does this help in understanding the concept of hegemony? This is precisely one of the ways in which hegemony functions. Take the example of a soccer game: its practical message is providing people with a form of entertainment and collectivity by cheering for their favorite team. It may even provide a form of nationalism that the spectators willingly take part in. On the other hand its exploitative message re-enforces the capitalist system. This is done through the various advertisements that the spectators are subject to, whether through the logos on the players clothing or equipment, or through the billboards placed around or above the playing field. It also provides a spectacle inducing a form of escapism leaving most people exhilarated and somewhat rejuvenated. Also the sheer mass of the building exudes a sense of power that many people feel overwhelmed by. In essence it serves to pacify any felt tensions while re-enforcing ideas to consume, the commodities advertised become taken for granted, part of the commonsense reality of the everyday world. To consume people must sell their labour for a wage thus sustaining the capitalist system and the exploitative nature of this system. Thus hegemony is constructed through power structures that people take part in everyday. This from of ideological domination however, where the mass of the population is hoodwinked, a very Orwellian conception, can only really be applied to the modern state. Even then there are always groups who see through the veil. There are always various tensions produced by the capitalist system that allow for hegemony to be questioned and challenged. What is important to keep in mind is that hegemony is constructed and maintained through the cultural norms of a given society where cultural reproduction is controlled by the state. It is also interpreted and challenged through these same ‘cultural norms’ in that it is the only system in which the population can access reality. Scott’s work provides us with a good case study to further pursue this method of analyzation. What Scott argues in his work is that the notion of ideological hegemony, i.e. the production of 'false consciousness’, or mystification where social peace and ‘passive compliance’ prevail is an unrealistic analysis of the peasant culture that he studied in the Malaysian village of Sedaka. (Scott 338) Scott states that ‘[t]he poor, when they may do so with relative safety, display an impressive capacity to penetrate behind the pieties and rationales of the rich farmers and to understand the larger realities of capital accumulation, proletarianization, and marginalization’. (Ibid. 304) What he witnessed was peasant forms of resistance to the penetration of capitalism and the production relations made possible by double cropping and mechanization. ‘Foot dragging’, vandalism, quiet strikes, theft and malicious gossip were all various forms of resistence employed by the peasants of Sedaka. (Ibid. preface xvii) It is important to note that the peasant village is very secluded from state apparatus’s used to construct hegemony, namely state schools, the media, any form of material consolation, or the various structures of power we have already discussed. Scott acknowledges this himself stating that the ‘…peasantry, if anything is even further removed from the institutional circuits of symbolic power. Living outside the cities where the agencies of hegemony are quartered, operating largely within an oral tradition that somewhat insulates it from printed media, being an old class (unlike the proletariat) with its own cultural traditions and patterns of resistance, and having its own shadow institutions (for example, informal religious schools, rituals, and festivals), the peasantry is simply less accessible to hegemonic practice’. (Ibid. 321) It is important to note that Gramsci was using the modern state for his theory and not peasant culture, but Scott’s work proves very interesting none the less. Scott examines the connection between social control and the social use of property in the peasant village to probe for the basis of ideological conflict. That is the resistance that takes place on the level of ideas through the reconstitution and use of the traditional symbols of the village culture. Scott explores the ‘cultural norms’ that have been undermined by the new relations of production in paddy farming produced by the Green Revolution. The analyzation of these forms of resistance proves very important for this discussion because it attempts to identify and ‘…grasp the nature of the normative filter through which these self-interested actions must pass and how and why they are socially transformed through this passage’. (Ibid. 306) In other words, the peasants in the village of Sedaka access reality through a ‘filter’ of ‘cultural norms’. These norms have been threatened by the penetration of new capitalist methods of production. Scott is interested in how resistance is accessed and created by tensions within these ‘cultural norms’ produced by the new relations of production. Traditionally, according to Scott, ‘[t]he large farmer who wanted to ensure his labor supply and his political following had to handicraft his social authority link by link by means of strategic gif...