Hello! My name is Tom and welcome back to my channel where I talk a little bit about
theatre, a little bit about being a PhD student and a little bit about those two
things squished together. So today, the third episode of What the Theory?, in
which I look at the concept of cultural hegemony. I said at the beginning of this
series that I might gradually spiral out from theatre into some wider
cultural and more general theoretical principles and today, because hegemony is
something that I've been working with in my writing and my research quite a lot
recently, I wanted to talk about that. As always, ideas and suggestions are
really useful. If you have anything you particularly want me to do a video about
then do leave a suggestion down in the comments and, if you want to watch more
of these videos, then do subscribe. But here we go with episode three of What The
Theory?.
The term hegemony stems from Classical Greece where the term hegemon was used
to refer to a state, usually in this case a city-state,
which held political and military dominance over others. Periods such as
the Spartan Hegemony and the Theban Hegemony referred to times in which
those particular city-states held dominance over all others. And, for much
of history the term was used to describe this kind of physical, geopolitical
control. In contemporary scholarship, however, the term has been developed to
refer to control outside of the relatively simple notion of physical
control. The theorist who is mostly to thank for this development is the Italian
Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a key figure in Italian communism towards the
beginning of the 20th century. As such, when Mussolini came to power, he was put
behind bars and died after 11 years in prison. While he was there, however, he
wrote extensively and some of his ideas and theories have been incredibly
influential ever since. Hegemony, then, was a key component of what Gramsci
described as his Philosophy of Praxis, alongside Ideology and Organic
Intellectuals. I won't go into the other two here but, essentially, Gramsci used
these three terms together to describe and analyse how social classes come to
dominate society. Much like its use in Classical Greece then, Gramsci's
conceptualisation of hegemony is still about control. Particularly, he uses it to
analyse how the bourgeoisie (the wealthy and the ruling classes) come to dominate
in a capitalist society. Gramsci's key development, however, was to acknowledge
that such power and such control comes about not only through physical power
but also through cultural domination. To put it into a relatively simple
contemporary example, we might observe that many media outlets and newspapers
are owned by the incredibly wealthy. As such, they will tends to have an
editorial outlook that will support political parties, policies and programs
which legitimise the existence of vast wealth
equality. These papers and media outlets however do not present this as one side
of a many-sided argument but as a simple, "common
sensical" worldview. Gradually then, the idea that some should be incredibly
wealthy while others struggle embeds itself in society to the point where
those whom this kind of thought process actively harms will actively support it.
Neoliberal capitalism, for example, is often presented as the defacto best way
of ensuring technological progress and individual freedom. And, so deeply is this
idea embedded in contemporary society, that we often find that those who face
the more dark side of contemporary capitalism will also be vocal advocates
for it. Cultural hegemony, then, is something which is often not clear to
see but hides itself within and beneath cultural texts. It's essentially the idea
of a dominant group using culture in order to legitimize their dominance. To
use a slightly different example there was a time, very recently, where a family,
as presented on television or in a film, would always consist of a mother, a
father and their children. Very few of these programs or films made a big deal
out of this. But, once we take them as a whole and we realise that there is only
this image of the nuclear heterosexual family being presented on our screens,
then we can see that this is presenting that this is what a family looks like
and this is only what a family looks like. Again, this is not an open political
debate, but simply cultural texts supporting a certain status quo. Further
examples might include many war films where we often find the global North and
global West engaging in military intervention in continents such as Africa
or South America. And, it's often shown to be quite a good thing. Again, these aren't
clear bits of political propaganda, but they do help to support that status quo
Gramsci's chief biographer famously described hegemony as 'predominance,
obtained by consent'. In this way, we can see that cultural hegemony is the idea
that power can be exercised and reinforced as
much through cultural texts as through physical force. Hegemony is a key concept
in cultural theory as it implicates power and politics into cultural texts.
It suggests that it does not necessarily have to be intentional but that most
works either support or revoke a certain state of hegemony. It is the
fundamental idea that power is not just exercised through physical force but
is also reinforced through the stories that we tell and the images that we make
whatever form they come in. Thank you very much for watching this episode of
What the Theory?, I couldn't manage to get absolutely everything about hegemony
into this short video but I hope it's a really nice starting point.
There's some great articles out there which give a really good overview and, if
you've enjoyed this, then please do consider subscribing or give it a thumbs
up. And, if you've got suggestion for another video, put it down in the
comments. Thanks very much and have a great week!