A baseline finding of social science is that we are not only independent producers of our consciousness, we’re also literally subjected to reams of external and coercive influences. Even when we imagine another possible world, a better one, our forms of thought come from the prevailing circus of our culture. The raw reality that we seek to explicate by critical thought is more distant than we’re led to believe, in other words. The term for external and prevailing social ideology is hegemony.
Our enforcement of our powers of agency and authenticity depends on an awareness of the pressures that society puts upon us. Feeling put-upon is not, after all, only real when we are aware of its presence. Pushy people and their agendas are only the tip of the iceberg steering us, as it were, to a berth in the steerage compartment of the Titanic of industrial modernity. If we feel like our world is closing in on us, in terms of available avenues of ideological egress, we’re not alone.
One Gramsci at a Time
While being imprisoned by fascists in the 1930s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci elucidated how bourgeois mastery over media and mentalities leads us to quite literally see the world through the eyes of the ruling class. “Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes of post-1870 industrial Western European nations consent to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions.” We consent to this domination in the way a child enjoys literal Kool Aid – only as adults do we find, as I did, that the Kool Aid was added to a glass of tap water to counter the nasty taste. It behooves us to remember that cultural Kool Aid, the hegemonic ideologies of our times, is meant to taste good so as to mask unpleasant realities.
Pop Culture: Hegemony’s Ground Zero
Take Taylor Swift and her erudite sporting star partner, Travis Kelce. Legions of Swifties hang on to her every word and feel empowered in doing so, “what a role model,” they say, “what a loud and proud ambassador for self-expression.” And so she is, but it’s never enough for some segments of society. To the most strident, and seemingly most socially conscious, cultural critics, for whom the project of identity must lead to certain and stable conclusions, Swift’s ambiguity about her sexuality is a door waiting, as it were, to be slammed in the face of intrusive patriarchal heteronormativity. Swift lately was somewhat taken to task by a New York Times columnist for claiming that her life felt like being in the closet: was Swift actually gay and not properly liberated enough to say so, the columnist mused? Presently her life unfurls against a public backdrop of her dating a masculine hero of brains and brawn, Travis Kelce, who, famously in another interview, used for her the traditional term homosexuals use for their ostensibly gay partner: a breeder. “I’m gonna find a breeder, and I’m gonna get kids so that Mom can love me again”, he said. Maybe they’re all gay and furthering the oppression of their homosexual bedfellow, journalists seemed to wonder.
Now, if you’re like me and have participated in your share of turkey-baster humor with lesbians, including at the local Pride Club, and certainly have known lesbians who would so enjoy the miracle of motherhood without the pestilence of a, probably underwhelming, man, this all rings a bit suspicious. Is the journalist really attacking hegemonic values by calling out Swift’s obscurantism? Perhaps what’s really at hand, or closet, is a hegemonic desire for people to adopt a stable identity and stick with it, so that consumerism’s marketing department can take over.
If we thought hanging off every interview word of Taylor Swift was an entertaining inquiry into the nature of hegemonic values being inculcated into our little craniums, just imagine what’s being taught to us behind our backs. No amount of consciousness about core beliefs or conscious predilection is enough to fully overcome the cultural hegemony of the ruling class. In a heated dispute over the power of discourse, such as that tied to individual rights in our era of identity politics, cultural litigants Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau compared discourse to a game of ping pong. Each side is allowed to give the game of ideology their best effort, shoot their best shot as it were, but one side (the proletariat, or working class) finds itself perpetually tethered to one leg of the ping pong table. A match to be sure, but one with a literal handicap forced upon those in the subaltern social position. It’s for this reason, some say, that pathologization into roles of mental health disability is placed onto those in vulnerable positions in society. We are all of us times defined by hegemony but the more marginal we are the louder the criticism rains down if we don’t play by the rules.
A contradiction is at the heart of hegemony where popular culture is concerned. On the one hand, Taylor Swift represents the vital entrepreneurial urge of creativity associated with speaking truth to power. On the other hand, as a representative of the entertainment industry. her life’s work functions to essentially advertise certain methods of dressing, expressing and consuming. The garb of any culture’s hegemonic values, be it a burqa or a miniskirt, represents the local definition of being dressed for success. Presenting oneself as a woman on a mission, a person fulfilling certain dreams of a career that entertain others for profit, is itself the product of a society run by entrepreneurs. Yet, so is seeking to bring marginalized identities to the light of day by almost any means possible. When these two doors open at once conflict ensues.
Meanwhile, there’s the infamous intersection of public and private, where the personal is politicized when a cultural icon is concerned. Gramsci reminds us that “massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position …”. Hegemony is something sensed by everyone, no matter her politics. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe “argued that there was nothing essential in the antagonisms politicized by the new social movements that guaranteed their articulation to the Left”. Because we all feel constrained by external hegemonic forces, the way out of such a straitjacket, by definition, cannot be limited to participation in this or that protest movement; activism gloms us onto existing manners of presentation, of self, which have arisen and been supported by existing hegemonic systems. We know this every time a new world crisis is presented in the media; people become caricatures of themselves, imbuing their certainties with the courage of knowing that others like them have taken the same stand.
Yet every standpoint entails a standing still, as it were, a pausing to adopt a contingent identity, as when trying on a new item of clothing. Tattoo parlours now exist in even the smallest small towns nowadays, perhaps not so much to express the need to attach a permanent reminder of our identity onto our skin but, rather, to give the illusion of permanence to our ephemeral desires. We do well to recall Lady Gaga’s famous song in which she as a youngster watches her Mom meticulously applying makeup all the while explicitly telling her offspring that she was “born this way”. Abstract essential identities, as we find when we foray out into other cultures who have different clothing and habits and food, are relative to context and often not achieved without a performative effort.
One surety is that society is run by people whose livelihoods depend not on consistent, predictable, incomes but on taking big chances in pursuit, golden parachute in tow, of big rewards. “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” involves certainty and consistency, rather than a labile sense of self. Investment culture is not the same as the workaday world, yet the former “forms of consciousness express a particular class view of the world” where people take big risks, so long as its within accepted realms. While many people live paycheck to paycheck, hegemonic culture teaches us to aspire to success at the expense of others rather than to fulfill collective goals – with the exception of when social justice is concerned. All this while deploying the royal we to describe arguably-asinine outcomes like discovering a new space nebula or ocean trench.
In a darker sense the hegemonic we is deployed when collective guilt for climate sins is attributed to society as a whole rather to the real movers and shakers fuelling ecological decline. But there’s enough gravy on the scholarly train for us to grind our way out of this fix, if only we remember that even the answers that seem to critique the system are themselves planted in a way that functions to distract us from drawing our own conclusions. It all begins with remembering that what we put into our bodies and minds will seep out of us, sometimes unconsciously, in how we interpret this world we live in.
Once we accept that hegemony is more powerful than can be overcome by a Saturday Night Live skit skewering this or that public figure, and a critique of hegemony is not as simple as we are led to believe, then we are on the path to truly thinking for ourselves. Crucially too, this means accepting that, no matter what we think we know, it’s in the nature of human nature for a panoply of perspectives to emerge. The bondage of seeking to be well-adjusted is best unravelled by accepting others just as we’d wish to accept ourself, and our personal evolutionary journey. But lo is that a difficult task! Personally, I’ve lately tried giving radical tolerance a try, the better to avert upholding hegemonic values without even meaning to.
