HegemonyRaymond Williams

1a. Political rule or domination1b. Relations between social classes wherein there is a ruling class

2. Hegemony goes beyond culture to encompass the “whole social process” that isinvolved in the distribution of power and influence.

– in society there are inequalities in the way people are treated around the issuesof class, (race, gender, sexual preference) that deals with dominance andsubordination [108]

3a. Relations of domination and subordination effect the whole process of living – notjust economic and political activities.

– Hegemony effects the whole substance of lived activity, including livedidentities and relationships to such an extent that there is a kind of deception.– Hegemony effects us to the extent that pressures and limits related to economic,political, and cultural systems seem like pressures related to the limits ofexperience

3b. Hegemony relates, then, to the whole body of practices and expectations related tothe whole of living, including the following: our senses; assignments of energy; ourshaped perceptions of ourselves & the world. This lived system of meanings and valuesrelate to constituting and being constituted by societal practices. [100]3c. Two advantages to the concept of hegemony

A1. its forms of domination and subordination correspond to normal processes ofsocial organization and control in developed societies

A2. it replaces the past idea of the ruling class dominating a lower class; things aremore complex than this.

B1. pressures and limits of a form of domination are experienced and are internalizedand, in this way, transformed

B2. People live beyond mere political and economic means: they see themselves andeach other in personal terms:

– they see themselves in terms of the natural world– people use their physical and material resources in relation to leisure and

entertainment and art– these relationships relate to the culture of production, to the whole area of lived

experience [111]

4a. Hegemony does not just passively exist as a form of dominance; it must becontinually renewed, recreated, defended, and modified.– it is also continually resisted, limited, altered, and challenged by pressures that arecounter-hegemonic.– there is counter-hegemonic and alternative hegemonic [112-113]4b. Hegemony relates to dominating rather than domination because it is a process thatis underway. So Williams would rather use hegemonic rather than hegemony; it too is

never total or exclusive. Williams wants to avoid a static hegemony with some abstracttotalizing definition.

5a. Hegemony: in complex societies there is active, formative, and transformationalprocesses5b. Sometimes we take on subcultural alternative or oppositional forms to counterhegemonic aspects of society and their practices of domination5c. A cultural process must not be assumed to be adaptive, extensive, and incorporative.Authentic breaks within and beyond it in specific social conditions can vary fromextreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity.

– we need to develop modes of analysis that do not reduce active processes tofinished products, activities to fixed positions– hegemony works in relation to finite but significant open works of art, assignifying forms that make possible variable signifying responses.