hegemony is hard (core post)

The Gramscian theory of hegemony is equally valuable and difficult to pin down. The pitfall—as Todd Gitlin points out—is to view hegemony as a totalizing ether that anaesthetizes its subjects to consent. Such a view neither aligns with the complexity of Gramsci’s thinking in its original formulation, nor is valuable for approaching cultural objects that participate in the production of ideology and reproduction of the social body. Gitlin’s strategy is to break down howexactly consent is produced by specific formal elements of television. These forms are “format and formula; genre; setting and character type; slant; and solution” (254). His article then details how each of these categories calls out to viewers, and in a sense responds to their desires and beliefs, rather than monolithically imposing a belief system upon them. Format and formula, for example, work by restructuring the leisure time of viewers into manageable blocks, and by interpolating viewers as consumers. Genreworks diachronically, adapting received forms of storytelling to new viewpoints and audience demands. In each case, although concessions are made to the viewer, television ultimately coopts its viewers into a hegemonic framework.

                  Gitlin’s piece is clearly from a certain moment in scholarship on hegemony, however, before it was pulled into the study of race by such scholars as Stuart Hall. Part of hegemony’s dark magic is the way it creates political unity among groups with opposing class interests. The prototypical example is the union of working class whites to the white ruling elite in the United States; racism unified these two groups to create a ruling bloc, and thereby also weakened the possibility for class consciousness to develop. If we take into consideration this element of Gramsci’s thinking—which understands hegemony not just as generalized consent, but as a temporary condition produced by the alignment of certain political and social forces—what would it mean for television? I hypothesize that in the context of the United States, one would have to analyze how television has been mobilized and transformed to maintain a certain hegemonic alignment. Since we are, it seems, now in a period of what Gramsci and Hall termed “crisis”, the function of television must also change. Hendershot touches on this question in her article on Parks and Rec, where the show proposes a liberal democratic response to the first green shoots of hegemonic realignment in the tea party.