Hegemony

Raymond Williams
1a. Political rule or domination
1b. Relations between social classes wherein there is a ruling class

2. Hegemony goes beyond culture to encompass the whole social process that is
involved in the distribution of power and influence.
in society there are inequalities in the way people are treated around the issues
of class, (race, gender, sexual preference) that deals with dominance and
subordination [108]

3a. Relations of domination and subordination effect the whole process of living not
just economic and political activities.
Hegemony effects the whole substance of lived activity, including lived
identities 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 of
experience
3b. Hegemony relates, then, to the whole body of practices and expectations related to
the whole of living, including the following: our senses; assignments of energy; our
shaped perceptions of ourselves & the world. This lived system of meanings and values
relate 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 of
social organization and control in developed societies
A2. it replaces the past idea of the ruling class dominating a lower class; things are
more complex than this.
B1. pressures and limits of a form of domination are experienced and are internalized
and, in this way, transformed
B2. People live beyond mere political and economic means: they see themselves and
each 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 be
continually renewed, recreated, defended, and modified.
it is also continually resisted, limited, altered, and challenged by pressures that are
counter-hegemonic.
there is counter-hegemonic and alternative hegemonic [112-113]
4b. Hegemony relates to dominating rather than domination because it is a process that
is 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 abstract
totalizing definition.

5a. Hegemony: in complex societies there is active, formative, and transformational

processes
5b. Sometimes we take on subcultural alternative or oppositional forms to counter
hegemonic aspects of society and their practices of domination
5c. 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 from
extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity.
we need to develop modes of analysis that do not reduce active processes to
finished products, activities to fixed positions
hegemony works in relation to finite but significant open works of art, as
signifying forms that make possible variable signifying responses.