Gramsci and Hegemony

If, as Vološinov insists, ideology is signification, who produces and disseminates the signifiers?   It is Antonio Gramsci who is credited with the theory of hegemony as it relates to lived ideology or as Terry Eagleton puts it, a transition from a system of ideas to social practice.  Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense of the term, is a dynamic system of signification that encompasses all facets of what he defines as civil society: cultural, institutional, political, and economic formations.  Hegemony includes ideology, but is more of a practice; a continual stream of signification based on ideological principles or world view.  The more a world view permeates the connecting threads of society - religion, literature, media, economic system, and government to name a few - the more consent is derived from the various classes that define the society.  Hegemony is a continuum of consent and coercion, with the most powerful hegemonic regimes falling far closer to the former than the latter. 

The current hegemony of neoliberal capitalism is dominant because it manages to connect its basic ideological tenants to the intrinsic sense of identity psychologically maintained by individuals.  And it manages to do so in what Gramsci terms a spontaneous manner.  Spontaneous in the sense that the freedom of markets and trade ideologically espoused by neoliberalism aligns with the human subject’s psychological sense of a free identity.  Western (and Northern) cultures signify the ideology of neoliberalism through language, literature, movies, television, and news media.  Political institutions promote the ideology through coercion, sometimes by force (see Iraq), but most often by manipulating non-conforming governments (the IMF and World Bank require economic and political practices that match neoliberal ideology before they will support a developing nation).  Cultural coercion of the individual mind layers itself upon the political manipulation to form a powerfully entrenched hegemony.