I am a communications student at Humboldt State in California, and it is interesting to hear what everyone in my department has to say, especially regarding identity, justice, liberation, and society. At heart, I am a cynic and take everyone’s word with a grain of salt. I don’t like to be duped or made to believe things that aren’t true so I spend a lot of my time making sure I know the correct information, or at least the information regarded as close to correct as possible. When I first entered this more liberal sphere, I was initially delighted as it was a much needed contrast to the conservative nature of my hometown.
There are things that I have noticed, though, that draw my eye to the hidden things that I don’t wish to see. Or at least, it feels like I don’t want to see it even though learning about it has given me more insight into my own life than anything else. A lot of this comes from the theory classes that I have taken so far. While I don’t take it for doctrine, I recognize its usefulness as a lens to view the world with.
There is a filmmaker named Slavoj Zizek who describes the concept of ideology as an internal mechanism of the human mind. If you wanted to be able to see the world without your ideology, you would need magic glasses to do so. I was resistant to this idea at first because I, like so many others, believed in the concept of the objective human. I was so inured with the idea that we could truly, 100% know reality, yet I could not describe to anyone the mechanisms with which to do so. I began to realize that human identity is a byproduct of our lived experience and thus, regardless of what has been learned, will be informed by biases from the past. Being able to realize this has helped me make more sense of an even bigger idea, one that I have a hard time getting around in its entirety.
The idea I refer to is that of Hegemony, or Cultural Hegemony as theorized by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian, Marxist imprisoned by Moussolini during WWII. Using his insights about the way fascism functioned in Italian society along with the facts of his existence as an oppressed person helped him realize a mechanism of society that could explain why so many people would follow the ideologies of people such as Mussolini and Hitler, but also can be used to explain why general cultural patterns persist and are defended over time. At its core, hegemony has to do with power. As a professor put it, power is being able to get others to do what you want or participate in the reality you have defined. This means getting people to agree with you and believe in the same ideas you do, and if you can do it without force, that is more powerful. The best slave is the one that doesn’t realize it.
This seems like kind of a far out idea because when we participate in our culture, it feels natural. But the idea that I ask you to think about is this: imagine every time you have ever entered a dark room in your house, apartment, or living space. What is the first thing your hand does upon entering the darkness? It reaches for the light and turns it on. You don’t always have to consciously think about doing this, sometimes your hand just does it because it has done it so many times in the past. You have, essentially, trained your hand to think by itself and do a specific task.
Now, consider this: simple functional tasks are not the only thing that can be trained, deep ideological behaviors and values can be conveyed through the training of the body and the control of messages. If you are a young boy and you hurt yourself, other boys will tell you to ‘man up’ and get over it. Rub some dirt in it. Walk it off. You’ll be fine. After a while this becomes their reality, and they will not have realized that they were not the ones creating it. If you are a woman, how often did you hear, throughout your life, “sit like a lady/girl/woman?”How do you think this has shaped your behavior today? When you sit, do you automatically cross or close your legs?
These are limited examples, ones that have much more context than a simple power grab, but the idea that I am trying to exemplify is that even with all this other context, all interaction has some basis of a power structure that is made invisible. No one questions why women are encouraged to wear make up while men are not, and the vocal few who do are “Othered” because they don’t fit within the status quo. This “othering” is the practice of make clear distinctions between Us and Them, between the in crowd and the obscene. This othering is a byproduct of hegemony because hegemony does not condone resistance or rebellion. How often have you seen someone who did not fit your cultures norms and think, “that person is weird”? That reaction is hegemony in its purest form, a policing action to get someone, even if there is not direct interaction, into the box that society has prescribed for them.
So, in a sense of conclusion, hegemony creates the conditions of ideological conformity such that it trains the body and mind in specific ways, rendering the process of hegemony invisible. This invisibility is achieved through the enforcement of ideology at all levels of society from state authority to the family and social setting so that it seems like a natural part of life.
This is not so much a structured writing as it was a mind dump. I have way more to write about this, but it is late at night and I’m done for now.
A DARKER ENERGY 