Hi everyone. I hope you're doing well. Um I'm recording this before I leave. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys think about some of the concepts this week. Um so today we are talking about a new form of power and or not say form of power, a new way of thinking about power and how it works. Um, and the readings I've given you are kind of applied in that they're looking at how to use these concepts in particular cases. So, my goal today is to kind of give you like the theoretical overview because we've had a bunch of kind of conceptual readings so far. So, that's my goal for today is to kind of pin this down. Um and then the lecture that you guys will have on Thursday is more about um how this concept has been used in particularly in the field of international relations which I hope you will find interesting. Okay. Um so and the concept we're talking about is hegemony. Hegemany is a kind of complicated word in that a lot of people don't know how to pronounce it the first time they see it. Um but it's a pretty useful tool for studying power and politics. Um and so you know last week when we talked about the general will right um Rouso makes this distinction between the will the general will right which is embodied in the sovereign and then the force that the sovereign can exercise right. um and that you know he he has this whole like the state can force you to be free which is to say it can force you to do what is best for everyone which is the general will right um but I think some of the issues we were discussing about how do we actually get to the general will pointed to some of the issues here which is that it's not a binary choice between either you force people to do things or they do it of their own free will. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Um so our contemporary theoretical use of the concept of hegemony comes from the work of Antonio Grahamshy. Antonio Grahamshy was an Italian communist at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a member of parliament and a pro-democracy activist. Um because at this point in time uh they were dealing with the rise of fascism in Italy and he opposed the fascist government and he wanted increased democracy in order to bring about kind of a communist change in the government. Um so they sent him to jail. Mousolini put him in jail. Um I believe until a within a year of his death he stayed in jail. Um but he was allowed to write while he was in jail and he ended up writing what we call the prison notebooks. Now he didn't give it a title. He didn't say this is the book I'm writing. Right? So he was writing in prison and he was having to be very careful because everything he sent out was read. Right? So he couldn't just say and this is how I will have a communist revolution. Right? He had to say how do we get things and what can we understand about society? Um but he couldn't you know say exactly what he meant. So there's the texts can be obscure which is why I didn't assign you him. Um but this kind this is the context in which he's developing these ideas right resisting fascism imprisoned for what his beliefs were and trying to think about how do we get to real social change. And so the the concept that he focuses on is the idea of hegemony. Um this comes from the ancient Greek word hegeimon. Um which was a leader or commander. And hegemany was the the rule of the the commander or leader over whatever they ruled. Um and so generally we use the word hegemony to mean domination. In political science we often mean domination over a territory or polity. Right? We control this territory. So I've got the biggest power and therefore I'm in control of this, right? Um it's not let's say that uh in the the distinction between hegemony and sovereignty as we've seen it used hijgemony is a bit more uh control focused as opposed to rule focused. Let's say we're going to talk more about that later on. Um and so excuse me Grahamshy in particular emphasized the role of cultural hegemony which was to say power that is held in the realms of culture and ideology like the ideas about power the ideas about what is good and right that people hold exercises control over the people. So for those of you who may have read some marks um there's this idea in Marxist theory of false consciousness right which is where the workers have been convinced to do things against their own interest that obviously it's in their interest to do X but they've been convinced to go along with what their bosses want right um and so there's this idea of you know you've got false consciousness of your situation you need to be educated to change it. And to a certain extent, this notion of cultural hegemony is continuous with that, which is to say, it's a way in which you are made to think in a way that might be against your interests or might not be what you actually want because it's so normalized, right? Um and so he hijgemany basically the argument here is if those who are powerful in society set the terms for what's good right if they say this is what's good if they are the ones who justify the social system then if you want to change the social social system that's really freaking hard right if you've been convinced that the way things are is the way that it is fundamentally best to trying to change that becomes really difficult. Um, and so like some examples, right? We we kind of got to in some of our earlier conversations like why do we s why do we accept the continued existence of the state and its continued monopoly on the use of force, right? And we talked about the fact that that can come from legitimacy, right? Which is the idea that this is good. And one of the things that Grahamshy is pointing out is that that legitimacy doesn't only come from doing it well. That legitimacy can come from like convincing people it's the right thing. Right? So we can be convinced that it is better to acquies to the state than to rise up against it even if it might not actually be. Right? Kind of see the the exchange that's happening here. So like You see ideas about you know the state the state that exists now is a legitimate unit right we couldn't change what the state is right we can't change the core principles of how the state is governed right like we can we can change nuances but fundamentally the basic system is there um so I used to teach in the US and I would often have students I'd teach political theory and I'd ask them to say like is this just right like should people have this right kind of questions like that and I would actually get back yes you should have that right because it's in the constitution and I was like that's that's an argument about whether or not it is good that's an argument telling me where that it's in the constitution right so in order to think that argument makes sense you have to think the constitution ution is where good things are and so if something is in the constitution it is good right that's a form of hegemony saying this is the place you get good ideas from um come see me again in fourth year and we'll talk about the constitution US constitution then um right so lots of ideas are hegemonic right so one of them right is the idea that our state exists exists the way it um continues to exist, will continue into the future, continues back into the past, right? Um that kind of we should think about it in that kind of sense. That's one hegemonic ideal. Another is uh this middle icon is meant to represent growth, right? The idea that economies should always be growing. That's a hegemonic idea. Um because we kind of take it for granted that if we're talking about economics, we want to see growth quarter over quarter, right? We want to see, you know, line go up, line go up is what we want as opposed to thinking is line go up what we want, right? Um then I've got some gender symbols on there. Right? First of all, I think there's a powerful case to be made that the idea that there are only two genders and that they are immutable from birth is a hegemonic idea. Similarly, the idea of uh heterosexuality as the correct way to live is also can be hegemonic. Right? I think we are seeing change in some of those fields, but I'm going to talk about a little later the type of change we see in those ideas. Right? um and that that kind of hegemonic background is still kind of there pulsing at us even as change is happening. And so one of the things that is really underlined in conversations about hijgemony and cultural hegemony is that you can use force to get people to do what you need them to do. Right? But just like you know that that great line from uh Rouso where he says it's not that force makes you a legitimate ruler. All it means is we follow force if forced. That's like the definition of the term. We have to go beyond that to say what gives people legitimacy, right? What actually gives you the right to do something? Force can't do that, right? And his argument is this form of democratic legitimacy, but Grahamshy argues actually you can just get people to agree to it, right? You don't have to put a gun to people's heads every day to make them do it if you've convinced them that they should do it and that it's just the way it is, right? Or that it's it's the way things are organized or obviously the right idea, like any of that. If you can convince people to agree with you, then you're continuing to uh get their consent to be governed even if you're oppressing them, right? Um think about the idea where um let's say different people have different ideas about how to go about a certain policy and a powerful elite group says our options are A or B. Say the political parties in that country say we can take policy A or policy B. Which of these should we do? And then like people debate and pick between policy A and policy B. But that doesn't let people say, "Oh, there could be CDE E FG." Right? Not just not every idea has been presented, but we've been presented with these are the only ideas that could work, right? And trying to move beyond that doesn't really make sense, right? Um, and so this is partially about how we are restrained in our vocabularies and our conceptualizations of what we're allowed to do in politics. Um, and so he has this idea of a passive revolution. Um, I think this connects to other concepts around co-optation, right? How you co-opt demands against the state. But basically, it's when you say when you can recognize that the elitees hegemonic hold is starting to shrink and then you say like, "Oh, so I guess we should change things." But you don't actually change who's in charge, right? You give a concession. You make certain acknowledgments. You do certain power sharing. And then the people who were pushing back consent to it, right? And we get back in the situation where you no longer need to coers them. You can get them to consent if you offer them the right kind of incentives, right? Um so, you know, this can be a little controversial, but there's been a lot of debate over land acknowledgements and what land acknowledgements do. And I myself am of the opinion that land acknowledgements are a part of a process of trying to co-opt indigenous demands for sovereignty. Because if we start saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this was Anishnab territory, right? If we start like that and put that out into the world, but then we don't actually change how power is distributed between settler and indigenous communities or how the Canadian government governs indigenous communities. We haven't actually changed that deep system, right? And so people who feel like, oh, now we do land acknowledgements, that's a big step. I mean, it is a change, right? But has it changed the fundamental power structure? And remember, Graham's a communist. He's writing under fascism. He wants to change the fundamental power structure of Italy, right? In a way that makes sense. Um so you can kind of see here the way by kind of starting to offer these concessions you can prevent um a situation where you have to actually use coercion. Okay. Um and then this is a concept of these are two of the concepts that come from um the Herata reading. Um and I think they're actually both useful. The third one I don't want to get into. These are these are the ones we should deal with right now. Right? Um and it's the difference between detached and dominative hegemony. Right? So detached hegemony is when the hegeimon is able to adapt, right? It's able to like it's challenged. It's weakened, but instead of actually being overthrown or changed, it kind of manages to adapt and build back up. goes through this passive revolution process and then reasserts its hijgemony. Um, and then there is dominative hegemony which is where the hegeimon starts to recognize its instability and starts pushing on people on whoever it's trying to exercise hegemony over to ensure that the hegemony continues to exist. Right? So um if you get a situation right let's talk about let's talk about changing norms around um homosexuality and uh gender identity right so detached hegemony would say okay this this norm of universal heterosexual coupling and universal attachment to sex assigned at birth is starting to collapse. We need to start building something up in order to uh keep the fundamental underpinnings of the system that keeps a certain type of person in power going. But we need to start adapting. And so you get a movement where um what's called in queer theory homonormativity. Right? there now then becomes a correct form of being a member of the LGBT community, right? Which is to say that you are interested in having a nuclear family that just is organized with partners of the same sex, right? So, it's okay to be gay as long as you kind of fit this mold. Or this is where you get the kind of dominance and like pressure of the um I was born this way. I always knew I was a girl/boy narratives where binary trans people are asked to like demonstrate that it's just, you know, there's something wrong with me. I really should belong to this category. And so like you're just correcting a mistake. You're not kind of acknowledging that the system is broken, right? Um and then dominative hedgeimony in this case would be um a situation where when you start seeing that the norms that I'm not going to say norms, norms are next week. um the the the kind of ideas, the ideology at stake is starting to crumble, right? That's when you start using force to impose it, right? You start saying, um you can only access transition care if you can tell this exact story. Or alternately, we actually don't think you can change gender, so therefore, we're going to stop you from doing it, right? We're going to take away your medical care. we're going to take away your ability to change sex on documents, right? Um or you know, we don't actually think your relationships are equivalent to the type we need. So therefore, we're going to like continue to suppress them and keep them from being seen in the public eye. Right? So in both of these cases, the ideas of heteronormativity and cisormativity exist. They are still dominant features of the cultural landscape, but the way they adapt to changes doesn't make them go away, right? Um, and this is kind of the biggest thing is just because you've changed exactly how things work doesn't mean you've changed the underlying lying power structures. It allows something to sweep back in and kind of do a different way of going about it. In some ways, this is a response to how hard it is to create social change, right? How come these cultural ideas are so sticky and we can't get over them? Well, they're so sticky because there's a force of power at work. And that force of power is called hijgemony. All right, these are my conceptual notes for this week. I will look forward to seeing emails from you and getting comments from you guys about uh what you do in class and I will see you later.