Special Issue: Essays on (De-)Composing the Nation

Theory, Culture & Society, 2007

W HAT IS the problem to which hegemony is the answer? It is that of power -not about what it is, but rather about its general operation from the point of view of political strategy, legitimation and intellectual leadership, and from the standpoint of organized opposition to prevailing relations of power . Underlying the question of hegemony, therefore, is another set of questions concerning, on the one hand, the government of conduct and the problem of the correlations of security, territory and population in the context of the mobile and conjunctural production and reproduction of unequal relations of power , and, on the other hand, concerning the anticipation of a time to come in which such inequalities will have been abolished or altered. Differently imagined futures are at stake here; they bring to the surface principles outside political interest in the narrow sense, for they implicate the ethical and ontological principles inscribed in the foundation of the political, say, about notions of the human that underlie fundamental rights and the idea of the common good. They thus refer to a transcendent or metaphysical dimension, for example inscribed in a religion -which is the conventional though still prevalent route -or circumscribing claims for an immanent, unrepresentable but generative force that would underlie the imagination of political order of one kind or another. Thus, in the background to the question concerning power, besides issues relating to political or economic interests, one encounters a dimension of the virtual that harbours being as potentiality, whether animated by a will, or desire or élan vital, or indeed a transcendent spirit. In what follows I shall construct a genealogy of power by reference to cultural theory, paying attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, alongside shifts

American Ethnologist, 2002

an attempt to synthesize Barthesian notions of myth with Williams's theories on hegemony and construct that product as a foundation for the perpetual development of Cultural Studies, envisioned by Stuart Hall. *Everything uploaded to my Academia.edu in 2017 is considered a draft. I was required to do regular graduate course work for the first year of my doctoral studies and took the opportunity to play out some personal theories. It's all a prolegomenon for a bigger project down the road and these ideas will require a more rigourous distillation to be of real value to the scholarly community.

2015

Introduction Culture is a much complex term. It not only includes the fine arts such as painting, drawing, music, dance etc., but also includes literature, drama, media, science and technology, knowledge, architecture, religion, philosophy, foods and clothes etc., everything that is valuable and has been achieved by mankind through ages. All have their origin in the activities of man and nature, acting on each other. Man by his activities transformed nature to suit to his needs. His existence depends on either whatever is available to him in nature or whatever he has produced by acting on nature. Therefore, the process through which he produces his livelihood and which sustains him is basic to him and the rest of the other things are the results of this process and his relationship to his fellow men, and are called as superstructures. Relationship of base and superstructure in Marxist theory has been much discussed and debated by various writers. Here, we will first discuss Marx’s conception of it, its dimensions in various fields i.e. philosophy, religion, culture, etc., and move on to Gramsci and Raymond Williams’ analysis of it and their new concepts regarding hegemony and the material conditions determining the consciousness explaining the things more clearly rather than the concepts of base and superstructure and the clarifications of Engels to the questions raised in his time and will try to understand that the concepts expressed by Gramsci and Raymond Williams etc., are not new and we find them in the writings of Marx and Engels but Marxism is not a static but a living and evolving concept and these writers have not denied or contradicted what has been laid down by the founders of Marxism but further elaborated these concepts in the more developed and modern situations. We will also try to understand the workings of the hegemony in the field of culture, media, literature and theatre both by the ruling classes and the emerging classes and how they have evolved in our country and what are their effects.

2009

Andreas Ventsel’s dissertation TOWARD SEMIOTIC THEORY OF HEGEMONY consists of an introductory chapter and five papers. They are primarily focused on establishing political semiotics as a specific discipline, which would give researchers better means for analysing the field of politics, which is the reason for focusing primarily on integration of the cultural semiotics of the Tartu-Moscow School and theory of hegemony by Essex School. From this elaborated theoretical framework was analysed empirical material, which is all taken from Estonian contemporary history . In paper 1 (The construction of the ‘we’-category: Political rhetoric in Soviet Estonia from June 1940 to July 1941. Sign System Studies, 2007, 35. ½, 249-267 ) I focus on applying one alternative approach to the research of political discourse, analysing how power relations are established through pronouns (deictics) used in political speeches in first soviet period. Papers 2 (Towards a semiotic theory of hegemony: Naming as hegemonic operation in Lotman and Laclau. Sign System Studies m 2008, 36.1, 167-183) and 3 (An outline for a semiotic theory of hegemony. Semiotica, 2009, xx - xx. [forthcoming]) (both co-written with Peeter Selg) I elaborate the model of this theoretical approach, using the discourse of the Bronze Night and the Singing Revolution as the analysis material. Paper 4 (Hegemooniline tähistamisprotsess fotograafias [Hegemonic process of signification in photograph]. Kunstiteaduslikke uurimusi. 2009, XX-XX [forthcoming]) tries to distinguish some of the signification practices of the visualisation of power by examining the hegemonic signifying strategies that were used in creating “the people” in the public picture-producing regime during the Stalinist period. The paper also makes use of Barthes’ semiotic and visual rhetoric views on photography. Paper 5 (The role of political rhetoric in the development of Soviet totalitarian language. Russian Journal of Communication, Vol. II, No. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2009), 9-26) tries to explicate, within the created framework, the phenomenon of totalitarian language of the Soviet era.

2003

Chapter Seven from my book The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime, Duke UP, 2003.

2008

Studi di estetica, anno XLVI, IV serie, 2018

In this article, it is argued that Gramsci's conception of hegemony ought to be located not simply in the theory and praxis of Leninism but also in Gramsci's reading of Machiavelli. By situating such a reading in relation to Nietzsche's notion of will to power, it is possible to defend Gramsci's political theory against some of the criticisms leveled by those who decry the "hegemony of hegemony". Such a reading of the concept of hegemony enables us to understand the idea of "common sense" as oriented towards the distribution and redistribution of the sensible.