Roseberry (1994)

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Roseberry, William
1994 Hegemony and the Language of Contention. In Everyday Forms of
State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern
Mexico. Pp. 355-366. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds.
Durham: Duke University Press.

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The article opens with a discussing of Scott, Corrigan and Sayer's work that inform
everyday forms of state formation. Roseberry wants to "point out that each of their
founding metaphors" are "taken from the work of E.P. Thompson" (Roseberry 1994:355).

Scott: "took Thompson's references to the 'moral economy' of the poor in
eighteenth and nineteenth century England as central image and
starting point for his own theoretical model of peasant
consciousness in the face of capitalist expansion and the formation
of colonial states" (Roseberry 1994:355).

Corrigan and Sayer: "in turn, take Thompson's critique of orthodox Marxist
understandings of "the bourgeois revolution as a challenge for their
study of the formation of the English state (Roseberry 1994:356).

Thompson: "wrote of a long and particular history of state making and
capitalist transformation, challenging Marxists to abandon
readymade historical and political scripts and explore the historical
formation of particular capitalist civilizations (Roseberry
1994:356).

Field of Force Thompson proposes field of forceClass Struggle Without Class
Specifically addresses the probs. of pop. cul. w/ relations of dom.
Concerned with "polarization of antagonistic interests and the
corresponding dialectic of culture.



Describes as an image: "in which an electrical current magnetized a plate
covered with iron fillings. The fillings, which were evenly
distributed, arranged themselves at one pole or the other,
while in between those fillings which remains in place
aligned themselves sketchily as if directed towards
opposing attractive poles. This is very much how I see
eighteenth-century society, with for many purposes, the
crow at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other,
and until late in the century, the professional and merchant
groups bound by lines of magnetic dependency to the
rulers, or on occasion hiding their faces in common action
with the crowd" (Roseberry 1994:356).

Roseberry (1994)
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Problems with above metaphor:
1) While the magnetic field is bi-polar, most social situations are more "complex,
with multiple sites of domination or forms and elements of popular experience"
2) Due to the bi-polar field the pattern of the fillings are symmetrical in a "ways
that the 'dominant' and the 'popular' can never be"
3) The image is static, as new fillings fit easily "within a preexisting pattern and
field of force
4) "clarity becomes a problem when we move from a two-dimensional template to
the multidimensional world of the social, political and culture (Roseberry
1994:357).

Roseberry intends to "move into that multidimensional world, and attempt to understand
social fields of force in more complex and processual terms," and queries whether there
are "additional and related concepts that can serve as suggestive guides?" (Roseberry
1994:357).

One concept is the "Gramscian understanding of hegemony," although Scott and
Corrigan and Sayer are not "especially sympathetic to the concept." In Weapons of the
Weak, Scott challenges those theorists who understand hegemony as "ideological
consensus," while Corrigan and Sayer suggest how the "power of the staterests not so
much the consent of its subjects but with the state's regulative and coercive forms and
agencies," accomplished not "simply through its police and armies but through its offices
and routines, its taxing, licensing, and registering procedures and papers (Roseberry
1994:357).

Roseberry criticizes these perspectives by nothing that "there is more to Gramsci
and his use of the idea of hegemony, however, than the concept of consent
appropriated by political scientists and criticized (forcefully and correctly) by
Scott, Corrigan and Sayer" (Roseberry 1994:358).

Gramscian understanding of hegemony:

i) understood and emphasizedthe complex unity of coercion and consent in
situations of domination
ii) was a more material and political concept than it has since become
iii) focused on the "fragility of hegemony," as noted by Gramsci's interpretation
of the failure of the Piedmont bourgeoisie to "form a bloc that could rule, through
force and consent (Roseberry 1994:358).

Roseberry intends to "explore hegemony not as a finished and monolithic ideological
formation but as a problematic, contested, political process of domination and struggle
(Roseberry 1994:358).

To do so, he notes how the:

1) historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State, and that the
"fundamental historical unity, concretely results from the organic relations
between State or political society and "civil society"
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2)The subaltern classes are "not unified and cannot unite until they are able to
become a 'State'"

Due to the fact that the subaltern classes "history is intertwined with that of civil society,
and thereby with the history of States," it is necessary to study:

1) "the objective formation of the subaltern groups, by the developments and
transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production, their quantitative
diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups

2) their active/passive affiliation with dominant political formations, and attempts
to influence programmes of these formations to make their own claims, and the
consequences of these attempts

3) birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of
the subaltern groups to maintain control over them

4) the formations produced by subaltern groups to press claims of a limited/partial
character

5) those new formations which assert the autonomy of subaltern groups, but
within the old framework

6) those formations which assert integral autonomy (Roseberry 1994:358-359).

Features of Gramsci's introductory comments that bear emphasis on hegemonic process:

1) For both the ruling and subaltern classes, Gramsci implies plurality or diversity,
unityis a political and cultural problem. Through his discussion, his emphasis is on the
plural, classes and groups (Roseberry 1994:359).

2) Unity requires control of the state (the subaltern classes, "by definition," are not
unified because they are not the state), but control of the state by the ruling classes is not
assumed. Such control is at once juridical and political, and moral and cultural"
(Roseberry 1994:359).

3) By rendering the history of ruling groups and of states and groups of states as
problematican array of questions similar to those posed by Gramsci of subaltern
classes needs to be considered (Roseberry 1994:359). Need to consider their 'objective'
formation in the economic spherethe movements, developments and transformations in
production and distribution, and their social and demographic distribution is space and
time (Roseberry 1994:359).

At the same time one needs to study the ruling groups relations with other
groupsother ruling groups within and beyond their region of spheres of
influence, subaltern groups, within and beyond their region (Roseberry 1994:359).
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As well, one should consider their "political associations and organizations, and
the political institutions, laws, routines, and orders they confront, create and
attempt to control (Roseberry 1994:359).

Such questions show how complex the field of force can become

Sectoral differentiation-------- distinct class fractions, based on different roles and
positions within accumulation processes

Spatial differentiation----------the uneven and unequal development of social powers in
regional spaces (Roseberry 1994:359).

4) Need to ask the same questions of subaltern classes with regards to their relationships
to political institutions and dominant groups (Roseberry 1994:360).

5) Subaltern groups are not assumed to be "captured or immobilized" by ideological
consensus, since he "considers the possibility of 'their active or passive affiliation to the
dominant political formations'" (Roseberry 1994:360).

6) "Relations between ruling and subaltern groups are characterized by contention,
struggle, and argument" (Roseberry 1994:360). "Gramsci envisions a much more active
and confrontational subaltern population than many of his interpreters have assumed," as
he "places action and confrontation within the formations, institutions, and organizations
of the state and civil society in which subordinate populations live (Roseberry 1994:360).

With the above six points in mind, Roseberry proposes that "we use the concept not to
understand consent but to understand struggle, the ways in which the words, images,
symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and movements used by subordinate
populations to talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist
their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself (Roseberry 1994:361).

Hegemony constructs a "common material and meaningful framework for living through,
talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination. That common
material and meaningful framework, is, in part, discursive: a common language or way
of talking about social relationships that sets out the central terms around which and in
terms of which contestation and struggle can occur (Roseberry 1994:361).

"Attention to such political and discursive processes and projects can illuminate many
aspects of a complexly structured field of force" (Roseberry 1994:363).

Conceptualizing the hegemonic process in terms of the necessity of constructing a
common discursive framework allows us to examine both the power and fragility of a
particular order of domination (Roseberry 1994:363).

Corrigan and Sayer describe the power of States: "Out of the vast range of human social
capacitiespossible ways in which social life could be livedstate activities more or less
forcibly 'encourage' some whilst suppressing, marginalizing, eroding, undermining others
(Roseberry 1994:363).
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"To the extent that a dominant order establishes such legitimate forms of procedure, to
the extent that it establishes not consent but prescribed forms for expressing both
acceptance and discontent, it has established a common discursive framework (Roseberry
1994:364).

"If we conceive a hegemonic process and common discursive framework as state projects
rather than state achievements, however, we can advance our understanding of 'popular
culture' and 'state formations' in relation to each other (Roseberry 1994:365).

By focusing attention on points of rupture, area's where a common discursive framework
cannot be achieved, it serves as a point of entry into the analysis of a process of
domination that shapes both 'the state' and 'popular culture' (Roseberry 1994:366).