The Hegemony In British Culture Studies

"Hegemony" is one of the most important concepts of Western theoretical studies. Thinking as a kind of political strategy of revolution, Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (Russian:eopr(?) Ba(?)eHTHHOB(?) (?)exaHOB) and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, two most important and influential revolutionaries in Russia use the term of Hegemony to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian politician, political philosopher, redefined and rebuilt the meaning of Hegemony. In Gramsci’s view, hegemony could not only be a way to gain the benefit for the dominant class, but also be accepted by the dependent classes to become the "common sense" of the total society. During the process of the realization of hegemony, the maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the ’common sense’ values of all by the way of negotiation.In 1960s, two paradigms of Cultural Studies in Britain, Culturalism and Structuralism, met the crisis, that is, the reductionism of Culturalism and the ignorance of individual activity of Structuralism caused the Left theorists into the difficult and embarrassing situation. Facing such a predicament, the British Left theorists, such as Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall realized the necessity to look for the new and helpful theories. In this social and theoretical context, the theory of hegemony of Gramsci was highly valued by these theorists who formed their different ideas of hegemony that could be seen as a kind of genealogy of the British theory of hegemony.Inspired by Gramsci, Perry Anderson sharply criticized the tradition of the collaboration between the working-class and British society. He profoundly pointed out that the cooperative attitude of working-class to the bourgeoisie was the deeply reason of the failure of the socialist revolution in Britain. And Raymond Williams raised his theory of cultural development, that is, culture could be thought as three kinds------dominant, residual and emergent and the difference and transformation between the dominant culture and the emergent one could be elaborated by the theory of Structure of Feeling. This theory also used by Raymond Williams to explain the art of performance of drama. In his view, the drama should be seen as a kind of art of recreation, so the actors should not just want to reach the model of idea, but have the encouragement to create the new structure of feeling and new classic works. For Stuart Hall, the meaning of theory of Gramsci was that it helps people to understand and answer the new social conditions and questions raised in Britain after the World War II. Companying with the emergence of issues of nation, race and sexuality, the dominant status of class issue gradually was shaken. Meanwhile, the differentiation of society and the overlapping and the intersection of identities made the hegemony between the classes become the articulation of the different communities. Therefore, the issue of class transformed into the issue of communities.However, there was the conflict inside the British cultural studies, which mainly is embodied in debate of the concept of culture. Just like Raymond Williams, he thought that culture was a kind of total way of life. And for Perry Anderson, culture should be thought as a kind of total way of struggle. On the contrary, Stuart Hall believed that the society was becoming the non-class society rather than class one, so the total way of culture in non-class society only could be a result of articulation.Specially, in the field of social culture, generally the advanced culture of the dominant class is the prior condition for its culture hegemony, but there is also the room for the government of culture. For example, Hall found the relation between the encoder and decoder of information wasn’t necessarily linear. Because of the inner compatibility of symbol, the encoding of symbol often deviated from the prospection of encoder who also could realize the purpose of "completely specific communication" by adjusting the symbol. This process also was a field of struggle for cultural hegemony. Another example is the case of museum. In terms of the theory of cultural hegemony, especially of Tony Bennett, we could found that the function of museum is not only to protect and exhibit the cultural and historical heritage, but also a political way used by dominant class to advocate its ideology, reinforce the identity of government and nation, standardize citizen’s behavior and so on to strengthen its dominant status.The concrete and social meaning also lie that if the Chinese traditional culture want to gain the dominant status now, it has to have our own opinion on the emergent issues, like communities, sexuality and animal rights to achieve the broadly acceptation and agreement, In the case of animal rights, the traditionally Confucian thought of animal is really difficult to be accepted by modern people but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be changed. The crucial point of animal rights is the problem of people, the community of protection of animal. How to gain the agreement of this tremendous amount community through the process of cultural negotiation has become a very important cultural issue for the dominant class.