Posthegemony or post-hegemony is a concept which designates a period or a situation in which hegemony is no longer said to function as the organizing principle of a national or post-national social order, or of the relationships between and amongst nation-states within the global order.[1] The concept has different meanings within the fields of political theory, cultural studies and international relations.
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In the field of cultural studies, posthegemony has been developed as a concept by a number of critics whose work engages with and critiques the use of cultural hegemony theory within the writings of Ernesto Laclau and within subaltern studies.[2] George Yúdice, in 1995, was one of the first commentators to summarize the background to the emegence of this concept:
The shift to post-Fordism and other changes in the mode of production [...] correspond to a weakening of the articulation of national discourse and state apparatuses, particularly the disciplinary, "educational" ones. This does not mean that the state itself has been weakened; it has, rather, reconverted to accommodate new forms of organization and capital accumulation. Flexible accumulation, consumer culture, and the "new world information order" are produced or distributed (made to flow) globally, to occupy the space of the nation, but are no longer "motivated" by any essential connections to a state, as embodied, for example, in a "national-popular" formation. Their motivations are both infra- and supranational. We might say that, from the purview of the national proscenium, a posthegemonic situation holds. That is, the "compromise solution" that culture provided for Gramsci is not now one that pertains to the national level but to the local and transnational. Instead, the "culture-ideology of consumerism" serves to naturalize global capitalism everywhere.[3]
The concept of posthegemony is related to the rise of the "multitude" as a social force which, unlike the "people", cannot be captured by hegemony, together with the roles of affect and habitus in mechanisms of social control and agency.[4] Posthegemony and its related terms are influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s accounts of the supra- and infra-national forces that are said to have rendered obsolete the national-popular forms of coercion and consent through which, for Antonio Gramsci, hegemony structured and constituted society.
The features of posthegemony as a concept correspond closely to those of postmodernity. Thus, posthegemony theory argues that ideology is no longer a political driving force in mechanisms of social control, and that the modernist theory of hegemony, which depends on ideology, therefore no longer accurately reflects the social order.[5] Some commentators also argue that history is not, as Karl Marx described it, a class struggle, but rather a "struggle to produce class".[6]
The concept of posthegemony also resonates with the work of post-Foucauldian theorists such as Giorgio Agamben. Nicholas Thoburn, drawing on Agamben's discussion on the "state of exception," writes that "it is, perhaps, with the recasting of the relationship between law and politico-military and economic crises and interventions that is instituted in the state of exception that the time of hegemony is most revealed to have passed."[7]
Among the criticisms of the theory of posthegemony is Richard Johnson's, that it involves "a marked reduction of social complexity."[8] Johnson concedes that "one considerable achievement of ‘the post-hegemony project’ is to draw many observable post-9/11 features into a single imaginative picture, while also synthesizing different currents in contemporary social theory." But he argues that "it is strange, however, that the result is viewed as the end of hegemony rather than as a new hegemonic moment."[9] He therefore calls for a rejuvenation of the concept of hegemony, rather than its abandonment.
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