Hegemony is an unstable equilibrium never certain of success

Evidence

For Stuart, Gramsci’s critical contribution is to recognize the dynamic quality of the ongoing struggle for hegemony as necessarily operating as a “continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria,” in which dominant social forces always strive to frame and subordinate other cultures and perspectives within their own horizons of thought but can never be certain of success. Thus, hegemony has to be actively secured in the face of both residual and emerging forms of dissent and disaffection. It is within this framework that the media perform their ideological labor in the selective construction of the cultural lexicon of a given age (or in another terminology, the “mythologies” that Roland Barthes anatomized). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 767

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Gramsci’s hegemony as dynamic, contested, never-secured — a key concept for understanding Hall’s economics.
• XREF: Directly continues the Gramscian articulation from earlier chapters in this volume. — connects to: Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; Hegemony lets ideologies operate without any locatable authority. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 103