ABSTRACT
In his suggestive examination of the formation of ideological consciousness in corporate societies, Stanley Aronowitz helps trace the development of a particular idea that has come to rest at the bottom of our brains. The idea and its ideological function are quite similar to the thread that guided the analysis of my previous chapters, and especially in Chapter 7. He argues that hegemony operates in large part through the control of meaning, through the ‘manipulation’ of the very categories and modes of thinking we commonsensically employ. Thus, there is an ‘internal tendency of capitalism to increasingly give relationships between people the character of relationships between things. Commodity production intrudes into all corners of the social world.’1 And the unequal social world that educators live in is represented by the reification, the commodification, of the very language they use. Cultural control, hence, as both Gramsci and Williams noted, acts as an important reproductive force. Through the definition, incorporation, and selection of what is considered legitimate or ‘real’ knowledge, through positing a false consensus on what are appropriate facts, skills, hopes, and fears (and the way we all should evaluate them), the economic and cultural apparatus are dialectically linked. Here knowledge is power, but primarily in the hands of those who have it already, who already control cultural capital as well as economic capital.
