ABSTRACT
The task of hegemony is to ensure that those who are economically, politically and socially dispossessed feel that they have a stake in the social order upon which their dispossession is predicated. This process can work by the obfuscation of that dispossession, but it can also take the form of a limited revelation of dispossession-along with the lesson that the only way to gain what has been removed is precisely through faithful (faith revealed in attitudes, words, actions) adherence to the processes which in fact cause such loss. In any
case, hegemony is concerned with the control of the ‘possibilities of phenomena’ and with the direction of the grammar in which we live. Such control can take place within what Althusser called ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (as, for example, with the ‘band of efficient schoolmasters’), and it was this sort of process in fact that might have led Foucault to ask the question:
What is an educational system, after all, if not a ritualization of the word; if not a qualification of some fixing of roles for speakers; if not the constitution of a (diffuse) doctrinal group; if not the distribution and an appropriation of discourse, with all its learning and its powers?5
