Hegemony

Hegemony, as it appears in Kornbluh's argument, is a concept drawn from Gramsci that reframes ideological domination in terms of a system of rule rather than a state of mind. The key theoretical move is to distinguish two modes of power: rule by force (coercion) and rule by ideas (consent). Hegemony names the latter—but crucially, it does so without reducing ideological domination to individual belief, false consciousness, or mistaken cognition. In this sense, Hegemony functions as a corrective reformulation within Marxist theory: it preserves the materialist commitment that ideas are always situated and socially conditioned, while sidestepping the epistemological trap of "false consciousness," which implicitly posits a "true" or "correct" consciousness as its outside.

The concept is therefore introduced not as a replacement for ideology but as a more theoretically rigorous synonym for it—one that relocates ideology's operation from the interior of minds to the exterior structure of social relations and practices. This aligns with the broader Lacanian-inflected insistence that ideology is not primarily a matter of what people consciously believe but of what they do, how they participate in and reproduce structures of social reality. Hegemony, by referring to the "system of rule," makes visible the impersonal, structural dimension of ideological domination that consciousness-based accounts obscure.

In anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, Hegemony appears as part of a genealogical argument that rehabilitates the Marxist theory of ideology against its popular misreading as "false consciousness." The concept is positioned downstream of Engels, Lukács, and Marcuse, each of whom is shown to have grappled with ideology in ways that ultimately reinforce rather than resolve the consciousness problem. Gramsci's Hegemony is presented as the most effective reformulation in this lineage precisely because it displaces the locus of ideology from cognition to structure.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Hegemony functions as an extension and specification of Ideology as theorized in the corpus. The Lacanian-Žižekian definition of Ideology insists that its deepest operation is not epistemic but structural—it works through social reality itself, through practice and jouissance, not through conscious belief. Hegemony, as Kornbluh deploys it, converges on exactly this point: by referring to the "system of rule" rather than "mind-sets," it makes the same anti-subjectivist move. Similarly, Hegemony stands in implicit contrast to the concept of False Consciousness (cross-referenced but not fully defined here), which it is explicitly offered as an improvement upon. And it resonates with the critique of Consciousness developed across the Lacanian corpus—namely, that consciousness is structurally secondary, derivative, and not the site where ideological power is ultimately exercised.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.53)

Hegemony therefore functions like a synonym for ideology which circumvents some of the pitfalls of consciousness since it refers to the system of rule rather than something like mind-sets.

The phrase "circumvents some of the pitfalls of consciousness" is theoretically loaded because it names the precise conceptual problem Hegemony is designed to solve—the conflation of ideology with subjective mental states—while "system of rule rather than something like mind-sets" marks the shift from an interior, epistemic register to an exterior, structural one, which is exactly the move required by any materialist theory of ideology that takes practice, not belief, as ideology's primary site of operation.