Three Mediations on Relationality and Hegemony

Let me begin by saying that, essentially, relationality can be seen as the “abyssal ground”1 of hegemony. Understood as the formless substratum from which separate forms – relationships – emerge, relationality is comparable to gravity insofar as it is diffuse and ungraspable, but nevertheless “pulls” all the time. It is a continuous force that constitutes relationships between entities, and in constituting these relationships constitutes as well as reconstitutes the entities within these relationships. In other words, relationality dissolves the content and form binary since the “what” of any given constitution, be that constitution a thing, an event, a phenomenon or a discourse, is inextricably intertwined with the “how” of that constitution. The same logic of dynamic co-constitutivity can be seen operating in hegemony. To borrow Raymond Williams’ famous definition, hegemony is not only the explicit and clearly articulated level of ideology which determines what is good, appropriate and desirable in any given society, it is “a whole body of practices over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy … a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.”