smooth

I need you to direct me to where Gramsci stated this.
The only way I could envision Gramsci stating that hegemony would cease to operate would be when a particular class obtains class consciousness. He certainly wouldn't speak about a single person breaching hegemony and nothing, nothing in his writings would speak to the fact that a single person could cease the operation of hegemony as a social construction. Quite the opposite, a persons rationalizations operate within and according to hegemony. You seem to bring it about as a conspiratol artifact, yet he understands it as even operating upon the dominant group along with the subjected. Such is its power, that both groups consensually "buy" into the concept...such is its ability to perpetuate itself...to hogtie all classes in a given society within a particular paradigm...


I find these comments interesting because I read the snopes article about the journalists backstories and only one journalist expressed that he had discussed the words with his editor:

Furthermore, notwithstanding our disagreement (or agreement, I don't know yet) on whether a person can step outside his or her hegemonic context after critically assessing a given situation, Graythen's responses do not support your contention that he critically analysed his own preconceived notions of what he was seeing. Here is his (what I labeled an ad hoc) rationalization of what he saw and chose to report on:

First, I contend that he did not make these kinds of assessments "on the ground." By their own statements, Graythen examined his concerns about whether looting was or was not occurring in response to his editor's concern--not while he was watching the event. Such is the basis for my assertion that the rest of his reasoning is an ad hoc response to explain to himself and others a basis for using "finding" rather than "looting" in his description of the events.

Second, when he looks back on the scene, he isn't as you attributed to him critically assessing the situation. His comments fall right in line with preconceived notions and cultural definitions of what constitutes "looting." Looting, according to this passage, occurs when people "bust down windows and get electronics." Looting occurs when things wouldn't be "floating away anyhow."

Now the issue can be semantically disputed: whether ownership really changes once something floats out of a store, or whether stealing hinges on whether the owners are coming back for their possessions, or whether you need to witness the item floating out of the door to realize it isn't yours (although this situation is especially poignant since the journalist admits he did see the items float out of the store and into the hands of the scavengers).

But what is most interesting to me, and how this most relates to hegemony according to my understanding, is that he explicitly links his concept of looting to common conceptions of what constitutes it (not even paradoxically how the law, much less a jury, would conceive of the taking of private property during the course of disaster and/or breakdown of social control [quite accuratly the definition of looting, as I have researched the term]); that he states what he would consider looting. That we can access the media database of who does those actions he alluded to--that impoverished minorities bust storefronts and take non-essential merchandise.

So we have a photojournalist saying across the desk to his editor, I guess you're right. This isn't looting. I've seen looting, I've seen it on TV, I've read about it in the papers, and this doesn't look like it. But those conversations didn't take place in the other newsroom. And presumably they didn't take place before the images of "looters" in wal-mart, taking food too we have to state, were splashed across our airwaves. The same kind of restraint shown with this piece wasn't shown in the pieces when black persons were photographed and discussed. No distinction has been made between the women taking food and the women taking clothes...or whether people taking TV's are the same people as the ones taking supplies that the Other is able to distinguish as necessary.

But what's really disturbing is how powerful hegemony is. Because we can see right here in this very example how racism as a hegemonic process can continue to operate even when all the actors want to not be racist. Yet it's ingrained in our social understandings. It's powerful and resilient...

...because guess what...even after all that discussion in the newsroom about being careful about describing the situation the end result is an image of a young black man described as having looted a place and a young white woman described as finding items.

So I contend that although not intentional, these media representations that replicate imagery of impoverished minorities as looters is not coincidental. Such a powerful theory...that even when we try to stop something we replicate it because it is part of our social reality and we can not, as individuals, walk away from the social constructions we are enmeshed within.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman