Cultural hegemony is dead. Today the media-digital indifference lives

Today, more than by politics, it is produced by the automatisms of technologicalized social life. Ferrara, Fofi, Ginzburg: an analysis by many voices in the journal “Vita e pensiero”

It hasn’t been talked about for some time, but what is (if it still exists) a cultural hegemony? In the latest issue that has just come out (2/2023) the magazine Vita e Pensiero asked Giuliano Ferrara, Goffredo Fofi, Lisa Ginzburg and Chiara Valerio to pronounce themselves on the matter, rather dissonant voices both in the definition of hegemony and in the way of opposing or neutralize what damage it can inflict on those freedoms of thought and expression that our constitutions claim to uphold. The questions posed by the magazine were three in particular: (1) Has left-wing hegemony been replaced by right-wing? (2) And has Gramsci’s memory really gone forever? (3) In the era of cultural homogenization and cancel culture, of technoscience and nihilism, what remains of engagement? It does not seem to me that those called to answer have taken these questions into account much, but the way in which they have in turn freely posed the problem of hegemony starting from their personal points of view is interesting.