The (Re)production of Everyday Life in Conditions of Hegemony/Empire.

The paper proposes ‘hegemonic discourse’ as an analytical framework for studying the conditions of production, reproduction and change of social life at a global scale. It is suggested that social agents and subjects cannot exist beyond, outside a certain ‘hegemonic’; their actions and their reactions, their voices and their silences, their support and their resistance, all constitute moments in the reproduction of social life and as such are dictated by a certain ‘hegemonic’. Within this context ‘everyday life’ is proposed as the key ‘explanatory’ factor; for the ‘hegemonic’, is about the production and reproduction of everyday life, and thus everyday life is what gives life to, reproduces and changes the ‘hegemonic’. However, the fact that everyday life and the ‘subject’ cannot exist beyond the ‘hegemonic’ should not be interpreted as an argument for social stagnation, discourse reification, and inevitability of change. Hegemonic discourses, as social spheres, cannot but be inherently incomplete, which can only exist through their social reproduction and the changes that this brings with it. Furthermore, the biopolitical nature of the ‘hegemonic’, in terms of the production and conceptualisation of social life itself, does not neutralise the politics of the ‘hegemonic’, in terms of who gets, what, when and how. It is exactly this challenge, of bringing under a common analytical framework the traditions of politics and biopolitics, that the paper addresses through the employment of ‘hegemonic discourses’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]