Morality as Hegemony

In lecture on November 23, we discussed theories of hegemony presented by Antonio Gramsci and Roland Barthes. I was immediately reminded of a story I had read by Franz Kafka titled The Penal Colony, which tells of an explorer who visits a penal colony and, for the first time, encounters the vicious machine of morality. The process of justice with which the machine is associated does not constitute a defense on behalf of the condemned, who is therefore always immediately found guilty. As a result, the prisoner is strapped to a machine and whatever commandment he disobeyed is inscribed upon his body; the prisoner in the story, for instance, would have “HONOR THY SUPERIORS!” engraved on his body. This method was so powerful that future generations would find it “impossible to alter anything, at least for many years to come.”

            Kafka’s story offers a depiction of morality as something that is forced upon the prisoner without his being able to argue against it; similarly, hegemony presents us with things/images that we cannot argue with. By imposing a system of morality (i.e. conceptions of right and wrong) on society, the elite class has acquired a hidden source of control through which they can exercise their own interests at the expense of the lower classes’ liberty. When someone threatens the interests of the upper class, they are threatening the social order and therefore need to be punished. Morality was engraved upon society centuries ago by the privileged class, and has been evolving ever since; yet the fact that morality has changed over the years offers proof that it is not a fixed concept. In other words, morality is not a part of nature, and has only been naturalized by the elite to maintain the social hierarchy.

            At the end of Kafka’s story, the officer who explains the process of justice to the explorer decides to try the machine on himself. He programs it to engrave the words “BE JUST” on his body; however, the mechanism goes haywire and stabs the officer to death. The way I interpret this is as follows: because this process of justice was in fact incredibly unjust, it eventually became outdated and the machine stopped working. Perhaps, then, all systems of morality ultimately must come to an end because, in effect, they breach the rights of the majority of society so that the privileged can maintain their position. Does this mean that one day morality will be made to benefit the wider population? Or will the elite continue to find ways to conceal this method of hegemony?

I recommend reading the short story by Kafka, but here is a video I found on Youtube that portrays the story quite accurately:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StwAGxbPxlU