David Bainbridge

Hegemony/electronic mediation

David’s project is a study of the political category of hegemony, and of mediation via electronic tele-communications technologies, within both the artistic and wider socio-political fields. This involves consideration of electronic technologies (re)constituting the public and private spheres via panoptic surveillance.

Such technologies might be seen to constitute hegemonic technologies of power, enforcing complicity in social agents through awareness of being systematically observed. Considerations of hegemony initially take lead from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose deconstructive, Post-Marxist reading of hegemony provides a certain intersection between poststructuralist and historical-materialist discourses; as such, it has been widely influential both amongst contemporary thinkers of the Left, and within continental philosophy.

His project utilises musical case studies, and aims towards a musical praxis within which certain theoretical concerns might be articulated in practice.