CONCEPT
Manufactured Consent (Gramscian)
The specifically Gramscian account of how consent is produced — not through propaganda imposed from outside but through the institutions of civil society that generate willing participation in subordinating arrangements.
The phrase has been associated in American usage with the Chomsky-Herman model of media-produced consent, but the specifically Gramscian account predates and differs from that model. For Gramsci, consent is not manufactured by a central propaganda apparatus but produced through the distributed operations of civil society institutions — schools, churches, media, cultural organizations, professional associations — each performing its part in the reproduction of hegemonic common sense. The consent that results is not false. It is real. The subject genuinely believes what she believes and genuinely desires what she desires. The manufacturing operates at a deeper level than propaganda — at the level of what counts as obvious, what counts as reasonable, what counts as the way things are.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between Gramscian consent production and centralized propaganda is analytically important. Propaganda can be resisted once recognized as propaganda. The Gramscian operation cannot be resisted as easily because it does not present itself as persuasion. The