CONCEPT
Naturalization
The ideological operation by which a political arrangement stops registering as political — becomes reality, the way things simply are, beyond debate — and through which hegemony achieves its most durable form.
Naturalization is the specific mechanism through which power achieves invisibility. A political arrangement that has been naturalized no longer registers as an arrangement. It registers as the world itself. The arrangement might serve particular interests at the expense of others; the distribution of its costs and benefits might be radically unequal; but none of this is visible because the arrangement has been absorbed into the fabric of common sense. Questioning it feels not like politics but like questioning gravity. The Gramsci volume's foreword identifies the river of intelligence metaphor as a paradigmatic naturalization — the translation of contingent political arrangements into cosmic natural process.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept is central to Gramscian analysis because it names the mechanism through which hegemony achieves its specific character. Domination that operates through visible coercion is always vulnerable to the recognition of its contingency — the compelled subject knows she is compelled. Hegemony that operates through naturalized common sense is nearly invulnerable because the