aro0823, hebdige

The Hebdige piece was very much a general summary of all of the frameworks we studied in CMC 100. Reading about the theorists side by side allowed for the illumination of their similarities and differences.

Barthes: Barthes built upon de Saussure’s linguistic theory to talk about the transmission of myth through society. In his work, he was able to bridge the gap between the language and reality to form a more tangible understanding of everyday experience.

Hall: Hall theorized about encoding and decoding of text. He argued that the audience was not just a passive one, instead, they formed their own negotiated reading of a given text based on previous life experiences.

Althusser: Althusser, as we studied last class, took Marx’s ideas of the imbalance between the ruling and the ruled and developed ISAs and RSAs. The things that we come to accept as common sense are by no means what they appear.

Gramsci: Gramsci is the originator of the notion of cultural hegemony. He expounds upon Althusser’s framework and says that common sensical notions are purposefully developed by the hegemonic elite and passed down to the masses. The lower classes internalize this ideology so thoroughly that they fail to question it and merely accept it as natural.

de Saussure: de Saussure, in review, was the establisher of the notion of the arbitrary nature of language. He posited that language was comprised of a series of signs and signifiers, and “in language, there are only differences.”

By studying the ideas of these postmodern thinkers, it is easy to establish a relationship between the political, economic, social, and cultural ideals of any society. Hegemony, a term I had never heard of before CMC 100, suddenly seems to be the framework for life as we know it. The more we discuss hegemony, the more I am inspired to (in colorful Marxist language), through of the shackles of passivity and take a more active approach in interpreting the ideological notions I am bombarded with everyday.