yellowdaisy4, 3/19/09

When discussing Althusser in class, a couple quotes caught my attention more than others because they were easier to understand and relate to. My first example is when Althusser states “the author and the reader…both live…naturally in ideology”. I found this quote interesting because when I first read it, it was hard for me to figure out what he meant by natural because what’s natural is never usually given much thought. The example of having a white board from a classroom in a hotel room would have you questioning it and noticing it as strange, even though seeing it then in the classroom wasn’t, helped clear up exactly what Althusser meant. I can also connect this to how when I was in France when I was younger and saw a bunch of naked people on the beach. I was shocked and questioned what they were doing because to me being naked on a beach wasn’t normal, yet the French see it as natural and were not phased by anyone around them. I also found the quote “those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology” to be very relatable as a CMC student. Because we study ideologies at work, we try to be less of a passive audience and believe that it’s everyone else who is in ideology not us because we are now aware of what it does. As Benjamin talked about the public is an absent minded examiner who just follows ideologies and because we know this, we should be able to know what to look for. Yet, I agree with the concept of double-coding because when we are in class we do actually think this way and believe it. Yet later when we are out of class and go shopping to buy the same jeans we saw Katie Holmes wearing in a magazine, then we are part of another different ideology.
Additionally, the Marilyn Manson video for “Dope Show” was fascinating to watch because it showed how Marilyn, as a symbol for counterculture, challenged ideologies through being taboo and shocking. Marilyn Manson was seen as a freak or a threat to some because of this. However, he was just the avant-garde who put out something different to the forefront, like on MTV for example, but now is replicated by other rock bands so now it has less meaning. Moreover, when we were discussing how Hebdige explains Althusser in the quote “ideology is profoundly unconscious”; an example was given about a mother seeing her son get hit by a car and also being the doctor. This example really got my attention because I had a hard time figuring out how the doctor and mother could both have that boy as their son without connecting that the doctor could be a mother. The fact that I couldn’t put that together made me upset with myself because no one, especially women, wants to believe that we are just following that ideology of doctors only being male. Lastly, I found the concept of hegemony and “social authority” to be interesting because like Dr. Rog discussed, everyday we are going on facebook and seeing pictures of our friends really drunk or dressed scandalously and we laugh and talk about it. Even though we all know it’s not good for future employers to see, people still post these pictures because they do gain social capital. This can go as far as to make people famous like Paris Hilton for example. She puts out a sex tape and although morally wrong for most, she gains a lot of social capital.