Gwatter06, 11/1

This week in class we covered a lot on Hebdige, Hockeheimer and Adorno. With Hebdige we covered his concepts on culture and hegemonic ideologies. It was easily noticeable how much of Hebdige’s concepts relate to other theorists both that we have covered this semester and other’s that I’ve encountered in other areas of critical media. Hebdige defines culture as, “all these tightly wound ideologies that make people act and respond a certain way under the belief that they are under a set of ideologies.” To comment on this, “belief that they are under a set of ideologies,” I full heartedly agree with this statement. I believe that our society and the different cultures that are found within are too susceptible to conforming to base ideologies. These ideologies created by cultures establish this subconscious belief that people are bound to one culture solely through ideologies. Another interesting concept that we covered from Hebdige was the notion that, “subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence…” (154). This directly relates to Hebdige’s concept of “deviance” in saying that those who know what the hegemony is but make choices that are deviant or counter-cultural (anti-hegemonic) represent deviance. He explains that these people make those choices to not be ascribed to hegemony. An example of this that we were shown in class was the graffiti artist who chooses not to express his art on the conventional canvas, but to rather express his art on the sides of buildings and trains. I think this deviance found within culture relates to Macherey’s concept of rupture in literature in the sense that it is a change or separation from societal conformity. We also covered some interesting topics from Hockheimer and Adorno, but one of the main concepts that stood out to me was, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (41). What I believe the authors were explaining with this quote is that conformity is infectious and that cultures are controlled by ideologies in which create this sameness between those who are signified by that culture. All in all, I thought we covered a lot on all of the theorists this week and I was surprised at how much I was able to comprehend and incorporate it to past works.