Nemo 11/1

In class on Tuesday we connected our reading by Dick Hebdige to other theorists such as Althusser, and Barthes. We spent some time analyzing Althusser's quote "the author and the reader...both live...'naturally' in ideology" (46). We said that the ruling class would be the author and the reader would be the majority. When we talked about this quote in class we came up with many different ideas of what it means. One idea was that Althusser was trying to say that ideology has become so normalized that we don't even question it anymore. Another was that maybe the author doesn't now that he or she is even functioning under ideology. We gave the example of how people don't even question a police man, they just do what they are told because they have too.

During class this week we also discussed how culture, myths, ideology, and hegemony are all the same thing just with different terms attached to the meaning. We looked at Barthes' quote "myth is a type of speech". Here we said that Barthes is talking about the same thing as Hebdige but instead of calling it culture he refers to it as myths. We looked at Althusser's idea of hegemony and "social authority" and how it is the dominant ideology in power - which is what Marx describes as the ruling class. We discussed Mythology and normalization. The words deviance and freaks were given as an example of how the 'ruling class' has created these words to describe people and now the majority uses them just because they were told that one of these terms describes a certain myth. We then looked at Hebdige and his idea of recuperation of the subculture, and how subcultural sings become mass produced. The quote that highlighted this point for me the most was "as soon as the original innovations which signify 'subculture' are translated into commodities and made generally available, they become 'frozen'" (156). Here he is saying that strategies are created in order to deal with the other. We said how we trivialize, domesticate, and naturalize in order to reduce otherness to sameness. The class discussions this week were really helpful in making me understand that even though all the theorists are saying things in different ways they are the same thing. That the 'ruling class' has made people become zombies, in a sense that they just do what they are told, they become the same and that there is no room to challenge the authoritative figures.