ashlayla, 3/17

In class Tuesday one quote that was easiest for me to understand was Volosinov’s quote, “sign becomes the arena of the class struggle.” I understood this to mean that the ruling ideas are played out in our culture by signs and how we interpret them. For example, when we were talking about the pictures of the Mercedes and GM signs most people would assume that Mercedes is the sign of the ruling class because Mercedes is like an elitist type of car. GM is more for the middle class people because the cars are affordable and easily accessible. Mercedes is more expensive than GM which makes the cars more desirable. Most people don’t have Mercedes, but they want it. More people can get a GM car which doesn’t make them that desirable. When we were discussing these two pictures, I originally thought that Mercedes would be the sign of the ruling class because, to me, it is a symbol of the high class people in the world. After the discussion though, I began to think that GM was the sign of the ruling class because more people can afford to own a GM car. The structure of our society is what determines who the ruling class is. The Mercedes sign is the symbol of the “rich” ruling class while the GM sign is the symbol of the “dominant” ruling class. Branding also contributes to determining the ruling class. Most people would assume that champagne is the sign of the ruling class because wealthier people drink it more than people that don’t have a lot of money. But Budweiser is the sign of the ruling class because, like GM, it is the dominant brand that more people can afford. The signs we talked about in class create a class struggle because the brands that we would normally associate with the “ruling class” are not the dominant brands. Signs for things such as GM, Budweiser, and diners/fast food restaurants are the signs of the ruling class because more people have them and can afford them.

Smiley Face - 3/22

Looking back on this week's classes, there are two main points that I took away: firstly I made a connection between the work of Dick Hebdige on subcultures and that on Jenkins and his participatory culture, and secondly the language of education and hegemony within everyday set-ups.
According to Hebdige, the construction of subcultures is heavily reliant on ideology in order to become part of society. Jenkins elaborates further on this by recognizing 'participatory fandom' as key to the functioning of any subculture, since subcultures are primarily identified by their opposition to hegemony therefore it would be expected for subcultures to thrive off of input from within. The world of the internet has opened so many doors to the creation of subcultures within hegemonic societies and each can thrive in its own electronic world. Subcultures ultimately and eventually become naturalized within the structure of any given hegemony and consequently the subculture, that was once unique and different, has become part of the mainstream. The way that the mainstream media is able to succeed in making subculture part of culture is by presenting it to the public within the context of the current ideologies of the culture. When subcultures faces threats from hegemonic dictatorship, it is certain that the dominant ideology will surpass; however technology has made it possible for the battle between dominant culture and subculture more difficult to fight.
The language of education can be clearly found in the double-coding of 'class.' Education has always been difficult for me to perceive as a hegemony, yet the structure of me sitting in class writing down every thing important said in the room or that's posted on the board is not natural. The relationship between the structure of a college (classes, disciplines, divisions etc) and the structure of any society is similar. Therefore the functioning of a dominant hegemony needs a solid structure based on class and subdivisions to work.

Rubber Soul, Horkheimer and Adorno

"You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property-all that you shall keep. But from this day on you will be a stranger among us" (49).

Max and Theodor argue that culture has been restricted to a standardized scheme in the media. Style and ingenuity have been erased due to the economic pressures of media production. "The unified standard of value consists in the level of conspicuous production, the amount of investment put on show" (43). The theorists go on to explain how the familiar sells in our society-- these "ready-made cliches" when one can predict the outcome from the very start of a film as to who will prevail and who will be punished in the end. Nothing really is left up to the imagination. The small details in the films may vary but ultimately the plot is solidified. "The so-called leading idea is a filing compartment which creates order, not connections" (45). Film is designed to disallow the audience the freedom to interpret because the objective of its framework is to make reality indistinguishable to film. Thus, the consumer identifies with what is seen in the movies, what is seen in the movies is naturalized, and therefore culture is understood only confined to this limited structure. Media has become a totalizing metanarrative. Lyotard would stress that we need to "wage a war" on the structure of the media's mind-numbing tendencies. "...the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest. Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination" (42). Considering media as an art form is irrelevant because everything presented to us through film, radio, and television follow regulations constituted by a small number of big corporations that own these media outlets. Democracy in the media is the only way we can create a genuine, horizon-broadening culture. There is a song lyric by Jewel that I thought was relevant to this reading:"Maybe if we were all surrounded in beauty, someday we would become what we see." Until then, those who attempt to go against the grain of the trash we are accustomed to seeing and who attempt to create something truly unique, are cast out as strangers.

CMCstudent, 3/2

During class we talked about how ideology functions subconsciously to normalize everything we do and makes it appear “natural.” An example we used was that of a classroom atmosphere being “normal” for us. We expect to walk in and see whiteboards, desks, and for all students to sit down facing toward the teacher. We are told by ideology that this is a “classroom setting” and therefore expect to see it in “classrooms.” On spring break if we were to walk into the hotel room and see a whiteboard we would think…uh this is not a classroom, what is this doing here? Instead we expect to see a cheap seascape. Vis-à-vis, if we walked into a classroom and saw cheap seascapes where whiteboards should be we would be very confused. This shows that some ideology has to exist or everything would become chaotic and out of place.

Culture is not just different depending on place, but also depending on time. I remember my dad telling me about a time he was in the hospital when he was about my age. When he woke up from his surgery, he looked across the room to a guy who also just had surgery. The guy had his leg bandaged up and was casually smoking a cigarette [in the hospital]. My dad didn’t think anything of it, nor did the doctors or nurses. Ideology was in play and no one was to question it. Smoking in hospitals was something in the culture of the 70’s/80’s that was normal. That is how things have changed in just the past 20 to 30 years for example in health services because we are constantly learning, replacing old ideology with new ideology. Today, we have the mindset of “why would anyone in their right mind smoke in a hospital, everyone knows second hand smoke is deadly!” This is an example of an ideological change over time.

post-it note, 3/19/09

From what I understand ideology to be, it can be in one sense but not another when looked at from a different perspective. An example is the square and rectangle rule: a rectangle, by definition, can be a square, but a square can never be a rectangle. So it also goes that an ideology always is born from an idea, but an idea does not always become an ideology. It is the avant-guard nature of an idea that prevents it from becoming an ideology. As the public learns of the idea, it becomes an ideology as it becomes understood and questioned more. Out of these questions, an opposing ideology can be created.

De Saussure said that “the community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to the usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of setting up a single value” (6). Without people to follow an idea, it cannot become an ideology. Lyotard also reinforces this idea in his quote “there is not reality unless testified by a consensus” (42). He is saying that the community places the value on something; that value is not inherent in an idea rather it is determined by the price that someone is willing to pay or adhere to it.

I see an ideology as someone’s perspective of the world. It is there enveloping concept of their environment. But this environment is not necessarily the environment of everyone’s experience. Lyotard also mentioned a concept such as this when he said “we have the idea of the world, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it” (43). This is where ideologies clash, and become destructive. Just because someone’s truth is not another persons same experience, it should not devalue the experience and ideas of the first person.

Juice15, 3/17

There were a few interesting points made in the Marx discussion earlier this week. One interesting subject was about the binary oppositions of the American ruling class. Today we believe fast is better than slow. We want faster technology and we want to get things done faster whether it is getting somewhere or finishing up homework. I feel this belief that faster is better has lead to our hyper stimulated sensitivity. The next opposition is how we want new rather than old. Today you can trade your old car for a brand new one and companies are always coming out with new products that are marketed to obviously be better than the last one. The third binary opposition is how we view upward more positive than downward. Nobody wants to move downward because this word has a negative connotation to it, everyone is trying to move up in this world, not down. Hotels don’t put the penthouse suites on the bottom floor. This upward has a sense of being above other people, as if you are more powerful. Another binary opposition is many versus few. The more things you have, cars, houses, basically anything is associated with being wealthy or powerful. The last binary opposition is active and passive. Active I look at as people who are go getters or the entrepreneurs of the world. They know what they want and go get if before everyone else does. I had to read a book in high school for a class about how to be more active and/or proactive in life. I am pretty sure there are not too many books trying to help people become more passive in their lives. Overall, I feel that fast, new, upward, many and active are all related to one another and can lead to avant-garde.

thestig, 3/22

“That author and the reader … both live … ‘naturally’ in ideology’” (46).

When we discussed this in class, Dr. Rog used an example that I could relate to easily to explain what it was that Althusser is saying here. Althusser means that we don’t’ question ideology because it seems normal. With ideology comes consistency, and what is consistent is normal. Dr. Rog’s exemplified the baseball hat as being an item that once signified “you are a baseball player.” If you played baseball, then you wore a baseball hat. If you didn’t play baseball, you wouldn’t wear a baseball hat (at least one with a teams logo on it), and wouldn’t be able to buy one, either. Then, the hat became available to the public, so the people who would buy them are fans. And in recent years, the hat has been commodified to be a fashion item. We see everyone walking around wearing hats with baseball team logos on them, and you’ll find that some people are wearing them because they “like the hat,” not because they identify with the team at all. I can identify with this story because my dad told me this story as I was growing up. He has been a Yankee fan many, many years, and he’s had many baseball hats. There is one particular hat that he had, and still has, that is ‘unique.’ It is unique because it was only available to people who played for the Yankees; it was different from hats available to the consumer because the stitching were raised. When we walked it to a hat store in Coopers Town, NY, the woman who owned the store erupted! She was shocked that my dad had the hat. Nowadays, you could walk into her store and buy the exact same hat that Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter will be wearing when they take the field. What we have seen here is an evolution in what is natural, what is normal.