Questions of Ideology and Power

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Questions of Ideology and Power

• CRS 1001 Introduction to Cultural Studies

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Richard Johnson (1996)

• A study of historical forms of consciousness of
  subjectivity
• subject a person of free will
• subjectivity processes by which we are formed as
  persons
• To explore
• how we come to be who we are ?
• how we are produced as subject?

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Two basic Marxist concepts

• Subjectivity the construction of individuals in
  social and ideological relations
• Capitalist industrial societies are divided
  unequally along ethnic, gender, generational and
  class lines
• ? Production of individuals of unequal positions
  and power

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Cultural Studies as Politics

• The examination of knowledge as a matter of
  positionality
• Power pervades every level of social
  relationships
• Specific concerns with subordinated groups of
  class, gender, race, and social minority

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Culture and Identity

• Culture as a contested and conflictual set of
  practices of representation
• a principle site where division is established
  and contested
• bound up with the processes of formation and
  re-formation of social groups

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Critical studies of culture

• Culture as signifying practices
• In representations, languages and customs
• The main analytical question
• How the world is socially constructed and
  represented to and by us?

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Representation

• Modes and media in which
• the production and consumption of meaning are
  articulated
• Embedded in sounds, inscriptions, objects,
  images, books, magazines and television
  programmes
• Produced, enacted, used and understood in
  specific social contexts
• Every time a good time!

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Media as an ideological tool

• Marxist media as an ideological arm of the
  dominant class
• The mass is socialized into and internalize the
  norms of the dominant culture
• It functions to produce 'false consciousness' in
  the working-classes

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Ideology

• Marx and Engels The German Ideology
• We do not set out from what men say, imagine,
  conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of,
  imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in
  the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and
  on the basis of their real life-process.
• The former A distortion of reality
• The latter to find a distant echo of a deeper
  reality

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Ideology of the capitalists

• Capital flows economic development /progress
• Labor free and equal exchange
• Product quality and quantity fair,
  accessible, and affordable
• Market law of reason
• Capitalism ? the only true universal economic
  principle

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Class ideology

• A fixed set of ideas, held by the partial views
  of a social group, sways over the whole of a
  society
• Two implications
• A dominant class ? a subordinated working class
• Social class as a fundamental category of
  analysis, agency of control and thus of social
  change

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Adorno and Horkheimer (1979)

• The Culture Industry
• Cultural products are commodities
• Products of capitalist ideologies
• They are authoritarian, conformist and highly
  standardized
• Producing a uniform system through films, radio,
  magazines, popular music, etc.

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Althusser Ideological State Apparatuses

• Primary institutions where ideology is
  transmitted, legitimized
• The family
• The education system
• The church
• The mass media

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Gramsci (1881-1937)

• Hegemony control is won and maintained by
  consent
• To include common sense
• Habitual, unexamined daily practices
• Assimilation of ruling class ideas as well as
  others
• Naturalizing an existing social order in
  everyday thoughts and action

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Social class

• Mixed by nature
• Complicated by language, gender, generation,
  race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation

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Stuart Hall

• The mass media do tend to reproduce
  interpretations which serve the interests of the
  ruling class, but they are also 'a field of
  ideological struggle
• It also serve 'to reinforce a consensual
  viewpoint by using public idioms and by claiming
  to voice public opinion'

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Stuart Hall

• meaning is always a result of articulation a
  social production
• The field of culture as a major site of
  ideological struggle a terrain of
  incorporation and resistance
• a site where hegemony is to be won or lost

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Du Gay The Circuit of Culture