Culture and Ideology

• The relationship between world of ideas/beliefs and the world of material (the symbolic and the material)

Culture and Ideology

• L. Althusser: ideology means the “lived relation” between people and their world

• R. Williams: culture is part of a social and political order that is materially produced.

Culture and Ideology

• Culture as the medium through which people transform the mundane phenomena of the material world into a world of significant symbols to which they give meaning and attach value (48)—Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

The Concept of Ideology

• Marx’s critique of Hegel’s disciple Ludwig Feuerbach—illusion of German ideology

• Realm of ideas vs. their material conditions

Marx: Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (49)

The Concept of Ideology

• Marx proposes to explain these connection [philosophy and material reality] historically, in the sense that the material world can only be understood as the historical product of particular social practices (49).

The Concept of Ideology

•階級衝突透過意識型態解決 （ 49 ） Read together

• False consciousness: concealment of people’s real interests from themselves, and the concealment of one group’s interests from other people.

The Concept of Ideology

• Ideology is of practical significance in concealing interests and negating social contradictions.

• Can you give an example from the readings of this semester?

The Concept of Ideology

• The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force (50).

• Can you give an example?

The Concept of Ideology

• Raymond Williams• 1. any system of beliefs that are

characteristic of a particular class or group

• 2. refer negatively to a system of illusory beliefs, false ideas or false consciousness

• 3. the general process of the production of meanings and ideas

The Concept of Ideology

How ideologies work in practice?Characteristic selectivities Represent certain interests or to concea

l them in a more or less consistent way (50)

Eg. Women are the fairer sexOther examples?

The Concept of Ideology

• How do ideologies work in practice?

Take the form of commonsense (51)

A form of unexamined discourse

Read together

The Concept of Ideology

• John Urry: How do ideology as the concealment of interests works?

• Read together (51)

The Concept of Ideology

• Any statement of belief or any social practice can be regarded as “ideological” insofar as it fails to make clear the interests that it represents (52).

• Ideologies offer decontextualized readings of social situations which are partial in both senses of that term.

Hegemony and power

• A situation of uncontested political supremacy (52).

• Gramsci: the power of a dominant class to persuade subordinate classes to accept its moral, political, and cultural values as the “natural” order.

The power of persuasion

Hegemony and power

• In capitalist society, hegemony is never fully achieved—it is always contested.

• Resistance may not always be active and open. Often it will be latent and largely symbolic.

Hegemony and power

• Frank Parkin• Social closure (read together) (53-4)• Exclusionary closure, ururpationary cl

osure, dual closure

Rituals of resistance (59)

• Forms of resistance• Not inevitably take the form of

active struggle. Often, indeed, the meaning of resistance is latent and appears purely symbolic in form.

• Subcultures as examples

Cheerleaders and ombudsmen

• What do these two words mean?• Cultural practices have

ideological effects to the extent that they contribute to the domination of one social group by another through the selective concealment of interests.

• 73-74

D. Mitchell

• “Cultural Politics: the Dialectics of Spectacle”

Cultural politics

• Cultural politics: contestations over meanings, over borders and boundaries, over the ways we make sense of our worlds, and the ways we live our lives (159)

Cultural politics

• Strategizing in the realm of practice and meaning to create new worlds, new histories, new ways to live (161)

Popular culture as resistance

• Rey Chow-listening, rock, Walkman (149-51 ）

Practice of Everyday Life

• Michel de Certeau• Tactics and strategies (151-53)• Walking • Social vs. individual

Punks and carnivals: strategies of inversion

Spectacle and resistance

• Guy Debord• Commodities are now all there are to s

ee; the world we see is the world of the commodity. The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image (164).

• Read together (164-5) society of spectacle