INTR 100: Class 3
Ideology & Pop Culture
Today’s Class
1. Last Class, Next Class, This Class
2. Posting to Our Blogs
3. Ideology & Cultural Studies
4. Break Time!
5. Guilty Pleasures & Pop Objects
6. Unit 2 Introduction
Ideology: Definition 1 ~ Group Ideology
• “a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people” (2)
• What examples of this type of ideology can you think of?
• What did you call this type of ideology?
• Describe CPC’s ideology.
Ideology: Definition 2 ~ False Consciousness
• "...a certain masking, distortion, or concealment. Ideology is used here to
indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality.
They produce what is sometimes called 'false consciousness'. Such
distortions...work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the
powerless." (3) • What examples of this type of ideology can you think of?
• What did you call this type of ideology?
• What false consciousness does Apple generate?
Ideology: Definition 3 ~ Ideological Forms
• "...uses the term [ideology] to refer to 'ideological forms' (Marx, 1976a,: 5)
….intended to draw attention to the way in which texts…always present a
particular image of the world” (3) • What examples of this type of ideology can you think of?
• What did you call this type of ideology?
• What is the NFL’s “compelling
ideological signification”?
Ideology: Definition 4 ~ Ideological Mythologies
• “[Roland] Barthes argues that ideology (or ‘myth' as Barthes himself calls it)
operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary, often
unconscious meanings that texts and practices carry, or can be made to
carry. (4)
• For Barthes myths (ideology) attempts to portray as natural (i.e. just existing)
something that is in fact cultural (made by humans) • What examples of this type of ideology can you think of?
• What did you call this type of ideology?
• What does this famous
image naturalize?
Ideology: Definition 5 ~ Material Practices
• “Althusser’s main contention is to see ideology not simply as a body of ideas,
but as material practice….[what] is encountered in the practices of everyday
life and not simply in certain ideas about everyday life.” (3) • What examples of this type of ideology can you think of?
• What did you call this type of ideology?
• How does this material practice
“bind us to the social order”?
Marx
• In the social production of their existence men enter into definite, necessary
relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production
corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces
of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a
legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
Storey (3)
Pop Culture: Definition 1
• The culture that is liked by a wide number of people (is popular)
• How many people need to like it for it to be “popular”?
Pop Culture: Definition 2
• What is left over after we define 'high' culture
• Pop Culture as residual; cultural flotsam and jetsam
• Bourdieu: “taste is a deeply ideological category” (6); “a marker of
class” (6)
• “For Bourdieu, the consumption of culture is 'predisposed, consciously
and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social
differences’" (6)
• Who is invested in the maintenance of the High/Low divide? (i.e. who stands
to gain by it’s maintenance?)
Pop Culture: Definition 3
• “Pop Culture as ‘mass culture’” (8)
• A culture produced for a non-discrimination mass, and is itself formulaic
and manipulative
• A culture consumed by cultural dupes
• Associated with the Frankfurt School (a later class)
• A benign version of this sees mass culture as a form of public fantasy
(escapism)
• Do you ever feel like you’ve been duped after you go to see a movie, or buy a
video game, or…?
Pop Culture: Definition 4
• “the culture that originates from 'the people’” (9)
• An 'authentic' or 'real' culture
• See popular culture as folk culture
• A working class culture that is in opposition to the mass culture of
capitalism
• Highly romanticized
• Who are 'the people'?
• Is this 'authentic' culture never commercial? What about Cowichan
sweater sold to tourists in Victoria?
Pop Culture: Definition 5
• Gramsci: pop culture as a key agent of hegemony
• Hegemony: “the way in which dominant groups in society, through a
process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership,’ seek to win the consent of
subordinate groups in society” (10)
• Note that hegemony works through 'intellectual and moral' leadership
• Pop culture becomes a site of conflict and resistance
• Pop Culture becomes the very terrain of the class struggle
• Note Gramsci’s notion of “compromise equilibrium”
Bennett
• The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the ruling class to
win hegemony and by forms of opposition to this endeavour. As such, it
consists not simply of an imposed mass culture that is coincident with
dominant ideology, nor simply of spontaneously oppositional cultures, but is
rather an area of negotiation between the two within which — in different
particular types of popular culture — dominant, subordinate and oppositional
cultural and ideological values and elements are ‘mixed’ in different
permutations (96) (Storey 10)