Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Culture Hebdige (10/22) Post Class


The most interesting part of class on Monday for me was when we were going over Dick Hebdige and Culture. And also throughout the class the concepts of ideology and the control that the ruling class has over them.  One of my favorite quotes from yesterday was Marx’s Golden Rule “He who owns the Gold Rules” I thought that was important when talking about ideology. The ruling class, the class with the gold is the ones that control ideology; they control culture in the sense that culture is a group ideologies or beliefs that are set by a society. When we create ideologies or follow them it is not on purpose most likely cloaked in common sense. “Ideology is profoundly unconscious” – Althusser.  On Sunday I was watching Walking Dead with some buddies of mine and basically by this point in the show society had been broken down into a low form where material possessions are no longer sought after and the sole focus was safety in the form food and shelter. There is part where the main group takes shelter in a prison. When they find prisoners still inside of the prison, some people automatically perceive them as bad without even considering why they are in prison. This is true to in ‘real’ life because our ideology conditions us to assume all prisoners are bad (which makes sense) but in this show those ideology can’t be assumed because society has been broken down and culture has been lost, around the time where right and wrong disappeared.  This is now a question the group must physically ask themselves; Are the prisoners bad or good? Should we trust them? Because they can no longer count on themselves to subconsciously use their “common sense” in this situation it becomes a conscious one.  This was a long example of how our culture shaped by Ideology how we play an unconscious role in keeping this structure successful.

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