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61 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Marx and Freud
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: Normalizing and civilizing function to the development of identity
- For Freud this is a balance: We suffer without normalization, but too much makes us ill - For Marx this makes us hollow, falsely identified, and alienated docile workers |
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Mirror Stage
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Forming a sense of self that always feels lacking (consumption soothes, media images as current ideals we fall short of)
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Performativity
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We have no true self, no core, no essence
- Media images ideologically covers this up |
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Regulatory Fictions
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Logics of surveillance (imagining how others see us) produces technologies of the self
- Technologies of the Self: Foucault. Our way of assessing, controlling, evaluating ourself - Produces an internalized gaze (self consciousness) in response to power/knowledge (social norms) - Setting in motion the idea of “normal” and what is not normal - Productive and constraining: Where there is a constraint, a skill set is created that has to go around the constraint - The ideas are “normal” but fictional in the sense that they are constructed (not natural) - Ideals change over time, are not the same in different cultures and times - The internalized gaze is the means by which we regulate ourselves - Not so much pressure from outside, but an internal gaze, and how we relate to outside pressures |
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Bodily and Emotional Normativities
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Being happy, being successful has become a cultural and moral imperative
- Political dissent is seen as angry and militant - Our culture orients us away from reckoning with loss, disappointment, and our imperfections - The narratives become variations of overcoming adversity. We only tolerate failure if it is turned into success - Cultural rules about bodies appear to us as bodies inherently lacking or people who do not take care of themselves |
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Representation
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There are multiple ways to represent any event
- We can select and represent “facts” in a variety of ways - Editing, context, framing - Represetations play a role in the construction of social reality |
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Stuart hall and Representation
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He offers a common or old idea of representation and critiques it
- Not only one idea |
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Identity
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What are some of the different understandings of how our identities are animated?
To what extent is identity animated by nature or external factors |
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Freud
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Drive theory (biology) We are compelled biologically to be pleasure seeking
- Nature element is the drivenness to seek pleasure - As soon as we’re born, all we want to do is feel good - In the womb, all needs are taken care of. - We have to resolve the Oedipus complex to accept social demands - We learn that we cannot have pleasure all the time, some things are punishable, embarrassing, not appropriate - Key for development of our gendered and sexual identities are acceptance of taboos on sexuality - e.g. No sexuality toward family members/no incest - Gender binaries, girls are one way boys are another - We employ all manners of defense mechanisms to meet these social demands e.g. denial - Which is also formative of our personalities and the nuances of how we live our identitites - Gender norms, sexuality norms, reinforced by popular culture |
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Marx
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Ideology is, in principle, the key external force
- One’s class identity, identity as a consumer - How consciousness is involved - Identities we form alienate us - School teaches us to be a good worker - Ideological state apparatus (school and media) are the eans by which ideology is conveyed - We are interpellated by social roles, literally called into being and recognized as certain kinds of people (workers, consumers) - When you’re thought to be a way, you mold into that expectation - Media pushes us |
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Frankfurt School
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Combined Freud and Marx
- Growing up is about the pleasure principle giving way to the reality principle - The reality principle is informed by broader social conditions esp. demands of capitalism - The taming and containing of sexuality into the nuclear family, men as productive and women as reproductive - Go to school, get a job, get married, etc - Freud’s Cure: To enable us to love and to work |
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Mirror Stage
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Lacan
- Child’s recognition of himself as a separate being - Cognitive realization of a reflection of oneself - Outside view of ourselves, how others see us - Imagining how others see us - This is a misrecognition, as we always see ourselves more together than we actually feel inside - We appear stable, integrated, holistic - This sense of wholeness is haunted by how we feel we are always lacking and falling short of such completeness and coherency |
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Performativity
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social scripts about sexuality, gender and how they are enacted
- We see examples of it - There Is nothing emotionally inside or biological that tells us masculinity and sexuality - we only know masculinity through how others perform it and give us an example - Social scripts about sexuality, gender, and other dimensions of identity are enacted - Not an actor playing an “artificial” role, different from performance - Instead no one ever gets out of performativity - We’re not born with sexual preference or sexual characteristics, we get an example and we act it as well - It is only at the surface level - It is the constant repetitions and viewings of these masculine behaviors that cause boys to act this way. We get the impression that there is some “core” to it, that must be the natural way - Sex is as culturally constructive as gender - Culture is obsessed with insisting how different men and women are - Enactment of social norms we are born into, and generate our identities arou |
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Regulatory Factors:
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Logics of surveillance (Imagining how others see us) produces “technologies of the self”
- We draw upon social norms and understanding of what is normal and we use them to make sense of ourselves and how we are being seen - We think we are free but we are actually surveilling ourselves - We’ve taken in ideologies that make us control ourselves - e.g. Leaving this house with makeup on only, or no pjs - Internalized gazes (self consciousness) in reponse to social norms |
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Stuart Hall:
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There is no single meaning to an event, so representation cannot conveny the meaning of an event truthfully or even inaccurately
- The process of representing brings meaning to an event - Representation does not occur after the event, representation is constitutive of the event Encoding and Decoding: Dominant Hegemonic: The “preferred meaning” the creators wanted to evoke in us Negotiated Position: We grasp the intended meaning, but we modify it according to our own interests Oppositional Reading: We understand but reject the intended meaning because of alternative values/ideas |
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Essentialism
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Identity is a fundamental, unchanging core of meaning that transends culture and politics
- Identity is grounded in nature and unquestionable truths |
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Social Constructivism
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Identities are produced through culture and politics
- Genetics might establish broad parameters for what we do/think/feel, but it is cculture that helps us establish who we think we are |
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Agency
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The capacity each of us has to shape our own life
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Freudian Theory of Identity
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Stages of identity development are a critical precondition for the individual's integration into society
- Identities are not natural, but produced to manage chaotic, socially unacceptable desires - Babies are not born with identities, they have none - A baby's eventual realization that their mother and the world are not merely extensions of them, and they are a seperate and individual being, is a traumatic break and begins the process of socialization - Socialization is managing and containing powerful impulses toward the other |
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Key Moments in Freudian Social Development
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1) The recognition of sexual difference: The presence and absence of a penis
- Imposes social meaning on our early desires, directing us away from the forbidden love object of our mother/father's body 2) Acquisition of Language: Works to channel our desire into acceptable forms of adult sexual orientation and gender identity |
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Oedipal Triangle
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Mother-Father-Child
- Lays the groundwork for orientating the self in relation to others - Sexual feeling: The desire to possess the other - Identification: Recognition of similitarity between onesself and the other: Inspiring a desire to be the other - These two drives are the resolution of the oedipal complex, to reflect "proper" gender identification and sexual orientation - These patterns are then re-enforced culturally by education, family, and popular culture |
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The Unconscious Mind
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Civilization demands we repress socially unacceptable fears and desires into the unconscious
- However, in the unconscious they create troubling ripples in our emotional lives, threatening the stability of our gender identification and heterosexual orientation - The determination to which we cling to our identities is partly a reflection of an unconscious tear of the consequences of ackowledging the ambivilance that underlies them - The stable and coherent selves we articulate to the world are constructions to control the chaotic drives and impulses that do not fit in society |
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Marxist Theory of Identity
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Like Freud, Marx believed identity is an armor people use as a way of coping with needs and society
- Ideology is the primary force in creating identity and consciousness - The working class accepted their idetity by acceptng capitalism and its inevitability |
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Marx and Freud's Identity Theory
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Identitty may be an illusion, but it works for some people in a way that doesn't for others
- Capitalism/society establishes identity as a crucial focus of self-organization - It also prescribes and limits what kind of identities that are acceptable to adopt |
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Ideological State Apparatuses
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Social Structures through which ideology is produced
- Rebision of Marx's theory - Rather than being absolutely determined by the economy, culture is desseminated through institutions - False consciousness that distracts from capitalism - Althusser |
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Feminist Theory
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Taken up the insights of Freud and Marks while showing the limits of psychoanalysis and Marxism
- Concepts of unconscious and ideology help to explain how gender identity is socially constructed, and why it is so firmly entrenched - Very notion of gender is shot through with ideology - Women have been less okay historically with identity than men |
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Interpellation
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Althuser
- Indiviuals are compelled through a mix of psychological and social imperatives to identify with social roles offered to them - For institutions to function, it requires individuals to take up assigned places in already established relationships and recognize and identify with their role |
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Black Skin, White Masks
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Showed how, int he cultural context of colonialism and its aftermath, racial minorrities are driven to define their identities in fractured forms
- Leads to a stronly conflicted sense of self and community - Shows power relationship |
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Mirror Stage
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Lacan
- Child's recognition of themself as a seperate being, looking in the mirror and identifying themself - This recognition about the self is actually a misrecognition: The reflected image is very stable and unified. The child itself is way more uncoordinated - that moment of identification is actually a splitting: The promise of wholeness is hampered by the impossibility of fulfillment\ - identity is always characterized by lack |
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Foucault's Identity and Power/Knowledge
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Shows how power both constrains and produces social meaning
-Marx saw power as belonging to a ruling class, Foucault saw it as circulating through society - Power concentrates continuously throughout society, concentrating in different places, and constituting particular meanings and identities as it does so - Foucault does not contest Maex that power is unequally distributed, rather he questions the stability and fluidity of that distribution - Power shapes society productively. This does not mean all effects of power are good, it means power is also discourses, whole systems, thought, speech, knwoledge production that structures institutions and social practices |
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History of Sexuality
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19th century lead to a hightened focus on the body as a site of social regulation and discipline
- Sexuality and identity - Sexuality and regulatory fiction |
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Discipline
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Can be either method of training designed to enforce obedience, but also branches of knowledge characterized by particular rules or methods
- Material consequences of knowledge are put into effect in institutions such as hospitals, schools, prisons - Then reproduces social heriarchies in the shaping of individuals |
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Regulatory Fiction
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Produced as part of a system of social control that works on the basis of drawing a distinction between "normal" and "deviant" identities
- Key distinction is reproduced through discourse aand put into practice through treatment, punishment, etc - Enforces social control e.g. Homosexuality threatened the 1950s nuclear family essential to capitalism and bourgie values |
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Panopticon
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A structure comprising of a tower erected in the center of a courtyard with cells arranged all around it
- All cells were visible from the tower, but more importantly tower was visible from all cells - Spiritual disciplinary power was not from the fact that guards could always watch, but that prisoners always felt watched - Prisoners internalization of the disciplinary gaze represents a model of a more general process in which individuals came to subject themselves to a kind of social stability |
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Foucault's Theory of Identity
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Power works not by restriction but by the production of new meanings
- Identity arises not from within individuals or groups, but from complex social structures and relations of power - Identity is historically specific, some aspects of identity (e.g. individualism) emerges in the context of significant social/economic arrangements - Identity is both imaginary and real. Imaginary in the sense that its qualities are ideologically or discoursively constructed, and real in the sense that those constructions have material consequences in the form of laws, policies, beliefs, and actions |
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Postfeminism
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Feminism has achieved everything it has set out to do
- Feminism is an angry movement that is anti-men and anti-pleasure - The patriarchy no longer exists - Rejection of feminism's assertion that who we are is shaped by the culture we live in, and the structutre of power that guides us |
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Labels
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Foucault highlights why we find labels so important
- They restrict meaning, but they also produce meaning in recognizable categories of gender identity |
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Sex and Gender
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Sex refers to biological characteristics (male/female while gender refers to cultural consciousness (masculinity/femininity)
- Sex may be a given, but gender is fluid e.g. girls playing sports |
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Self-Controlled Body
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Existence has to be negotiated with an increasing awareness
- The civilized body is one that is subject to an expanding set if taboos and social codes - Self restraint, a clear sense of seperation between private andd public |
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Performativity
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Social scripts about how sex and gender get enacted
- There is no "real" identity underneath, like an actor playing a part -Identities are made to seem "natural" through repeated performance - It is through the dynamic of repetition that ideas are confirmed - However, no perfomance can live up to the ideal - When our experiences do not live up to the cultural norms, the perfomative nature of identity is more visible to us |
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Habitus
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A term connoting both living space and habit
- Describes the way in which particular social environemnts are internalized by individuals in the form of dispositions toward particular bodily orientations and behaviors - Social differences are reporduced at the level of the individual body - e.g. class dictates social location and taste - Working class bodies vs. dominant class bodies |
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Biopolitical
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Employs new forms of info and knowledge to enhance life and health at the level of the population as a whole
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Representation
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Involves social production of meaning through sign systems
- Signs are fundamental units of communication: Can be a word, a gesture, an expression, anything that conveys meaning and is recognized as doing so - Language by itself isn't the determining factor, rather it is language as the central medium of culture and how it influences the way we perceive the world around us |
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Structuralism
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Language does not simply reflect, but constructs our understanding of reality
- Structuralists are concerned not with what words mean, but how they mean according to the structure and rules of the system in which they are generated |
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Semiotics
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How the individual elements of langauge and signs work together according to the rules of selection and combination, to produce meaning
- Relationship between the two parts of a sign: A word (signifier) and the concept behind it (signified) - Not natural, determined by convention - Words derive their meaning by association and difference - Meaning is produced by selecting a series of particular elements from a whole paradigm of possibilities and combining them into a particular order, or syntagm |
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Signification
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Making meaning according to principles of difference, especially binary opposition
- Concepts acquire meaning through what they're not |
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Mythologies
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How sign systems work ideologically to reproduce and legitimize particular social relationships
- In addition to their literal meanings, signs also assume connotative/mythological significance - These associations are charged with a culture's dominant beliefs or values - Myth is a form of representation that works to justify the dominant values of a culture |
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Connotative Label
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A label that drags along with it a whole referential context, with particular assumptions and values
- Symbolic baggage (e.g. mugging) for a greater idea (american social problems and fears) - Reflects broader issues in society - Mythological significance |
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Semiotic Reading
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Focuses on the way in which meaning is generated through the relationships between signs in a text
- Meaning and substance re determined by the cultural context, and the broader system of social relations that determines not only what has meaning in a culture, but who gets to say what under what circumstances and with what social effect |
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Moral Panic
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A condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests
- Stylized and stereotypical - Us vs. them, inner vs. outer, order vs. chaos |
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Discourse
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Describes the way speech and writing work i conjuction with specific structures and insittutions to shape social reality
- Defines broad rules in the context of speech/writing, who is officially permitted to speak on particular subject, and the authority the particular speaker carries - Knowledge is constituted through relations of power, which determine what is true, and what material effects that knowledge will have in the world - Knowledge i s power: It comes into being through the operations of power, and it exercises power by making things happen - Science, medicine, law are broadly connected with social power: Define and manage human subjects through study, treatment, incarceration, etc - Legitimizes forms o social control over particular groups in society (e.g. unfit, socially ill, criminals) - Incorporates forms of representation with forms of social practices |
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News
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An account assembled from a mass of chaotic data according to particular principles of selection and ordering framed by internal organization contraints and broader social codes
- Gives equal weight to moderate and extremist views (cult of balance) - dominant institution determines how issues are framed, what questions can/cannot be asked - uses consensus - "Voice of all of us" - Lack of symbolic representation translates into a more concrete lack of power - Gains substance through the power of myth |
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Inside vs. Outside Perspective
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Inside represents community, concerned citizens, the media thratened by an outside, irrational forcee
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Consensus
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Represents society as if threre are no major cultural or economic conflicts or breaks, and if there is, there is a legitimate and institutionalized way of settling it
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Representation
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Has a lot to do with power, what gets spoken about in what way by who on whose behalf
- In media and sign systems, representation tends to reproduce existing relations of social power and make them seem natural - Classification and marginalization of relatively powerless members of society, works to keep them in their place |
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Realism
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Describes a mode of representation that is taken to provide a faithful and objective picture of the world
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Classical Conitioning
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Training someone to find something unpleasant acceptable by associating it with rewards
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News Value
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Out of the ordinary, dramatic in a tragic way, easily personalized, can be incorporated into broader pattern of stories
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Operant Conditioning
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Teaching subjects to act habitually without regard for consequences
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Photographs
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Stands out more vividly than actual experience
- Tears objects out of their place in space and time and context - Apparent naturalness conceals the mediating role of culture in its construction - Decisions made by photographer what to include/exclude, cultural resources viewers bring to their interpretation all changes the photograph |
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Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding
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Suggests that audiences are not passive consumers, they read cultural texts finding in them sources of irony, humor, fantasy
- Meaning does not exist solely in the heads of creators or in the show itself - Meaning is created and altered by viewers who construct it using signs and narrative forms supplied by the surrounding culture and their position in that culture - Does not suggest audiences are free to take whatever they wish because they have accepted the legitimacy of a preferred reading, but modify it in light of personal circumstances to an oppositional or counter hegemonic reading position - Challenges the passive consumer of television who takes it however the creator intends, and that viewers are completely uncritical - Not viewer misinterpretation, but a deeper reading thanks to cultural values and opinions - e.g. NYPD scene |
