In the context of narrative fiction, ideology may be defined as the frame of values informing the narrative. This frame installs hierarchical relationships between pairs of oppositional terms such as real vs. false, good vs. bad, and beautiful vs. ugly. These preferences may be explicitly stated in the text or remain more or less implicit. The reader can engage with the frame in variety of ways: he or she can make it explicit (and thus engage with the hierarchy discovered in the text), construct it only partially, or disregard it completely. It is always the reader who pieces together the ideology of the fiction at hand, but relevant choices invariably emerge from an interaction between three elements: reader, context and text. Theories of ideology can be categorized according to the element they stress: psychological approaches are mostly concerned with the reader, sociological analyses tend to highlight the context (including the author), and discursive inquiries focus on the actual text.
Category Archives: Dialectics
Othello
Notes on Democracy
“Politicization entails raising the particular to the level of the universal.”
STEM (HUM415)
Looking over the pop quiz responses it seems clear that: 1) almost nobody has read The Committee and 2) many people have not read, or at least fully understood, Hawkes. It also appears that there are people in the class who don’t know what STEM means.
Let’s take the first one last. STEM stands for Science Technology Engineering Mathematics– that is to say, those fields of study that are ostensibly the most “serious” and remunerative. (That they are routinely treated as such is already an indication that our society tends to treat rationality metaphysically.)
In the formula STEM s̅ dialectics → Hiroshima, “STEM s̅ dialectics” stands for what Adorno calls “instrumental reason” and “Hiroshima” stands for a moral and human catastrophe on par with the European genocide.
Rough Notes on Methods (HUM415)
I’m trying to formulate a list of critical methods Hawkes employs in Ideology. If you have any suggestions I’d welcome them.
1. “X has become so pervasive it has effectively ceased to exist.”
This formulation ought to evoke paradox, the interpenetration of opposites, the dialectic.
The Dialectic According to Gosling (HUM415)
I’ve not seen this film but it’s pretty clear the screenwriters (who are both from the Bay Area) have read some Marx and Engels. Though I’m not entirely comfortable with the trope of the earnest white savior, on the other hand nothing matters except getting free.
