Contemporary Problems, My Response to Chapter 2

2011.NOV.04     
Chapter 2, Viewers Make Meaning

•  Key Questions from Presentation

Who was Foucault? Define names and terms

Working beyond Marxist determinism: not class, but power everywhere

What is class? How is power and politics built into everything? Rooms, schools, design as discipline

Habitus, Bourdieu: who does the reading, seeing?

Why would they want to get to the author’s reading? A form of Will to Power, we submit?

Audiences get sold to advertisers, we are the product of media

Audience active responses, bricolage, counter-bricolage: who uses terms like this?

Can we think of examples? Useful to design practice?

Hasn’t technology empowered viewers, everyone creates now?

•  My Key Questions

Politics of reading; of course viewer has the last word

The question is how are we determined: everyone in this room equal?

       What determines you? Profession; Race; Nation; Class?              
Share readings, backgrounds? What can design do about that? How do we see Asia, e.g.?

Producers losing central: new understanding of meaning, not a transmission,

       an ‘inner’ content

Barthes, why and how author are no longer the final word in meaning

Looked at semiotics of images, book Image, Music, Text, trans. 1977

“Photographic Message,” works without a code? Is it natural or cultural? + captions

“Rhetoric of the Image,” can’t have limitless readings, not just anything will do

Just that the inventory of registers and codes and styles is vast, beyond u/stdg, control

“Death of the Author,” no one voice in any writing, writing is operation of system of signs

Modern authors, Mallarme, saw they weren’t the centre, signs and social languages were

Surrealism: surrender to irrational, modernity uncontrollable, systems too large and dominant

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” i.e. intertextual

Texts, by definition, author is absent; author created in the act of reading, reader creates them

Closure of ‘author’ construct suits critics, find the correct reading: positivism

“Refuse God and his hypostases—reason science law”

       under + standing: essences, underlying substance, vs. attributes, properties that come from

It is human reason, science, law etc. that create God i.e.

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”: we are formed as ideological subjects

Interpellated, hailed or ‘called’

Beyond Marx, no false consciousness, just “imaginary relationships to real conditions”

French CP, Stalin: theory seen as science, not formed in struggle but from above

à Repressive State Apps (vs. Occupy movement): Government, Police, Courts, Army, Schools

à Ideological SA’s? education, religion, family, politics, unions, media, culture, sport, entertainment

ISAs are private, not centralized coherent machines, still part of the state

Ideology not a representation of ‘reality,’ the Real, actual conditions: but it represents something real

Our understanding, rel’nship to an unknowable Real (like religion, not true but a true need)

Things that are obvious = ideology: power of recognition of normally tacit governing ideas

       i.e.  women should be equal; people are competitive and selfish; communism can’t work etc.

à do we exist as individuals before language? Words ‘call’ us, design us, give us tools to be subjects

Design works to make those responses and thoughts the same? Disciplines designers?

Makes designers into particular subjects, a social position

Design also disciplines others: aesthetic demands, a professional code

Foucault, “What is an Author?”

Idea of author appears at privileged moment, text points to author’s existence

Not an interior meaning, but several exterior meanings

Text meant to survive us, elude death, make you immortal; now we look at work, not individual

But work (oeuvre) is harder to limit, or define, than it appears: what is the work of the designer?

What is in the hole left by the absent author, what space or position remains for us?

       Can we pass beyond individual, modern subject?

Foucault, “Subject and Power,” look at how objectification makes humans into subjects

Objective practices of dividing, naming, identifying, all defined by reason: madness, sexuality, etc.

Greater field of power than pathologies of Nazism or Stalinism or Capitalism

How to fight the power that defines us, makes us individual subjects

Like Christianity, individual salvation, a new, dispersed form of power, like punishment, no longer a public spectacle to instil fear openly: you just know it's there, internalize it

See him going beyond Marx, and focus on class power and materal production

Aesthetics: Pros know quality, symbolic language, priesthood, not polling (Komar + Melamid)

How is that “subjective” experience codified and kept in place? Where is design?

Hebdige, other readings, places, punks, British Cultural Studies, Birmingham, R Williams, Stuart Hall

Postmodern legacy, study of more than ‘quality’ design and high art, good thing

But problem of no outside: today rough surfaces and scrawls are inside, become valued,

       no leverage against canon, professional consensus itself

Doesn’t matter what signs you make, the system sustains itself, aesthetic authority is end in itself

Hebdige,  Subculture: Style subversive, revolt, something personal, crimes against proper use of codes

Safety pins: relation to mass culture, find uncanny new meaning for signs, “things mean and mean again”

Also reject vision, utopia, reject moralizing, see pop culture as a totality, not good and bad

All structured by “ruling ideas,” ideology that gives narrative structure to real material relationships

Hegemony, social groups form “provisional alliances,” exerts “total social authority”

Need consent, make certain interests seem natural, inevitable, irresistible

What does it take to get outside that? Can’t fix meaning the way you want, change it to your meaning

Circuit of meaning always left open, continues to flow