The Occupation of My Time

I haven't put much up recently. The workload is really bogging me down. So, in my lapse of reading and writing, I thought I would show you what is keeping me from writing something a little more entertaining than this:

“Culture, Ideology, Interpellation” – John Fiske

After reading a few paragraphs of Fiske, I was reminded of the class discussion on Marxism. Marx didn’t factor in race and gender, but Fiske emphasizes the importance of those factors, like the class did, in uncovering the ideologies found in any culture.

Fiske’s argument that “Consciousness is never the product of truth or reality but rather of culture, society, and history” (1269), is intriguing because it posits that there is no reality. Reality is presented to us, or given to us through the ideology we adopt unconsciously. In this reality, we find the idea of consciousness and think it into existence in our mind. The human mind presents itself as a quandary of problems in this argument. The mind invents ways to control others in the form of an ideological apparatus, this apparatus, described by Fiske, is TV. Indeed the creation of an apparatus and its language that has such a powerful influence over humans takes a lot of intelligence, but this intelligence also values the minds of those that it wishes to control or subdue. The ideology recognizes the mind’s capacity for imagination, and turns that capacity upon itself so the mind imagines a real world.

Fiske argues that these ISAs (ideological state apparatuses) don’t favor any social class or group. The ISA looks at the whole social structure and seeks to suffocate every demographic to implant a morality. The ideology is found in the omnipresent apparatuses of a society.

Fiske’s interpretation of the language used on TV was interesting. I didn’t think his ideas were so far-fetched that I couldn’t buy into them. I loved his analysis of the repetitive “heart” metaphor. “The repeated use of the “heart” metaphor not only makes “America” into a living, breathing body (like the one “we” inhabit), but it constructs the unions as a potentially lethal disease, if not a stiletto-wielding assassin!” (1272) For Fiske, the repetitive terms used over time in this medium establish in us the idealistic image of ourselves that some of us have become accustomed to force upon others.

These are my reading notes for an English class.