ENGL 275 Midterm Passages

"In the social production of their life, men [sic] enter into definite

relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations

of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of

their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of

production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real

foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of

production of material life conditions the social, political and

intellectual life process in general."

Marx

(p. 31, 1859 Preface)

"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive

forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of

production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with

the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.

From forms of development of the productive forces these relations

turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With

the change of the economic foundation the entire immense

superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."

Marx

(p. 31, 1859 Preface)

*this passage appears again in 10/19 lecture on Gramsci

"In considering such [social] transformations a distinction should always

be made between the material transformation of the economic

conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision

of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or

philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become

conscious of this conflict and fight it out."

Marx

(p. 31, 1859 Preface)

"[We set] out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-

processes demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes

and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of

men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process,

which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.

Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology as well as the

forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain

the semblance of independence."

Marx and Engels

(p. 32, The German Ideology)

"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling

class."

Marx and Engels

(p. 44, The Communist Manifesto 44)

"In considering such [social] transformations a distinction should always

be made between the material transformation of the economic

conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision

of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or

philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become

conscious of this conflict and fight it out."

Marx

(p. 31, 1859 Preface 31)

The "work of [dream] interpretation

seeks to undo the dream-work"

Freud

(p. 210, The Dream-Work)

"It [homosexuality] was everywhere present in him: at the root of all

his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active

principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a

secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less

as a habitual sin than as a singular nature."

Foucault

(p. 43, The History of Sexuality)

"As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a

category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than

the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual

became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood... The

sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a

species."

Foucault

(p. 43, The History of Sexuality)

"The forbidding of certain words, the decency of expressions, all the

censorings of vocabulary, might well have been only secondary devices

compared to that great subjugation: ways of rendering it [sex] morally

acceptable and technically useful"

Foucault

(p. 21, The History of Sexuality)

crypto-normative tone

"Sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive

existence"

Foucault

(p. 33, The History of Sexuality)

crypto-normative tone

"Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a

political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex"

Foucault

(p. 23, The History of Sexuality)

sexuality is not repressed; it is

made useful

"Sex needed to be "managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated

for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum.

Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one

administered"

Foucault

(p. 24, The History of Sexuality)

sexuality is not repressed; it is

made useful

"The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic,

planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the

[film] studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies,

pseudodocumentary novels, and hit songs)..."

Adorno and Horkheimer

(p. 163, "The Culture Industry")

"Mechanization has such power over a man's leisure and happiness,

and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods,

that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process

itself"

Adorno and Horkheimer

(p. 137, "The Culture Industry")

"Mass-produced culture "occup[ies] men's senses from the time they

leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next

morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they

themselves have to sustain throughout the day"

Adorno and Horkheimer

(p. 131, "The Culture Industry")

"The National Socialists [Nazis] knew that the wireless [radio] gave

shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation.

The metaphysical charisma of the Fürher ... finally turned out to be no

more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the radio... The

gigantic fact that the speech penetrates everywhere replaces its

content. ... The inherent tendency of radio is to make the speaker's

word, the false commandment, absolute"

Adorno and Horkheimer

(p. 159, "The Culture Industry")

"I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues,

acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are

always the others, whom we don't know, and can't know. ... To other

people, we also are masses. Masses are other people.

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people

as masses"

Williams

(p. 299-300, "Culture and Society: 1780-1950")

"The old rural culture, which is so widely (and sometimes sentimentally)

admired, rested on generations of experience within a general continuity

of common condition. The speed and magnitude of the changes which

broke up this settlement were never fully realized..."

Williams

(p. 311-312, "Culture and Society: 1780-1950")

The answer to the dilemmas of mass communication "lies in conceding

the practice of democracy ... in adopting a different attitude toward

[cultural] transmission, one which will ensure that its origins are genuinely

multiple, that all the sources have access to the common channel"

Williams

(p. 316, "Culture and Society: 1780-1950")

Hegemony "refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of

certain social groups can exert 'total social authority' over other

subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition

of ruling ideas, but by 'winning and shaping consent so that the power

of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural."

Hebdige

(p. 15-16, "From Culture to Hegemony)

"The school is presented as "a neutral environment purged of ideology ...

where teachers, respectful of the 'conscience' and 'freedom' of the

children who are entrusted to them ... open up for them the path to the

freedom, morality, and responsibility of adults by their own example,

by knowledge, literature and their 'liberating' virtues"

Althusser

(p. 156-157, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses")

"[N]o class can hold State power over a long period of time without at

the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological

Apparatuses"

Althusser

(p. 146, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses")

"[T]he Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but

also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class

struggle"

Althusser

(p. 147, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses")

"[I]deology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects

among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the

individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise

operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, which can be

imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or

other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!'"

Althusser

(p. 174, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses")