ENGL 275 Midterm Review

Base

According to Marx, the material productive forces of a society and its relations of production. The base determines and sets limits on the superstructure.

Superstructure

All noneconomic institutions in a society (e.g., religion, culture, national identity). These ideas and values derive from the base and serve to legitimize the current system of exploitation

Mode of production

The sum of the material productive forces and the relations of production

Material productive forces

The technology, natural resources, and capabilities of a society, based on its stage of development

Relations of production

How the workplace is organized in a society

Legal and political superstructures

The state, laws, courts, police, and governing institutions that rise upon a society's economic base. However, those that control the means of production really control society, not the government. It is just a byproduct that organizes the affairs of the bourgeoise

Religious, aesthetic, and philosophical elements

Religion serves as both a reflection of material suffering and a tool for social stabilization. When an economic base begins to crack and a social revolution approaches, aesthetics become a battleground. Art and literature become the ideological forms in which people "become conscious of the conflict and fight it out." Philosophy functions to analyze, organize, and subtly explain the underlying reality of a society. It creates cohesive worldviews that make the current economic system feel natural, logical, and inevitable

Ideology

Hall defines it as the lived "maps of meaning" and systems of representation that allow people to understand how society works. Althusser defines it as a set of practices and ideas produced by social institutions (like media, schools, and family) that actively construct "subject positions" (how we live out roles like worker, student, or citizen)

Ideology as false consciousness

According to Marx, ideology is a system of distorted, illusory beliefs that emerge from the economic base of society to make the rule of the dominant class look natural and fair, thus creating a "false consciousness"

Ideology as a terrain of struggle

Gramsci and Hall: rather than ideology being a set of lies, there is a "survival of the fittest" type of struggle with cultural values. Dominant values intrinsically shape a society, while residual values sneak through and survive despite social changes. Certain ideas are engendered or enabled by an economic system where people make sense of their world. Different groups compete to shape common sense.

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories

The unconscious

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware.

The dream-work

The process by which the latent content of a dream is transformed into the less threatening manifest content

Condensation

The process by which your unconscious mind compresses multiple thoughts, memories, and emotions into a single image, word, or person in a dream. As a result, there is more latent dream content than there is manifest dream content

Displacement

An unconscious defense mechanism that disguises latent content as trivial, distorted aspects of a dream as a form of emotional redirection

Latent content

The unconscious meanings or desires behind a dream

Manifest content

The literal storyline of a dream

Secondary revision

Resynthesizing dream elements after they have been distorted by dream work. This resynthesizing gives the distorted dream elements enough meaning and coherence to be accepted into consciousness, creating red herrings that further disguise latent meaning

The Oedipus complex

According to Freud, a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father

Signifier/signified/sign

Saussure's linguistic model, 1) the acoustic image, 2) the concept it contains, 3) the relationship between these parts

Form/concept/signification

Barthes' adoption of Saussure's linguistic model 1) the cultural signifier, 2) the cultural signified, 3) the relationship between these parts

The repressive hypothesis

Freud's idea that if you talk about and understand why you are how you are (sexual/taboo desires), you'll be less miserable. This was rejected by Foucalt, who argued that sexual discourse (through medical study, pedagogy, psychiatry, etc.) created an "endlessly proliferating economy" surrounding sex

Mass culture

The production of works of art and entertainment designed to appeal to a large audience. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that mass culture turns individuals into "masses" due to the passive consumption process, but Williams countered that techniques of mass communication are "at worst, neutral." It matters less what the mass form is than its ownership, and reducing people to "masses" is impersonal

Culture industry

A term coined by the Frankfurt School to describe how media companies produce or "make" culture in the same way that other companies produce products

Mass culture as woman

Huyssen's essay argued that high modernism defined itself by gendering mass culture as feminine. Flaubert portrayed Madame Bovary as a dupe of mass culture, while the book itself was regarded as a modernist achievement that taught readers to resist the seduction of mass culture

Culture as a whole way of life

From the 1700s-1900s, the rise of industrial capitalism caused the very concept of "culture" to change, from the "growth" or cultivation of society to a "court of common appeal" for society. Williams argued that "culture" encompasses the collective beliefs, morals, customs, language, and social norms that give a group of people a common identity and worldview, not just intellectual and creative works. Normal people don't relate to culture like intellectuals

Hegemony

Dominant social groups exert social authority not by coercion, but by "winning and shaping consent" so that it feels legitimate and natural. It is not a one-time deal, but rather something that must be won and sustained, a "moving equilibrium" that responds to changes from below

Repressive state apparatus

The ruling class use force to control the working class and protect their power/position in society via police/courts/army etc.

Ideological state apparatus

Agencies of the state which serve to spread dominant ideology and justify the power of the dominant social class by winning the consent of the governed, ex. school, church, press

Interpellation

Althusser; the communication process by which one is pulled into the social forces that place people into a specific identity; ideology recruits subjects, "hey, you there!"