Idelological subjects pgs 69 to 89

Reading images as idelogical subjects,





Taste can often be seen as ideology, socieites functions by looking at idelology as its natural system of their values an beliefs of that picture or image, when viewing are own ideologys its hard when looking at others it comes to us as common sense.

ideology is seen today in karl marxs theory, his theory states "that ananlyzes both the role of economics in the porgress of history and the ways that capitalism works in terms of class realtions" in other words for us to understand marxs term- the dominant social classes that own or control the newspaper,television, film and communication industries are able to control the content generated by these media forms. There are two significant alterantions to marxist theory 1 st was louis althusser statement of what it is - ideology represents the imaginary relationship of indivduals to their real conditions of existence.



In are world without ideology we would have no means of thinking about or expericencing that thing we call reality. ideoloty is necessary for our means or reality to understnd what around us. ideology speaks to us as readers and brings us to authors so we can understand the subjects that addressed to us. Its very important for us as human beings to think of the term ideology as plural . An italian marxist, Antonio gramsci, introduced the concept of hegemony in place of the concept of domination in order to help us to think about this kind of resistance.



The term hegemony emphasizes that power is not wielded by one class over another rather, power is negotiated among all classes of people. hegemonyis the push a pull method that push and pulls its way through all levels of society, not one single class "has" hegemony, rather, hegemony is a state or conditions of a culture arrived at through negotiations over meaning, laws and social relationships.



All images are encoded with meaning that is decoding by viewers. There are three methods of encoding and decoding .



#1 dominant - hegemonic reading

#2 negatiated reading

#3 oppostional reading



negotiation invokes the process of trade. today we think of it as a kind of bargaining over meaning that takes place among viewer, image and context. we use the term negotiation in a metaphorical sense to say that we often" haggle" with the dominant meaning of an image when we interpret it.

All of these different modes of engagment that i have listed are with popular culture introduced by stuart hall ( Dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional.)




many images and pictures reapresent many meaning of our culture today for example on page 88 the advertisment ( juicy couture) uses idelolgy to draw out attention to the ways ideology draws us into consumption. the fact of this message in the advertisment shows us how juicy you can really be with the large consumption of alchol and diamonds and being famous, this message and images shows the world how different are age is from the ages of barthes. starting from are age era to the 1990's viewers who make meaning does not only through describing an experience with the image but also through reordering, redisplaying, and reusing images in new and differently meaningful ways in the reordering of everyday life.