Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Chapter 1
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To see is a process of
observing and
recognizing.
To look is to actively
make meaning of that
world.
Practices of Looking
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Representation
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Representation refers to
the use of language and
images to create meaning
about the world around us.
These systems have rules
and conventions about how
to express and interpret
meaning.
Representation
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Representation
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HOME
Denotes a place
where one resides
Connotes family,
safety, love
What does this image mean? When and where was it taken? What
kind of event does it depict?
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What is the
signifier, signified,
and sign in this
advertisement?
Vincent Van
Gogh s Irises sold
for $53.8 million in
1991.Why is this
painting worth so
much?
s
concepts of
ideology have been
influential, but can
be seen as
disempowering.
! How much agency
do we have in our
lives?
can be a form of
oppositional production and reading.
! To appropriate is to take something for
oneself without consent, to steal.
! Cultural appropriation is the process of
borrowing and changing the meaning of
cultural products, slogans, images, or
elements of fashion.
How is the
mainstreaming of rap
music an example of
counter-bricolage?
How does the
mainstream culture
constantly mine the
margins of culture for
meaning?
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Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet,
Woman with a Parrot, 1866
V. Power/Knowledge and
Panopticism
Foucault believed modern societies are
structured on a basic relationship of power/
knowledge.
! Modern societies power relations are structured
to produce citizens who will actively participate in
self-regulating behavior, such as obeying laws,
participating in social norms, and adhering to
dominant social values.
! Certain kinds of knowledges are validated in
our society through social institutions such as
the press, the medical profession, and education
while other knowledges are discredited.
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V. Power/Knowledge and
Panopticism
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V. Power/Knowledge and
Panopticism
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Photographic images
are instrumental in
the production of what
Foucault called the
docile body of the
modern state
citizens who
participate in the
ideologies of the
society through a
desire to fit in and
conform
V. Power/Knowledge and
Panopticism
According to Foucault, we
internalize a managerial
gaze that watches over
us, and this imagined
gaze makes us behave
and conform. This is
called panopticon.
! It idea is that the structure
of surveillance, whether
active or not, produces
conforming behavior.
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He
Swallows Gold and Spits out Tin-Plate, 1932
There are
phenomenological
differences in the way
that we experience
media that are
particular to their
material qualities.
Goddess of
Democracy,
Tiananmen Square,
1989
Scott Peterson on trial for killing his wife Laci and their unborn son.
I. Consumer Society
Fundamental changes in the experience of
community in the rise of the consumer society
came through an increased complexity and
diversity of the urban population, increased
immigration, and a loosening of the hold of small
and stable communities and families on social
values.
! It has been argued that people derive their
sense of their place in the world and their selfimage at least in part through their purchase and
use of commodities which seem to give meaning
to their lives in the absence of the meaning
derived from closer-knit community.
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I. Consumer Society
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I. Consumer Society
! Today,
consumption is thought of as a
form of leisure, pleasure, and as a form of
therapy.
! Commodities can fulfill emotional needs
but those needs are never truly fulfilled as
the forces of the market lure us into
wanting more or different commodities.
The advertising
strategy of repeating
a motif can be used to
establish familiarity
with a product and to
keep viewers
attention.
Counter-bricolage: Pablo
Picasso and Apple Computers