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Panopticon's Subject Index Hh
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Hegelian dialectic
Hegemony
Hermeneutics
High (or Classic) Modernism
Hyperreality
Hypertext
Hegel's famous dialectic, based on Socratic-influenced principles, held that every human idea contains its own internal contradictions (composed of the thesis and antithesis) that must struggle to create a new idea (or synthesis). This process of thesis/antithesis/synthesis thus provides the basis for our understanding of knowledge, rationality, and reality. The process is very deterministic in nature (i.e., we can't change it, at least not easily.) Marx developed Hegel's dialectic to set the economic framework as the base, with the (hegemonic-style) culture of the ruling classes as the superstructure. However, Marx rejected the focus on Hegel's abstract Idea and turned instead to dialectical materialism, based on now-familiar notions of historical and economic determinism.
~~~~~~~~~~ 'Hegemony' -- the willing acceptance of one social group's dominance and control by another and the dominating group's main vehicle of control -- can be seen in terms of the more complex view of social structure, elaborated for the analysis of popular culture, developed in recent years within the Gramscian tradition and articulated by theorists such as Stuart Hall.
However, an understanding of the more fundamental use of the term is also important. While it is difficult to find an adequate definition for hegemony, Todd Gitlin gives a sense of how the concept works:
[H]egemony is a ruling class's (or alliance's) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion. . . . In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven. See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, 253.
~~~~~~~~~~ See also "phenomenology" (more to come)
~~~~~~~~~~ Important people in the beginnings of high modernism - Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, etc.
1) Only a small group of artists involved but modernism was happening in all the arts and was having a disproportionate influence on 20th c.
2) Before WW1, primary concern of modernists to change the form of art; were all about innovation (eg. Cubism, Imagists, and Symbolists); idea dates back to the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements in late 19th c.
3) After WW1, more of a desire to connect art with life (eg. Dada).
~~~~~~~~~~ Hyperreality and Mediatization are closely related:
Baudrillard says that signs that used to represent things are drained of their meaning (hyperreality); the relation between signifying systems and reality can be very confusing. (e.g. Spinal Tap)Related concepts:
1) Commentators who concentrate on the media as the main culprit behind postmodernism would say that the media have become increasingly intense both in terms of availability (TVs, VCRs, Walkmen, etc.) and in terms of how culture comes to us.
2) Hebdige talks of a 'representation crisis' in two terms: political representation (for example in Parliament) and cultural representation (in films, TV, etc. how is your group, women, blacks, etc., represented?)
3) People lost faith in political representation in 1960s, but what about representation crisis in cultural terms; Baudrillard's hyperreality is an example of this crisis.
~~~~~~~~~~ (More to come)
Roland Barthes' distinction between readerly and writerly texts helps form part of the theoretical framework for hypertext. Readerly texts, where the reader passively consumed information in a linear manner, are the norm for print technology (e.g., reading a book). Writerly texts should be the norm in an electronic environment, when the reader can choose how to relate to the text by negotiating a path through it using different links, nodes, and networks in a web of information. This conception of text in terms of networks and links is also shared by Michel Foucault. While Barthes was writing years before the Internet evolved into a mass medium, his writing perfectly describes the environment of the World Wide Web.
See also
- Foucault
- World Wide Web
CT. Subject Index Hh
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Last Updated: feb 25, 2001