Cultural Stacks: Ideology, Interpellation, Subject Position

I 

Also the layer "below" the common cultural layers is our planet Earth (BwO) (Deleuze?)
Our common natural freedoms, and semiotics? , (complimentary and self-similar) emergent from the 'random movements' of layered textured surfaces in relation to our subject position... may be shuttered out/excluded by the ideological forces of cultural construction...(Language and it's bias for fixed boundaries,dualism and absolute opposition) (also the postmodern force of the situated flat plane)


....where does Discourse Analysis fit in the context of this, it's concerned with social constructions (from the 'common' layers (c.f Personal Construct Psychology with its focus on individual subject position and numeric categories) but the focus/limit is language with the limits/biases mentioned above...)


It's access to the "experiments"/ "appreciative modes" that explore these 'natural'/'random' layers or dismiss them as not worth exploring that is the issue of concern and as such it relates to research methods as they compare across the   qualitative/quantitative divide/bridge...




There is a relation to conceptions of 'efficiency' which may be defined within the cultural layer or stack but not necessarily beyond it,  this also relates to automation and the considered potential of automation and what is considered an  acceptable  level of automation .... c.f viability of  evolution of solutions via randomness and redistribution of wealth ... (see Hogarth/Einhorn)

c.f Shapiro:

"Derrida's deconstruction can be shown to disclose how  social order rests on forgetting the exclusion practices through which one set of meanings had been institutionalised and various other possibilities have been marginalized."  321

Interpellation re Althusser, Louis. (1972)

Subject Position re Davies and Harre (2011)
Hogarth (1990) Insights into decision making 
Shapiro 


...perhaps need to think more about...Hegemony ...and the fluid corporate driven  market profiling/segmentation of today  (Re Massumi)

...in the context of inclusive value c.f comparative and exchange value

http://srtmres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/modernismpostmodernism-and-space-for.html

Hall: Hegemony & the Emergent

Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be worked on, maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions … and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams called "the emergent" – and the reason why history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals




A political perspective on emergence by Stuart Hall, could be related to Foucaults Exclusion and Dominant/Marginalised Discourse. Closure/Openness is mentioned, >research  Raymond Williams use of term...

The motivation to mystify?

There are problems with the wording , utilising  the systems term of  "Emergence", perhaps  "Tao", maybe "Grace"  for the "simple unfolding of harmony" but in the "rational domain" do we have a 'simple' acceptable term for this apart from those from the General Systems Theory eg "self-organisation" (Deleuze)?

Perhaps a Post-Marxist  analysis could explore the motivation to mysticism and complexity in realtion to creative technique, as  we are driven to secure our monetary position by establishing a niche for ourselves, perhaps an academic niche or personal brand... something that sets me apart from the rest. These individual interests drive discourse from a coherent balanced centre to a set of confrontational polemical positions? (hegemony (Gramsci)) (c.f the 'counter' argument of "a happy diversity of products")

'High Art' is an example of reification? The common resource of Random Flow has been bottled and labeled and 'secret ingredients' added by the author... not so far from  'Publicity' 



Hence for example  a flat plane of competing discourses (Hicks) where no shared qualities are allowed to be  aknowledged such as  those established in General Systems Theory (Von Bertanfly)), these are  dismissed as Meta Narratives (Lyotard)  once a certain undisclosed 'mystical' boundary is passed (D'arcy) 


The boundaries it could be argued are themselves created and reinforced by these  forces of hegemony?(Gramsci?)(Hall?)(Pope R.)


Where does's post structuralism fit with its endless scepticism ? Surely a consistently modest post structuralist would admit their uncertainty about the ?validity? (not referential!) of these discourses... ?   Perhaps they have created a  fantastic base for endless criticism of  other creations for their "will to truth"(Foucault)? Perhaps they enable creativity in a way I have yet to understand...?


Towards the centre we have the drive of education (social education?), towards the periphery the drive of market/capital (technical education?)




Berger : Ways of Seeing

Hegemony and the concept of "Random Expressive Flow"

Considering the definition of hegemony given below, I could, reflexively, analyse the possible forms of hegemony that could frame the meaning of "Random Expressive Flow"

Conceptual (De Bono) -  Poetic/Intuitive (Poeisis/Heidegger) - Performative/Improvised(Delanda/Eshleman)

<------------------------------------------------Random Expressive Flow--------------------------------------------------->

I see 'Random Expressive Flow' as a possible simple inclusive access point to the creative commons of our planets evolutionary capacity.(c.f Deleuze bWo, morphogenic potential (Delanda)) I am not implying that Quality and Fit will inevitably emerge, just that the experiment, if it can be designed safely, should be done before we impose order based on assumptions(bad faith?c.f pragmatism) (Hogarth Hume) (1.)

Being such an open, inclusive concept, "Random Expressive Flow" offers the opportunity for the reader to select/project different meanings. It is possible certain ones will dominate, leading to a dominant discourse being generated around the concept...

For example 'Random Expressive Flow' could be assumed to be concerned  exclusively with introverted poetic intuition on one hand, or extroverted performance on the other, these could in turn be associated with  "irrelevance to rational debate"  (perhaps by a modernist) on one hand and "the potentially abusive"  (perhaps by a feminist) on the other...


It may perhaps also  be considered an enabler or a block to empathy...


Such interpretations may or may not have "validity",  depending on the context ( post structuralists would deny the refferential validity of  truth claims (Derrida)). The point is that discourse around the concept changes depending on the  perspectives/views taken..


However what  leads to the dominant discourse and what to the marginalised? How is the dominant discourse maintained? What "Truths" are claimed? (Foucault)


Compare: 
Derrida (Marginalised Discourse)
Foucault (Docile Bodies)
Habermas (Strategic & Communicative Discourse)
Giddens (Structuration/Reproduction of Structure)

Hegemony, Intellectual property and the Commons...

[. . .] nothing determined or automatic about this process. Such hegemony can be sustained by the rulers only by the constant exercise of skill,  of theatre and of concession. [S]uch hegemony, even when imposed successfully, does not impose an all-embracing view of life; rather, it imposes blinkers, which inhibit vision in certain directions while leaving it clear in others.  (Thompson 1991, p. 86) In this case, the blinkers tend to clear the way for our gaze in the direction of private property, while obscuring and even diverting it away from a closer inspection of an area where certain things are not privately owned, or rather, are supposed to be freely accessible: the public domain, or the commons. The Western conception of authorship, based on ideas of individuality and originality 􏰀/ which emerges towards the end of the eighteenth century and which to this day exerts a prevailing influence over how we view ourselves and the world 􏰀/ is profoundly counterproductive in helping us to understand this collective nature of creativity, not to mention that it is an historically specific rather than a god-given or natural rule. ‘Authorship’, indeed, is one blinker that makes us see clearly that which we have been taught to recognize as ‘correct’ expressions of individuality and originality, and that wraps a dense fog around the significance of artifacts and practices that fall outside of what, in effect, is an extremely narrow idea of how cultural work occurs. The repercussions of this inclination are perhaps most acutely felt in the problems facing indigenous/native peoples as they seek access to a legal regime that has disregarded the specificity and value of traditional, collective knowledge and culture (Brown 2003). (and our own  mystified/repressed/dismissed ?simple R.E.F. access to creativity (as valid as any other view ?) A major danger of the problems addressed in this issue of Cultural Studies and in critical studies of intellectual properties more generally is that they seem to invite polarization of debate and ways of thinking: intellectual property rights v. the public domain; free v. control; private v. public; owned v. unowned, perhaps even, (although I would have thought that division long buried) droit d’auteur v. copyright. All of these concepts are placeholders in a binary system of discourse that sometimes leads well-meaning scholars and activists to misrepresent the complexity of the problem. It is almost as if we need the perfect oppositions of  good v. bad in order to make an expedient case against the increasing encroachment of greedy intellectual property rights holders. This is under- standable, perhaps even necessary. But I have a problem with the fact that such a matrix of opposites makes it so easy, too easy in fact, to determine who are the bad guys, and thus quite logically, who are the good ones. It sets the stage for oversimplification, and when possible, oversimplification should be avoided. Instead, a more constructive way to approach these pairs is to envision them not as static opposites, but as constituents of a field in constant flux. As we consider the public domain must we also deal with intellectual property rights, or rather with flows of ownership between spheres that we sometimes define as private, sometimes as public. Indeed, what is most striking about these spheres from an historical point of view is that they are never pure and fixed but always in motion.  My aim has been to stress how important rhetoric and discourse are to our analytical constructions, and how they sometimes result in navigation with one eye only. Finally, it cannot be stressed forcefully enough how intellectual proper- ties/the public domain are global issues. Yes, they are also about national laws and nation-state interests, but their ramifications cannot be countered without international mobilization; nor is it possible to move ahead analytically without collaboration. Self-reflexivity is an essential part of such a global, inter- disciplinary dialogue that ultimately should be about lowering, not raising, blinkers. OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs table of content - full text Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs(2006) 'OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND', Cultural Studies, 20: 2, 282 — 291

also read Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (Vaidhyanathan 2001), Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Lessig 2004), and Freedom of Expression†: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (McLeod 2005), M.F.Brown: Who Owns Native Culture?                     (edic. Harvard Univ.Press, 2003) http://juanjolopezgutierrez.com/filesHTM/NativeCulture.htm

Performative Defn : Judith Butler

Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold (i.e. they have come to seem natural in our culture as it presently is) -- but, she suggests, it doesn't have to be that way. Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble' -- the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders -- and therefore identity.

Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity.

This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner "core" self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances.

It's not (necessarily) just a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner...

Hence it is a potential response to "pseudo empirical" interpellation  we are all subject to 

(ie it offers a way to address the fact that we are convinced we have a particular identity eg "consumer identity because it is "real" "normal" or natural" when it it actually a habitual performance, often generated by forms of power )

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm

JUDITH BUTLER is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Herbert Mead, etc.), structural anthropologists (Claude Levì-Strauss, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, etc.) and speech-act theory (particularly the work of John Searle) in her understanding of the "performativity" of our identities. All of these theories explore the ways that social reality is not a given but is continually created as an illusion "through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign" ("Performative" 270). A good example in speech-act theory is what John Searle terms illocutionary speech acts, those speech acts that actually do something rather than merely represent something. The classic example is the "I pronounce you man and wife" of the marriage ceremony. In making that statement, a person of authority changes the status of a couple within an intersubjective community; those words actively change the existence of that couple by establishing a new marital reality: the words do what they say. As Butler explains, "Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names" (Bodies 13). A speech act can produce that which it names, however, only by reference to the law (or the accepted norm, code, or contract), which is cited or repeated (and thus performed) in the pronouncement.

Butler takes this formulation further by exploring the ways that linguistic constructions create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day. By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we "incorporate" that reality by enacting it with our bodies, but that "reality" nonetheless remains a social construction (at one step removed from what Lacan distinguishes from reality by the term, "the Real"). In the act of performing the conventions of reality, by embodying those fictions in our actions, we make those artificial conventions appear to be natural and necessary. By enacting conventions, we do make them "real" to some extent (after all, our ideologies have "real" consequences for people) but that does not make them any less artificial. In particular, Butler concerns herself with those "gender acts" that similarly lead to material changes in one's existence and even in one's bodily self: "One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and successors as well" ("Performative" 272). Like the performative citation of the conventions governing our perception of reality, the enactment of gender norms has "real" consequences, including the creation of our sense of subjectivity but that does not make our subjectivity any less constructed. We may believe that our subjectivity is the source of our actions but Butler contends that our sense of independent, self-willed subjectivity is really a retroactive construction that comes about only through the enactment of social conventions: "gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior 'self,' whether that 'self' is conceived as sexed or not. As performance which is performative, gender is an 'act,' broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority" ("Performative" 279).

Butler therefore understands gender to be "a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were" ("Performative" 272). That style has no relation to essential "truths" about the body but is strictly ideological. It has a history that exists beyond the subject who enacts those conventions:

The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again." ("Performative" 272)

What is required for the hegemony of heteronormative standards to maintain power is our continual repetition of such gender acts in the most mundane of daily activities (the way we walk, talk, gesticulate, etc.). For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.

Butler underscores gender's constructed nature in order to fight for the rights of oppressed identities, those identities that do not conform to the artificial—though strictly enforced—rules that govern normative heterosexuality. If those rules are not natural or essential, Butler argues, then they do not have any claim to justice or necessity. Since those rules are historical and rely on their continual citation or enactment by subjects, then they can also be challenged and changed through alternative performative acts. As Butler puts it, "If the 'reality' of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized 'sex' or 'gender' which gender performances ostensibly express" ("Performative" 278). For this reason, "the transvestite's gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations" ("Performative" 278).

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html