Vision, Ideology and SUVs

I'd like to add a few things to the discussion of how we look, how it's shaped by our ideologies, and where those ideologies come from that the colonel began in his last post here. His analysis of images is, I believe, spot on. The difference between their denotations and connotations can be thought of in another way: that of fact versus feeling. To a certain extent, an image is a fact - which is to say, it shows what it shows. On a different wavelength, however, are the feelings that these images conjure up for us. These feelings, as the colonel points out, are shaped in large part by our ideologies.

Corresponding to the quote from Marx and Engels, Jean Baudrillard writes in an essay entitled "The Ideological Genesis of Needs," published in The Consumer Society Reader, that "the survival threshold is never determined from below, but from above." This also connects with the colonel's example of Starbucks, SUVs and McMansions - these are only normal for those who can afford them, but have been structured in such a way that they are also "normal" for everyone else.

If our ideologies are decided for us by elites, does the potential for us to change them, to restructure them in such a way that is more based in reality still exist? Can we take control of ideologies, and perhaps make them "for the people, by the people?"

-the ambassador

What we see and how we look

In the book Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright they draw a difference between "seeing," the casual observance in passing by, and "looking," the act of interpreting the things around us. Looking involves the relaionship of power and the meaning of an image.
There is a common fallacy that an image is unquestionably truthful. Which is fair to say and yet misleading at the same time. In a denotative way, yes, an image shows that X was happening at Z point in time in Y space. The truth of what X, Y and Z really means is the connotative way of "looking" at an image.
The connotation can, of course, be different for different people depending on the ideology they have been a part of for so long. Ideologies change over time and location, so our interpretations of an image are different than they would have been 50 years ago and are far different from the interpretations one might find abroad.
It is curious how a culture develops an ideology.
Marx and Engels (chapter 3, The German Ideology) say, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."
Quick examples: Starbucks, who but a man with money can afford a four dollar cup of coffee every day - yet it has become the paradigm of quality coffee. SUVs and McMansions, again the wealthy can afford these things - America's addiction to oil and credit?
Though these things seem like staples in our lives (even I am victim to the connotation of the Starbucks image) they have not always been, and it seems that the average person with limited means would not decide that expensive coffee and cars are important.
The wealthy, which typically translates into the ruling class, deemed these objects important and normal.
The desire to be normal is a question that must be faced. Where do our ideologies, which shape what our definition of "normal," come from? Why do we follow them and how do we brake away from them?

-the colonel

To make things a little more clear: though the contents page on the Narodna Collective home page say this is confined to political philosophy, it's actual contents will be a little more broad than that. Media theory, psychoanalysis as applied to politics and other themes will also be explored here. The foreign and domestic policy blogs will, on the other hand, be strictly what they say they are.

-the ambassador