Questioning Ideology Essay sample

The word ideology is complicated. In al of the texts that I have examined, ideology is a recurring issue. Ideology can be used as a type of curse, used to impose a predetermined destiny. Ideology can be used as a way to break away from the provided path in a quest for freedom. Ideology can be used as a form of oppression, something those in power use to remain in power. It appears that ideology is just a representation of reality, an ever-changing phenomenon that humans use to make sense of their world. At the start of this course we learned that reality itself is created by representation. Language, words, stories, narratives, and literature are all things that we piece together in order to form a reality. Nevertheless, all of those things are directly influenced by ideologies. Since we base our lives around ideologies that have been influenced by other ideologies it appears that human beings have no real control over their lives.

Quite often I feel that human existence has become so contrived that our likes and dislikes are all force fed to us by the hierarchal structure of our society. The idea to break away from the given ideology and search for individuality is a paradox. Individuality has been written down, published and sold to the masses. Is there such a thing as individuality or truth? The sheer idea of taking a person’s criticism of an ideology and adopting it, is simply buying into another ideology already in place. Perhaps the only way to achieve individuality or truth then is to take a person’s criticism of an ideology, and use it as a way to create your own ideology. However, it seems impossible to achieve individuality or truth that is free of influence. With that said, is it still truth if it is influenced? In order to further examine the relationship between ideology and truth; Foucault’s discourse and power theory, re-presentation, and the post-colonial theory on colonization and culture must be examined as well.

A narrow definition of discourse can be given as the relationship between language and power. In the Foucault reader, we first examined the idea of a central structure used to command power over the non-dominant society. We first looked at this idea when we discussed the panopticon. The panopticon consists of a tower surrounded by buildings divided into levels and cells. The prisoner can see nothing but knows that a supervisor is watching and that he will be punished if he does not behave accordingly. The point of the panopticon is that after a while, a supervisor is not required, “if the prisoner is never sure when he is being observed, he becomes his own guardian (Foucault, 19).

It is the idea that you can take the center out of the system, but that the idea becomes so internalized that the original manipulation of the system becomes blurred. The blurring of discourse and adopting it as your own is how I viewed the author function, and the integration of discourse from an idea into language. The author function is a metaphor for the system of knowledge and power that is currently in place. In the author function, Foucault describes the author as being a perceived beacon of truth. The author’s name becomes synonymous with truth. In fact, the authors name becomes so powerful that it overshadows whatever it is that the author produces. “Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work” (Foucault, 103). It is extremely dangerous expelling so much power to a figure in which we are supposed to take all his/her ideals based on their name. Foucault said in The body of the condemned when referring to the relationship between power and knowledge, that “it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination” (Foucault, 173). Foucault meant that when we think people have knowledge, that we give them power over us.

The author function reminds me of the United States of America Presidential position. The President as I understand it in a democracy is supposed to be the leader and voice of the American people, not in any way is he all knowing. However, somehow the President has become so powerful that his voice is the only voice that matters. Too often the American people listen to what the president has to say, and take his ideas as the truth. A very good example of that is the war in Iraq. The American people were lied to in many instances but still managed to re-elect the man back into office who was responsible for the lying. How can something like that be explained? I learned in an interpersonal communication class that people have the tendency to maintain an attribution once it has been made, even in the face of contradictory evidence. The American people have attributed the position of President with trustworthy, honest and always having the public’s best interest in hand. The distinction between President and the man is lost. The relationship between language and power is one in the same when people allow themselves to buy into ideologies such as the author function.

In the story At the auction of the ruby slippers the ruby slippers hold a power that may or may not be what the masses expect it to be. However, the fact that people believe so immensely in the ruby slippers is the power. “We revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches; because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return” (At the auction of the ruby slippers, 92). People from all walks of life come to the auction in hopes that the ruby slippers will return their state of chaos to normalcy. It is never revealed if the ruby slippers power is real or a fallacy, but the ideology is in place, and people believe in the shoes. The belief in a power that the ruby slippers may possess seems harmless, like believing in God with ought really knowing if he exist. Nevertheless, the ruby slipper story parallels the Wizard of OZ. In the end, the great Oz had no truth to relay upon Dorothy and her friends, his magic was a sham. However, in the end the morale that you are supposed to learn from the Wizard of OZ is in the journey that Dorothy took.

Dorothy ended by finding the truth on her own, as did the lion and the tin man. The Wizard of OZ story is important because when studying imperialism in the Roman Empire and truth through the “falsum” and aletheia, that there is no such thing as a quest for truth, but that the quest is the truth. If that is true, then it doesn’t matter if the ruby slippers hold the power that the villagers want it to, but that the path they take to obtain the ruby slippers, the quest to return to normalcy may be the truth. On the flip-side of that, I always watched the Wizard of OZ thinking that Dorothy and her friends sure did waste a lot of time, and get in to a lot of trouble because of the false hope that they instilled in the OZ. In many ways, the belief that OZ was their only hope of getting home, courage or a heart was their downfall. It took the dismantling of the center in place for them to realize that they could get home, find courage and a heart all along.

This idea is the same for At the auction of the ruby slippers because perhaps if all these people weren’t relying on the ruby slippers as their only hope to fix their problems, they could figure out what is wrong and fix their own problems. Still, examining the story further leads me to ponder if the normalcy that the villagers are aching to return to exist. Later in the story, they mention “home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is much to yearn for, there are so few rainbows anymore, they promised to take us home”(At the auction of the ruby slippers,93). The italicized home emphasizes the fact that home may be a fabrication that people idealize as home, but the idea of it is far more powerful than any innate feeling it may truly possess, just like the ruby slippers. Zack Braff explains the idealized meaning of home perfectly in the movie Garden State. “You know that point in your life, when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of sudden even though you have someplace where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s all family really is, a group of people that miss the same imaginary place” (Garden State, 2004). The imaginary place that Large misses in garden state is the same imaginary power that all of the people lined up at the auction are hoping to find in the ruby slippers............