As Eric Liu begins in ‘How To Understand Power,’ we all move, each and every day, through systems and structures and guidelines—systems of power—that we’re not always fully in control of:
At first, this may seem a bit depressing, or, perhaps, even like a down-right lie: who is Liu to question? Who is he to say we do not wield full agency over our lives? But, as he notes, power isn’t really so much a question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’—it’s a force, an element of life, akin to fire or physics. The evaluation of power lies in how it’s deployed—what ends it achieves—rather than just some presumed, inherently negative ‘thing.’ It is a system of power, after all, which protects me from getting decked in the face every time I leave my apartment; it is, likewise, that very same system of power which suppressed my right to publicly love who I wanted to love in decades and centuries prior. Power isn’t good or bad: it just is.
In Liu’s sketch, power is defined specifically as “the ability to make others do what you would have them do.” Sometimes, this force can be expressed quite overtly. The bigger, taller, scarier bully asks for your lunch money—physical force compels you to do what you otherwise wouldn’t do, and hand over the cash. To continue the theme: the government passes a law mandating a legal drinking age—high schoolers are compelled to party in secret, when the parents are out of town. The students gather en masse outside the school grounds, demanding access to better resources—the school administrative body is compelled to act in a direction they may not have otherwise.
But not all expressions of power are as overt, or as easy to spot. Take this scenario, for example. You’re hunkering down for a night of old-school, classic television; you flip on Fox, it’s Sunday night, it’s the ‘Animation Domination’ night. Up first is Family Guy, where you indulge in the comedic antics of a white, middle-class, heteronormative family: a stay-at-home mom, a breadwinner dad, a son, a daughter, a baby, and a dog, living and loving in suburban America. Up next is American Dad, where we find a shockingly similar arrangement: a stay-at-home mom, a breadwinner dad, a son, a daughter, a fish, and—for a bit of intrigue—an alien; white, upper-middle class background, living and loving in suburban America. You’re really feeling yourself, so you cozy up for the next program: The Simpsons: a stay-at-home mom, a breadwinner dad, a son, a daughter, a baby, a cat and a dog, middle-class background, living and loving in suburban America. And, just as soon as we might say: well, at least they’re all yellow—yellow, in The Simpsons, is a stand-in for whiteness: we know this, because characters of color aren’t drawn yellow. The trend continues: Bob’s Burgers, South Park, King of the Hill—animated show after animated show putting forward the same generalizations, the same stories, the same narratives… despite the fact that, as a drawn medium, these families could quite literally be anything. Some might even have a name for this continually-depicted arrangement: the Nuclear Family. They might even think of this as the ‘normal’—and, maybe even ‘ideal’—familial arrangement in America.
Of course, there are plenty of families out there in America that don’t look like those culled from the minds of Seth MacFarlane and Matt Groening and the like. But in continually putting forward the same idea of the ‘successful family,’ these programs subtly suggest what we’re all meant to aspire to. It limits who can be seen within the ‘American Dream,’ who is meant to achieve it, and what role we’re meant to play in it. It compels us, perhaps, to act in certain ways we might not have otherwise, or at the very least to hold particular beliefs we might not have otherwise had. And that’s what Liu is getting at when he talks about some of those less tangible, softer powers that nevertheless assert themselves upon us each and every day—the power of norms, the power of social and cultural conditionings, the power of technological and mediated influence. Within the humanities and social sciences, we often call these kinds of powers—the power to shape ideas, our ways of seeing and making sense of the world—powers of ‘ideology.’
For some of us, this may be a term we’ve heard before; for others, this may be our first time encountering it—no matter your experience, this light-hearted, introductory video from media scholar Matthew Hale may prove helpful:
The beginning of an understanding of ideology can, in many ways, be found in the name itself: ideology is a term we use to describe the prevailing ‘ideas’ of society, the beliefs and assumptions any given cultural/social/political group holds to be true and self-evident and unassailable. One is not born into the world believing, for instance, that one political party is better than another, that one career path is more favorable than another, that one system of finance is better than another—these beliefs are ideologies, and those who ascribe to these beliefs have come to hold them through processes of ideological indoctrination. And while some ideologies can be benign, others can be quite dangerous: one is not born believing, for example, that there are differences in ability between men and women, but ideologies of patriarchy insist that there are, and convince many that there are; one is not born thinking differently about people of different cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds, but ideologies of white supremacy say otherwise; one is not born thinking that one form of love is more respectable than another, but ideologies of heteronormativity claim the opposite.
That said, ideology, like power, isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but rather a fact of social life: each and every day, we encounter thousands of ideological messages, which serve to reinforce (or challenge!) certain ‘logics’ of the world, certain ways of thinking, seeing, believing, and making sense which holds a cultural group together, dictating right from wrong, acceptable from unacceptable, agreeable to disagreeable. We refer to the most overwhelming, widely-held, and most influential ideologies—such as white supremacy, patriarchy, Judeo-Christianity, capitalism—as dominant ideologies, but their counterparts (i.e., feminism, multiculturalism, etc) are also to be understood as ideologies.
Though ideology moves through many channels, mass media—such as movies, social media, music, TV, radio—plays a particularly important role. In fact, as influential scholar Stuart Hall argues, “media channels and artifacts carry decisive and fundamental leadership in the cultural sphere,” having become the primary conduit “through which we perceive the ‘worlds,’ the ‘lived realities’ of others, and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible ‘whole-of-the-world,’ some ‘lived totality’” (372) As contemporary media scholar Nicholas Couldry adjoins, “one of the most distinctive features of media power [is] the ability to influence the basic reference points of social life” (146). In other words, what both Hall and Couldry are getting at is that there is no ‘just’ when it comes to media culture—‘just’ a movie, ‘just’ an app, ‘just’ a clothing brand; instead, each device, each production, each phenomenon adds to an ever-growing basis upon which we come to know ourselves, our peers, and the worlds around us—they reinforce particular ideas, understandings, and ways of making sense in our world, and simultaneously de-emphasize other perspectives. Think about the Animation Domination argument from above, and all the ideological ‘lessons’ put forth: men are meant to be breadwinners and women stay-at-home mothers, success is a two-story home in the suburbs, white skin is the de facto skin color (and culture) of America, to list a few of the many.
This, ultimately, is what the bombastic, pessimistic philosopher Slavoj Žižek is getting at in this clip from The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology:
Power and ideologies are all around us, have always been all around us, will always be all around us; each and every day, we have, and will always, encounter countless structures which serve to compel us in a variety of directions we might not have taken otherwise. Many of these forces are for good; they help keep us, as Thomas Hobbes wrote way back in 1651, from a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But, with many of the cases discussed above, these forces can be used for less noble ends, too. And so we must, like Ben Nada in They Live, put on the glasses, to see, Žižek argues, “the real message beneath all the propaganda, publicity, glitz, posters and so on.”
While we certainly don’t have to follow Žižek all the way down the dystopian rabbit hole, I’ve always found the imagery of his film (and of They Live) a helpful way of ‘seeing’ ideology: an advertisement for a computer entertainment system is replaced with ‘obey’ in simple typeface; a billboard for a Caribbean getaway replaced with ‘marry and reproduce’—the whole world reimagined as a series of socio-political commandments, subliminally preaching a gospel of ‘no thoughts,’ ‘stay asleep,’ and ‘obey,’ indoctrinating the unaware masses into blissful compliance.
Similarly, I find the allegory of the glasses provides a helpful conduit for understanding a core skill of media studies: close reading, which asks us to continually take the time to ask those age-old rhetorical questions to ensure we’re getting the full picture. To closely read is to inquire about the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘where’s’ of one’s consumption, to think critically about what one is consuming, how they’re consuming it, where it comes from, and so on; to ask important questions like: how is this information or media trying to persuade me? What's in it for those who created it? Where did it come from and what does its origins say about its reliability?
Putting on the glasses in this way—thinking critically about not just about the information itself, but the larger contexts in which it is couched—can help us develop what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls ‘disciplined curiosity,’ where one strives to be strategic about how and what they consume:
We are surrounded, each and every day, by countless ideological positions which serve to influence the truths we hold about the world; this unit, and others in this collection, looks to provide us with the critical tools necessary to navigate these ideological waters with more care, consternation, and effectiveness.
Works Cited
Cottom, Tressie McMillan & Virginia Commonwealth University. “Think on This.” YouTube, 22 Jan. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJbxuzizKp8
Couldry, Nick. “Power.” Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017, p. 146.
Hale, Matthew. “What is Ideology and How Does It Work?.” YouTube, 16 Feb 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhTko9cH2XA&t=9s
Hall, Stuart. “Culture, Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’.” Essential Essays, edited by David Morley, Duke University Press, 2018, p. 327.
Liu, Eric & TED-Ed. “How to understand power.” YouTube, 4 Nov. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Eutci7ack
© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA
