ANiCO – Individualism vs Ideology

Replying to McGowan’s questions and some of his comments in this post.

“…are we capable of making any degree of progress or even forward-thinking change? Or are we just a band of robots who are unable to be individuals? And with this type of discourse in mind, how do we even define “the individual”?”

I think we kind of delved into this with Benjamin’s idea of the original, but I’ll take it a step further by referring to Henry Jenkins and his talking about subculture and how fans will take the canon and create something new with it.

Yes, we all live in ideology and can never escape it. Yes, the elite and general society create it and naturalize it for us to accept it. I can be bitter and say “well, we’re just going to have to wait for the elites to think it’s time to be forward thinking, lol!”

But I can be positive, and think we’re on some sort of cusp in technological and communicative advancement. When the industrial media creates something, we have the legitimate power to question, break, expand, or demean whatever media or ideology that’s thrown at us, with just a post on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and pretty much the rest of the internet. Yes, we can and will get muddled up in ideology, because it’ll even extend into the internet, but you can’t really let that stop you. It’s hit or miss. People will fuse ideas and ideology all on their own and progress on their own, even if it seems like it won’t in the present.

For example, what we’re learning right now—the acknowledgment of ideology, what it is, how it works—is probably an ideology itself. But we’re going to try and use this knowledge to apply in a progressive way to the world today, even if these were words made up by mostly white dudes that are either old or dead now. Their ideas were once individual ideas (and maybe even then, not really, if they constantly shared with other theorists,) but have since expanded into something incredible after being released into the world. I hope this made sense, because I’m posting this at midnight. Basically, what I’m saying, I know there’s a lot of scary and bad things that ideology can do. But sometimes you can make it do good things, like people becoming just a little bit self-aware. We just have to make more good than bad. (and hope our perspective of what is good becomes hegemonic, HA!)