BECAUSE YOU ARE WATCHING BIG BROTHER!
             In the first block we saw how Western science is one particular way of viewing the world. And, as Heisenberg has argued, the way in which we view reality, frames the way we do science, which influences the answers, or representations, we get about the world. He is saying that our representations of nature are mediated, or structured, by our way of doing science.
             In the second block we encountered some of the ideas from postmodernism. Postmodernists argue that our views of our world are merely representations, and that those representations are socially constructed. They consider them socially constructed because they are mediated. They are mediated firstly, by our physical senses of sight, touch, etcetera and, following Kant, they say that everything we understand about the world is mediated by our senses.
             The second way our representations are mediated is through our ideology, or social norms. Last week, we examined how our ideas about race and our gender roles have been, to a large extent, socially constructed. That is, there are certain sociocultural norms that structure they way we understand issues of race and gender. Marx, who we met in Week 6, called these social expectations the superstructure, or a society's ideology. Louis Althusser, a neo-Marxist, argued that those social norms which benefit the owners of the mode of production are perpetuated by these elite through, what he called, State Ideological Apparatuses such as religion, the law, the education system, and the media. Following Althusser, Jameson, calls the ideology generated by SIA's our 'political unconscious'. For Jameson, this political unconscious - which structures our social norms - mediates our representations of and understandings about reality.
             In this lecture, I will discuss the relationship between the media and reality. Following Jameson I will argue that the media is a major State Ideol...