A2 Comms: Objects of Desire / Marxism

Click here to watch a Ted talk about the workers' experience on the production line in China: excellent revision/extension for Objects of Desire and Marxism.

AS LANG/LIT: All My Sons - Watch these clips before Friday!

Click here to watch lots of short clips about All My Sons. Absolutely essential viewing to help you to prepare for Friday's exam.

A2 Literature - King Lear revision walls

'The play presents the inevitable struggle of the young to overthrow the old'

'The real point of Cordelia's death is precisely that it is pointless.'

'King Lear is above all a play about power, property and inheritance.'

'The energy of the play is directed against society: there is anger, and a desire to strip away all clothing, to show that people are equally natural and equally sinful'

AS Comms - sample exam answer

SAMPLE EXAM ANSWER

 Question 1 (20 marks)

‘Popular culture is a form of cultural pollution, which undermines traditional values and standards.’ This viewpoint, which I will be supporting in this essay, stems from ideas relating to culture which can be traced back to Matthew Arnold. The idea that popular culture ‘pollutes’ culture suggests that traditional (high) culture needs to be protected from the superficial and disposable world of contemporary popular culture.

 

By separating culture from money, Arnold saw culture as an expression of creativity rather than as a mechanical production line shooting out cultural products for audiences to gobble up and then throw away when they become bored. I see culture as something which expresses a truth or an idea about humanity in a way which is not afraid to be challenging; the contemporary world of Big Brother and Heat magazine are two good examples of popular cultural products which threaten real (or ‘high’ culture).

The Channel 4 television show Big Brother presents a world where celebrity-status (however z-list) is the prize and where the journey is made up of trivial and mundane popularity contests. It offers absolutely nothing of value whilst attempting to create an ‘addiction’ of voyeurism and its cheap thrills. Meanwhile, while Channel 4 count the money as the advertising revenue rolls in, they also cut their funding of serious documentaries and weighty dramas and films because ‘good’ television cannot attract big enough audiences. This ‘dumbing down’ of culture by programmes like Big Brother encourages audiences to lose their powers of concentration and their ability to think and be challenged. Presumably this is why Channel 4 is happy to screen Big Brother and its spin-offs on several channels, often at prime time, yet was not interested in purchasing the rights to the challenging, thought-provoking and critically acclaimed drama series The Wire (a drama of real cultural value).

 Magazines like Heat feed off programmes like Big Brother in circulating interviews and photos of ex-contestants shopping in Tescos, promoting a culture of empty celebrity and encouraging people to sift through mindless pap rather than read a book or reflect on what might be important in life. Popular culture encourages to us to develop an interest in gossip rather than the news, in celebrity rather than humanity, and moulds us to expect culture to be easy to absorb.

 A further example can be found in London’s theatre-land. Musicals fill theatres up and down Shaftesbury Avenue because they are popular and accessible. Meanwhile, directors have little chance of staging plays by both traditional and contemporary playwrights because audiences are used to a good tune to sing along to rather than 90 minutes of concentration and being challenged to think.

 The victim here is real culture – anything genuinely challenging and interesting is being rejected in favour of easy, lazy consumption. Popular culture really is polluting our cultural world.

 

Question 2

Personal communication is much influenced by the gender of both senders and receivers. Consider gender’s specific influence on appearance. (20 marks)

It can be argued that the means by which we communicate with others is significantly influenced by our gender – our understanding of what it means to be male or female. This understanding has been learnt via agents of socialisation such as our family, the media and our peer group. According to Goffman, the ways we communicate – which includes our appearance – are aligned to how we choose to stage ourselves to the outside world. Our use of props - which may well include clothes, accessories and body art  -  communicate our self-image to others as well as the sub-cultural groups that we belong to. Perhaps above all, our appearance communicates our own understanding of ourselves (as we have learned it) as either male or female.

 Traditionally, gender has been communicated through appearance in fairly structured ways. A good way of examining this is to consider the traditional school uniform: trousers, shirt and tie for boys, a skirt or dress for girls. These paradigmatic choices of clothing in themselves communicate an ideology relating to the differing roles of men and women in society as well as ideas about masculinity and femininity. Clothes were seen as a signifier of power (men) or domesticity (women). The changing perception of women as people who can take an equal role in the work-place means that in contemporary society it is now perfectly acceptable for women to wear trousers; however it is still pretty unusual to see a man dressed in a skirt or a dress in the work-place (or elsewhere in society, for that matter). Perhaps this suggests that the cultural codes governing male identity are more controlled than they are for women. If a man wears a skirt he is choosing to make a statement: one message being encoded by this choice of clothing could be that he is rejecting the stereotypical assumptions of masculinity. When David Beckham was photographed wearing a sarong a few years ago, he was both mocked and acclaimed by different sections of the media. Some receivers saw it as a healthy expression of a modern male identity, and a rejection of the burden of the stereotypical male image – others read his clothing choice more as a cynical attempt to appeal to the pink pound, or even as a comment on his own sexual orientation.

 Makeup is another prop used differently depending on gender. For women, the cultural practice of wearing makeup has become normalised; it is almost expected that to present yourself as a ‘normal’ woman you must enhance your facial features in the form of this literal ‘mask’ (Goffman). Who this mask is for is debateable. Some women will claim that it is not to present themselves as more attractive to men but to enhance their own self-confidence. Of course, make-up also comes with its own cultural codes – too much and you are perceived as a slapper. The syntagm of what is means to be a man in western society does not include the wearing of make-up because make-up is a signifier of femininity. When men do choose to wear make-up it is probably a way of expressing their membership of a sub-cultural group (such as punks or Goths) where the boundaries of gender identity are allowed to be more blurred, or perhaps their sexual orientation.

Question 3 – cover of Finishing Touches book.

a)     Who do you think is the audience for this text? (4 marks)

Judging by the paradigmatic choices made in constructing this book cover, we can infer that the audience being targeted is female, 25-45 and middle class with aspirational tastes.

 b)     Identify and briefly explain icons, indexes and symbols within this text. (6 marks)

Iconic signifers include the woman, the sofa & the fireplace – collectively they are used to signify a home – specifically, the lounge. The assumption is that it is a lounge the audience aspire to.

Indexical signifers include the positioning of the woman. The way she holds the cushion acts as evidence that this is her lounge. The outstretched hand in the direction of vase acts as evidence that she has just finished putting the ‘finishing touches’ to the tray. The two wine glasses on the mantelpiece act as evidence that two people  - a couple – live in the home.

Symbolic signifiers include the two logos used to anchor the text (Changing Rooms and BBC). The flowers and wine can also be seen as symbolic signifiers of romance.

 

c)     What does the room and its contents communicate about the woman’s identity? (10 marks)

 The woman’s identity is being staged as a middle-aged, middle class home-maker. This has partly been created through the choice of female model, who is well groomed, slim and blond. It is also communicated through the props used to ‘stage’ the woman’s identity: the minimalist furnishing of the room and its reliance on black & white colours which connote simplicity and sophistication. The paradigmatic choices made in selecting the fireplace, wine glasses & flowers help to create the syntagm of ‘the middle-class home’ – it all looks as though it has been plucked out of a Heals’ catalogue. This is what helps to communicate her socio-economic background. The books scattered on the hearth at the corner of the image signify an education and interest in the world. The carefully arranged lounge creates a calm, thoughtful and stylish identity for the woman. The choice of words such as ‘styling’ and ‘transform’ is also the language of women’s magazines, and helps to position the woman as the home-maker, anchoring her identity even further.

Question 4

Use your knowledge of communication and culture to explore the role played by self-knowledge in the creation and maintenance of personal identity. (20 marks)

 How well we know ourselves is an important factor to consider when assessing the creation and maintenance of our personal identity. According to Cooley, it is partly through other people – and their reactions to us – that we gain self-knowledge in the first place. His ‘looking glass’ theory suggests that we use other people as mirrors through which we can see ourselves reflected. For example, we might try out a new outfit when with a friend to judge their reaction; as a result we might judge that outfit to be a success or not.

 Gaining information about ourselves in this way, and reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures allows us to control the way we want the world to see us. It allows us to refine and project a sense of personal identity which reveals ourselves in the way we want to be seen. This process of editing out aspects of our selves which might be perceived as negative is known as gate-keeping. Many people engage in this everyday as they create and maintain pages on sites like Facebook and Bebo. People carefully include information and photos which help to maintain a sense of personal identity that they are happy with.

 We can apply the Johari window to this process. If we know ourselves effectively, we also know what to reveal in our ‘open self’ and what to conceal in our ‘hidden self.’ It might be that the more familiar and comfortable we feel with people, the happier we are to reveal ourselves more honestly, and the more our ‘open self’ expands. However, what we can’t control is our ‘blind self’ - those things about our self that others know but we don’t, or our ‘unknown self’- those things about our selves which have yet to reveal themselves to us or to others. Our own self-knowledge depends to an extent on how honestly we manage the feedback we get from others. Many of us use various self-maintenance strategies (Gergen & Gergen) to minimise the effect of feedback we perceive to be negative (for example, by rubbishing those who gave the feedback: ‘what does my teacher know anyway’) , rather than using negative feedback to reflect honestly on ourselves.

This leads to an interesting point, which is that our sense of personal identity is not a static and unchanging concept. We can never know everything about ourselves and as we experience more of life our self-image and the identity we want to present to the world changes too. As Goffman says, the roles we play in life partly determine our identity, and when we are ‘new’ to a role, it makes sense that a lack of self-knowledge means that our ‘blind self’ is likely to be larger until we have learned who to be in that role, partly through the process of feedback. This often happens when someone starts a new job, for example.

In addition, the sub-cultural groups that we identify with in life may well change as time passes. Our identification with a particular cultural or sub-cultural group will certainly influence how we construct a sense of identity and then knowingly present it to the world, as anyone who has decided to become a goth or a punk knows.

A2 Lit - resources for the exam

Have found a few resouces for Sheridan, which I thought might be useful:

Click here, and here, and here.

King Lear resources

Click here for some good resources from the RSC on King Lear...

AS Comms - Example answer for Question 2 - Groups

Choose one of the statements below in order to explore the relationship between our individual identity and the groups we belong to:

 

a)   Belonging to a group inevitably involves repressing or altering our individual identity so that we can fit in with the group’s norms and practices

 

b)   Belonging to a group enables us to freely express who we are in the knowledge that we will be accepted and valued

 

 

c)   Belonging to a group offers a structured, safe arena within which to discover and explore who we are as individuals

 

 

Introduction

Show understanding of key terms of question and whether you agree/disagree with the statement

 

I believe that statement B best describes the way in which we construct our individual identity and the groups that we belong to. I think that above all, humans are social creatures and we rely on the support of different groups at key points in our life. By being accepted by different groups we are able to learn more about who we are because we are continually sharing information about ourselves and comparing ourselves to others. This might be through shared interests and codes of communication in friendship groups at school or college, or it could be by providing us with role models in the family groups or within the work place. I think that whilst sometimes groups might make us behave in particular ways, most of the time we are able to express ourselves freely through the connections we make.

 

 

 

 

Paragraph One

Focus on a theory of identity and you could apply this to the question – include examples from your own experiences

 

One way in which we are immediately brought into contact with a group is through our key agents of socialisation which, for most of us, is firstly through our primary agents of socialisation – our parents. The family is the first group we belong to and provides us a clear sense of identification, for example some researchers found if you ask someone very young who they are they are then they will probably tell you they are someone’s son or daughter, or that they have a brother or sister. When I was younger the fact that I had supportive parents increased my self-esteem and made me more confident. Looking back I can see that some of the attitudes and values I still have today, such as being creative and standing up for myself are the result of the first group I belonged to, my family.

 

 

 

Paragraph Two

Focus on another theory of identity and explore this through examples

 

Furthermore, with my friendship group at school I can see that this group, or ‘team’ as Goffman would term it, really helped me to discover who I was and express my own personality. My close friends always encouraged me to develop by giving me positive feedback – for example when I decided to enter writing competitions as a teenager it was my friendship group who made me believe I could succeed (self-fulfilling prophecy). Without them I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do this. When we got older and started going out in town we always got ready together, doing our hair and listening to music, in this way all the members of the group were supporting each other’s self-presentation. In fact, most of the fun of going out was being part of the group (rather than meeting anyone new!) I found that I revealed more of my hidden self and reduced my blind self through the conversations we had when we all got together.

 

 

Paragraph Three

Focus on a final element of identity

 

When I got my first part time job, I became a member of another kind of group where I was accepted and valued. I worked in a busy restaurant and it was often stressful dealing with difficult customers. The other waitresses I worked with always supported me and made me laugh when things were really hectic – we had shared codes of communication, such as the names we gave to the chefs and certain customers. I also really looked up to one older girl who was studying at university, in a way she became my intellectual ideal self as I saw it what it was possible to achieve if you worked hard.

 

 

Counter-Argument

Any examples of the opposite happening? Any elements of theories you don’t think always apply in group situations?

 

Of course, some people could argue that my experiences of belonging in groups didn’t really allow me to freely express myself – it just moulded me into the cultural, social and educational expectations of others. I would agree that there have been points in my life where I have not said exactly what is on my mind because I don’t want to upset the group. For example, I am always positive and supportive to my friends when we are discussing relationships (even if I secretly sometimes think they are in the wrong!) You could say in this way I am being cynical and playing my role within the group – which is often the listener.

 

 

Conclusion

Come back to the key terms, how far do you now agree or disagree with the statement?

 

In conclusion though, without the experiences of belonging to supportive groups, I don’t think I’d be the person I am today. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we all have ‘belonging needs’  and without the love, affectation and feedback we get from being part of groups we cannot achieve our own sense of self-worth. Without groups I would not be able to achieve my individual potential.