Generally we associate value to something based on the meaning it has to the individual. This is the ebb and flow of society. We will always have push and pull with all entities that are apart of society and culture. Culture must be read from a worldly perspective as a starting point to gauge, compare, and add or take away meaning. Specifically, this notion that Barthes has on reading culture, “The implicit assumption that it still required a literary sensibility to ‘read’ society with the requisite subtlety, and that the two ideas of culture could be ultimately reconciled was also, paradoxically, to inform the early work of the French writer, Roland Barthes, though here it found validation in a method-semiotics - a way of reading signs” (Hawkes, 1977, p. 126). This quote is quite profound in the sense that the readability of anything is crucial to understanding the needs, wants, and desires to control the flow of hegemony and the inherent importance and impact the tone of culture has. Culture has so many external pressures and influences based on the country where one is trying to gauge and understand culture. As Hebdige brilliantly states, “You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things” (Hebdige, 2012, p. 125). This quote speaks miles ahead of its time. This is an extremely honest sentence because the everything must have context to associate its meaning and this sentence feels like it trying to do exactly that. Below I have shared an excerpt from Hebdige that I through the was quite profound.
“Williams was, then, proposing an altogether broader formulation of the relationships between culture and society, one which through the analysis of ‘particular meanings and values’ sought to uncover the concealed fundamentals of history; the ‘general causes’ and broad social ‘trends’ which lie behind the manifest appearances of an ‘everyday life’” (Hebdige, 2012, p. 125).
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