From Louis Althusser’s “The State of Ideological Apparatuses.” The Cultural Studies Reader.
Better readers of Marx and Althusser, please chime in here.
Under the heading “Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the
Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence,”
Althusser makes the claim that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship
of individuals to the real conditions of existence” (155). This is Althusser’s
thesis, and under the banner of “ideology” he folds together ideologies of religion,
ethics, politics, law, and so forth.
Question: So, we begin with a statement about
ideology as imaginary. This statement being “Thesis I.” Then, Althusser adds
the layer that, although ideologies “constitute an illusion,” they “make allusion”
to reality, which leaves to interpretation the task of discovering “the reality
of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world” (156). Then
comes “Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence” (157). These theses are
not irreconcilable to me, but I am struggling to follow Althusser’s scaffolded
discussion of ideology as an intangible apparatus mediating “imagined”
experience, while possessing a material existence. I get point A (I think), but
I am hung up on the “imaginary” part of ideology, which seems to be the bridge
to point B. I think I’m flummoxed by the term “imaginary”—is politics, for
example, an imaginary mediator of a person to their lived environment? Thinking
toward Ferdinand de Saussure, I’m wondering if ideologies are not so much imaginary
as they are arbitrary, that is, values collectively invested in, shored
up by the arbitrary—to the extent that the ideology’s value is not inherent but
externally applied by the group—impulse of society, nation, or culture.
From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
“Ch. 3 Stuart Hall, cultural studies and marxism” by Colin Sparks.
Question: Why did early iterations of cultural
studies align themselves with a “structuralist Marxism,” if Marxism, according to
Hall’s own reflection of cultural studies vis-à-vis Marxism, neglected to
account for the very parts of culture that cultural studies takes an interest in? Why is cultural studies, among other contemporary humanist enterprises like literary studies, so taken by universalizing principles, while at the same time investing in local politics, such as Policing the Crisis engages?
In tracing the links
between cultural studies and Marxism, Sparks points out that early affinities for Marxism
waxed structuralist. “Structural marxism,” notes Sparks, “formed the
intellectual basis of what we may term the ‘heroic age’ of cultural studies" (84). In our reading from last week, Stuart Hall himself writes that the
relationship of cultural studies to Marxism—from his ‘autobiographical’ POV—was
fraught, not the least of which because Marx’s theory neglected to account for the sides
of human experience, such as race and gender, that are bound up in issues of
class and labor. Cultural studies takes up these very things and champions them
as vital elements of conjuncture, socio-historical blocs, and other constitutive elements
of the political. And yet, cultural studies tended at first toward a “structuralist”
approach to Marxism, an approach that repeated the same kind of narrow
analysis, in which issues of gender, race, and so on were off-loaded in favor
of the structure or the system, what structuralists like Saussure and Levi Strauss believed all society and culture could be reduced down to. Sparks
writes that the “new Marxist cultural studies” rejected socialist humanism, and
in so doing “implied a fundamental shift in the perceptions of the importance
of experience and agency in the understanding of culture” (84).
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