A longtime member of the French Communist Party, Althusser's arguments and theses were set against the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and the humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the "cult of personality" and of ideology. Althusser wrote extensively about mirror misrecognition and the role it plays in forming identities, and used this to explore the relationship between cinema goers and film texts.
Louis Althusser
(1918 - 1990)
Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on both Freud and Lacan's psychological concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology and avoid being subjected to it. Althusser further asserted that, in order to unmask what the dominant ideology obscured, one must perform symptomatic readings that can work to identify the structural absences and constitutive lacks in cinematic narrative.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Structural Marxist -- viewed the class background of policymakers, etc. as purely incidental to the "bourgeois" nature of the modern state.
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Apparatus Theorist – maintained that cinema is ideological by nature because of the mechanics of representation are ideological, and because the films are created to represent reality. Held that the mechanics of representation include the camera and editing.
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Danger of the “cult of personality” and ideology –The repressive state apparatus (RSA) is controlled by the ruling class, because more often than not, the ruling class possesses State power – exerts authority over prevailing ideology.
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Althusser takes the Marxist theory of the State forward by distinguishing the Repressive State Apparatus from the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA).
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Ideology is everywhere and impossible to escape.
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Viewed the central position of the spectator within the perspective of the composition as an ideological focus.
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Film-going, and the consumption of movies and their associated myths are symbolic activities, that work to create and support culturally significant events.
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Believed that the cinematic apparatus basically sets realistic images and sounds in the eyes and ears of viewers.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Ideological State Apparatuses – institutions such as education, the churches, family, media, trade unions, and law, which were formally outside state control but which served to transmit the values of the state, to interpellate those individuals affected by them, and to maintain order in a society, above all to reproduce capitalist relations of production. A “soft” power concept.
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Repressive State Apparatuses -- the army, the police, the judiciary, and the prison system. A “hard” power concept.
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Ideology – Refers to a set of political beliefs or a set of ideas that characterize a particular culture. Capitalism, communism, socialism, and Marxism are ideologies. a system of presentations that explicitly or implicitly claim to absolute truth.
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Interpellate – (Marxist theory) Interpellation is the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions, constitutes the nature of individual subjects' identities through the very process of institutions and discourses of 'hailing' them in social interactions. To bring into being, or give an identity to an individual or category.