MHRD-UGC ePG Pathshala

13 Pages·2017·0.2 MB·English

Paper 10: Module No 27: E Text
MHRD-UGC ePG Pathshala - English
Principal Investigator & Affiliation: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee, University of Hyderabad

Paper No & Title: Literary Criticism and Theory (Paper 10)
Paper Coordinator & Affiliation: Dr. Anita Bhela, Delhi College of Arts and Commerce,
University of Delhi

Module Number & Title: Culture, Ideology and Technology: Louis Althusser, Walter
Benjamin, Jonathan Dollimore (27)
Content Writer's Name & Affiliation: Mr. Sk Sagir Ali, Assistant Professor, Mednapore
College, West Bengal

Name & Affiliation of Content Reviewer: Dr. Jyotsna Pathak, University of Delhi
Name & Affiliation of Content Editor: Dr. Anita Bhela, Delhi College of Arts and
Commerce, University of Delhi

The term ‘Culture’ having its origin from ‘cultura’ and ‘colere’, meaning ‘to
cultivate’, has developed into a web of generated meanings and ideas in the prevailing site of
power relations. The extension of ‘canonised’ works of literature to pamphlets and different
kinds of documents is a part of the continuous struggle in the politics of culture. Culture,
according to Stuart Hall, is a debating site that can never be registered permanently for one
side or the other. It is a complex process, where meanings are negotiated in terms of power
relations, where a certain class governs meanings, where meanings are subverted in the
culture of masses. This term is seen pejoratively. Stuart Hall’s essay ‘Cultural Studies: Two
Paradigms’ (1981) sees the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the ideological
hegemony of the dominant classes to reinterpret the power structures in society. The Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in Great Britain develops
critical ideas of several ideologies in several schools of thought. Marxist scholars like
Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser and Raymond
Williams in their works decipher ideology, production, mechanical reproduction, economic
and social fabrics to figure out how culture is ‘produced’, what constitutes the culture of a
community, which cultural artefact produces meaning in the so-called ‘culture industry’ in
our society. They also emphasize the relationship between politics and literature, ideology
and hegemony and the relationship of literature with technologies that control society. Such
studies in turn are concerned with issues like ideology, race, identity and subcultures which
remain hidden in the parent culture. Raymond Williams in “Culture is Ordinary” emphasizes
that:
Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own
shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses
these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the
finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate
and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery,
writing themselves into the land. (1989:7)
Thus, culture is the cumulative effect of social, economic, mechanical and ideological
dynamics that make us understand that prevailing conditions are ‘natural’. To read literature
is to read culture; however to understand literature, we have to be conscious about culture.
Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution (1961) analyses culture and society:
Our description of our experience comes to compose a network of
relationships, and all our communication systems, including the arts, are
literally parts of our social organization…Since our way of seeing is literally
our way of living, the process of communication is in fact the process of
community: the offering, reception and comparison of new meanings, leading
to the tensions and achievements of growth and change. (1961:55)
Louis Althusser (1918-1990), a French Structural Marxist thinker, is one of the most
important theoreticians in France. He influenced Marxist literary theory. He has greatly
influenced the concept of ideology through his work in literary and cultural studies. He
conceives of ideology as a representation of the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their
real conditions of existence’. (1971:162) Althusser pointed that ideology does not portray the
real world but paints ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals’ to the actual world. Ideology
is twice removed from the real like Lacan’s ‘imaginary order’ is to the ‘real’. Althusser
elaborated his concept of ideology in For Marx (1965). He says:
An ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations
(images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a
historical existence and a role within a given society…Ideology, as a system
of representations, is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social
function is more important than the theoretical function(function as
knowledge). (For Marx : 231)
Ideology is a kind of discourse of which we are not conscious, rather it amounts to the stream
of discourses, images, ideas we live and breathe only to develop into unconscious happening.
He writes:
Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases
these representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’: they are usually
images and occasionally concepts but its above all as structures that they
impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’. They are
perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men
via a process that escapes them. (For Marx : 233)
He exemplified the idea of Ideological State Apparatuses for the materialistic conception of
ideology only to find proclamation that “ideology has no history” while individual ideologies
are embedded in histories and the common form of ideology is peripheral to history. His
thesis “ideology has a material existence” expressed his notion of materialistic social
practices that stressed the fact that ideologies are achieved through our actions and practices
which find resonance in Marx’s concept of practical materialism. Ideology lives only in the
material practices of material apparatuses. For French Marxist critic Louis Althusser, the
function of ideology in life, how it is produced and flourished through State apparatuses
constitutes the dynamics of repressive (police, army) and ideological (family, education,
religion, culture) State apparatuses. Reproduction of labour power and relations of
productions under the subjection of ruling class with a ruling ideology shape patterns of
circulation and consumption ‘produced away from the factory’ in actual relations of labour.
He put it scientifically in the essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1969):
To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour
power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time,
a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a
reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a
reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the
agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the
domination of the ruling class 'in words'. ( Lenin and Philosophy, and Other
Essays :132-33)
Althusser worked with the ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor that is continuously
‘reproduced’ in society to show how and where the interrelationship works. Althusser posed
the question whether ideology is a state-sponsored project, by drawing a frame of repressive
and ideological apparatuses in tangible terms. According to Althusser Ideological State
Apparatuses being ‘the site of class struggle’ correspond to the common domain, a middle
path to be found out by progressive or revolutionary class. Earlier, Church/temple/mosque
was one of the State apparatuses. Now, school, the most abiding instrument of producing the
ruling ideology, has been given the responsibility in reproducing the relations of production
in education that brings forth technicians, army men, supervisors, clerks, administrators,
analysts, scientists, thinkers, philosophers who cater to the interests of the ruling class.
According to Marx, ideology can be seen in negative terms – unreal and outside human
history, whereas Althusser propagates ideology in affirmative terms, as an agency that satisfy
the material reality. He writes:
And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which
these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological
apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small
church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports' club, a school day, a political
party meeting, etc. (Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays :169)
Here, Althusser emphasizes the rituals and practices that State apparatuses uphold to become
a State subject.

Central to the formation of ideology, Althusser sees ‘recognition’ as one of the
important steps in the interpellation of individual. ‘All ideology hails or interpellates concrete
individuals as concrete subjects’. A police officer hails an individual – ‘Hey, you there!, and
the individual turns round to find that s/he becomes the subject. Ideological State
Apparatuses such as church, education, police interpellate subjects to find subjectivity in a
particular fashion by constructing individual self–consciousness. So, we can see that
individuals are ‘born into’ ideology and they find subjectivity, which is constructed by
ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan), or discourse (Foucault) within their assurance of
family, society to advocate it since it gives them a sense of identity and security through
language, social system and conventions. Christian religious ideology interpellated subjects
by the ISA (Ideological State Apparatuses) of the church that advocates the concept of God
and to obey God, the idea of hell and heaven and its punishment in terms of deeds committed
by individuals, etc and also leads us to think that we are free to our submission of thought and
action. Althusser opines:
I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it
'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms'
the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise
operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be
imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other)
hailing: 'Hey, you there!' (Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays: 174)
The construction of ideology in its workings contains a duality of Subject (God) - subjects
relationship in the interpellating ideology where individual carries out his/her certain
practices through rituals not as acts of acquiescence but actions s/he chooses to do as a free
subject. These social codes and conventions, system of thought and practice are never
interviewed and questioned since ‘recognition’ provided by ideology is equated with
‘misrecognition’. Althusser argues:
we should note that all this 'procedure' to set up Christian religious subjects is
dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a
multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a
Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God. (Lenin and Philosophy, and Other
Essays: 178)
Althusser speaks of ‘social practice’, by which he means the several practices, namely,
economic, literary, political, ideological that form the practice of literary production. He
defines it:
By practice in general I shall mean any process of transformation of a
determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation
effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of
‘production’). In any practice thus considered, the determinant moment (or
element) is neither the raw material nor the product, but the practice in the
narrow sense: the moment of the labour of transformation itself, which sets to
work in a specific structure, men, means and a technical method of utilizing
the means. (For Marx: 166)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German Marxist theorist came up with technological
developments and new mass media technologies and forms (photography and
photojournalism, radio and film) to find the radically reformed status and role of arts that
shattered originality and the unparalleled status of the work of art in cultural sphere
embedded in cultural politics. Central to the hegemonic control in art, Benjamin hailed a
technological and revolutionary transformation in the oeuvres of artistic creations. Benjamin
deciphered the relationship between art and technology in some seminal essays like ‘‘A
Small History of Photography’’ (1931), ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’’ (1935-36) and the ‘‘Paris Letters’’ published in 1936. What Benjamin
developed in connection with art, technology and politics are some new concepts like ‘aura’,
‘reproducibility’ and the ‘monumental’. Aura is the esoteric sense that encompasses artistic
or ritual objects like a ring of light or halo that is ruined by techniques of mechanical
reproduction such as photography. He writes in ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’’:
…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the
work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond
the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of
reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.
(1973:221)
In another essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” included in Illuminations (1973) he entitled
‘aura’ as ‘the associations which, at home in the memorie involontaire, tended to cluster
around the object of a perception’. (1973:188) Here, Marcel Proust’s division between
involuntary and voluntary recollection and the concept which is attributed to Freud that
memory fragments are most effective since the incident on which they are positioned never
come into consciousness. (1973:162) Benjamin describes not only the ‘shattering’ effect but
also the liberating potential in paradigm progress of technology to have a mimetic interaction
with cosmos just like like children’s engagement with their surroundings. He emphasizes the
historical development of art through magical and cultic analysis of objects, through sacred
function of religion and to the secularization of this religiosity in the manifestation of beauty
in art that is the history of auratic art. He writes:
We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual-first
the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the
work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual
function. In other words, the unique value of the "authentic” work of art has its
basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis,
however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most
profane forms of the cult of beauty. (1973:162)
The cultic artefact, the aura appears to rest on something autonomous and free from the
ideological control or human interference. With the coming of modernity, the cult of aura
disappears and the banality of bourgeois capitalism stands tall. Apart from photography,
Benjamin argues about the revolutionary potential of film as a mode of mechanical
reproduction. Film actors do not face the audience like performers on stage. Audience no
longer contemplate film, rather, film consumes. Thoughts of individuals remain disjuncted
and the moving images hinder the structure of perceptions. He says:
Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a
painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the
spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he
cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed.
It cannot be arrested….The spectator’s process of association in the view of
these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This
constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be
cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical
structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in
which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect
(1973:238)
Mass consumption leads to the obliteration of ‘aura’ and the loss of ‘aura’ culminates in the
potential to open up the politicization of art. Under the new conditions of production and
consumption of art, the rebellious potential of art can become instrumental through which the
‘false consciousness’ of modern man may be overthrown. Technological change attends to
facilitate the politicization of art rather than the “introduction of aesthetics into political life.”
Technology provides individuals the kind of art that requires less concentration in the
systems of authenticity. Central to the transformation of individual into a collective body, ‘a
matrix from which all traditional behaviour toward works of art issues today in a new form’
brings a close parallel between the mass as viewer and the massive quality of reproductions,
between the viewer and the viewed in a broader framework of the political character of art
and in the dynamic character of technology. (1973:239) Art is ‘politicized’ when it challenges
the authority we obey. In the Epilogue to this essay Benjamin opines that technology appears
as an opportunity whose potential can be, now, related more explicitly to the aestheticizing
tendencies of fascism:
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the
Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the
first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. ( 1973:242).
The inevitable disappearance of ‘auratic’ art in accordance with mass reproduction
that changes the nature of a work of art and the ‘politicization of art’ and its transformation
into the dissolution of aesthetic aura, as well as the emancipatory potential of mass culture,
particularly films, arrest us to the ‘fetishization’ to the growing reverence of technology in
interpretation of cultural phenomena. In his essay, ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) Benjamin
being a sympathizer to modernism, holds that revolutionary action cannot reflect traditional
forms if it hopes to usher in social change and diagnoses the relation between artistic
production and politics, between the techniques used in the production of a work of art and
the political orientation. He was sensitive to the very impact of technology with an aim to
erase the capitalist artefacts only to access political liberation. His primary concern was with
the fate of art within capitalist modernity, with the Marxist critique of commodity culture
with a critical representation of the urban environment.
Jonathan Dollimore (1948), a social theorist in the fields of Renaissance
literature, gender, queer theory, art, censorship and cultural theory has developed the concept
of ‘the perverse dynamic’ that stresses the importance of sexual formulations of perversion
out of earlier religious understandings and structures which were at work in the culture of
early modernity. The relation between civilization and perversion is a complex one.
Dollimore writes:
There is something counter-effective in the very mechanism of
repression…and indeed within the entire civilizing process: instead of
transforming perverse desire into civilized achievement, it counter-
productively coerces the subject into a perverse or neurotic
existence.(1991:177)
It is the production of perversion within the the problematic of sexual deviance, the
return of the suppressed what Dollimore calls ‘transgressive reinscription’ in Western culture.