Louis Althusser
"Ideology"
Christian Buss
Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology" starts
with the premise that there is a fundamental flaw in the Marxist determination
of ideology, namely its establishment as a "representation of the real
conditions of existence in an imaginary form." In this critique of late
60's orthodox Marxism, Althusser goes on to win back the materiality of the
ideological by asserting that Ideology is not a means of representing not the
real condition of man's existence, but rather the imaginary relationships of
individuals to their conditions. This
implies that these imaginary relationships are in truth constituted within
primary practices and apparatuses, and not merely reinforced by them. An example: A believer in god, he goes to
mass, gets on his knees, prays, does pennance, and must do so if he is to
"follow his beliefs and ideas". As such, the ideology must exist
within the actions, practices, and rituals of daily life. With this reordering,
the primacy of the idea is thrown to the wolves and replaced by the fundamental
status of all individuals as subjects inserted into ideology by practices and
rituals. This insertion is accomplished
by an individuals being constituted through an act of hailing of interpellating
by the ideological apparatuses, whether they be the state, a friend, or even a
dog barking for attention. A further example:
A friend sees you across the street, but you do not apprehend his
presence. He shouts out “Hey there, you.” In Althusser’s world, nine times out
of ten the correct individual turns looks to the friend and within that instant
of turning has been hailed, located and locked in as a subject of an
ideological relationship, in this case the primary ideology of “friend”. However, this moment is not a moment of
becoming locked, as for Althusser there is no outside of this particular
ideology. You are never outside of this ideological relationship, you are
“Always already” ideologically locked down by the sheer force of the
ideological binary that the Ideology itself establishes. Whether you accept or
reject the hailing of the friend, the friend has himself already addressed you
as a friend, and in the act of hailing not only expects, but demands a
particular response, a response within the binary of friend or perhaps in this
case not friend.
This
always already-ness, however is grounded by reference to Freud’s conception of
the happy birth and the expectations of parents, friends and
family in the period leading up to the birth, which when said child pops out of
the womb, are constituted by the particular clothing, training and toys that
fully enframe and limit what kind of subject the little ankle-biter is. Similarly adult subjects are themselves
completely enclosed by the Ideological state apparatuses of the tax collector,
the police, and whatever other functions are used by the state to placate the
individual and let him exclaim “Amen-So be it.” This amen, this so be it are unavoidable and must
be adopted and accepted within the consciousness of the individual. This “must” and its limiting of the
individuals potential as subject to the monad, to the singular capital S
Subject establishes a stagnancy, a lack of movement and a permanence that is
the greatest limitation of Althusser’s argument.
Let
us envision an alternative to this singular interpellatory placement of the
individual. Scene: Two individuals walk down the street, six feet apart. One, a
banker has only his lunch on his mind and his briefcase by his side. The other,
a thief, has just snatched a purse and is coolly, and briskly walking along the
street away from the scene of the crime.
Again, an old friend spies the banker walking down the street, calls out
“Hey, you” and waits for a response. The thief, already recently established as
a particular subject “thief,” reacts to the “hey you” not as the potential
subject intended, ie. friend, but rather as a man about to be booked as a
third-striker and soon-to-be guest at the local pokey, and breaks into a
heavy-breathing run, shocking passersby and caller-out alike. The hungry banker
on the other hand, has a hot pastrami on the mind, and is searching for the
best deli south of 52nd street on 5th avenue. With
visions of hot meat and spicy mustard, the sine waves may reach his cochlea and
forming a “hey you” in his ear drum, but sadly be subsumed by the growling of
his stomach and his own pre-existent status as a subject out for a good meal.
Quickly we see that a
nine-times-out-of-ten correct response to the friendly “hey you” breaks apart
under the practical possibility of individuals not already constituted as
capital S subject, but rather existing within any moment as one of a thousand
possible subjects. The question then is
not one of how the individual is interpellated as a subject, but rather
one of which subject one is to become. No longer are we all an
“always-already” subject then, but rather an “always-becoming” subject,
constantly being reconstituted and re-interpellated, by sometimes more and
sometimes less successful attempts at hailing. Now we can speak of ideologies,
battling for primacy at the location of the individual. Critical research is
therefore not designed to expose how “recognition is indeed, in the last
resort, the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations
deriving from them” (Althusser, Ideology, p.303) but rather how the
moment of recognition is the primary instant when the establishment of hegemony
is contested
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics[3]
(1916)
Rob Schechtman
In the lives of individuals and societies,
language is a factor of greater
importance than any other.
Saussure (7)
Few books in the twentieth century
have impacted intellectual thought as broadly as the Course in General
Linguistics by the Swiss Professor of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913). First published
posthumously in 1916 as the Cours de Linguistique Générale by two of
Saussure’s students from assembled course notes, the book sparked the creation
of structuralist movements in linguistics, anthropology, and literary
criticism, and it laid the foundation for later poststructuralist
critique.
This review focuses on the first
half of the book, which has the greatest relevance to literary theory. The first section discusses the field of
linguistics and its object of study. The
next two parts lay out Saussure’s principles of synchronic linguistics and
discuss the nature of the linguistic sign.
The remaining three parts of the book discuss diachronic
(“retrospective”) and geographical linguistics, and were themselves enormously
influential in shifting the focus of linguistics from a primarily
historical-comparative approach in the nineteenth century to an almost
exclusively synchronic approach in the twentieth century.
His first principle regarding the
nature of the linguistic sign is that the sign is arbitrary. The association between the sound pattern,
called the signifiant (‘signifier’ or ‘signal’), and the concept, called
the signifié (‘signified’ or ‘signification’), can vary infinitely
across languages.[4] He later tempers this principle, allowing for
the fact that some signs may be motivated “to a certain extent” (cf.
130f.). Nevertheless, the arbitrary
nature of the sign is the foundation of his analysis.[5]
The signs in a language are
arranged in a system of structures: “[…] it is linguistic structure
which gives language the unity it has.” (11)
The system in general he calls langage. A specific system of signs, such as English,
he refers to as a langue. (Although both terms are often translated as
‘language’ or ‘Sprache’, the distinction between the general capacity and the
specific instance is crucial.) The
system of structures or rules is collective and social: “[…] the language is
never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the
collectivity.” (13) He contrasts this
with parole, speech produced using the language, which is
individual The langue/parole
distinction is a second crucial duality in Saussure’s theory.
Meaning arises within the language
system through relations of association and opposition: “Two signs, each
comprising a signification and a signal, are not different from each other, but
only distinct. They are simply in opposition
to each other. The entire mechanism of
language […] is based upon oppositions of this kind […].” (119) The two types of relations are syntagmatic
and paradigmatic. The former
relation operates through linear ordering and restriction (e.g., in the phrase
‘The department chair’, the syntagmatic association of ‘department’ restricts
the possible interpretations of ‘chair’).
The latter relation expresses similarities of sound or meaning between
signs. Signs acquire their meanings only
through these structural relations: “A language is a system in which all the
elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the
simultaneous coexistence of all the others. […] In a given language, all the
words which express neighboring ideas help define one another’s meaning.”
(113f.) This, he goes on to say, applies
not only to words but also to sounds and to more complex structures such as
grammatical units.
Saussure uses the analogy of a
chess game several times to explain his view of language:
A game of chess is like an artificial form of languages present in a natural form. [...] The
value of the chess pieces depends on their position upon the chessboard just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all the other terms. [...] It is true that the values also depend ultimately upon one invariable set of conventions, the rules of the game, which exist before the beginning of the game and remain in force after each move. These rules, fixed once and for all, also exists in the linguistic a case: There the unchanging principles
of Semiology.
(87f.)
The arbitrary sign
is paralleled by the arbitrary form of the chess pieces; it is irrelevant how
exactly the pieces are shaped, or even what they are made of, as long as
certain recurring forms are used in rule-bound ways within the game. The primacy of synchronic analysis over the
diachronic is shown in that the players of the game are unaware of, and indeed
probably not interested in, how the game developed or how it may have been
played in the past. What matters in
playing the game today is simply the set of meaningful relations governing the
movements of the pieces.[6]
How does one perform a
structuralist analysis? First, by
isolating the distinctive, meaningful units within a particular system, and
then by determining the relationships of association and opposition which
govern those units. Structuralist theory
was applied to literature most notably by the Prague School (cf.
Jakobsen). Structuralism is not without
its limitations, however. Its focus on
binary oppositions reflects a very limited conceptualization scheme. The analyses are typically purely formalist,
concerned with the form and not the content of elements – in some ways similar
to New Criticism. Structuralist
linguistics traditionally focused on the phonetics and syntax of languages,
neglecting discourse and the pragmatic, communicative use of language. The strict emphasis on synchronic study
effectively stopped all diachronic scholarship on languages for nearly a
century. Nevertheless, structuralism led
to enormous advances in language sciences.
Poststructuralism arose when
Derrida took the structuralist notion of meaning to its extreme. The Course
writes: “In the language itself [langue], there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact
that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which
the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no
positive terms.” Here Derrida saw a
necessary end to the age-old, yet futile, search for positive, transcendental
grounds for meaning external to the language.
The poststructuralist critique is based on the pervasiveness of différance,
of differing and deferral through chains of syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations, of endlessly partial significations and misreadings.
Poststructuralism has been called
anti-humanist due to the power attributed to language as a system (Heidegger’s
remark that “language speaks man” became a motto for
poststructuralistists). Saussure might
have differed; responding to the animist tendencies of nineteenth century
linguistics, he wrote: “[…] it became unacceptable to say ‘the language does
this or that’, to speak of the ‘life of the language’, and so on, because a
language is not an entity, and exists only in its users.” (5, footnote 1) Yet the subtly subversive nature of language
is presaged in Saussure’s statement, “For the sign always to some extent eludes
control by the will, whether of the individual or of society: that is its
essential nature, even thought it may be by no means obvious at first sight.”
(16) The ramifications of Saussure’s
structuralism are themselves not obvious at first sight and are still shaping
intellectual thought today.
Winfried
Kudszus „Literature und Schizophrenie“
Azadeh
Yamini-Hamedani
Before receiving his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1968, Winfried
Kudszus studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Universities of
Zurich, Freiburg, and Munich. In 1968 he joined the Berkeley faculty, and
became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1984. His writings explore questions and
interrelationships of literature, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, culture,
and psychoanalysis.
Kudszus’s Literature und Schizophrenie (1977) is a
compilation of several essays, to which he offers an introduction and an essay.
The compilation includes essays by Peter Gorsen, Gotthart Wunberg, Gerhard
Irle, Leo Navratil, and a talk by Walter Vogt. In his introduction, Kudszus
offers a reading of complex linguistic structures, evident in the
schizophrenic’s verbal communication and in modern literature’s language.
Literary works by Hoelderlin, Celan, Nietzsche, Nerval, and Artaud contain
linguistic structures, set against the world of norm.
The study of literature
and the difficulty of modern linguistic structures create for the reader and
the literary theorist a puzzle to be solved; along with the schizophrenic they
all face a linguistic Grenzgebiet. Trying to solve this puzzle, literary theory
itself falls into a complex linguistics, deemed incomprehensible. Literary
studies and Schizophrenieforschung share a common quest and similar
problematic area, mainly the understanding of “dunkler Sprachstrukturen” (2),
and the development of methodological insights to establish a unity where none
comes to mind.
Modern literature leads
to a Grenzgebiet where reality’s known images transform into the
abnormal and unknown. The breaking of linguistic structures extends itself to
the breaking of social norms. Mediums of
speech contain normative thought, and schizoid linguistic structures expose the
naiveté of traditional categories and laws.
Kudszus addresses the
socialization of language, and the development of literature and schizophrenia
as productive opposition. Kudszsus refers to R.D. Laing’s notion of the
double-bind. According to this theory the individual is set in a system of opposites,
which allows the social structure to better control and manipulate him. The
double-bind contains contradictory signals, which are brought to light in
schizophrenia’s language and modern literature. The creative and the insane
converge in the moment of their breaking away from social/cultural norms and
pre-determinations.
In his talk “Die Schizophrenie der Kunst” Walter Vogt
addresses the social suppression of creativity, because creativity rises out of
questioning. The poet who turns his back to the play of powers thus posses a
greater danger than a politically-engaged literature, and the harmless
schizophrenic, who closes the door to society, makes a more profound political
statement, than the dictator. In the modern context, Wahnsinn and poetry
take an oppositional stance to a society of production and consumption.
According to Vogt language, poetry, and Wahn all occupy the empty space
between signifier and signified. Language represents a system of signs and
their obligatory (when you say sky, you think blue). The child however
experiences the world differently than what he is taught. In the contradiction
of experience and the linguistic world order lies the birth of the poet or the
schizophrenic.
Modern literature agrees with
anti-psychiatric perspectives, and Kudzsus refers to the anti-oedipal
schizoid-analysis of Deleuze and Guattari (the fathers of anti-psychiatry): “Im
literarischen gestalteten Wahn des familiaeren und- eng damit verbunden- des
gesellschaftlichen Normensystems kommt die Erkenntnis des “Schizo” zum
Durchbuch, dass der Oedipus-Komplex Vorurteile verschleiert, die auf die
systematische Destruktion des Subjekts zum Zweck seiner Maniepulierbarkeit in
einer patriachalisch struktuierten Gesellschaftsordnung abzielen” (5). The schizoid embodies the anti-oedipal, and stands in opposition to
the subject’s systematic destruction into society’s patriarchal structure.
Schizophrenia thus functions as a breakthrough experience,
questioning civilization’s structures and bringing to light a realm, which
would otherwise remain in darkness. The schizoid does not fall victim to
schizophrenia but rather uses it as an exit for new creative grounds. Deleuze
and Guattari refer to the work of Kafka as an example of the schizoid energies
within literature, asserting that it displays signs of the double-bind and the
oedipal, and grotesque family structures and patriarchal repression mechanisms.
Psychopathology and the creative process build upon the
same principles of meaning, mainly “Physiogonomisierung, Formalisierung, und
Symbolbildung” (9); they contain the same components of literary development.
Although the aesthetics of being other may not serve as an expansion of “the
beautiful,” it nevertheless acts as a source for literary and artistic self-understanding.
Schizophrenic disturbances contain creative potentiality, and the creativity of
the ill posses a healthy norm, unbreakable in the face of traditional
aesthetics.
Kudzsus refers to the
work of Gerhard Irle, who addresses the emancipating function of schizoid
episodes. Irle argues toward the positive aspects of depersonalization: in the
falling apart of the self lies the chance for self-finding, a self beyond the
repressive elements of culture and society. Our age finds the structure of its
thoughts, its visions, and fears in a great schizophrenia.
Kudszus in agreement with Gorsen, who
points to the self-alienating element in modern literature and art, proposes
the negation of traditional categorical systems for new possibilities of
communication and understanding: “So treffen sich im Spannungsfeld von
Literatur, Kunst und Psychopathologie eine Aesthetic und eine Psychiatrie, die
ihre jeweiligen Kategoriensysteme negieren und im Versagen ‘normaler’
Kommunikation neue unverfaelschte Verstaendnismoeglichkeiten zu erschliessen
suchen” (11). Kudzsus brings his introduction to a close asserting: “Es gibt
sich hier…eine Wechselbeziehung von systemkritischer Theorie
Interpretationspraxis, die im Grenzgebiet von Literature und Schizophrenie
Kommunikationsformen zu verstehen erlaubt, deren Sinn in ihrer ‘Abnormalitaet’
liegt” (11).
Kudszsus takes
as his model literary works by Hoelderlin, Celan, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal,
Nerval, Kafka, and Artaud. Kudszus’s project offers an interesting reading of
the linguistically abnormal, and reflects the poststructuralist project of
critiquing orthodox habits of mind, culture, and language. The work takes an
oppositional stance against traditional intellectual categories, and
concentrates on the decentered subject. In this respect, Kudsuzs’s work can
thus be read in dialogue with Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and
Guattari, de Man, Greenblat, and Kristeva.
Kudszus’s work could potentially be of interest to the
feminist project, in studying psychopathology and linguistic structures in the
feminine. For a future project the reception of Hoelderlin’s works could be of
interest. Why do Hoelderlin’s writings appeal to two completely different
projects: Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung and Kudszus’s Literatur
und Schizophrenie? While Dilthey receives the works of Hoelderlin as a
reflection of das Geistesgeschichtliche, Kudszus interprets Hoelderlin’s
use of abnormal linguistic structures as a stance against the social fabric.
For Dilthey Hoelderlin stands as a central figure of German national identity,
and for Kudszus his writings reflect the margins of social norm.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)[11]
Richard Ascarate
Born in Poitiers, France, Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
studied philosophy and psychology at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), was
head of the philosophy departments at the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand and
Vincennes, and elected in 1970 to the Collège de France. Other works include Mental Illness and
Psychology (1954/trans. 1976), Madness and Civilization (1961/65), The Birth of
the Clinic (1963/1973), The History of Sexuality [Vol. I: An Introduction (1976/78); Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure (1984/85); Vol. III: The Care of the Self (1984/86)].
Foucault opens with a description of the grisly quartering
of attempted regicide Damiens in 1757.
Penalties of such severe form no longer prevailing, he argues that the
body as locus poenae has been replaced by the soul (16), observing that the
modern criminal justice system no longer partakes of the directness represented
by Damiens’s execution. The crime,
committed against the tangible person of the king (which included his
property: “L’état, c’ést moi!’”), was
then punished by the king’s tangible
representatives upon the equally tangible body of the accused. Today, however, the criminal justice system
“functions and justifies itself only by […] perpetual reference to something
other than itself, by […] unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems”
(22). The “something other than itself”
includes psychiatric and psychological experts, educationalists, parole
officers, pathologists and other scientific investigators (21). The king has been replaced by the nebulous
body of society. Crime is redefined so
as to exert control over that society.
The author’s purpose, then, is to offer a “correlative
history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge” (23), to argue that
punishment of the offense has been superseded by supervision, or discipline, of
the individual (18). Such supervision
(in essence, a means of control, of enforcing normativity) extends beyond the
penal system, however, and can be seen in “factories, schools, barracks,
hospitals, which all resemble prisons” (228).
To carry out his analysis, Foucault makes the following
assumptions: 1) Punishment is a “complex
social function,” not merely a mechanism of repression; 2) Punishment is a
political tactic, a means of exercising power; 3) The “technology of power [is]
the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the
knowledge of man”; and 4) Replacement of the body by the soul in penal justice
(and the insertion of ‘scientific’ knowledge into legal practice) represents a “transformation of the way in which the
body itself is invested by power relations” (23-4). Thus, Foucault’s study reaches beyond the
economics of crime and punishment and into the “mode of subjection” by which
man becomes an “object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status”
(24).
Foucault notes that the development of capitalist society
itself brought about a restructuring of the “economy of illegalities”
(87). Thus, the “right to punish […]
shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society”
(90). The need arose not only to make
the punishment fit the crime (differentiation), but also to re-form the
criminal: “A body is docile that may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136).[12] Foucault examines the rise of
disciplinary methods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeing in
them “general formulas of domination” (137).
Among these were new and highly-detailed ordinances delineating exact
positions of the soldier’s body parts when standing at attention or presenting
arms, strict time-tables (articulated to the minute) to govern the activities
of elementary school children, the examination (which both reasserts the power
of the instructor and transforms the individual student into a “case” for
evaluation), and Bentham’s Panopticon.
Still widely used in prisons and hospitals (and in the department store
security camera), the scheme allows a minimum investment of power while
providing a maximum perception of observation.
In each of the formulae domini listed above, those being “dominated”
became ever more susceptible to observation and evaluation. The arrangement of school children in neat
rows, for example, not only reinforces the teacher/student power relation but
also allows the teacher to instantly examine the status of all students and to
make comparisons among them. The
Panopticon enables control to be exerted even without the presence of an
authority figure, for one can never be sure when one is being observed. Here, too, one sees the transference of the
visible (through ceremonies, rituals, costumes) power of the king to an
anonymous, unlocatable authority: “There
is a machine that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who
exercises power” (202).
Foucault goes on to claim that delinquency, spawned by the
penal system’s failure, is used by that very system to infiltrate society, to
provide information about further illicit activities, to supervise the “whole
social field” (281). He concludes that
the carceral system has been transferred to institutions not ordinarily
associated with punishment (i.e., education and medicine): “The judges of normality are present
everywhere” (304).
Commentary/Associations
The author is versed in the Saussurean vocabulary of
“sign,” “signifier,” and “signifying system” (128), repeatedly invoking the
terms to describe various power relations and events. In seeing the infiltration of society by the
systems and agents of the normative power, he is also in dialog with himself.[13] He suggests a restructuring of
illegalities with the rise of the capitalist system, and the reader would
benefit from at least a passing familiarity with Marx.
Absent from Foucault’s study is an examination of the role
of religion in normalizing social behavior.
The author early on dismisses the Christian soul (“illusion of
theologians” [30]) as something born for punishment, seeing the secular one
instead as the “effect and instrument of a political anatomy” (30), something born
out of punishment. He thus forgoes the
opportunity to examine an invisible, omnipresent (and conceptually more ancient
than any of the sources he cites) God as the ultimate Panopticon. He thereby also elides the Judaeo-Christian
tradition of inscribing power relations both on the body (the mark of Cain,
circumcision, Samson’s hair, the Crucifixion) and on the soul (Matt. 6:6, Rom.
1:9).
Walter Benjamin, “The Origin of the German Tragic Drama”
Julie Koser
First conceived in 1916 and composed between 1924 and 1925 (Steiner 7), Benjamin’s (1892-1940) Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel was turned down as Habilitationsschrift for the University of Frankfurt, but did appear in book form in