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Example research essay topic: Mode Of Production Means Of Production - 1,148 words

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ter>Sam Vaknin's Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web Sites With the exception of Nietzsche, no other madman has contributed so much to human sanity as has Louis Althusser. He is mentioned twice in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as someone's teacher. There could be no greater lapse: for two important decades (the 60 s and the 70 s), Althusser was at the eye of all the important cultural storms. He fathered quite a few of them. This newly-found obscurity forces me to summarize his work before suggesting a few (minor) modifications to it. (1) Society consists of practices: economic, political and ideological. Althusser defines a practice as: "Any process of transformation of a determinate product, affected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of production) " The economic practice (the historically specific mode of production) transforms raw materials to finished products using human labour and other means of production, all organized within defined webs of inter-relations.

The political practice does the same with social relations as the raw materials. Finally, ideology is the transformation of the way that a subject relates to his real life conditions of existence. This is a rejection of the mechanistic worldview (replete with bases and superstructures). It is a rejection of the Marxist theor ization of ideology. It is a rejection of the Hegelian fascist "social totality." It is a dynamic, revealing, modern day model. In it, the very existence and reproduction of the social base (not merely its expression) is dependent upon the social superstructure.

The superstructure is "relatively autonomous" and ideology has a central part in it - see entry about Marx and Engels and entry concerning Hegel. The economic structure is determinant but another structure could be dominant, depending on the historical conjuncture. Determination (now called over-determination - see Note) specifies the form of economic production upon which the dominant practice depends. Put otherwise: the economic is determinant not because the practices of the social formation (political and ideological) are the social formation's expressive epiphenomena - but because it determines WHICH of them is dominant. (2) People relate to the conditions of existence through the practice of ideology. Contradictions are smoothed over and (real) problems are offered false (though seemingly true) solutions.

Thus, ideology has a realistic dimension - and a dimension of representations (myths, concepts, ideas, images). There is (harsh, conflicting) reality - and the way that we represent it both to ourselves and to others. (3) To achieve the above, ideology must not be seen to err or, worse, remain speechless. It, therefore, confronts and poses (to itself) only answerable questions. This way, it remains confined to a fabulous, legendary, contradiction-free domain. It ignores other questions altogether. (4) Althusser introduced the concept of "The Problematic": "The objective internal reference... the system of questions commanding the answers given" It determines which problems, questions and answers are part of the game - and which should be blacklisted and never as much as mentioned.

It is a structure of theory (ideology), a framework and the repertoire of discourses which - ultimately - yield a text or a practice. All the rest is excluded. It, therefore, becomes clear that what is omitted is of no less importance than what is included in a text. The problematic of a text relates to its historical context ("moment") by incorporating both: inclusions as well as omissions, presences as much as absences. The problematic of the text fosters the generation of answers to posed questions - and of defective answers to excluded questions. (5) The task of "scientific" (e. g. , Marxist) discourse, of Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the problematic, to read through ideology and evidence the real conditions of existence.

This is a "symptomatic reading" of TWO TEXTS: "It divulges the un divulged event in the text that it reads and, in the same movement, relates to it a different text, present, as a necessary absence, in the first... (Marx's reading of Adam Smith) presupposes the existence of two texts and the measurement of the first against the second. But what distinguishes this new reading from the old, is the fact that in the new one, the second text is articulated with the lapses in the first text... (Marx measures) the problematic contained in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any questions posed. " Althusser is contrasting the manifest text with a latent text which is the result of the lapses, distortions, silences and absences in the manifest text. The latent text is the "diary of the struggle" of the unposed question to be posed and answered. (6) Ideology is a practice with lived and material dimensions. It has costumes, rituals, behaviour patterns, ways of thinking. The State employs Ideological Apparatuses (ISAs) to reproduce ideology through practices and productions: (organized) religion, the education system, the family, (organized) politics, the media, the industries of culture. "All ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constructing' concrete individuals as subjects" Subjects to what? The answer: to the material practices of the ideology.

This (the creation of subjects) is done by the acts of "hailing" or "interpellation." These are acts of attracting attention (hailing), forcing the individuals to generate meaning (interpretation) and making them participate in the practice. These theoretical tools were widely used to analyze the Advertising and the film industries. The ideology of consumption (which is, undeniably, the most material of all practices) uses advertising to transform individuals to subjects ( = to consumers). It uses advertising to interpellate them.

The advertisements attract attention, force people to introduce meaning to them and, as a result, to consume. The most famous example is the use of "People like you (buy this or do that) " in ads. The reader / viewer is interpellated both as an individual ("you") and as a member of a group ("people like... "). He occupies the empty (imaginary) space of the "you" in the ad.

This is ideological "mis recognition." First, many others mis recognize themselves as that "you" (an impossibility in the real world). Secondly, the mis recognized "you" exists only in the ad because it was created by it, it has no real world correlate. The reader or viewer of the ad is transformed into the subject of (and subject to) the material practice of the ideology (consumption, in this case). Althusser was a Marxist. The dominant mode of production in his days (and even more so today) was capitalism. His implied criticism of the material dimensions of ideological practices should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

Interpellated by the ideology of Marxism himself, he generalized on his personal experience and described ideologies as infallible, omnipotent, ever successful. Ideologies, to him, were impeccably functioning machines which can always be relied upon to reproduce subjects with all the habits and thought patterns required by the dominant mode...


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