28 Culture, Ideology and Technology: Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Dollimore

Mr. Sk Sagir Ali

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dollimore uses Freud’s theory of civilization that is a kind of superstructure built upon the base of repressed, perverse instincts that will come again within the official domain of culture, weakening its traditions, disrupting its hierarchies of values, and introducing an element of conflict which cannot be resolved within the dialectic of civilization. Dollimore and Sinfield with their co-edited collection Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1994) has proved that Cultural Materialism in Britain and New Historicism in America constitute a ‘new academic order’ in the Renaissance studies. According to them, ‘culture’ in ‘cultural materialism’ is ‘analytic’, scientific, rather than ‘evaluative’ since it ‘does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production’. Dollimore and Sinfield argue that cultural materialism has a political leaning of a ‘commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class’. (1994 :viii) Dollimore stresses the importance of optional modes of textual analysis in the material mechanisms of cultural production. Individual authors and texts are no longer an autonomous entity. Rather, Dollimore denied believing ‘that the real struggle is always elsewhere than in the text’, and suggested that ‘many struggles are not textual’. ( 1990: 92- 94) Sinfield offers a brief summary of the function of cultural materialism :

Cultural materialists investigate the historical conditions in which textual representations are produced, circulated and received. They engage with questions about the relations between dominant and subordinate cultures… the scope for subaltern resistance, and the modes through which the system tends to accommodate or repel diverse kinds of dissidence. In this approach, the terms ‘art’ and ‘literature’ … are neither spontaneous nor innocent. They are … strategies for conferring authority upon certain representations, and hence upon certain viewpoints.

Dollimore’s major focus of sexual dissidence is observed at the ‘points’ where cultural materialism and a frame of references – ‘biography, literary and cultural theory, theodicy, social history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminism, and … lesbian and gay studies’ – ‘intersect with, but sometimes also contest each other’ (1991: 21) But, Dollimore has shown some earnest desire in the study of death and desire in Western culture, from classical antiquity to the present. Though his Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1999) is stimulated by the cultural politics, it succumbs more to cultural materialism, material mechanisms of cultural production. Dollimore insisted on cultural materialism’s commitment to the reversal of the entire social structure. In analyzing the relation of literature to history, in which historical aspects are dissected not merely as the backdrop of the text but as being embedded in some ways through textual interests and discourses, cultural materialism shows how meaning is not timeless but the variegated product of several ideological and discursive structures, space and time with the fractures of ideology and subversion of power.

As long as we live in a society that is governed by capitalist economy, ideology, perversion, dominant and subordinate cultures and dynamic character of technology , we will not be able to understand the literature and culture of that society without thinkers like Althusser, Benjamin and Dollimore.

Reference

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