Tuesday, 13 August 2019

We ‘misrepresent the world in ideology’ because we want to do so, because there is some reward or benefit to us in doing so!'

You've Got Mail | As an Example of a Product of Mass Culture

Any discussion on ideology would sure prove grossly inadequate and incomplete without invoking the name of the awesome Althusser!

And any discussion on Althusser would possibly allude much to his student Foucault too! And for added info, it would do well to remember that Macherey, whose Theory of Literary Production we’d discussed in our previous post was also an admirer and devoted student of Althusser!

I should also add to say that it was Louis Althusser who was quite instrumental in reconstructing and reinterpreting the legendary Marx for the lay soul, the literary soul, and the philosophical soul alike, with such simple and refined elegance! 

One reason why, one of his most celebrated of essays, titled, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, (1969) elaborates much on the Marxist conception of ideology! This essay also bespeaks to how ideology interpellates individuals as human subjects!

[Well, in his extended notes to the concept of Agency, in an invaluable reference tool titled, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Bill Ashcroft has given us the three chief means by which human subjectivity is constructed. I quote Bill: ‘human subjectivity is constructed by ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan), or discourse (Foucault), the corollary is that any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a consequence of those things!]

So now let’s begin with Althusser!

‘Althusser’s most influential contribution to literary and cultural studies has been his theory of ideology’, says Luke Ferretter!

And this Althusserian concept of ideology is first explicated in Althusser’s essay, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, published in the year 1963. In this essay he defines ideology as, ‘a system of representations, (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and a role within a given society'.

Giving below, Ferretter’s take on ideology from Althusser’s perspective, for y’all –

Here goes Ferretter –

Althusser means that ideology is primarily the kind of discourse that we do not consciously appropriate for ourselves, rationally judging it to be true. It is not the kind of discourse to which, having critically reflected upon it, a person makes a conscious act of assent. Rather, ideology comprises the stream of discourses, images and ideas that are all around us all the time, into which we are born, in which we grow up, and in which we live, think and act.

Ferretter continues –

The messages of the advertisements by which we are constantly surrounded, for example – the images of a healthy family relationship, of a mother’s role, appearance, weight, hairstyle, reading matter, interests, and so on, of the ideal male and female bodies, of the ideal clothes, lifestyle, home, eating habits, entertainments, of the way in which we are supposed to think, look, and want – all these are examples of ideology in Althusser’s sense. It comes to us primarily in the form of obviousness – common sense, popular opinion, what everybody thinks, what we take for granted.

Continues Ferretter, Western culture is better than Muslim culture; people should get married and have children, especially women; the British are fundamentally decent, tolerant people; hard work brings success. All these assumptions, insofar as they remain assumptions, rather than becoming objects of critical reflection, are examples of the kind of sub-conscious conceptual framework that constitutes ideology.

To Althusser then, says Ferretter, ‘ideology is the way in which people understand their world!’ Or in other words, ‘the set of discourses in whose terms we understand our experience – it constitutes the world of our experience, our ‘world’ itself’.

And he opines that we ‘misrepresent the world in ideology’ because we want to do so, because there is some reward or benefit to us in doing so! A general does not send his men out to die for their country, without firmly believing that it is their duty to do so!

Ferretter is awesome for me, on many counts! He applies Althusser’s theory of ideology for the study of culture, and how! ;-)

Follow the storyline now, to know howww and the wowww of it all!  

Let’s for a moment, get back on track to memory lane, down the days, down a time travel of two decades ago, when the romcom You’ve Got Mail hit our silver screens! Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were the vibrant pair who made such an impact on their roles as Kathleen and Joe! ain’t they!


Well, Ferretter takes up this movie as an example of a ‘product of mass culture’, in which, a representation of an imaginary relationship to real conditions of existence is offered to the reader.


The heroine of this film, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), owns a small children’s bookshop in the Upper West Side of New York. The hero, Joe Fox, (Tom Hanks), owns a giant chain of bookshops, which puts Kathleen out of business. The traumatic effect of this on her and her employees is emphasized – she says: ‘I feel as if a part of me had died … and no-one can ever make it right’.

Nevertheless Kathleen and Joe unwittingly fall in love over the internet, as they correspond anonymously in an internet chat room.

Once Joe finds out that it is Kathleen he has been writing to, he pursues her. Just before the final scene, in which Kathleen also realizes who she has been writing to, the question of the relation between their economic relationship and their romantic relationship is explicitly raised:


Joe: If I hadn’t been Fox Books and you hadn’t been The Shop Around The Corner, and you and I had just … met.

Kathleen: I know …

In this penultimate speech, it seems that their position in capitalist society defines them. Their lives are determined by the material conditions that follow from their place in the system of production relations. But in the next scene we discover that this is not true. Kathleen finds out that it is Joe with whom she has fallen in love, tells him, ‘I wanted it to be you so badly’, and the film finishes with a close-up kiss.

It transpires, in other words, that at the level of what really matters in human life, Joe is not Fox Books and Kathleen is not The Shop Around The Corner. Their places in the production relations of the capitalist society in which they live do not determine who they are. Fundamentally, they are individuals, centres of emotion and desire, who will be fulfilled above all by an emotional relationship with another individual.

In Althusser’s terms, the film represents for its viewers an imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence. In reality, our lives are determined in every respect by the capitalist system of production relations within which we live. You’ve Got Mail, however, articulates the ideological claim that this is not the case. Economic relations, it tells us, are only a secondary and inessential part of who we ‘really are’; it is our emotional relationships that constitute our most fundamental reality.

This romantic comedy, continues Ferretter, deals too explicitly with capitalism before effacing its significance in comparison to the love of the heroine and hero to be a ‘good’ example of the genre. As Macherey pointed out in his analysis of Verne, there are realities of which ideologies cannot speak. In the ideology of romantic love, economic relations can only be mentioned insofar as they are superseded by personal relations!

To be continued… 

images: amazondotcom, nytimesdotcom

No comments:

Post a Comment