‘How far can the acts of recognition daily performed in the practical activity of women and men be informed by or produce an understanding of the nature of the social process in which they are caught up? To a large extent the possibility or otherwise of a cognitive artistic practice which can aim to produce understanding about the world stands or falls on the answer to this question.
… the Althusserian position claims that the attempt to represent the social formation can produce only “the natural world of the dominant ideology”. Behind this view lie two crucial concepts developed by Althusser, first, “ideology in general” and second, “the ideological category of the subject”. Althusser proposes a distinction between “ideology in general”, which is necessary to the functioning of any society, and specific ideologies belonging to particular social formations at particular points in their history – bourgeois ideology, for instance. “Ideology in general” is theorised as a material force rather than merely a set of false ideas circulating in people’s heads that should by now have been changed by Socialist teaching and example. It acts as a material support to specific ideologies, and is a structure providing the necessary mediation between (1) the forces and relations of production, (2) the social institutions they give rise to, and (3) the individuals who have to live through them.
Ideology enables men and women to make sense of their world and feel in control of it. However, it is in their practical activity rather than in their ideas that ideology materialises itself… ideology is a necessary component of human society; “it is not an abberation or a contingent excrescence of History; it is a structure essential to the historical life of societies.
Ideology is able to materialise itself in the activities of women and men precisely because they operate under the illusion of being concrete individuals at the center of and to a mesure initiating their lived experience, because they perform the daily acts of recognition which maintain and perpetuate the structures and institutions of the social formation” (Gledhill, 829-830)
Just an extract of stuff I’ve been reading for an essay on women and cinema + myths + althusser and it explained stuff clearer than other writers.
why the picture of laika? because i read this article today and it broke my heart. plus today, 50 yrs ago, laika went into space. and its more interesting than reading about cup day.
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