Ideology Takes a Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture

Abstract

As theories of mass culture that focus on empowerment, use value and utopian bribes have become increasingly popular, Althusser's groundbreaking work on structural causality and ideology has been left aside because of its alleged inability to account for social resistance. This is unfortunate because such Althusserian concepts still provide the most productive foundation for a Marxist approach to mass culture that avoids both unwitting apologetics and facile, ethical critiques. Nevertheless, many of Althusser's theoretical claims are in need of revision. As the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off implicitly suggests, Althusser's distinction between ideology and the aesthetic no longer holds in consumer-oriented capitalism. In addition, the film undermines Althusser's assertion that the schools are the most powerful ISA under capitalism, suggesting instead that mass culture now fulfills this function under late capitalism. Moreover, this reshuffling of the ideological hierarchy necessarily produces a fresh set of concrete, historically specific contradictions. These contradictions, in turn, provide new possibilities for resistance and social change. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/5 Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture Chip Rhodes SUNY at Stony Brook Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation among men and their 'world,' that is the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence. -Marxism and Humanism In the move within cultural studies toward the effacement of the distinction between high and low culture, the Althusserian theory of ideology has become something that one moves beyond. In this theory's implications many critics have detected the creeping specter of the culture industry's conception of texts, with its supposed vision of the masses as lambs led unwittingly to the slaughter. In its place, a variety of modes of reading the popular (in John Fiske' s phrase) have gained popularity that focus on empowerment, use value, and utopian bribes and seek to bring what Fredric Jameson calls dialectical criticism into the study of mass culture. It will be the argument of this paper that these two recognizable poles of cultural criticism-the conspiracy theories of massive interpellation of an essentially docile public, and the populist theories of a more savvy public that picks and chooses according to its needs and desires-represent a false choice between structuralism without agency and humanism with. In this reduction, Althusser's groundbreaking work on ideology, structural causality, relative autonomy and overdetermination is either ignored or misconstrued. Using these conceptual tools, this essay will attempt the following: first, to articulate an Althusserian approach to mass culture that draws on both Althusser's work on ideology and his less influential work on the aesthetic; second, to update much of what Althusser says specifically about the contours of ideology under capitalism, focusing in particular on the rise of mass culture. I will begin with a discussion of a standard critique of Althusser and then move on to those alternative models that focus largely on struggle at the level of consumption. Then I will discuss a film (Ferris Bueller's Day 00 at length because it points in the direction that an 1 Rhodes: Ideology Takes a Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture Published by New Prairie Press 40 STCL, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1994) elaboration of Althusser's work must go in order to deal with the increasingly dominant role played by mass culture within the ISAs as a whole. More concretely, I hope to use the film to show how mass culture's widespread success in producing consumer desire in contemporary America requires a revamped Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation that includes the aesthetic. This project, again, need not import concepts from outside Althusserian Marxism. It is quite consistent with Althusser's model of ideology in general, even if it takes issue with some of its particulars. The ultimate goal is to produce knowledge about what he calls in Reading Capital the mechanism of of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production (66).