Silencing Interpellation: Gorin, Althusser and the Ideological State Apparatus

Abstract

It’s well known that Jean-Pierre Gorin studied with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault and that the former’s deconstruction of Marx’s Base-Superstructure model into an autonomous, unconscious duality of the Ideological State Apparatus (I.S.A.) and Repressive State Apparatus (R.S.A.) played a key structural and formal role in four important Dziga Vertov Group films: Pravda (1970), Vent d’est, 1970), Lotte in Italia, 1971), and Vladimir and Rosa (1971). In all four cases, the use of silence acts as an intrusive stutter or multiplicitous AND that creates an epistemological rupture in the seeming uniformity of the I.S.A., sparking a deterritorializing vector into alternative modes of thinking and production that help to challenge and foreground the reactionary role of interpellation as a creator of hegemonic consensus. In Lotte in Italia, for example, a young bourgeois radical, Paola Taviani, is critiqued for her lack of political consciousness by inserting black leader and sound drop-outs into images of her daily life as a daughter, teacher, and politico. These are subsequently filled in by images and sounds of the means of production – factories and workers – that make her life possible so that she becomes aware of the interpellating strategies that ‘absorb’ her into bourgeois ideology.