[note: updated at noon on Monday with stuff from today’s class]
Very quickly, I wanted to address some of your index cards from last time:
MODE OF INSTRUCTION: a couple of you addressed the general question of how I teach the material. Two students mentioned that I talk too fast, making it hard to digest the concepts and take good notes. One went further, expressing frustration that I digress and/or fail to address arguments and questions squarely. I will certainly try to slow down and have more discipline about sticking to the main line of arguments. There are two limitations, however, that are hard to completely overcome:
a) insofar as I successfully get you to participate, there will be some digression, since inevitably you students raise unpredictable and sometimes tangential questions/exceptions/issues, and that’s fantastic. It’s my job to keep us on topic, but I don’t want to do so with such a strong hand, that it turns into a lecture with 25 passive students. So I’ll keep working on this and feel free to check in via notecard/office hours/email if you have ongoing concerns
b) this stuff is really, really hard. There’s only so clear it can be to someone who’s coming at it for the first time. As the Culler reading that we read in September states, “theory” is a body of knowledge in which each piece assumes knowledge about a lot of other pieces. So I hope some things become clearer as we go (e.g., Lacan becomes clearer after reading Saussure and Althusser), but inevitably we will all feel like we’re missing some aspects of mastery by the end of the course (including myself).
What is a camera obscura in the Marxist sense? Are there modern analogues to this metaphor?
Interesting question. Marx’s metaphor uses a familiar technology of the era and emphasizes that “ideology” is something that the subject is within in some sense: as with Plato’s cave metaphor, Marx emphasizes that ideology gives us the real, but in ways that also cut us off from its context. I’m not sure what’s a better analogy in the 21st C: ideology so saturates everyday life for us in ways that Marx couldn’t have anticipated. Our smartphones and TVs and tablets make me think that the “screen” is the best candidate: the space that combines fantasy and reality (illusion/allusion as Althusser says), that connects us to others while dissociating us, that provides us with a wealth of information and an equal wealth of disinformation.
You say Benjamin views “distraction” positively, yet that he warns that it can be used by fascism. So is distraction positive or negative?
This may have been a moment I rambled/went too quickly. For Benjamin, “distraction” names the opposite of “absorption,” the mode of attention that he associates with “aura.” The auratic art object takes us over, especially in a ritual context, and turns off our critical capacities to a great extent. B likes “distraction” (his example is the way people process the “program” of a building, through semi-conscious, practical navigation of the structure over and over) because it fails to dominate our consciousness and allows for a more critical mode of perception. Fascism manages to make the mechanically reproduced object (the films of Riefenstahl, the radio addresses of Hitler, the poster art of Goebbels) spectacular or “aesthetic” in ways that create the ritualized “absorptive” reaction that is associated with aura. Benjamin proposes a counter-force in the form of art that is “politicized,” fostering a critical response, whereby part of us distractedly thinks about the ideologies behind the work of art, the institutions that produced it, and so on, even as we’re experiencing the film or photograph or poster. It’s debatable whether all his assumptions about aura, absorption, etc. hold up, but I think if B were reading over my shoulder, he’d agree that the above captures his argument.
Very long question on “aura”: to paraphrase, can 21stC cultural technologies recreate “aura” for old images. For example, the experiment in which 3D printing was used, along with complex algorithms, to paint a Rembrandt-like portrait.
This is a cool question and anticipates the work of Kittler and other theorists of new media, which we’ll look at in December. Within the terms of Benjamin’s argument, the vanishing of aura in the era of “mechanical reproducibility” is a one-way street. But subsequent critics have examined the phenomenon with more nuance, especially in light of digital technologies that really make us question the idea of any kind of “original” or “authenticity.” Jean Baudrillard, the French poststructuralist, joked that Disneyland exists in order to distract us from the fact that Los Angeles doesn’t really exist (i.e., it’s all simulation, copies of copies that have no original). The example you choose would seem better positioned to prove the theoretical argument that, in the era of mechanical reproduction, the media themselves are more important than the texts they communicate: Marshall McLuhan memorably summed this up, “The medium is the message.” Here, a focus on Rembrandt as “message” is trumped by the algorithms and the printing tech as “medium.”
Is the three-layered model of experience that Althusser takes from Jacques Lacan (REAL-IMAGINARY-SYMBOLIC) similar to Nietzsche’s work on language as a “prison house”?
Damn, you’re good. It’s certainly the case that Lacan emphasizes that the price the subject pays for becoming an “individual” is subjection to the “symbolic” (basically what Saussure calls “langue,” the rules that govern what makes a sensible statement in language, or any other sign system). In a revision of Freud’s Oedipus complex, Lacan argues that the subject gives up his/her primary relationship to the mother, with its pre-linguistic, image-based and unbounded state, for a more bounded self that must ask for recognition from others via the rules of the Symbolic. And having to know and be known through the pre-given terms of the symbolic (or ideology in Althusser’s terms) confines one in various frustrating ways. So, for example, as Fanon faces the ideology of race and color, he finds himself very much “imprisoned” and unable to experience a full, free subjectivity.
Is interpellation essentially just internalizing and “individuating” that which is socially ingrained in us?
Yes. If I’m understanding you, the “hailing” of ideology demands that we answer, and our answer “subjects” us to the terms of the dominant ideology, but in ways that make us feel like we’re exercising free choice. When I choose a wife and say “I do,” I feel free but ignore the fact that I didn’t choose the heteronorm (the expectation that a man will choose a woman), the custom of marriage itself, the formulation “I do,” and so on.
Which comes first, an ideology or its material embodiment? Can we know? Does it matter?
On some level, it’s unknowable and doesn’t matter: ideology always combines what we think of as “spiritual” and “material” aspects. Althusser emphasizes the materiality of ideology because he’s working against several centuries of Western thought that privileges ideas over materialities. His point is that what makes ideology so powerful is not that its ideas or arguments are so compelling; it’s that they are conveyed through everyday rituals and practices that we hardly notice but that are all the more powerful for that reason. Hence the genuflection in church, the handshake, the standing in line at the DMV, the purchase of a moccacchino (sp?).