Day 4

Name quiz!

Blog Schedule posted

Althusser:

• Althusser contends that ideology has a material existence because "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" (Lenin 112). Ideology always manifests itself through actions, which are "inserted into practices"
• Althusser makes it clear that the "becoming-subject" happens even before we are born. 
• Through education, each mass of individuals that leaves the educational system at various junctures (the laborers who leave the system early, the petty bourgeoisie who leave after their B.A.s, and the leaders who complete further specialist training) enters the work force with the ideology necessary for the reproduction of the current system: "Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfill in class society"
•  The very importance of this function is why schools are invested in hiding their true purpose through an obfuscating ideology: "an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is...lay), where teachers respectful of the 'conscience' and 'freedom' of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their 'parents' (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their 'liberating' virtues" (Lenin 105-06). So pervasive is this ideology, according to Althusser, that "those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they 'teach' against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped... are a kind of hero" 

In other words, every product of our culture (how we speak, movies, books, art, education, work) is enforcing the "rules" that govern the way we do everything, even as it creates the rules.

Example:

• "Polite Society" 
• Sexual education
• Gender performance

Movies are an example of an ISA--they subtly write and enforce the rules of the dominant class

Based on this theory, is a movie that depicts an earlier time a product of the time the movie was made or the time that was filmed?  Example: the movie Dracula filmed in 1992 depicts fictional events of late 1880's Victorian England--Does it promote the culture of the Victorian era or that of American 1990s?  Why?


Homework:

Watch the following:

Feel free to ignore the first 50 seconds of the last video.  The creator of the video sets the video up as if it were a hypothetical, but it actually happened.  So, mostly, he just wasted 50 seconds and confused pretty much anyone who didn't know the film(s) in question to begin with.