Originally Posted by Geewiz
Oh gosh - I'm gonna lose many of you.
Some easy stuff:
1. I worked in fed anti-fraud word for much of my working life while in the evening worked inn the arts. From the art perspective, I abhor censorship. From anti-fraud work - I can tell you that, aside from obvious "bad guys," folks who you would consider are "good" are capable of doing stuff to get themselves in serious legal trouble.
2. Folks with serious mental problems (many not so obvious) and weapons - from guns to fertilizer - are not a good mix. That's so clear, it's a "duh." How we fix that is very political and I'm not getting into that debate.
But, why "normal" folks behave the way they do - good or bad - is interesting and very complex.
Here is where I may lose some of you...but, if you hang in there, the work will be worth it. This is a summary of Louis Pierre Althusser's ideas - if you research him you may hate many of his ideas...but, this bit is very good and hard to understand...still, worth trying:
Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements, and so forth are the products of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image.
Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious, "responsible" agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.
For Althusser, however, a person's capacity for perceiving him or herself in this way is not innate or given. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject.
Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give him or her an idea of the range of properties that he or she can have, and of the limits of each individual.
Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories.
In Althusser's view, our values, desires, and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects.
Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations, and most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate.
There is, however, no single ISA that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.
Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as Althusser states, "ideology has no history".
All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of "hailing" or "interpellation," which draws heavily from Lacan and his concept of the Mirror Stage.
He compares ideology to a policeman shouting "Hey you there!" toward a person walking on the street. Upon hearing this call, the person responds by turning around and in doing so, is transformed into a subject.
The person is conscious of being a subject and aware of the other person. Thus, for Althusser, being aware of other people is a form of ideology. Within that, Althusser sees subjectivity as a type of ideology. The person being hailed recognizes him or herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond.
Althusser calls this recognition a "mis-recognition" (méconnaissance), because it works retroactively: a material individual is always already an ideological subject, even before he or she is born.
The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always already happened; Althusser here acknowledges a debt to Spinoza's theory of immanence. To highlight this, Althusser offers the example of Christian religious ideology, embodied in the Voice of God, instructing a person on what his place in the world is and what he must do to be reconciled with Christ.
From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify himself as a Christian, he must first already be a subject; that is, by responding to God's call and following
His rules, he affirms himself as a free agent, the author of the acts for which he assumes responsibility. We cannot recognize ourselves outside of ideology, and in fact, our very actions reach out to this overarching structure. For Althusser, we acquire our identities by seeing ourselves mirrored in ideologies.
Further, Althusser advances two theses on ideology: "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence"; and "Ideology has a material existence". The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based.
The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious "representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses.
Central to the view of individuals as responsible subjects is the notion of an explanatory link between belief and action, that “every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing in the 'ideas' that his 'consciousness' inspires in him and freely accepts, must act according to his ideas", must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice.”
For Althusser, this is yet another effect of social practice:
"I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into his material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which we derive the ideas of that subject...Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, describing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.”
These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus. ISAs may also anticipate Foucault's disciplinary institutions, which provide a critical rethinking of Althusser.
Althusser also recognized the role played by what he termed the "Repressive State Apparatus" (RSA). According to Althusser, the basic function of the RSA (heads of state, government, police, courts, army, etc.) is to intervene and act in favour of the ruling class by repressing the ruled class through violent and coercive means. The RSA is controlled by the ruling class, because more often than not, the ruling class possesses state power. He accentuates the differences between the RSA and the ISAs as follows:
1. The RSA functions as a unified entity (an organized whole) as opposed to the ISA, which is diverse and plural. However, what unites the disparate ISAs is the fact that they are ultimately controlled by the ruling ideology.
2. The RSA functions predominantly by means of repression and violence and secondarily by ideology, whereas the ISAs function predominantly by ideology and secondarily by repression and violence. The ISAs function in a concealed and a symbolic manner.
At times when individuals and groups pose a threat to the dominant order, the state invokes the Repressive State Apparatus. The most benign measures taken by the RSA are the systems of law and courts, where putatively public contractual language is invoked in order to govern individual and collective behaviour. As threats to the dominant order mount, the state turns to increasingly physical and severe measures in response: incarceration, police force, and ultimately military intervention.
Perry Anderson, in his essay "Considerations on Western Marxism", writes that
"despite the huge popularity gained by the concept in many circles, ISA as a concept was never theorised by Althusser himself in any serious manner. It was merely conceived as a conjunctural and temporary tool to challenge the contemporary liberalism within the French Communist Party. A further elaboration of the concept in the hands of Nicos Paulantzas was easily demolished by Ralph Miliband in the exchanges over the pages of New Left Review. For, if all the institutions of civil society are conceptualised as part of the state, then a mere electoral victory of a left wing student organisation in a University can also be said to be a victory over a part of the state!"
The point is that folks behave in a good or bad manner due to a a variety of outside influences ... some the state can try to control; but most the state can only try to control.
For better or worse we have created a society that provides us with certain freedoms and with those freedoms comes a loss of control of the ideology that governs behavior. Simplistic solutions and easy judgments will not solve complex problems. People do what people do and unless we are willing to surrender certain basic freedoms - we will have to learn to accept the social cost - even if that means more Newtowns and Auroras.
Cheers!
|
01-08-2013, 08:22 AM
and that means...
MOM
