Response to Ideology Takes a Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture

Chip Rhodes defends Althusser's scientific belief that the subject is a bearer of structures and opposes the humanist claim that the subject functions independently of its contexts. However, recent work in cultural studies examines how identity is constructed and allows us to reconcile the scientific and the humanist view. Ideological interpellation may define our subject positions but we are still able to refuse them. For instance, Rhodes' account of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off " assumes that the subject is a fully interpellated, adolescent, Anglo, middle or upper class, heterosexual male. However, the film also offers various oppositional subject positions, including adolescent female or Hispanic, working class youth. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/6 Response to Ideology Takes A Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture Janet Staiger University of Texas at Austin This fine essay by Chip Rhodes details both the limitations and possibilities of revised Althusserian Marxism for use by those interested in theory and practice of historical change. Althusser's privileging of some aesthetics to the denigation of others has troubled many cultural critics, but, in my opinion, unjustly. As Rhodes suggests, it may be possible to recognize the overdetermined and contradictory character and the unevenness of even popular texts, opening sites for resistance. What does concern me, however, is how Rhodes describes where the possibilities exist for his revision of Althusser. Specifically, he contrasts "a strict Althusserian approach [which] should conceive of texts and subjects as both the bearers of structures" with a humanist approach that "affirms the existence of a subject that can be distinguished from its social context." Rhodes claims this opposition is an unfruitful one. Instead, what we need to do is start to read popular texts in a new Althusserian mode by elucidating how they provide subject positions for pleasurable consumption. This new mode would, he thinks, thus include the aesthetics ignored in Althusser's original presentation. Rhodes concludes by arguing that even the popular text only offers a contradictory opportunity for the subject as he asserts the dialectic to be inevitable, a simple, irrefutable outcome of a Marxist theory of history. In attempting to make his argument, Rhodes neglects the signal importance of Althusser's description of the interpellation process, which specifically distinguishes between the individual and the subject. Althusser stresses that the function of ideology is to "hail" the individual to take up a subject position in a structural relation. Both the terms of "individual" and "subject" are theoretical-humans are never individuals in the abstract. Rather humans are always in process, moving from subject position to subject position. Yet simultaneously, subject positions are also theoretical. They are sites of structural relations, but Althusser's formulation suggests the possibility of refusal to take up a proffered position, to not recognize the ritual of a handshake or a calling by name. lie writes: 1 Staiger: Response to Ideology Takes a Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture Published by New Prairie Press 56 STCL, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1994) I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects. (Lenin 171; italics in original) Consequently, Althusser creates the problematic description (because of its Lacanian foundations) of "hailing" individuals: "all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. . . . I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it `recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or `transforms' the individuals into s u b j e c t s (it transforms them all) . . . " (173-74). As these passages continue, Althusser may not suggest any free will or unlimited agency on the part of individuals in connection with those hailings which they recognize to be addressed to them, but it seems to me that this is the place for a meeting between a "strict Althusserian" approach and a "humanist" one. Much of the work of cultural studies has been to understand how identities (also to be thought of as subject positions) are constructed for individuals. Althusser even provides the explanation for the variety of identities/subject positions available. The ISAs are private, they are plural, and they function by ideology. They are, for Althusser, "the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle" (147). Like some other writers, I prefer to think of ideologies as having progressive and reactionary potentials, depending upon the transformation of ideologies through their encounters with subjects in historical contexts.' This is because I believe that while individuals are constituted as subjects, they are also capable of recognizing contradiction and structured oppression to the point of (at least) resisting. Yet as Jonathan Dollimore writes, it would be also a mistake to consider history as so unstable as to be at every moment capable of revolution: "So the critique of ideology identifies the contingency of the social (it could always be otherwise), and its potential instability (ruling groups doubly contested from without and within), but does not underestimate the difficulty of change (existing social arrangements are powerfully invested and are not easily made otherwise)" (87). How is this possible? I think it is possible because of two features built into the Althusserian model. One is the contradictory nature of any specific ideology that will attempt to hail concrete individuals to take up specific subject positions; the second is that individuals may not recognize or may reject their being hailed as those subjects. While we 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 18, Iss. 1 [1994], Art. 6 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/6 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1338