CIN301Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: The German Ideology, Friedrich Engels, Raymond Williams
Apparatus theory
● Basic definitions of ideology from Raymond Williams, Marx and Literature:
○ A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular group or class
○ A system of illusory beliefs—false ideas or false consciousness—which
can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge
○ The general process of meanings and ideas
● “Towards a Semiotics of the Cinema” (1964)
○ Problem of film images as analogical, continuous signs
■ Absence of difference
■ “A critic wanting to treat the cinema as a language... would
therefore need to begin by working out whether in the filmic
continuum there are elements which are not analogical, or whose
analogical character has been deformed, transposed or codified;
elements which are structured in such a way that they can be
treated as fragments of language.”
○ Shift from sign to syntagm
■ “The syntagm is as responsible for meaning as the sign itself...”
■ “Exchanges between linguistics and cinema are possible, provided
you choose a linguistics of the syntagm rather than a linguistics of
the sign.” (280)
○ Suspension of meaning: deferral, play, and posing questions rather than
fixing definitions/determination or providing answers focused on single
outcomes
■ “Man is so fatally bound to meaning that freedom in art might seem
to consist, especially nowadays, not so much in creating meaning
as in suspending it; in constructing meanings without, however,
making them rounded and complete.” (281)
● Christian Metz
○ Why cinema is a language, but not a language system (langue)?
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■ Cinema only allows for deferred conversation, not two-way
conversation
■ Cinema lacks the equivalent of the arbitrary linguistic sign
■ Cinematic images are not doubly-articulated in the same manner as
written/spoken language
●La Grande Syntagmatique
○ “Large syntagmatic”
○ A paradigm of syntagmas
■ On a syntagmatic axis
Althusser
● Critique of Marx on ideology
○ According to Marx, “ideology is the system of ideas and representations
which dominate the mind of man or a social group.”
■ For Marx “Ideology is...thought as an imaginary construction whose
status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among
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those writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was purely
imaginary... [e.g, has no material basis]”
○ Ideology as a problem of distorted or inverted perspective
■ “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down
as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from
their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina
does from their physical life-process.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The German Ideology (1846)
○ Believes Marx is not sufficiently Marxist on the question of ideology
■ Not a matter of false consciousness, imaginary constructions,
inverted perspectives
■ There is no “outside” of ideology but ideology is also totally
“outside” historical reality
■ Ideology is a matter of representations, unconscious processes,
and concrete practices whose primary medium is the subject
○ Marx = ideology as what to think
■ Althusser = ideology as what structures thought and the thinkable
➢“Ideology is indeed a system of representations [images,
myths, ideas or concepts], but in the majority of cases these
representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’ . . .
it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast
majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness.’ They are
perceived-accepted suffered cultural objects and they act
functionally on men via a process that escapes them [e.g.,
they are unconscious but not immaterial]”
● The subject is the fundamental category and medium of ideology
○ Subject: individual understood as independent origin of her/his own
thoughts, actions, emotions
■ René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”
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Document Summary
Basic definitions of ideology from raymond williams, marx and literature: A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular group or class. A system of illusory beliefs false ideas or false consciousness which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge. The general process of meanings and ideas. Towards a semiotics of the cinema (1964) Problem of film images as analogical, continuous signs. The syntagm is as responsible for meaning as the sign itself . Exchanges between linguistics and cinema are possible, provided you choose a linguistics of the syntagm rather than a linguistics of the sign. (280) Suspension of meaning: deferral, play, and posing questions rather than fixing definitions/determination or providing answers focused on single outcomes. Man is so fatally bound to meaning that freedom in art might seem to consist, especially nowadays, not so much in creating meaning as in suspending it; in constructing meanings without, however, making them rounded and complete. (281)