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LECTURE, 1 OCT 2009

Cultural critique, ideology, and articulation theory:

Roland Barthes, Lacan/Althusser, and Stuart Hall; Angela McRobbie on disarticulation

This lecture starts by looking at the application of linguistic or semiotic concepts to cultural critique as exemplified by Roland Barthes analysis of what he calls the modern myth. What Barthes does here is essentially a way of analysing ideology. Ideology constructs subject positions for individuals and groups.

What is lacking in Barthess approach is a theory of the subject, and this takes us to Jacques Lacan, who has rewritten Freud in semiotic terms. In his account of the functioning of the imaginary and the symbolic, Lacan positions the subject at the continuous crossing point between identifications with others and the law-like force of the symbolic order which precedes the existence of any individual. In this tension, the subject (the individual becoming a subject) is necessarily decentred, and thus the Lacanian view of the subject already shows the way to poststructuralist views. At the same time, Lacans view of the subject is rather rigid, as there is no way to escape the Law (the symbolic order): the effects of contradictory discourses within that order are not considered any more than the effects of different interaction practices in the imaginary field.

Lacans view of the subject then becomes one important ingredient in Althussers theory of ideology. Althusser shows the effectivity of ideology as a necessary imaginary relation to reality, which takes us beyond the simple notion of false consciousness. This achievement is marred by a rigidity also inherited from Lacan: ideologies are considered to be unified and unifying in a way which gives them an absolute containing force. This is so in spite of the fact that in his theory of society Althusser introduces the notion of structural causality and overdetermination, which are both theories of social dynamism and the possibility of change.

2 The next step is the theory of articulation, here articulated with the question of ideology. Articulations can be viewed in connection with representations and solidarities. Articulation theory is here discussed, after an initial definition by Laclau and Mouffe, as it appears in Stuart Halls thinking. Articulations also imply the notion of discourse and discursive struggles. The terminological change from ideology to discourse in some contexts equals a depoliticization of ideology, but it can also imply a continuation of ideology theory by other means in a changing socio-cultural environment (as in does in Lawrence Grossbergs thinking).

Finally, disarticulation is discussed by looking at a text by Angela McRobbie.

Roland Barthes on the modern myth, or structuralism as critique

Slides 2 4

First we shall take a look at Roland Barthes Mythologies, or more precisely, at the concluding essay in that collection of writings, called Myth today. Mythologies was published in 1957, and its main content is a number of journalistic pieces on popular culture, especially in the French context. There are two main emphases in these. One of them is an emphasis on the meaningfulness (also in a quite literal sense of the term) of popular culture, and the need to analyze it as a serious object of study (albeit in this case with a light touch suitable for the medium). The other is a critique of the bourgeois ideology of French culture. The concluding essay is focused on this latter dimension, as it describes the way that modern myths seize conflicting and oppositional discourses and convert their meanings into the service of the status quo.

Mythologies is in pre-structuralist work, as the high structuralist moment took shape somewhere in the mid-sixties and after but of course such transitions and moments are not so clear-cut. Still, Barthes is here applying the Saussurian description of the sign (the signifier/signified relation) to his purposes of cultural analysis and critique. This is a very different application from that of Lvi-Strauss that we discussed earlier in the lecture

3 course. While Lvi-Strauss exemplifies the scientific aspirations of high structuralism (shared also by Barthes in the moment of his own scientific delirium as he called it), Mythologies and especially its concluding essay represent a semioclastic orientation where concepts derived from structuralist linguistics and semiotics are turned into instruments of a critical analysis of culture. The latter obviously has apolitical edge, and as a part of French theory it also became an important influence on the Cultural Studies movement.

Now let us take a look at the model Barthes devised in this essay in order to account for the functioning of the modern myth: SLIDE 3.

The model is deceptively simple, although it describes complex phenomena. We can see that this is staggered or two-layered model where the first layer directly equals Saussures description of the sign structure: the combination of signifier and signified make up the sign carrying a certain meaning. In Barthes, this becomes the basis or starting point for a second layer of meaning so that the first-order sign becomes the signifier for the secondorder sign. Thus the signifier of the second-order sign is not material in the strict sense of the term (remember the non-semantic structure of the phoneme), but already semantically meaningful.

Barthes calls this first-order meaning denotation or denotative meaning. The secondorder meaning which takes off from it is often called connotation or connotative meaning. In this staggered system something that already signifies, something that already is a full sign, gives rise to, or carries, another level of meaning. If a full sign is an articulation of signifier and signified, this model describes two interlocking articulations, a double articulation. (To go to the roots, the term double articulation was first used to describe the combination of the non-semantic and the semantic levels of the sign.) In principle, this doubling of articulations can go on indefinitely, although the socio-cultural and situational contexts where these articulations take place provide anchorages for this process.

4 In more general terms, Barthes also designates the first level of this articulation as language, because he regards the second level as a semiotic extension of what goes on in natural language and here, of course, by the special twist of the mythical operation.

Later, in his post-structuralist phase, Barthes distanced himself from the idea that simple denotative meanings exists rather, even what is called denotation is something produced by the sign process something that for the time being is naturalized so that it seems to be a basic and neutral meaning. This of course disrupts the earlier model, but it need not worry us too much right now, because apart from describing the first-order meaning as a matter of just recognizing its basic constituents (denotation), Barthes in a somewhat contradictory way goes on qualifying this level in terms of richness and fullness, which in his example, as we shall see, also opens up to contradictory meanings and conflicts. If we take this qualification into account, the later poststructuralist theories do not simply disqualify the earlier model, which continues to serve as a means helping us deal with the workings and effects of ideology or todays myths.

Let us take a look at Barthes example of how the modern myth works. SLIDE 4. He offers the well-known example of a black soldiers saluting, we may infer, the tricolour. We are looking at a picture of a black soldier serving in the French colonial army. This much is what our perception and our cultural knowledge immediately suggest to us. For the French looking at the picture when it appeared on the cover of the magazine ParisMatch, as for Barthes when he saw it at the barbers, the colonial war in Algeria was certainly also suggested. This is the meaning of the first-order sign. As this is an image and not a verbal sign, even the shapes we first perceive have a sensory quality which is lacking in the linguistic signifier. More importantly, the signifieds that our cultural knowledge attaches to them make up a full sign, sufficient in itself. It is a self-sufficient instance of visual language.

Myth takes on this first level of meaning. It needs its richness, which it exploits in order to impose its own secondary meaning. This secondary meaning, however, is

5 paraded as the real and original meaning of the picture. We need not bother here about Barthess terminology, but his purpose is well clarified when he designates the hinge, the meeting point between the two levels, by two different terms; what in the first order is a full meaning (its end point) becomes a form for the second order (its starting point). What happens on this boundary is that the historical and political contingency (including possible contradictions of meaning and values) of the first-order meaning is emptied, impoverished, only the form remains. By this operation, the myth can now invest the form with its own meaning, and be extension take over the whole first-order meaning. In this case, as Barthes describes it, the mythical meaning suggests that all true Frenchmen, irrespective of race, serve the nation, and set an example for everyone to follow. They also prove that the detractors of the state are wrong. Although Barthes describes these steps analytically, in real life all this happens at one stroke.

Using this model Barthes tries to show how ideological co-option takes place. It is about inclusion and exclusion, but in a very different way from what was presented in terms of boundary in the text by Lotman which we discussed in an earlier lecture. In Lotmans main examples, there was a simple division between what is included and what is excluded, no nonsense about it. In the model for analysing modern myth the situation is quite different: it is a matter of persuasion, of the ways in which a dominant ideology or, more concretely, a power structure, rhetorically strengthens its dominance. Such persuasion is always both defensive and assertive it consolidates a discourse or set of values, it strengthens the belief of those who already believe, and at the same time it wards off the challenge and threat coming from the outside.

This Barthesian model at the same time provides a way to describe a certain modus operandi of ideology, and a tool to undertake a critical analysis of the same. This quality also made it important for the Cultural Studies movement.

We can see how different Barthes aim and procedure are from those of Lvi-Strauss. Lvi-Strauss is a scientist the way that Saussure is a scientist. He wants to show how a system works; he wants to explain how an underlying structure of relations produces the

6 order of things that we may observe on the surface. This is in fact what Barthes also does in his high structuralist period, notably in the treatise Systme de la Mode, The Fashion System, and in many smaller writings of that period (such as Introduction to the Study of Narrative). In his pre-structuralist phase Barthes is not yet such a stringent structuralist; rather he is using Saussurian concepts to undertake cultural critique, and to this end these Saussurian concepts serve him more as a kind of heuristic than a grounding of meticulous scientific work. It is significant that Lvi-Strauss sticks to the model of binary opposition, while Barthes opens up the sign process at this stage still with the denotation/connotation binary, but all the same opening up the sign process to ever new levels of connotation.

One final caveat: We must bear in mind that connotation as such is not necessarily ideological. It becomes ideological by taking over the first-order meaning and giving it a politically functional naturalizing twist which covers up a basic conflict in this case, the conflictual nature of French colonialism.

Lacans subject
Slides 5 7

In describing critically the workings of the modern myth, Barthes gets by without a theory of the subject. Rhetoric, including the rhetoric of ideology, does not need it. (You may want to look at John B. Thompsons book Ideology and Modern Culture for different kinds of ideological rhetoric; no theory of the subject is needed there either.) Remaining on this level, we could define ideology as naturalizing rhetoric combined with a quest for hegemony (Gramsci).

But even if ideology is a collective phenomenon by definition, it does not take hold of people directly as a collectivity. In order to function collectively, ideology needs to address each individual; it must be able to invite each individual into a certain subject

7 position, which may vary in different institutional settings. In this way, ideology is always connected with subject formation.

Ideology as a forceful encoding procedure creates subjects in a double movement. In this case, even etymology helps understand the operation: subject means literally to be thrown under, which in one usage means that the subject is the basis (agent) of thinking and action, and in another, that the subject is subjugated, subordinated (in fact, made into an object). In the context of ideology, the individual is called to order and made believe that this is its (her/his) own choice (that is, being made into object is experienced as being a subject in the first sense of the term). The crucial question then is, how necessarily we are all partners in this double dealing?

Thus in order to understand the workings of ideology from top to bottom we need a theory of the subject, a theory of subjectivity. For ideologies to be able to call (interpellate is the Althusserian term) individuals and groups so effectively into their service there must be as response structure in the psychological makeup of individuals, something that at the same time is a matter of social psychology and thus culturally mediated. Subjectification is individual and collective, psychological and cultural.

This takes us to Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser. Lacan did not theorize ideology himself, but his account of the formation of subjectivity became an important ingredient in the Althusserian theory of ideology.

Jacques Lacan was a psychoanalyst who rewrote Freud in semiotic terms. I will here give a short description of Lacans account of subject formation. I will not touch on his views on the phallogocentric nature of the gendered subject, as important as it is (including the Feministic critique of it).

Already in the 1930s Lacan began his project to apply key concepts of structural linguistics to Freuds ideas of the dynamics of the human psyche. Although Lacan has been considered as something of a structuralist in his insistence on the powerful nature

8 of the symbolic order and the way the subject is produced as the result of the imaginary/symbolic apparatus (for brevitys sake, what Lacan calls the real can with some bad conscience be left out here). On the other hand, the subject as it is formed in this interplay is characterized by a lack which on the hand gives the subject its dynamism but at the same time renders it forever unstable. It is easy to see that both these characteristics give post-structuralist leaning to Lacans theory of the subject, well in advance of its time. Lacans own polemics was against ego psychology, which started from the premise that the human subject or self was (or could be made to be) a basically unified and rational entity, able to control the irrational forces of the unconscious. This, according to Lacan, was a misreading of Freud. Lacans correction (in his view, s semiotic return to Freud) was that the unconscious is structured like language. The unconscious is not basically about dark drives; rather, it is formed as an internalization of the symbolic order coming to us through language. And although language is the Law, Lacan looked on language as a constant reconfiguring of the relations between signifiers and signifieds (post-sructuralism, again!) in the way that Freud had already described the functioning of dreamwork (condensation/displacement, metaphoric and metonymic movements). For Lacan, this was not something that only happened in dreams but in conscious discourse as well precisely because the unconscious is structured like language.

The situation, however, is even more complicated. What has so far been said relates to the symbolic. If you look at SLIDE 7 and the L-schema figure in it, you notice that the axis of the symbolic is crossed by the axis of the imaginary. The imaginary refers back to Lacans earlier theory of the mirror stage. The imaginary has to do with the infants identification with itself in his or her mirror image. The mirror is meant both in a literal and a metaphoric sense, as responses from other people also have mirroring effects. In the mirror, the infant sees a whole image of itself, when her or his own coordination is still quite imperfect. This wholeness is at the same time a divided experience, because the mirror image is both separate from and yet the same as itself. This duality remains. The mirror phase is the basis for all later identifications with other people, too. These others in the imaginary realm Lacan calls little others in

9 distinction from the big Other in the symbolic realm. The little others are by definition essential for any identification and communication, and as such they are always absent, removed from initial symbiosis. The big Other, in contrast, always point to a predetermined subject position in the symbolic order. Beyond the primary identifications of the child, the symbolic order (the big Other) is for Lacan the determining factor, even affecting the significance of the little others and the subjects desires.

In this process full of tensions the ego can never reach a full identity with itself; neither can the (pre)conscious ego be identified with the subject. We may say that the subject is always subject in the two senses of the word, the ego corresponding to the conscious agent. The subject is a complex construction coming about at the intersection of the imaginary and the symbolic axes, both axes with their own particular tensions.

This leaves us with two conclusions important to the theory of ideology as well: on the one hand, the subject is always decentred, and on the other, the symbolic order has a powerful determining influence on the subject. Distancing ourselves from Lacan we could say that in the realm of the psychological makeup of individuals this is a special instance of divide et impera, divide and rule.

Althussers ideology
Louis Althusser was structuralist Marxist also influenced by Lacans theory of the subject. Althusser introduced a new reading of Marx. He identifies an epistemological break in Marxs own thinking, where after his early thinking Marx distanced himself from the remnants of humanism, historicism, Hegelianism, and empiricism. Instead, the forces and relations of production became all-important in his theory of society. In a sense, Althusser goes back to Marx in the same way that Lacan went back to Freud both want to bring out certain things in their Masters which were at least implicit in their thinking but which can be clarified with concepts developed after their own time.

10 As with Lacan, I cannot even try to give any comprehensive view of Althussers thinking here, perhaps I dont even want to. His theory of ideology, however, has been very influential, and although his theoretical moment has passed, his work still holds more than just historical interest.

According to Lacan (and many little others), language speaks us. According to Althusser, the forces and relations of production (or in total, the mode of production) make us. In terms of ideology, a more precise analogy with Lacan is important: as we remember from the previous section, the imaginary relations, while remaining powerful, are ultimately subservient to the power of the Symbolic order the small others are subservient to the big Other, the Cultural Code. Still, the cultural code does not provide a simple unity, it is (to use Althusserian terminology), a structure in dominance. The crucial difference is that the symbolic order creates our cultural (and by implication) individual unconscious most of the time, we are not aware of its workings. The imaginary order is not necessarily conscious either, but it is the axis where our everyday identifications take place (our selfimage, our images of the others). It may first seem that the imaginary is analogical to Althussers idea of ideology, which he defines as peoples imaginary relations to their real conditions of social existence. Lacans Symbolic, in its turn, might look like the counterpart of Althussers objective structures. But although the imaginary axis is more directly experiential and the Symbolic is precisely a code or set of coded cultural meanings, neither of these is for Lacan the Real the real, Lacan was fond of saying, does not exist because we never have direct access to it once we have entered language, we can never grasp anything independently of it, although the Real as body, drives, pleasure and pain makes itself felt. By way of this qualification, we can now understand the whole scope of Althussers idea of ideology: although he defines ideology as imaginary relations, what he refers to in Lacanian terms is the whole interplay of the imaginary-symbolic complex, which for Lacan produces the psychological subject and for Althusser the subject of ideology. What Althusser calls imaginary relations, is in Lacanian terms symbolically determined imaginary relations. The Real, instead, is for Althusser accessible as the reality of the whole social system.

11 In analyzing the functioning of the social system the concepts of structural causality and overdetermination are important and still productive, but I am addressing these issues here. Regarding Althussers theory of ideology, what is important is that he does not regard ideology as simply false consciousness. Instead, it is necessarily what it is; there is no way to fundamentally change out everyday imaginary relations to reality. Thus there is a radical split between consciousness and the Marxist science of society that he tries to develop. This is what his theoretical anti-humanism means. Politically it leads to what could be considered a problematic chain of authority, where a theoretical vanguard produces the analysis of the Real, and this is transmitted to the people by the political party elite. These are the basics of Althussers theory of ideology. It should be added that ideology was Althusser a very concrete phenomenon, nit just hanging in the air but imposed by state apparatuses (education, religion, etc) which showed concrete individuals their place as subjects.

The theory of articulation

This has already been discussed during the lecture course. I content myself with referring to the article by Jennifer Slack where this problematic is well discussed, as well as to the slides I have set up on this subject. Generally speaking, articulation theory provides a more supple view of the power relations which Althusser tries to address with his model. In my view, Althussers ideas are very useful when freed from the rather rigid totality in which he has embedded them himself. More precisely, they can be repositioned in terms of articulations. Strangely, Althussers own ideas of structural causality and overdetermination in fact imply the possibility of such a move. There is a path from Lacan/Althusser to Foucaults conception of discourse and power to articulation theory. This is not a straightforward or developmental line. In my view, without such ideas as overdetermination and structural causality even Foucauldian views of productive power and articulation theory may lead to a play of differences and indeed of articulations where really existing economic, political and representational

12 constraints are overlooked. The result could be a strange ideological effect a kind of homogeneity in hybridity. The excerpt by Angela McRobbie on disarticulation can be discussed (for example) in view of the issues I have mentioned on the slide. McRobbie describes disarticulation as a cultural disruption of womens solidarity and of the goals of Feminist movement by a move where modernization itself makes out to do the same job by the equality of consumption. What I mean by a possible critical function of disarticulation (mentioned in the slide) is simply a further move from this: by disarticulating certain relations, the consumer society has raised new articulations; these, again, can be critically disarticulated. Thank you.