¶ … exemplify the importance of Louis Althusser's work on ideology and ideological state apparatuses to visual communication theory?
In his theorizing upon the nature of the world of ideology and ideological state apparatuses, Louis Althusser used Jacques Lacan's linguistic theory to better understand the way a state and a culture's enforced and often invisible ideology functioned in any given societal context. The constructed nature of language, for both Althusser and for Lacan, meant it was impossible to access any truly 'real' conditions of existence. Language was referential and arbitrary; there is no intrinsic sense of 'catness' to any given animal, unless one understands what is not a cat, for instance. Likewise one has no state identity as a citizen of America unless one understands what is anti-American or at very least, not American.
This endlessly relational nature of language and state ideology is also true of visual as well as verbal culture and ideological references. Only through an analytic and deconstructionist approach to the visual cultural and society and one understand the transient nature of what is construed as real, in linguistic, ideological, or visual terms. Thus, Althusser does not believe that language of either the verbal or the visual is 'bad,' for to be locked in such a system is inevitable. Rather, Althusser posits a series of hypotheses that he explores to clarify his understanding of ideology.
The first of these hypotheses is that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. In terms of the ideology of the state, the state transmits a message that citizens believe because the citizenry, given the limits of human perception and cognitive understanding, can imagine no other relationship, even if this relationship is constructed. Likewise, a visual work communicates a version of the 'real' that may seem deceptively real, like a still-life photograph of fruit in contrast to a Cezanne portrait of the same bowl of fruit, but both communicates only, because of the visual's...
He states secondly that ideology has a material existence -- for instance, the ideology of capitalism has real and material effects upon the body of the worker in its yolk. In the language of visual communication, a fashion photograph could motivate a young woman to starve herself -- or at least buy a new outfit. Because one swims in a sea of culture, breathing in its water like air and cannot, except by removing one's self from it through heightened and temporary states of analysis, critically reflect upon it, all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. This Althusser states thirdly as a corollary to his second proposition. By "interpellates" he means that in other words, living in the ideological visual fabric as one does, of the United States, one will have certain reactions to the visual and verbal language of the world around. Even to burn a symbolic image of the flag is to acknowledge its historical and emotional power, if only to react to it in anger. The emotional jolt one feels at the sight of a police car, when one is speeding, as opposed to an ordinary sedan is testimony to the power of a specifically visual texture of state, ideological culture.
There is no escape from being trapped in ideology. As such lastly, in his final and fourth hypothesis the theorist states that individuals are always, already subjects, even if at times his verbal tenses make seem like becoming a subject and locked with a culture is an active choice or an unconscious process, like entering puberty. Instead, an individual is a subject upon birth, and the division of self and other is made in ideological, cultural, and state terms. In fact, a potential individual may be always-already a subject, perhaps even before he or she is born, as a parent braces him or herself for the visual…
