Exemplify the Importance of Louis Althusser\'s Work

¶ … 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 subjective nature, the image of the artist's mind at a particular given moment in time, as well as the artist's ideology as to what the nature of his or her medium should transmit to a viewer.

Althusser does not deny the potent nature of ideology and its material effects. 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 surprise of being greeted by a girl or a boy, by a face deemed ugly or lovely by society.

Describe the four fundamental principles of Gestalt Theory and give examples of their impact on visual images

The sum of the 'whole' of Gestalt Theory, no pun intended, is that the sum of the whole of a composition is greater or may have a different effect than that composition's specific parts. Visually speaking, this relates to the perception of a composition as a whole rather than a series of images, colors, brush strokes, or lines. While each of the individual parts of a picture or a photograph has meaning on its own, when all of the elements of the piece are taken together by the eye and mind as one, the meaning of that piece must and will change. The perception of the gazer of the piece is thus based on the individual's understanding of all the bits and pieces working in unison.

The four principles of Gestalt Theory relating to visual composure are that proximity, similarity, orientation, and closure. The principle of proximity (nearness, or similarity of location) means that the eye is able to focus more closely on smaller shapes if they are near rather than far. If far or close together, small shapes become related as a group. This can be seen in pointillism, where tiny pinpoints of color blend together to create different colors and images than they would if viewed singularly or far from one another, and also simply how by relating two images together, such as a saint and a sinner in a Medieval triptych, the two figures take on a different meaning.

Similarity can simply mean that objects in a visual composition can have a similar form pattern, as well as size, color, and texture. But it also underlines that if objects are alike in one of several ways, the eye will have less difficulty relating them to one another, whether they lie together or at a distance. In Monet's "Water lilies," one does not perceive each lily distinctly, the fact that numerous lilies of similar design are in the picture make it easier to see them as proximate and related, even if the lilies may have slightly different shapes, they still belong to the same form pattern.