Article Summary
Storey J - 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture': Althusserianism

The extract focuses on the importance of Louis Althusser in the development of cultural theory and in particular sates that within this his most important development was his different attempts to categorize ideology. At the foundation of this is Althusser's rejection of the 'mechanistic interpretation of the base/superstructure formulation' in favour of social formation of which ideology, along with economics and politics, makes up its key practices. What is meant by this is that the superstructure (ie societal,economic and political institutes), are not simply an expression of the base, the individuals within a society who can also be seen as the means of production) but rather they rely on it to ground there own existence.
Althusser's definition of ideology is of key importance to this as he argues that ideology is a system, series of representations such as pictures or a practice through which people tie there view of the world to the 'real conditions of existence'. That is to say ideology dispels the contradictions within the relationship between the base superstructure by offering 'false but seemingly true' resolution to problems.
Furthermore Althusser's definition of ideology is a closed system in that it only ever sets itself 'such problems as it can answer' and remain within its own boundaries. This leads to the creation of what Althusser refers to as the problematic. This refers to information that appears to be absent from, for example, a piece of writing, that once revealed gives us a deeper insight into the text its self as well as the assumptions which inform it. Therefore when looking at any given piece of information we should apply what Althusser refers to as 'symptomatic reading' where by it is de-constructed to reveal the problematic.