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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
Louis Althusser claims that ideology is “not the system of the real relations
which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of
those individuals to the real relations in which they live”? This imaginary
relation is determined by the Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs) operating
in the field of religion, education, family, law, politics, culture, etc. that
are the material realization of ideology.** Eagleton explains that “what
is misrecognized in ideology is not primarily the world, since ideology
for Althusser is not a matter of knowing or failing to know reality at all.
The misrecognition in question is essentially a self-misrecognition, which is
an effect of the ‘imaginary’ dimension of human existence. ‘Imaginary’ here
means not ‘unreal’ but ‘pertaining to an image”.”** Hawkes clarifies Althusser’s
theory stating “ideology has ‘always already’ determined a specific set of
roles, a particular subjectivity, into which the individual will be slotted”.”*
The ISAs offer the materialised structure of ideology and play an important
role in how an individual is systematically forced “into this pre-allocated
‘subject-position”.?** Althusser calls the process of the individual occupying
the subject position as ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellation’, offering examples from
common everyday practices. He also argues that what “seems to take place
outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology.
What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside
it".257 It is useful to put this statement beside Bond’s claim that “in drama,
putting fiction into reality can isolate and dialecticise the fiction already in it.
It is a practical way to steal ideology’s clothes”.*** According to him drama is
a possible way of showing ideology in places that seem to be outside of it.
Though Althusser approaches the relation of social reality and the individual
from different direction than Adorno he too describes a social reality that
has an overall grip on the individual. Eagleton articulates a critique that
appears elsewhere too when he writes that “Althusser’s model is a good
deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways in which
subjects may be ideologically accosted — partially, wholly, or hardly at all — by
discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity”.’®
The monistic nature of Bond’s concept of ideology can be questioned as
well, if we understand ‘society’s story’ literally as an explanation that is simply
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Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),
in Lenin and philosophy and other essay, London, Monthly Review Press, 1971, 165.
Ibid., 143.
Eagelton: Ideology, 142.
David Hawkes: Ideology, 2°‘ edn., London, Routledge, 2003, 119.
286 Ibid.
287 Althusser: Ideology, 175.
288 Bond: The Cap, xii.
289 Eagleton: Ideology, 145.
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