Summary: The guest this week is C. Derick Varn. Varn is a poet and university lecturer working in South Korea and this we got together via Skype to discuss Late Capitalism and the French Philosopher Louis Althusser's essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I want to thank Billy L, Matthew G, and Jason F for their generous donations to the podcast, and to thank everyone who subscribes to the Podcast and workshop and gives monthly. The last three signed copies of my novella Wave of Mutilation have now been spoken for, however you can still get ahold of my memoir Pick Your Battle and I'm working on a couple of other books right now. I'm writing a novella for Eraserhead Press entitled the Doom That Came to LOLcats, working on a book entitled All I Ever Needed to Know About Capitalism I Learned from Watching Star Trek (and you can read excerpts from that at Tor.com) and my first full fledged novel is due out from Tor.com in August of 2013. So there will be plenty of opportunities to get signed copies of my various books in the near term future. Music in this episode includes Yaron Herman Trio covering Britney Spears Toxic. --- Somewhat related Essay: Five Steps For Understanding Althusser’s Concept of Ideology Without Going Insane 1. Skim over Althusser’s book On Ideology after rereading Kapital for Beginners (the comic book). Assuage your guilt about not being truly versed on either philosopher by reminding yourself that Althusser confessed that he’d barely read Marx. In his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time he claimed that it was only his knack for catching on quickly, his skill at faking his way along, that made him famous in French intellectual circles. Recall that the point of Althusser’s last book was to explain to the public how and why he’d strangled his wife to death in 1980. The philosopher was apparently in a fugue state brought on by depression when he massaged his wife’s neck until she was dead. Althusser skipped jail and went directly to a mental hospital. He was unfit to stand trial apparently. 2. Buy a Venti Nonfat Latte. Use your iPhone to look up quotes about Althusser while taking gulps of lukewarm latte from your paper cup. “Ideology is a ‘representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’” -Althusser, On Ideology Notice the doubling here. Althusser says that ideology is not the way people use their imaginations to represent the world, but rather is the representation of the way people use their imaginations. This means that ideology is not some false picture of the world but our false picture about our false picture. One ideology might tell us that we have a false picture of the world, that we believe in God for example, because we’ve been manipulated by bad guys. The caste of ancient priests, kings, and queens foisted false stories about the world on us in order to control us. Another ideology might blame the world itself for our false picture. Living under such poor conditions people needed a God in heaven. After all, who wouldn’t fantasize when faced with the plague? It was the reality of living in and off our own filth and debris that pushed us into delusion. But, Althusser isn’t buying these explanations. He says that ideology is simply necessary. Ideologies are fantasies that support our relationships with each other and these false pictures give us our very identities. In fact, we don’t really fantasize about the world, but rather we are the fantasy. Our relationships and thus our very identities are not backed up by anything. There is no true reality being blacked out or denied. Read more at Thought Catalog.
