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.For example, the earliest essay,channelling the convictions of those they address.A discursive'The Currency of the Photograph', set out to bring a scmioticanalysis such as this does not pretend to be final or exhaustive.analysis of photographic codes into conjunction with an AlthusscrianDiscourses have conditions of existence which they do not determineaccount of 'Ideological State Apparatuses' and to hold them inand, in any case, comprise more than languages alone.Moreover,place by a Foucauldian emphasis on the power effects of discursiveany analysis of their effects cannot be other than a conditionalpractices.The purpose was to avoid the reductive, expressivecalculation framed by the context, perspective and form of practicemodels that had prevailed in the social history of art, from Antalwithin which it is itself made.and Schapiro even to Clark himself.The problems of this 'solution',To reject the idea that cultural practices and systems of meaninghowever, soon became evident.constitute a level of representation determined in its meanings andeffects by some more basic material reality is not, therefore, to positan autonomous discursive realm.Equally, what is not discourse25Introduction24 The Burden of Representationanalytical redundancy, and condemned his model to a circularitycannot be held to constitute a unified, distinct and counterposedin which the Ideological State Apparatuses were bound to performdomain: an ontologically prior unity of being to which discoursein unison a function procured for them in advance by the powermay be referred.(The argument is crucial here for cultural theory,and unity of purpose and ideology of an already ruling class.Theas it was earlier for grasping the nature of photographicmodel had to assume what it set out to explain.The discourses,representation.) What is denied is not the 'non-discursive' but thepractices and institutional structures of the Ideological Stateconception of it as a unitary category with general attributes,Apparatuses could secure nothing in themselves but only functionknowable through a non-discursive 'experience', yielding generalas the reflex of an already inscribed power and repetitively re-enactcriteria of epistemological validity.The non-discursive, the real, isor re-present what was already ordained at the level of the relationsdiversely constituted in different discourses and practices andof production, into which a complex diversity of irreducible socialcannot be imagined as a universal, common or necessary referent,relations were now collapsed.existing autonomously, yet somehow available through a non-For all Althusser's intentions of breaking with expressive,discursive representation to serve as a measure of truth.Just ashistoricist readings of Marxism, his retention of the idea of unifiedthere is no object of knowledge or process of knowledge in general,levels or instances performing functions set for them by theiroutside specific discursive systems, so there can be no general test.positions in a structured totality returned his theory to the sameParticular bodies of discourse and practice can and do developlinear separation and functionalist reduction of social practices andtheir own appropriate criteria of adequacy and effectivity, specificthe same hierarchy of causality that characterised the base-to their objectives and to the technologies they deploy, but notsuperstructure model.21 When the concepts of pre-given unities andvalid beyond their domains.As bases for disputes and tests, suchthe transparency of representation are rejected, this model iscriteria may be radically different, but their efficacy is sufficientlydecomposed, and with it goes the function of reproduction: the ideaestablished in the context of the determinate purposes andthat the cultural institutions and practices of a particular societycircumstances of the discourses and practices to which they relate.must exhibit a necessary unity of character and ideological effect.There is no necessity to posit a general measure and certainly noThe conditions of capitalist production are, for example, complex,basis to the idea of measuring their relative degrees of openness toflexible and compatible with a wide range of familial, managerial,an imagined authentic experience of an original reality [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]