Zandrav, Eric and others - to address this topic I must, as I usually do, make a recourse to French structuralism, namely Louis Althusser and Michael Foucualt, and in doing so both, following as they do Neitzche and Heidegger, REJECT both German idealism and, more importantly, REJECT humanism. At its core, humanism posits an idea of an "essential" human self which transcends its cultural context and is somehow formed before the moment of being in society. This is a conception that makes no sense to me and I utterly reject it. I detect a residue of humanist thought in the claim that it is first and foremost THE BRAIN that magically knows how to filter information - I do not believe that the brain would do this automatically or necessarily in the same way if it had not been socially conditioned to in the first place. We know a certain configuration of sand and recognise it as "a beach", first and foremost, because we've been conditioned to recognise it as such - the concept of the beach always-already prefigures the beach itself. This social conditioning force is called "ideology", it functions through various discourses and can be defined as the representation of the human individual's imagined relationship to the world around him. This is the force that let's us recognise a police man as a representative of the law, it is the force that allows us to identify ourselves as "free" and "autonomous" individuals.
Here is some stuff from my PhD thesis that explains this in some more depth:
Originally written in Parvini's thesis
As a Marxist writing in the 1960s , Althusser was concerned with why the uprising Marx predicted in The Communist Manifesto didn’t happen. Rather than speaking of “culture”, Althusser shifts the emphasis to “ideology” which is defined as representative of ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ . And this relationship ‘has the function… of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’ via a process of interpellation: individuals are interpolated as concrete subjects so that they can recognise themselves as ‘concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects’ . It is mainly through ideology then that the State is able to keep its subjects subordinate and therefore not rising up in rebellion.
Althusser makes a distinction between what he calls the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), when the State is forced into action to physically apprehend or subdue its subjects, and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which is far more insidious in that it dominates its subjects through their own thought processes, it makes natural or “second nature” that which has been learnt. Like Geertz’s cathedral, for Althusser, ideology has a material existence, the “ISAs” take the form of ‘Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures’ . Their effects are so all-encompassing that ‘an individual is always already a subject, even before he is born’ in that a child will already have a name, a social context, an identity, a gender and a spectrum of social roles he or she will be expected to fill in the future. The State is thus able to reproduce the conditions of its own reproduction in its subject so that, as long as this process takes place successfully, overthrow is virtually impossible. To use a ‘real life’ example (for Althusser’s own examples are seldom cogent) as a subject of the Capitalist West when I walk into a shop and wish to buy a chocolate bar (note that the concepts of monetary exchange, buying, selling, being a customer, shops, chocolate bars, shops that sell chocolate bars and wanting to buy a chocolate bar are always-already inscribed in me as “natural” here), I expect to have a choice between at least fifteen or more chocolate products with at least three or more brands available – and I take it for granted that this “choice” is a good choice, if I go into the shop and (shock!) it only has the one chocolate bar available, I see that as bad – I am a consumer, I have money that I have worked for and, as a consumer and a good capitalist subject, I expect a choice of chocolate bars. So a consumer choice like this is (naturally) a desirable one and if I want to make such choices I need to get money, and so I must also choose from the myriad of possible roles available to me, I’ve always been told I am good at writing things so perhaps it might be a good idea to choose for myself the role of literary critic so then I could not only choose between different chocolate bars but also choose between different houses, different cars, different DVDs, different television sets and so on. But for Althusser, all such choices are necessarily illusionary – there is no real freedom in my choices – in that in each instance I am merely reinforcing the State, merely replicating my ideologically inscribed role as consumer. My choice to be a literary critic was in fact no choice at all but something determined, in a different set of circumstances I might have been a bin man, a doctor, a pub landlord, a supermarket assistant or even a hairdresser: each of these roles exists, each is always-already filled with someone who has supposedly chosen to fill that role. For Althusser this illusionary choice is ideology’s foremost tool of containment, individuals don’t rebel because they live in the belief that they are free and autonomous rather than subject and exploited and, as Terry Eagleton suggests, ‘unless we did so we would be incapable of playing our parts in social life’ .
And much of this thought pre-figures the work of Althusser’s former student, Michael Foucault, who ultimately proved to be more palatable to the new historicists who may have found Althusser too State-centric and above all too Marxist for Cold War-era American tastes. Like Althusser, Foucault owed much of his thought to Saussurean structuralism in that he was still committed to the idea of a readily analysable finite structural system. Rather than talking about “culture” or “ideology”, Foucault is primarily concerned with ‘power relations’ that are held together by ‘fields of discursive events’ , or put more simply, by discourses. For Foucault all discourse necessarily entails a power-relation, which should ‘take as its model a perpetual battle’ rather like dialogue in a Harold Pinter play where one party is always dominating and subjecting another. Like Althusser’s ideology, for Foucault these various discourses help to govern
The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be at home.
However, unlike Althusser’s static notion of ideology emanating from ISAs onto hapless individuals, Foucault’s discourses:
Cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus… these relations go right down into the depths of society… they are not localized in the relations between state and it citizens… they do not merely reproduce at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures, and behaviour, the general form of the law or government… there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality… They are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of power relations.
It is clear to see here that Foucault is in some form of dialogue with Althusser, where Althusser’s theory is homogenous, unitary and watertight, Foucault’s is heterogeneous, fractured and bursting with sites of conflict. Althusser makes a differentiation between what he calls “scientific knowledge” and “ideological knowledge”, for him, most common knowledge, the knowledge of common sense for example, is ideological; but he reserves a special category of knowledge for “science”, which for him, somehow, is able to objectively observe “the truth”, free of the taint of ideology – Marx’s critique of capitalism, Freud’s “discourse of the unconscious” or Lacan’s conception of the “mirror-phase” would both fall into this category . Foucault implicitly rejects this model of knowledge with his claim that ‘power produces knowledge… power and knowledge directly imply one another… there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ . So it is impossible for an individual to know anything at all without being subject to a power relation or to the effects of a power relation, in this way, individuals can be said to be always-already in the grip of power-knowledge.
I think a discussion of Foucualt imparticular here would be most cogent here as both self-identification and the identification of
anything in the world AS part of a particular order in the world is inextricably bound up with the formative power of discourse.
I think the discussion so far, whilst interesting, fails to account for this and Zandrav and Eric must give full consideration to it (though, of course, not necessarily agree) in order to properly come to an answer regarding the problem of perception and of identification.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" - John Milton (Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 254-55)
