A Race to Deceive: a Symptomatic Reading of Hidalgo
A Race to Deceive
A Symptomatic reading of John Fusco and Joe Johnston’s Hidalgo
(Touchstone Pictures 2004)
Ideology is the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group - Louis Althusser
The essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ by Althusser makes a theoretical statement about the function of ideology in life and the way ideology gets produced and evolved through what are called state apparatuses. In Althusser’s essay, we see a clear demarcation between two kinds of state apparatuses. The former constitute administrative, political, crudely repressive, and the latter refer to the forms of the superstructure.
Ideology according to Althusser, is not just a static set of ideas through which we view the world, but a dynamic social practice, constantly in process, constantly reproducing itself in the ordinary workings of these apparatuses.
In Marxist terms, popular culture is one of the ideological forms of the superstructure. So to understand any text, it must first be situated in its historical moment of production and analysed in terms of the historical conditions which produced it. Every text, according to Althusser, is bound by its ideological paradigms and thus takes up only those issues that it can address. It chooses to remain silent on those issues that threaten to take it beyond these boundaries. This formulation leads Althusser to the concept of the ‘problematic’. The problematic of a text relates to its moment of historical existence as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. It encourages a text to answer questions posed by itself, but at the same time, it generates the production of ‘deformed’ answers to the questions it attempts to exclude. The task of Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the problematic: to perform what he calls, a symptomatic reading.
A symptomatic reading involves reading not only the
A Symptomatic reading of John Fusco and Joe Johnston’s Hidalgo
(Touchstone Pictures 2004)
Ideology is the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group - Louis Althusser
The essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ by Althusser makes a theoretical statement about the function of ideology in life and the way ideology gets produced and evolved through what are called state apparatuses. In Althusser’s essay, we see a clear demarcation between two kinds of state apparatuses. The former constitute administrative, political, crudely repressive, and the latter refer to the forms of the superstructure.
Ideology according to Althusser, is not just a static set of ideas through which we view the world, but a dynamic social practice, constantly in process, constantly reproducing itself in the ordinary workings of these apparatuses.
In Marxist terms, popular culture is one of the ideological forms of the superstructure. So to understand any text, it must first be situated in its historical moment of production and analysed in terms of the historical conditions which produced it. Every text, according to Althusser, is bound by its ideological paradigms and thus takes up only those issues that it can address. It chooses to remain silent on those issues that threaten to take it beyond these boundaries. This formulation leads Althusser to the concept of the ‘problematic’. The problematic of a text relates to its moment of historical existence as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. It encourages a text to answer questions posed by itself, but at the same time, it generates the production of ‘deformed’ answers to the questions it attempts to exclude. The task of Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the problematic: to perform what he calls, a symptomatic reading.
A symptomatic reading involves reading not only the
Bibliography: John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Theory: An Introduction; UK, Pearson Education Limited, 1993 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Anand Prakash (ed), Approaches in Literary Theory: Marxism, (Delhi: Worldview, 2002) Pierre Machery, ‘For a Theory of Literary Production’, in Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (ed), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Second edition), (USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) IMDb: Hidalgo (2004), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317648/ Basha O’Reilly, ‘Hidalgo – From Myth to Movie’, www.thelongridersguild.com/myth.pdf