The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

Social philosophers elaborated the role of communication structures in negotiating class ideology, and imagined literature as both an aspect of the structures of social control and a prime location for resistance against dominant ideals. The work of Louis Althusser emphasizes the all-encompassing presence of dominant ideology, one in which social structures like education, family, communication, and literature are key tools for perpetuating and defending a normative system of belief. He argues that, in most people's experience, the structures he calls “Ideological State Apparatuses” play a greater role than more direct instruments of authority (like the military, for example) in securing the reproduction of the capitalist state. These ISA's govern individual perception and thus produce the subject. This understanding of subjectivity puts greater interpretive distance between ideology and reality than Althusser sees in Marx's writings, and thus promotes the importance of the cultural production of the imaginary: “What is represented in ideology is therefore 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” (Althusser 168). Althusser argues that ideological apparatuses like literary texts help frame an individual's point of view and create his or her subjective reality. The subject, then, is the person who views, reads, and interprets this world of signs from a particular viewpoint, one produced by dominant ideology. Social change—difficult in the eyes of Althusser, who was still waiting on a French communist revolution in the second half of the twentieth century—comes when conflicting cultural messages destabilize dominant values within the ISA's. He states, “Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake but also the site of class struggle,” in part “because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle” (147).

Althusser's examination of cultural power as social control influenced the work of Michel Foucault and other New Historicists, as did the application of structural analysis to anthropology and myth by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Foucault in turn encouraged the critical practice of analyzing a wide range of cultural texts for their roles in creating the power of