If you are so inclined, you may refer back to the previous posts entitled and Morals, Ethics, Politics and Molecular Politics in Practice. Here it goes:
To reiterate, politics is the opening up of possibilities for one agent at the expense of closing possibilities for another agent. Power applies to any living agent.
Freedom, on the other hand, only applies to humans. Freedom is the recognition of the multiple possibilities open to oneself. Freedom is limited by what the existentialists call mauvaise foi, or "bad faith." Bad faith occurs when a human convinces itself that opened possibilities are actually closed.
Ideology is the factor that regulates which specific possibilities a human believes are actually open or closed. Ideology does not limit a person's power, but limits a person's freedom. In his essay "Ideology and the State," Louis Althusser makes the following points about ideology:
1. "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."
2. "[T]here is no practice except by and in an ideology."
3. "[T]here is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects."
4. "Ideology [i]nterpellates [sic.] [i]ndividuals as [s]ubjects."
No comments:
Post a Comment