Similar for free open academic work, which is what I’ll be discussing here. It is standard and proper practice for academics to present their sources and discuss agreements and disagreements in the open. What is generally not shared, are works in progress, course notes and similar academic bread-and-butter work. Some of the reasons for this is obvious and understandable: works in progress are not finished and may contain embarrassing mistakes, unclear rubbish and stuff that borders on plaigiarism if released because quotes haven’t been fully worked through. Course notes may be incomprehensible to others and include material that is copyright protected and cannot be shared publicly.

However, there are other less worthy reasons for doing the same things: a fear that people will steal your material, reduce your worth as teacher because others steal your ideas for groundbreaking courses, etc. In other words, we are dealing with a concern about academic capital: our research and our teaching (to a lesser extent) is what sell us to universities, provide us with research grants and get our conference papers accepted. A very understandable concern then arises that if we share our work, our value is decreased and we will lose our positions, grants and conference attendance. This view corresponds completely to typical, capitalist exchange.

Put in Althusserian terms, by reproducing academic labor power there is also a reproduction of submission to ruling ideology. An academic who does not share his or her work steps into this trap of submitting to an ISA which reduces academic thinking to a commodity like any other. Lack of sharing means viewing creative thinking and critical thinking as a commodity that can only be produced by the academic laborer, but still a commodity.

However, unlike regular commodities that are consumed, creative and critical thinking grows rather than diminishes when shared; they are not spread too thin, but instead (hopefully) inspire others to generate more creative and critical thinking. My argument is therefore a call for FOAW - free open academic work - which will not reduce academic capital, but instead produce more. As an academic who shares, it becomes possible to be a “bad subject” who rejects the ISA which reduces academic work to fixed-value commodities. I don’t agree with this view, and so will share my work. I don’t believe that this will create a perfect, ideal world, for there are also negative sides to sharing, which I need to think more carefully about. For now, let this stand as a call to more academic sharing - either in blogging form or any other.

Althusser is trying to work out the concept of reproduction, and how people accept the dominant order of the culture and society they live in. Much of what Althusser develops here, is later expanded by people such as Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Reproduction, for Althusser as for Marx, is the necessary condition of production to take place. As Althusser states

To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.

In other words, it is necessary to submit to the ruling ideology in order to be a “good worker”, and necessary to manipulate the ruling ideology in order to be a “good capitalist”. Ideology is for Althusser intimately tied up with skills and know-how, and he goes on to argue that it is not possible to learn one without the other:

I believe that the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.

Subjection - being subjected to (and a subject to) dominant ideology - is part of the educational system, which forms one example of what Althusser terms Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The ISA is part of the State Apparatus, but does not function like the typical Repressive State Apparatus - ie. violence from police or military - but functions through ideology first, and violence later. In the case of the educational system, punishments only arrive if one does not follow the rules, but it is far more insidious in the way it encourages proper behavior by awarding good grades for those who follow the rules.

ISAs thus work mostly invisibly throughout society, and their work is done by ideolog, which is to say a particular way of addressing persons. Althusser begins by defining ideology in conjunction with Marx: “ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” However, Althusser moves on from this definition to a much more complex, and much more interesting.

First of all, Althusser does away with the notion that ideology is located in society merely as a set of ideas. What makes ideology so pervasive, is the fact that it is material. He reverses the typical notion of saying that ideology leads to ritual practices, and instead argues that it is in fact the ritual practices which create and embody ideology in material actions:

I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

It is here that interpellation emerges, from the way the individual is made into a subject by ideology:

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this level concrete subjects only exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete individual. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation

Interpellation of the subject is thus exactly ideology, which is also what prompts Althusser to say that there is no outside to ideology, and at the same time there is no outside ideology.

What is sometimes misunderstood about Althusser, is the notion that there is no escape from the interpellation of ideology and the subject position offered. This is not exactly true, as Althusser states that when we act according to ideology and performs the material actions required of us, we are ‘good subjects’. However, it is possible to be a ‘bad subject’ which is of course to not perform ideology. They require the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus; military, police, etc.

While this seems to me obviously true, it also seems that this is one place where the ISA can take action just as much as the RSA. While the police will stop bad subjects who protest against capitalist ideology, such as in the WTO ‘riots’, there are plenty of cases where the ISA simply functions as ideological repression, such as generating the beliefs that sex before marriage is a sin, or that people with tattoos are criminals or whatever might be considered strictly legal but not within ruling ideology. Because of this, I will investigate the case of bad subjects in further posts.

The problem in dealing with genre/audience relation is that it is so complex, both methodologically and analytically. For obvious reasons, there are numerous reasons for reading a specific genre and not all of them are particularly interesting or revealing. From boredom to required reading to curiosity, none of these uses tell us anything useful about the text-reader relationship. Consider the case of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which became one of 2004’s best selling films. Yet, it is hardly what one would call a popular film, nor was it obvious that it would gross so much. Here, it is difficult to establish why people went to see the film, but one may suspect hype and a controversial topic. While these are interesting areas in themselves, they are not related to genre audiences.

Even when narrowing the topic to just the relation between genre works and genre audiences, may we imagine too many different motivations. The ritual approach to genre study as developed by John Cawelti, Thomas Schatz and others attempts to suggest some common threads among many, if not most, of the genre audience. Their intention is to find links between culture and texts, and attempt to answer what role genre texts play in genre audiences’ lives. The approach is somewhat anthropological and redefines the relation between reader and text from one of aesthetic consumption to one of ritualized practice.

To concept is suggestive for a number of genres, where conventions, fanzines, etc do give the impression of being part of a very stylized environment. It also proves somewhat successful in explaining why texts that are quite similar – often referred to as formulaic – remain popular with audiences, despite not being innovative or surprising. Naturally, this means that the ritual approach to genre primarily applies to popular genres and less so to high cultural genres, although one could argue that there are still ritualistic elements in avant-garde theater, concrete poetry, etc.

John Cawelti writes in Adventure, Mystery and Romance: “Formulas enable the members of a group to share the same fantasies [...] When a group’s attitudes undergo some change, new formulas arise. [...] Existing formulas commonly evolve in response to new audience interests” (34). The point here is that there is a very tight connection between formulas and audience, and that these two poles interact or oscillate constantly. Genres function as a communicative method between the genre members, but at the same time the genre members also alters the very formulas of the genre itself. Some form of negotiation seems to be going on, but exactly how is unclear.

Cawelti argues further that

Formula stories affirm existing interests and attitudes. [...] Formulas resolve tensions and ambiguities resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups within a culture or from ambiguous attitudes toward particular values. The action of a formula story will tend to move from an expression of tension of this sort to a harmonization of these conflicts (35).

In other words, formula stories (genres) are consumed to resolve cultural tensions and to harmonize any conflicts that a culture may contain. To some extent, and in the case of many genres, I find this claim unproblematic, but there are a number of what might be called oppositional genres – punk, anarchist fiction and others – where the claim seems more complex. While Hollywood films certainly serve as the best example of harmonizing texts, in other cases the affirmation and resolution only applies within the genre subculture, affirming resistance toward mainstream or dominant culture. In these cases, recuperation is extremely problematic, since it risks leaving the subculture without a proper response or proper resistance toward dominant culture.

Depending on the genre, one need also to take into account what is seemingly left out of the ritual approach – the industrial aspect of the genre. Publishers, agents, production companies and many other parts of the genre field are less interested in affirming existing interests, resolving cultural conflict or allowing genre members to share fantasies than they are in bottom line. This part of genre is generally ignored by the ritual approach, as it definitely questions to what extent existing formulas evolve in response to new audience interests, as Steve Neale points out in Genre and Hollywood (225ff).

Having said all this, I do find the ritual approach significant to the extent that it explains some of the questions of genre consumption. Given the (sub)cultural capital in owning various paraphernalia from classic sf shows, signed copies, first editions, a full set of New Worlds and so forth, it does seem appropriate to accept a ritual aspect to genre. Not to mention the ritual nature of seeing or reading selected works over and over again, perhaps even dressing up as characters from these works. In other words, parts of the genre iconography is brought into the members’ lives and serve as forms of identification and certainly as communicative acts.

Although it would require very detailed study, the fact that some values, fantasies, interests and attitudes are shared by genre members through genre works would seem to indicate a certain correlation between genre canon/tradition and these values. In other words, the ascendancy of New Wave sf during the 60s as the popular sf to read would probably indicate a shift in sf audience’s interests toward a more literary preference, possibly even a political change as well. With cyberpunk, attitudes changed to a greater interest in the effect computers and wearable, personal technology would have on our culture and society. While these correlations are by no means simple, linear or predictable, some form of correspondence must be expected to the extent that genre audiences do “vote with their money”, hence creating publication possibilities for some authors who had fewer before, and less for some who previously had more.

These points also begin to explain some of the partisan nature present inside the genre field when new cycles appear. Some hail them, while other decry them and much of this depends as much on the attitudes and interests communicated, as on any aesthetic concern with the works themselves. Here, we can begin to see a degree of overlap between the ritual approach and Bourdieu’s idea of cultural distinction and cultural capital. New formulas thus also rise or fall depending on which producers are dominant within the genre field, and not just on the interests of genre members. While some are therefore more successful in setting the agenda for which attitudes, interests and conflicts are allowed within the genre field, literary (and other media) history is full of examples of “sleeper” works which grew bigger than expected, or cult followings which keep some works alive for longer than usual. One can therefore speak of different power struggles even within relatively small fields as the sf genre field.