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Ah, but you see, that's just the thing with Althusser -- we can't choose to stop eating what "they" give us, because "they" do not exist: we're all part of a self-constituting "us." We all of us order our lives within ideologies that find concrete expression in what LA calls Ideological State Apparatus (and, yes, he goes on to call them ISAs). With this view, the cultural productions -- pieces of 'art' -- that we consume appeal to us because they reflect the significations that we have all developed to explain and order our world. They are not imposed on us from without, but spring up from within ourselves, all of us, trapping us all in the same prisonhouse of consumerist, ideological representation.
We are all of us the "them" that imprison each of us individually. As such we cannot produce any kind of art that is not an expression of what we have made ourselves to be in order to find existence within the ISAs that we've built to order our existence. Freedom from these is a dream.
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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