Essay Assignment: A Symptomatic Reading of a Cultural Artifact
Method of Analysis: Finding ‘The Problematic’:
In this writing assignment you will Conduct what Louis Althusser calls a ‘symptomatic reading’ of an artifact of popular culture. As a cultural critic, you are like a doctor who must diagnose an illness based on symptoms that your patient is showing. In this case, your cultural artifact is the patient. Culture or ideology, broadly speaking, is the disease. The artifact shows symptoms of specific ideological formations or cultural trends, which Althusser calls “The Problematic”. The Problematic is defined by Althusser as a set of assumptions, ideological biases, and answers to unasked questions that the artifact provides. Like a disease, the Problematic remains hidden, but produces symptoms that can be observed. In terms of cultural criticism, we are looking at what kind of ‘cultural work’ the artifact performs. However, we are concerned not with just any kind of cultural work, but cultural work that is informed by ideology, and thus hides and manipulates meaning. Just as John Berger puts it, we are not so much concerned with the artifacts themselves, but with how meaning is transmitted through them.
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