Monday, February 15, 2016

RSA and ISA, What Do You Believe?

Ideology is understood as beliefs, values and ideas. Most link ideology to Communism due to the various texts written by Marx such as the Communist Manifesto.

                                      Figure 1.

Much of ideology is based on politics and social structure such as the class system. Production in the world is created because of social structure and in order to have effective production in society there needs to specific conditions. These conditions are effective because the previous production is reproduced.

For instance, you have a product, in order to obtain that product you have materials, the materials are obtained from a merchant, that merchant has workers, those workers get paid wages. The wages keep the workers returning in order to feed their family so that their children will continue the job when they are gone. If this exact formula is reproduced than it is reproduction of production.

Although with every formula rules are applied in order to achieve the same outcome.
But with rules, or signifiers comes user error due to metaphor. This is why ideology can produce different results because people can have different beliefs, values and ideas based on variables.


So Marx created 2 representations of ideology such as, ISA which is Ideological State Apparatus and RSA: Repressive State Apparatus. 

The ISA is described by Marx as religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade-union, and communications and cultural.Marx says that all of these elements function together as Ideology, by beliefs, values and ideas. He goes on to describe RSA.

RSA is described by Marx as, “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons etc.” (Althusser, Ideology andIdeological State Apparatuses.)
Where ISA is considered mainly ideology with little to no violence  RSA is considered violent, with the main word examined is repress. A current example of RSA is the Police brutality and Black Lives Matter movement.

                                     Figure 3.

Now when examining media and media studies these topics fit under the Ideological State Apparatus. For example media and media studies fits under communications. Communications can be heavily based on metaphor because of its basis on language. 

When one studies media they realize that there are various different platforms where media can be expressed through language and through content. One platform can be social media such as twitter. When one writes on twitter sometimes their messages can be misconstrued because of how the reader interprets the text due to metaphor or preconceived ideas. Once again ideology is beliefs, values and ideas, therefore communications in this example is considered ISA.

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