Navigation

In 1970 the philosopher Louis Althusser published his influential essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)” in the journal La Pensée. This panel will mark the fifty-year anniversary of this essay (and the writings that came after it) by taking Althusser’s reflections and concepts as its theoretical point of departure. The panel solicits presentations that explore what the ideology of the academic discipline of art history, theory and criticism consists of and how it functions not only at the level of the external ensemble of symbolic and real conditions, but also at the very level of the development of the form and content of art historical scholarship. For this reason, the panel is especially interested in presentations that explore the following questions: How do individuals become interested in art and its history? Can one produce a genealogy of such formation? Can we speak of academia as an apparatus that interpellates individuals in such a way that they recognize themselves as “academic subjects”? If so, how does this affect scholarly work, interests and commitments? Who is permitted to contemplate, critically analyze and construct theories and histories of art and who is not? Who does the art historian, theoretician and critic write for? How does this affect their work? And what is the social and political responsibility of scholarship on art within academia? Finally, how does the dominating force of the capitalist mode of production and the ideology of academic knowledge production relate at the level of scholarly work?