Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Althusserianism 77
no ideology is sufficiently consistent to survive the test of figuration’ (194–5). Thus by
giving fictional form to the ideology of imperialism, Verne’s work – ‘to read it against
the grain of its intended meaning’ (230) – stages the contradictions between the myth
and the reality of imperialism. The stories do not provide us with a ‘scientific’ denunciation
(‘a knowledge in the strict sense’) of imperialism, but by an act of symptomatic
reading ‘which dislodges the work internally’, they ‘make us see’, ‘make us perceive’,
‘make us feel’, the terrible contradictions of the ideological discourses from which each
text is constituted: ‘from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches
itself . . . and to which it alludes’ (Althusser, 1971: 222). Verne’s science fiction, then,
can be made to reveal to us – though not in the ways intended – the ideological and
historical conditions of its emergence.
In the nineteenth century there were a great number of books written to advise
young women on appropriate conduct. Here, for example, is an extract from Thomas
Broadhurst’s Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind and Conduct of Life
(1810),
She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various duties of a wife and
daughter, a mother and a friend, is far more usefully occupied than one who, to
the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic
and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted regions of
fiction and romance (quoted in Mills, 2004: 80).
Rather than see this as a straightforward sign of women’s oppression, a Machereyan
analysis would interrogate the extent to which this text is also an indication of the failure
of women to occupy positions traditionally demanded of them. In other words, if
women were not engaging in philosophic and literary speculation, there would be no
need to advise them against it. Women actually engaging in literary and philosophic
speculation (and probably so much more) is, therefore, the determinate absence of the
text. Similarly, Sara Mills (2004) points out how women’s travel writing in the nineteenth
century had to continually address discourse of femininity which suggested that
travel was something beyond a woman’s strength and commitment. For example, in
Alexandra David-Neel’s account of her travels in Tibet we read, ‘For nineteen hours we
had been walking. Strangely enough, I did not feel tired’ (quoted in Mills, 2004: 90).
It is the phrase ‘strangely enough’ that points to a determinate absence: a masculine
discourse of disbelief that haunts the unconscious of the text.
Finally, Photo 4.3 shows two figures on an otherwise empty beach; they look cold
and uncomfortable. When trying to decide what this photograph signifies, it is very
likely that our interpretation may well be organized and shaped by a historically
specific determinate absence: a normative expectation of a beach as a place of holidaymakers,
relaxed and enjoying themselves. It is this determinate absence that locates the
‘meaning’ of the photograph in a specific historical moment: before the rise of the
seaside holiday in the 1840s, this normative expectation would have been unavailable
as an interpretative framework. In other words, the meaning we make is both historical
and structured by absence.