Page 89 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C04.qxd 10/25/08 16:31 Page 73

Althusserianism 73

(the ‘symptoms’ of a problem struggling to be posed) in the manifest text, to produce
and read the latent text. For example, a symptomatic reading of the film Taxi Driver
would reveal a problematic in which answers are posed to questions it can hardly
name: ‘How does the Veteran return home to America after the imperial horrors of
Vietnam?’ At the heart of the film’s problematic are questions relating to real historical
problems, albeit deformed and transformed into a fantasy quest and a bloody resolu-
tion. A symptomatic reading of Taxi Driver, reading the ‘symptoms’ for evidence of an
underlying dis-ease, would construct from the film’s contradictions, its evasions, its
silences, its inexplicable violence, its fairy-tale ending, the central and structuring
absence – America’s war in Vietnam.
Another example can be seen in the number of recent car advertisements that
situate vehicles isolated in nature (for example, see Photos 4.1 and 4.2). This mode of
advertising, I would argue, is a response to the growing body of negative publicity
which car ownership has attracted (especially in terms of pollution and road conges-
tion). To prevent this publicity having an adverse effect on car sales these criticisms
have to be countered. To confront them in a direct way would always run the risk of
allowing the criticisms to come between the car being advertised and any potential
buyer. Therefore, showing cars in both nature (unpolluted) and space (uncongested)
confronts the claims without the risk of giving them a dangerous and unnecessary
visibility. In this way, the criticisms are answered without the questions themselves
having been formally posed. The emphasis placed on nature and space is, therefore, a
response to the twin questions (which remain unasked in the advertisement itself but
exist in the assumptions which organize the advert – in the text’s ‘problematic’): does

Photo 4.1 Advertising as an example of the ‘problematic’.