Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

White, Daniel

Thesis/Dissertation Co-Chair

Harrawood, Michael

Abstract

In the 1960s, the French Communist thinker Louis Althusser undertook to reorient capitalistic societies toward realizing socialist ideals. However, Althusser envisioned a self-sustaining capitalist state placing, through ideological state apparatuses, seemingly insurmountable limitations on constituents’ ideas and actions. In brief, his characterization of social phenomena as revealing a constructed ideology favoring the state, itself supporting the economy, seems to have contradicted his revolutionary goal. This thesis argues that communication theory, as explicated by the Canadian theorist Anthony Wilden, provides a framework capable of rectifying Althusser’s theory of the state to meet his goal of creating a society whose citizens are free from state control. Althusser thought undoing ideological apparatuses began with their identification, proceeded through their disruption, and concluded with their transformation. Wilden’s theory of morphogenic systems, conceptualizing “resistance” to ideological structures as “noise” in the “signal” of the state apparatus, shows that generating noise permits political actors to foster morphogenesis in a “repressive” state.

Comments

Includes bibliography.

Extent

73 p.

Identifier

FA00003622

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