READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION

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.