The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors

The publication of Louis Althusser’s 1969 article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” made a deep impact on cultural studies and was instrumental in the formation of the apparatus theory in film studies. While contemporaneous with the emergence of performance art, this article and the questions of ideology and apparatus it raises barely registered in the field of performance studies, which was then in its formative phase. Jakovljević takes this absence of Althusser’s apparatus the...