Camera+Obscura

For a 2 paragraph passage, this is horribly confusing. The one sentence that seems to make any sense is the final one:  “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a //camera obscura//, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process”
 * Karl Marx: Camera Obscura **

My take on the camera obscura idea is this: real-world individuals are the starting point of any ideologies. Based on their real lived experience in the world, and their empirical analysis of their connections between the “social and political structure with production”, they form ideologies and ideas. Unfortunately, their ideas are mixed up, confused, and distorted. However, this is not because of a lack of understanding or intellectual capacity, but because the very life-process of real people leads them to have distorted understandings. **

I found the following teaching-aid online that links this Marx passage to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Sorry for the hopeless pun, but it does seem to ‘shed some light’ on the camera obscura idea… “Marx actually speaks of something very like a cave-a camera obscura, a dark room in which images of the outside are cast upon a table by a device of mirrors and lenses in the ceiling. [| [7 ]]  If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. [| [8 ]] This suggests that the shadows on the wall in Marx's Cave are //ideology//. Where do these shadows come from? Another famous passage from Marx tells us: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. . . . The individuals composing the ruling class. . . rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. ( [|http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/papers/marx.html] )