"Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture"
About this Quote
Fo takes a word that usually arrives as an accusation and refuses to let it stay there. “Ideology” is meant, in polite conversation, to signal distortion: the other person’s rigid worldview, their propaganda, their inability to see facts. Fo’s move is to puncture that comforting fantasy of neutrality. If ideology is “an inherent part of culture,” then the real delusion isn’t having an ideology; it’s believing you don’t.
The line carries the fingerprints of a playwright who made his career staging the politics everyone else tried to treat as mere background noise. Fo’s theater - especially in works like Accidental Death of an Anarchist - thrives on the idea that power doesn’t just operate through laws and police batons, but through language, jokes, common sense, and the stories a society repeats until they feel natural. Calling ideology “inherent” is a direct challenge to the cultural gatekeepers who want art to be “universal” (read: safely nonthreatening) while their own values quietly set the rules of what counts as tasteful, realistic, or respectable.
The subtext is a warning disguised as a clarification: if you think ideology only belongs to extremists, you’ve already been recruited by the dominant one. Fo isn’t romanticizing ideology; he’s demystifying it. Culture isn’t a neutral container that politics contaminates. Culture is one of politics’ favorite delivery systems, and theater - live, communal, hard to fully control - is where that becomes easiest to see.
The line carries the fingerprints of a playwright who made his career staging the politics everyone else tried to treat as mere background noise. Fo’s theater - especially in works like Accidental Death of an Anarchist - thrives on the idea that power doesn’t just operate through laws and police batons, but through language, jokes, common sense, and the stories a society repeats until they feel natural. Calling ideology “inherent” is a direct challenge to the cultural gatekeepers who want art to be “universal” (read: safely nonthreatening) while their own values quietly set the rules of what counts as tasteful, realistic, or respectable.
The subtext is a warning disguised as a clarification: if you think ideology only belongs to extremists, you’ve already been recruited by the dominant one. Fo isn’t romanticizing ideology; he’s demystifying it. Culture isn’t a neutral container that politics contaminates. Culture is one of politics’ favorite delivery systems, and theater - live, communal, hard to fully control - is where that becomes easiest to see.
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| Topic | Deep |
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