Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx".
- Louis Althusser
Before a summational tour through this famous article I want to point out two things. First, in spite of Althusser’s parenthetical subtitle which would seem to suggest that this is not a finished and perfected statement of his views on these matters, most have tended to take it as just that, though when I read this, the tentative nature seems quite manifest to me. Second, while this title is very well known and so frequently anthologized, if one looks at editions of the Norton Theory and Criticism, or The Critical Tradition or any of a number of other anthologies, the amount that they excerpt from this text is quite small, and in the recent editions of the Norton, steadily shrinking. Rather than seeing the reason for the shrinkage as the tentative nature of the text, I think the entire article is worth thinking through and that there is much in it which is rarely discussed or read.
Althusser points out that thinking about ‘production’ alone is a dead-end and that we must think about the “reproduction of the conditions of production” (100). By this he means that the “existing relations if production” and the “productive forces” both must be reproduced in order for production itself to be sustainable (101). To begin with this includes the literal means of production itself, the machinery, factory, fuel, raw materials, etc. As such reproducing the means of production is not accomplished within an individual business concern, but must embrace all such firms in concert. Labor-power must also be reproduced and Althusser defines wages as “that part of the value produced by the expenditure of labour-power that is indispensable for its reproduction” (102). But there is still more involved in reproducing labor-power, as those workers must be “suitable to to be set to work in the complex system” that is, the must be educated in certain ways beyond the specifics of the actual labor. They must have incorporated the “attitude[s] that should be observed by every agent in the division of labor” (103) these rules or ‘work ethics‘ of the “established order” (104) are also crucial to reproducing the conditions necessary for continued production. He then introduces the (in)famous marxist notions of infrastructure and superstructure, the former being “the economic base” or “the ‘unity’ of the productive forces and relations of production” and by the latter he refers to a two-tiered structure whose levels are “politico-legal (law and State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc)” (105). The superstructure can not “‘stay up’ (in the air) alone” and must “rest” on the infrastructure. What Althusser adds (though it is not absent in Marx, simply overlooked more often than now) to this equation is not a rigid determination but “determination in the last instance” by the infrastructure. This last-instance determination takes two forms in marxist thought. That of “relative autonomy” between the levels or of “reciprocal action” (105). Althusser notes that this analysis is crucial but that it is also metaphorical and descriptive, requiring that we go beyond it theoretically. Althusser believes that to do this, one must focus on reproduction (106). Next he launches an analysis of the state, the law and ideology. The state he says, in line with many before him, is a “repressive apparatus” which “enables the ruling classes (...) to ensure their domination over the working class (...) [and] the process of surplus-value extortion” (106). The state is thus all of the material institutions of the state’s power, the courts, the law, the police, etc which combine to create “State power” (108). In an attempt to go beyond what he thinks of as a valid beginning to a marxist theory of the state (as that found in the “descriptive” account of superstructure and base) Althusser feels that more must be added. Althusser distinguishes between the state apparatus and state power, noticing that in many historical situations that much of the apparatus often survives the shift from one or another group holding state power. As such, when he says “the State” be means the apparatus itself, but that “State power” must be seen as crucial to “class objectives” (109). All of this being the case whether the state in question in socialist or capitalist, fascist or any other political form. Next raises the issue of the “State Ideological Apparatuses” (109-13). A state ideological apparatus he defines somewhat loosely (and calls for much more careful scrutiny of this articulation) as “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (110). He then produces the famous list which includes, amongst others, the “religious ISA,” the “family ISA,” the “political ISA,” the “cultural ISA” and others (110-1). He insists that there is but one “(Repressive) State Apparatus” which is in the “public domain” but there is a “plurality” of ISAs which operate primarily in the “private domain” (111). Forestalling criticism that he is unjustly calling private institutions, ideological apparatuses of the State, he, citing Gramsci, avers that the distinction public/private is “internal to bourgeois law” but ultimately thinks the criticism is misplaced as what is important is “how they function” within the social whole (111). He distinguishes the “Repressive State Apparatus” (RSA) from the ISAs by virtue of the former functioning by violence and the latter by ideology (111). He clarifies by saying that the RSA functions “predominately by repression” (111) and only “secondarily by ideology” (112) but observes that violence acts as the guarantee of its effectivity. The ISAs by contrast function mostly via ideology but “secondarily by repression, even if ultimately (...) this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic” (112). The posited “unity” of the ISAs is secured in Althusser’s view by virtue of them all function “beneath the ruling ideology,” that is, the ideology of the class which holds state power (112). He further suggests that “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses” (112). He then returns to a question left in abeyance earlier, that of how, specifically, the relations of production are reproduced (113). In large part he thinks that the answer is that this is accomplished via the superstructure, but that the ISAs have a specific role which is crucial in this regard. The RSA is “centralized” in its service to the ruling class but the ISAs, which are “relatively autonomous” allow for contradictions produced by the exercise of state power to find expression in some form and at the same time be reigned in by the ideology of the ruling classes (114). Althusser then gives a schematic historical account of the dominant ISA in the pre-capitalist period of the middle ages, the church, showing how, its powers were in time wrested from it through revolutions of various sorts and entrusted to new and different ISAs (115-7). Althusser’s conclusion is that at the present time it is the educational ideological apparatus which is the dominant ISA (116). Returning to ISAs in general he claims that they all “contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production” and “in the way proper to it” (117, my italics). All the ISAs do this “dominated by a single score,” that of the ideology of the class holding state power (118). Then, he spends some time on the educational ISA to think what it provides, which he concludes is “a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in the capitalist social formation” require in order that they be reproduced (119). He sees this activity as stratified based on how far a subject goes in their education, but at each level the students are “practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfill in class society” (118). Now Althusser turns to a discussion of ideology per se, advancing a number of theses about it and its functioning.
Though Althusser argues that Marx’s nowhere-explicit “theory” of ideology in the 1844 Manuscripts and the later German Ideology, is not “marxist” in its essence, he nonetheless adopts while resignifying certain aspects of Marx’s position about this question. The first of these is the claim that “ideology has no history” (121). Crucial to this claim is that we are here talking about ideology in general, and not any specific ideology or ideologies which, in every case, a historically and materially situated region example of the general phenomenon. But why has ideology in general no history? Althusser remarks that “the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical (...) omni-historical reality” (122). He evokes Freud claim that the unconscious is eternal as a parallel to his assertion, if, and only if “eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, transhistorical and therefore immutable in form” (122). Where Marx had treated ideology as both a pure illusory construction and (paradoxically) one that alludes to actual conditions of existence, Althusser reframes the questions of ideologies relation to material reality in the famous “THESIS I: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (123). He dispenses with the possibility that ideology is entirely illusion and focuses on how it is both allusion and illusion in varying degrees. The key word in the thesis turns out to be relationship, as “it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology (...) it is their relation to those conditions of existence (...). It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e., imaginary representation of the real world” (124). [A few words here about Althusser’s use of Lacanian ideas is in order. Though he will rely rather heavily on both imaginary and real, there is some conceptual slippage in his use. Imaginary is closest to its Lacanian origin, both as a kind of Hegelian “picture thinking,” (essentially the assumption that a static image representing a situation provides an adequate knowledge of it) and in the sense crucial in the Mirror-Phase essay where and image, outside of the subject, is take as its truth. What Althusser does not make use of (which is unfortunate) is the inherently conflictual nature of the imaginary in Lacan’s use.] His use of real is quite unlike Lacan and can best perhaps be read as actual-material conditions of existence, rather than “real.” Gone entirely is a thought of the real as distinct from reality as in Lacan.] After also dispensing with the position that ideologies are organized, instituted and maintained solely through the nefarious efforts of those in power, he offers, “THESE II: Ideology has a material existence” (125). That is, “the ‘ideas’ or ‘representations’, etc., which seem to make up ideology do not have an ideal (...) or spiritual existence,” rather they exist materially, or not at all (125). The reason for this that “ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” (126). As a result, an individual “adopts such and such a practical attitude, and (...) participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject” (125). To further ground this idea he turns to Pascal’s famous advice to the man who had lost his faith “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (127). He concludes that for any individual “his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (127). His next major claim then concerns the subject; “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects” (128). As such, “the category of the subject (...) is the constitutive category of all ideology” (129). Interpellation constitutes subjects through both recognition and misrecognition (129). Because we “live, move and have our being” in ideology, the category of the subject strikes us “a primary ‘obviousness’ (...): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc...)” (129) and yet despite what each feels is so manifestly obvious, we are “interpellated as (...) (free) subject(s) in order that [we] shall submit freely to” our own domination (136). Thus, “[t]here are no subjects except by and for their submission” (136). Interpellation is then how individuals are constituted as subjects; recognized in the sense found in the example of being hailed on the street, and misrecognized as well in that so very much of what we are as subjects is determined without reference to the material reality of our phenomenal existences and in fact is waiting at the ready by the time we exit the womb. Here Althusser refers to (without using the term) the symbolic order which, at least in the western world, determines in advance the child last name, its relation to others (family) and as soon as the child is out of the mother, its gender and thus a host of other determination which will frame the child’s existence as “always-already” a subject (130). Because of the aforementioned obviousness which we feel as operators of language and bearers of a name, a sex, and ethnicity, etc. all subjects (barring true believers) thus always feel that ideology is something afflicting not themselves, but others. In light of this Althusser claims that “ideology has no outside (for itself), but that at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)” (131). This is basic line of thought and argument in the text.
In the years since (the article was written in 1969) the ideas herein have been rabidly held to by some and just as relentlessly disputed by others. “Althusserianism” so called, has had its day and it impact upon the thinking of ideology and much else. In my view a great deal of this remains pertinent. The notion of interpellation, as valuable as it is, and in limited scenarios, as much explanatory power as it has, still seems to need to transcend (to borrow Althusser’s terms) its merely descriptive status and become more general still, or be supplanted by any alternate concept which does the work of interpellation but is not so unilateral in its conceptual functioning. Toward that end it seems to me that we need to recognize that the status of subject is univocal. That is, as subject of the United States, I am subject to its laws - I may break them, but my submission to them is relatively inflexible. But as a Lacanian, I am subject to something certainly, though it is not Lacan and nor is it psychoanalytic law (of which there is precious little), rather it seems that I am subject to a few basic insights, and in my own thinking about this, I am beholden not to treat psychoanalytic thinking as immutable but as requiring further development, development that I too have the opportunity to be involved in. Being a subject in these two senses (and in many others imaginable) seems quite different, and that sort of difference is either absent or imperceptible in Althusser’s account.
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| I searched google images using the phrase "ideological state apparatus" and I got an picture of a naked woman holding a hammer and sickle. I went to the source and found another picture which you see here, which seems to be an artwork and not an actual person, though I may be wrong. Whatever, all responsibility is mine & for good or ill, I like the image. |
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