Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Ideological State Apparatuses

Starts by discussing how the productive forces are reproduced themselves through capitalist culture:

131-132: “How is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of labour power provided for in a capitalist regime? Here, unlike social formations characterized by slavery or serfdom this reproduction of the skills of labour power tends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly to be provided for 'on the spot' (apprenticeship within production itself), but is achieved more and more outside production: by the capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions.”

132-133: “the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology… and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in words'.”

The switches to the question of the reproduction of the relations of production.

To explain how it happens, he introduces a division between the State power (function), the (repressive) State apparatus (institutions) and the ideological State apparatuses. “I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions.” (143) It includes institutions of religion, education, family, law, politics, trade-unionism, media and culture.

145: “the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology… for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic.”

146: “To my knowledge, 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. I only need one example and proof of this: Lenin's anguished concern to revolutionize the educational Ideological State Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism.”

Althusser then makes his main argument in the essay: that the relations of production are “secured by the legal-political and ideological superstructure.” (148) The main ideological state apparatus which contributes to it is education. “It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most 'vulnerable', squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy).” (155)

Althusser then makes a number of remarks on what he calls ‘theory of ideology’. He starts making parallel with the Freudian unconscious, arguing that ideology has no history, because it, just as the unconscious, is omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history (ideologies have history, but not ideology per se, as a grand phenomenon of human life: ideology emerges with the society and will be gone with it). Ideology and the unconscious are, actually, interrelated in Althusser’s opinion.

Ideology is a 'Representation ' of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence

“it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that 'men' 'represent to themselves' in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there.” (164)

“Ideology has a material existence… an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.” (166)

166-167: “the 'individuals' who live in ideology, i.e. in a determinate (religious, ethical, etc.) representation of the world whose imaginary distortion depends on their imaginary relation to their conditions of existence, in other words, in the last instance, to the relations of production and to class relations (ideology = an imaginary relation to real relations). I shall say that this imaginary relation is itself endowed with a material existence.” People materialize and embody ideologies, which can’t exist without them. “the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports' club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc.” (168)

169: “where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that 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.”

·         “Disappeared: the term ideas.

·         Survive: the terms subject, consciousness, belief, actions.

·         Appear: the terms practices, rituals, ideological apparatus.”

THE CENTRAL THESIS: Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects

170: “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it ) of 'constituting ' concrete individuals as subjects.”

172: “It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize.” This means that ideology teaches people to interpret the world in certain ways that individuals recognize as their own.

“the category of the 'subject' is constitutive of ideology, which only exists by constituting concrete subjects as subjects” (173)

To explain how ideology penetrates into subjects, he moves on to Lacan:

180: “We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject [i.e., itself – ideology] is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning… The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:”

181: “1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects;
2. their subjection to the Subject;
3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself;
4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen -- 'So be it '.”

“caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses).”