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Paper XII(A): 4 Term Papers [M.A. Semester III, 2018- 2019]

Term Paper III ( Contemporary Literary Theories)

12 December 2018

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”: Exposition and Interpretation

This paper proposes to examine Althusser’s essay with a view to explaining it and interpreting

it."Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)" (French:

"Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche") is an essay by the French

Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. First published in 1970, it advances Althusser's theory

of ideology. Where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thinly-sketched theory of ideology

as false consciousness, Althusser draws upon the works of later theorists such as Antonio

Gramsci, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to proffer a more elaborate redefinition of the

theory. Althusser's theory of ideology remains influential since it was written.

The initial coiner of the term ‘ideology’, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, writing in the

aftermath of the French revolution, intented to create a proper branch of study concerned with

ideas. Later on Karl Marx and Engels are the two great thinkers who very early developed this

concept but whose conceptualization remains influential to this day. (Freedan: 4-5). Marx and

Engels maintained that “in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a

camera obscura.” (qtd in Freedan: 5) Further, they associated class ideology, asserting that the

ideas of the ruling class were an instrument in the hands of the rulers, through the state, and were

employed to exercise control and domination. Moreover, the filtering of interests through a

container – ideology – permitted them and ideology itself, to be represented as if they were truth-

claims that possessed universal, rational validity. (Freeman: 6)

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Althusser is a Marxist philosopher. The intention that governs all his major works, particularly

the essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, is that Marx’s thought and practice

should be rightly understood and acted upon. His work consisted entirely in understanding the

immense theoretical revolution that had taken place in the work of Marx. (Ferretter: 11).

Reproduction of the relations of production:

Althusser begins the essay by reiterating the Marxist theory that in order to exist, a social

formation is required to essentially, continuously and perpetually reproduce the productive

forces, the conditions of production and the relations of production. The reproduction of

production relations is ensured by the wage system which pays a minimum amount to the

workers so that they appear to work day after day, thereby limiting their vertical mobility. The

reproduction of the conditions of production and the reproduction of the relations of production

happens through the state apparatuses which are insidious machinations controlled by the

capitalist ruling ideology in the context of a class struggle to repress, exploit, extort and

subjugate the ruled class. To quote from Althusser’s essay: “As Marx said, every child knows

that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as

it produced would not last a year. The ultimate condition of production is therefore the

reproduction of the conditions of production. (Lenin: 1)

The Marxist spatial metaphor of the edifice describes a social formation constituted by

the foundational infrastructure, i.e. the economic base, on which stands the superstructure

consisting of two floors: the law/the state (the politico-legal floor) and ideology. The

infrastructure consists of the forces, the means, and the relations of production. The following

examples reflect the concept of the infrastructure in further detail. The forces included the
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workers. Also, it consists of the technical knowledge to perform the work, such as training and

knowledge. Again to quote from the same essay:

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. (Lenin: 6)

The means are the materials of production. This includes the raw materials, tools, and

machines. The relations of production reflect the interactions between workers as well as

between the workers and owners. The superstructure arises from the infrastructure and consists

of culture and ideology. The following examples reflect the concept of the superstructure in

further detail.The culture includes the laws, politics, art, etc. Ideology includes the world views,

values, and beliefs. Marx's theory is that the superstructure comes from the infrastructure and

reconditions ways of life and living so that the infrastructure continues to be produced.

Althusser extends this topographical paradigm by stating that the infrastructural

economic base is endowed with an "index of effectivity" which enables it to ultimately determine

the functioning of the superstructure. He scrutinizes this structural metaphor by discussing the

superstructure in detail. A close study of the superstructure is necessitated due to its relative

autonomy over the base and its reciprocal action on the base.

Repressive state apparatuses:

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The ruling class uses the repressive state apparatuses (RSA) to dominate the working

class. The basic, social function of the RSA (government, courts, police and armed forces, etc.)

is timely intervention to politics in favour of the interests of the ruling class, by repressing the

subordinate social classes as required, either by violent or non-violent coercive means. The

ruling class controls the RSA, because they also control the powers of the state (political,

legislative, armed).

Althusser has enhanced the Marxist theory of the state, by distinguishing the repressive

apparatuses of the state from the ideological apparatuses of the state (ISA), which are an array of

social institutions and multiple, political realities that propagate many ideologies — the religious

ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA, the communications

ISA, the cultural ISA, etc.

The differences between the RSA and the ISA are:

The repressive state apparatus (RSA) functions as a unified entity (an institution), unlike

the ideological state apparatus (ISA), which is diverse in nature and plural in function. What

unites the disparate ISA however is their ultimate control by the ruling ideology.

The apparatuses of the state, repressive and ideological, each perform the double

functions of violence and ideology. A state apparatus cannot be exclusively repressive or

exclusively ideological. The distinction between an RSA and an ISA is its primary function in

society, respectively, the administration of violent repression and the dissemination of ideology.

In practice, the RSA is the means of repression and violence, and, secondarily, a means of

ideology; whereas, the primary, practical function of the ISA is as the means for the
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dissemination of ideology, and, secondarily, as a means of political violence and repression. The

secondary functions of the ISA are affected in a concealed and a symbolic manner.

Moreover, when individual persons and political groups threaten the social order

established by the dominant social class, the state invokes the stabilising functions of the

repressive state apparatus. As such, the benign forms of social repression affect the judicial

system, where ostensibly public contractual language is invoked in order to govern individual

and collective behaviour in society. As internal threats (social, political, economic) to the

dominant order appear, the state applies the proportionate social repression: police suppression,

incarceration, and, military intervention.

Ideological state apparatuses:

Ideological state apparatuses (ISA), according to Althusser, use methods other than

physical violence to achieve the same objectives as RSA. They may include educational

institutions (e.g. schools), media outlets, churches, social/sports clubs and the family. These

formations are ostensibly apolitical and part of civil society, rather than a formal part of the state

(i.e. as is the case in RSA). In terms of psychology they could be described as psychosocial,

because they aim to inculcate ways of seeing and evaluating things, events and class relations.

Instead of expressing and imposing order, through violent repression, ISA disseminate ideologies

that reinforce the control of a dominant class. People tend to be co-opted by fear of social

rejection, e.g. ostracisation, ridicule and isolation. In Althusser's view, a social class cannot hold

state power unless, and until, it simultaneously exercises hegemony (domination) over and

through ISA. Quoting from Althusser’s essay is useful here:

What are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)?

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They must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatus. Remember that in

Marxist theory, the State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Administration, the

Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the

Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions

by violence’ – at least ultimately (since repression, e.g. administrative repression, may take non-

physical forms). (Lenin: 17-18)

Educational ISA, in particular, assume a dominant role in a capitalist economy, and

conceal and mask the ideology of the ruling class behind the "liberating qualities" of education,

so that the hidden agendas of the ruling class are inconspicuous to most teachers, students,

parents and other interested members of society. Althusser said that the school has supplanted

the church as the crucial ISA for indoctrination, which augments the reproduction of the relations

of production (i.e. the capitalist relations of exploitation) by training the students to become a

source of labour power, who work for and under capitalists. However, because ISA cannot

dominate as obviously or readily as RSA, ideological state apparatuses may themselves become

a site of class struggle. That is, subordinate social classes are able to find the means and

occasions to express class struggle politically and in so doing counter the dominant class, either

by utilizing ideological contradictions inherent in ISA, or by campaigns to take control of

positions within the ISA. This, nevertheless, will not in itself prevent the dominant class from

retaining its position in control of RSA.

Ideological state apparatuses on the other hand function behind the shield in the form of

morals and ethics. Ideological state apparatuses are quite different from the repressive state

apparatuses as these are not violent. They include educational institutions, religious institutions,

family, media outlets, trade unions, cultural groups, political groups, legal groups etc. In all
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ideological state apparatuses, the set of ideological discourses at work are always dominated by

the ruling ideology.

According to Althusser, the educational institution is the core of ideological state

apparatuses. In earlier times Church used to shape the minds of the people and today it is the

school which makes the children learn morals and ethics. The students are taught the proper

ways of behavior, ways of talking, interacting, thinking and acting. Those who dominate become

capitalists while others become workers. Ruling ideologies do not enjoy freedom in ideological

state apparatuses. (English Summay)

In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" Louis Althusser asks the traditional

Marxist question of how are conditions and relations of production being reproduced and

maintained is society. Althusser's answer is that two types of mechanisms are at play here:

"repressive state apparatuses which gain abidance and cooperation from the public through

physical coercion means such as the police, army, prisons, courts etc. the other type of

mechanism Althusser notes are the "ideological state apparatuses". ideological state apparatuses

are somewhat reminiscent of Gramsci's concept of hegemony and soft power. According to

Althusser ideological state apparatuses" are sustained by cultural institutions such as the

education system, the church, the family, media and culture. The ideological state apparatuses

gain free willed cooperation and a sense of choice of what is in reality imposed.

Two theses on ideology :

Althusser advances two theses on ideology: "Ideology represents the imaginary

relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" and "Ideology has a material
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existence". The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the

function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based.

The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious

"representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and

behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses. Central to the

view of individuals as responsible subjects is the notion of an explanatory link between belief

and action, that every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing in the 'ideas' that his

'consciousness' inspires in him and freely accepts, must act according to his ideas, must therefore

inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice for Althusser, this is

yet another effect of social practice.

Where only a single subject (such and such individual) is concerned, the existence of the

ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into his material

practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological

apparatus from which we derive the ideas of that subject...Ideas have disappeared as such to the

precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices

governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears

that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real

determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, describing material

practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject

acting in all consciousness according to his belief.

Interpellation :
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Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must

now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say:

ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it

clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily

leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are

‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always already are. This proposition might

seem paradoxical. (Lenin: 53)

According to Althusser, the obviousness that people (you and I) are subjects is an effect

of ideology. Althusser believes that there are two functions of interpellation. One function of

ideology is “recognition” and the other function, its inverse, is “misrecognition”. Below are a

few concrete illustrations that Althusser provides to further explain the two functions: When a

friend of yours knocks on your door, you ask “Who’s there?” The answer, since it is obvious, is “

it’s me”. Once you recognize that “it is him or her”, you open to the door. After opening the

door, you see that it truly is he or she who is there.

Another illustration reflects Althusser’s idea of reconnaissance. When recognizing a

familiar face on the street in France, for example, you show him that you have recognized him

and that he has recognized you by saying “Hello, my friend”. You also shake his hand when

speaking. The hand-shake represents a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in

every-day life of France. Other locations across the world may have different rituals.

Althusser uses the term "interpellation" to describe the process by which ideology

constitutes individual persons as subjects. The ideological social and political institutions — the

family, the media, religious organisations, the education system and the discourses they
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propagate — 'hail' the individual in social interactions, giving him his identity. Althusser

compares ideology to a policeman shouting "hey you" to a person walking in the street. The

person responds to the call and in doing so is transformed into a subject — a self-conscious,

responsible agent whose actions can be explained by his or her thoughts. Althusser thus goes

against the classical definition of the subject as cause and substance, emphasising instead how

the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject. Concrete individual persons

are the carriers of ideology — they are "always-already interpellated" as subjects. Individual

subjects are presented principally as produced by social forces, rather than acting as powerful

independent agents with self-produced identities. Althusser's argument here strongly draws from

Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage. We acquire our identities by seeing ourselves

somehow mirrored in ideologies.

As a further example, Althusser depicts Christian religious ideology, embodied in the

Voice of God, instructing a person on what his place in the world is and what he must do to be

reconciled with Christ. Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify himself

as a Christian, he must first already be a subject; that is, by responding to God's call and

following His rules, he affirms himself as a free agent, the author of the acts for which he

assumes responsibility. We cannot recognize ourselves outside of ideology, and in fact, our very

actions reach out to this overarching structure.

The term interpellation was an idea introduced by Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to

explain the way in which ideas get into our heads and have an effect on our lives, so much so

that cultural ideas have such a hold on us that we believe they are our own. Interpellation is a

process, a process in which we encounter our culture’s values and internalize them.
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Interpellation expresses the idea that an idea is not simply yours alone (such as “I like

blue, I always have”) but rather an idea that has been presented to you for you to

accept. Ideologies – our attitudes towards gender, class, and race – should be thought of more

as social processes. Accepting or not accepting a culture’s given attitudes places one in a

particular relationship with power.

For Althusser, interpellation works in a manner much like giving a person a name, or

calling out to them in the street. That is, ideologies “address” people and offer them a particular

identity which they are encouraged to accept. However, one is not forced to accept that role

through violence. Because those roles are offered to us everywhere we look, or even assigned to

us by culture, they are presented in such a way that we are encouraged to accept them. This

works best when it is an invisible, but consensual process. It works best when we believe these

values are our own, and reflect the most obvious, logical way to live.

Ideologies, therefore, play a crucial role first in constructing our identities and then

giving us a particular place in society. To say that someone is fully interpellated is to say that he

or she has been successfully brought into accepting a certain role, or that he or she has accepted

values willingly.

Althusser’s major concepts — Ideological State Apparatuses, Interpellation, Imaginary

relations, and Overdetermination — permeate the discourse of contemporary literary and cultural

theory, and his theory of ideology has influenced virtually all subsequent serious work on the

topic.

Althusser’s point is that the economy is fundamentally structured by exploitation, and

this exploitation always produces conflict. Ideology is a second-order formation that strives to
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ensure the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and continuing working-class

adherence to a system that oppresses them. However, he argues that ideology cannot maintain an

unbroken domination, because it is produced by apparatuses that are enmeshed in material class

society. Because these apparatuses are bound up in labor, they cannot be fully owned and

controlled by the capitalist state, and they are not fully reconcilable into a consistent social

whole. As a result, ideology carries with it proletarian values, as well as bourgeois domination.

The proletarian elements that have been distorted in capitalist ideology can be strengthened and

clarified to the degree that eventually the entire edifice can be overthrown in a revolutionary

process. But because individual experience is always constituted by ideology, this process of

liberation must always take place as part of a commitment to working-class activity, not as a

personal break with delusion and conformity.

Althusser argues that the basic contradictions and irrationalities of the capitalist

system will also interfere with the ability of ideology to fully capture a convincing experience of

the world. These inherent contradictions produce ideological sub-formations. He argues that it

was exactly these contradictions and sub-formations that characterized the eruption of discontent

and insurrection by French workers and students in May 1968. In the later stages of the Russian

Revolution, insists Althusser, Vladimir Lenin understood this basic framework, and that is why

he was so interested in reforming education and social institutions under the rubric of the

Cultural Revolution.

For Althusser, class struggle takes place within ideology, and Marxist science can

discern this process. He argues that the capacity to understand ideology from a scientific point of

view is also a product of class struggle and the historical achievement of the workers’ movement.

Many of Althusser’s readers have not understood that many of his most difficult writings are
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actually an attempt to introduce the effect of the workers’ movement into the academic

philosophy of science (which necessarily involves difficult, specialized terminology), not an

effort to dictate workers’ activity from above.

Althusser’s work has proven enormously influential over the past half-century. Why have

his ideas proven so inspirational? One striking effect of his analyses is the emphasis on the

necessity of cultural norms in order to reproduce capitalist social relations. A consequence of this

is that Althusser posits the family as a basic ideological state apparatus and a site of the

reproduction of productive relations. Some feminist thinkers describe Althusser as a decisive

figure. They have credited Althusser’s innovations with stimulating their ability to rethink

gendered work within the capitalist economy. Judith Butler has also made use of Althusser’s

theory of ideological state apparatuses in order to better understand the means by which

oppressed groups are given social identities. His work is of great value for understanding

mechanisms of oppression by means that avoid reductionism while never forgetting the

determining role of relations of production.

Althusser’s emphasis on the necessity of ideology in reproducing productive relations is

tied to another controversial innovation. Deemphasizing the more deterministic role allotted to

productive forces, he argued that relations of production must be considered primary. This

anticipates and affects the perspective of contemporary historians described as political Marxists,

whose outlook has sparked such stimulating recent debate in the International Socialist tradition.

By all means, and according to most contemporary studies, Althusser’s polemics

read as extraordinarily tendentious in certain aspects. For example, he collapses together all

“humanists” into one revisionist camp; he rejects Hegelian dialectics completely, and he posits a
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sharp, absolute break between the early and mature work of Marx. Many of the European

thinkers who were deeply marked by his insights came to reject his positions on one or more of

these issues. On all of these matters, Althusser had a worthwhile point to make, although he

drastically overstated it: He saw humanism as a means of avoiding the radical nature of class

struggle, and his notion of a break in Marx’s thought in 1845 is a useful heuristic for

understanding a serious change in method. He did not read many of the more serious exponents

of Hegelian Marxist humanism, such as Georg Lukács, very well, and as a result some of his

criticisms are unconvincing.

Louis Althusser builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology

functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In

the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed "false consciousness," a false

understanding of the way the world functioned (for example, the suppression of the fact that the

products we purchase on the open market are, in fact, the result of the exploitation of laborers).

Althusser explains that for Marx "Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose

status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those

writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues'" (Lenin 108).

Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of "reality," the world

we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. Althusser's understanding of

ideology has in turn influenced a number of important Marxist thinkers, including Chantalle

Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Fredric Jameson.

The traditional way of thinking of ideology led Marxists to show how ideologies are false

by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology (for example, the "real" economic base for

ideology). According to Althusser, by contrast, ideology does not "reflect" the real world but
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"represents" the "imaginary relationship of individuals" to the real world; the thing ideology

(mis)represents is itself already at one remove from the real. Althusser contends that ideology

has a material existence because an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or

practices. Ideology always manifests itself through actions, which are inserted into practices, for

example, rituals, conventional behavior, and so on.. According to Althusser, the main purpose of

ideology is in constituting concrete individuals as subjects. So pervasive is ideology in its

constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as true. Althusser

makes it clear that the becoming-subject happens even before we are born. Althusser admits;

nevertheless, that an individual is always-already a subject, even before he is born Most subjects

accept their ideological self-constitution as "reality" or "nature" and thus rarely run afoul of the

repressive State apparatus, which is designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant

ideology. Hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive State apparatuses as the police than it

is on those Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects.

The individual is interpellated as a free subject in order that he shall submit freely to the

commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in

order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself.

Works Cited

Cultural Reader." Louis Althusser : On Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses-summary,

review notes". 28 August, 2018.

http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/08/louis-althusser-on-ideology-ideology.html.

Accessed 27 Oct, 2018.

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English Summary."Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Summary by Althusser."

https://englishsummary.com/ideology-ideological-state-apparatuses/.

Accessed 25 Oct, 2018.

Fellugo, Deno."Modules on Althusser: On Ideological State Apparatuses." Introductory Guide to

Critical Theory, 17 July, 2002.

www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/modules/althusserISAs.html.

Accessed 20 Oct, 2018.

Ferretter, Louis. "Louis Althusser." Routledge, London.

Freedan, Michael."Ideology: A Very Short Introduction." Oxford University Press, Oxford.

3.Lenin, Vladimir. "Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essasys.'' Abbr. by Lenin .Monthly

Review Press 1971.