Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.

uk

Very generally, one could say that a Marxist notion of ideology posits some relationship
of effect between the respective social reality - whatever that may be - and the individuals’
ways of symbolically representing, or ordering this social reality. That means the material
conditions individuals find themselves in, somewhat determine the ways in which subjects
think, act, and make sense of their own and others’ places in the world. Benno just presented
one version of this notion and concluded by giving a preliminary definition of ideology as
‘necessarily false consciousness’. While this approach can evidently inform and enrich
discourse analysis it is, of course, only one definition currently used in the social sciences and
humanities.
Terry Eagleton, for instance, names 16 ways to understand the concept. They are not
necessarily mutually exclusive and could be said to highlight different aspects of the same
phenomenon.The general approach to ideology I would like to talk about in the next 20 minutes
or so is one first developed by the French Marxist philosopher – and discourse analyst avant la
letter – Louis Althusser. It probably most resembles the three definitions highlighted here. In
different ways, it influenced people like Foucault, Pêcheux, Jameson, Zizek, or Butler and
rather than talking of ‘false consciousness’ it suggests a concept of ideology which underlines
the role of discourse, meaning and meaning production, and the lived character of ideology.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

Within this framework, ideology differs quite a bit from orthodox Marxist ideas about how
ideology should be understood. Althusser argues that it has nothing to do with ‘false
consciousness’, that it is not primarily concerned with (immaterial) ideas but with practices,
and that it is necessary to differentiate between ‘ideology in general’ (which is eternal and
almost universal) and ‘different ideologies’ which can be criticised and analysed.

To show the relevance of this understanding to Discourse Studies and to present it as a

decidedly Marxist and genuinely discursive approach to ideology, I will first insert the concept

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

of ideology into a Marxist approach to political economy in the broadest sense to then present
a theory of ideology in general. The last bit sums up this conceptualisation and suggests that
we can understand ideology as a ‘discursive positioning practice’.

To understand what ideology is, we need to take a small detour to establish one of the things
ideology does. In a nutshell, ideology takes part in the reproduction of the dominant relations
of production, which are essentially relations of exploitation in capitalism.

In every mode of production, the conditions of production – that is the way in which we
organise the production of our material life – need to be reproduced and sometimes modified.
That is pretty obvious when it comes to the means of production. Machines, factories, software,
infrastructure etc. need to be replaced and ‘modernised’ and raw materials need to be obtained
all to ensure the production of the ‘immense collection of commodities’ Marx talks about.
Also, the productive forces need to be reproduced by paying workers a wage, so they can feed,
clothe, and house themselves and have some downtime and entertainment so they can go back
to work the next day – to put it bluntly. And the skills and know-how of people need to be
maintained and developed through education, apprenticeships, etc. where also rules of
behaviour and rules of morality and how to live in the given social formation is partly learned.
And it also seems necessary that most people accept and deem ‘normal’ or ‘right’ the way
things work. In other words, the subjection to the ruling ideology has to be ensured. Of course
it’s more complicated than that but the last point brings us to ideology and we can see one way
in which ideology keeps things going in favour of the existing social conditions.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

There is this famous (and problematic) metaphor of base and superstructure in classical
Marxism which denotes that there is an economic base – with the forces of production and the
relations of production - and a superstructure consisting of the state, ideology, the law, and
culture. While the different elements of the superstructure are relatively autonomous, in the last
instance, what happens in the superstructure is determined by the base.
What we just said about know-how, education, and the ruling ideology would belong to this
superstructure.

When it comes to the reproduction of relations of production, instances in what would be called
‘superstructure’ in this metaphor, play a big role.

Namely this reproduction is to a large part ensured by two things:

The Repressive State Apparatus, and the Ideological State Apparatuses.

The repressive state apparatus functions predominantly by repression and violence, or the threat
thereof. It’s comprised of the police, the military, the juridical system, etc. But obviously most
subjects work all by themselves – they don’t need to be violently forced to play by the rules
and know and accept how things are.

Ideological State Apparatuses, on the other hand, function predominantly by and through
ideology. The name “state apparatuses” is a bit misleading, though, because they cover a wide
range of institutions, such as churches, parties, sports clubs, the family, cultural institutions and
so on. These different institutions individuals are involved in and their respective (religious,

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

political, moral) ideologies can contradict each other. What unites these different ideological
institutions is that they are dominated by the dominant or ruling ideology, which is the ideology
of the ruling class. With Gramsci we might say that it exercises hegemony in the ideological
state apparatuses. But they are not only a site of domination, but also a site of struggle. We
could say that there is also class war being waged on the level of ideology. What is seen as
normal, good, evident, and the ways things should work is negotiated and fought over within
structures of domination. And this struggle is not always violent, but more often than not
discursive and symbolic. What we can take from this at this point is something Benno already
pointed out, namely that we have to take into account the material conditions in which
discourses and ideologies emerge.

So now we can move on to a definition of ideology, and to what it has to do with discourse.
It is the ‘representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real material
conditions of existence’.

The first thing I would like to point out is that what follows is a general theory of ideology and
not one of particular ideologies. General in the sense like there is a general theory of the
unconscious, for example.

In every conceivable social formation, individuals have to ‘find their place,’ take up a subject
position, make intelligible to themselves the conditions they exist in, and live their relation to
those conditions.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

And these relationships are always – in some way – imaginary. You may notice a small but
important difference to what Benno presented. Here, it is not the ideas about or the
representations of the social reality that are false or distorted, but the relationships of
individuals to these social relations that are (necessarily) imaginary.

It is still a necessarily distorted representation, but what is represented is the symbolic

relationship individuals have to their real social and individual relations. It has to do with how
they occupy a subject-position in the social world – or in discourse - and how they relate to
other groups, individuals, and the material conditions they find themselves in more generally.

Althusser writes that We live, talk, think, ‘have our being’ in ideology; it is the Logos we move
in. In another book he writes that ideology is a matter of the lived, subjectively meaningful
relation of individuals to their world.

Meaningful, representation, Logos – these terms put us in close vicinity to discourse and we
can see that ideology has to do with the production of meaning. And that it can be described as
a lived relation brings us to another crucial point.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

At the outset, I said that ideology is not really concerned with immaterial ideas. This is a bit
surprising because in its beginnings in the 18th century with Destutt de Tracy it denoted the
science of ideas. But what Althusser, Pêcheux, and others point out is that ideology is
fundamentally material. The first hint to why that is lies in the ‘idea’ that it is a lived relation
and not just a thought relation. It is something unconscious, rather than conscious and
something we do rather than something we think. The ways in which individuals relate to and
make intelligible their social conditions and relations to others in it, do not primarily have to
do with the ideas in people’s minds.

In this sense, we can say that ideology has its existence in material practices. I can’t go into
detail here, but if we accept this, ideas take on a new meaning. They appear as “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 the subject”.
While these things are of course material in a specific sense, they are certainly not immaterial
or ideational. Let’s say that they have a materiality of performative practices.

So concepts usually associated with ideology are slightly redefined. Beliefs are external, ideas
are material actions, and the reality of convictions is performative.

Also, the representations of individuals do not evolve out of the subjects’ transcendental
consciousness as in Kant, but are derived from the ideological apparatuses that enable the

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

subjects to position themselves in (material) social reality, which is another way of saying that
social being determines practical consciousness.

If ideology pertains to the production of meaning and has to do with representation and
symbolic relationships and if ideology has its existence in pracitices, then it is possible to
maintain that these ideological practices are discursive practices.

So then we have discursive practices through which individuals represent and live their relation
to the world. To this something else needs to be added if we really want to understand what
ideology is. And it has to do with subjectivity or the status of the subject in this theory.

To practically live the relation to their conditions of existence, the individual has to be an
ideological subject. Without ideology there is no practice. And there is no practice and no
ideology except by the subject and for subjects.

This sounds pretty abstract, but what it means is that in order to speak, say ‚I‘, and ‚know who
you are‘, and live your relation to the worlds, you need to be a speaking subject. And it is
ideology with constitutes us as subjects and provides us with a position from which we can
produce meaning.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

The operation through which ideology constitutes speaking and thinking subjects can be called
‚interpellation‘. So what ideology does on this very basic level is providing individuals with a
symbolic position from which they can speak represent their imaginary relations.

And it does so, by interpellating individuals as speaking subjects. Obviously, you are all
subjects in this room. And if you recognize that I maybe meant you in what I just said, we are
already knee deep what Althusser calls a ritual of ideological recognition. And also we can
obviously all say ‚I‘ and mean something by it. It is the same obviousness that makes a word
mean something. But, it is exactly this kind of obviousness that is provided by ideology.

We are always-already subjects. That is, we cannot watch an individual being turned into a
subject on the street. So what is interpellation? Interpellation, or hailing , is the operation by
which ideology ‘recruits’ individuals as subjects and can be imagined on the lines of someone
calling an someone, who recognizes that ‘the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it
was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else)’. This calling can be a ‘hey, you!’ or
whistling, or gesturing, or providing another kind of material sign. Another example of
interpellation can be found in Judith Butler’s work, for instance. There the simple ‘It’s a girl’
interpellates the child into a gendered subject position. The same operation is at work when
some priest tells you that Jesus died for YOU. And of course there are many many other subject
positions that are provided in this way.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

Through interpellation the subject is designated a place in the social formation that it accepts.
Or better, that it must freely accept and ‘choose’. Ideology keeps subjects in place. To conclude
this part, we can say that “The signifying practice of interpellation provides subject positions
[in discourse] from which meaning about the individual’s conditions of existence and social
relations can be produced and represented.” Unfortunately, these subject positions cannot be
freely chosen. It always also depends on how we are positioned, classified, categorised by
others, on how we are interpellated and what interpellations we affectively accept or suffer or
consider as evident and true.

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

Ideology is not ‚false consciousness‘ in the orthodox Marxist sense and when we deal with
ideology, it is not primarily immaterial ideas we are concerned with. Because we are all
ideological subjects, ideology is not a purely negative phenomenon. There are also pretty good
ways to represent our relations to our conditions of existence. And we also saw that it is not
simply a ‚false representation of social reality’.

Rather, it is something we almost universally and unconsciously do. And this doing can best
be conceptualised as a discursive practice which provides individuals with subject positions
and enables them to live a meaningful relationship to the social conditions and relations the
find themselves in.

This is the sense in which ideology is a discursive practice. It positions, places, or, alternatively,
offers subject-positions to the subject that can only then enter the necessarily imaginary relation
to its real conditions of existence.

It can be seen as material discourse in which the relations between the individuals are
symbolically defined. Althusser writes that ‘in order for the individual to be constituted as an
interpellated subject, it must recognize itself as a subject in ideological discourse’.

A meaningful relation to the subject’s reality is possible only from a certain, definite position
occupied by the subject in relation to language.

Individuals’ representations take place within language and individuals are hailed or
interpellated as speaking subjects in discursive formations in which they take up subject

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 Johannes Beetz | University of Warwick |Centre for Applied Linguistics | j.beetz@warwick.ac.uk

positions. In Pêcheux, as in Althusser, the subject positions individuals are interpellated into,
are antecedent to the individual. We cannot freely choose the positions we are assigned by
others or are able to occupy.

Again, Ideology, in the sense suggested here, can be conceptualised as a discursive practice
through which individuals occupy and distribute subject positions in an imaginary relationship
to their conditions of existence. And ultimately these practices are limited, or constituted by
material social conditions and relations.

Of course all this doesn’t mean that there are no ‘false’ representations of social reality.
The whole point of engaging with the conceptualisation and analysis of ideology is – of course
– still critique and this critique will also be normative. But from the perspective of the approach
I just presented, this critique will profit from a theory of ideology that delineates the general
operation and the mechanisms of ideology.

So if we are critiquing a particular religious, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist ideology, we can say
that it ‘misrepresents reality’ in a profound way. And we can also critique ideologies specific
to capitalism – such as commodity fetishism – within this framework and say that the imaginary
relationship to others represented in it, which is reifying and objectifying our relations to them,
is a necessary effect of an inverted reality. But I would suggest that this critique should happen
in a framework which conceives of ideology as a material discursive practice which represents
the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

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