Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Althusser

Context

From the 1950s onwards it became clear to many on the political left that the October 1917 Russian revolution had turned into a repressive bureaucratic dictatorship. Khrushchev had denounced Stalinist crimes, but the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956 to suppress reforms demonstrated that little had really changed. Marxist critics of the Soviet Union began to review Marx's early writings to condemn what had been done in his name. This humanist moral criticism was developed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as well as within the French Communist Party itself. 

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) rejected this moral criticism of Stalinism, which gave him the false label as a closet Stalinist. In fact, he proposed a deeper analysis of what had gone wrong in the communist movement. He applied the ideas of historians of science such as Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard, who showed that scientific innovations revamp the thinking of thought, replacing older questions and patterns with new ones.

When he applied this approach to Marx's early humanistic view of history, Althusser found it prescientific. He maintained that Marx himself had seen the limitations of his earlier philosophy and turned to empirical studies to develop new concepts. Althusser concluded that Marx had seen that major social transformations were not inevitable through some aristotelian 'telos', but were the outcome of a complex web of circumstances. 

Althusser and his students re-read Das Kapital using the structuralist methods of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who understood society as a complex set of structures producing effects independently of humans.

The outcomes of the rereading of Das Kapital were a more refined vision of Marxist economics and new thinking about economic activity and society. Althusser discarded economic determinism and opted for a wider vision of society as different 'practices': cultural, intellectual, political and economic, each playing a role.

The author emphasised cultural processes, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), such as schools, the family, trade unions, political parties, churches, and voluntary associations. This was followed up by poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault, who finally disengaged them from their economic foundations.

Commentary

At the beginning of his essay "Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État (Notes pour une recherche) (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Notes Towards an Investigation), first published in 1970, Althusser refers to the concepts of Ideological State Apparatuses (religious institutions, the educational system, the family, the political system, trade unions, communications: press, radio, television, culture: literature, arts, sports...) which operate in private lives through ideology and Repressive State Apparatuses (the government, the army, the administration, prisons, courts, police) which operate publicly and often through violence. 

Both apparatuses are tools to consolidate and perpetuate the power of the State and citizens are controlled both through repression and ideology, that of the ruling class:

“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.”

The Ideological State Apparatuses governed by the ruling class are also the site of class struggle.

Althusser rejects the notion that individuals act freely according to conscious beliefs. He affirms that belief systems are shaped within an ideological frame such as God, Justice and Duty. These beliefs are reflected in our behaviours and everyday decisions. Our actions become practices dictated by rituals. Deviation is viewed as ethically wrong because it may indicate a contrary belief which challenges the established ideology:

“I shall therefore say that, 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.”

One characteristic of ideology is that it imposes discreetly, without appearing to do so. It thus becomes a truth, whereas it is actually a belief.

Another feature of ideology is that it functions by turning individuals into subjects with roles in the ideological framework. Once an individual becomes a subject the ideology reinforces their beliefs through practices and rituals, then dictates what they must believe and how they must act and live their lives.

“I add that 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. In the interaction of this double constitution exists the functioning of all ideology, ideology being nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence of that functioning.”

The author points out that ideology works in two ways:

- Ideology confers an identity on us as subjects, which we assume is unquestionable

- Ideology also imposes a distorted reality where we believe this identity is a natural truth, whereas in fact it is a constructed one.

Themes

Philosophy

According to Althusser most philosophy repeats abstract ideas which sustain established socio-economic relationships. This allows these forces to function with minimal opposition. For the author, genuine philosophy is the theory of theoretical practice and it works to aid science by distinguishing between ideological and scientific concepts. His rereading of Das Kapital had the goal of clarifying the concepts that enabled Marx's scientific analysis to proceed.

Althusser's reading of Marx emphasises the Marxist philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. He maintains that individual productive processes are related within a structured whole that he calls "structural causality". Each element of production is also determined by all the others.

Contradiction is another philosophical concept that enables understanding of Marx's scientific process of production. This idea means that at any specific time many concrete practices happen within a mode of production, and there may be tensions among them. An example of this appears in Marx's book when he noted that the expropriation of peasants' holdings by the new bourgeois in the early 16th. century was illegal according to laws passed by the Church and aristocracy. Althusser concluded that the development of practices within a mode of production is not necessarily linear.

A further Marxian concept is “structure in dominance.” This describes the principal element in the whole production structure that organises all other practices. For example in contemporary society the production of moral values, scientific knowledge, the family, art, and so on is dominated by the production/consumption of commodities. In another era the dominant structure that organised the socio-economic structure was religious beliefs and practices.

Aesthetics

Althusser argues that art generally reproduces ideology. He sees no formal method of distinguishing between a work of art and a cultural production, such as advertising, because you can identify yourself equally with the protagonist of an advert and of a drama. However, the author thinks that "authentic" art can question a subject's relationship with the world so that both are not seen as fitting together. This art distances the subject from their habitual worldview and opens the possibility of acting to change the world.