Subject and Ideology

Louis Althusser, in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (which is available online here), argues for an interconnection between the subject and ideology. It is also here that he develops his basic argument for interpellation. The following is a brief discussion of this, but I’m not trying to be particularly innovative or say anything revolutionary. Just trying to wrap my head around his concepts.

Althusser is trying to work out the concept of reproduction, and how people accept the dominant order of the culture and society they live in. Much of what Althusser develops here, is later expanded by people such as Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Reproduction, for Althusser as for Marx, is the necessary condition of production to take place. As Althusser states

To put this more scientifically, I shall say that 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 for the workers, 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’.

In other words, it is necessary to submit to the ruling ideology in order to be a “good worker”, and necessary to manipulate the ruling ideology in order to be a “good capitalist”. Ideology is for Althusser intimately tied up with skills and know-how, and he goes on to argue that it is not possible to learn one without the other:

I believe that the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.

Subjection - being subjected to (and a subject to) dominant ideology - is part of the educational system, which forms one example of what Althusser terms Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The ISA is part of the State Apparatus, but does not function like the typical Repressive State Apparatus - ie. violence from police or military - but functions through ideology first, and violence later. In the case of the educational system, punishments only arrive if one does not follow the rules, but it is far more insidious in the way it encourages proper behavior by awarding good grades for those who follow the rules.

ISAs thus work mostly invisibly throughout society, and their work is done by ideolog, which is to say a particular way of addressing persons. Althusser begins by defining ideology in conjunction with Marx: “ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” However, Althusser moves on from this definition to a much more complex, and much more interesting.

First of all, Althusser does away with the notion that ideology is located in society merely as a set of ideas. What makes ideology so pervasive, is the fact that it is material. He reverses the typical notion of saying that ideology leads to ritual practices, and instead argues that it is in fact the ritual practices which create and embody ideology in material actions:

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.

It is here that interpellation emerges, from the way the individual is made into a subject by ideology:

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this level concrete subjects only exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete individual. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation

Interpellation of the subject is thus exactly ideology, which is also what prompts Althusser to say that there is no outside to ideology, and at the same time there is no outside ideology.

What is sometimes misunderstood about Althusser, is the notion that there is no escape from the interpellation of ideology and the subject position offered. This is not exactly true, as Althusser states that when we act according to ideology and performs the material actions required of us, we are ‘good subjects’. However, it is possible to be a ‘bad subject’ which is of course to not perform ideology. They require the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus; military, police, etc.

While this seems to me obviously true, it also seems that this is one place where the ISA can take action just as much as the RSA. While the police will stop bad subjects who protest against capitalist ideology, such as in the WTO ‘riots’, there are plenty of cases where the ISA simply functions as ideological repression, such as generating the beliefs that sex before marriage is a sin, or that people with tattoos are criminals or whatever might be considered strictly legal but not within ruling ideology. Because of this, I will investigate the case of bad subjects in further posts.