Precis for Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"

by Michael Bench

Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. The State, for Althusser, is the kind of governmental formation that arises with capitalism; a state is determined by the capitalist mode of production and formed to protect its interests. It is historically true that the idea of nations as discrete units is coterminous with capitalism. It is also possible that democracy, as an ideology and/or a governmental form is also coterminous with capitalism, as democracy gives the "illusion" that all people are equal, and have equal power.

Althusser mentions two major mechanisms for insuring that people within a State behave according to the rules of that State, even when it's not in their best interests (in regards to their class positions) to do so. The first is what Althusser calls the RSA, or Repressive State Apparatuses, that can enforce behavior directly, such as the police, and the criminal justice and prison system. Through these "apparatuses" the state has the power to force you physically to behave. More importantly for literary studies, however, are the second mechanism Althusser investigates, which he calls ISAs, or Ideological State Apparatuses. These are institutions which generate ideologies which we as individuals (and groups) then internalize, and act in accordance with. Ideology is a structure, its contents will vary, you can fill it up with anything, but its form, like the structure of the unconscious, is always the same. And ideology works "unconsciously."

Althusser's first premise or thesis is that "Ideology is a 'representation' of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real conditions of existence." He begins his explanation of this pronouncement by looking at why people need this imaginary relation to real conditions of existence. Why not just understand the real.

The first answer to this question, Althusser says, comes from the 18th century, and the idea that ideology comes from priests and despots. This is basically a conspiracy theory, which says that a handful of powerful men fooled the populace into believing these (falsified) representations/ideas about the world.

The second (and, from the Marxist perspective, the right) answer is that the material alienation of real conditions predisposes people to form representations which distance them from these real conditions. In other words, the material relations of capitalist production are themselves alienating, but people can't quite deal with the harsh reality of this, so they make up stories about how the relations of production aren't so bad; these stories, or representations, then alienate them further from the real (alienating) conditions. The double distancing involved here, or the alienation of alienation, works like an analgesic, a pill, to keep us from feeling pain of alienation.

These ideas about representation and reality assume that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in ideology is the "real world," or real conditions of existence. Althusser says that ideology doesn't represent the real world per se, but human beings' relation to that real world, to their perceptions of the real conditions of existence. In fact, we probably can't know the real world directly; what we know are always representations of that world, or representations of our relation to that world. Ideology then is the imaginary version, the represented version, the stories we tell ourselves about our relation to the real world.

In more Marxist terms, what ideology does is present people with representations of their relations to relations of production, rather than with representations of the relations of production themselves.

Althusser says that ideology, as material practice, depends on the notion of the subject. Hence the two theses: "there is no practice except by and in an ideology" and "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects". There are no belief systems, and no practices determined by those belief systems, unless there is someone believing in them and acting on those beliefs.

The final part of Althusser's argument: How is it that individual subjects are constituted in ideological structures? Or, in other words, how does ideology create a notion of self or subject?

All ideology has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects--of enlisting them in any belief system, according to Althusser. That's the main thing ideology as structure and ideologies as specific belief systems do -- get people (subjects) to believe in them. There are two main points that Althusser makes about this process of becoming subjects in ideology.

1. We are born into subject-hood (if only because we're named before we're born; hence we're always-already subjects).

2. We are always-already subjects in ideology, in specific ideologies, which we inhabit, and which we recognize only as truth or obviousness.