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MODULE NO.8 Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses FURTHER READING MODULE NO.8 Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses Points to Ponder • Although Althusser’s scheme of ISAs has many limitations, it allows us to understand how various institutions that seemingly have no connection with State power work in fact to ensure the continuance of the State, and the relations of production that are behind the State. • All of us live in ideology; no one exists outside. Ideologies may be viewed as good or bad, positive or negative depending on where we stand, but even this standing, the questioning is something that happens from within ideology. As such, ideology does not have a negative connotation. • Ideological State Apparatuses are the sites of struggle, according to Althusser. Since all members of society, all individuals, must pass through ISAs, they remain open to varied influences, and therefore the ideology that holds grounds in ISAs may change even though the exterior form of the ISA may not TIMELINE October 16, 1918 --- born in Algeria at Birmandreis 1939 --- accepted to study at l’Écolenormalesupérieured’Ulm (ENS) 1940 ---- drafted for the war against Germany 1945 ---- back to the ENS where he studied until 1948, getting second place for his agrégation in philosophy early 1960s ---- Althusser writes unorthodox articles, published in Marxist journals such as "La Pensée" (The Thought) and later in "La Nouvelle Critique" (The New Critique). 1962 ---- criticized by the senator and director of "La Pensée" Georges Cogniot for being pro-Chinese. 1965 --- wrote “For Marx”and “Reading Capital” 1967 --- presented a doctoral thesis, a revolutionary interpretation of Marxism with Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière 1967 --- createdthe "Spinoza Group" at ENS 1969 ---- wrote “Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays” 1985 --- wrote “The Future Lasts A Long Time” 1990 ---- died of a heart attack at the mental hospital in the Paris region at La Verrière on October 22 GLOSSARY 1. ALIENATION -----An ideological concept used by Marx in his Early Works (q.v.) and regarded by the partisans of these works as the key concept of Marxism. Marx derived the term from Feuerbach’s anthropology where it denoted the state of man and society where the essence of man is only present to him in the distorted form of a god, which, although man created it in the image of his essence (the species-being), appears to him as an external, pre- existing creator. Marx used the concept to criticize the State and the economy as confiscating the real self-determining labour of men in the same way. In his later works, however, the term appears very rarely, and where it does it is either used ironically, or with a different conceptual content (in Capital, for instance). 2. BREAK, EPISTEMOLOGICAL (---A concept introduced by Gaston Bachelard in his La Formation de l’espritscientifique, and related to uses of the term in studies in the history of ideas by Canguilhem and Foucault (see Althusser’s Letter to the Translator). It describes the leap from the pre-scientific world of ideas to the scientific world; this leap involves a radical break with the whole pattern and frame of reference of the pre-scientific (ideological) notions, and the construction of a new pattern. Althusser applies it to Marx’s rejection of the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideology of his youth and the construction of the basic concepts of dialectical and historical materialism in his later works. 3. CAUSALITY, LINEAR, EXPRESSIVE AND STRUCTURAL ---Whereas classical theories of causality have only two models, linear (transitive, mechanical) causality, which only describes the effects of one element on another, and expressive (teleological) causality, which can describe the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence, Marxist theory introduces a new concept of the effect of the whole on the parts, structural, complex causality, where the complex totality (q.v.) of the structure in dominance (q.v.) is a structure of effects with present-absent causes. The cause of the effects is the complex organization of the whole, present-absent in its economic, political, ideological and knowledge effects. Marx himself often used the theatrical analogy of the Darstellung (representation, miseen scène). Empiricist ideologies, seeing the action on the stage, the effects, believe that they are seeing a faithful copy of reality, recognizing themselves and their preconceptions in the mirror held up to them by the play. The Hegelian detects the hand of God or the Spirit writing the script and directing the play. For the Marxist, on the contrary, this is a theatre, but one which reflects neither simple reality nor any transcendental truth, a theatre without an author; the object of his science is the mechanism which produces the stage effects. 4. CONSCIOUSNESS ---- A term designating the region where ideology is located (‘false consciousness’) and superseded (‘true consciousness’), contaminated by the pre-Marxist ideology of the Young Marx. In fact, Althusser argues, ideology is profoundly unconscious – it is a structure imposed involuntarily on the majority of men. 5. CONTRADICTION ---A term for the articulation of a practice (q.v.) into the complex whole of the social formation (q.v.). Contradictions may be antagonistic or non-antagonistic according to whether their state of overdetermination (q.v.) is one of fusion or condensation, or one of displacement (q.v.). 6. DIALECTIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS ---- The Hegelian dialectic, or any dialectic where the various elements or moments are externalizations of a single, simple, internal principle, as Rome in Hegel’s Philosophy of History is an expression of the abstract legal personality, etc. 7. EMPIRICISM --- Althusser uses the concept of empiricism in a very wise sense to include all ‘epistemologies’ that oppose a given subject to a given object and call knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object. Hence the knowledge of the object is part of the object itself. This remains true whatever the nature of the subject (psychological, historical, etc.) or of the object (continuous, discontinuous, mobile, immobile, etc.) in question. So as well as covering those epistemologies traditionally called ‘empiricist’, this definition includes classical idealism, and the epistemology of Feuerbach and the Young Marx. 8. FETISHISM ---- Fetishism is the mechanismwhich conceals the real functioning (the real movement) of the dominant structure in the social formation, i.e., it is the constitutive dislocation (q.v.) between the ideological practice and the other practices (q.v.). This is not a subjective mystification, but the mode of appearance of reality (Marx calls it a reality – Wirklichkeit). In the capitalist mode of production it takes the form ofthe fetishism of commodities, i.e., the personification of certain things (money-capital) and the ‘reification’ of a certain relationship (labour). It does not consist of a general ‘reification’ of all relationships, as some humanist interpretations of Marx argue, but only of this particular relationship. Fetishism is not absent from other modes of production, it is merely displaced onto whichever level is dominant in the social formation characterized by that mode of production. 9. HISTORICISM -----A currently widespread interpretation of Marxism which originated around the time of the October Revolution, and which dominates the ideas of authors as diverse as Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Della Volpe, Colletti and Sartre. It is characterized by a linear view of time (q.v.) susceptible to an essential section (q.v.) into a present at any moment. The knowledge of history is then the self-consciousness of each present. This self- consciousness of the present may take a number of forms; (different ‘mediations’ may intercede between the historian and the totality): the class consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat (Lukács), the organic ideology of the ruling (hegemonic) class (Gramsci), or the practice of human inter-subjectivity as a whole, human ‘praxis’ (Sartre). Historicisms may or may not be humanist (Sartre and Colletti respectively). 10. HUMANISM ---- Humanism is the characteristic feature of the ideological problematic (q.v.) from which Marx emerged, and more generally, of most modern ideology; a particularly conscious form of humanism is Feuerbach’s anthropology, which dominates Marx’s Early Works (q.v.). As a science, however, historical materialism, as exposed in Marx’s later works, implies a theoretical anti-humanism. ‘Real-humanism’ characterizes the works of the break (q.v.): the humanist form is retained, but usages such as ‘the ensemble of the social relations’ point forward to the concepts of historical materialism. However, the ideology (q.v.) of a socialist society may be a humanism, a proletarian ‘class humanism’ [an expression I obviously use in a provisional, half-critical sense. L. A.]. 11. IDEOLOGY ----Ideology is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world, or a reflected form of this unconscious relation, for instance a ‘philosophy’ (q.v.), etc. It is distinguished from a science not by its falsity, for it can be coherent and logical (for instance, theology), but by the fact that the practico-social predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it precedes the science that is produced by making an epistemological break (q.v.) with it, but it survives alongside science as an essential element of
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