I Dialogues

Enunciating Louis Althusser’s Theses on Ideology

I.
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. (Lenin 109)

Whereas the old Marxist view showed how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology, Althusser says, by contrast, ideology does not reflect the real world but represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to the real world. The thing ideology [mis] represents is itself already at one remove from the real.

Borrowing Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary, Althusser says we are always within ideology because of our reliance on language to establish our reality. This means—that different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary ‘reality,’ not a representation of the real itself.

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II.
Ideology has a material existence. (Lenin 112)

It is so because an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. Ideology always manifests itself through actions which are inserted into practices—e.g. rituals, conventional behavior, and so on.

Citing Blaise Pascal’s formule for belief—“Kneel down, move your lips in prayer and you will believe, (Lenin 114)”

Althusser contends it is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that constantly instantiates us as subjects. (Refer to critic Judith Butler’s preoccupation with performance/ performativity is inspired and/or informed by this thought on ideology.)

What thus seems to take place outside ideology (in the street, to be precise) in reality takes place in ideology. Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology (Lenin 118)

III.
All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. (Lenin 115)

Ideology’s purpose is in constituting concrete individuals as subjects (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as true and obvious.

The rituals of ideological recognition guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and naturally irreplaceable subjects. (Lenin 117)

Through interpellation, individuals are turned into subjects (which are always ideological):

Police Officer: Hey, you there!

Assuming that the scene takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180° physical conversion, he becomes a subject. (Lenin 118)

The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology.

IV
Individuals are always-already subjects. (Ideology has no history.)

Although his example of interpellation suggests temporality—I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology—Althusser says that the becoming-subject happens even before we are born. Not a paradox at all, even before the child is born—it is certain in advance that it will bear its father’s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.

 Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. (Lenin 119)

Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as reality or nature and thus rarely come into conflict with the repressive state apparatus, designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology.

It can be said therefore that hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) as the police than it is on those ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects.

Althusser says it best, thus:

“the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subjects, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’” (Lenin 123)

Understanding Louis Althusser’s “Ideological StateApparatuses”
By adding the concept of ideological state apparatuses, Althusser complicates the Marxist notion of the relation between base and superstructure.

For Marx, various levels in society are the infrastructure or economic base and the superstructure or political and legal institutions (law, government, and the police) and ideology (religious, moral, political, etc.) In Marxist thought, superstructure is relatively autonomous from base—it relies on economic base but can sometimes persist for a long period despite major changes in the base.

Exploring the ways in which ideology is more pervasive, and more material than previously acknowledged, Althusser distinguishes between Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs).

ISAs include the religious (schools), family, legal, political (systems, parties), trade union, communications (press), and the cultural (arts, sports, literature). Less centralized and more heterogeneous, ISAs access the private, not the public realm. They work predominantly by ideology, including punishment or repression.

Schools and churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to discipline not only their shepherds but also their flocks. (Lenin 98)

State apparatuses (SAs), or Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) are agencies that function by violence, imposing punishment and privation in order to enforce power. Working predominantly by violence and secondarily by ideology, SAs include the government and administration, army and the police, courts and prisons, etc.

Though they are quite disparate, ISAs are virtually unified subscribing to a common ideology in the service of the ruling class. Indeed the ruling class must maintain a degree of control over ISAs to ensure stability of the SAs.

No class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the ISAs.

It is much harder for the ruling class to maintain control over the multiple, heterogeneous, and relatively autonomous ISA (alternative perspectives can be voiced in each ISA)—which is why there is continual struggle for hegemony/domination in this realm.

In what may seem to me as the repute of schools being [re] defined, Althusser says, “what the bourgeoisie has installed as its dominant ISA is the educational apparatus, which has replaced in its functions the Church.”

Walking, graduate studies and other preoccupations

WHILE I consider walking a romantic activity mainly because ever since I could remember I have always walked to wherever I choose to go or to be, or simply because I must have read Henry David Thoreau’s essay on it from Walden and later romanticized the whole idea by treating it as the best daily exercise, I also realize that doing so in the city does not make sense at all.

Funny how I realize that walking from Katipunan Avenue going to the Loyola campus cannot always be a leisurely activity—especially if I have to do it towards noontime. Sun’s heat just becomes unbearable and then it is up for me to be pissed off by the stress it causes me—that later determines my tasks and activities inside the university library where I have to read for my graduate studies.

This morning I realized that taking a tricycle can make a big difference. I chose to ride a tricycle and not walk and that saved my time, effort and energy so that, minutes ago, I already started pounding these keys to write this lament, thus, [this] discourse.
I just realize I am a subject of the urban culture that rather compels people to buy cars so transportation and mobility are a bit easier for them.

Now I also realize I cannot just cater to the demands of such culture. Not right now, at least. I understand I cannot do much to change such culture as I know I am even the object of generosity of the ruling class [my scholarship tells me I am a recipient of their being able to provide for others].

I ride along. There is nothing for me to do. According to literary theorists preoccupied by their presuppositions on the experiencing self, or the subject, I am only a subject.

In fact, I have many subjectivities. I am also a graduate student at the Ateneo de Manila University, an academic institution run by Jesuits that, in more ways than one, have always allowed all kinds of human beings to thrive and live—the dominant ruling class whose names are carved in its buildings, the struggling middle-class who compose the Ph.D. faculty members, and the white-collar workers belonging to either the canteen cooperatives, the maintenance personnel employed by their respective agencies, or the job-hire construction workers hammering at the scaffolds being built for the new social science hall named after a Chinese benefactor. Such culture where I am right now just allows people to live. Yes, live.

That is the essence of life. To live. The purpose of me [read: I] as another subject.

Every single day I get opportunities to study and learn new concepts from reading at the library, attending campus lectures, or sitting in my teachers’ classes. And here I am learning and getting to read many things about my presently being a subject of different social structures—from the traffic rules in Katipunan Avenue to the undergraduate class schedules to the terms of use of computers in the Rizal Library.

My graduate studies are not in vain. While a graduate degree will help me land a university slot in teaching or related work, there is much to savor as I finish it. One of the payoffs is being able to realize and understand some terms in my studies that parallel or reflect the things in my present circumstances.

Class mobility, a phrase I caught from sitting in my professor’s undergraduate class—figures in the Marxist reading of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The Marxist train of thought reads that Jane Eyre’s marriage to a wealthy man rather helps her attain class mobility.

The then orphan girl who struggled her way through the social ranks to become a governess and worked her way up the social ladder is sadly just appropriated by her marriage to the dominant ruling class. Class mobility, vulgarly translated or appropriated, refers to people’s ability to further on with how to go about their lives in a society that is both patriarchal and ruled by the dominant class.

There is much truth when I realize that literary theorists—classic or modern, recognized or unacknowledged, mainstream or recalcitrant—have really something to say whenever they claim that to study literature as it relates to social structures is to help define life itself.

I feel relieved at the end of this lament because bit by bit my ideas are being put into paper. Thoughts become my words, and they become truths, at least my truths. I feel justified and lucky because I am learning beyond what books say or what I understand in books—or maybe I am just learning what the books indeed say—I am living a life that goes beyond what can be taught.