Cultural Theory: Summary of: Althusser’s Concept of Ideology

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Cultural Theory: Summary of: Althusser’s Concept of Ideology

Louis Althusser builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the Marxist understanding of ideology. In earlier model, ideology was believe to create what was termed “false consciousness”, a false understanding of the way the world functioned. (For example the suppressions of the fact that the products were purchased on the open market are, in fact, the, result of exploitation of laborers.) Althusser explains that for Marx Ideology is thought an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream before Freud. Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan’s understanding of “reality” the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the "Real conditions of existence" due to our reliance on language; however, through a rigorous "scientific" approach to society, economics, and history, we can come close to perceiving if not those "Real conditions" at least the ways that we are inscribed in ideology by complex processes of recognition. Althusser's understanding of ideology has in turn influenced a number of important Marxist thinkers, including Chantalle Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Fredric Jameson.

Althusser posits a series of hypothesis that he explores to clarify his understandings of ideology:

1. “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”: The traditional way of thinking of ideology led Marxists to show how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology (for example, the "real" economic base for ideology). According to Althusser, by contrast, ideology does not "reflect" the real world but "represents" the imaginary relationship of individuals" to the real world; the thing ideology represents is itself already at one remove from the real. In this, Althusser follows the Lacanian understanding of the imaginary order, which is itself at one step removed from the Lacanian real 2. “Ideology has material existence”: Althusser contends that ideology has a material existence because "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" Ideology always manifests itself through actions, which are "inserted into practices" for example, rituals, conventional behavior, and so on. Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to adopt Pascal's formula for belief: "Pascal says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” It is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that continually instantiates us as subjects. 3. “All ideology hails or interpellants concrete individuals as concrete subjects”: According to Althusser, the main purpose of ideology is in "constituting concrete individuals as subjects". So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as "true" or "obvious". Althusser gives the example of the "hello" on a street: "the rituals of ideological recognition guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and irreplaceable subjects". 4. “Individuals are always-already subjects”: Although he presents his example of interpellation in a temporal form, Althusser makes it clear that the "becoming-subject" happens even before we are born. "This proposition might seem paradoxical". 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". Althusser thus once again invokes Lacan's ideas, in this case Lacan's understanding of the “Name of the father.” Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as "reality" or "nature" and thus rarely run afoul of the repressive State apparatus, which is designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology.