Communications Question

You should write a response to Althusser’s (1970) and Brummett (2013). You may find Althusser a bit challenging.  Be sure to focus on his discussion of the media. The Brummett article is more accessible but do not be tempted to focus primarily on this reading since this is an application of the theory of ideology, not the theory itself.

The paper should reflect a critical reading of the texts and your reaction.  Think of the paper as having two parts:

1) Make sure to identify the key arguments/relevant concepts in the video and the reading. Summarize what the authors meant, or at least what you think the authors meant, and try to see the world with that theoretical lens.

2) Critique the  theory from an outside perspective, finding its strengths but also its flaws.  Try to include an example that helps update the theory.

Post paper in Canvas by Monday of week 2 before class

Grading: Papers will be evaluated according to the extent to which they reflect thorough research, clarity of thought, and adherence to the principles of effective writing.  Papers should be prepared according to the guidelines of theMLA Handbook, the Publication Manual of the APA, or the Chicago Manual of Style. and Post two critical questions for each of the articles

Louis Althusser 1970
“Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays
Ideology and
Ideological State
Apparatuses
(Notes towards an Investigation)
First published: in La Pensée, 1970;
Translated: from the French by Ben Brewster;
Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
Monthly Review Press 1971;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production[1]
I must now expose more fully something which was
briefly glimpsed in my analysis when I spoke of the
necessity to renew the means of production if
production is to be possible. That was a passing hint.
Now I shall consider it for itself.
As Marx said, every child knows that a social
formation which did not reproduce the conditions of
production at the same time as it produced would not
last a year.[2] The ultimate condition of production is
therefore the reproduction of the conditions of
production. This may be ‘simple’ (reproducing exactly
the previous conditions of production) or ‘on an
extended scale’ (expanding them). Let us ignore this
last distinction for the moment.
What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions of
production?
Here we are entering a domain which is both very
familiar (since Capital Volume Two) and uniquely
ignored. The tenacious obviousnesses (ideological
obviousnesses of an empiricist type) of the point of
view of production alone, or even of that of mere
productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the
process of production) are so integrated into our
everyday ‘consciousness’ that it is extremely hard, not
to say almost impossible, to raise oneself to the point of
view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside
this point of view remains abstract (worse than onesided: distorted) – even at the level of production,
and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice.
Let us try and examine the matter methodically.
To simplify my exposition, and assuming that every
social formation arises from a dominant mode of
production, I can say that the process of production
sets to work the existing productive forces in and under
definite relations of production.
It follows that, in order to exist, every social
formation must reproduce the conditions of its
production at the same time as it produces, and in
order to be able to produce. It must therefore
reproduce:
1.
the
productive
forces,
2. the existing relations of production.
Reproduction of the Means of Production
Everyone (including the bourgeois economists whose
work is national accounting, or the modern ‘macroeconomic’ ‘theoreticians’) now recognizes, because
Marx compellingly proved it in Capital Volume Two,
that no production is possible which does not allow for
the reproduction of the material conditions of
production: the reproduction of the means of
production.
The average economist, who is no different in this
than the average capitalist, knows that each year it is
essential to foresee what is needed to replace what has
been used up or worn out in production: raw material,
fixed installations (buildings), instruments of
production (machines), etc. I say the average economist
= the average capitalist, for they both express the point
of view of the firm, regarding it as sufficient simply to
give a commentary on the terms of the firm’s financial
accounting practice.
But thanks to the genius of Quesnay who first posed
this ‘glaring’ problem, and to the genius of Marx who
resolved it, we know that the reproduction of the
material conditions of production cannot be thought at
the level of the firm, because it does not exist at that
level in its real conditions. What happens at the level of
the firm is an effect, which only gives an idea of the
necessity of reproduction, but absolutely fails to allow
its conditions and mechanisms to be thought.
A moment’s reflection is enough to be convinced of
this: Mr X, a capitalist who produces woollen yarn in
his spinning-mill, has to ‘reproduce’ his raw material,
his machines, etc. But he does not produce them for his
own production – other capitalists do: an Australian
sheep farmer, Mr Y, a heavy engineer producing
machine-tools, Mr Z, etc., etc. And Mr Y and Mr Z, in
order to produce those products which are the
condition of the reproduction of Mr X’s conditions of
production, also have to reproduce the conditions of
their own production, and so on to infinity – the whole
in proportions such that, on the national and even the
world market, the demand for means of production (for
reproduction) can be satisfied by the supply.
In order to think this mechanism, which leads to a
kind of ‘endless chain’, it is necessary to follow Marx’s
‘global’ procedure, and to study in particular the
relations of the circulation of capital between
Department I (production of means of production) and
Department II (production of means of consumption),
and the realization of surplus value, in Capital,
Volumes Two and Three.
We shall not go into the analysis of this question. It is
enough to have mentioned the existence of the
necessity of the reproduction of the material conditions
of production.
Reproduction of Labour-Power
However, the reader will not have failed to note one
thing. We have discussed the reproduction of the
means of production – but not the reproduction of the
productive forces. We have therefore ignored the
reproduction of what distinguishes the productive
forces from the means of production, i.e. the
reproduction of labour power.
From the observation of what takes place in the firm,
in particular from the examination of the financial
accounting practice which predicts amortization and
investment, we have been able to obtain an
approximate idea of the existence of the material
process of reproduction, but we are now entering a
domain in which the observation of what happens in
the firm is, if not totally blind, at least almost entirely
so, and for good reason: the reproduction of labour
power takes place essentially outside the firm.
How is the reproduction of labour power ensured?
It is ensured by giving labour power the material
means with which to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages
feature in the accounting of each enterprise, but as
‘wage capital’,[3] not at all as a condition of the material
reproduction of labour power.
However, that is in fact how it ‘works’, since wages
represents only that part of the value produced by the
expenditure of labour power which is indispensable for
its reproduction: so indispensable to the reconstitution
of the labour power of the wage-earner (the
wherewithal to pay for housing, food and clothing, in
short to enable the wage earner to present himself
again at the factory gate the next day – and every
further day God grants him); and we should add:
indispensable for raising and educating the children in
whom the proletarian reproduces himself (in n models
where n = 0, 1, 2, etc….) as labour power.
Remember that this quantity of value (wages)
necessary for the reproduction of labour power is
determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’
Guaranteed Minimum Wage (Salaire Minimum
Interprofessionnel Garanti) alone, but by the needs of
a historical minimum (Marx noted that English
workers need beer while French proletarians need
wine) – i.e. a historically variable minimum.
I should also like to point out that this minimum is
doubly historical in that it is not defined by the
historical needs of the working class ‘recognized’ by the
capitalist class, but by the historical needs imposed by
the proletarian class struggle (a double class struggle:
against the lengthening of the working day and against
the reduction of wages).
However, it is not enough to ensure for labour power
the material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be
reproduced as labour power. I have said that the
available labour power must be ‘competent’, i.e.
suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the
process of production. The development of the
productive forces and the type of unity historically
constitutive of the productive forces at a given moment
produce the result that the labour power has to be
(diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such.
Diversely: according to the requirements of the sociotechnical division of labour, its different ‘jobs’ and
‘posts’.
How is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of
labour power provided for in a capitalist regime? Here,
unlike social formations characterized by slavery or
serfdom this reproduction of the skills of labour power
tends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly to be
provided for ‘on the spot’ (apprenticeship within
production itself), but is achieved more and more
outside production: by the capitalist education system,
and by other instances and institutions.
What do children learn at school? They go varying
distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to
read, to write and to add – i.e. a number of techniques,
and a number of other things as well, including
elements (which may be rudimentary or on the
contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary
culture’, which are directly useful in the different jobs
in production (one instruction for manual workers,
another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final
one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn
know-how.
But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in
learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules’
of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be
observed by every agent in the division of labour,
according to the job he is ‘destined’ for: rules of
morality, civic and professional conscience, which
actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical
division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order
established by class domination. They also learn to
‘speak proper French’, to ‘handle’ the workers correctly,
i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their
servants) to ‘order them about’ properly, i.e. (ideally) to
‘speak to them’ in the right way, etc.
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, the school (but also other State
institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like
the Army) teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms which
ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery
of its ‘practice’. All the agents of production,
exploitation and repression, not to speak of the
‘professionals of ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or
another be ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order to perform
their tasks ‘conscientiously’ – the tasks of the exploited
(the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of
the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high
priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc.
The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as
its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’
but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling
ideology or of the ‘practice’ of that ideology, with the
proviso that it is not enough to say ‘not only but also’,
for it is clear that it is in the forms and under the forms
of ideological subjection that provision is made for the
reproduction of the skills of labour power.
But this is to recognize the effective presence of a new
reality: ideology.
Here I shall make two comments.
The first is to round off my analysis of reproduction.
I have just given a rapid survey of the forms of the
reproduction of the productive forces, i.e. of the means
of production on the one hand, and of labour power on
the other.
But I have not yet approached the question of
the reproduction of the relations of production. This is
a crucial question for the Marxist theory of the mode of
production. To let it pass would be a theoretical
omission – worse, a serious political error.
I shall therefore discuss it. But in order to obtain the
means to discuss it, I shall have to make another long
detour.
The second comment is that in order to make this
detour, I am obliged to re-raise my old question: what
is a society?
Infrastructure and Superstructure
On a number of occasions[4] I have insisted on the
revolutionary character of the Marxist conception of
the ‘social whole’ insofar as it is distinct from the
Hegelian ‘totality’. I said (and this thesis only repeats
famous propositions of historical materialism) that
Marx conceived the structure of every society as
constituted by ‘levels’ or ‘instances’ articulated by a
specific determination: the infrastructure, or economic
base (the ‘unity’ of the productive forces and the
relations of production) and the superstructure, which
itself contains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: the politicolegal (law and the State) and ideology (the different
ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.).
Besides its theoretico-didactic interest (it reveals the
difference
between
Marx
and
Hegel),
this
representation has the following crucial theoretical
advantage: it makes it possible to inscribe in the
theoretical apparatus of its essential concepts what I
have called their respective indices of effectivity.What
does this mean?
It is easy to see that this representation of the
structure of every society as an edifice containing a base
(infrastructure) on which are erected the two ‘floors’ of
the superstructure, is a metaphor, to be quite precise, a
spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography
(topique).[5] Like every metaphor, this metaphor
suggests something, makes some thing visible. What?
Precisely this: that the upper floors could not ‘stay up’
(in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their
base.
Thus the object of the metaphor of the edifice is to
represent above all the ‘determination in the last
instance’ by the economic base. The effect of this spatial
metaphor is to endow the base with an index of
effectivity known by the famous terms: the
determination in the last instance of what happens in
the upper ‘floors’ (of the superstructure) by what
happens in the economic base.
Given this index of effectivity ‘in the last instance’,
the ‘floors’ of the superstructure are clearly endowed
with different indices of effectivity. What kind of
indices?
It is possible to say that the floors of the
superstructure are not determinant in the last instance,
but that they are determined by the effectivity of the
base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet
undefined) ways, this is true only insofar as they are
determined by the base.
Their index of effectivity (or determination), as
determined by the determination in the last instance of
the base, is thought by the Marxist tradition in two
ways: (1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the
superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a
‘reciprocal action’ of the superstructure on the base.
We can therefore say that the great theoretical
advantage of the Marxist topography, i.e. of the spatial
metaphor of the edifice (base and superstructure) is
simultaneously that it reveals that questions of
determination (or of index of effectivity) are crucial;
that it reveals that it is the base which in the last
instance determines the whole edifice; and that, as a
consequence, it obliges us to pose the theoretical
problem of the types of ‘derivatory’ effectivity peculiar
to the superstructure, i.e. it obliges us to think what the
Marxist tradition calls conjointly the relative autonomy
of the superstructure and the reciprocal action of the
superstructure on the base.
The greatest disadvantage of this representation of
the structure of every society by the spatial metaphor of
an edifice, is obviously the fact that it is metaphorical:
i.e. it remains descriptive.
It now seems to me that it is possible and desirable to
represent things differently. NB, I do not mean by this
that I want to reject the classical metaphor, for that
metaphor itself requires that we go beyond it. And I am
not going beyond it in order to reject it as outworn. I
simply want to attempt to think what it gives us in the
form of a description.
I believe that it is possible and necessary to think
what characterizes the essential of the existence and
nature of the superstructure on the basis of
reproduction. Once one takes the point of view of
reproduction, many of the questions whose existence
was indicated by the spatial metaphor of the edifice,
but to which it could not give a conceptual answer, are
immediately illuminated.
My basic thesis is that it is not possible to pose these
questions (and therefore to answer them) except from
the point of view of reproduction.
I shall give a short analysis of Law, the State and
Ideology from this point of view. And I shall reveal
what happens both from the point of view of practice
and production on the one hand, and from that of
reproduction on the other.
The State
The Marxist tradition is strict, here: in
the Communist
Manifesto and
the Eighteenth
Brumaire (and in all the later classical texts, above all
in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin’s
on State and Revolution), the State is explicitly
conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a
‘machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling
classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class
and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their
domination over the working class, thus enabling the
former to subject the latter to the process of surplusvalue extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation).
The State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics
have called the State Apparatus. This term means: not
only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sense)
whose existence and necessity I have recognized in
relation to the requirements of legal practice, i.e. the
police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army, which
(the proletariat has paid for this experience with its
blood) intervenes directly as a supplementary
repressive force in the last instance, when the police
and its specialized auxiliary corps are ‘outrun by
events’; and above this ensemble, the head of State, the
government and the administration.
Presented in this form, the Marxist-Leninist ‘theory’
of the State has its finger on the essential point, and not
for one moment can there be any question of rejecting
the fact that this really is the essential point. The State
Apparatus, which defines the State as a force of
repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interests
of the ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by
the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat, is
quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its
basic ‘function’.
From Descriptive Theory to Theory as such
Nevertheless, here too, as I pointed out with respect
to the metaphor of the edifice (infrastructure and
superstructure), this presentation of the nature of the
State is still partly descriptive.
As I shall often have occasion to use this adjective
(descriptive), a word of explanation is necessary in
order to remove any ambiguity.
Whenever, in speaking of the metaphor of the edifice
or of the Marxist ‘theory’ of the State, I have said that
these are descriptive conceptions or representations of
their objects, I had no ulterior critical motives. On the
contrary, I have every grounds to think that great
scientific discoveries cannot help but pass through the
phase of what I shall call descriptive ‘theory ‘. This is
the first phase of every theory, at least in the domain
which concerns us (that of the science of social
formations). As such, one might and in my opinion one
must – envisage this phase as a transitional one,
necessary to the development of the theory. That it is
transitional is inscribed in my expression: ‘descriptive
theory’, which reveals in its conjunction of terms the
equivalent of a kind of ‘contradiction’. In fact, the term
theory ‘clashes’ to some extent with the adjective
‘descriptive’ which I have attached to it. This means
quite precisely: (1) that the ‘descriptive theory’ really is,
without a shadow of a doubt, the irreversible beginning
of the theory; but (2) that the ‘descriptive’ form in
which the theory is presented requires, precisely as an
effect of this ‘contradiction’, a development of the
theory which goes beyond the form of ‘description’.
Let me make this idea clearer by returning to our
present object: the State.
When I say that the Marxist ‘theory’ of the State
available to us is still partly ‘descriptive’, that means
first and foremost that this descriptive ‘theory’ is
without the shadow of a doubt precisely the beginning
of the Marxist theory of the State, and that this
beginning gives us the essential point, i.e. the decisive
principle of every later development of the theory.
Indeed, I shall call the descriptive theory of the State
correct, since it is perfectly possible to make the vast
majority of the facts in the domain with which it is
concerned correspond to the definition it gives of its
object. Thus, the definition of the State as a class State,
existing in the Repressive State Apparatus, casts a
brilliant light on all the facts observable in the various
orders of repression whatever their domains: from the
massacres of June 1848 and of the Paris Commune, of
Bloody Sunday, May 1905 in Petrograd, of the
Resistance, of Charonne, etc., to the mere (and
relatively anodyne) interventions of a ‘censorship’
which has banned Diderot’s La Réligieuse or a play by
Gatti on Franco; it casts light on all the direct or
indirect forms of exploitation and extermination of the
masses of the people (imperialist wars); it casts light on
that subtle everyday domination beneath which can be
glimpsed, in the forms of political democracy, for
example, what Lenin, following Marx, called the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
And yet the descriptive theory of the State represents
a phase in the constitution of the theory which itself
demands the ‘supersession’ of this phase. For it is clear
that if the definition in question really does give us the
means to identify and recognize the facts of oppression
by relating them to the State, conceived as the
Repressive State Apparatus, this ‘interrelationship’
gives rise to a very special kind of obviousness, about
which I shall have something to say in a moment: ‘Yes,
that’s how it is, that’s really true!’[6]
And the accumulation of facts within the definition of
the State may multiply examples, but it does not really
advance the definition of the State, i.e. the scientific
theory of the State. Every descriptive theory thus runs
the risk of ‘blocking’ the development of the theory, and
yet that development is essential.
That is why I think that, in order to develop this
descriptive theory into theory as such, i.e. in order to
understand further the mechanisms of the State in its
functioning, I think that it is indispensable to add
something to the classical definition of the State as a
State Apparatus.
The Essentials of the Marxist Theory of the State
Let me first clarify one important point: the State
(and its existence in its apparatus) has no meaning
except as a function of State power. The whole of the
political class struggle revolves around the State. By
which I mean around the possession, i.e. the seizure
and conservation of State power by a certain class or by
an alliance between classes or class fractions. This first
clarification obliges me to distinguish between State
power (conservation of State power or seizure of State
power), the objective of the political class struggle on
the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other.
We know that the State Apparatus may survive, as is
proved by bourgeois ‘revolutions’ in nineteenth-century
France (1830, 1848), by coups d’état (2 December, May
1958), by collapses of the State (the fall of the Empire
in 1870, of the Third Republic in 1940), or by the
political rise of the petty bourgeoisie (1890-95 in
France), etc., without the State Apparatus being
affected or modified: it may survive political events
which affect the possession of State power.
Even after a social revolution like that of 1917, a large
part of the State Apparatus survived after the seizure of
State power by the alliance of the proletariat and the
small peasantry: Lenin repeated the fact again and
again.
It is possible to describe the distinction between state
power and state apparatus as part of the ‘Marxist
theory’ of the state, explicitly present since
Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in
France.
To summarize the ‘Marxist theory of the state’ on this
point, it can be said that the Marxist classics have
always claimed that (1) the state is the repressive state
apparatus, (2) state power and state apparatus must be
distinguished, (3) the objective of the class struggle
concerns state power, and in consequence the use of
the state apparatus by the classes (or alliance of classes
or of fractions of classes) holding state power as a
function of their class objectives, and (4) the proletariat
must seize state power in order to destroy the existing
bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace
it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus,
then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that
of the destruction of the state (the end of state power,
the end of every state apparatus).
In this perspective, therefore, what I would propose
to add to the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state is already
there in so many words. But it seems to me that even
with this supplement, this theory is still in part
descriptive, although it does now contain complex and
differential elements whose functioning and action
cannot be understood without recourse to further
supplementary theoretical development.
The State Ideological Apparatuses
Thus, what has to be added to the ‘Marxist theory’ of
the state is something else.
Here we must advance cautiously in a terrain which,
in fact, the Marxist classics entered long before us, but
without having systematized in theoretical form the
decisive advances implied by their experiences and
procedures. Their experiences and procedures were
indeed restricted in the main to the terrain of political
practice.
In fact, i.e. in their political practice, the Marxist
classics treated the State as a more complex reality than
the definition of it given in the ‘Marxist theory of the
state’, even when it has been supplemented as I have
just suggested. They recognized this complexity in their
practice, but they did not express it in a corresponding
theory.[7]
I should like to attempt a very schematic outline of
this corresponding theory. To that end, I propose the
following thesis.
In order to advance the theory of the State it is
indispensable to take into account not only the
distinction between state power and state apparatus,
but also another reality which is clearly on the side of
the (repressive) state apparatus, but must not be
confused with it. I shall call this reality by its
concept: the Ideological State Apparatuses.
What are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)?
They must not be confused with the (repressive) State
apparatus. Remember that in Marxist theory, the State
Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the
Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call
the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests
that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions by
violence’ – at least ultimately (since repression, e.g.
administrative repression, may take non-physical
forms).
I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain
number of realities which present themselves to the
immediate observer in the form of distinct and
specialized institutions. I propose an empirical list of
these which will obviously have to be examined in
detail, tested, corrected and re-organized. With all the
reservations implied by this requirement, we can for
the moment regard the following institutions as
Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I
have listed them has no particular significance):
the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),
the educational ISA (the system of the different public
and private ‘schools’),
the family ISA,[8]
the legal ISA,[9]
the political ISA (the political system, including the
different parties),
the trade-union ISA,
the communications ISA (press, radio and television,
etc.),
the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.).
I have said that the ISAs must not be confused with
the (Repressive) State Apparatus. What constitutes the
difference?
As a first moment, it is clear that while there is one
(Repressive) State Apparatus, there is a plurality of
Ideological State Apparatuses. Even presupposing that
it exists, the unity that constitutes this plurality of ISAs
as a body is not immediately visible.
As a second moment, it is clear that whereas the
unified – (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely
to the public domain, much the larger part of the
Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent
dispersion) are part, on the contrary, of
the private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions,
families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural
ventures, etc., etc., are private.
We can ignore the first observation for the moment.
But someone is bound to question the second, asking
me
by
what
right
I
regard
as
Ideological StateApparatuses, institutions which for the
most part do not possess public status, but are quite
simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist,
Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one
sentence. The distinction between the public and the
private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and
valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois
law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State
escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the
State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither
public nor private; on the contrary, it is the
precondition for any distinction between public and
private. The same thing can be said from the startingpoint of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is
unimportant whether the institutions in which they are
realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how
they function. Private institutions can perfectly well
‘function’ as Ideological State Apparatuses. A
reasonably thorough analysis of any one of the ISAs
proves it.
But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the
ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the
following basic difference: the Repressive State
Apparatus functions ‘by violence’, whereas the
Ideological State Apparatuses function ‘by ideology’.
I can clarify matters by correcting this distinction. I
shall say rather that every State Apparatus, whether
Repressive or Ideological, ‘functions’ both by violence
and by ideology, but with one very important
distinction which makes it imperative not to confuse
the Ideological State Apparatuses with the (Repressive)
State Apparatus.
This is the fact that the (Repressive) State Apparatus
functions
massively
and
predominantly by
repression (including physical repression), while
functioning secondarily by ideology. (There is no such
thing as a purely repressive apparatus.) For example,
the Army and the Police also function by ideology both
to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in
the ‘values’ they propound externally.
In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say
that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses
function massively and predominantly by ideology, but
they also function secondarily by repression, even if
ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated
and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing
as a purely ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and
Churches use suitable methods of punishment,
expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their
shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the
Family…. The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus
(censorship, among other things), etc.
Is it necessary to add that this determination of the
double ‘functioning’ (predominantly, secondarily) by
repression and by ideology, according to whether it is a
matter of the (Repressive) State Apparatus or the
Ideological State Apparatuses, makes it clear that very
subtle explicit or tacit combinations may be woven
from the interplay of the (Repressive) State Apparatus
and the Ideological State Apparatuses? Everyday life
provides us with innumerable examples of this, but
they must be studied in detail if we are to go further
than this mere observation.
Nevertheless, this remark leads us towards an
understanding of what constitutes the unity of the
apparently disparate body of the ISAs. If the ISAs
‘function’ massively and predominantly by ideology,
what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning,
insofar as the ideology by which they function is always
in fact unified, despite its diversity and its
contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is
the ideology of ‘the ruling class’. Given the fact that the
‘ruling class’ in principle holds State power (openly or
more often by means of alliances between classes or
class fractions), and therefore has at its disposal the
(Repressive) State Apparatus, we can accept the fact
that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological
State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling
ideology which is realized in the Ideological State
Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions. Of course,
it is a quite different thing to act by laws and decrees in
the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to ‘act’ through
the intermediary of the ruling ideology in the
Ideological State Apparatuses. We must go into the
details of this difference – but it cannot mask the
reality of a profound identity. To my knowledge, no
class can hold State power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in
the State Ideological Apparatuses. I only need one
example and proof of this: Lenin’s anguished concern
to revolutionize the educational Ideological State
Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible
for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power,
to secure the future of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and the transition to socialism.[10]
This last comment puts us in a position to
understand that the Ideological State Apparatuses may
be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle,
and often of bitter forms of class struggle. The class (or
class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the
ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State
apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes
are able to retain strong positions there for a long time,
but also because the resistance of the exploited classes
is able to find means and occasions to express itself
there, either by the utilization of their contradictions,
or by conquering combat positions in them in
struggle.[11]
Let me run through my comments.
If the thesis I have proposed is well-founded, it leads
me back to the classical Marxist theory of the State,
while making it more precise in one point. I argue that
it is necessary to distinguish between State power (and
its possession by …) on the one hand, and the State
Apparatus on the other. But I add that the State
Apparatus contains two bodies: the body of institutions
which represent the Repressive State Apparatus on the
one hand, and the body of institutions which represent
the body of Ideological State Apparatuses on the other.
But if this is the case, the following question is bound
to be asked, even in the very summary state of my
suggestions: what exactly is the extent of the role of the
Ideological State Apparatuses? What is their
importance based on? In other words: to what does the
‘function’ of these Ideological State Apparatuses, which
do not function by repression but by ideology,
correspond?
On the Reproduction of the Relations of
Production
I can now answer the central question which I have
left in suspense for many long pages: how is the
reproduction of the relations of production secured?
In the topographical language (Infrastructure,
Superstructure), I can say: for the most part,[12] it is
secured by the legal-political and ideological
superstructure.
But as I have argued that it is essential to go beyond
this still descriptive language, I shall say: for the most
part, it is secured by the exercise of State power in the
State Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive)
State Apparatus, on the other the Ideological State
Apparatuses.
What I have just said must also be taken into
account, and it can be assembled in the form of the
following three features:
1. All the State Apparatuses function
both by repression and by ideology,
with
the
difference
that
the
(Repressive)
State
Apparatus
functions
massively
and
predominantly by repression, whereas
the Ideological State Apparatuses
function massively and predominantly
by ideology.
2. Whereas the (Repressive) State
Apparatus constitutes an organized
whole whose different parts are
centralized beneath a commanding
unity, that of the politics of class
struggle applied by the political
representatives of the ruling classes in
possession of State power, the
Ideological State Apparatuses are
multiple,
distinct,
‘relatively
autonomous’ and capable of providing
an objective field to contradictions
which express, in forms which may be
limited or extreme, the effects of the
clashes between the capitalist class
struggle and the proletarian class
struggle, as well as their subordinate
forms.
3. Whereas the unity of the
(Repressive) State Apparatus is
secured by its unified and centralized
organization under the leadership of
the representatives of the classes in
power executing the politics of the
class struggle of the classes in power,
the unity of the different Ideological
State Apparatuses is secured, usually
in contradictory forms, by the ruling
ideology, the ideology of the ruling
class.
Taking these features into account, it is possible to
represent the reproduction of the relations of
production[13] in the following way, according to a kind
of ‘division of labour’.
The role of the repressive State apparatus, insofar as
it is a repressive apparatus, consists essentially in
securing by force (physical or otherwise) the political
conditions of the reproduction of relations of
production which are in the last resort relations of
exploitation. Not only does the State apparatus
contribute generously to its own reproduction (the
capitalist State contains political dynasties, military
dynasties, etc.), but also and above all, the State
apparatus secures by repression (from the most brutal
physical force, via mere administrative commands and
interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political
conditions for the action of the Ideological State
Apparatuses.
In fact, it is the latter which largely secure the
reproduction specifically of the relations of production,
behind a ‘shield’ provided by the repressive State
apparatus. It is here that the role of the ruling ideology
is heavily concentrated, the ideology of the ruling class,
which holds State power. It is the intermediation of the
ruling ideology that ensures a (sometimes teethgritting) ‘harmony’ between the repressive State
apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and
between the different State Ideological Apparatuses.
We are thus led to envisage the following hypothesis,
as a function precisely of the diversity of ideological
State Apparatuses in their single, because shared, role
of the reproduction of the relations of production.
Indeed we have listed a relatively large number of
Ideological State Apparatuses in contemporary
capitalist social formations: the educational apparatus,
the religious apparatus, the family apparatus, the
political apparatus, the trade-union apparatus, the
communications apparatus, the ‘cultural’ apparatus,
etc.
But in the social formations of that mode of
production characterized by ‘serfdom’ (usually called
the feudal mode of production), we observe that
although there is a single repressive State apparatus
which, since the earliest known Ancient States, let
alone the Absolute Monarchies, has been formally very
similar to the one we know today, the number of
Ideological State Apparatuses is smaller and their
individual types are different. For example, we observe
that during the Middle Ages, the Church (the religious
Ideological State Apparatus) accumulated a number of
functions which have today devolved on to several
distinct Ideological State Apparatuses, new ones in
relation to the past I am invoking, in particular
educational and cultural functions. Alongside the
Church there was the family Ideological State
Apparatus, which played a considerable part,
incommensurable with its role in capitalist social
formations. Despite appearances, the Church and the
Family were not the only Ideological State Apparatuses.
There was also a political Ideological State Apparatus
(the Estates General, the Parlement, the different
political factions and Leagues, the ancestors of the
modern political parties, and the whole political system
of the free Communes and then of the Villes). There
was also a powerful ‘proto-trade union’ Ideological
State Apparatus, if I may venture such an anachronistic
term (the powerful merchants’ and bankers’ guilds and
the journeymen’s associations, etc.). Publishing and
Communications,
even,
saw
an
indisputable
development, as did the theatre; initially both were
integral parts of the Church, then they became more
and more independent of it.
In the pre-capitalist historical period which I have
examined extremely broadly, it is absolutely clear
that there was one dominant Ideological State
Apparatus, the Church, which concentrated within it
not only religious functions, but also educational ones,
and a large proportion of the functions of
communications and ‘culture’. It is no accident that all
ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, starting with the first shocks of the
Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and
anti-religious struggle; rather this is a function
precisely of the dominant position of the religious
Ideological State Apparatus.
The foremost objective and achievement of the
French Revolution was not just to transfer State power
from the feudal aristocracy to the merchant-capitalist
bourgeoisie, to break part of the former repressive State
apparatus and replace it with a new one (e.g., the
national popular Army) but also to attack the numberone Ideological State Apparatus: the Church. Hence the
civil constitution of the clergy, the confiscation of
ecclesiastical wealth, and the creation of new
Ideological State Apparatuses to replace the religious
Ideological State Apparatus in its dominant role.
Naturally, these things did not happen automatically:
witness the Concordat, the Restoration and the long
class struggle between the landed aristocracy and the
industrial bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth
century for the establishment of bourgeois hegemony
over the functions formerly fulfilled by the Church:
above all by the Schools. It can be said that the
bourgeoisie relied on the new political, parliamentarydemocratic, Ideological State Apparatus, installed in
the earliest years of the Revolution, then restored after
long and violent struggles, for a few months in 1848
and for decades after the fall of the Second Empire, in
order to conduct its struggle against the Church and
wrest its ideological functions away from it, in other
words, to ensure not only its own political hegemony,
but also the ideological hegemony indispensable to the
reproduction of capitalist relations of production.
That is why I believe that I am justified in advancing
the following Thesis, however precarious it is. 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.
This thesis may seem paradoxical, given that for
everyone, i.e. in the ideological representation that the
bourgeoisie has tried to give itself and the classes it
exploits, it really seems that the dominant Ideological
State Apparatus in capitalist social formations is not
the Schools, but the political Ideological State
Apparatus, i.e. the regime of parliamentary democracy
combining universal suffrage and party struggle.
However, history, even recent history, shows that the
bourgeoisie has been and still is able to accommodate
itself to political Ideological State Apparatuses other
than parliamentary democracy: the First and Second
Empires, Constitutional Monarchy (Louis XVIII and
Charles X), Parliamentary Monarchy (Louis-Philippe),
Presidential Democracy (de Gaulle), to mention only
France. In England this is even clearer. The Revolution
was particularly ‘successful’ there from the bourgeois
point of view, since unlike France, where the
bourgeoisie, partly because of the stupidity of the petty
aristocracy, had to agree to being carried to power by
peasant and plebeian ‘journées révolutionnaires’,
something for which it had to pay a high price, the
English bourgeoisie was able to ‘compromise’ with the
aristocracy and ‘share’ State power and the use of the
State apparatus with it for a long time (peace among all
men of good will in the ruling classes!). In Germany it
is even more striking, since it was behind a political
Ideological State Apparatus in which the imperial
Junkers (epitomized by Bismarck), their army and their
police provided it with a shield and leading personnel,
that the imperialist bourgeoisie made its shattering
entry into history, before ‘traversing’ the Weimar
Republic and entrusting itself to Nazism.
Hence I believe I have good reasons for thinking that
behind the scenes of its political Ideological State
Apparatus, which occupies the front of the stage, what
the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as
its dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the
educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its
functions the previously dominant Ideological State
Apparatus, the Church. One might even add: the
School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family
couple.
Why is the educational apparatus in fact the
dominant Ideological State Apparatus in capitalist
social formations, and how does it function?
For the moment it must suffice to say:
1. All Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are,
contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the
relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of
exploitation.
2. Each of them contributes towards this single result in
the way proper to it. The political apparatus by
subjecting individuals to the political State ideology,
the ‘indirect’ (parliamentary) or ‘direct’ (plebiscitary or
fascist) ‘democratic’ ideology. The communications
apparatus by cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses
of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc,
by means of the press, the radio and television. The
same goes for the cultural apparatus (the role of sport
in chauvinism is of the first importance), etc. The
religious apparatus by recalling in sermons and the
other great ceremonies of Birth, Marriage and Death,
that man is only ashes, unless he loves his neighbour to
the extent of turning the other cheek to whoever strikes
first. The family apparatus …but there is no need to go
on.
3. This concert is dominated by a single score,
occasionally disturbed by contradictions (those of the
remnants of former ruling classes, those of the
proletarians and their organizations): the score of the
Ideology of the current ruling class which integrates
into its music the great themes of the Humanism of the
Great Forefathers, who produced the Greek Miracle
even before Christianity, and afterwards the Glory of
Rome, the Eternal City, and the themes of Interest,
particular and general, etc. nationalism, moralism and
economism.
4. Nevertheless, in this concert, one Ideological State
Apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although
hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent!
This is the School.
It takes children from every class at infant-school
age, and then for years, the years in which the child is
most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the Family State
Apparatus and the Educational State Apparatus, it
drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a
certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling
ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the
sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its
pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy).
Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of
children are ejected ‘into production’: these are the
workers or small peasants. Another portion of
scholastically adapted youth carries on: and, for better
or worse, it goes somewhat further, until it falls by the
wayside and fills the posts of small and middle
technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle
executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion
reaches the summit, either to fall into intellectual semiemployment, or to provide, as well as the ‘intellectuals
of the collective labourer’, the agents of exploitation
(capitalists, managers), the agents of repression
(soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.)
and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts,
most of whom are convinced ‘laymen’).
Each mass ejected en route is practically provided
with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in
class society: the role of the exploited (with a ‘highlydeveloped’ ‘professional’, ‘ethical’, ‘civic’, ‘national’ and
a-political consciousness); the role of the agent of
exploitation (ability to give the workers orders and
speak to them: ‘human relations’), of the agent of
repression (ability to give orders and enforce obedience
‘without discussion’, or ability to manipulate the
demagogy of a political leader’s rhetoric), or of the
professional ideologist (ability to treat consciousnesses
with the respect, i.e. with the contempt, blackmail, and
demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of
Morality, of Virtue, of ‘Transcendence’, of the Nation,
of France’s World Role, etc.).
Of course, many of these contrasting Virtues
(modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand,
cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, selfimportance, even smooth talk and cunning on the
other) are also taught in the Family, in the Church, in
the Army, in Good Books, in films and even in the
football stadium. But no other Ideological State
Apparatus has the obligatory (and not least, free)
audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist
social formation, eight hours a day for five or six days
out of seven.
But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of knowhow wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the
ideology of the ruling class that the relations of
production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the
relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to
exploited, are largely reproduced. The mechanisms
which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime
are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally
reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning
because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling
bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the
School as a neutral environment purged of ideology
(because it is …lay), where teachers respectful of the
‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are
entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their
‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their
children) open up for them the path to the freedom,
morality and responsibility of adults by their own
example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’
virtues.
I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful
conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can
find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the
ideology, the system and the practices in which they are
trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and
how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect
the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and
crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their
heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most
advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So
little do they suspect it that their own devotion
contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of
this ideological representation of the School, which
makes the School today as ‘natural’, indispensable-
useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as
the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable and generous
for our ancestors a few centuries ago.
In fact, the Church has been replaced today in its role
as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the
School. It is coupled with the Family just as the Church
was once coupled with the Family. We can now claim
that the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now
shaking the education system of so many States across
the globe, often in conjunction with a crisis (already
proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto) shaking the
family system, takes on a political meaning, given that
the School (and the School/Family couple) constitutes
the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the
Apparatus playing a determinant part in the
reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of
production threatened in its existence by the world
class struggle.
On Ideology
When I put forward the concept of an Ideological
State Apparatus, when I said that the ISAs ‘function by
ideology’, I invoked a reality which needs a little
discussion: ideology.
It is well known that the expression ‘ideology’ was
invented by Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and their
friends, who assigned to it as an object the (genetic)
theory of ideas. When Marx took up the term fifty years
later, he gave it a quite different meaning, even in his
Early Works. Here, ideology is the system of the ideas
and representations which dominate the mind of a man
or a social group. The ideologico-political struggle
conducted by Marx as early as his articles in
the Rheinische Zeitung inevitably and quickly brought
him face to face with this reality and forced him to take
his earliest intuitions further.
However, here we come upon a rather astonishing
paradox. Everything seems to lead Marx to formulate a
theory of ideology. In fact, The German Ideology does
offer us, after the 1844 Manuscripts, an explicit theory
of ideology, but …it is not Marxist (we shall see why in a
moment). As for Capital, although it does contain
many hints towards a theory of ideologies (most visibly,
the ideology of the vulgar economists), it does not
contain that theory itself, which depends for the most
part on a theory of ideology in general.
I should like to venture a first and very schematic
outline of such a theory. The theses I am about to put
forward are certainly not off the cuff, but they cannot
be sustained and tested, i.e. confirmed or rejected,
except by much thorough study and analysis.
Ideology has no History
One word first of all to expound the reason in
principle which seems to me to found, or at least to
justify, the project of a theory of ideology in general,
and not a theory of particular ideologies, which,
whatever their form (religious, ethical, legal, political),
always express class positions.
It is quite obvious that it is necessary to proceed
towards a theory of ideologies in the two respects I have
just suggested. It will then be clear that a theory of
ideologies depends in the last resort on the history of
social formations, and thus of the modes of production
combined in social formations, and of the class
struggles which develop in them. In this sense it is clear
that there can be no question of a theory of
ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the
double respect suggested above: regional and class)
have a history, whose determination in the last instance
is clearly situated outside ideologies alone, although it
involves them.
On the contrary, if I am able to put forward the
project of a theory of ideology in general, and if this
theory really is one of the elements on which theories of
ideologies depend, that entails an apparently
paradoxical proposition which I shall express in the
following terms: ideology has no history.
As we know, this formulation appears in so many
words in a passage from The German Ideology. Marx
utters it with respect to metaphysics, which, he says,
has no more history than ethics (meaning also the other
forms of ideology).
In The German Ideology, this formulation appears in
a plainly positivist context. Ideology is conceived as a
pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its
reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an
imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the
theoretical status of the dream among writers before
Freud. For these writers, the dream was the purely
imaginary, i.e. null, result of ‘day’s residues’, presented
in an arbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even
‘inverted’, in other words, in ‘disorder’. For them, the
dream was the imaginary, it was empty, null and
arbitrarily ‘stuck together’ (bricolé), once the eyes had
closed, from the residues of the only full and positive
reality, the reality of the day. This is exactly the status
of philosophy and ideology (since in this book
philosophy is ideology par excellence) in The German
Ideology.
Ideology, then, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage
(bricolage), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted
by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive
reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material
individuals materially producing their existence. It is
on this basis that ideology has no history in The
German Ideology, since its history is outside it, where
the only existing history is, the history of concrete
individuals, etc. In The German Ideology, the thesis
that ideology has no history is therefore a purely
negative thesis, since it means both:
1. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a
pure dream (manufactured by who
knows what power: if not by the
alienation of the division of labour, but
that,
too,
is
a negative determination);
2. ideology has no history, which
emphatically does not mean that there
is no history in it (on the contrary, for
it is merely the pale, empty and
inverted reflection of real history) but
that it has no history of its own.
Now, while the thesis I wish to defend formally
speaking adopts the terms of The German
Ideology (‘ideology has no history’), it is radically
different from the positivist and historicist thesis of The
German Ideology.
For on the one hand, I think it is possible to hold that
ideologies have a history of their own (although it is
determined in the last instance by the class struggle);
and on the other, I think it is possible to hold that
ideology in general has no history, not in a negative
sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely
positive sense.
This sense is a positive one if it is true that the
peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a
structure and a functioning such as to make it a nonhistorical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the
sense in which that structure and functioning are
immutable, present in the same form throughout what
we can call history, in the sense in which
the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history
of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies.
To give a theoretical reference-point here, I might say
that, to return to our example of the dream, in its
Freudian conception this time, our proposition:
ideology has no history, can and must (and in a way
which has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but,
quite the reverse, is theoretically necessary, for there is
an organic link between the two propositions) be
related directly to Freud’s proposition that
the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history.
If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal)
history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore
immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I
shall adopt Freud’s expression word for word, and
write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious.
And I add that I find this comparison theoretically
justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious
is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general.
That is why I believe I am justified, hypothetically at
least, in proposing a theory of ideology in general, in
the sense that Freud presented a theory of the
unconscious in general.
To simplify the phrase, it is convenient, taking into
account what has been said about ideologies, to use the
plain term ideology to designate ideology in general,
which I have just said has no history, or, what comes to
the same thing, is eternal, i.e. omnipresent in its
immutable form throughout history (= the history of
social formations containing social classes). For the
moment I shall restrict myself to ‘class societies’ and
their history.
Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of
Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence
In order to approach my central thesis on the
structure and functioning of ideology, I shall first
present two theses, one negative, the other positive.
The first concerns the object which is ‘represented’ in
the imaginary form of ideology, the second concerns
the materiality of ideology.
Thesis I. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship
of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
We commonly call religious ideology, ethical
ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many
‘world outlooks’. Of course, assuming that we do not
live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. ‘believe’ in
God, Duty, Justice, etc….), we admit that the ideology
we are discussing from a critical point of view,
examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a
‘primitive society’, that these ‘world outlooks’ are
largely imaginary, i.e. do not ‘correspond to reality’.
However, while admitting that they do not
correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an
illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality,
and that they need only be ‘interpreted’ to discover the
reality of the world behind their imaginary
representation
of
that
world
(ideology
= illusion/allusion).
There are different types of interpretation, the most
famous of which are the mechanistic type, current in
the eighteenth century (God is the imaginary
representation of the real King), and the ‘hermeneutic
‘ interpretation, inaugurated by the earliest Church
Fathers, and revived by Feuerbach and the theologicophilosophical school which descends from him, e.g. the
theologian Barth (to Feuerbach, for example, God is the
essence of real Man). The essential point is that on
condition that we interpret the imaginary transposition
(and inversion) of ideology we arrive at the conclusion
that in ideology ‘men represent their real conditions of
existence to themselves in an imaginary form’.
Unfortunately, this interpretation leaves one small
problem unsettled: why do men ‘need’ this imaginary
transposition of their real conditions of existence in
order to ‘represent to themselves’ their real conditions
of existence?
The first answer (that of the eighteenth century)
proposes a simple solution: Priests or Despots are
responsible. They ‘forged’ the Beautiful Lies so that, in
the belief that they were obeying God, men would in
fact obey the Priests and Despots, who are usually in
alliance in their imposture, the Priests acting in the
interests of the Despots or vice versa, according to the
political positions of the ‘theoreticians’ concerned.
There is therefore a cause for the imaginary
transposition of the real conditions of existence: that
cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men
who base their domination and exploitation of the
‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which
they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by
dominating their imaginations.
The second answer (that of Feuerbach, taken over
word for word by Marx in his Early Works) is more
‘profound’, i.e. just as false. It, too, seeks and finds a
cause for the imaginary transposition and distortion of
men’s real conditions of existence, in short, for the
alienation in the imaginary of the representation of
men’s conditions of existence. This cause is no longer
Priests or Despots, nor their active imagination and the
passive imagination of their victims. This cause is the
material alienation which reigns in the conditions of
existence of men themselves. This is how, in The
Jewish Question and elsewhere, Marx defends the
Feuerbachian idea that men make themselves an
alienated (= imaginary) representation of their
conditions of existence because these conditions of
existence are themselves alienating (in the 1844
Manuscripts: because these conditions are dominated
by the essence of alienated society – ‘alienated
labour’).
All these interpretations thus take literally the thesis
which they presuppose, and on which they depend, i.e.
that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of
the world found in an ideology is the conditions of
existence of men, i.e. their real world.
Now I can return to a thesis which I have already
advanced: it is not their real conditions of existence,
their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in
ideology, but above all it is their relation to those
conditions of existence which is represented to them
there. It is this relation which is at the centre of every
ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real
world. It is this relation that contains the ‘cause’ which
has to explain the imaginary distortion of the
ideological representation of the real world. Or rather,
to leave aside the language of causality it is necessary to
advance the thesis that it is the imaginary nature of
this relation which underlies all the imaginary
distortion that we can observe (if we do not live in its
truth) in all ideology.
To speak in a Marxist language, if it is true that the
representation of the real conditions of existence of the
individuals occupying the posts of agents of production,
exploitation, repression, ideologization and scientific
practice, does in the last analysis arise from the
relations of production, and from relations deriving
from the relations of production, we can say the
following: all ideology represents in its necessarily
imaginary distortion not the existing relations of
production (and the other relations that derive from
them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of
individuals to the relations of production and the
relations that derive from them. What is represented in
ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations
which govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of those individuals to the real
relations in which they live.
If this is the case, the question of the ‘cause’ of the
imaginary distortion of the real relations in ideology
disappears and must be replaced by a different
question: why is the representation given to individuals
of their (individual) relation to the social relations
which govern their conditions of existence and their
collective and individual life necessarily an imaginary
relation? And what is the nature of this imaginariness?
Posed in this way, the question explodes the solution by
a ‘clique’[14], by a group of individuals (Priests or
Despots) who are the authors of the great ideological
mystification, just as it explodes the solution by the
alienated character of the real world. We shall see why
later in my exposition. For the moment I shall go no
further.
Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.
I have already touched on this thesis by saying that
the ‘ideas’ or ‘representations’, etc., which seem to
make up ideology do not have an ideal
(idéale or idéelle) or spiritual existence, but a material
existence. I even suggested that the ideal
(idéale, idéelle) and spiritual existence of ‘ideas’ arises
exclusively in an ideology of the ‘idea’ and of ideology,
and let me add, in an ideology of what seems to have
‘founded’ this conception since the emergence of the
sciences, i.e. what the practicians of the sciences
represent to themselves in their spontaneous ideology
as ‘ideas’, true or false. Of course, presented in
affirmative form, this thesis is unproven. I simply ask
that the reader be favourably disposed towards it, say,
in the name of materialism. A long series of arguments
would be necessary to prove it.
This hypothetical thesis of the not spiritual but
material existence of ‘ideas’ or other ‘representations’ is
indeed necessary if we are to advance in our analysis of
the nature of ideology. Or rather, it is merely useful to
us in order the better to reveal what every at all serious
analysis of any ideology will immediately and
empirically show to every observer, however critical.
While discussing the Ideological State Apparatuses
and their practices, I said that each of them was the
realization of an ideology (the unity of these different
regional ideologies – religious, ethical, legal, political,
aesthetic, etc. – being assured by their subjection to the
ruling ideology). I now return to this thesis: an ideology
always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or
practices. This existence is material.
Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an
apparatus and its practices does not have the same
modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or
a rifle. But, at the risk of being taken for a NeoAristotelian (NB Marx had a very high regard for
Aristotle), I shall say that ‘matter is discussed in many
senses’, or rather that it exists in different modalities,
all rooted in the last instance in ‘physical’ matter.
Having said this, let me move straight on and see
what happens to the ‘individuals’ who live in ideology,
i.e. in a determinate (religious, ethical, etc.)
representation of the world whose imaginary distortion
depends on their imaginary relation to their conditions
of existence, in other words, in the last instance, to the
relations of production and to class relations (ideology
= an imaginary relation to real relations). I shall say
that this imaginary relation is itself endowed with a
material existence.
Now I observe the following.
An individual believes in God, or Duty, or Justice, etc.
This belief derives (for everyone, i.e. for all those who
live in an ideological representation of ideology, which
reduces ideology to ideas endowed by definition with a
spiritual existence) from the ideas of the individual
concerned, i.e. from him as a subject with a
consciousness which contains the ideas of his belief. In
this way, i.e. by means of the absolutely ideological
‘conceptual’ device (dispositif) thus set up (a subject
endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms
or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes), the
(material) attitude of the subject concerned naturally
follows.
The individual in question behaves in such and such
a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and,
what is more, participates in certain regular practices
which are those of the ideological apparatus on which
‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness
freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he goes
to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does
penance (once it was material in the ordinary sense of
the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he
believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding
attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices ‘according to the
correct principles’. If he believes in Justice, he will
submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and
may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions,
take part in a demonstration, etc.
Throughout this schema we observe that the
ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to
recognize that every ‘subject’ endowed with a
‘consciousness’ and believing in the ‘ideas’ that his
‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freely accepts, must
‘act according to his ideas’, must therefore inscribe his
own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material
practice. If he does not do so, ‘that is wicked’.
Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a
function of what he believes, it is because he does
something else, which, still as a function of the same
idealist scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his
head as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts
according to these other ideas, as a man who is either
‘inconsistent’ (‘no one is willingly evil’) or cynical, or
perverse.
In every case, the ideology of ideology thus
recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the
‘ideas’ of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought
to exist in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends
him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however
perverse) that he does perform. This ideology talks of
actions:
I
shall
talk
of
actions
inserted
into practices. And I shall point out that these practices
are governed by the rituals in which these practices are
inscribed, within the material existence of an
ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that
apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a
minor match at a sports’ club, a school day, a political
party meeting, etc.
Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive
‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable
us to invert the order of the notional schema of
ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move
your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus
scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like
Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something
hardly Christian (for woe to him who brings scandal
into the world!) – scandal itself. A fortunate scandal
which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a
language that directly names the reality.
I will be allowed to leave Pascal to the arguments of
his ideological struggle with the religious Ideological
State Apparatus of his day. And I shall be expected to
use a more directly Marxist vocabulary, if that is
possible, for we are advancing in still poorly explored
domains.
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. Naturally, the four inscriptions of the adjective
‘material’ in my proposition must be affected by
different modalities: the materialities of a displacement
for going to mass, of kneeling down, of the gesture of
the sign of the cross, or of the mea culpa, of a sentence,
of a prayer, of an act of contrition, of a penitence, of a
gaze, of a hand-shake, of an external verbal discourse
or an ‘internal’ verbal discourse (consciousness), are
not one and the same materiality. I shall leave on one
side the problem of a theory of the differences between
the modalities of materiality.
It remains that in this inverted presentation of
things, we are not dealing with an ‘inversion’ at all,
since it is clear that certain notions have purely and
simply disappeared from our presentation, whereas
others on the contrary survive, and new terms appear.
Disappeared: the term ideas.
Survive:
the
terms subject, consciousness, belief, actions.
Appear:
the
terms practices, rituals, ideological
apparatus.
It is therefore not an inversion or overturning (except
in the sense in which one might say a government or a
glass is overturned), but a reshuffle (of a nonministerial type), a rather strange reshuffle, since we
obtain the following result.
Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are
endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the
precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is
inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals
defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus.
It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is
acted by the following system (set out in the order of its
real determination): ideology existing in a material
ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices
governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in
the material actions of a subject acting in all
consciousness according to his belief.
But this very presentation reveals that we have
retained the following notions: subject, consciousness,
belief, actions. From this series I shall immediately
extract the decisive central term on which everything
else depends: the notion of the subject.
And I shall immediately set down two conjoint
theses:
1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology;
2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects.
I can now come to my central thesis.
Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects
This thesis is simply a matter of making my last
proposition explicit: there is no ideology except by the
subject and for subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology
except for concrete subjects, and this destination for
ideology is only made possible by the subject:
meaning, by the category of the subject and its
functioning.
By this I mean that, even if it only appears under this
name (the subject) with the rise of bourgeois ideology,
above all with the rise of legal ideology,[15] the category
of the subject (which may function under other names:
e.g., as the soul in Plato, as God, etc.) is the constitutive
category of all ideology, whatever its determination
(regional or class) and whatever its historical date –
since ideology has no history.
I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all
ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add
that the category of the subject is only constitutive of
all ideology insofar as all ideology has the
function (which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete
individuals as subjects. In the interaction of this double
constitution exists the functioning of all ideology,
ideology being nothing but its functioning in the
material forms of existence of that functioning.
In order to grasp what follows, it is essential to realize
that both he who is writing these lines and the reader
who reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore
ideological subjects (a tautological proposition), i.e.
that the author and the reader of these lines both live
‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideology in the sense in
which I have said that ‘man is an ideological animal by
nature’.
That the author, insofar as he writes the lines of a
discourse which claims to be scientific, is completely
absent as a ‘subject’ from ‘his’ scientific discourse (for
all scientific discourse is by definition a subject-less
discourse, there is no ‘Subject of science’ except in an
ideology of science) is a different question which I shall
leave on one side for the moment.
As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the ‘Logos’,
meaning in ideology, that we ‘live, move and have our
being’. It follows that, for you and for me, the category
of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’ (obviousnesses
are always primary): it is clear that you and I are
subjects (free, ethical, etc….). Like all obviousnesses,
including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or
‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness
of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘obviousness’
that you and I are subjects – and that that does not
cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the
elementary ideological effect.[16] It is indeed a peculiarity
of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so,
since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as
obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and
before which we have the inevitable and natural
reaction of crying out (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice
of conscience’): ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s
true!’
At
work
in
this
reaction
is
the
ideological recognition function which is one of the two
functions of ideology as such (its inverse being the
function of misrecognition – méconnaissance).
To take a highly ‘concrete’ example, we all have
friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask,
through the door, the question ‘Who’s there?’, answer
(since ‘it’s obvious’) ‘It’s me’. And we recognize that ‘it
is him’, or ‘her’. We open the door, and ‘it’s true, it
really was she who was there’. To take another example,
when we recognize somebody of our (previous)
acquaintance ((re)-connaissance) in the street, we
show him that we have recognized him (and have
recognized that he has recognized us) by saying to him
‘Hello, my friend’, and shaking his hand (a material
ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life
– in France, at least; elsewhere, there are other
rituals).
In this preliminary remark and these concrete
illustrations, I only wish to point out that you and I
are always already subjects, and as such constantly
practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which
guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete,
individual,
distinguishable
and
(naturally)
irreplaceable subjects. The writing I am currently
executing
and
the
reading
you
are
[17]
currently performing are also in this respect rituals of
ideological recognition, including the ‘obviousness’
with which the ‘truth’ or ‘error’ of my reflections may
impose itself on you.
But to recognize that we are subjects and that we
function in the practical rituals of the most elementary
everyday life (the hand-shake, the fact of calling you by
your name, the fact of knowing, even if I do not know
what it is, that you ‘have’ a name of your own, which
means that you are recognized as a unique subject, etc.)
– this recognition only gives us the ‘consciousness’ of
our incessant (eternal) practice of ideological
recognition – its consciousness, i.e. its recognition –
but in no sense does it give us the
(scientific) knowledge of the mechanism of this
recognition. Now it is this knowledge that we have to
reach, if you will, while speaking in ideology, and from
within ideology we have to outline a discourse which
tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the
beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on
ideology.
Thus in order to represent why the category of the
‘subject’ is constitutive of ideology, which only exists by
constituting concrete subjects as subjects, I shall
employ a special mode of exposition: ‘concrete’ enough
to be recognized, but abstract enough to be thinkable
and thought, giving rise to a knowledge.
As a first formulation I shall say: 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 or hailing, and which can be
imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’[18]
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined
takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn
round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why?
Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’
addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was
hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that
the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that
they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle,
the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him
who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange
phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained
solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who
‘have something on their consciences’.
Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little
theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the
form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus
in the form of a temporal succession. There are
individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind
them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One
individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one)
turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for
him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant
by the hailing. But in reality these things happen
without any succession. The existence of ideology and
the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects
are one and the same thing.
I might add: what thus seems to take place outside
ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes
place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology
seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why
those who are in ideology believe themselves by
definition outside ideology: one of the effects of
ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological
character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says,
‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology,
i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in
ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general
case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the
accusation of being in ideology only applies to others,
never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a
Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same
thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no
outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is
nothing but outside (for science and reality).
Spinoza explained this completely two centuries
before Marx, who practised it but without explaining it
in detail. But let us leave this point, although it is heavy
with consequences, consequences which are not just
theoretical, but also directly political, since, for
example, the whole theory of criticism and selfcriticism, the golden rule of the Marxist-Leninist
practice of the class struggle, depends on it.
Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as
subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress
the temporal form in which I have presented the
functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has alwaysalready interpellated individuals as subjects, which
amounts to making it clear that individuals are alwaysalready interpellated by ideology as subjects, which
necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals
are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are
‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always
already are. This proposition might seem paradoxical.
That an individual is always-already a subject, even
before he is born, is nevertheless the plain reality,
accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all. Freud
shows that individuals are always ‘abstract’ with respect
to the subjects they always-already are, simply by
noting the ideological ritual that surrounds the
expectation of a ‘birth’, that ‘happy event’. Everyone
knows how much and in what way an unborn child is
expected. Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if
we agree to drop the ‘sentiments’, i.e. the forms of
family ideology (paternal/maternal conjugal/fraternal)
in which the unborn child is expected: 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. I hardly need add that this
familial ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness,
highly structured, and that it is in this implacable and
more or less ‘pathological’ (presupposing that any
meaning can be assigned to that term) structure that
the former subject to-be will have to ‘find’ ‘its’ place, i.e.
‘become’ the sexual subject (boy or girl) which it
already is in advance. It is clear that this ideological
constraint and pre-appointment, and all the rituals of
rearing and then education in the family, have some
relationship with what Freud studied in the forms of
the pre-genital and genital ‘stages’ of sexuality, i.e. in
the ‘grip’ of what Freud registered by its effects as being
the unconscious. But let us leave this point, too, on one
side.
Let me go one step further. What I shall now turn my
attention to is the way the ‘actors’ in this mise en
scène [setting] of interpellation, and their respective
roles, are reflected in the very structure of all ideology.
An Example: The Christian Religious Ideology
As the formal structure of all ideology is always the
same, I shall restrict my analysis to a single example,
one accessible to everyone, that of religious ideology,
with the proviso that the same demonstration can be
produced for ethical, legal, political, aesthetic ideology,
etc.
Let us therefore consider the Christian religious
ideology. I shall use a rhetorical figure and ‘make it
speak’, i.e. collect into a fictional discourse what it ‘says’
not only in its two Testaments, its Theologians,
Sermons, but also in its practices, its rituals, its
ceremonies and its sacraments. The Christian religious
ideology says something like this:
It says: I address myself to you, a human individual
called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in
the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own
name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you
are answer able to Him. It adds: God addresses himself
to you through my voice (Scripture having collected the
Word of God, Tradition having transmitted it, Papal
Infallibility fixing it for ever on ‘nice’ points). It says:
this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin,
you were created by God for all eternity, although you
were born in the 1920th year of Our Lord! This is your
place in the world! This is what you must do! By these
means, if you observe the ‘law of love’ you will be saved,
you, Peter, and will become part of the Glorious Body of
Christ! Etc….
Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but
at the same time quite a surprising one.
Surprising because if we consider that religious
ideology is indeed addressed to individuals,[19] in order
to ‘transform them into subjects’, by interpellating the
individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject, free
to obey or disobey the appeal, i.e. God’s
commandments; if it calls these individuals by their
names, thus recognizing that they are always-already
interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (to the
extent that Pascal’s Christ says: ‘It is for you that I have
shed this drop of my blood!’); if it interpellates them in
such a way that the subject responds: ‘Yes, it really is
me!’ if it obtains from them the recognition that they
really do occupy the place it designates for them as
theirs in the world, a fixed residence: ‘It really is me, I
am here, a worker, a boss or a soldier!’ in this vale of
tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a
destination (eternal life or damnation) according to the
respect or contempt they show to ‘God’s
Commandments’, Law become Love; – if everything
does happen in this way (in the practices of the wellknown rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion,
confession and extreme unction, etc. …), we should
note that all this ‘procedure’ to set up Christian
religious subjects is dominated by a strange
phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a
multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute
condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other
Subject, i.e. God.
It is convenient to designate this new and remarkable
Subject by writing Subject with a capital S to
distinguish it from ordinary subjects, with a small s.
It then emerges that the interpellation of individuals
as subjects presupposes the ‘existence’ of a Unique and
central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious
ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects. All this
is clearly[20] written in what is rightly called the
Scriptures. ‘And it came to pass at that time that God
the Lord (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud. And
the Lord cried to Moses, “Moses!” And Moses replied
“It is (really) I! I am Moses thy servant, speak and I
shall listen!” And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to
him, “I am that I am”’.
God thus defines himself as the Subject par
excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I
am that I am’), and he who interpellates his subject, the
individual subjected to him by his very interpellation,
i.e. the individual named Moses. And Moses,
interpellated-called by his Name, having recognized
that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes
that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject
subjected to God, a subject through the Subject and
subjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him, and
makes his people obey God’s Commandments.
God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the
innumerable subjects of God’s people, the Subject’s
interlocutors-interpellates:
his mirrors,
his reflections.Were not men made in the image of
God? As all theological reflection proves, whereas He
‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God
needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as men
need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God
needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in
the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the
subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).
Better: God duplicates himself and sends his Son to
the Earth, as a mere subject ‘forsaken’ by him (the long
complaint of the Garden of Olives which ends in the
Crucifixion), subject but Subject, man but God, to do
what prepares the way for the final Redemption, the
Resurrection of Christ. God thus needs to ‘make
himself’ a man, the Subject needs to become a subject,
as if to show empirically, visibly to the eye, tangibly to
the hands (see St. Thomas) of the subjects, that, if they
are subjects, subjected to the Subject, that is solely in
order that finally, on Judgement Day, they will re-enter
the Lord’s Bosom, like Christ, i.e. re-enter the
Subject.[21]
Let us decipher into theoretical language this
wonderful necessity for the duplication of the Subject
into subjects and of the Subject itself into a subjectSubject.
We observe that the structure of all ideology,
interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a
Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirrorstructure,
and doubly speculary:
this
mirror
duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its
functioning. Which means that all ideology is centred,
that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of
the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of
individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connexion
such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while
giving them in the Subject in which each subject can
contemplate its own image (present and future)
the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him,
and that since everything takes place in the Family (the
Holy Family: the Family is in essence Holy), ‘God
will recognize his own in it’, i.e. those who have
recognized God, and have recognized themselves in
Him, will be saved.
Let me summarize what we have discovered about
ideology in general.
The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures
simultaneously:
1. the interpellation of ‘individuals’ as
subjects;
2. their subjection to the Subject;
3. the mutual recognition of subjects
and Subject, the subjects’ recognition
of each other, and finally the subject’s
recognition of himself;[22]
4. the absolute guarantee that
everything really is so, and that on
condition that the subjects recognize
what they are and behave accordingly,
everything will be all right: Amen – ‘So
be it’.
Result: caught in this quadruple system of
interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject,
of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the
subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast
majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad
subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of
one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State
Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects
work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose
concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State
Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed
by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing
state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true
that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be
obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de
Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love
thy neighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete, material
behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the
admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.
Yes, the subjects ‘work by themselves’. The whole
mystery of this effect lies in the first two moments of
the quadruple system I have just discussed, or, if you
prefer, in the ambiguity of the term subject. In the
ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a
free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who
submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped
of all freedom except that of freely accepting his
submission. This last note gives us the meaning of this
ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect
which produces it: the individual is interpellated as
a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to
the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he
shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he
shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection
‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for
their subjection. That is why they ‘work all by
themselves’.
‘So be it! …’ This phrase which registers the effect to
be obtained proves that it is not ‘naturally’ so
(‘naturally’: outside the prayer, i.e. outside the
ideological intervention). This…