LU Cold War Movie Ideology And Indentity Paper

For the third reaction paper consider aspects of Stuart Hall’s complex discussion of the notion of identityalong with concepts related to Althusser’s discussion ofIdeologyandIdeological State Apparatuses. Apply critical concepts (such as the subject, subject position, identity politics, interpellation, RSA, ISA, ) that are introduced in the texts toward the analysis of the film Cold War (Powlikowski, Poland  2019).

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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 one-sided: 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 ‘macro-economic’ ‘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 wageearner (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 socio-technical 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 politico-legal (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 surplus-value 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 State Apparatuses,
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 starting-point 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 teeth-gritting) ‘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 number-one 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,
parliamentary-democratic, 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 SchoolFamily 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
semi-employment, 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 ‘highly-developed’
‘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, self-importance, 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 know-how 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 non-historical 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, transhistorical 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 theologico-philosophical
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 Neo-Aristotelian (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 non-ministerial 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 currently[17] 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 self-criticism, 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 always-already interpellated individuals as subjects,
which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already 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 preappointment, 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 well-known 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 subject-Subject.
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 mirror-structure, 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 phrase proves that it has to be so if t…