The essay “Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatus” contained in Althusser's book Lenin and Philosophy tries to illuminate the working of ideology
in society. By taking lacanian concept of the imaginary, the real, and the
symbolic, Althusser defines ideology as “the imaginary relations of individuals
to their real conditions of existence. Ideology naturalizes, justifies and
sustains hegemony and it shape the cultural forms seek to ensure the perennial
dominance of the ruling class. Terry Eagleton views it as “the ways in which
what we say and believe connects with the power structure and power relations
of the society we live in (Eagleton 13) .
For him, it is those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have
some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.
The entire social formation is
perennial, where occurs production and maintenance of relations of productive
forces; that is, there is continuous reproduction of conditions of production. The
Marxist conceptualization of society using metaphors of infrastructure and
superstructure, in which the former determines the floors, gets reinvestigated
and Althusser leads us to think of the Marxist statement of relative autonomy
of the superstructure and the reciprocal action of the superstructure on the
base. Marxist tradition strictly conceived state as a repressive apparatus for
state for them was a machine of repression. The tools for the repression include;
the police, the courts, prison, and also the army, which are necessary in the
practice of law.
The essay discusses how does human
subjects very often come to submit themselves to the dominant ideologies of
their societies. Althusser sees ideology as vital to maintaining the power of a
ruling class. He has sometimes been seen as a ‘structuralist’ Marxist for him
“human individuals are products of many different social determinants and thus
have no essential unity” (Eagleton 149) . He differentiates
between the state power and the state control. State power is maintained by the
‘repressive structures’ which are the institutions like law, courts, prisons,
the police force, and the army, which operate by external force. His term
ideology, anyhow, asks for rather than mere conformation to social reality as ‘natural’,
critically questioning how it, and ourselves, came to be constructed, and could
possibly be transformed.
Althusser argues that the state
apparatuses, whether repressive or ideological, is sympathetic to the aims of
the state and the political status quo. Political parties, schools, the media,
churches, the family, and art and literature foster an ideology for the sustenance
of this status quo. Thus, even an individual feels that he is making a free
choice he is just acting out something which is being imposed on him. Peter Barry
observes that the concept of ideology is closely linked to the notion of
Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’. For Gramsci, ‘rule’ is practiced with direct political
control which uses force when necessary and hegemony as Raymond Williams puts
it, “the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and
dominant meanings, values and beliefs of a kind which can be abstracted as a “worldview”
or “class outlook” (Barry 111) .
Ideology ‘interpellates’ the subject
and it is just like Lacanian mirror stage concept. It is the ‘trick’ whereby individuals
are made to feel that they are choosing when they really have no choice. The idea
of democracy uses the same trick while we feel that we are choosing the kind of
government that we have but in practice the difference between the political
parties is considerably zero.
He exposes Ideology as an important
factor which could control how an individual comes to recognize himself as an
autonomous, free, unified, free, self generating individual. It is the
effective presence and functioning of ideology that creates ‘meaning’ for an
individual and its deeds and does not allow him to simply act the way he wants.
It is through Ideology that makes it possible for an individual to accept the
societal attribution of his role, creates an impression of a ‘relation’ with
the society, though his presence is dispensable. For Althusser, thus, it is
ideology that does the ‘centering’ of an individual in the society. It is very
subtle, pervasive and unconscious than a set of explicit doctrines.
Althusser tries to enable a more
subtle view of how society works. He explains that instead of exertion of power
from a single source as it in the case of material power ideological power is of
greater significance. Literature, which was considered by the traditional
Marxist as a helpless and passive reflector of economic base is with its own
crucial significance as a reproducer of the ideology itself. Barry propounds
that Althusser’s views are considered as revisionist Marxism because he rethinks,
and repackages the basic concepts in a form which is more subtle and more
flexible. But he was not as such a flexible thinker generally but dogmatic and
much attacked on the left for his promotion of ‘theory’ as a separate
realmwhich is above experience, practice, or activism.
Bibliography
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to
Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd. UK: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary
Theory: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers
Ltd., 1996.
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