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Louis Althusser



Because Althusser held that our desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements and so forth are the consequences of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist society, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious agent. For Althusser, however, a person’s capacity for perceiving herself in this way is not innate. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject. Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give her an idea of the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each social practice. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories. In Althusser’s view, our values, desires and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects through the process of interpellation. Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations and, most importantly, the education system, as well as the received ideas they propagate [2]. There is, however, no one ISA that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we learn this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.

Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as Althusser's first thesis on ideology states, "ideology has no history". All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of interpellation. He uses the example of an individual walking in a street: upon hearing a police whistle, or any other form of hailing, the individual turns round and in this simple movement of her body she is transformed into a subject. Althusser discusses the process by which the person being hailed recognizes herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond. Even though there was nothing suspicious about her walking in the street, she recognizes it is indeed she herself that is being hailed. This recognition is a mis-recognition (méconnaissance) in that it is working retroactively: a material individual is always-already an ideological subject. The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always-already happened; Althusser acknowledges here a debt toward Spinoza's theory of immanence. That is to say, our idea of who we are is delivered by ideology. The second of Althusser's theses is that "ideology has a material existence":

“ 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, describing 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. [3] ”

These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, as the ISA may in a sense be compared with Foucault's disciplinary institutions. Althusser offers the example of the Voice of God - an embodiment of Christian religious ideology - instructing a person on what her place in the world is and what she must do to be reconciled with Christ. From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify herself as a Christian, she must first already be a subject. We acquire our identities by seeing ourselves and our social roles mirrored in material ideologies.

Althusser also recognized the role played by what he termed "Repressive State Apparatuses". ISAs share Gramsci's concept of hegemony and function similarly to what Boal termed "cops in your head". Individuals and groups are deemed to be self-regulating free agents within society. At times when individuals and groups pose a threat to the dominant order the state invokes Repressive State Apparatuses. The most benign of the RSAs are the systems of law and courts where putatively public contractual language is invoked in order to govern individual and collective behavior. As threats to the dominant order mount, the state turns to increasingly physical and severe measures: incarceration, police force and ultimately military intervention are used in response to internal threats. RSAs are generally applied sparingly in the hope that the ISAs are all that are needed in order for the existing order to prevail. The application of RSAs is only done reluctantly in response to increasingly threatening questioning of the existing order.

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Influence

Although Althusser's theories were born of an attempt to defend what some saw as Communist orthodoxy, his manner of presenting Marxism reflected a move away from the intellectual isolation of the Stalinist era - Althusser argued strongly for what he called a left-wing rather than liberal or reformist critique of Stalinism - and furthermore was symptomatic both of Marxism's growing academic respectability and of a push towards emphasising Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than as an economist. Judt saw this as a criticism of Althusser's work, saying he removed Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort. [4]

Althusser has had broad influence in the areas of Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism: Interpellation has been popularised and adapted by the feminist philosopher and critic Judith Butler; the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses has been of interest to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; the attempt to view history as a process without a subject garnered sympathy from Jacques Derrida; historical materialism was defended as a coherent doctrine from the standpoint of analytic philosophy by G. A. Cohen; the interest in structure and agency sparked by Althusser was to play a role in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration; Althusser was vehemently attacked by British historian E. P. Thompson in his book The Poverty of Theory. As well as this, several of Althusser's students became eminent intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Alain Badiou and Étienne Balibar in philosophy, Jacques Ranciere in history and the philosophy of history, Pierre Macherey in literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in sociology. The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the aforementioned Derrida, noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.

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Endnotes

  1. ^ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation is available in several English volumes including Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
  2. ^ The concept may be found in the text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, published in English in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, available online here
  3. ^ Ibid., p.169-70
  4. ^ New Republic, V. 210, 03-07-1994, p33.

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Further reading

  • Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. (Online version)
  • Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism
  • Callinicos, Alex (ed.), Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976).
  • James, Susan, 'Louis Althusser' in Skinner, Q. (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.
  • Waters, Malcolm, Modern Sociological Theory, 1994, page 116.
  • Lewis, William, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism. Lexington books, 2005. (link)
  • McInerney, David (ed.), Althusser & Us, special issue of borderlands e-journal, October 2005. (link)
  • Montag, Warren, Louis Althusser, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003.
  • Resch, Robert Paul. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992. (link)
  • Heartfield, James, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, Sheffield Hallam UP, 2002 [3]

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External links




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