Comments on Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”

Roberto Ponce CorderoApril 24, 2017September 23, 2017Filosofía, Inglés, Política

The problem with trying to react to this essay is that, for better or worse, Althusser’s main ideas are so popular and have had such a great influence on all thought on ideology and subject constitution that has emerged after him that they sound, nowadays, almost commonsensical or, to paraphrase him, “obvious” (p. 172). Of course the classical Marxist theory of the State is incomplete without its taking into account the existence of “ideological State apparatuses” (p. 142). Of course “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” (p. 146) – all the more reason (of course) to focus on those apparatuses and on the subtle, perfidious ways in which they “largely secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production, behind a ‘shield’ provided by the repressive State apparatus” (p. 150). Of course ideology plays a fundamental role in the process of the reproduction of the relations of production (p. 133) – it is, in fact, the “score” that dominates the “concert” of the functioning of the ideological State apparatuses along with the repressive State apparatus and of each ideological State apparatus along with the others (p. 154). And of course “ideology has a material existence” (p. 165) through the practices of its subjects, organized by rituals in ideological apparatuses that in turn determine the ideas that lead the subjects to even start with their practices (pp. 168-169).

Having said that (and being completely conscious of this essay having been groundbreaking and still being relevant –indeed crucial– for every discussion on ideology, among other things because maybe all this “obvious” notions are not as “obvious” as they seem to be), I think Althusser’s argument gets a little bit more disputable when it comes to the actual workings of ideology and to the moment of interpellation in which the subject is constituted. The justly famous example of the policeman hailing “Hey, you there!” and of the individual becoming a subject by his recognizing herself as the addressee (p. 174), for instance, is on the one hand mind-blowing (after reading it and grasping what it tries to illustrate, you can never see the world as you saw it before you thought of the subjects being constituted in this way), but on the other stops short of conceptualizing the complexity of the processes by which different subjects are constituted by different instances of ideology, or even by different ideologies.

Granted, Althusser’s argument is preceded by several attempts to come to terms with the fact that the ideological apparatuses can have contradictory effects (hence the need for a “single score” to “dominate” the aforementioned “concert”), and he moreover acknowledges the schematic character of his example by making it clear that interpellation and subject constitution through ideology do not happen chronologically (p. 175). Nevertheless, the argument remains, in my opinion, severely unilateral. What if the individual is being hailed, and thus interpellated as a subject, not only by a policeman but also by a myriad of other voices? What if she responds, or how does her response affect the policeman’s voice, to what extent can her response also be a hailing?

Not surprisingly, even to me these questions sound silly now, partly because Althusser’s main concern is not the constitution of the subject but the way ideology is constituted (two processes that we, however, cannot really look at separately), but mostly because the whole point of the concept of the ideological State apparatuses is to accommodate the plurality of social institutions that act on the individuals and that tend to stabilize power in a historical canvas on which nothing stays the same (neither the institutions nor the power relations or the relations of production) but ideology itself. Thus, in a way he is already dealing with the subject’s responses and with the constant interplay of hailing and contra-hailing, even if some elaboration could be helpful. So, maybe my uneasiness stems more from the emphasis on authority than from the unilateral character of the interpellation process it is related to anyway. Why does it have to be a policeman in the first place, or in other words what happens if it is not? What if it is a friend (I know Althusser uses the example of meeting a friend on the street for recognition [p. 172], but not for interpellation), what if it is a stranger, what if it is a beggar?

I guess the answer for that is that, then, it is simply not ideology, or at least not the dominant one that is used or manipulated by the ruling classes to sediment their position of power, according to Althusser (see p. 133, for example). Leaving aside, for the sake of brevity, my criticism to that conception, as well as to the term “manipulation” (which implies an intentionality and a rationality I do not believe power relations to ultimately have), I must say that I wonder what kind of resistance is possible in this model of tautological ideology. In fact, I wonder (and what follows is supposed to be a serious question, even though it may not look like that) what happens if the individual does not speak the policeman’s language or, more radically, what happens if the individual is deaf? Is that the only possible resistance? And how does one accomplish that?

(Crédito de imagen de post: https://thecharnelhouse.org/tag/louis-althusser/. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: https://www.amazon.com/Reproduction-Capitalism-Ideology-Ideological-Apparatuses/dp/1781681643).