English 393
Professor Hughes
Study Guide

Louis Althusser

I begin with what is left out of our version of the text. The description of ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) and RSAs (Repressive State Apparatuses): these overlap, but have primary drivers. RSAs are about force and coercion. ISAs are driven by ideology. Force directly controls people. Ideology is subtle, indirect; it’s about social formations that shape what people believe. 

Dr Richard Paul provides this example: In the United States . . . most people are raised to believe that the U.S. form of economic system (capitalism) is superior to all others. When we are speaking in ideological ways, we call it “free enterprise.” We also often assume (ideologically) that no country can be truly democratic unless it uses an economic system similar to ours. Furthermore, we assume that the major alternative economic systems are either “wrong” or “enslaving” or “evil” (the “evil empire”). We are encouraged to think of the world in this simplistic way by movies, the news, schooling, political speeches, and a thousand other social rituals. Raised in the United States, we internalize different concepts, beliefs, and assumptions about the world and ourselves than we would had we been raised in China or Iran (for example). Nevertheless, no lexicographer would confuse these ideological meanings with the foundational meanings of the words in a bona fide dictionary of the English language. The word ‘communism’ would never be given the gloss ‘an economic system that enslaves the people.’ The word ‘capitalism’ would never be given the gloss ‘an economic system essential to a democratic society.’

However, because we are socially conditioned into a self-serving conception of our country, many of our social contradictions or inconsistencies are hidden and go largely unquestioned. Leaving social self-deception undisturbed is incompatible with developing the critical thinking of students. Command of concepts cannot be separated, then, from recognition of when they are, and when they are not, ideologically biased.

At this point, all I think Althusser is asking us to do is ask questions. I tend to apply the critical thinking rubric, which has recently been modified.

"We may not be able to see the forest of our assumptions for the trees of our common sense.”

                                                                        ---Stephen D. Brookfield

WSU CT RUBRIC #2) Identifies and assesses the key assumptions.

Emerging: Does not surface the assumptions and ethical issues that underlie the issue, or does so superficially.
Substantially Developed: Identifies and questions the validity of the assumptions and addresses the ethical dimensions that underlie the issue.

Whenever we begin to think about something we begin with our assumptions, which are fundamentally everything we take for granted. We cannot avoid assumptions and some are justified. Sometimes we state our assumptions in explicit ways for the purpose of public evaluation.  Most times, the most critical assumptions we make are unexamined.  A writer or speaker may be unaware of the assumptions that make up his or her reasoning.  If the assumptions are faulty, then the reasoning will inevitably be poor. Be aware of and careful about the assumptions you make; be ready to examine and critique them.

Use Thought to Promote Thought About Our Assumptions.

Althusser will say that some teachers do attempt to teach us how to break ideology, but he is intellectually skeptical. Today critical thinking skills may also be about breaking ideology, but some scholars, like Peter Facione, argue that we have a lot of work to do.  

ON IDEOLOGY

Ideology has not history. You can grapple with this statement, as you will.

Pay attention to Althusser’s thesis statements. Thesis 1 is significant: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (1264).

Ideology is an illusion that alludes to reality.

Another significant thing about ideology in my mind: what Althusser calls the ideological effect (116). That is, ideology never declares that it is ideological. It operates in the shadows never seeming to impose any influence on our thinking.  For a country that believes in freedom of thought, this is worth looking at more closely--thus the purpose of rhetorical analysis. Many people tend to believe that everyone else has a point of view while “I” am merely seeing the world as it is, or objectively. What Althusser suggests in the term “ideological effect” hinges on achieving the awareness that we all have a point of view and that we all see the World or develop “know how” that is ideological and yet we cannot always take the time to examine our assumptions. The Matrix is perhaps a film that borrows on the idea, which retells, basically, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” And while the Hollywood film identifies an evil conspiracy of machines in place (and Marx identifies the state or the wealthy), Althusser equivocates. Rather than underscore the Marxist notions of conspiracy and isolation, he emphasizes our relationships to the real conditions of existence; this is first a matter of institutions and only as a distant second, a matter of the individuals.  Why do people believe what they believe? It may not be a conscious conspiracy to manipulate the masses. People truly believe that they can talk with God or that their government or system is best. It very well may be that as an American I could argue that our system of government is “best,” but we also need to realize that this is argument, not fact. If I treat it as objective truth, then I lose the ability to ask questions.

In the opening line of his introduction to Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Frederic Jameson writes, “The Althusser we reread today is not longer the center of those heated polemics and ideological battles that characterized the Marxists in the 1660s and 1970s” (vii). In other words, we may need to think historically when we consider Althusser’s ideas; we return to Althusser’s work and apply his “theory of ideology” in new ways that strive to understand and evaluate his writing in a contemporary context. Such a task requires some tolerance for useful historical differences in perspective and asks us to evoke critical thinking skills in a fair-minded way.

Jameson suggests that Althusser’s ideas live on as a kind of pioneering way; perhaps analogous to understanding how our own ancestors still contribute to the lives we live today. One basic premise seems reliable, accurate. Jameson writes,” . . .what we normally think of as ideological positions—thoughts, opinions, world-views, with all their political implications and consequences—never exist only in the mind of the individual experience and consciousness; they are always supported and reinforced, indeed reproduced, by the social institutions and apparatuses, whether those are state based, like the army or the judicial instance, or seemingly as private as the family and the school, the art museum and the institutions of the media, the church and the small-claims court. Ideology is institutional first and foremost and only later on to be considered a matter of consciousness” (xii).

Again, Althusser can be seen as asking the following: Why do people believe what they believe? The impetus here is that we all carry assumptions about the world around with us in our minds and Althusser suggests that we may need to be vigilant and willing to question the validity of those assumptions, especially if they are grounded in ideological biases.

According to Plato, Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is easy to misread Althusser here. He explodes (proves false) the ideas of Marx that suggest that Priests and despots manipulate the masses with “Beautiful Lies.” That does not mean that “Wag the Dog” doesn’t happen. Yet, Althusser’s intension is to look elsewhere. The key is the “relationship” the real world. And Althusser asks an interesting question. Why is this imaginary relationship even necessary?

Ideology has a material existence. Althusser says he will not prove this statement. He asks for us to consider it because awareness resides here. Ideology exists in different modalities; it is deliverable in different ways. I may be imposing on Althusser, but “institutions” result from ideas, but the reverse also applies, from various points of view or levels of consciousness that we believe we have chosen freely. In a schema, we inscribe out thinking onto the world (or so we believe) and act out the ritual practices according to the correct principles (1266).  We act out the ideas in our head—or rather the ideas of a human subject exist in his action or ought to.  Yet, Althusser suggests that rituals are predetermined in part, an ideological apparatus. His example of a funeral, for instance, can be seen as an institutionalized “script” that we will follow sometimes without question—the proper action of the caring and the compassionate person is inscribed in the material existence of an ideological apparatus for burial. We purchase coffins and pieces of ground in the cemetery and thus participate in the rules of the ritual. Today, some resistance to the absolute apparatus of a funeral exist; alternative points of view emerge? The point here is that in acting out our desire to be a compassionate and loving person , we embrace certain practices, rituals, that tell us directly, almost in motion, what to do to achieve that sense of self. We ought to have a funeral like this for otherwise this is “wicked.”

I remember when the great naturalist, anarchist, and above all else, incredible writer Edward Abbey died. Some of you may remember him. He wanted his body basically to be dumped in the desert (a landscape he so loved) and consumed by the buzzards, his flesh to actually be returned to the earth from the ass end of these magnificent birds. So be it. His closest friends (supposedly the story goes) stole his body and did as he had requested. The problem is that such is against the law (RSAs) and secondly it just seems strange and wrong, i.e. wicked (ISAs).

Althusser admits that we are looking at poorly explored domains. He acknowledges the complexity of all this heavy thinking about “subject” and his central thesis: ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. “Hey You.”