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Althusser king of infinite space

Althusser’s essay on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is an attempt to answer the question of how the conditions of production reproduce themselves within a capitalist society. In classical Marxism the forces of production are the basic units of the system: labor power + capital, and these two mutually regenerating forces affect the social relationships amongst everyone in the system. But it requires more than just new workers being born as old ones die off, new materials (capital) being added etc. There’s something else required to insure the system continues to reproduce itself. So how does that happen? That is the question Althusser is seeking to answer in this famous essay.
This blog post is not a complete summary of Althusser’s entire argument in that essay but it does summarize and comment on some of the key points Althusser makes in regards to his theory of interpellation, which is what Althusser is most remembered for today.
In classical Marxism the concept of the State is seen only as a repressive power of force, but Althusser has two things to say about this. First, he says it’s important to distinguish between State power and State apparatus.  State apparatuses are the specific institutions or manifestations of State power and these can change during revolutions and regime changes while State power (the ruling class) still persists. Second, Althusser says the State apparatuses themselves have two parts: there are Repressive State apparatuses (like prisons and militaries) that predominantly use force and then there are Ideological State Apparatuses that predominantly use ideology. Both of these apparatuses are needed to get people to behave in the desired ways (in reality both use a bit of each, but this is a minor point). Althusser says the way the superstructure reproduces itself is via Ideological State Apparatuses.
The most important ISA  is the educational ideological apparatus. Makes sense. We learn a lot about the society we live in from going to school. Not just the lessons but the social skills we gain there teach us how to behave in society and instill within us the predominant ideological beliefs of our society.
 
So far so good, right? But what is ideology exactly? The second part of Althusser’s essay tries to answer that question. Althusser says Marx said “ideology has no history.” Personally I don’t remember that particular assertion in Marx but I guess this is a reference to Marx’s materialist ontology (as opposed to Hegel’s idealism). As Althusser puts it, “ideology, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage).” This is just a fancy way of saying ideas don’t have material existence so therefore they do not exist, i.e. they are imaginary, but Althusser sorta rejects this. He (Althusser) asserts that ideas/ideology do have a material basis in the actions and practices that people undertake because of their ideological beliefs. Example: Jason believes in God, and this belief is manifest via Jason’s actions. Jason goes to church, performs the sign of the cross, kneels etc. All of these things are the material manifestation of Jason’s ideological belief in God.
Since he is a Marxist Althusser doesn’t like to talk about ideas (he says that word is “disappeared”). Instead he talks about the material manifestation of ideas in actions and behavior.  Ideological apparatuses are the everyday practices and rituals of ideological belief.
He writes, “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“
Now we get to the concept of interpellation!
Althusser continues directly after the sentence above: “It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted [upon] by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus [e.g. the Church], prescribing material practices [e.g. tithing, genuflecting] governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.” (brackets inserted by me for clarification purposes)
The central concept here is the notion of the subject. Althusser links ideology to the creation of subjects, by which he means something like our social identities, how others categorize us, our role in society. Ideology gives us our identities as social creatures and that is the entire purpose of ideology: to tell us who we are within society but it’s not a one way endowment. It is instead a sorta collaborative process. We are called or hailed as X, and we ourselves respond to this call and that’s how ideology works. It’s called interpellation. Both the call and our response. This, Althusser says, is how social identities are created, how ideology works to reproduce the system.
It’s very important to realize this is not society saying to us YOU ARE X and therefore we are X. It requires the response by us. Althusser uses the word “recruit;” he says ideology “recruits” subjects among individuals and the way it does this is via interpellation or hailing. He gives an example of the beat cop on the street who shouts out “Hey you there!” at someone and then someone turns around (responds) to that call. That’s interpellation. Ideology hails the individual; and we as individuals answer that call and become subjects.
There is no point in time in which we exist before this process. We are all always already interpellated as subjects from birth.
One final point, Althusser says this small-s subject requires or implies the existence of a large S-Subject. If we are called, that means there is a caller. In the religious ideology this Subject is also called God. These two, subject and Subject, are mirrors of each other. You can’t have one without the other. They need each other. He calls this the mirror structure of all ideology.
And that is Althusser’s essay in a nutshell.
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The hell of living inside our own heads

One of the most common themes in literature and philosophy is the importance of shedding our preconceived notions. This requires being curious about the world and observing it with the beginner’s mind as the Buddhists like to say. Not sleepwalking through life! It also means questioning the wisdom of conventional external authorities (the prevailing ideas in the larger society around us) and interrogating ourselves, which is much more difficult to do.

This is the main idea of Claire Messaud’s excellent introduction to the new edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s also a common theme in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. In the opening of Arendt’s book The Human Condition she implores us to stop and “think what we are doing.”

Lolita is a story about a man who does not do that. Humbert Humbert is a solipsist who uses other people as objects of manipulation in his own fantasy world. Solipsism is the theory that only oneself exists; everything else out there in the so-called “world” is just a figment of our own imaginations. There is nothing larger than the self.  The resulting hell this point of view creates is a particularly painful and tragic one. I have some experience with it.

After my brother died, my father’s grief became so all encompassing that soon his grief was the only thing he could see. He never recovered from the loss of his son and he lived in this hell for the rest of his life. It impacted all his personal relationships and impeded his ability to love and be loved. The only thing that existed for him was his grief. He was unable to see anything else, even the humanity of his own family members. The story of my father is a sad and tragic one.

By chance, I also re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” last night and realized this story, too, is another version of the idea that living too much inside your own head is a tragic truncation of human life. In the story, a young man walks out into the woods with this figure the reader comes to recognize as the devil. In the woods the man sees everyone he recognizes from his village, from the local priest to his young new wife, as the most debauched of sinners. He leaves the wood and goes on about his life but what he saw there forever changed him. Whether it was all just a dream doesn’t matter. Young Goodman Brown is forever changed by the experience. He becomes “a stern, sad… distrustful… man” who dies in “gloom” just like what happened to my father. In high school, we learned that this was a story about the cultural zeitgeist of late 17th century New England Puritan society, but reading it alongside Claire Messaud’s introduction to Lolita, I see it now as also a warning to all of us against the dangers of living too much inside our own heads and seeing around us only our own fantasies or worst nightmares.

I think a lot of people go through the world just this way. Whether on the right or the left, one of the effects of political polarization is an inability to see other people as they really are. We only see, and respond to, our own caricatures of other people. Such a solipsistic view of the world leaves us alienated not only from each other but also from ourselves. Is it any wonder then that we are also experiencing an epidemic of loneliness? The social consequences of such a way of living ripple throughout society. It’s easy for someone living in a world of their own making to make the decision to take up a gun and shoot a few other people before taking their own lives. The murder-suicide, I think is, in their eyes, is just suicide. They lost the ability to see other people as other people.

It’s worth it to take Arendt’s advice and stop a minute to “think what we are doing.” Are we sleepwalking through life or are we open to experiencing the world and other people as they really are, not as extensions of ourselves? It’s a hard task to undertake but I think there’s nothing more important than this. It’s the only way to avoid a hell of our own making.

 

 

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How do you get a room full of political science majors to focus on something else the day after election day?

By talking to them about truth and politics, which is the title of a 1967 essay we are reading by Hannah Arendt.  I started class by reminding students of something we encountered in Plato and in Hannah Arendt which is the counter-intuitive idea (heretical for a poli-sci major!) that politics isn’t actually everything.

Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us to keep things in perspective and we really need that right now, not only for our own mental health but for the health of our country as a whole. When politics become framed in existential terms of life or death, that’s when political violence can erupt.

Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us remember that there is a world outside of the political realm and even more importantly, that is actually where truth resides, two kinds of truth specifically: rational truths (such as 2+ 2 = 4 as Plato shows us through the Socratic dialogues) and FACTUAL truths (as Hannah Arendt shows us in her 1967 article Truth and Politics).

Let me walk you through Arendt’s argument if you haven’t read it. It’s true, she says that facts are the most vulnerable kind of truths because they are contingent (they always could have been otherwise). What she means is that there is nothing self-evident about a factual truth. Either Germany did or did not invade Belgium in August 1914 or maybe it was Belgium that invaded Germany. We can’t know which of these statements is true without seeking external validation in the form of witnesses or other documentation of the events. It’s their contingent nature that makes such factual truths vulnerable to manipulation by the political powers-that-be.

We also know that unwelcome facts can be very threatening to the political status quo, more threatening even than disagreeing with official state ideology or the official state religion. It was more dangerous in Nazi Germany, she says, to talk about the existence of the concentration camps (which everyone knew existed) than it was to disbelieve Nazi ideology or antisemitism. Political power is threatened most by factual truths because factual truths form the basis of political life, the “life of the city” as Plato puts it.

But here is where Arendt’s essay turns to make a really important point about the role of truth in politics. Arendt says that facts are also somehow, despite all the above, incredibly resilient. Even a totalitarian regime like Stalin’s could not erase the fact that a man by the name of Leon Trotsky existed even though he was wiped out of all the history books.  (Leon Trotsky was part of the Bolshevik leadership after the Russian Revolution and had a falling out with Stalin and subsequently went into exile. His existence was written out of official history books and denied by the totalitarian state under Stalin and yet we still know who Trotsky was today and we didn’t even have to wait until the USSR collapsed in 1991 to find out! We know because factual truths always involve other people. There were people who saw Trotsky, met him, knew him. His existence was a factual truth that the state tried to suppress. Arendt’s point is that no political regime is powerful enough to suppress factual truths forever, not even a totalitarian regime of one of the world’s most powerful countries.

So ultimately Arendt’s message is a hopeful one that we should remember as we go through these next few years of official state-sanctioned lying (propaganda). People who have lived under totalitarian regimes can describe how odd it feels when the official state-sanctioned truth is a known lie. It can be very disorientating. We’re going to experience a lot of that over the next few years given Trump’s track record with telling falsehoods. We will feel sick at being gaslighted with all the lies and we may even start to feel like there is no truth at all, no ground beneath our feet and then we will be falling like Alice slowly down through the rabbit-hole. But if you remember Arendt’s point in this article you can keep your head: factual truths, she says, are real. They do exist and political power cannot erase them. They are the sky that stretches above us and the ground beneath our feet.

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The Origins of State Propaganda

When did nation-states first start institutionalizing their propaganda efforts? Find out in this video tutorial on the Origins of State Propaganda by political science instructor Barbara Howe at the University of Florida. Part of her Fall 2024 advanced political theory course POT 4936: Democracy and Propaganda.

You can find more of Barbara Howe’s instructional videos on international relations and political science theories on her YouTube channel.

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Propaganda as Ideology: Jason Stanley explains how propaganda works

In 2015, the political theorist Jason Stanley wrote a book called How Propaganda Works. The book explains the ideological dimension of political speech (propaganda) and how it can either support or undermine a particular ideology.

You can find more of Barbara Howe’s instructional videos on international relations and political science theories on her YouTube channel.