Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes on an Investigation) Part I

In the first part of this essay, Althusser explains how exploitation continues under capitalism as a self-proliferating mechanism that produces its own conditions of reproduction along with its own existence. For this, he divides these conditions of production under two main aspects:

1. Reproduction of productive forces
2. Reproduction of relations of production

He says that the reproduction of productive forces basically means reproduction of labor power. This is done by providing them with wages/material means. Interestingly, these wages are not determined by the labor class’s biological needs but by their historical needs that are imposed by proletariat class struggle in each country. He gives the example of beer for Englishmen and wine for Frenchmen (an example Marx cited of historical needs). Also, the conditions of reproduction of labor include their schooling, training and ideological conditioning, which all go into the creation of productive forces that will help propagate capitalism.

In order to approach the reproduction of relations of production, he first states that it is necessary to ask what a society is. This in turn, takes us to the concept of the base and superstructure. Althusser notes that this concept is topographic, it is a spatial metaphor. This implies certain relations between the base (the productive forces) and the superstructure (State and ideological apparatuses). For instance, one is based on the effectivity of the other and their relative autonomy from one another. Althusser cautiously begins, that although he agrees with Marx’s theory he finds its descriptive in nature – that which is metaphorical and can only be seen as a beginning of later development theory.

Repressive State Apparatus vs Ideological State Apparatus:

Marx only charts out the State as a machine of repression that enabled the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class. Althusser calls this the repressive State apparatus that includes the police, army, administration etc and differentiates them from ideological State Apparatuses  which consists of schools, cultural institutions, theater, cinema, communication forms etc. The prime difference between RSA and ISA is that the former uses physical coercion and violence as the dominant mode of control while the latter relies on ideological conditioning along with socially validated physical punishment (like in schools) to control productive forces. Now, coming back to the reproduction of the relations of production, it is precisely in the exercise of State power by RSAs and ISAs that this reproduction of relations of production is secured.

In fact Althusser elaborates on the rise of the School as the most powerful ideological state apparatus in capitalist societies and not the Church. He explains how the Church-Family couple got replaced by the School family couple in order to produce labourers who would be ideal citizens and the institution would eject them at different levels depending on their class.

Author: Noopur Raval

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation) Part II

In the second part of his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Louis Althusser talks about the idea of what ‘Ideology’ actually stands for.  Looking at the historical evolution of the term, he narrates how the term ‘Ideology’ first coined by Cabanis, Destutt  de Tracy and their friends who ‘assigned to it as an object the theory of ideas’ was given a completely different meaning by Marx fifty years later. According to Marx, ideology is the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of man or a social group.

Althusser, however, formulates different theses on Ideology based on the project of a theory of ideology in general and a theory of particular ideologies. Both these premises involve class positions at some point in time. He also finally explains how the theory of ideologies is not possible as it always depends on history of social formations, whose determination is situated outside ideologies alone. He thus proposes the project of a theory of ideology in general which is based on the idea that “Ideology has no history”.

The thesis that “Ideology has no history” is inspired by Marx’s definition of ideology in The German Ideology as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e as nothingness. Here Althusser draws comparison as to how the same terms he adopts from The German Ideology (Ideology has no history) is starkly different in meaning to his definition. He says that even though he theorises that Ideology has no history, he thinks that ideologies have a history of their own which is ascertained in the last instance by the class struggle. On the other hand, he also proposes that ideology in general has a history which is external to it, thus ‘it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality i.e. an omni historical reality”. Relating the idea of ideology as an imaginary construct to Freud’s proposition that unconscious is eternal; Althusser surmises that ideology is eternal. He thus justifies in proposing the theory of ideology in general as Freud also presented a theory of the unconscious in general.

In his discourse on the structure and function of ideology, he presents two contradictory theses:

Thesis I: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

According to him, so many of the ‘world outlooks’ are all imaginary and they are only required to be interpreted so that we are able to discover the reality of the world. Among the various interpretations, the most popular one is the mechanistic and the hermeneutic types which is based on the fact that ‘men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’. In answering why men needed this imaginary transposition he proposes two solutions. First, priests and despots with their beautiful lies dominated and exploited other people on a falsified representation of the world. Second, the material alienation which reigns in the conditions of existence of men themselves.

Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.

By this he does not mean to compare the existence of ideology to the existence of a physical object but referring to his discussion of the ideological state apparatuses and their practices, he means to say that an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice or practices. This existence is material. Thus according to him, the ‘ideas’ of a human subject exists in his actions.

Althusser concludes his essay by ‘interpellating individuals as subjects’. In discussing this he says that there is no ideology except by the subject and for the subjects. The category of the subject is a primary obviousness and at work in this reaction is the ideological recognition function. The subjects thus are habituated to constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition which establishes that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and irreplaceable subjects. 

Author Sagorika Singha

Symbolic exchange and death

In Symbolic exchange and death, Baudrillard essentially mounts a critique of the capitalist understanding of value itself. In critiquing the law of value, he mainly approaches it from a Marxist economic theory of use and exchange value and from the post War French linguistic scenario including Barthes and Saussure who talk about symbolic value of signs and meaning making.

Symbolic exchange, as Baudrillard explains, is central to all forms of meaning making and helps in the organization of social order and hierarchies. The difference from other forms of exchange is that in symbolic exchange is that the value of an exchanged object does not value the act of exchanging it. The title refers to the perception of time in so- called primitive cultures, which relies on a cyclical model instead of a linear one. Life and death are not separate, but are coextensive forms of presence. In regular, ritual festivities, the living “animate” the deceased, make them part of their present so that both the living and the dead inhabit the same space. This collapses the binary of forms (life/death) and places them as complementary to each other. This time of the ritual is also a period where the regular activities of daily life are suspended and riches are wasted in order to exhibit one’s social standing within the group. This ability to waste, to give all that one has in a symbolic act, marks an individuals social rank and is a source of recognition. Baudrillard finds these forms of negating exchange as destruction or rendering obsolete of the law of value, which then helps mount a critique of capitalism. For him, capitalism also cancels death and thus cancels all alternatives to it, making simulation and hyper reality central to its reproduction.

Apart from the economic critique, he looks at linguistic theory and the conception of signification. Baudrillard rejects semiotics’ obsession with the meaning of signs, and the entire idea of determining meaning formation as if only one meaning is produced in the interaction of free floating signs. Taking on Barthes’ idea of associative meanings and one literal meaning, Baudrillard goes a step further to say that every literal meaning (or the dominant meaning as seen in an act of signification) is nothing but a possible associative meaning. Basically, he is referring to the consciousness of the ambivalence of signs and the impossibility to fix them. Thus the symbolic becomes subversive and simulation gains immense power in the mass media.

To summarize, in Baudrillard’s argument there is a clear urge to shift our understanding of linear models of time and the exchange-use-symbolic value model of thinking. He takes the help of social interactions from pre-modern societies and the metaphor of death to move away from them.

The Commodity as Spectacle

With a Marxist approach of ‘commodity fetishism’, Guy Debord in this essay critiques the ‘spectacle’ of the commodity that has overtaken its actual presence and use-value. He says that the society is dominated by things which are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. This gives birth to the world of ‘spectacle’ which is constructed of images which seem to be superior to the actual world. Debord asserts that in the world of the spectacle, all that was once lived has become mere representation and commodity rules over all lived experience. The commodity form, instead of being qualitative has become ‘quantitative’ where it is characterized by self-equivalence/currency-value. Although the commodity turns away from its quantitative value, but its development still depends on the qualitative.

Debord further observes that the commodity production has for long retained its ‘artisanal’ value where the quantitative was masked by the qualitative. However, with large-scale trade this production became quantitative. The commodities thus acquired an economic power and transformed human-labour into wage-labour which then gave rise to ‘abundance’. He argues that with such commodity production, societies do solve the problems of basic survival but they themselves get entrapped into its vicious circle. The economy transforms the world but it transforms the world into a world of the economy. This ‘abundance’ of commodities gives rise to what Debord calls ‘augmented survival’.

The ‘spectacle’ allows the commodity to attain a social life. Debord asserts that if the first industrial revolution alienated the worker from the product of their own labour, the second industrial revolution has alienated them from not just production but also consumption. The proletarian who was once a ‘producer’ of commodity has now also become a ‘consumer’ due to the ‘abundance’ of commodities. This is where ‘spectacle’ comes into play. To correspond to the growing pseudo-needs of people, Debord suggests that new opportunities for employment must be created in the service and the tertiary sector. He examines how exchange-value gained an upper hand over use value and the process of exchange became indistinguishable from utility. The undermining of use-value gave birth to a new form of privation. The new privation, in the realm of ‘augmented survival’ does not limit itself to basic survival but goes much ahead of that.
In Debord’s words, “The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion. The commodity is
this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form.”

The spectacle, for Debord is the other side of money- the abstract general equivalent of all commodities, for in it (spectacle) a unified image of the commodity world is visible. “The spectacle is not just the servant of pseudo-use – it is, in itself, the pseudo-use of life.” He feels that with an ‘economic abundance’, the social labour has become visible as a result of abstract representation. By replacing the necessity of human needs with the necessity of economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is being replaced by the “pseudo-needs”. The society of the spectacle, thus, does not need a developing economy for survival, but one which has to provide for the survival of the economy itself.

Unity and Division within Appearances

In this chapter, Debord discusses the paradoxical characteristic of the ‘spectacle’ where it is “at once united and divided”. The contradiction in the society, which emerges from the spectacle, is itself being contradicted by the society. For example, the class struggle that divides the society is actually aimed at unifying it with the purpose of running the same socio-economic system. The society that constructs the ‘spectacle’ does not dominate underdeveloped regions only through economic hegemony but also through the hegemony of the ‘spectacle’ itself. Just the way, society of spectacle promotes a desire for pseudo-needs and pseudo-goods; Debord believes that “it may also offer false models of revolution to local revolutionaries”. He feels that the roots of spectacle stand firm in the economy and it is economy that dominates the spectacular market.

For Debord, the glitter of the ‘spectacle’ produces a banality where although all commodities are different but all are superficially coated with the ‘spectacle’ tending to look the same. Rebelliousness also arises from the ‘spectacle’ by contradicting it and yet allowing to merge within the unity of the spectacle. The reason for this, Debord figures is “that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular raw material”.

Debord looks at the phenomenon of stardom and believes that stars are “spectacular representations of living human beings”. Celebrities are also a result of production who embrace an appearance/spectacle hiding behind the real-self. He further claims that an individual, in the course of becoming a star or embracing the ‘spectacle’, becomes an enemy of the individual within him and of many other individuals. In order to become a model that others would identify with, he loses his power to identify himself. Therefore, although the celebrities might portray different personalities on the outside, within they enjoy the same consumption and satisfaction. He goes on to say that the people who we admire are the ones who embrace a level of reality
lower than that of the most insignificant individual life.

Debord feels that the consumption of abundance has established itself in the antagonism between youth and adulthood where an adult is nowhere to be found and youth is not proper to people who are young. This antagonism characterizes the economic system where the things that rule are young. Such spectacular antagonism conceals the unity of poverty. In such cases, the spectacle is in a concentrated or diffused form. While the concentrated form of the spectacle is characterized by bureaucratic capitalism, the diffused form is associated with the abundance of commodities where each commodity’s presence is justified due to the ‘abundance’ factor. Giving the spectacular logic of the automobiles, Debord says that for a perfect traffic flow, the spectacle calls for the destruction of the old city centers whereas the spectacle of the city itself proposes that these sections be turned to museums. So the satisfaction derived from the consumption of the whole is questioned from the outset as the consumer can consume it only in fragments.

In the society of the spectacle, every commodity fights for itself and imposes its presence over the other and in this process actualizes itself in a higher order than its original self. In the word of Debord, “the commodity becoming worldly coincides with the world’s being transformed into commodity”. In this abundance of commodities, they have lost their use-value or intrinsic value but are only bought for their spectacular value. Debord feels that as the “mass of commodities become more and more absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity”. For Debord, the pseudo-need imposed by modern consumerism cannot be opposed by any genuine need which is not
itself shaped by society and its history and this eventually leads to the “falsification of life”.

Debord gives example of the falsified nature of advertising and the fake promise of products they offer. With every new product, the consumers are made to believe that this is the ultimate one for them until a new product arrives with a new promise or “disillusionment”. This continual process of product replacement hints at the fake gratification of the product and the illusory nature of the society of the spectacle. Each new lie of the advertising industry acknowledges the one told before. At the end, Debord also claims that the ‘spectacle’ lacks permanence and is an ever-changing phenomenon.

Author: Ritika Pant

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

In their work Enlightenment as Mass Deception Adorno and Horkheimer claim that since Enlightenment popular culture has degenerated into a mechanical apparatus, a factory that manufactures standardized cultural goods, a factory they call the culture industry. In their work they raise questions about the growing influence of entertainment industries, the increasing commodification of art and a culture that has been infected by sameness and uniformity where repetition is invaluable and individuality redundant.

According to them the entire industry is a thin gossamer of illusion which extends a false sense of pleasure. It spawns a desire which is permanently repeated and suspended but never fulfilled capturing the consumers in an eternal cycle of unfulfilled desires and promises. All the products of this industry are made in a way that makes imagination, creativity and fantasy unnecessary. It lulls the consumers into passive states of consumption turning them into mere statistics on research organization charts. Films are fashioned to be seamless extensions of the real world so that consumers do not feel the need to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Escape, they say is an escape not
from reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality. This prevents the viewers to fashion their own fantasies and imaginations and only identify with the imagination that they’ve been fed with. Adorno and Horkheimer talk about the intractable detail that was an expression of opposition, the enemy of organization and structure and whether it was the harmonic effect in music, a particular detail in art or the psychological penetration in the novel it was an expression of individuality that is no longer found. Since the culture industry thrives on repetition and reproduction it lays special emphasis on totality which has leveled all idiosyncrasies where the whole and the detail look alike.

Everything is already a copy and even beauty is mechanically reproduced so that the film star that one is supposed to fall in love with is already copy of himself and the natural faces of the Texas girls resemble some established model. This mechanical reproduction and increasing sameness of mass culture where originality is impossible is seen by Adorno and Horkheimer as a threat to high art. The culture industry works within the limits of a catalog of schematic formulas which define the boundaries of imagination and creativity beyond which no one ventures. ‘To be entertained is to be in agreement’ with those rules and boundaries and entertainment is a way of escaping mechanized labour so that people can go back to it. Within the confines of the culture industry, whose reach is
infinite, totality has devoured the detail.

The authors state that everything is economically intertwined and there is high level of dependence on capital “the dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of film on the banks, characterizes the whole sphere, the individual sectors of which are themselves economically intertwined.” Horkheimer and Adorno believe that advertisements, media broadcasting, radio programmes, films and entertainment are essentially propaganda to disguise the domination of capitalism and its control of consumers is mediated by entertainment. The authors believe that the
consumers are aware of the exploitation of the culture industry but remain inactive or passive because of sheer powerlessness. Cultural tyranny like de Tocqueville suggests leaves the body and works directly on the soul. The consumers are so comprehensively surrounded by the pressure of capitalism that they willingly accept what is being offered. 

The industry has made works of art readily available at reduced prices. In the past people paid a price for a work of art, a piece of music or a performance. If nothing else the price made the consumer connect with the work of art and value it. The authors believe that that era has now come to an end. To consumers incessantly battered with crude resemblances and bad copies, even works of art are but more copies and mechanical reproductions. Even more alarming is the trend of pursuing prizes which have reduced art to a matter of chance. The symphony becomes the prize for listening to the radio or the film for watching television. Since culture has become a bonus everybody rushes in willingly or unwillingly to claim it because if they don’t they might miss the opportunity.

The authors do not believe that consumers can escape this cycle because the freedom that the industry allows lasts as long as one operates within the boundaries of the industry. Any deviancy or rebelliousness, any intention to introduce the detail against the totality is met with dire consequences. The consequence of non conformity is bankruptcy or expulsion where one suffers intellectual powerlessness. There is no escape from the all encompassing cycle of the culture industry unless it is the fake catharsis that one opts for.

Author: Vibhushan Subba