Continental
Addendum on fetishism:
Since we worship objects in capitalism, we consider only relationships between objects. This computer is made by Lenovo. But who is Mr. Lenovo? There is no such thing, there are only workers all over the world who work day and night together socially to create this one object. We forget that social relations and socially conditioned work stand behind the products. We mistake social relationships as relationships between objects.
Althusser:
In the 1950s, the idea of Marx was that he was a humanist. Shared by Stalinists, Catholics, and Phenomenologists. Ie. As Capitalism as a force that alienates humanity’s essence.
The young Marx was not yet Marx. There is intellectual development throughout Marx’ life, it is wrong to project the early Marx onto the later Marx.
The origin is not always the most transparent appearance of a thought. And Marx didn’t even publish these texts!
Emphasis on a discontinuity in the reading of history of philosophy (Gaston Bachelard’s Epistemological Break). In the understanding of the history of the sciences, Bachelard emphasises the breaking points between different theories in the sciences. This is odd, given that historian often try to grasp the continuity, in trying to grasp the essential part of what is at stake. Bachelard shows that if we do it like this, we may not show what is singular for a certain epoche. This may be better for grasping the physionomy of an era. He is the inspiration for Foucault’s teacher. This is why there is a debate between Sartre and Foucault about what history should do. Sartre says that Foucault is not doing history, because one cannot explain how one evolves out of the other. Foucault shows with the notion of episteme the epistemological background setting through which every epoche develops its theories. This also inspires Althusser.
They put emphasis on the couture. The cut. The caesura.
Structuralism is anti-humanistic: interpreting cultural phenomena not as conscious decisions of an autonomous human being, but rather as products of abstract social codes.
Humanism says that the human being, with its tendency to rationality is the reason why we are where we are in history. For Althusser, all of this is ideological talk. Humanism itself is a form of ideology. It suggests to us that we are free when we are actually not. It suggests to us that we are reasonably and know why we are doing it, even though we may not.
The talk of us as agents, is an ideological construction, which has the motivation to hide the true nature of things in society, ie. That we are determined and contingent on society. We are constantly indoctrinated and are produced by society as docile workers. Humanism is part of the capitalist system’s domination.
The cultural phenomena of identities are not free or chosen. They are imposed by society upon us, by society as a system.
For Althusser, humanism is essential to the production of a transparent subject, through which we know why we do what we do, and which we are essentially aware of.
Instead, we are products of a social coding which reflects the structural organisation of society. The secrets of our wishes and desires lies not in ourselves, but in the social system to which we are thrown.
As such, we have to understand the apparatus which produces in us the representations we have of ourselves, which is mainly led by society, and we need to understand these mechanisms that dominate us. The ideas that we naturally embrace and fail to question, are what Althusser considers ideology.
Althusser takes inspiration from a lot of the consequences of structuralism, who shows us that meaning and functioning are without a thinking subject, produced automatically by semiotic systems.
It is based on this basic insight that Althusser goes further and says that this is the essential point to understand in Marx. Sense is produced without a conscious thinking subject.
Marx ”Society” = a structure consisting of three fundamental levels:
the economic base: the means of production, the workers, the capital flows, the materials that are processed: everything is decided in the economic base. It is the main place of alienation lies and occurs, because here occurs the disappropriation of the product of labour. Here is the origin of the injustices and inequalities of the capitalistic economy. This is why the revolution has to start there and no where else. This is why in the 70s, the communists went to the factories and the storehouses for their political propaganda. They have to talk to the workers, not the universities. There was a huge exodus from the universities into the factories. All other struggles like the struggle for gender equality, against sexual repression and prisoners rights, are lateral secondary struggles. They need to be more properly dealt with once the working class is freed. This became a major problem for the 68 revolution. In it, the communist party was not able to include the students.
the superstructure, on top of the economic base: legal and political insititutions on the one hand, and ideology on the other. Universitites, schools etc.
Ideology has nothing to do with consciousness. It is an unconscious phenomena based on social structure. Ideas are the result of ideology, but the core problem of ideology is the way in which these ideas and representations are transmitted, transposed and handed over to the subject, and the way in which the subject is produced by ideology.
Thinking the problem of our society merely in terms of wrong ideas, is not just about a wrong perspective that can be perfected. It is not changing one view of the world for another. This is what Feuerbach is saying. They say we can substitute one set of ideas with another. But rather, we have to change the material conditions of our existances, and not merely our mental representations of it.
Althusser introduces the notion of the unconscious, and adds the poststructuralist idea that the subject we are is something produced. This is the core of ideological production. The kind of subjectivity we are, not simply the kind of ideas, but the very production of our very identity, that we believe that we are, an ontological production ie. The humanist subject. But this production, in a marxist framework, is not simply a transmission of ideas, but a materially produced one. Institutions are materialised organisations, and as such ideology itself is materially situated. Schools etc. are places in which ideology is reproduced and handed over to the subject, but also the place where they are produced as subjects.
This is similar to Foucault, though rather Foucault moving closer to Althusser. We are prodced as docile productive subjects.
”Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases these have nothing to do with consciousness: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structure that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ’consciousness’. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them”
Ideology works not through insights, discussions, but through the ways in which we are constrained by institutions. It is enforced by being put into a place in which we belong. These are the moments at which ideology is put to work. Not simply the priest talking in a church to the community about how we have to behave, this is not where ideology is put to work. But is the very moment at which we have to sit straight, behave according to a certain code, and when we learn how to have pleasure and suffer losses etc.
It is rather through a form of doing through which ideology is put into place. The thinking comes after the fact. After being physically constrained by institutions. Ideology is a system of ideas, but more importantly, the way in which these systems are produced, materially, as docile subjects.
Since ideology is only secondarily a system of representations, but primarily a form of production of the subject, it escapes our representations, it is situated in a precognitive realm, because about how our body is organised. As such, we cannot reach it with our ideas.
As such, ideology can be defined as the sum of the forms in which men and women are entangled in relations of production, institutions and class struggle. Not just ideas but material bonds and relations.
The structural inequality in Capitalism is how ideas are sedimented for us. It is okay that some possess more and others possess less. These are real relationships of inequality in which we find ourselves, which aren’t representations.
Nevertheless ideology crystallises as a set of discourses in terms of which we understand and represent our experience. In ideology, preople express their real relation to the system of social relations in an imaginary and fictitious form. There is a real entanglement in the relationships of production. Either you sell your working force, or you buy working force. Where we stand in the sphere of production. But as soon as ideology emerges, these are represented in an imaginary form. The system of representations, of ideas, to which ideology generally is related, is only part of the imaginary. But we should not forget that the imaginary part belongs structurally to the real entanglement. So the real and the imaginary go hand in hand. So ideology is the imaginary presentation of real relationships.
For Lacan, there is no possibility to correctly represent the real. It can only be suffered in some form of delusional experience. It is the irrepresentable. The real can only show itself through the imaginary or the symbolic. This kind of structural intertwinement is a lacanian inspiration in Althusser. The real can only show itself in the imaginary in the form of phantasm, that the real is subverted into something else. In the same way in Althusser, we cannot have a rerepresentation of the relations of production to which we belong. As such, we only have an imaginary representation of that. In capitalism, the highest ideology of that then, is humanism.
It is a representation of the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existance.
The imaginary relations are always about the ways in which we understand ourselves. Any identity I ascribe to myself is generally imaginary. Because the real condition of our existance is not to be that which we label ourselves. But our imaginary identities suggest to us that we are those labels. So what is the imaginary? Everything we thinkg about. There is a structural misrepresentation in the imaginary. And there is no truth behind which we actually can grasp at. However, Althusser must think that there is a momentuous breaking through of this ideology, and as such there are different degrees of imaginary entanglement.
Fetishism and the imaginary has an affective power, it is a way of feeling and desiring and being-there, which we cannot alter with thoughts. Ideology therefore are effectively and emotionally grounded in ourselves, that are ways of existing. This is the same as in psychoanalysis, we need to change the affects.
”We also understand that ideology gives men a certain knowledge of their world, or rather allows to recognise themselves in their world, gives them a certain recognition; but at the same time, ideology only introduces them to its misrecognition – such is ideology from the perspective of its relation to the real.”
The imaginary is not just an illusory set of ideas, but it is also, in the form of the imaginary, that the sciences work, that knowledge is produced. Think of the aestethics of Apollon, ie. What fuels scientific discoveries. The scientist brings the disorder of the world into numbers and laws in order to make it beautiful. There is a cognition going on, but it is one of misrecognition. There is a progress in the sciences and the political system, there is an amelioration of the conditions of life, but it is all entangled by a constant misrecognition of ourselves.
”In ideology the real relation is invariably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.”
The revolutionary will is part of the imaginary relation. The revolutionary desire to overthrow the system is itself an imaginary relation. This means that the theory of althusser himself is entangled in the imaginary. It is an imaginary take on the real. But there are some imaginary constructs that are more valuable. Probably because they produce less oppression etc.
Ideological state apparatus 1970:
How do societies reproduce the relations of production by which they function? How is it that the exploited allow themselves to continue to be exploited? Why are we behaving to dumb sheep and listening to our professor? Why not killing Till?
State is in itself a state apparatus: the sum of the institutions by which the ruling class maintains its economic dominance – the government, the civil service, the cours, the police, the prisons and the army etc. This is the superstructure. Althusser is theorising the physionomy of the superstructure of the superstructure.
The notion of apparatus is a reminder that it is a machine that blindly produces sense and meaning as ideology.
There is the repressive state apparatus (RSA). It works negatively, not necessarily by physically harming individuals, but at least by threatening them on a symbolic or institutional level.
Next to that is the ideological state apparatus (ISA).
There is eg. the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA (eg. the senate or the lawmakers), the political ISA (the parliment), the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA (press, radio, etc.), the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports etc.).
These all work mainly on a national level. Marxism is very sensitive to the fact that different nations are in conflict with each other, and as such has competition about the means of production.
Everything is on the side of production, nothing is outside the Apparatuses. The RSA functions by violence, whilst the ISA function by ideology. They work together to mainain the order of the state.
”The RSA functions massively and predominantly by repression, while functioning secondarily by ideology (reeducation, resocialisation) (there is no such thing as a purely repressive apparatus). For their part, the ISA function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if only ultimately but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic.”
There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus. When an explanation is given in a school, it is predominantly a focus on ideology, on the transmission of ideas. But this transmission is accompanied by repressions, like grades and so on. There is only a symbolic repression, like the grades, but nevertheless there is a form of harm incurred.
The ISAs constitute an apparently disparate body of institutions, but nonetheless they are all unified by the same ideology through which they function.
The institution and rituals always precede and govern our systems of ideas. ”an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices.”
There is no ideology outside of an institution or a practice (a habitus almost). An insitution is the emergence of a codified behaviour. Every practice is already a seed of an institution.
ISAs are also a site in which oppositional ideologies (those of the exploited class) are articulated, ie. The ideology of revoltution. They are not only the fundamental means through which ideologies are transmitted. ISAs are a site of class struggle.
”The class in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easliy as it can in the RSA, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the reisstance of the exploited classses is able ot find means and occasions to express itself these, either by the utilisation of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in the struggle.”
If you have a student that always contests the idea of the professor, this is allowed often in the ISAs, and this is the reason why contestary ideologies can emerge in the SA.
Already in psychoanalysis we see that the individual subject is only apparently the origin of their ideas and beliefs, Althusser sees this as opening a path to rebellion.
”Ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects.” Ideology makes individuals as subjects.
Interpeller = to call out to, to shout at, to question, to interrogate.
Subject = most important category of ideology on which all other categories of ideology are founded. We have to understand ourselves as subjects in order to believe that we are free about the certain things we do. Deconstructing the subject is actually one of the first revolutionary acts we can take.
In earlier philosopher, God is the only subjectum, from which all emanates, and we are all objects of God.
In the precapitalist phase of Europe, the subject was born.
Through the concept of the subject, the individual that carries this denomination becomes an individual human being which is believed to be the independent origin of their own thoughts, actions and emotions. Subject refer to a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, we are the author of ourselves.
Althusser claims that social practices and their relationships determine the lives of the individuals within them, not the inverse. Our practices are all determined in the last instance by the economy, in the sphere of production.
”Ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits subjects among individuals, or transofrms the individuals into subjects by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police hailing: ’Hey, you there!’. Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.”
You are handed over to ISA.
This is a kind of mystical moment. We see it already at early childhood. The whole trajectory of our identity is construed before the child is already born. The child will be handed over a name, will react to its name and as such have accepted subjectification. The social identity is printed onto us. The individual is a kind of preideological self to which we don’t have access. We only have access to the individual as subject, someone who is legally bound to the state apparatus. Only subjects can appear in front of the law. We are all produced as subjects.
If you are thrown out of the systems in place, you might get closer to the preideological individual. This is why psychiatry and prisons become important, because we need to take care of them to make sure they don’t leave society. We have individuals who are less normatised by the state-apparatus. The hailing implies the immediate acceptance of a social identity. You give yourself over to the whole social system; to ideology.
Not answering that kind of hailing seems to be the seed of revolutionary action.
Before social determinism can work, we need to be configured as subjects.