Althussers Ideological State Apparatuses Literary Criticism

Decalages, 2022

The Althusser Reading Group The essays in this issue are the product of a two-day online conference, "Reading Althusser Politically." The Althusser Reading Group, out of which this conference grew, was formed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and in the aftermath of the worldwide uprisings of the same year. We coalesced around a small group of scholars who read Althusser's texts with an eye towards their possibilities in guiding militants and political practice. The reading group sought to counter the allegations of Althusser's "theoreticism" removed from practical politics. We nonetheless set out upon a path to read Althusser against the grain, to explore the political and practical resources latent "in the practical state" in some of Althusser's more austere and "theoreticist" writings of the 1960s. Following Althusser's formulation in "Lenin and Philosophy" that philosophy represents class struggle in theory, we proceeded from the intuition that both For Marx and Reading Capital must, in principle, "bear witness" to and "represent" the unique history of the political conjuncture in which they take part. Even when we account for this theoretical "detour," the detour through which theory represents an attempt at grappling with the situation is disclosed by the conjuncture with all of the risks that this entails.

Oliver Twist (1839) is a social realist novel written in the nineteenth century by Charles Dickens. It satirises the hypocrisies of the period such as child labour and living conditions of the poor, especially children in the workhouses. The writer (1812-1870) reveals how a child can be considered as a criminal because of his/her living conditions in relation to the concept of poverty and universalises the theme of corruption in the system. In the nineteenth century, England experienced the expansion of capitalism which led to poverty, exploitation of the working class and prosperity of the upper class. In the same period, The New Poor Law (1834) was introduced and it ensured that the poor were housed in workhouses. In workhouses, children were abused and also there was a hierarchy among them even though they were members of the same class. In the novel, Dickens also critically discusses the treatment of the poor and implicitly unearths how these poor people are associated with crime and laziness within the framework of the socio-cultural circumstances and ideological narratives of the period. Considering these, this study will draw on L. Althusser's arguments regarding ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses and attempt to articulate the process of cultural, social and ideological interpellation into the fundamental operation of the system in the Victorian period. Through a close reading of the novel, this study will also explore how the process of interpellation is perpetuated and sustained in a nonviolent way through the fiction of the period.

Louis Althusser is a structuralist-Marxist. Immediately, one might ask how can that be?

Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought, 2013

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 2015

Ideology has always been the most vital apparatus for each government and dominant groups of society to keep their superior position so that every inferior subject could remain obedient and live like a programmed machine that is required to operate according to some fixed and rigid codes. Sometimes these codes are so apparent and tangible in the society that breaking them would result in sheer oppression such as impressment, exile and even execution. However in modern era the controlling and domination are not applied through force and physical attempts yet it does not mean it ceased to exist. The traditional ways of oppression are not extinct; yet they remain in new forms, tools and weapons which in Althusser’s terminology they are called RSA. Nevertheless there is another difference in modern time; it has been attempted to control the minds of people through other less vivid weapons. These weapons could poison the minds of subjects and control and train them in a way that dominant...

Mediations, 2017

In " e Spectre of Ideology," Slavoj Žižek identifies three axes around which the term ideology has been mobilized: first, "ideology as a complex of ideas (theories, convictions, beliefs, argumentative procedures)"; second, ideology in its material form, in institutions, structures, and even bodily practices; and finally, what Žižek calls "the most elusive domain, the 'spontaneous' ideology at work at the heart of social 'reality' itself." 1 As an example of the second -ideology in its material form -Žižek offers an example of what he means right away, as soon as he names the axis: Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), those set of institutions, coordinated by the State, in which ideology is manifested materially, via the practice or practices of that apparatus. With respect to the third -"spontaneous" understandings of ideologyinstead of an example he provides a cautionary note: "it is highly questionable if the term 'ideology' is at all appropriate to designate this domain -here it is exemplary that, apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx never used the term 'ideology.'" 2 Althusser's On the Reproduction of Capitalism is a detour of a book, bookended by a desire named at the outset and a conclusion (of sorts) reached in the final chapter. We are told in the introduction that the overall aim of the book is to outline "a scientific definition of philosophy"; to reach that goal, there first needs to be a long analysis of how the superstructure functions to reproduce relations of production. Žižek might associate Althusser's ISAs with the materiality of ideology, and the core part of this newly translated book certainly confirms this view. But by the time we make it to the concluding chapter, "On Ideology," it's clear that the careful work of materializing ideology has, at least in part, been undertaken in order to figure its spontaneous operations. At the core of the various articulations that Althusser offers of ideology (with all of their tricky and at times inconsistent metaphors), of its links (at least structurally) to psychoanalysis, of its constitution of subjects -even of the very need for subjects in a discussion of ISAs -is a fascination with a single problem. How is it that subjects "go" -or rather: how is it that they manage to "go

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 2015

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed ‘false consciousness’, a false understanding of the way the world functioned. Althusser explains that for Marx “Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues” (1971:108). Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of reality, the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the real conditions of existence due to our reliance on language. This could be seen throughout the novel by Margaret Atwood who writes The Ha...

verso book, 2014

Louis Althusser’s renowned short text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks of cultural, political and literary theory. Louis Althusser’s renowned short text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks of cultural, political and literary theory. The text has influenced thinkers such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek.

In order to address the relationship between class domination, social practices, and ideologies, Louis Althusser approaches the social formations from the point of view of reproduction. His project is firmly founded on theorizing the reproduction of domination and its mechanisms. For him, the economic modes of production in a capitalist society, function not only through the reproduction of the labor power skills and structure, but also within the reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology that provides the necessary conditions for workers exploitation and repression. In his view, no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over the ideological sphere.