Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)
1. This text is made up of two extracts from an ongoing study. The sub-title ‘Notes towards an Investigation’ is the author’s own. The ideas expounded should not be regarded as more than the introduction to a discussion.
2. Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 209.
3. Marx gave it its scientific concept: variable capital.
4. In For Marx and Reading Capital, 1965 (English editions 1969 and 1970 respectively).
5. Topography from the Greek topos: place. A topography represents in a definite space the respective sites occupied by several realities: thus the economic is at the bottom (the base), the superstructure above it.
6. See p. 158 below, On Ideology.
7. To my knowledge, Gramsci is the only one who went any distance in the road I am taking. He had the ‘remarkable’ idea that the State could not be reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, as he put it, a certain number of institutions from ‘civil society’: the Church, the Schools, the trade unions, etc. Unfortunately, Gramsci did not systematize his institutions, which remained in the state of acute but fragmentary notes (cf. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971, pp. 12, 259, 260–3; see also the letter to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 1931, in Lettre del Carcere, Einaudi, 1968, p. 479. English-language translation in preparation.
8. The family obviously has other ‘functions’ than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power. In different modes of production it is the unit of production and/or the unit of consumption.
9. The ‘Law’ belongs both to the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to the system of the ISAs.
10. In a pathetic text written in 1937, Krupskaya relates the history of Lenin’s desperate efforts and what she regards as his failure.
11. What I have said in these few brief words about the class struggle in the ISAs is obviously far from exhausting the question of the class struggle.
To approach this question, two principles must be borne in mind:
The first principle was formulated by Marx in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘In considering such transformations [a social revolution] a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’ The class struggle is thus expressed and exercised in ideological forms, thus also in the ideological forms of the ISAs. But the class struggle extends far beyond these forms, and it is because it extends beyond them that the struggle of the exploited classes may also be exercised in the forms of the ISAs, and thus turn the weapon of ideology against the classes in power.
This by virtue of the second principle: the class struggle extends beyond the ISAs because it is rooted elsewhere than in ideology, in the Infrastructure, in the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and constitute the base for class relations.
12. For the most part. For the relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
13. For that part of reproduction to which the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus contribute.
14. I use this very modern term deliberately. For even in Communist circles, unfortunately, it is a commonplace to ‘explain’ some political deviation (left or right opportunism) by the action of a ‘clique’.
15. Which borrowed the legal category of ‘subject in law’ to make an ideological notion: man is by nature a subject.
16. Linguists and those who appeal to linguistics for various purposes often run up against difficulties which arise because they ignore the action of the ideological effects in all discourses – including even scientific discourses.
17. NB: this double ‘currently’ is one more proof of the fact that ideology is ‘eternal’, since these two ‘currentlys’ are separated by an indefinite interval; I am writing these lines on 6 April 1969, you may read them at any subsequent time.
18. Hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite ‘special’ form in the policeman’s practice of ‘hailing’ which concerns the hailing of ‘suspects’.
19. Although we know that the individual is always already a subject, we go on using this term, convenient because of the contrasting effect it produces.
20. I am quoting in a combined way, not to the letter but ‘in spirit and truth’.
21. The dogma of the Trinity is precisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (the Father) into a subject (the Son) and of their mirror-connexion (the Holy Spirit).
22. Hegel is (unknowingly) an admirable ‘theoretician’ of ideology insofar as he is a ‘theoretician’ of Universal Recognition who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of Absolute Knowledge. Feuerbach is an astonishing ‘theoretician’ of the mirror connexion, who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of the Human Essence. To find the material with which to construct a theory of the guarantee, we must turn to Spinoza.
Reply to John Lewis (Self-Criticism)
1. The title of John Lewis’s article is The Althusser Case. Not surprisingly: in his conclusion, John Lewis compares Marxism to… medicine.
2. N.B.: in the last instance. I do not want to be misunderstood. What I am saying is that philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. I am not saying that philosophy is simply class struggle in the field of theory.
3. This formula, which is extremely condensed, might mislead the reader. I would therefore like to add three points to help orient him. (1) Because of its abstraction, its rationality and its system, philosophy certainly figures ‘in’ the field of theory, in the neighbourhood of the sciences, with which it stands in a specific set of relations. But philosophy is not (a) science. (2) Unlike the sciences, philosophy has an especially intimate relation with the class tendency of the ideologies; these, in the last instance, are practical and do not belong to theory (‘theoretical ideologies’ are in the last instance ‘detachments’ of the practical ideologies in the theoretical field). (3) In all these formulations, the expression ‘in the last instance’ designates ‘determination in the last instance’, the principal aspect, the ‘weak link’ of determination: it therefore implies the existence of one or more secondary subordinate, overdetermined and overdetermining aspects – other aspects. Philosophy is therefore not simply class struggle in theory, and ideologies are not simply practical: but they are practical ‘in the last instance’. Perhaps there has not always been a full understanding of the theoretical significance of Lenin’s political thesis of the ‘weak link’. It is not simply a question of choosing the ‘weak link’ from a number of pre-existing and already identified links: the chain is so made that the process must be reversed. In order to recognize and identify the other links of the chain, in their turn, one must first seize the chain by the ‘weak link’.
4. See note 2 above.
5. I cite the expressions of John Lewis himself.
6. In a Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967, to be published), I proposed the following definition: ‘Philosophy states propositions which are Theses’. (It therefore differs from the sciences. ‘A science states propositions which are Demonstrations’)
7. ‘What is true is what has been done.’ Marx cites Vico in Capital, in connexion with the history of technology.
8. I do not know John Lewis’s personal philosophical history. But I am not sticking my neck out much in betting that he has a weakness for Jean-Paul Sartre. Lewis’s ‘Marxist Philosophy’ in fact bears a remarkable resemblance to a copy of Sartrian existentialism, in a slightly Hegelianized form, no doubt designed to make it more acceptable to Communist readers.
9. For us, struggling under the rule of the bourgeoisie, ‘man’ who makes history is a mystery. But this ‘mystery’ did have a sense when the revolutionary bourgeoisie was struggling against the feudal regime which was then dominant. To proclaim at that time, as the great bourgeois Humanists did, that it is man who makes history, was to struggle, from the bourgeois point of view (which was then revolutionary), against the religious Thesis of feudal ideology: it is God who makes history. But we are no longer in their situation. Moreover, the bourgeois point of view has always been idealist as far as history is concerned.
10. It is not certain – here I shall have to bow to the judgement of Marxist historians – that the slave class did not, in spite of everything, quietly but genuinely ‘make history’. The transition from the small-property slave system to the large-scale system at Rome is perhaps significant here.
11. Capital, Part VII, Ch. XXV, sec.4. Excluded from production, without fixed work or completely unemployed, (often) in the street, the sub-proetarians are part of the reserve army, the army of unemployed, which capitalism uses against the workers.
12. To clarify this point, this reformist ‘position’ must be related to its bourgeois origins. In his letter to Weydemeyer (5 March 1852), Marx wrote: ‘No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle of the classes, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes’. The thesis of the recognition of the existence of social classes, and of the resulting class struggle is not proper to Marxism-Leninism: for it puts the classes in the front rank, and the class struggle in the second. In this form it is a bourgeois thesis, which reformism naturally feeds on. The Marxist-Leninist thesis, on the other hand, puts the class struggle in the front rank. Philosophically, that means: it affirms the primacy of contradiction over the terms of the contradiction. The class struggle is not a product of the existence of classes which exist previous (in law and in fact) to the struggle: the class struggle is the historical form of the contradiction (internal to a mode of production) which divides the classes into classes.
13. I put this idea forward in a study called ‘Marx and Lenin before Hegel’ (February 1968), published with Lenin and Philosophy, Maspero, Paris, 1972 [English translation in Louis Althusser, Politics and History, NLB, 1972]. For more details, see below the Remark on the Category: ‘Process without a Subject or Goal(s).
14. Transformation into a thing (res) of everything which is human, that is, a non-thing (man = non-thing = Person).
15. The word ‘man’ is not simply a word. It is the place which it occupies and the function which it performs in bourgeois ideology and philosophy that gives it its sense.
16. I wrote ‘one can only know what exists’, in order not to complicate things. But it might be objected that this impersonal ‘one’ bears the traces of ‘man’. Strictly speaking, we should write: ‘only what exists can be known’.
17. John Lewis is right to criticize me on this point: philosophy is not only ‘concerned’ with politics and the sciences, but with all social practices.
18. How are these effects produced? This question is very important. Let us limit ourselves to the following comment: (1) Philosophy is not Absolute Knowledge; it is neither the Science of Sciences, nor the Science of Practices. Which means: it does not possess the Absolute Truth, either about any science or about any practice. In particular, it does not possess the Absolute Truth about, nor power over, political practice. On the contrary, Marxism affirms the primacy of politics over philosophy. (2) But philosophy is nevertheless not ‘the servant of politics’, as philosophy was once ‘the servant of theology’: because of its position in theory, and of its ’relative autonomy’. (3) What is at stake in philosophy is the real problems of the social practices. As philosophy is not (a) science, its relation to these problems is not a technical relation of application. Philosophy does not provide formulae to be ‘applied’ to problems: philosophy cannot be applied. Philosophy works in a quite different way: by modifying the position of the problems, by modifying the relation between the practices and their object. I limit myself to stating the principle, which would require a long explanation.
19. Sartre’s Theses are obviously more subtle. But John Lewis’s version of them, schematic and poor as it is, is not basically unfaithful to them.
20. There is no absolutely pure idealist or materialist philosophy, even if only because every philosophy must, in order to take up its own theoretical class positions, surround those of its principal adversary. But one must learn to recognize the dominant tendency which results from its contradictions, and masks them.
21. Lenin said: Marx has given us the ‘corner-stones’ of a theory which we must ‘develop in every direction’.
22. The fact that scientific propositions may also, in the context of a philosophical debate, ‘function philosophically’ is worthy of thought.
23. Cf. Etienne Balibar, ‘La Rectification du Manifeste communiste’, La Pensée, August 1972.
24. Marx’s emphasis. Marx was therefore criticizing the formula of the socialist John Lewises of his time, inscribed in the Unity Programme of the German Social-Democratic Party and Lassalle’s Party: ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture’.
25. Then called ‘True’ or ‘German’ socialism.
26. He can certainly cite Engel’s use of the negation of the negation in Anti-Dühring – which can be found in Lenin’s What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are. But it is a rather ‘peculiar’ defence: an anti-Hegelian one.
27. The Holy Family, English translation, Moscow 1956.
28. Lenin speaking of the study of imperialism: ‘This study is only beginning and it is without an end, by its very nature, like science in general’. (The Collapse of the Second International.)
29. One really must be short of arguments to have to use, as a proof of Lenin’s ‘humanist philosophy’, a few lines from The German Ideology (1844) which Lenin copied into his notebook! John Lewis is obviously not worried about gaining the reputation of ‘schoolman’ himself.
30. And in the edition of Reading Capital published in the Petite Collection Maspero, 1968, vol. 1.
31. The corrections which I later made to this formula (for example: Philosophy is ‘Theory of theoretical practice in its distinction from the other practices’, or ‘Theory of the processes of the production of knowledge’, or ‘…of the material and social conditions of the processes of production of knowledge’, etc., in For Marx and Reading Capital) do not touch the root of this error.
32. One must be careful with philosophical categories taken one by one: for it is less their name than their function in the theoretical apparatus in which they operate that decides their ‘nature’. Is a particular category idealist or materialist? In many cases we have to reply with Marx’s answer: ‘That depends’. But there are limit-cases. For example, I do not really see that one can expect anything positive from the category of the negation of the negation, which contains within it an irreparable idealist charge. On the other hand it seems to me that the category of alienation can render provisional services, given a double and absolute condition: (1) that it be ‘cut’ from every philosophy of ‘reification’ (or of fetishism, or of self-objectivization) which is only an anthropological variant of idealism; and (2) that alienation is understood as secondary to the concept of exploitation. On this double condition, the category of alienation can, in the first instance (since it disappears in the final result) help to avoid a purely economic, that is, economist conception of surplus-value: it can help to introduce the idea that, in exploitation, surplus-value is inseparable from the concrete and material forms in which it is extorted. A number of texts from the Grundrisse and from Capital go, in my opinion, in this sense. But I know that others go in a different and much more ambiguous sense.
33. Cf. the Introduction to For Marx.
34. Lenin: ‘In theory there is undoubtedly a certain period of transition between capitalism and communism. It must necessarily combine the traits or particularities of these two economic structures of society. This transitory period can only be a period of struggle between the death agony of capitalism and the birth of communism, or, in other terms: between vanquished, but not yet eliminated capitalism, and already born, but still weak communism. […] Classes remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. […] Classes remain, but each class has undergone a change in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it simply takes other forms’ (Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat).
Note on ‘The Critique of the Personality Cult’
1. A few examples, remaining at the theoretical level: the economist evolutionism of Stalin’s Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism; the conjuring away of the historical role of Trotsky and others in the Bolshevik Revolution (Short History of the CPSU [B]); the thesis of the sharpening of the class struggle under socialism; the formula: ‘everything depends on the cadres’, etc. Among ourselves: the thesis of ‘bourgeois science/proletarian science’, the thesis of ‘absolute pauperization’, etc.
2. For Marxism the explanation of any phenomenon is in the last instance internal: it is the internal ‘contradiction’ which is the ‘motor’. The external circumstances are active: but ‘through’ the internal contradiction which they over-determine. Why the need to be precise on this question? Because certain Communists, finding the ‘explanation’ in terms of the ‘cult’ inadequate, thought of the idea of adding a supplement, which could only be external: for example, the explanation by capitalist encirclement, whose reality no one can deny. Marxism, however, does not like supplements: when you need a supplement too much, you have probably missed the internal cause.
3. The term ‘Stalinism’, which the Soviet leaders have avoided using, but which was widely used by bourgeois ideologians and the Trotskyists, before penetrating into Communist circles, offers in general the same ‘disadvantages’ as the term ‘personality cult’. It designates a reality which innumerable Communists, above all, have experienced, either in direct and tragic form, or less directly and with more or less serious consequences. Now this terminology also has theoretical pretensions: among bourgeois ideologists and many Trotskyists. It explains nothing. To set out on the road of a Marxist explanation, to be able to pose the problem of the explanation of these facts, the least that is required is to put forward Marxist concepts, and to see whether they are suitable. That is why I am proposing the concept of ’deviation’, which is a concept that can certainly be ‘found’ in Marxist-Leninist theory. Thus one might, first of all, talk of a ’Stalinian’ deviation: first of all, because to talk of a deviation necessarily requires that it should next be qualified, that one should explain in what it consisted, and always in Marxist terms. One thing, at the present stage, must be made clear: to speak of a ‘Stalinian’ deviation is not to explain it by an individual, who would be its ‘cause’. The adjective certainly refers to a man in history, but above all to a certain period in the history of the International Labour Movement.
* Reprinted in For Marx [Translator’s note]
4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Part I, section 2.
5. Cf. Marxism and Revisionism, The Collapse of the Second International, The Renegade Kautsky, etc.
6. Lenin: in the ‘transition’ between capitalism and communism, classes remain, the class struggle remains, but takes on new forms.
Remark on the Category: ‘Process without a Subject or Goal(s)’
1. The category of ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’ can therefore take the form: ‘process without a Subject or Object’.
Freud and Lacan
1. Revue de l’Enseignement philosophique, June-July 1963, ‘Philosophic et sciences humaines’, p. 7 and p. 11, n.14: ‘Marx based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo œconomicus”, Freud based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo psychologicus”. Lacan has seen and understood Freud’s liberating rupture. He has understood it in the fullest sense of the term, taking it rigorously at its word and forcing it to produce its own consequences, without concessions or quarter. It may be that, like everyone else, he errs in the detail or even the choice of his philosophical bearings; but we owe him the essential.’
2. The most dangerous of these temptations are those of philosophy (which gladly reduces the whole of the psycho-analysis to the dual experience of the cure and thereby ‘verifies’ the themes of phenomenological intersubjectivity, of the existence-project, or more generally of personalism); of psychology which appropriates most of the categories of psycho-analysis as so many attributes of a ‘subject’ in which, manifestly, it sees no problem; finally, of sociology which comes to the aid of psychology by providing it with an objective content for the ‘reality principle’ (social and familial imperatives) which the ‘subject’ need only ‘internalize’ to be armed with a ‘super-ego’ and the corresponding categories. Thus subordinated to psychology or sociology psycho-analysis is usually reduced to a technique of ‘emotional’ or ‘affective’ re-adaptation, or to a re-education of the ‘relational function’, neither of which have anything to do with its real object – but which unfortunately respond to a major demand, and what is more, to a demand that is highly tendentious in the contemporary world. Through this bias, psycho-analysis has become an article of mass consumption in modern culture, i.e. in modern ideology.
3. These are the two German expressions made famous by Freud, with which a small child under his observation sanctioned the appearance and disappearance of its mother by the manipulation of an arbitrary object that ‘represented’ her: a cotton-reel.
4. Formally: for the Law of Culture, which is first introduced as language and whose first form is language, is not exhausted by language; its content is the real kinship structures and the determinate ideological formations in which the persons inscribed in these structures live their functions. It is not enough to know that the Western family is patriarchal and exogamic (kinship structures) – we must also work out the ideological formations that govern paternity, maternity, conjugality and childhood: what are ‘husband-and-wife-being’, ‘father-being’, ‘mother-being’ and ‘child-being’ in the modern world? A mass of research remains to be done on these ideological formations. This is a task for historical materialism.
5. A branch of neuro-biology and one of psychology have been only too pleased to discover in Freud a theory of ‘stages’, and they have not hesitated to translate it directly and exhaustively into a theory of ‘stadial growth’, either neuro-biological or bio-neuro-psychological – mechanically assigning to neuro-biological growth the role of an ‘essence’ for which the Freudian ‘stages’ are merely the ‘phenomena’ pure and simple. This perspective is nothing but a re-edition of the old theory of mechanical parallelism. This is directed particularly towards the disciples of Wallon, for Wallon himself did not take any notice of Freud.
6. There is a risk that the theoretical scope of this formal condition may be misconstrued, if this is countered by citing the apparently biological concepts (libido, affects, instincts, desire) in which Freud thinks the ‘content’ of the unconscious. For example, when he says that the dream is a ‘wish-fulfilment’ (Wunscherfüllung). The sense here is the same as the sense in which Lacan opposes man’s ‘empty speech’ to his ‘full speech’, as to the language of unconscious ‘desire’. But only on the basis of this formal condition do these (apparently biological) concepts obtain their authentic meaning, or can this meaning be assigned and thought and a curative technique defined and applied. Desire, the basic category of the unconscious, is only intelligible in its specificity as the sole meaning of the discourse of the human subject’s unconscious: the meaning that emerges in and through the ‘play’ of the signifying chain which makes up the discourse of the unconscious. As such, ‘desire’ is marked by the structure that commands human development. As such, desire is radically distinct from organic and essentially biological ‘need’. There is no essential continuity between organic need and unconscious desire, any more than there is between man’s biological existence and his historical existence. Desire is determined in its ambiguous being (its ‘failure-in-being’ – manque à être – says Lacan) by the structure of the Order that imposes its mark on it and destines it for a placeless existence, the existence of repression, for its resources as well as for its disappointments. The specific reality of desire cannot be reached by way of organic need any more than the specific reality of historical existence can be reached by way of the biological existence of ‘man’. On the contrary: just as it is the categories of history that allow us to define the specificity of man’s historical existence, including some apparently purely biological determinations such as his ‘needs’ or demographic phenomena, by distinguishing his historical existence from a purely biological existence – similarly, it is the essential categories of the unconscious that allow us to grasp and define the very meaning of desire by distinguishing it from the biological realities that support it (exactly as biological existence supports historical existence) but neither constitute, nor determine it.
7. An expression of Lacan’s (‘machine’), referring to Freud (‘ein anderes Schauspiel’… ‘Schauplatz’). From Politzer, who talks of ‘drama’ to Freud and Lacan who speak of theatre, stage, mise en scène, machinery, theatrical genre, metteur en scène, etc., there is all the distance between the spectator who takes himself for the theatre – and the theatre itself.
8. If this term ‘effect’ is examined in the context of a classical theory of causality, it reveals a conception of the continuing presence of the cause in its effects (cf. Spinoza).
A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre
1. See La Nouvelle Critique, no. 175, April 1966, pp. 136–41.
2. La Nouvelle Critique, no. 164, March 1965; For Marx, pp. 242–7.
3. Now in Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, Paris, 1966, pp. 125–57.
4. [Jean Marcenac, Elsa Triolet, Lukács, among others.
5. [Jean Marcenac, Les Lettres Françaises, 1966. ‘I have always regretted the fact that F. Joliot-Curie never pursued the project he suggested to me at the time of Eluard’s death, the project of a comparative study of poetic creation and scientific creation, which he thought might eventually prove an identity in their procedures.’]