Louis Althusser

7 Key excerpts on "Louis Althusser"

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  The Žižek Dictionary

  • Rex Butler, Rex Butler(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ALTHUSSER T he work of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990) is important for Žižek in a variety of ways. This is most apparent in Žižek’s conception of ideology, as it is at least partially against the backdrop of Althusser’s own conception of ideology that Žižek’s is constructed. In order to see this relationship, we should first say a bit about Althusser’s conception of ideology. Althusser rejects the traditional Marxist conception of ideology as a kind of simple false consciousness that can be completely overcome or set right by a proper Marxist analysis. Rather, for Althusser, ideology is always in operation in our subjective awareness. That is, as Althusser puts it in For Marx, all consciousness is ideological (Althusser 1969: 33). According to Althusser, even though particular historical ideological forms come into being and pass away, much like the Lacanian concept of the “symbolic”, the structure of ideology is an ever-present feature of conscious life. His theory of interpellation, given in the famous piece entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation” (Althuser 1971: 85–126), is meant to further expand on and explain this point. In this essay, Althusser distinguishes between what he calls “Repressive State Apparatuses”, or RSAs, which are those parts of the state (including the state itself) that function to enforce the domination of the ruling class through violence (here, Althusser cites institutions such as the prisons, law, the courts, the police and the military), and what he calls the “Ideological State Apparatuses”, or ISAs, which have the same function (to enforce the domination of the ruling class) but operate differently (ibid.: 143). ISAs work not through violence, but through the reproduction of a given set of historical ideologies

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  Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (set)

  • Gregory Claeys(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Althusser devotes considerable space in his major work of the 1960s to expounding the details of this new science, of which Marx, he argued, had left only the cornerstones. Here, we need to mention the influence of structuralism on Althusser’s thought. Althusser is sometimes described as a structuralist Marxist. This description is a mistake. Structuralism, rather, was the intellectual milieu in which Althusser worked out his conception of authentically Marxist science and with which he shared certain basic approaches. Structuralism was an interdisciplinary movement that became the height of intellectual fashion in France in the 1960s. We will mention here only what Althusser has in common with its major exponents. First, structuralism was an antihumanist method of inquiry. It understood the objects it examined—from kinship relations to novels to the unconscious mind—as products not of individual human beings but of social systems. A novel, for example, was not the product of the genius of its author but of the unconscious system of rules for writing novels in the society in which it was produced. In a similar way, Althusser believes that a society, as Marx had truly understood it, is not a collection of individuals but a system, the nature of which determines the lives of all the individuals within it. Second, structuralism understands the objects of its inquiry as systems of elements in relationship. The meaning of a given passage in a novel does not consist in its relationship to reality but in its relationship to all the other passages and kinds of passage in the novel. Althusser understands society in the same way, as a system made up of elements that can only be understood in terms of their relationship to all the other elements in the system.

  The Science of History

  Like other scientific revolutions, Althusser argues that the revolution in the science of history founded by Marx involves new terms and new relationships between those terms. In place of the term man, the fundamental concept of the ideology of humanism, Marx puts the mode of production, the fundamental concept of the science of historical materialism. The mode of production—the ways in which society produces the material conditions of its members’ lives—is the most fundamental reality of social life for Marx. He develops a new lexicon of terms in order to expound this insight—terms such as class, ideology, base, and superstructure.

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  Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers

  • Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick, Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In turn, Althusser proposed replacing the traditional Marxist conception of science as empirical analysis with a model which, instead of grounding itself in procedures of observation and verification, stressed the internal consistency of a theory as providing proof of its validity. Thus, for Althusser, what Marxist theory states need not correspond to an immediately verifiable social reality, for the veracity of its analysis is shown in the internal consistency of the premises that underpin it. The conception of modes of production was then supplemented by Althusser with a reformulation of the meaning and significance of ideology in the shape of his theory if ideological state apparatuses, a conception again developed in order to fill what he contended were gaps in traditional Marxist theory.

  Also, Althusser espoused the view that individuals do not in any sense exist independently of the constitution of economic and social structures. This view lay at the heart of Althusser’s anti-humanism. Whereas Marxists had traditionally argued that human beings are the authors of their own destinies, Althusser’s contention was that individuals are an expression of the relations which inhere within the historically determined structures that make up the capitalist mode of production.

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  Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology

  An Encyclopedia

  • R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  69–165) and his 1968 lecture “Lenin and Philosophy” (Althusser, 2011, pp. 167–202). In these lectures, Althusser broke with what he called his earlier “theoreticism” and advanced a new, practical conception of philosophy as the representation of class struggle in theory. Althusser’s rethinking of philosophy as a dialectical struggle of idealist and materialist “tendencies” stimulated creative research and publications by his associates, such as Pierre Macherey, Pierre Raymond, and Dominique Lecourt. In his highly influential 1969 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (excerpted from a longer manuscript that was only posthumously published and has not yet been translated into English: Sur la reproduction [On Reproduction]), Althusser sought to reframe Marx’s account of ideology not as a set of false beliefs but as a complex, and contradictory, assemblage of social practices through which every individual is transformed into a “subject” (Althusser, 2008, pp. 1–60). In other words, individuals do not originate as, but become, self-conscious and responsible agents through the interplay of a wide variety of “ideological state apparatuses,” such as family, mass media, religious organizations, and especially the educational system. There is no single ideological state apparatus that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious, responsible agents. Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it means to fulfill the role of a parent, child, teacher, student, administrator, worker, citizen, religious believer, and so forth. Althusser never underestimated the significance of what he called the “repressive state apparatus,” whose underlying violence is supplemented by the everyday social reproduction carried out by ideological practices

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  An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture

  • Dominic Strinati(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Louis Althusser (1918–1990) was a French philosopher whose major work was published in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when there was widespread intellectual interest in Marxism and structuralism. In keeping with the conventions of academic theory in France, Althusser himself denied he was a structuralist in the same way that more contemporary theorists deny they are post-structuralists or postmodernists. Althusser is concerned with Marxist theory, and the need to secure its philosophical foundations. At their simplest, Althusser’s objectives are to establish Marxism as a science and to rid it of economic determinism. In trying to attain them, Althusser develops a distinctive view of science which sees it as an abstract and logical system which proceeds from first principles, and works upon all kinds of empirical material to produce knowledge. For Althusser, the first principles of Marxism as a science are to be found in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci; these are to be examined, clarified, refined and applied by the theorist in order to demonstrate their veracity. Althusser sees himself carrying on the tradition of Marxist science established by Marx, and trying to resolve theoretical problems Marx, in particular, left unresolved, such as the absence of a theory of ideology. The solutions for these problems are to be found in the Marxist classics even if they are undeveloped or barely recognised. The classics contain the solutions to problems thrown up by the development of Marxist theory and the history of capitalism, but much theoretical labour has to be expended before they can be discovered and explained. Consequently, Althusser presents his arguments in an abstract and assertive manner: this makes sense if you feel that the texts you rely on contain the truth, but can be difficult to accept if you do not.

  While we do not want to dwell for long over Althusser’s definition of science and of Marxism as a science, it is useful to note their importance in his development of concepts and theories. This can be seen, for example, in how his theory of ideology (which has influenced some subsequent analyses of popular culture) is asserted to be a logical resolution of a theoretical problem which Marx himself chose not to address in a systematic or rigorous manner. Althusser’s idea of science is equally one of the guiding assumptions in his critique of the economic determinism to be found within Marxism.

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  Marxist Aesthetics

  The foundations within everyday life for an emancipated consciousness

  • Pauline Johnson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Althusser’s analysis of ideology is designed to establish the practical role performed by an ideology in a socialist society. His theory of ideology is, as Rancière remarks, based on a politics ‘which claims to have got beyond classes’. 13 Althusser’s conception of the general function performed by ideology precludes an attempt to identify the practical basis within everyday life for a changed consciousness. In capitalist society the ideological instance adapts people to their real, exploitative conditions of existence. In a classless society, people are adapted by ideology to the non-exploitative demands of their real conditions of existence. Since, for Althusser, the ideological instance simply serves to reproduce the real, an enlightened consciousness can only have its foundations outside immediate experience in scientific theory. Rancière comments: The class struggle in ideology, forgotten at the start, reappears in a chimerical, fetishized form as a class struggle between ideology (weapon of the ruling class) and science (weapon of the ruled class). 14 Rancière points out that the undemocratic character of Althusser’s fetishised account of ideological struggle is illustrated by the use made of his science/ideology distinction in the post-May 1968 period. In the university context, Althusser’s Marxism served an attempt to distort the radicalism of the student’s demands for a changed learning relationship into a question concerning the content of knowledge. According to Rancière, the radical science/ideology distinction was used to ‘transfer the university’s police role from the authority of the teacher to the authority of the knowledge’. 15 He suggests that the Althusserian science/ideology distinction was also used to reinforce a political hierarchy between the masses and the Party intellectuals. The political authority of the intellectuals was guaranteed by their position as the possessors of scientific knowledge

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  Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (RLE Social Theory)

  A Comparison of the Theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser

  • Miriam Glucksmann(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Capital is the mechanism which makes the result of history’s production exist as a society, so focussing his theoretical attention on the mechanism ‘producing the society-effect peculiar to the capitalist mode of production’. The subjects of history are social formations and these include three main instances: the economy, polity and ideology, each of which have a relatively autonomous existence and practices specific to them. Ideology here has the meaning of the lived relations between men and their world, and is a necessary part of all societies including post-revolutionary ones.

  This anti-humanism is one of the most distinctive aspects of Althusserian Marxism, and has many similarities with Lévi-Strauss’s anti-subjectivism. For both of them, relations and structures are the unit for analysis, rather than man’s lived and subjective experience, and these are to be explained by impersonal structural forces (play without an author) (see below p. 149 ). It is on the basis of this that Althusser criticizes and rejects theories and philosophies based on concepts of alienation, human nature or praxis, which all tend to be based ultimately on the individual and to conceive of theory as superstructural; that is, as being an expression of class consciousness and thus directly tied to a social base, rather than having a scientific truth independent of its social determination. Both of these, he would argue, derive from a Hegelian and essentialist philosophy and are incapable of viewing social formations as complex unities of levels and instances with their own specific practices and productions.

  To summarize this section, in the structuralist interpretation of Marx, historical materialism is a theory of structures based on certain fundamental concepts: forces of production, relations of production, economic base, and political and ideological level which are related by metonymic causality where the economy is determinant in the last instance but where the other instances have their own autonomous development within limits. Other crucial concepts include determination, dominance, the specificity of practices, overdetermination and production.

  History is the development of structures and their transformation. The theory of Capital

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