Ideology, Interpellation, ‘Munchausen Effect’

Abstract

Ideology in general, which as we have seen is not realised in the ideological state apparatuses — so it cannot coincide with a historically concrete ideological formation — is also not the same thing as the dominant ideology, as the overall result, the historically concrete form resulting from the relationships ofuneveness-contradiction-subordination characterising in a historically given social formation the ‘complex whole in dominance’ of the ideological formations operating in it. In other words, whereas ‘ideologies have a history of their own’ because they have a concrete historical existence, ‘Ideology in general has no history’ in so far as it is ‘endowed with a structure and an operation such as to make it a non-historical reality, i. e., an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and operation are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i. e., the history of class societies’ (Althusser 1971b, pp. 151f.). The concept of Ideology in general thus appears very specifically as the way to designate, within Marxism-Leninism, the fact that the relations of production are relationships between ‘men’, in the sense that they are not relationships between things, machines, non-human animals or angels; in this sense and in this sense only: i. e., without introducing at the same time and surreptitiously, a certain notion of ‘man’ as anti-nature, transcendence, subject of history, negation of the negation, etc. As is well known, this is the central point of the Reply to John Lewis (Althusser 1976b).KeywordsClass StruggleEvident FactLogical EmpiricismDominant IdeologyClass SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.