Sunday, 5 August 2018

Ideological State Apparatus | Peter Brooker
A description introduced by the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser in an important essay in his Lenin and Philosophy.

The concept develops Antonio Gramsci's emphasis on the operation of ideology in civil society, and has been extremely influential on a range of work within Literary, Film and Cultural Studies.

Althusser distinguishes between two kinds of state apparatus: repressive state apparatuses (or RSAs - for example, the penal system, police and army) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs - including religion, the legal system, education, the family, culture and communication).

The first are coercive in their operation, while the second function to unify society through ideology and reproduce a regime through consent.

The latter are relatively independent of the state, though they serve to ratify and legitimize it, and to function, says Althusser, 'beneath the ruling ideology which is the ideology of "the ruling class".

Althusser's concept is an important aspect of his critique of traditional Marxism and his re-reading of Marx.

Althusser proposes a thoroughly anti-idealist and anti-humanist Marxism, which would suggest that everything is 'material', including ideas.

Thus 'the "ideas" or "representations", etc., which seem to make up ideology do not have an ideal or spiritual existence, but a material existence'.

Ideological state apparatuses therefore simultaneously comprise ideas and material forms.

This perception was welcomed since it appeared to re-articulate Marx's classic distinction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure, so as to free it from a mechanistic and deterministic interpretation.


In Althusser's view of 'the social formation', ideas and ideological forms (the 'representations', above, which are the object of cultural study) have a 'relative autonomy' and the economy while determining is determining 'in the last instance'.

This formulation was seen to acknowledge the specificity and critical ideological potential of culture.

image: cparkergradsdotdigitalodu / helpessaydotme

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