Althusser: Ideology and Subjectivity

Louis Althusser views ideology as a sum of material institutions and practices.  Ideology has little to do with consciousness as these institutions and practices of ideological state apparatus (ISA) perform the constant and eternal work of subjecting the individual.  Ideology interpolates or hails the individual and in so doing creates the subject.  Althusser gives the example of how religious ideology calls to the individual through scripture and ceremony and how the inevitable response creates the subject.   ISAs include institutions such as religion, political parties, and media, but they are also found in the subtle social practices of shaking hands, linguistic forms of greeting, and politeness codes (to name only a few).  Ideology for Althusser is material and not the result of false consciousness or commodity fetishism.  Ideology creates the subject and the subject cannot exist outside of ideology and its material manifestations.  It is possible to see the ideology of another subject, but not that of your own subjective position.  Ideology is not, as Lukács suggests, a reified consciousness so much as it is the manner in which the subject lives with the reification of belief.  

Althusser describes this thesis if ideology as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.  Althusser brings Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis into the theory of ideology.  If an individual could be consciously aware of the deterministic manner in which ideological apparatus subjects them, the result could only be depression. Althusser suggests ideology works on the unconscious of the individual to form the subject.  Althusser believes we recognize ideological practices, but we do not have knowledge of them.  These practices and institutions are inseparable from personal belief as they manifest in action.  Knowledge is only attainable through scientific theorizing and even that takes place within ideology. Terry Eagleton finds Althusser’s reading of Freud and Lacan to be flawed in the sense that the subject Althusser refers to would be closer to Freud’s superego and Lacan’s ego and other than either man’s conception of the subject.  This flaw is important because it opens the door for the individual’s rejection or ignorance of the ideological hail.  Lacan’s other is a complex and shifting psychic entity that would allow for some form of individual determinism.

Althusser’s conception of a completely material ideology seems to dismiss any attempt to discover a cognitive explanation for ideological formation.  Terry Eagleton questions the complete materiality of ideology by bring meaning back into the picture.  Institutional and social practice can be performed unconsciously, but inevitably practice will demand meaning, how else can Althusser’s notion that individual belief is enacted through material action?  In order to form a belief meaning must be determined.  Conceptual integration of ideological apparatus must take place that links belief with action through meaning.  Conceptual integration must also take place for the mind to accept the reification of abstract ideas into material form.