fLouis Althusser 1970“Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays

Ideology andIdeological State

Apparatuses(Notes towards an Investigation)

First published: in La Pensée, 1970;Translated: from the French by Ben Brewster;Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, MonthlyReview Press 1971;Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

On the Reproduction of the Conditions ofProduction[1]

I must now expose more fully something whichwas briefly glimpsed in my analysis when I spokeof the necessity to renew the means ofproduction if production is to be possible. Thatwas a passing hint. Now I shall consider it foritself.

As Marx said, every child knows that a socialformation which did not reproduce the conditionsof production at the same time as it produced

would not last a year.[2] The ultimate conditionof production is therefore the reproduction ofthe conditions of production. This may be‘simple’ (reproducing exactly the previousconditions of production) or ‘on an extendedscale’ (expanding them). Let us ignore this lastdistinction for the moment.

What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions ofproduction?

Here we are entering a domain which is bothvery familiar (since Capital Volume Two) anduniquely ignored. The tenacious obviousnesses(ideological obviousnesses of an empiricisttype) of the point of view of production alone,or even of that of mere productive practice(itself abstract in relation to the process ofproduction) are so integrated into our everyday‘consciousness’ that it is extremely hard, notto say almost impossible, to raise oneself tothe point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless,everything outside this point of view remainsabstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) –even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, atthat of mere practice.

Let us try and examine the matter methodically.

To simplify my exposition, and assuming thatevery social formation arises from a dominantmode of production, I can say that the processof production sets to work the existingproductive forces in and under definiterelations of production.

It follows that, in order to exist, everysocial formation must reproduce the conditionsof its production at the same time as itproduces, and in order to be able to produce. Itmust therefore reproduce:

1. the productive forces, 2. the existing relations of production.

Reproduction of the Means of Production

Everyone (including the bourgeois economistswhose work is national accounting, or the modern‘macro-economic’ ‘theoreticians’) nowrecognizes, because Marx compellingly proved itin Capital Volume Two, that no production ispossible which does not allow for thereproduction of the material conditions ofproduction: the reproduction of the means ofproduction.

The average economist, who is no different inthis than the average capitalist, knows thateach year it is essential to foresee what isneeded to replace what has been used up or wornout in production: raw material, fixedinstallations (buildings), instruments ofproduction (machines), etc. I say the averageeconomist = the average capitalist, for theyboth express the point of view of the firm,regarding it as sufficient simply to give acommentary on the terms of the firm’s financialaccounting practice.

But thanks to the genius of Quesnay who firstposed this ‘glaring’ problem, and to the geniusof Marx who resolved it, we know that thereproduction of the material conditions ofproduction cannot be thought at the level of thefirm, because it does not exist at that level inits real conditions. What happens at the levelof the firm is an effect, which only gives anidea of the necessity of reproduction, butabsolutely fails to allow its conditions andmechanisms to be thought.

A moment’s reflection is enough to be convincedof this: Mr X, a capitalist who produces woollenyarn in his spinning-mill, has to ‘reproduce’his raw material, his machines, etc. But he doesnot produce them for his own production – othercapitalists do: an Australian sheep farmer, MrY, a heavy engineer producing machine-tools, MrZ, etc., etc. And Mr Y and Mr Z, in order toproduce those products which are the conditionof the reproduction of Mr X’s conditions ofproduction, also have to reproduce theconditions of their own production, and so on toinfinity – the whole in proportions such that,on the national and even the world market, thedemand for means of production (forreproduction) can be satisfied by the supply.

In order to think this mechanism, which leadsto a kind of ‘endless chain’, it is necessary tofollow Marx’s ‘global’ procedure, and to studyin particular the relations of the circulationof capital between Department I (production ofmeans of production) and Department II

(production of means of consumption), and therealization of surplus value, in Capital, VolumesTwo and Three.

We shall not go into the analysis of thisquestion. It is enough to have mentioned theexistence of the necessity of the reproductionof the material conditions of production.

Reproduction of Labour-Power

However, the reader will not have failed tonote one thing. We have discussed thereproduction of the means of production – butnot the reproduction of the productive forces.We have therefore ignored the reproduction ofwhat distinguishes the productive forces fromthe means of production, i.e. the reproductionof labour power.

From the observation of what takes place in thefirm, in particular from the examination of thefinancial accounting practice which predictsamortization and investment, we have been ableto obtain an approximate idea of the existenceof the material process of reproduction, but weare now entering a domain in which theobservation of what happens in the firm is, ifnot totally blind, at least almost entirely so,and for good reason: the reproduction of labourpower takes place essentially outside the firm.

How is the reproduction of labour powerensured?

It is ensured by giving labour power thematerial means with which to reproduce itself:by wages. Wages feature in the accounting ofeach enterprise, but as ‘wage capital’,[3] not atall as a condition of the material reproductionof labour power.

However, that is in fact how it ‘works’, sincewages represents only that part of the valueproduced by the expenditure of labour powerwhich is indispensable for its reproduction: soindispensable to the reconstitution of thelabour power of the wage-earner (the wherewithalto pay for housing, food and clothing, in shortto enable the wage earner to present himselfagain at the factory gate the next day – andevery further day God grants him); and we shouldadd: indispensable for raising and educating thechildren in whom the proletarian reproduceshimself (in n models where n = 0, 1, 2, etc....)as labour power.

Remember that this quantity of value (wages)necessary for the reproduction of labour poweris determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’Guaranteed Minimum Wage (Salaire MinimumInterprofessionnel Garanti) alone, but by the needs ofa historical minimum (Marx noted that Englishworkers need beer while French proletarians needwine) – i.e. a historically variable minimum.

I should also like to point out that thisminimum is doubly historical in that it is notdefined by the historical needs of the workingclass ‘recognized’ by the capitalist class, but

by the historical needs imposed by theproletarian class struggle (a double classstruggle: against the lengthening of the workingday and against the reduction of wages).

However, it is not enough to ensure for labourpower the material conditions of itsreproduction if it is to be reproduced as labourpower. I have said that the available labourpower must be ‘competent’, i.e. suitable to beset to work in the complex system of the processof production. The development of the productiveforces and the type of unity historicallyconstitutive of the productive forces at a givenmoment produce the result that the labour powerhas to be (diversely) skilled and thereforereproduced as such. Diversely: according to therequirements of the socio-technical division oflabour, its different ‘jobs’ and ‘posts’.

How is this reproduction of the (diversified)skills of labour power provided for in acapitalist regime? Here, unlike socialformations characterized by slavery or serfdomthis reproduction of the skills of labour powertends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly tobe provided for ‘on the spot’ (apprenticeshipwithin production itself), but is achieved moreand more outside production: by the capitalisteducation system, and by other instances andinstitutions.

What do children learn at school? They govarying distances in their studies, but at anyrate they learn to read, to write and to add –

i.e. a number of techniques, and a number ofother things as well, including elements (whichmay be rudimentary or on the contrarythoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literaryculture’, which are directly useful in thedifferent jobs in production (one instructionfor manual workers, another for technicians, athird for engineers, a final one for highermanagement, etc.). Thus they learn know-how.

But besides these techniques and knowledges,and in learning them, children at school alsolearn the ‘rules’ of good behaviour, i.e. theattitude that should be observed by every agentin the division of labour, according to the jobhe is ‘destined’ for: rules of morality, civicand professional conscience, which actuallymeans rules of respect for the socio-technicaldivision of labour and ultimately the rules ofthe order established by class domination. Theyalso learn to ‘speak proper French’, to ‘handle’the workers correctly, i.e. actually (for thefuture capitalists and their servants) to ‘orderthem about’ properly, i.e. (ideally) to ‘speakto them’ in the right way, etc.

To put this more scientifically, I shall saythat the reproduction of labour power requiresnot only a reproduction of its skills, but also,at the same time, a reproduction of itssubmission to the rules of the establishedorder, i.e. a reproduction of submission to theruling ideology for the workers, and areproduction of the ability to manipulate theruling ideology correctly for the agents of

exploitation and repression, so that they, too,will provide for the domination of the rulingclass ‘in words’.

In other words, the school (but also otherState institutions like the Church, or otherapparatuses like the Army) teaches ‘know-how’,but in forms which ensure subjection to the rulingideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’. All theagents of production, exploitation andrepression, not to speak of the ‘professionalsof ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or anotherbe ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order toperform their tasks ‘conscientiously’ – thetasks of the exploited (the proletarians), ofthe exploiters (the capitalists), of theexploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or ofthe high priests of the ruling ideology (its‘functionaries’), etc.

The reproduction of labour power thus revealsas its sine qua non not only the reproduction ofits ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of itssubjection to the ruling ideology or of the‘practice’ of that ideology, with the provisothat it is not enough to say ‘not only butalso’, for it is clear that it is in the forms and underthe forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for thereproduction of the skills of labour power.

But this is to recognize the effective presenceof a new reality: ideology.

Here I shall make two comments.

The first is to round off my analysis ofreproduction.

I have just given a rapid survey of the formsof the reproduction of the productive forces,i.e. of the means of production on the one hand,and of labour power on the other.

But I have not yet approached the question ofthe reproduction of the relations of production. This isa crucial question for the Marxist theory of themode of production. To let it pass would be atheoretical omission – worse, a seriouspolitical error.

I shall therefore discuss it. But in order toobtain the means to discuss it, I shall have tomake another long detour.

The second comment is that in order to makethis detour, I am obliged to re-raise my oldquestion: what is a society?

Infrastructure and Superstructure

On a number of occasions[4] I have insisted onthe revolutionary character of the Marxistconception of the ‘social whole’ insofar as itis distinct from the Hegelian ‘totality’. I said(and this thesis only repeats famouspropositions of historical materialism) thatMarx conceived the structure of every society asconstituted by ‘levels’ or ‘instances’articulated by a specific determination:the infrastructure, or economic base (the ‘unity’ ofthe productive forces and the relations of

production) and the superstructure, which itselfcontains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: thepolitico-legal (law and the State) and ideology(the different ideologies, religious, ethical,legal, political, etc.).

Besides its theoretico-didactic interest (itreveals the difference between Marx and Hegel),this representation has the following crucialtheoretical advantage: it makes it possible toinscribe in the theoretical apparatus of itsessential concepts what I have calledtheir respective indices of effectivity. What does thismean?

It is easy to see that this representation ofthe structure of every society as an edificecontaining a base (infrastructure) on which areerected the two ‘floors’ of the superstructure,is a metaphor, to be quite precise, a spatialmetaphor: the metaphor of a topography (topique).[5] Like every metaphor, this metaphor suggestssomething, makes some thing visible. What?Precisely this: that the upper floors could not‘stay up’ (in the air) alone, if they did notrest precisely on their base.

Thus the object of the metaphor of the edificeis to represent above all the ‘determination inthe last instance’ by the economic base. Theeffect of this spatial metaphor is to endow thebase with an index of effectivity known by thefamous terms: the determination in the lastinstance of what happens in the upper ‘floors’

(of the superstructure) by what happens in theeconomic base.

Given this index of effectivity ‘in the lastinstance’, the ‘floors’ of the superstructureare clearly endowed with different indices ofeffectivity. What kind of indices?

It is possible to say that the floors of thesuperstructure are not determinant in the lastinstance, but that they are determined by theeffectivity of the base; that if they aredeterminant in their own (as yet undefined)ways, this is true only insofar as they aredetermined by the base.

Their index of effectivity (or determination),as determined by the determination in the lastinstance of the base, is thought by the Marxisttradition in two ways: (1) there is a ‘relativeautonomy’ of the superstructure with respect tothe base; (2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ ofthe superstructure on the base.

We can therefore say that the great theoreticaladvantage of the Marxist topography, i.e. of thespatial metaphor of the edifice (base andsuperstructure) is simultaneously that itreveals that questions of determination (or ofindex of effectivity) are crucial; that itreveals that it is the base which in the lastinstance determines the whole edifice; and that,as a consequence, it obliges us to pose thetheoretical problem of the types of ‘derivatory’effectivity peculiar to the superstructure, i.e.it obliges us to think what the Marxist

tradition calls conjointly the relative autonomyof the superstructure and the reciprocal actionof the superstructure on the base.

The greatest disadvantage of thisrepresentation of the structure of every societyby the spatial metaphor of an edifice, isobviously the fact that it is metaphorical: i.e.it remains descriptive.

It now seems to me that it is possible anddesirable to represent things differently. NB, Ido not mean by this that I want to reject theclassical metaphor, for that metaphor itselfrequires that we go beyond it. And I am notgoing beyond it in order to reject it asoutworn. I simply want to attempt to think whatit gives us in the form of a description.

I believe that it is possible and necessary tothink what characterizes the essential of theexistence and nature of the superstructure on thebasis of reproduction. Once one takes the point ofview of reproduction, many of the questionswhose existence was indicated by the spatialmetaphor of the edifice, but to which it couldnot give a conceptual answer, are immediatelyilluminated.

My basic thesis is that it is not possible topose these questions (and therefore to answerthem) except from the point of view of reproduction.

I shall give a short analysis of Law, the Stateand Ideology from this point of view. And I shallreveal what happens both from the point of view

of practice and production on the one hand, andfrom that of reproduction on the other.

The State

The Marxist tradition is strict, here: inthe Communist Manifesto and the EighteenthBrumaire (and in all the later classical texts,above all in Marx’s writings on the ParisCommune and Lenin’s on State and Revolution), theState is explicitly conceived as a repressiveapparatus. The State is a ‘machine’ ofrepression, which enables the ruling classes (inthe nineteenth century the bourgeois class andthe ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure theirdomination over the working class, thus enablingthe former to subject the latter to the processof surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalistexploitation).

The State is thus first of all what the Marxistclassics have called the State Apparatus. This termmeans: not only the specialized apparatus (inthe narrow sense) whose existence and necessityI have recognized in relation to therequirements of legal practice, i.e. the police,the courts, the prisons; but also the army,which (the proletariat has paid for thisexperience with its blood) intervenes directlyas a supplementary repressive force in the lastinstance, when the police and its specializedauxiliary corps are ‘outrun by events’; andabove this ensemble, the head of State, thegovernment and the administration.

Presented in this form, the Marxist-Leninist‘theory’ of the State has its finger on theessential point, and not for one moment canthere be any question of rejecting the fact thatthis really is the essential point. The StateApparatus, which defines the State as a force ofrepressive execution and intervention ‘in theinterests of the ruling classes’ in the classstruggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and itsallies against the proletariat, is quitecertainly the State, and quite certainly definesits basic ‘function’.

From Descriptive Theory to Theory as such

Nevertheless, here too, as I pointed out withrespect to the metaphor of the edifice(infrastructure and superstructure), thispresentation of the nature of the State is stillpartly descriptive.

As I shall often have occasion to use thisadjective (descriptive), a word of explanationis necessary in order to remove any ambiguity.

Whenever, in speaking of the metaphor of theedifice or of the Marxist ‘theory’ of the State,I have said that these are descriptiveconceptions or representations of their objects,I had no ulterior critical motives. On thecontrary, I have every grounds to think thatgreat scientific discoveries cannot help butpass through the phase of what I shallcall descriptive ‘theory ‘. This is the first phase ofevery theory, at least in the domain whichconcerns us (that of the science of social

formations). As such, one might and in myopinion one must – envisage this phase as atransitional one, necessary to the developmentof the theory. That it is transitional isinscribed in my expression: ‘descriptivetheory’, which reveals in its conjunction ofterms the equivalent of a kind of‘contradiction’. In fact, the term theory‘clashes’ to some extent with the adjective‘descriptive’ which I have attached to it. Thismeans quite precisely: (1) that the ‘descriptivetheory’ really is, without a shadow of a doubt,the irreversible beginning of the theory; but(2) that the ‘descriptive’ form in which thetheory is presented requires, precisely as aneffect of this ‘contradiction’, a development ofthe theory which goes beyond the form of‘description’.

Let me make this idea clearer by returning toour present object: the State.

When I say that the Marxist ‘theory’ of theState available to us is still partly‘descriptive’, that means first and foremostthat this descriptive ‘theory’ is without theshadow of a doubt precisely the beginning of theMarxist theory of the State, and that thisbeginning gives us the essential point, i.e. thedecisive principle of every later development ofthe theory.

Indeed, I shall call the descriptive theory ofthe State correct, since it is perfectlypossible to make the vast majority of the facts

in the domain with which it is concernedcorrespond to the definition it gives of itsobject. Thus, the definition of the State as aclass State, existing in the Repressive StateApparatus, casts a brilliant light on all thefacts observable in the various orders ofrepression whatever their domains: from themassacres of June 1848 and of the Paris Commune,of Bloody Sunday, May 1905 in Petrograd, of theResistance, of Charonne, etc., to the mere (andrelatively anodyne) interventions of a‘censorship’ which has banned Diderot’s LaRéligieuse or a play by Gatti on Franco; it castslight on all the direct or indirect forms ofexploitation and extermination of the masses ofthe people (imperialist wars); it casts light onthat subtle everyday domination beneath whichcan be glimpsed, in the forms of politicaldemocracy, for example, what Lenin, followingMarx, called the dictatorship of thebourgeoisie.

And yet the descriptive theory of the Staterepresents a phase in the constitution of thetheory which itself demands the ‘supersession’of this phase. For it is clear that if thedefinition in question really does give us themeans to identify and recognize the facts ofoppression by relating them to the State,conceived as the Repressive State Apparatus,this ‘interrelationship’ gives rise to a veryspecial kind of obviousness, about which I shallhave something to say in a moment: ‘Yes, that’show it is, that’s really true!’[6]

And the accumulation of facts within thedefinition of the State may multiply examples,but it does not really advance the definition ofthe State, i.e. the scientific theory of theState. Every descriptive theory thus runs therisk of ‘blocking’ the development of thetheory, and yet that development is essential.

That is why I think that, in order to developthis descriptive theory into theory as such,i.e. in order to understand further themechanisms of the State in its functioning, Ithink that it is indispensable to add somethingto the classical definition of the State as aState Apparatus.

The Essentials of the Marxist Theory of the State

Let me first clarify one important point: theState (and its existence in its apparatus) hasno meaning except as a function of State power.The whole of the political class strugglerevolves around the State. By which I meanaround the possession, i.e. the seizure andconservation of State power by a certain classor by an alliance between classes or classfractions. This first clarification obliges meto distinguish between State power (conservationof State power or seizure of State power), theobjective of the political class struggle on theone hand, and the State Apparatus on the other.

We know that the State Apparatus may survive,as is proved by bourgeois ‘revolutions’ innineteenth-century France (1830, 1848), by coupsd’état (2 December, May 1958), by collapses of the

State (the fall of the Empire in 1870, of theThird Republic in 1940), or by the politicalrise of the petty bourgeoisie (1890-95 inFrance), etc., without the State Apparatus beingaffected or modified: it may survive politicalevents which affect the possession of Statepower.

Even after a social revolution like that of1917, a large part of the State Apparatussurvived after the seizure of State power by thealliance of the proletariat and the smallpeasantry: Lenin repeated the fact again andagain.

It is possible to describe the distinctionbetween state power and state apparatus as partof the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state, explicitlypresent since Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and ClassStruggles in France.

To summarize the ‘Marxist theory of the state’on this point, it can be said that the Marxistclassics have always claimed that (1) the stateis the repressive state apparatus, (2) statepower and state apparatus must be distinguished,(3) the objective of the class struggle concernsstate power, and in consequence the use of thestate apparatus by the classes (or alliance ofclasses or of fractions of classes) holdingstate power as a function of their classobjectives, and (4) the proletariat must seizestate power in order to destroy the existingbourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase,replace it with a quite different, proletarian,

state apparatus, then in later phases set inmotion a radical process, that of thedestruction of the state (the end of statepower, the end of every state apparatus).

In this perspective, therefore, what I wouldpropose to add to the ‘Marxist theory’ of thestate is already there in so many words. But itseems to me that even with this supplement, thistheory is still in part descriptive, although itdoes now contain complex and differentialelements whose functioning and action cannot beunderstood without recourse to furthersupplementary theoretical development.

The State Ideological Apparatuses

Thus, what has to be added to the ‘Marxisttheory’ of the state is something else.

Here we must advance cautiously in a terrainwhich, in fact, the Marxist classics enteredlong before us, but without having systematizedin theoretical form the decisive advancesimplied by their experiences and procedures.Their experiences and procedures were indeedrestricted in the main to the terrain ofpolitical practice.

In fact, i.e. in their political practice, theMarxist classics treated the State as a morecomplex reality than the definition of it givenin the ‘Marxist theory of the state’, even whenit has been supplemented as I have justsuggested. They recognized this complexity in

their practice, but they did not express it in acorresponding theory.[7]

I should like to attempt a very schematicoutline of this corresponding theory. To thatend, I propose the following thesis.

In order to advance the theory of the State itis indispensable to take into account not onlythe distinction between state power and stateapparatus, but also another reality which isclearly on the side of the (repressive) stateapparatus, but must not be confused with it. Ishall call this reality by its concept: theIdeological State Apparatuses.

What are the Ideological State Apparatuses(ISAs)?

They must not be confused with the (repressive)State apparatus. Remember that in Marxisttheory, the State Apparatus (SA) contains: theGovernment, the Administration, the Army, thePolice, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., whichconstitute what I shall in future call theRepressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggeststhat the State Apparatus in question ‘functionsby violence’ – at least ultimately (sincerepression, e.g. administrative repression, maytake non-physical forms).

I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses acertain number of realities which presentthemselves to the immediate observer in the formof distinct and specialized institutions. Ipropose an empirical list of these which will

obviously have to be examined in detail, tested,corrected and re-organized. With all thereservations implied by this requirement, we canfor the moment regard the following institutionsas Ideological State Apparatuses (the order inwhich I have listed them has no particularsignificance):

the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),

the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’),

the family ISA,[8]

the legal ISA,[9]

the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),

the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA (press, radio

and television, etc.), the cultural ISA (literature, the

arts, sports, etc.).

I have said that the ISAs must not beconfused with the (Repressive) StateApparatus. What constitutes the difference?

As a first moment, it is clear that whilethere is one (Repressive) State Apparatus,there is a plurality of Ideological StateApparatuses. Even presupposing that itexists, the unity that constitutes thisplurality of ISAs as a body is notimmediately visible.

As a second moment, it is clear thatwhereas the unified – (Repressive) StateApparatus belongs entirely tothe public domain, much the larger part ofthe Ideological State Apparatuses (in theirapparent dispersion) are part, on thecontrary, of the private domain. Churches,Parties, Trade Unions, families, someschools, most newspapers, cultural ventures,etc., etc., are private.

We can ignore the first observation forthe moment. But someone is bound to questionthe second, asking me by what right I regardas Ideological State Apparatuses,institutions which for the most part do notpossess public status, but are quitesimply private institutions. As a consciousMarxist, Gramsci already forestalled thisobjection in one sentence. The distinctionbetween the public and the private is adistinction internal to bourgeois law, andvalid in the (subordinate) domains in whichbourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. Thedomain of the State escapes it because thelatter is ‘above the law’: the State, whichis the State of the ruling class, is neitherpublic nor private; on the contrary, it isthe precondition for any distinction betweenpublic and private. The same thing can besaid from the starting-point of our StateIdeological Apparatuses. It is unimportantwhether the institutions in which they arerealized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. Whatmatters is how they function. Private

institutions can perfectly well ‘function’as Ideological State Apparatuses. Areasonably thorough analysis of any one ofthe ISAs proves it.

But now for what is essential. Whatdistinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive)State Apparatus is the following basicdifference: the Repressive State Apparatusfunctions ‘by violence’, whereas theIdeological State Apparatuses function ‘byideology’.

I can clarify matters by correcting thisdistinction. I shall say rather that everyState Apparatus, whether Repressive orIdeological, ‘functions’ both by violenceand by ideology, but with one very importantdistinction which makes it imperative not toconfuse the Ideological State Apparatuseswith the (Repressive) State Apparatus.

This is the fact that the (Repressive)State Apparatus functions massively andpredominantly by repression (including physicalrepression), while functioning secondarilyby ideology. (There is no such thing as apurely repressive apparatus.) For example,the Army and the Police also function byideology both to ensure their own cohesionand reproduction, and in the ‘values’ theypropound externally.

In the same way, but inversely, it isessential to say that for their part theIdeological State Apparatuses function

massively and predominantlyby ideology, butthey also function secondarily byrepression, even if ultimately, but onlyultimately, this is very attenuated andconcealed, even symbolic. (There is no suchthing as a purely ideological apparatus.)Thus Schools and Churches use suitablemethods of punishment, expulsion, selection,etc., to ‘discipline’ not only theirshepherds, but also their flocks. The sameis true of the Family.... The same is trueof the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship,among other things), etc.

Is it necessary to add that thisdetermination of the double ‘functioning’(predominantly, secondarily) by repressionand by ideology, according to whether it isa matter of the (Repressive) State Apparatusor the Ideological State Apparatuses, makesit clear that very subtle explicit or tacitcombinations may be woven from the interplayof the (Repressive) State Apparatus and theIdeological State Apparatuses? Everyday lifeprovides us with innumerable examples ofthis, but they must be studied in detail ifwe are to go further than this mereobservation.

Nevertheless, this remark leads us towardsan understanding of what constitutes theunity of the apparently disparate body ofthe ISAs. If the ISAs ‘function’ massivelyand predominantly by ideology, what unifiestheir diversity is precisely this

functioning, insofar as the ideology bywhich they function is always in factunified, despite its diversity and itscontradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, whichis the ideology of ‘the ruling class’. Giventhe fact that the ‘ruling class’ inprinciple holds State power (openly or moreoften by means of alliances between classesor class fractions), and therefore has atits disposal the (Repressive) StateApparatus, we can accept the fact that thissame ruling class is active in theIdeological State Apparatuses insofar as itis ultimately the ruling ideology which isrealized in the Ideological StateApparatuses, precisely in itscontradictions. Of course, it is a quitedifferent thing to act by laws and decreesin the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to‘act’ through the intermediary of the rulingideology in the Ideological StateApparatuses. We must go into the details ofthis difference – but it cannot mask thereality of a profound identity. To myknowledge, no class can hold State power over a longperiod without at the same time exercising its hegemonyover and in the State Ideological Apparatuses. I onlyneed one example and proof of this: Lenin’sanguished concern to revolutionize theeducational Ideological State Apparatus(among others), simply to make it possiblefor the Soviet proletariat, who had seizedState power, to secure the future of thedictatorship of the proletariat and thetransition to socialism.[10]

This last comment puts us in a position tounderstand that the Ideological StateApparatuses may be not only the stake, butalso the site of class struggle, and often ofbitter forms of class struggle. The class(or class alliance) in power cannot lay downthe law in the ISAs as easily as it can inthe (repressive) State apparatus, not onlybecause the former ruling classes are ableto retain strong positions there for a longtime, but also because the resistance of theexploited classes is able to find means andoccasions to express itself there, either bythe utilization of their contradictions, orby conquering combat positions in them instruggle.[11]

Let me run through my comments.

If the thesis I have proposed is well-founded, it leads me back to the classicalMarxist theory of the State, while making itmore precise in one point. I argue that itis necessary to distinguish between Statepower (and its possession by ...) on the onehand, and the State Apparatus on the other.But I add that the State Apparatus containstwo bodies: the body of institutions whichrepresent the Repressive State Apparatus onthe one hand, and the body of institutionswhich represent the body of IdeologicalState Apparatuses on the other.

But if this is the case, the followingquestion is bound to be asked, even in the

very summary state of my suggestions: whatexactly is the extent of the role of theIdeological State Apparatuses? What is theirimportance based on? In other words: to whatdoes the ‘function’ of these IdeologicalState Apparatuses, which do not function byrepression but by ideology, correspond?

On the Reproduction of theRelations of Production

I can now answer the central questionwhich I have left in suspense for many longpages: how is the reproduction of the relations ofproduction secured?

In the topographical language(Infrastructure, Superstructure), I can say:for the most part,[12] it is secured by thelegal-political and ideologicalsuperstructure.

But as I have argued that it is essentialto go beyond this still descriptivelanguage, I shall say: for the most part, itis secured by the exercise of State power inthe State Apparatuses, on the one hand the(Repressive) State Apparatus, on the otherthe Ideological State Apparatuses.

What I have just said must also be takeninto account, and it can be assembled in theform of the following three features:

1. All the State Apparatusesfunction both by repression and byideology, with the difference thatthe (Repressive) State Apparatusfunctions massively andpredominantly by repression,whereas the Ideological StateApparatuses function massively andpredominantly by ideology.

2. Whereas the (Repressive) StateApparatus constitutes an organizedwhole whose different parts arecentralized beneath a commandingunity, that of the politics ofclass struggle applied by thepolitical representatives of theruling classes in possession ofState power, the Ideological StateApparatuses are multiple, distinct,‘relatively autonomous’ and capableof providing an objective field tocontradictions which express, informs which may be limited orextreme, the effects of the clashesbetween the capitalist classstruggle and the proletarian classstruggle, as well as theirsubordinate forms.

3. Whereas the unity of the(Repressive) State Apparatus issecured by its unified andcentralized organization under theleadership of the representatives

of the classes in power executingthe politics of the class struggleof the classes in power, the unityof the different Ideological StateApparatuses is secured, usually incontradictory forms, by the rulingideology, the ideology of theruling class.

Taking these features into account, it ispossible to represent the reproduction ofthe relations of production[13] in thefollowing way, according to a kind of‘division of labour’.

The role of the repressive Stateapparatus, insofar as it is a repressiveapparatus, consists essentially in securingby force (physical or otherwise) thepolitical conditions of the reproduction ofrelations of production which are in thelast resort relations of exploitation. Notonly does the State apparatus contributegenerously to its own reproduction (thecapitalist State contains politicaldynasties, military dynasties, etc.), butalso and above all, the State apparatussecures by repression (from the most brutalphysical force, via mere administrativecommands and interdictions, to open andtacit censorship) the political conditionsfor the action of the Ideological StateApparatuses.

In fact, it is the latter which largelysecure the reproduction specifically of therelations of production, behind a ‘shield’provided by the repressive State apparatus.It is here that the role of the rulingideology is heavily concentrated, theideology of the ruling class, which holdsState power. It is the intermediation of theruling ideology that ensures a (sometimesteeth-gritting) ‘harmony’ between therepressive State apparatus and theIdeological State Apparatuses, and betweenthe different State Ideological Apparatuses.

We are thus led to envisage the followinghypothesis, as a function precisely of thediversity of ideological State Apparatusesin their single, because shared, role of thereproduction of the relations of production.

Indeed we have listed a relatively largenumber of Ideological State Apparatuses incontemporary capitalist social formations:the educational apparatus, the religiousapparatus, the family apparatus, thepolitical apparatus, the trade-unionapparatus, the communications apparatus, the‘cultural’ apparatus, etc.

But in the social formations of that modeof production characterized by ‘serfdom’(usually called the feudal mode ofproduction), we observe that although thereis a single repressive State apparatuswhich, since the earliest known Ancient

States, let alone the Absolute Monarchies,has been formally very similar to the one weknow today, the number of Ideological StateApparatuses is smaller and their individualtypes are different. For example, we observethat during the Middle Ages, the Church (thereligious Ideological State Apparatus)accumulated a number of functions which havetoday devolved on to several distinctIdeological State Apparatuses, new ones inrelation to the past I am invoking, inparticular educational and culturalfunctions. Alongside the Church there wasthe family Ideological State Apparatus,which played a considerable part,incommensurable with its role in capitalistsocial formations. Despite appearances, theChurch and the Family were not the onlyIdeological State Apparatuses. There wasalso a political Ideological State Apparatus(the Estates General, the Parlement, thedifferent political factions and Leagues,the ancestors of the modern politicalparties, and the whole political system ofthe free Communes and then of the Villes).There was also a powerful ‘proto-tradeunion’ Ideological State Apparatus, if I mayventure such an anachronistic term (thepowerful merchants’ and bankers’ guilds andthe journeymen’s associations, etc.).Publishing and Communications, even, saw anindisputable development, as did thetheatre; initially both were integral partsof the Church, then they became more andmore independent of it.

In the pre-capitalist historical periodwhich I have examined extremely broadly, itis absolutely clear that there was one dominantIdeological State Apparatus, the Church, whichconcentrated within it not only religiousfunctions, but also educational ones, and alarge proportion of the functions ofcommunications and ‘culture’. It is noaccident that all ideological struggle, fromthe sixteenth to the eighteenth century,starting with the first shocks of theReformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle; ratherthis is a function precisely of the dominantposition of the religious Ideological StateApparatus.

The foremost objective and achievement ofthe French Revolution was not just totransfer State power from the feudalaristocracy to the merchant-capitalistbourgeoisie, to break part of the formerrepressive State apparatus and replace itwith a new one (e.g., the national popularArmy) but also to attack the number-oneIdeological State Apparatus: the Church.Hence the civil constitution of the clergy,the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth,and the creation of new Ideological StateApparatuses to replace the religiousIdeological State Apparatus in its dominantrole.

Naturally, these things did not happenautomatically: witness the Concordat, the

Restoration and the long class strugglebetween the landed aristocracy and theindustrial bourgeoisie throughout thenineteenth century for the establishment ofbourgeois hegemony over the functionsformerly fulfilled by the Church: above allby the Schools. It can be said that thebourgeoisie relied on the new political,parliamentary-democratic, Ideological StateApparatus, installed in the earliest yearsof the Revolution, then restored after longand violent struggles, for a few months in1848 and for decades after the fall of theSecond Empire, in order to conduct itsstruggle against the Church and wrest itsideological functions away from it, in otherwords, to ensure not only its own politicalhegemony, but also the ideological hegemonyindispensable to the reproduction ofcapitalist relations of production.

That is why I believe that I am justifiedin advancing the following Thesis, howeverprecarious it is. I believe that theIdeological State Apparatus which has beeninstalled in the dominant position in maturecapitalist social formations as a result ofa violent political and ideological classstruggle against the old dominantIdeological State Apparatus, isthe educational ideological apparatus.

This thesis may seem paradoxical, giventhat for everyone, i.e. in the ideologicalrepresentation that the bourgeoisie has

tried to give itself and the classes itexploits, it really seems that the dominantIdeological State Apparatus in capitalistsocial formations is not the Schools, butthe political Ideological State Apparatus,i.e. the regime of parliamentary democracycombining universal suffrage and partystruggle.

However, history, even recent history,shows that the bourgeoisie has been andstill is able to accommodate itself topolitical Ideological State Apparatusesother than parliamentary democracy: theFirst and Second Empires, ConstitutionalMonarchy (Louis XVIII and Charles X),Parliamentary Monarchy (Louis-Philippe),Presidential Democracy (de Gaulle), tomention only France. In England this is evenclearer. The Revolution was particularly‘successful’ there from the bourgeois pointof view, since unlike France, where thebourgeoisie, partly because of the stupidityof the petty aristocracy, had to agree tobeing carried to power by peasant andplebeian ‘journées révolutionnaires’, somethingfor which it had to pay a high price, theEnglish bourgeoisie was able to ‘compromise’with the aristocracy and ‘share’ State powerand the use of the State apparatus with itfor a long time (peace among all men of goodwill in the ruling classes!). In Germany itis even more striking, since it was behind apolitical Ideological State Apparatus inwhich the imperial Junkers (epitomized by

Bismarck), their army and their policeprovided it with a shield and leadingpersonnel, that the imperialist bourgeoisiemade its shattering entry into history,before ‘traversing’ the Weimar Republic andentrusting itself to Nazism.

Hence I believe I have good reasons forthinking that behind the scenes of itspolitical Ideological State Apparatus, whichoccupies the front of the stage, what thebourgeoisie has installed as its number-one,i.e. as its dominant Ideological StateApparatus, is the educational apparatus,which has in fact replaced in its functionsthe previously dominant Ideological StateApparatus, the Church. One might even add:the School-Family couple has replaced theChurch-Family couple.

Why is the educational apparatus in factthe dominant Ideological State Apparatus incapitalist social formations, and how doesit function?

For the moment it must suffice to say:

1. All Ideological State Apparatuses,whatever they are, contribute to the sameresult: the reproduction of the relations ofproduction, i.e. of capitalist relations ofexploitation.

2. Each of them contributes towards thissingle result in the way proper to it. Thepolitical apparatus by subjecting

individuals to the political State ideology,the ‘indirect’ (parliamentary) or ‘direct’(plebiscitary or fascist) ‘democratic’ideology. The communications apparatus bycramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses ofnationalism, chauvinism, liberalism,moralism, etc, by means of the press, theradio and television. The same goes for thecultural apparatus (the role of sport inchauvinism is of the first importance), etc.The religious apparatus by recalling insermons and the other great ceremonies ofBirth, Marriage and Death, that man is onlyashes, unless he loves his neighbour to theextent of turning the other cheek to whoeverstrikes first. The family apparatus ...butthere is no need to go on.

3. This concert is dominated by a singlescore, occasionally disturbed bycontradictions (those of the remnants offormer ruling classes, those of theproletarians and their organizations): thescore of the Ideology of the current rulingclass which integrates into its music thegreat themes of the Humanism of the GreatForefathers, who produced the Greek Miracleeven before Christianity, and afterwards theGlory of Rome, the Eternal City, and thethemes of Interest, particular and general,etc. nationalism, moralism and economism.

4. Nevertheless, in this concert, oneIdeological State Apparatus certainly hasthe dominant role, although hardly anyone

lends an ear to its music: it is so silent!This is the School.

It takes children from every class atinfant-school age, and then for years, theyears in which the child is most‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the FamilyState Apparatus and the Educational StateApparatus, it drums into them, whether ituses new or old methods, a certain amount of‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology(French, arithmetic, natural history, thesciences, literature) or simply the rulingideology in its pure state (ethics, civicinstruction, philosophy). Somewhere aroundthe age of sixteen, a huge mass of childrenare ejected ‘into production’: these are theworkers or small peasants. Another portionof scholastically adapted youth carries on:and, for better or worse, it goes somewhatfurther, until it falls by the wayside andfills the posts of small and middletechnicians, white-collar workers, small andmiddle executives, petty bourgeois of allkinds. A last portion reaches the summit,either to fall into intellectual semi-employment, or to provide, as well as the‘intellectuals of the collective labourer’,the agents of exploitation (capitalists,managers), the agents of repression(soldiers, policemen, politicians,administrators, etc.) and the professionalideologists (priests of all sorts, most ofwhom are convinced ‘laymen’).

Each mass ejected en route is practicallyprovided with the ideology which suits therole it has to fulfil in class society: therole of the exploited (with a ‘highly-developed’ ‘professional’, ‘ethical’,‘civic’, ‘national’ and a-politicalconsciousness); the role of the agent ofexploitation (ability to give the workersorders and speak to them: ‘humanrelations’), of the agent of repression(ability to give orders and enforceobedience ‘without discussion’, or abilityto manipulate the demagogy of a politicalleader’s rhetoric), or of the professionalideologist (ability to treat consciousnesseswith the respect, i.e. with the contempt,blackmail, and demagogy they deserve,adapted to the accents of Morality, ofVirtue, of ‘Transcendence’, of the Nation,of France’s World Role, etc.).

Of course, many of these contrastingVirtues (modesty, resignation,submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism,contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even smooth talk and cunning onthe other) are also taught in the Family, inthe Church, in the Army, in Good Books, infilms and even in the football stadium. Butno other Ideological State Apparatus has theobligatory (and not least, free) audience ofthe totality of the children in thecapitalist social formation, eight hours aday for five or six days out of seven.

But it is by an apprenticeship in avariety of know-how wrapped up in themassive inculcation of the ideology of theruling class that therelations of production in acapitalist social formation, i.e. therelations of exploited to exploiters andexploiters to exploited, are largelyreproduced. The mechanisms which producethis vital result for the capitalist regimeare naturally covered up and concealed by auniversally reigning ideology of the School,universally reigning because it is one ofthe essential forms of the ruling bourgeoisideology: an ideology which represents theSchool as a neutral environment purged ofideology (because it is ...lay), whereteachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and‘freedom’ of the children who are entrustedto them (in complete confidence) by their‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. theowners of their children) open up for themthe path to the freedom, morality andresponsibility of adults by their ownexample, by knowledge, literature and their‘liberating’ virtues.

I ask the pardon of those teachers who, indreadful conditions, attempt to turn the fewweapons they can find in the history andlearning they ‘teach’ against the ideology,the system and the practices in which theyare trapped. They are a kind of hero. Butthey are rare and how many (the majority) donot even begin to suspect the ‘work’ thesystem (which is bigger than they are and

crushes them) forces them to do, or worse,put all their heart and ingenuity intoperforming it with the most advancedawareness (the famous new methods!). Solittle do they suspect it that their owndevotion contributes to the maintenance andnourishment of this ideologicalrepresentation of the School, which makesthe School today as ‘natural’,indispensable-useful and even beneficial forour contemporaries as the Church was‘natural’, indispensable and generous forour ancestors a few centuries ago.

In fact, the Church has been replacedtoday in its role as the dominant Ideological StateApparatus by the School. It is coupled withthe Family just as the Church was oncecoupled with the Family. We can now claimthat the unprecedentedly deep crisis whichis now shaking the education system of somany States across the globe, often inconjunction with a crisis (alreadyproclaimed in the Communist Manifesto) shakingthe family system, takes on a politicalmeaning, given that the School (and theSchool/Family couple) constitutes thedominant Ideological State Apparatus, theApparatus playing a determinant part in thereproduction of the relations of productionof a mode of production threatened in itsexistence by the world class struggle.

On Ideology

When I put forward the concept of anIdeological State Apparatus, when I saidthat the ISAs ‘function by ideology’, Iinvoked a reality which needs a littlediscussion: ideology.

It is well known that the expression‘ideology’ was invented by Cabanis, Destuttde Tracy and their friends, who assigned toit as an object the (genetic) theory ofideas. When Marx took up the term fiftyyears later, he gave it a quite differentmeaning, even in his Early Works. Here,ideology is the system of the ideas andrepresentations which dominate the mind of aman or a social group. The ideologico-political struggle conducted by Marx asearly as his articles in the RheinischeZeitung inevitably and quickly brought himface to face with this reality and forcedhim to take his earliest intuitions further.

However, here we come upon a ratherastonishing paradox. Everything seems tolead Marx to formulate a theory of ideology.In fact, The German Ideology does offer us,after the 1844 Manuscripts, an explicit theoryof ideology, but ...it is not Marxist (weshall see why in a moment). As for Capital,although it does contain many hints towardsa theory of ideologies (most visibly, theideology of the vulgar economists), it doesnot contain that theory itself, whichdepends for the most part on a theory ofideology in general.

I should like to venture a first and veryschematic outline of such a theory. Thetheses I am about to put forward arecertainly not off the cuff, but they cannotbe sustained and tested, i.e. confirmed orrejected, except by much thorough study andanalysis.

Ideology has no History

One word first of all to expound thereason in principle which seems to me tofound, or at least to justify, the projectof a theory of ideology in general, and not atheory of particular ideologies, which,whatever their form (religious, ethical,legal, political), always express classpositions.

It is quite obvious that it is necessaryto proceed towards a theory of ideologies inthe two respects I have just suggested. Itwill then be clear that a theory ofideologies depends in the last resort on thehistory of social formations, and thus ofthe modes of production combined in socialformations, and of the class struggles whichdevelop in them. In this sense it is clearthat there can be no question of a theory ofideologies in general, sinceideologies (defined in the double respectsuggested above: regional and class) have ahistory, whose determination in the lastinstance is clearly situated outsideideologies alone, although it involves them.

On the contrary, if I am able to putforward the project of a theory ofideology in general, and if this theory reallyis one of the elements on which theories ofideologies depend, that entails anapparently paradoxical proposition which Ishall express in the followingterms: ideology has no history.

As we know, this formulation appears in somany words in a passage from The GermanIdeology. Marx utters it with respect tometaphysics, which, he says, has no morehistory than ethics (meaning also the otherforms of ideology).

In The German Ideology, this formulationappears in a plainly positivist context.Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, apure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All itsreality is external to it. Ideology is thusthought as an imaginary construction whosestatus is exactly like the theoreticalstatus of the dream among writers beforeFreud. For these writers, the dream was thepurely imaginary, i.e. null, result of‘day’s residues’, presented in an arbitraryarrangement and order, sometimes even‘inverted’, in other words, in ‘disorder’.For them, the dream was the imaginary, itwas empty, null and arbitrarily ‘stucktogether’ (bricolé), once the eyes had closed,from the residues of the only full andpositive reality, the reality of the day.This is exactly the status of philosophy and

ideology (since in this book philosophy isideology par excellence) in The German Ideology.

Ideology, then, is for Marx an imaginaryassemblage (bricolage), a pure dream, emptyand vain, constituted by the ‘day’sresidues’ from the only full and positivereality, that of the concrete history ofconcrete material individuals materiallyproducing their existence. It is on thisbasis that ideology has no history in TheGerman Ideology, since its history is outsideit, where the only existing history is, thehistory of concrete individuals, etc. In TheGerman Ideology, the thesis that ideology hasno history is therefore a purely negativethesis, since it means both:

1. ideology is nothing insofar asit is a pure dream (manufactured bywho knows what power: if not by thealienation of the division oflabour, but that, too, isa negative determination);

2. ideology has no history, whichemphatically does not mean thatthere is no history in it (on thecontrary, for it is merely thepale, empty and inverted reflectionof real history) but that it has nohistory of its own.

Now, while the thesis I wish to defendformally speaking adopts the terms of TheGerman Ideology (‘ideology has no history’),

it is radically different from thepositivist and historicist thesis of TheGerman Ideology.

For on the one hand, I think it ispossible to hold that ideologies have a history oftheir own (although it is determined in thelast instance by the class struggle); and onthe other, I think it is possible to holdthat ideology in general has no history, not in anegative sense (its history is external toit), but in an absolutely positive sense.

This sense is a positive one if it is truethat the peculiarity of ideology is that itis endowed with a structure and afunctioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which thatstructure and functioning are immutable,present in the same form throughout what wecan call history, in the sense in whichthe Communist Manifesto defines history as thehistory of class struggles, i.e. the historyof class societies.

To give a theoretical reference-pointhere, I might say that, to return to ourexample of the dream, in its Freudianconception this time, our proposition:ideology has no history, can and must (andin a way which has absolutely nothingarbitrary about it, but, quite the reverse,is theoretically necessary, for there is anorganic link between the two propositions)

be related directly to Freud’s propositionthat the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it hasno history.

If eternal means, not transcendent to all(temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in formthroughout the extent of history, I shalladopt Freud’s expression word for word, andwrite ideology is eternal, exactly like theunconscious. And I add that I find thiscomparison theoretically justified by thefact that the eternity of the unconscious isnot unrelated to the eternity of ideology ingeneral.

That is why I believe I am justified,hypothetically at least, in proposing atheory of ideology in general, in the sensethat Freud presented a theory of theunconscious in general.

To simplify the phrase, it is convenient,taking into account what has been said aboutideologies, to use the plain term ideologyto designate ideology in general, which Ihave just said has no history, or, whatcomes to the same thing, is eternal, i.e.omnipresent in its immutable form throughouthistory (= the history of social formationscontaining social classes). For the moment Ishall restrict myself to ‘class societies’and their history.

Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the ImaginaryRelationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions

of Existence

In order to approach my central thesis onthe structure and functioning of ideology, Ishall first present two theses, onenegative, the other positive. The firstconcerns the object which is ‘represented’in the imaginary form of ideology, thesecond concerns the materiality of ideology.

Thesis I. Ideology represents the imaginaryrelationship of individuals to their realconditions of existence.

We commonly call religious ideology,ethical ideology, legal ideology, politicalideology, etc., so many ‘world outlooks’. Ofcourse, assuming that we do not live one ofthese ideologies as the truth (e.g.‘believe’ in God, Duty, Justice, etc....),we admit that the ideology we are discussingfrom a critical point of view, examining itas the ethnologist examines the myths of a‘primitive society’, that these ‘worldoutlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not‘correspond to reality’.

However, while admitting that they do notcorrespond to reality, i.e. that theyconstitute an illusion, we admit that theydo make allusion to reality, and that theyneed only be ‘interpreted’ to discover thereality of the world behind their imaginary

representation of that world (ideology=illusion/allusion).

There are different types ofinterpretation, the most famous of which arethe mechanistic type, current in theeighteenth century (God is the imaginaryrepresentation of the real King), and the‘hermeneutic ‘ interpretation, inaugurated bythe earliest Church Fathers, and revived byFeuerbach and the theologico-philosophicalschool which descends from him, e.g. thetheologian Barth (to Feuerbach, for example,God is the essence of real Man). Theessential point is that on condition that weinterpret the imaginary transposition (andinversion) of ideology we arrive at theconclusion that in ideology ‘men representtheir real conditions of existence tothemselves in an imaginary form’.

Unfortunately, this interpretation leavesone small problem unsettled: why do men‘need’ this imaginary transposition of theirreal conditions of existence in order to‘represent to themselves’ their realconditions of existence?

The first answer (that of the eighteenthcentury) proposes a simple solution: Priestsor Despots are responsible. They ‘forged’the Beautiful Lies so that, in the beliefthat they were obeying God, men would infact obey the Priests and Despots, who areusually in alliance in their imposture, the

Priests acting in the interests of theDespots or vice versa, according to thepolitical positions of the ‘theoreticians’concerned. There is therefore a cause forthe imaginary transposition of the realconditions of existence: that cause is theexistence of a small number of cynical menwho base their domination and exploitationof the ‘people’ on a falsifiedrepresentation of the world which they haveimagined in order to enslave other minds bydominating their imaginations.

The second answer (that of Feuerbach,taken over word for word by Marx in hisEarly Works) is more ‘profound’, i.e. justas false. It, too, seeks and finds a causefor the imaginary transposition anddistortion of men’s real conditions ofexistence, in short, for the alienation inthe imaginary of the representation of men’sconditions of existence. This cause is nolonger Priests or Despots, nor their activeimagination and the passive imagination oftheir victims. This cause is the materialalienation which reigns in the conditions ofexistence of men themselves. This is how,in The Jewish Question and elsewhere, Marxdefends the Feuerbachian idea that men makethemselves an alienated (= imaginary)representation of their conditions ofexistence because these conditions ofexistence are themselves alienating (inthe 1844 Manuscripts: because these conditions

are dominated by the essence of alienatedsociety – ‘alienated labour’).

All these interpretations thus takeliterally the thesis which they presuppose,and on which they depend, i.e. that what isreflected in the imaginary representation ofthe world found in an ideology is theconditions of existence of men, i.e. theirreal world.

Now I can return to a thesis which I havealready advanced: it is not their realconditions of existence, their real world,that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ inideology, but above all it is their relationto those conditions of existence which isrepresented to them there. It is thisrelation which is at the centre of everyideological, i.e. imaginary, representationof the real world. It is this relation thatcontains the ‘cause’ which has to explainthe imaginary distortion of the ideologicalrepresentation of the real world. Or rather,to leave aside the language of causality itis necessary to advance the thesis that itis the imaginary nature of this relation whichunderlies all the imaginary distortion thatwe can observe (if we do not live in itstruth) in all ideology.

To speak in a Marxist language, if it istrue that the representation of the realconditions of existence of the individualsoccupying the posts of agents of production,

exploitation, repression, ideologization andscientific practice, does in the lastanalysis arise from the relations ofproduction, and from relations deriving fromthe relations of production, we can say thefollowing: all ideology represents in itsnecessarily imaginary distortion not theexisting relations of production (and theother relations that derive from them), butabove all the (imaginary) relationship ofindividuals to the relations of productionand the relations that derive from them.What is represented in ideology is thereforenot the system of the real relations whichgovern the existence of individuals, but theimaginary relation of those individuals tothe real relations in which they live.

If this is the case, the question of the‘cause’ of the imaginary distortion of thereal relations in ideology disappears andmust be replaced by a different question:why is the representation given toindividuals of their (individual) relationto the social relations which govern theirconditions of existence and their collectiveand individual life necessarily an imaginaryrelation? And what is the nature of thisimaginariness? Posed in this way, thequestion explodes the solution by a‘clique’[14], by a group of individuals(Priests or Despots) who are the authors ofthe great ideological mystification, just asit explodes the solution by the alienatedcharacter of the real world. We shall see

why later in my exposition. For the moment Ishall go no further.

Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.

I have already touched on this thesis bysaying that the ‘ideas’ or‘representations’, etc., which seem to makeup ideology do not have an ideal(idéale or idéelle) or spiritual existence, buta material existence. I even suggested thatthe ideal (idéale, idéelle) and spiritualexistence of ‘ideas’ arises exclusively inan ideology of the ‘idea’ and of ideology,and let me add, in an ideology of what seemsto have ‘founded’ this conception since theemergence of the sciences, i.e. what thepracticians of the sciences represent tothemselves in their spontaneous ideology as‘ideas’, true or false. Of course, presentedin affirmative form, this thesis isunproven. I simply ask that the reader befavourably disposed towards it, say, in thename of materialism. A long series ofarguments would be necessary to prove it.

This hypothetical thesis of the notspiritual but material existence of ‘ideas’or other ‘representations’ is indeednecessary if we are to advance in ouranalysis of the nature of ideology. Orrather, it is merely useful to us in orderthe better to reveal what every at allserious analysis of any ideology will

immediately and empirically show to everyobserver, however critical.

While discussing the Ideological StateApparatuses and their practices, I said thateach of them was the realization of anideology (the unity of these differentregional ideologies – religious, ethical,legal, political, aesthetic, etc. – beingassured by their subjection to the rulingideology). I now return to this thesis: anideology always exists in an apparatus, andits practice, or practices. This existenceis material.

Of course, the material existence of theideology in an apparatus and its practicesdoes not have the same modality as thematerial existence of a paving-stone or arifle. But, at the risk of being taken for aNeo-Aristotelian (NB Marx had a very highregard for Aristotle), I shall say that‘matter is discussed in many senses’, orrather that it exists in differentmodalities, all rooted in the last instancein ‘physical’ matter.

Having said this, let me move straight onand see what happens to the ‘individuals’who live in ideology, i.e. in a determinate(religious, ethical, etc.) representation ofthe world whose imaginary distortion dependson their imaginary relation to theirconditions of existence, in other words, inthe last instance, to the relations of

production and to class relations (ideology= an imaginary relation to real relations).I shall say that this imaginary relation isitself endowed with a material existence.

Now I observe the following.

An individual believes in God, or Duty, orJustice, etc. This belief derives (foreveryone, i.e. for all those who live in anideological representation of ideology,which reduces ideology to ideas endowed bydefinition with a spiritual existence) fromthe ideas of the individual concerned, i.e.from him as a subject with a consciousnesswhich contains the ideas of his belief. Inthis way, i.e. by means of the absolutelyideological ‘conceptual’ device (dispositif)thus set up (a subject endowed with aconsciousness in which he freely forms orfreely recognizes ideas in which hebelieves), the (material) attitude of thesubject concerned naturally follows.

The individual in question behaves in suchand such a way, adopts such and such apractical attitude, and, what is more,participates in certain regular practiceswhich are those of the ideological apparatuson which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has inall consciousness freely chosen as asubject. If he believes in God, he goes toChurch to attend Mass, kneels, prays,confesses, does penance (once it wasmaterial in the ordinary sense of the term)

and naturally repents and so on. If hebelieves in Duty, he will have thecorresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritualpractices ‘according to the correctprinciples’. If he believes in Justice, hewill submit unconditionally to the rules ofthe Law, and may even protest when they areviolated, sign petitions, take part in ademonstration, etc.

Throughout this schema we observe that theideological representation of ideology isitself forced to recognize that every‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ andbelieving in the ‘ideas’ that his‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freelyaccepts, must ‘act according to his ideas’,must therefore inscribe his own ideas as afree subject in the actions of his materialpractice. If he does not do so, ‘that iswicked’.

Indeed, if he does not do what he ought todo as a function of what he believes, it isbecause he does something else, which, stillas a function of the same idealist scheme,implies that he has other ideas in his headas well as those he proclaims, and that heacts according to these other ideas, as aman who is either ‘inconsistent’ (‘no one iswillingly evil’) or cynical, or perverse.

In every case, the ideology of ideologythus recognizes, despite its imaginarydistortion, that the ‘ideas’ of a human

subject exist in his actions, or ought toexist in his actions, and if that is not thecase, it lends him other ideas correspondingto the actions (however perverse) that hedoes perform. This ideology talks ofactions: I shall talk of actions insertedinto practices. And I shall point out thatthese practices are governed by the rituals inwhich these practices are inscribed, withinthe material existence of an ideological apparatus, beit only a small part of that apparatus: asmall mass in a small church, a funeral, aminor match at a sports’ club, a school day,a political party meeting, etc.

Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’sdefensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderfulformula which will enable us to invert theorder of the notional schema of ideology.Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, moveyour lips in prayer, and you will believe.’He thus scandalously inverts the order ofthings, bringing, like Christ, not peace butstrife, and in addition something hardlyChristian (for woe to him who brings scandalinto the world!) – scandal itself. Afortunate scandal which makes him stick withJansenist defiance to a language thatdirectly names the reality.

I will be allowed to leave Pascal to thearguments of his ideological struggle withthe religious Ideological State Apparatus ofhis day. And I shall be expected to use amore directly Marxist vocabulary, if that is

possible, for we are advancing in stillpoorly explored domains.

I shall therefore say that, where only asingle subject (such and such an individual)is concerned, the existence of the ideas ofhis belief is material in that his ideas are hismaterial actions inserted into material practices governedby material rituals which are themselves defined by thematerial ideological apparatus from which derive the ideasof that subject. Naturally, the four inscriptionsof the adjective ‘material’ in myproposition must be affected by differentmodalities: the materialities of adisplacement for going to mass, of kneelingdown, of the gesture of the sign of thecross, or of the mea culpa, of a sentence, ofa prayer, of an act of contrition, of apenitence, of a gaze, of a hand-shake, of anexternal verbal discourse or an ‘internal’verbal discourse (consciousness), are notone and the same materiality. I shall leaveon one side the problem of a theory of thedifferences between the modalities ofmateriality.

It remains that in this invertedpresentation of things, we are not dealingwith an ‘inversion’ at all, since it isclear that certain notions have purely andsimply disappeared from our presentation,whereas others on the contrary survive, andnew terms appear.

Disappeared: the term ideas.

Survive: theterms subject, consciousness, belief, actions.

Appear: the terms practices, rituals, ideologicalapparatus.

It is therefore not an inversion oroverturning (except in the sense in whichone might say a government or a glass isoverturned), but a reshuffle (of a non-ministerial type), a rather strangereshuffle, since we obtain the followingresult.

Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar asthey are endowed with an ideal or spiritualexistence), to the precise extent that ithas emerged that their existence isinscribed in the actions of practicesgoverned by rituals defined in the lastinstance by an ideological apparatus. Ittherefore appears that the subject actsinsofar as he is acted by the followingsystem (set out in the order of its realdetermination): ideology existing in amaterial ideological apparatus, prescribingmaterial practices governed by a materialritual, which practices exist in thematerial actions of a subject acting in allconsciousness according to his belief.

But this very presentation reveals that wehave retained the following notions:subject, consciousness, belief, actions.From this series I shall immediately extractthe decisive central term on which

everything else depends: the notion ofthe subject.

And I shall immediately set down twoconjoint theses:

1. there is no practice except by and inan ideology;

2. there is no ideology except by thesubject and for subjects.

I can now come to my central thesis.

Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects

This thesis is simply a matter of makingmy last proposition explicit: there is noideology except by the subject and forsubjects. Meaning, there is no ideologyexcept for concrete subjects, and thisdestination for ideology is only madepossible by the subject: meaning, by thecategory of the subject and its functioning.

By this I mean that, even if it onlyappears under this name (the subject) withthe rise of bourgeois ideology, above allwith the rise of legal ideology,[15] thecategory of the subject (which may functionunder other names: e.g., as the soul inPlato, as God, etc.) is the constitutivecategory of all ideology, whatever itsdetermination (regional or class) andwhatever its historical date – sinceideology has no history.

I say: the category of the subject isconstitutive of all ideology, but at thesame time and immediately I add that thecategory of the subject is only constitutive of all ideologyinsofar as all ideology has the function (which definesit) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects. Inthe interaction of this double constitutionexists the functioning of all ideology,ideology being nothing but its functioningin the material forms of existence of thatfunctioning.

In order to grasp what follows, it isessential to realize that both he who iswriting these lines and the reader who readsthem are themselves subjects, and thereforeideological subjects (a tautologicalproposition), i.e. that the author and thereader of these lines both live‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideologyin the sense in which I have said that ‘manis an ideological animal by nature’.

That the author, insofar as he writes thelines of a discourse which claims to bescientific, is completely absent as a‘subject’ from ‘his’ scientific discourse(for all scientific discourse is bydefinition a subject-less discourse, thereis no ‘Subject of science’ except in anideology of science) is a different questionwhich I shall leave on one side for themoment.

As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the‘Logos’, meaning in ideology, that we ‘live,move and have our being’. It follows that,for you and for me, the category of thesubject is a primary ‘obviousness’(obviousnesses are always primary): it isclear that you and I are subjects (free,ethical, etc....). Like all obviousnesses,including those that make a word ‘name athing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (thereforeincluding the obviousness of the‘transparency’ of language), the‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects –and that that does not cause any problems –is an ideological effect, the elementaryideological effect.[16] It is indeed apeculiarity of ideology that it imposes(without appearing to do so, since these are‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses asobviousnesses, which we cannot fail torecognize and before which we have theinevitable and natural reaction of cryingout (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice ofconscience’): ‘That’s obvious! That’s right!That’s true!’

At work in this reaction is theideological recognition function which is oneof the two functions of ideology as such(its inverse being the functionof misrecognition – méconnaissance).

To take a highly ‘concrete’ example, weall have friends who, when they knock on ourdoor and we ask, through the door, the

question ‘Who’s there?’, answer (since ‘it’sobvious’) ‘It’s me’. And we recognize that‘it is him’, or ‘her’. We open the door, and‘it’s true, it really was she who wasthere’. To take another example, when werecognize somebody of our (previous)acquaintance ((re)-connaissance) in the street,we show him that we have recognized him (andhave recognized that he has recognized us)by saying to him ‘Hello, my friend’, andshaking his hand (a material ritual practiceof ideological recognition in everyday life– in France, at least; elsewhere, there areother rituals).

In this preliminary remark and theseconcrete illustrations, I only wish to pointout that you and I are always already subjects,and as such constantly practice the ritualsof ideological recognition, which guaranteefor us that we are indeed concrete,individual, distinguishable and (naturally)irreplaceable subjects. The writing I amcurrently executing and the reading you arecurrently[17] performing are also in thisrespect rituals of ideological recognition,including the ‘obviousness’ with which the‘truth’ or ‘error’ of my reflections mayimpose itself on you.

But to recognize that we are subjects andthat we function in the practical rituals ofthe most elementary everyday life (the hand-shake, the fact of calling you by your name,the fact of knowing, even if I do not know

what it is, that you ‘have’ a name of yourown, which means that you are recognized asa unique subject, etc.) – this recognitiononly gives us the ‘consciousness’ of ourincessant (eternal) practice of ideologicalrecognition – its consciousness, i.e.its recognition – but in no sense does it giveus the (scientific) knowledge of themechanism of this recognition. Now it isthis knowledge that we have to reach, if youwill, while speaking in ideology, and fromwithin ideology we have to outline adiscourse which tries to break withideology, in order to dare to be thebeginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology.

Thus in order to represent why thecategory of the ‘subject’ is constitutive ofideology, which only exists by constitutingconcrete subjects as subjects, I shallemploy a special mode of exposition:‘concrete’ enough to be recognized, butabstract enough to be thinkable and thought,giving rise to a knowledge.

As a first formulation I shall say: allideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals asconcrete subjects, by the functioning of thecategory of the subject.

This is a proposition which entails thatwe distinguish for the moment betweenconcrete individuals on the one hand andconcrete subjects on the other, although at

this level concrete subjects only existinsofar as they are supported by a concreteindividual.

I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’or ‘functions’ in such a way that it‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals(it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ theindividuals into subjects (it transformsthem all) by that very precise operationwhich I have called interpellation or hailing,and which can be imagined along the lines ofthe most commonplace everyday police (orother) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’[18]

Assuming that the theoretical scene I haveimagined takes place in the street, thehailed individual will turn round. By thismere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physicalconversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Becausehe has recognized that the hail was ‘really’addressed to him, and that ‘it was reallyhim who was hailed’ (and not someone else).Experience shows that the practicaltelecommunication of hailings is such thatthey hardly ever miss their man: verbal callor whistle, the one hailed always recognizesthat it is really him who is being hailed.And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and onewhich cannot be explained solely by ‘guiltfeelings’, despite the large numbers who‘have something on their consciences’.

Naturally for the convenience and clarityof my little theoretical theatre I have had

to present things in the form of a sequence,with a before and an after, and thus in theform of a temporal succession. There areindividuals walking along. Somewhere(usually behind them) the hail rings out:‘Hey, you there!’ One individual (nine timesout often it is the right one) turns round,believing/suspecting/knowing that it is forhim, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’who is meant by the hailing. But in realitythese things happen without any succession.The existence of ideology and the hailing orinterpellation of individuals as subjectsare one and the same thing.

I might add: what thus seems to take placeoutside ideology (to be precise, in thestreet), in reality takes place in ideology.What really takes place in ideology seemstherefore to take place outside it. That iswhy those who are in ideology believethemselves by definition outside ideology:one of the effects of ideology is thepractical denegation of the ideologicalcharacter of ideology by ideology: ideologynever says, ‘I am ideological’. It isnecessary to be outside ideology, i.e. inscientific knowledge, to be able to say: Iam in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or(the general case): I was in ideology. As iswell known, the accusation of being inideology only applies to others, never tooneself (unless one is really a Spinozist ora Marxist, which, in this matter, is to beexactly the same thing). Which amounts to

saying that ideology has no outside (foritself), but at the same time that it is nothingbut outside (for science and reality).

Spinoza explained this completely twocenturies before Marx, who practised it butwithout explaining it in detail. But let usleave this point, although it is heavy withconsequences, consequences which are notjust theoretical, but also directlypolitical, since, for example, the wholetheory of criticism and self-criticism, thegolden rule of the Marxist-Leninist practiceof the class struggle, depends on it.

Thus ideology hails or interpellatesindividuals as subjects. As ideology iseternal, I must now suppress the temporalform in which I have presented thefunctioning of ideology, and say: ideologyhas always-already interpellated individualsas subjects, which amounts to making itclear that individuals are always-alreadyinterpellated by ideology as subjects, whichnecessarily leads us to one lastproposition: individuals are always-alreadysubjects. Hence individuals are ‘abstract’with respect to the subjects which theyalways already are. This proposition mightseem paradoxical.

That an individual is always-already asubject, even before he is born, isnevertheless the plain reality, accessibleto everyone and not a paradox at all. Freud

shows that individuals are always ‘abstract’with respect to the subjects they always-already are, simply by noting theideological ritual that surrounds theexpectation of a ‘birth’, that ‘happyevent’. Everyone knows how much and in whatway an unborn child is expected. Whichamounts to saying, very prosaically, if weagree to drop the ‘sentiments’, i.e. theforms of family ideology (paternal/maternalconjugal/fraternal) in which the unbornchild is expected: it is certain in advancethat it will bear its Father’s Name, andwill therefore have an identity and beirreplaceable. Before its birth, the childis therefore always-already a subject,appointed as a subject in and by thespecific familial ideological configurationin which it is ‘expected’ once it has beenconceived. I hardly need add that thisfamilial ideological configuration is, inits uniqueness, highly structured, and thatit is in this implacable and more or less‘pathological’ (presupposing that anymeaning can be assigned to that term)structure that the former subject to-be willhave to ‘find’ ‘its’ place, i.e. ‘become’the sexual subject (boy or girl) which italready is in advance. It is clear that thisideological constraint and pre-appointment,and all the rituals of rearing and theneducation in the family, have somerelationship with what Freud studied in theforms of the pre-genital and genital‘stages’ of sexuality, i.e. in the ‘grip’ of

what Freud registered by its effects asbeing the unconscious. But let us leave thispoint, too, on one side.

Let me go one step further. What I shallnow turn my attention to is the way the‘actors’ in this mise en scène [setting] ofinterpellation, and their respective roles,are reflected in the very structure of allideology.

An Example: The Christian Religious Ideology

As the formal structure of all ideology isalways the same, I shall restrict myanalysis to a single example, one accessibleto everyone, that of religious ideology,with the proviso that the same demonstrationcan be produced for ethical, legal,political, aesthetic ideology, etc.

Let us therefore consider the Christianreligious ideology. I shall use a rhetoricalfigure and ‘make it speak’, i.e. collectinto a fictional discourse what it ‘says’not only in its two Testaments, itsTheologians, Sermons, but also in itspractices, its rituals, its ceremonies andits sacraments. The Christian religiousideology says something like this:

It says: I address myself to you, a humanindividual called Peter (every individual iscalled by his name, in the passive sense, itis never he who provides his own name), inorder to tell you that God exists and that

you are answer able to Him. It adds: Godaddresses himself to you through my voice(Scripture having collected the Word of God,Tradition having transmitted it, PapalInfallibility fixing it for ever on ‘nice’points). It says: this is who you are: youare Peter! This is your origin, you werecreated by God for all eternity, althoughyou were born in the 1920th year of OurLord! This is your place in the world! Thisis what you must do! By these means, if youobserve the ‘law of love’ you will be saved,you, Peter, and will become part of theGlorious Body of Christ! Etc....

Now this is quite a familiar and banaldiscourse, but at the same time quite asurprising one.

Surprising because if we consider thatreligious ideology is indeed addressed toindividuals,[19] in order to ‘transform theminto subjects’, by interpellating theindividual, Peter, in order to make him asubject, free to obey or disobey the appeal,i.e. God’s commandments; if it calls theseindividuals by their names, thus recognizingthat they are always-already interpellatedas subjects with a personal identity (to theextent that Pascal’s Christ says: ‘It is foryou that I have shed this drop of myblood!’); if it interpellates them in such away that the subject responds: ‘Yes, it really isme!’ if it obtains from themthe recognition that they really do occupy the

place it designates for them as theirs inthe world, a fixed residence: ‘It really isme, I am here, a worker, a boss or asoldier!’ in this vale of tears; if itobtains from them the recognition of adestination (eternal life or damnation)according to the respect or contempt theyshow to ‘God’s Commandments’, Law becomeLove; – if everything does happen in thisway (in the practices of the well-knownrituals of baptism, confirmation, communion,confession and extreme unction, etc. ...),we should note that all this ‘procedure’ toset up Christian religious subjects isdominated by a strange phenomenon: the factthat there can only be such a multitude ofpossible religious subjects on the absolutecondition that there is a Unique,Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God.

It is convenient to designate this new andremarkable Subject by writing Subject with acapital S to distinguish it from ordinarysubjects, with a small s.

It then emerges that the interpellation ofindividuals as subjects presupposes the‘existence’ of a Unique and central OtherSubject, in whose Name the religiousideology interpellates all individuals assubjects. All this is clearly[20] written inwhat is rightly called the Scriptures. ‘Andit came to pass at that time that God theLord (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud.And the Lord cried to Moses, “Moses!” And

Moses replied “It is (really) I! I am Mosesthy servant, speak and I shall listen!” Andthe Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, “Iam that I am"’.

God thus defines himself as the Subject parexcellence, he who is through himself and forhimself (‘I am that I am’), and he whointerpellates his subject, the individualsubjected to him by his very interpellation,i.e. the individual named Moses. And Moses,interpellated-called by his Name, havingrecognized that it ‘really’ was he who wascalled by God, recognizes that he is asubject, a subject of God, a subjectsubjected to God, a subject through the Subject andsubjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him,and makes his people obey God’sCommandments.

God is thus the Subject, and Moses and theinnumerable subjects of God’s people, theSubject’s interlocutors-interpellates:his mirrors, hisreflections. Were not men made inthe image of God? As all theologicalreflection proves, whereas He ‘could’perfectly well have done without men, Godneeds them, the Subject needs the subjects,just as men need God, the subjects need theSubject. Better: God needs men, the greatSubject needs subjects, even in the terribleinversion of his image in them (when thesubjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).

Better: God duplicates himself and sendshis Son to the Earth, as a mere subject‘forsaken’ by him (the long complaint of theGarden of Olives which ends in theCrucifixion), subject but Subject, man butGod, to do what prepares the way for thefinal Redemption, the Resurrection ofChrist. God thus needs to ‘make himself’ aman, the Subject needs to become a subject,as if to show empirically, visibly to theeye, tangibly to the hands (see St. Thomas)of the subjects, that, if they are subjects,subjected to the Subject, that is solely inorder that finally, on Judgement Day, theywill re-enter the Lord’s Bosom, like Christ,i.e. re-enter the Subject.[21]

Let us decipher into theoretical languagethis wonderful necessity for the duplicationof the Subject into subjects and of the Subject itselfinto a subject-Subject.

We observe that the structure of allideology, interpellating individuals assubjects in the name of a Unique andAbsolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirrorduplication is constitutive of ideology andensures its functioning. Which means thatall ideology is centred, that the AbsoluteSubject occupies the unique place of theCentre, and interpellates around it theinfinity of individuals into subjects in adouble mirror-connexion such thatit subjects the subjects to the Subject, while

giving them in the Subject in which eachsubject can contemplate its own image(present and future) the guarantee that thisreally concerns them and Him, and that sinceeverything takes place in the Family (theHoly Family: the Family is in essence Holy),‘God will recognize his own in it’, i.e. thosewho have recognized God, and have recognizedthemselves in Him, will be saved.

Let me summarize what we have discoveredabout ideology in general.

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideologyensures simultaneously:

1. the interpellation of‘individuals’ as subjects;

2. their subjection to the Subject;

3. the mutual recognition ofsubjects and Subject, the subjects’recognition of each other, andfinally the subject’s recognitionof himself;[22]

4. the absolute guarantee thateverything really is so, and thaton condition that the subjectsrecognize what they are and behaveaccordingly, everything will be allright: Amen – ‘So be it’.

Result: caught in this quadruple system ofinterpellation as subjects, of subjection to

the Subject, of universal recognition and ofabsolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’,they ‘work by themselves’ in the vastmajority of cases, with the exception of the‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke theintervention of one of the detachments ofthe (Repressive) State Apparatus. But thevast majority of (good) subjects work allright ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology(whose concrete forms are realized in theIdeological State Apparatuses). They areinserted into practices governed by therituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ theexisting state of affairs (das Bestehende),that ‘it really is true that it is so andnot otherwise’, and that they must beobedient to God, to their conscience, to thepriest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to theengineer, that thou shalt ‘love thyneighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete,material behaviour is simply the inscriptionin life of the admirable words of theprayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.

Yes, the subjects ‘work by themselves’.The whole mystery of this effect lies in thefirst two moments of the quadruple system Ihave just discussed, or, if you prefer, inthe ambiguity of the term subject. In theordinary use of the term, subject in factmeans: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre ofinitiatives, author of and responsible forits actions; (2) a subjected being, whosubmits to a higher authority, and istherefore stripped of all freedom except

that of freely accepting his submission.This last note gives us the meaning of thisambiguity, which is merely a reflection ofthe effect which produces it: theindividual is interpellated as a (free) subject in orderthat he shall submit freely to the commandments of theSubject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept hissubjection, i.e. in order that he shall makethe gestures and actions of his subjection‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except byand for their subjection. That is why they ‘workall by themselves’.

‘So be it! ...’ This phrase which registers theeffect to be obtained proves that it is not‘naturally’ so (‘naturally’: outside theprayer, i.e. outside the ideologicalintervention). This phrase proves thatit has to be so if things are to be whatthey must be, and let us let the words slip:if the reproduction of the relations ofproduction is to be assured, even in theprocesses of production and circulation,every day, in the ‘consciousness’, i.e. inthe attitudes of the individual-subjectsoccupying the posts which the socio-technical division of labour assigns to themin production, exploitation, repression,ideologization, scientific practice, etc.Indeed, what is really in question in thismechanism of the mirror recognition of theSubject and of the individuals interpellatedas subjects, and of the guarantee given bythe Subject to the subjects if they freelyaccept their subjection to the Subject’s

‘commandments’? The reality in question inthis mechanism, the reality which isnecessarily ignored(méconnue) in the veryforms of recognition (ideology =misrecognition/ignorance) is indeed, in thelast resort, the reproduction of therelations of production and of the relationsderiving from them.

January-April 1969

P.S. If these few schematic theses allow meto illuminate certain aspects of thefunctioning of the Superstructure and itsmode of intervention in the Infrastructure,they are obviously abstract and necessarilyleave several important problems unanswered,which should be mentioned:

1. The problem of the total process of therealization of the reproduction of therelations of production.

As an element of this process, theISAs contribute to this reproduction. But thepoint of view of their contribution alone isstill an abstract one.

It is only within the processes ofproduction and circulation that thisreproduction is realized. It is realized by themechanisms of those processes, in which thetraining of the workers is ‘completed’,their posts assigned them, etc. It is in theinternal mechanisms of these processes thatthe effect of the different ideologies is

felt (above all the effect of legal-ethicalideology).

But this point of view is still anabstract one. For in a class society therelations of production are relations ofexploitation, and therefore relationsbetween antagonistic classes. Thereproduction of the relations of production,the ultimate aim of the ruling class, cannottherefore be a merely technical operationtraining and distributing individuals forthe different posts in the ‘technicaldivision’ of labour. In fact there is no‘technical division’ of labour except in theideology of the ruling class: every‘technical’ division, every ‘technical’organization of labour is the form and maskof a social (= class) division andorganization of labour. The reproduction ofthe relations of production can thereforeonly be a class undertaking. It is realizedthrough a class struggle which counterposesthe ruling class and the exploited class.

The total process of the realization of thereproduction of the relations of productionis therefore still abstract, insofar as ithas not adopted the point of view of thisclass struggle. To adopt the point of viewof reproduction is therefore in the lastinstance, to adopt the point of view of theclass struggle.

2. The problem of the class nature of theideologies existing in a social formation.

The ‘mechanism’ of ideology in general is onething. We have seen that it can be reducedto a few principles expressed in a few words(as ‘poor’ as those which, according toMarx, define production in general, or inFreud, define the unconscious in general). Ifthere is any truth in it, this mechanismmust be abstract with respect to every realideological formation.

I have suggested that the ideologieswere realized in institutions, in theirrituals and their practices, in the ISAs. Wehave seen that on this basis they contributeto that form of class struggle, vital forthe ruling class, the reproduction of therelations of production. But the point ofview itself however real, is still anabstract one.

In fact, the State and its Apparatusesonly have meaning from the point of view ofthe class struggle, as an apparatus of classstruggle ensuring class oppression andguaranteeing the conditions of exploitationand its reproduction. But there is no classstruggle without antagonistic classes.Whoever says class struggle of the rulingclass says resistance, revolt and classstruggle of the ruled class.

That is why the ISAs are not therealization of ideology in general, nor even

the conflict-free realization of theideology of the ruling class. The ideologyof the ruling class does not become theruling ideology by the grace of God, noreven by virtue of the seizure of State poweralone. It is by the installation of the ISAsin which this ideology is realized andrealizes itself that it becomes the rulingideology. But this installation is notachieved all by itself; on the contrary, itis the stake in a very bitter and continuousclass struggle: first against the formerruling classes and their positions in theold and new ISAs, then against the exploitedclass.

But this point of view of the classstruggle in the ISAs is still an abstractone. In fact, the class struggle in the ISAsis indeed an aspect of the class struggle,sometimes an important and symptomatic one:e.g. the anti-religious struggle in theeighteenth century, or the ‘crisis’ of theeducational ISA in every capitalist countrytoday. But the class struggles in the ISAsis only one aspect of a class struggle whichgoes beyond the ISAs. The ideology that aclass in power makes the ruling ideology inits ISAs is indeed ‘realized’ in those ISAs,but it goes beyond them, for it comes fromelsewhere. Similarly, the ideology that aruled class manages to defend in and againstsuch ISAs goes beyond them, for it comesfrom elsewhere.

It is only from the point of view of theclasses, i.e. of the class struggle, that itis possible to explain theideologies existing in a social formation.Not only is it from this starting-point thatit is possible to explain the realization ofthe ruling ideology in the ISAs and of theforms of class struggle for which the ISAsare the seat and the stake. But it is alsoand above all from this starting-point thatit is possible to understand the provenanceof the ideologies which are realized in theISAs and confront one another there. For ifit is true that the ISAs representthe form in which the ideology of the rulingclass must necessarily be realized, and theform in which the ideology of the ruledclass must necessarily be measured andconfronted, ideologies are not ‘born’ in theISAs but from the social classes at grips inthe class struggle: from their conditions ofexistence, their practices, their experienceof the struggle, etc.

April 1970

Notes1. 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; seealso 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 ashis failure.

11. What I have said in these few brief words about the class struggle in the ISAs is obviously far from exhausting thequestion of the class struggle.

To approach this question, two principlesmust 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 betweenthe 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 formsin 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 beyondthese 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 inpower.

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 themateriality of the processes of production and circulation. But it shouldnot 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 preciselythe 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 ideologyof the Human Essence. To find the material with which to construct a theoryof the guarantee, we must turn to Spinoza.