June 15, 2018:
That something is the Ideological State Apparatuses, which Althusser differentiated from what he termed the Repressive State Apparatus with which classical Marxism was familiar. An "Ideological State Apparatus" is "a system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practices", through which the state realizes the dominant ideology — the ideology of the ruling class. Althusser lists them this way:
- the Scholastic Apparatus
- the Familial Apparatus
- the Religious Apparatus
- the Political Apparatus
- the Associative Apparatus
- the Information and News Apparatus
- the Publishing and Distribution Apparatus
- the Cultural Apparatus
Each ISA has its corresponding institutions. The Scholastic Apparatus consists of schools, obviously; but perhaps less obviously the networks of research institutes, think tanks, and so on. Each ISA is a system of institutions, organizations, and their corresponding practices; a system which is not reducible to ideas, but consists of ideologies plus the material infrastructures and social practices through which ideologies are materialized, disseminated, and reproduced.
You'll note something interesting about the list: not all of the organizations constituting the system of an ISA belong to the government. The family, churches, news and entertainment, many schools: these institutions are "free" — free of state control — part of what "freedom" means. Althusser argues that this freedom is not germane, since for him it's the system of institutions which form an ISA, and that a system is not the same thing as the individuals who own its components. Indeed — Althusser doesn't say this but I think it's implied — this very independence from government control is part of what makes certain ISAs effective: after all, nobody in Soviet Russia believed Pravda. Importantly the state is now a far wider concept than merely the government, which is just one of its components.
Althusser is trying to think the role which ideology plays in reproducing the conditions of possibility of the social formation and its dominant mode of production. How is it possible that people act day in day out against their class interests? He wants to theorize this without the idealist chimera of "false consciousness". He's saying: consciousness has nothing to do with it. He's showing how these apparatuses not only disseminate and reproduce the dominant ideology, but realize that ideology in their practices. Here's a late passage which helps make this clear:
"It is a fact that social reproduction is not realized exclusively on the basis of the reproduction of labor, but, rather, presupposes the fundamental intervention of the ideological. Let us take an example: a worker who goes to his workplace has already travelled a long road through the social institutions — individual or collective — that induce him to come, voluntarily or involuntarily, and offer his services in exchange for the purchase of his labor-power: time, energy, concentration, and so on. And although the material means of reproducing labor-power is wages, they do not suffice, as is well known. From his school years on, the worker has been ‘formed' to conform to certain social norms that regulate behavior: punctuality, efficiency, obedience, responsibility, family love and recognition of all forms of authority. This formation presupposes subjection to the dominant ideology. In other words, he is a subject structurally subjected to the dominant — or non-dominant — ideology; that is to say, to a society's hegemonic or subaltern norms and values."
This concept of Ideological State Apparatuses is perhaps Althusser's most striking and well-known intervention: it was intended to produce "effects", and it did. Althusser succeeded in prompting militants of all convictions to take a wider view of the state than simply its repressive forces, implying a correspondingly expanded view of activist political practice. It's no longer possible to do activism competently without thinking strategically about how to talk to people as subjects of these ideological effects. Implied, I think, is a new language, a new activist vocabulary which intervenes into the specific ways people think. Or, perhaps better, in the ideological narratives within and by which their thinking is determined.