Althusser: Ideology has no history

[papaspace]

Can someone explain Althusser's claim that "ideology has no history"? What is it supposed to mean?

[caramelpence]

Can someone explain Althusser's claim that "ideology has no history"? What is it supposed to mean?

Althusser views ideology as a functional necessity of all societies rather than being specific to certain modes of production. This is what the quote means. More specifically, he believes that societies need ideology in order for individuals to be constituted as subjects and made capable of acting on the world and conducting themselves as purposeful beings, such that communist society will also embody ideology and its own ideological apparatuses. This is different from what most scholars would see as a more orthodox Marxist understanding of ideology in that Marx himself used the term ideology as a way of referring to beliefs that arise from deficient material conditions and systematically distort the way people view and understand the world, as in his metaphor of the "camera obscura", so that, on Marx's account, ideology is specific to class society (and possibly only capitalist society, if his concept of commodity fetishism is closely tied to his earlier theory of ideology) and will be superseded with communism, under which individuals will have an unmediated and undistorted understanding of their society. In this sense, communist society for Marx is a society without ideology, whereas this is not and cannot be the case for Althusser. As part of his notion of the "interpellating" role of ideology, i.e. the way in which ideology constitutes subjects, Althusser distinguishes between ideology and science, and sees Marxism as a scientific view of the world, which identifies the operation of history through structures and structural contradictions rather than through determinate human subjects, and so in that sense he retains something of the original Marxist concept of ideology being negative and distorting, and differs from Lukacs, who identifies Marxism with proletarian ideology, but Althusser ultimately insists that we still need ideology because science cannot serve as an adequate basis when it comes to individuals being able to act in the world and in relation to other individuals.

I think his essay 'Marxism and Humanism' (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1964/marxism-humanism.htm) is the best explanation of these issues, and it is part of the book Pour Marx.

[jake williams]

Can someone explain Althusser's claim that "ideology has no history"? What is it supposed to mean?
It means that you shouldn't bother taking Althusser seriously whatsoever.

Here's what wiki has to say though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser#Ideological_state_apparatuses

[Old Mole]

Althusser is a charlatan, just a stalinist that is much more incomprehensible than the rest because of his flirtation with the disease called structuralism. Here is the definition of ideology according to Althusser from a quite good glossary:
"Ideology is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world, or a reflected form of this unconscious relation, for instance a ‘philosophy’, etc. It is distinguished from a science not by its falsity, for it can be coherent and logical (for instance, theology), but by the fact that the practico-social predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it precedes the science that is produced by making an epistemological break with it, but it survives alongside science as an essential element of every social formation, including a socialist and even a communist society."
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/index.htm#tendency
That glossary explains alot about Althusser, I dont know where they got the information, because Althusser seldom defines the meaning of the the terms he uses. The definition above deals with the relation between ideology and history according to Althusser, its of course total BS like everything else Althusser has ever said/written. (anti-communist traitor, still readable) Leszek Kolakowski crushes Althusser in this essay if youre interested:
http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5334/2235

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

he retains something of the original Marxist concept of ideology being negative and distorting, and differs from Lukacs, who identifies Marxism with proletarian ideology,
I find Althusser's definition of Ideology ("people's imagined relationship to their real circumstances") useful in avoiding the utopianism of Lukacs or of those arguments that claim the End of History is the End of Ideology - very eschatological, that.

On the other hand, Althusser is merely moving the goalposts. The issue remains, in what way is capitalist ideology different from all others? Here I find the alternate expression, "false consciousness" useful:


...not merely an ideology, an accurate, complex and intellectually rigorous system for fellating flies, but a false consciousness, a process of collusion with and against reality, a deliberate, often conscious effort to deny ... social reality... - The Red Museum. (http://theorangepress.com/publications)

[caramelpence]

I find Althusser's definition of Ideology ("people's imagined relationship to their real circumstances") useful in avoiding the utopianism of Lukacs or of those arguments that claim the End of History is the End of Ideology - very eschatological, that.

Neither Marx nor any post-Marx Marxist have ever identified communism with the end of history, to my knowledge, and Marx himself says the exact opposite, so I don't see what's eschatological here.


On the other hand, Althusser is merely moving the goalposts. The issue remains, in what way is capitalist ideology different from all others? Here I find the alternate expression, "false consciousness" useful:


...not merely an ideology, an accurate, complex and intellectually rigorous system for fellating flies, but a false consciousness, a process of collusion with and against reality, a deliberate, often conscious effort to deny ... social reality... - The Red Museum.

Except, this definition and the term "false consciousness" have nothing to do with Marx's understanding of ideology. By saying that false consciousness is about being "against reality" and "denying reality" you are making it seem as if ideology is solely a matter of subjective error or as if the distorting role of ideology is somehow independent of reality itself, but Marx makes it quite clear in his Introduction to his 1843 Critique, The German Ideology, and in Capital Vol. 1 that ideology organically emerges out of the process of material production and that it is ideological because of the deficient character of practice. When Marx says in the Introduction, for example, that "this state and society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world", he is implicitly opposing himself to those such as Voltaire who would argue that religion is a matter of pure illusion or otherworldliness and that it exists only through the intrigues of priests and churches and other institutions, and is instead seeking to convey the ways in which certain kinds of material conditions and processes are structured in such a way that they produce their own mystification and encourage a distorted worldview on the part of those who are embedded in them. His account of commodity fetishism represents the most detailed elaboration of this theoretical conception and that's why I suggested in my previous post that Marx might see ideology (in the specific way he deploys the term) as unique to capitalist society. Marx's notion of ideology being organically and spontaneously produced constitutes a further important difference between him and Althusser, other than their different perspectives on whether ideology is historically specific and necessary for subjectivity, in that Althusser does not see ideology as something that is spontaneously produced in and through material activity, but ties it to determinate institutions, his state ideological apparatuses, which (in my view) signifies a shift back towards pre-Marxian critiques of religion, and raises the question about what ensures that these apparatuses produce ideology that is favorable to the continued rule of the bourgeoisie. Lukacs is much closer to Marx in this respect despite not adequately distinguishing between Marxism and ideology in that he identifies the fragmentary and reifying characteristics of bourgeois ideology with the operations of capitalism itself and seeks to extend on Marx's account by examining how reification and fragmentation encompass the totality of consciousness and lived experience.

In fairness to you and Althusser, though, he does distinguish between ideology under capitalism and ideology in communist society, in that he says: "In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all men."

[caramelpence]

PS - now that I've read that quote again, which is from some random website, I need to ask, why do you make use of alleged theoretical explanations that involve weird sexual imagery, from people who no-one has ever heard of before? I remember you used a quote before that involved a reference to incest. There are plenty of other theorists who wrongly associate Marx's conception of ideology with "false consciousness" so why you need to draw on such obscure quotes and references is beyond me!

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

PS - now that I've read that quote again, which is from some random website, I need to ask, why do you make use of alleged theoretical explanations that involve weird sexual imagery, from people who no-one has ever heard of before?

So sorry. I should have mentioned that this weird expression, "false consciousness," is out of some dude named Engels nobody's ever heard of anyhow - I mean, what's the point of raising arguments when you can just name-drop authorities here and there like a Medieval scholastic?

PS - I can understand how references to sex, or shit, or material things get you kind of grossed out. So.... material, you know. So lower-clahsss.

[caramelpence]

So sorry. I should have mentioned that this weird expression, "false consciousness," is out of some dude named Engels nobody's ever heard of anyhow - I mean, what's the point of raising arguments when you can just name-drop authorities here and there like a Medieval scholastic?

PS - I can understand how references to sex, or shit, or material things get you kind of grossed out. So.... material, you know. So lower-clahsss.

I didn't actually say that "false consciousness" was a weird expression, I said that you cite obscure web pages whose authors are wrong in their interpretations of Marx and disturbing in their choice of imagery. I do hold that false consciousness is an inadequate characterization of Marx's conception of ideology however, and I also think that Engels' treatment of ideology, including but not limited to his usage of that term, is an example of Engels obscuring some of the more nuanced and insightful elements of Marx's thought in the interests of popularization and simplification. In any case, I've already given an explanation of why Marx doesn't understand ideology in terms of subjective illusion and the rejection of reality and you are welcome to respond if you choose.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

I would recommend reading "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm)" Or to get to what you are asking about, the following heading:


Ideology has no History

One word first of all to expound the reason in principle which seems to me to found, or at least to justify, the project of a theory of ideology in general, and not a theory of particular ideologies, which, whatever their form (religious, ethical, legal, political), always express class positions.
It is quite obvious that it is necessary to proceed towards a theory of ideologies in the two respects I have just suggested. It will then be clear that a theory of ideologies depends in the last resort on the history of social formations, and thus of the modes of production combined in social formations, and of the class struggles which develop in them. In this sense it is clear that there can be no question of a theory of ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the double respect suggested above: regional and class) have a history, whose determination in the last instance is clearly situated outside ideologies alone, although it involves them.
On the contrary, if I am able to put forward the project of a theory of ideology in general, and if this theory really is one of the elements on which theories of ideologies depend, that entails an apparently paradoxical proposition which I shall express in the following terms: ideology has no history.
As we know, this formulation appears in so many words in a passage from The German Ideology. Marx utters it with respect to metaphysics, which, he says, has no more history than ethics (meaning also the other forms of ideology).
In The German Ideology, this formulation appears in a plainly positivist context. Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For these writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of ‘day’s residues’, presented in an arbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even ‘inverted’, in other words, in ‘disorder’. For them, the dream was the imaginary, it was empty, null and arbitrarily ‘stuck together’ (bricolé), once the eyes had closed, from the residues of the only full and positive reality, the reality of the day. This is exactly the status of philosophy and ideology (since in this book philosophy is ideology par excellence) in The German Ideology.
Ideology, then, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence. It is on this basis that ideology has no history in The German Ideology, since its history is outside it, where the only existing history is, the history of concrete individuals, etc. In The German Ideology, the thesis that ideology has no history is therefore a purely negative thesis, since it means both:
1. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream (manufactured by who knows what power: if not by the alienation of the division of labour, but that, too, is a negative determination);
2. ideology has no history, which emphatically does not mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary, for it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history) but that it has no history of its own.
Now, while the thesis I wish to defend formally speaking adopts the terms of The German Ideology (‘ideology has no history’), it is radically different from the positivist and historicist thesis of The German Ideology.
For on the one hand, I think it is possible to hold that ideologies have a history of their own (although it is determined in the last instance by the class struggle); and on the other, I think it is possible to hold that ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely positive sense.
This sense is a positive one if it is true that the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies.
To give a theoretical reference-point here, I might say that, to return to our example of the dream, in its Freudian conception this time, our proposition: ideology has no history, can and must (and in a way which has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the reverse, is theoretically necessary, for there is an organic link between the two propositions) be related directly to Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history.
If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud’s expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. And I add that I find this comparison theoretically justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general.
That is why I believe I am justified, hypothetically at least, in proposing a theory of ideology in general, in the sense that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general.
To simplify the phrase, it is convenient, taking into account what has been said about ideologies, to use the plain term ideology to designate ideology in general, which I have just said has no history, or, what comes to the same thing, is eternal, i.e. omnipresent in its immutable form throughout history (= the history of social formations containing social classes). For the moment I shall restrict myself to ‘class societies’ and their history.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

In any case, I've already given an explanation of why Marx doesn't understand ideology in terms of subjective illusion and the rejection of reality and you are welcome to respond if you choose.

Well, I don't see much point in "responding" here, except to note that our positions are so far apart they make any further exchange useless to me: if you're going to conflate Marx's take on "ideology" (as in Destutt de Tracy) with his take on "consciousness" (as in Kantian / Hegelian epistemology) then you've already front-loaded your conclusions. It would be like someone who claimed that the sensual aspects presented to consciousness (bodies that move in certain ways) were the equivalent of the ways the self perceives them at any given time (eeew! sex!).

[caramelpence]

if you're going to conflate Marx's take on "ideology" (as in Destutt de Tracy)

Marx's understanding of ideology is not "as in Destutt de Tracy", though, and I don't think there is any commentator who would argue otherwise, whatever the other divergences between theorists on what Marx's conception of ideology involves. De Tracy's understanding of ideology is that it is a field of study (as in geology or biology) that is concerned with ideas and their historical and social determinants, and it was only with Bonaparte and Heine that the term underwent a shift in meaning and came closer to having a negative resonance and connotations of abstract and metaphysical ideas, which signifies both a move towards Marx's conception in particular, due to the negative aspect, and more recent conceptions of ideology in general, insofar as all contemporary theories of ideology (Freeden, Laclau, etc.) see ideology as a certain kind or form of consciousness, and not a field of study as in de Tracy's original usage, however much they may differ on the role of ideology and whether it is sensible to postulate a non-ideological worldview and a post-ideological world.


with his take on "consciousness" (as in Kantian / Hegelian epistemology)

In what way have I conflated Marx's understanding of ideology with consciousness in general? In the account I've given, Marx endows ideology with a negative meaning and envisages a society without ideology, and that account necessarily embodies a clear distinction between ideology and consciousness because it would be totally implausible to say that the communist society is also a society without consciousness because consciousness and ideology are the same thing. Also, it's not clear to me why Marx's understanding of consciousness should be seen as "Kantian".

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Marx's understanding of ideology is not "as in Destutt de Tracy", though, and I don't think there is any commentator who would argue otherwise.

No wonder you're so obsessed with the "proper authorities:" you think Marx got his concept of Ideology from the Word-Fairy. (Too bad he didn't call it "Hippopotamus," instead.)

Unfortunately the Ideologue's ideology was an ideology in the current sense of the term, it wasn't just the application of ideas, it was their application to the lower classes and society as a whole by a bourgeois elite in order to control society. The Ideologues were criticized on the right for the right reasons: they were trying to impose a system of social control that would substitute for religion. Marx simply flips the right-wing critique around as he had done with Feuerbach, and points out that the French bourgeois ideology is an ideology in the same way that religion is, that is ITS FOUNDATIONS ARE METAPHYSICAL, NOT SCIENTIFIC, or rather, its scientific foundations turn out to be just as much of a metaphysics. In other terms - and this answers your second confusion - there's no getting around Kant's questioning of the ruses of metaphysics as science, so one could argue that the German (Kantian metaphysical) way of thinking is an ideology, too. Obviously you didn't get the oxymoron joke in the title, "German Ideology".

But I see that our time is up for today. We'll talk about Kant next time.