An investigation of Ideology and its apparition in Althusser and Foucault

The two different texts “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and “Discipline

and Punish” have been taken as two counter posing texts, one which proclaims Marxism on

its every page and the other which has been an important text of Foucault on the way to his

hostile criticisms of Marxism. Neither Foucault nor Althusser were historians or sociologists

whose objective is to create theories of society or make the analysis of historical moments.

They are philosophers who exhibited the functions of certain concepts outside history and

within it to make an aufhebung possible, and to lead to different ways of thinking. In my point

of view these two works overlap, and they both enter into a domain of a survey of ideology.

Terry Eagleton in his book ideology made several descriptions of ideology, one of them is:

“… is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of

domination.”According to this definition, ideology is the study of the process of

legitimization of power and its ways of appearance in the very minimal components of the

society. I would take this definition of ideology and further dwell on the manifestation of

ideology in Foucault and Althusser.

Even though their theories oppose each other; Althusser and Foucault have reflected

on the same subject that the individual is not given and it has been constituted, produced

through different levels of mediation. The individual is reproduced with and within power

relations and it is shaped with the discourse of the power. For Althusser the ideology is

nothing but an imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The

ideology takes its raison d’être from the practice of life and it is a reflector of the practice of

life. But it is just a reflector for that reason it lasts as being an imitation of life where the

imaginary relations which are abstracted from the real take place. And the ideology always

needs to exist in an apparatus and it cannot be separated from its practice. It is where the

ideology gets duplicated and Althusser starts to use the term ideology of ideology: “In every

case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the

‘ideas’ of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions, and if that is

not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that

he does perform. These ideology talks of actions: I shall talk of actions inserted

into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in

which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological

apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a

funeral, a minor match at a sports’ club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc.” The

ideology by its nature needs to be materialized with an apparatus which distributes the

ideology. And the major apparatus of the ideology where the relations of power are practiced

is the state. Throughout history there have been diverse forms of domination, be it the feudal

lords and the serfs in Middle Ages or the plebeians and the slaves in Ancient Rome, but there

has always been different apparatuses for the distribution of the dominant ideology. In our

modern bourgeois society the distribution is held by the state. To sum up; Althusser is

interested in the process which the people are brought to ideology as subjects. He says: “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’ the individuals into subjects (it

transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or

hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday

police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!” He means that; the process is a process that no

one exists outside the system of ideology. We are hailed into the social system starting from

the very first moment that we are born. The ideology has no outside, but dialectically it is also

the opposite of the outside. It is the representation of the reality which is just a mere

imagination.

This is how Althusser deals with ideology and power relations, but how does Foucault

deal with it? For Foucault and his acolytes power is not something confined with the

apparatuses like army and parliament, but is something that is deeply diffused to our lives

which is apparent even in our slightest gestures and our daily ways of being. Foucault chooses

another path here; to limit power and its apparitions to mere political manifestations would

itself be an ideological maneuver so he adopts the term “discourse”. A quarrel between

husband and wife over who is supposed to cook tonight need not be ideological but it

becomes so when gender roles come into play. But saying that that content is ideological is

something different from saying “it is ideological”. Or the term Lebenstraum (sacrifice)

becomes ideological when connected with Fascism and the political interests this term serves.

That is why the problem of ideology in Foucault is reduced to a discourse that we build by the

help of language. The main impulse of Foucault’s philosophy is genealogy; he digs the

historical documents and compares the practices according to their meanings in that particular

era. His genealogy deconstructs what has been regarded as unified, but at the same time he

maintains the underlying historical continuity. He defines genealogy as the “history of the

present” in which we elaborate on history and by the help of history the present unfolds. His

philosophy is a perspectival philosophy which is not holistic, it gives us a chance of different

ways of interpretation and it is an assertion of white or black; but it is grey. That is why in

“Discipline and Punish” he compares the public execution of the middle Ages and the

imprisonment and the panoptic system of the modern world. He introduces the book: “This

book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a

genealogy of the present scientific-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its

base, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its

effects and by which it masks exorbitant singularity.” The survey of punishment and

discipline is taken as a complex social function which is an indicator of social structures and

the exercise of power. The history is the history of the body which it is bound with complex

reciprocal relations, materialized with the economic use of the body. The constitution of labor

power is only possible with the body and this only happens when the body is subjected. But

he continues: “This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or

ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material

elements, an yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organize, technically

thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither weapons nor of terror yet remain of a

physical order.” For Foucault there may be knowledge of the body and the mastery upon it

which is called the political technology of the body. This political technology is diffused in

many particular elements that the research of the apparatuses and the institutions would not be

enough because they only construct the micro physics of power.

As we can Foucault puts that the power relations cannot be reduced to the apparatuses or the

state, it is diffused in micro elements of the society. Foucault’s view seems instancial in

comparison to the Althusser’s because in his theory a holistic worldview does not exist and

his theory ends up being a relativist one. This way we can also say that Foucault opened a

pathway to the post-modernistic interpretation of history as metanarratives. So, if this is so

how can the theories be reconciled? The moment when Foucault said the soul is the prison of

the body he meant that the theologians were wrong with their idea of a substitution of the real

man for the soul and now the real man is imprisoned in the “soul” where more profound

power relations take place and he is also one of the actors of these relations. I find that the

opposition of Foucault is a one which is a rough one because it does not consider that the

apparatuses of the ideology does not need to be merely state and institutions but they are also

the micro organisms that help the ideology diffuse into culture and be reproduced throughout

history. I believe the diverse points of views are emerging out of the same research which is

the research on the practice of the power which would constitute diverse definitions of

ideologies for Terry Eagleton.