Philosophy for Non-Philosophers by Louis Althusser

Author:Louis Althusser [Goshgarian, Translated and edited by G. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472592026
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

11 IDEOLOGICAL PRACTICE

Now that we have discussed the practice of production and scientific practice, it is imperative that we also discuss ideological practice, for, without knowledge of it, we cannot arrive at an understanding of what philosophy is.

In my opinion, there clearly exists an ideological practice. Naturally, it is highly disconcerting, for it is not easy to recognize in ideological practice the categories that we have employed in our analyses so far. We should, however, take a closer look at it.

The most disconcerting thing about ideological practice is that we find no trace of the presence of an agent in it. If an ideology is a system of more or less unified ideas, it is clear that they act on ‘consciousnesses’ without the visible intervention of any agent whatsoever, not even that of the person who propagates them, since it is the self-evidence and power of ideas that acts through him. For we cannot say that the agent, in an ideology, is the individual who invented it. Everyone is well aware that the ideologies which play a real role in world history have no known author, or that, even if one can assign an author to them (Christ, for example), he could have been replaced at the same moment by anyone else at all. Thus it seems as if ideology acted all by itself, as if it were itself its own agent. This alone brings it close to the Aristotelian definition to which we have referred.

What continues to disconcert us in ideological practice, however, is the ‘nature’ of the raw material on which ideology acts as its own agent of transformation. On a rough preliminary approach, we can say that this raw material consists of human individuals insofar as they are endowed with ‘consciousness’ and have certain ‘ideas’, whatever they may be. Yet it can be seen right away that human individuals and their consciousness are mentioned here only as supports of the ideas they have, and that the raw material on which ideological practice acts is constituted by this system of ideas. Thus we find ourselves faced with the paradox of an ideological practice in which one system of ideas acts directly on another, for, since there is no distinct agent, the instruments of production (Generalities II) are conflated with the sole system of ideas of the existing ideology. On this condition, we can conceive of ideological practice as the transformation of existing ideology under the impact [sous l’effet] of the direct action of another ideology, distinct from the first. Otherwise, the question of its transformation would be absurd.

All this may seem mysterious. Things are nevertheless quite simple in principle, but on one condition: that we understand that an ideology is a system of ideas (or representations) only insofar as it is a system of social relations. In other words, in the guise of a system of ideas acting on another system of ideas in order to transform it, a system of social relations acts on another system of social relations in order to transform it.

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