Louis Althusser (1997), 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation' (1969) in Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 100-140.

Althusser begins his famous essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation' with the Marxist idea of the reproduction of the conditions of production (from Volume 2 of Capital). Every social formation is both produced and reproduces itself in order to maintain its hold over the productive forces and the relations of production (1997: 100-1). Althusser investigates this self-serving procedure initially through the reproduction of labour-power. Labour reproduces itself through wage-capital and not as a condition of the material reproduction of labour (although this clearly takes place too in the bourgeois family) to make sure the worker turns up for work over and over again. Unlike social formations of slavery, the reproduction of the skills or the lack of them required are provided by the capitalist education system and other institutions. Prospective workers learn the technical skills and knowledge needed to slot neatly into the working hierarchy - as manual labourers, technicians, engineers, managers, and so on. Althusser calls this 'know-how' but they also learn the rules of social behaviour that 'actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination' (1997: 103). Workers learn skills and rules that reproduces the labour-power appropriate to the dominant ideology.

The Marxist conception of the social whole is important here (as distinct from Hegel's conception) as it is founded on levels: the infrastructure or economic base (both the productive force and the relations of production) and the superstructure (which contains the politico-legal apparatus and ideology). The spatial metaphor reveals that the base literally supports the rest, and determines its operations somewhat - or rather is determined by the 'effectivity' of the base, as the superstructure is both relatively autonomous and the superstructure exerts a reciprocal action on the base (Althusser, 1997: 105). For Althusser, 'descriptive theory' such as this in the way contradiction works in requiring something beyond the description. It is from this description that Althusser proceeds in conceiving the superstructure in terms of reproduction.

The Marxist tradition casts the capitalist State generally as a repressive apparatus, as a means of repression ensuring domination and exploitation in the form of generating surplus value. This description demands its 'supersession' for Althusser - not that it is not correct but more is required - in a further supplementary theoretical development. This, of course, is the notorious theory of the 'ideological State apparatuses,' not to be confused with the 'repressive State apparatuses' (that includes the government, army, police, courts, prisons, etc.) that 'functions through violence' (1997: 110; perhaps through symbolic violence or 'administrative repression'). The ideological State apparatuses (includes the family, schools, church, legal apparatus, political system, trade unions, communications media, arts and culture, etc.) works not only in the public domain but in the private realm too - perhaps contributing to making the distinction meaningless (and in itself only meaningful in a capitalist context of course). Both function through repression and ideology but the essential difference is that rather than predominantly acting by repression or violence, it functions through ideology and more covertly. State power is thus maintained by the State apparatus that includes institutions that represent the repressive apparatus and the ideological apparatus (Althusser, 1997: 113). It requires this expanded description of the apparatus to understand its reproduction. 

This is not a new phenomena. In pre-industrial times, the ideological state apparatus worked through the Church predominantly, controlling other apparatuses like education, communications and culture. Antagonism was correspondingly directed at this oppressive ideological formation. Althusser, writing in 1969, thinks this central position has been taken by the education apparatus in capitalist social formations (1997: 116; coupled with the family in both cases), and the contemporary conception of the knowledge economy would appear to confirm this thesis. It is in school that the 'know-how' is 'wrapped in the ruling ideology' (1997: 118) and the introduction of a national curriculum makes this explicit (note: our recycling it into blank paper was a mild gesture of antagonism in this regard. The publication 'The Impossibility of Art Education' also has something to add on this subject, as does Alan Sekula in his essay 'School is a Factory'). In school there is a captive and free audience for the reproduction of the capitalist social formation: 'the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced' (Althusser, 1997: 119). This is why the politically committed still see teaching as a vital activity of counter-ideological struggle - sadly less and less in these post-political times. 

Ideology:

Ideology has no history, claims Althusser (something the art historian John Roberts emulated in his 'Art has no History' book title). Here he is not disregarding that allegedly Cabanais and Destutt de Tracy et al coined the term to describe a '(genetic) theory of ideas' or that Marx then formulated a theory of ideology, but to confirm that ideology necessarily expresses class positions as a non-historical reality (1997: 120 & 122). The paradoxical statement is taken from Marx's The German Ideology in which he proposes that ideology has no history, 'since its history is outside it, where the only existing history is, the history of concrete individuals, etc.' (1997: 121). The idea that ideology has no history is a negative thesis to indicate that ideology is pure illusion produced by those in power, but also its sense of history is a mere reflection of 'real history' - it has 'no history of its own' (1997: 122). 

Althusser defines ideology more closely again in terms of representation: 'ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence.' (1997: 123). It is an imaginary representation of the real conditions of production. He also claims that ideology has a material existence for it exists in the apparatus and its practice just as physical matter (and this is no surprise to someone versed in conceptualism, and immaterial production). The ideas of a human subject are 'material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject' (1997: 127). This proposition leads Althusser to assert that there is no ideology outside subjectivity (and he includes himself and the reader in this scenario as both 'in ideology'). This is a certain recognition of ideology as opposed to the function of misrecognition. To Althusser, we are 'always-already subjects' practising the rituals of ideological recognition: 'all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects' (1997: 130). Ideology interpellates or recruits subjects by hailing 'Hey, you there!' (1997: 131; the note says like the police hailing a suspect of a crime).

Althusser further explores the Freudian connections here in the construction of the subject and in the free acceptance of this condition: 
'the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection "all by himself". There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they "work all by themselves".
"So be it!..."' (1997: 136) 
This is the mechanism of ideology. For Althusser, ideology is thus seen to be 'misrecognition', and the 'reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them' (1997: 136). 


Note:

In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu's theory of 'habitus' that works slightly differently in examining the mechanisms by which ideology operates in everyday life. He proposes the idea of the 'collective unconscious' to describe the ways in which actions are regulated without a conscious obedience to rules.