[Marx started believing] [...] during the positivist transition represented by The German Ideology, that all philosophy should be purely and simply 'abolished', because philosophy was nothing but ideology, Marx set out on a study of 'positive matters', that is, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, a study of political economy. Aware that he had so far acquired only hearsay knowledge of the subject, he undertook a serious examination of it, deciding in 1 850 'to begin everything at the beginning'. On the basis of this examination, as is well known, he produced, seventeen years later, the first volume of Capital (1867) . Unfortunately, if Capital contains a number of elements for a theory of ideologies, especially the ideology of the vulgar economists, it does not contain that theory itself, which depends to a large extent (we shall see to what extent when the time comes) on a theory of ideology in general that is still lacking in Marxist theory as such. I would like to take the considerable risk of proposing a preliminary, very schematic sketch of such a theory. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.173

a peculiar feature of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and functioning such as to make it a nonhistorical - that is, an omni-historical - reality, in the sense that this structure and functioning are, in one and the same form, immutable, present throughout what is called history […]. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.175

The advantage of this theory of ideology […] is that it concretely shows how ideology 'functions' at its most concrete level, the level of individual 'subjects': that is, people as they exist in their concrete individuality, in their work, daily lives, acts, commitments, hesitations, doubts, and sense of what is most immediately self-evident. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.176

However, while admitting that these ideologies do not correspond to reality and, accordingly, constitute an illusion, we also admit that they do make allusion to reality and that we need only 'interpret' them to discover the reality of this world beneath the surface of their imaginary representation of it (ideology = illusion/ allusion). There are different types of interpretation. […] The essential point is that, provided we interpret the imaginary transposition (and inversion) of ideology, we arrive at the conclusion that, in ideology, 'people represent (in imaginary form) their real conditions of existence'. This interpretation leaves one 'small' problem in abeyance: why do people 'need' this imaginary transposition of their real conditions of existence in order to 'represent' their real conditions of existence? […] The first interpretation (the eighteenth century's) has a simple solution to hand: priests or despots are to blame. They 'forged' Beautiful Lies so that people would, in the belief that they were obeying God, in fact obey the priests or despots, generally allied in their imposture, with the priests working in the despots' service or, depending on the aforementioned theorists' political positions, the other way around. There is therefore a cause for the imaginary transposition of real conditions of existence: that cause is a small handful of cynics who base their domination and exploitation of the 'people' on a skewed representation of the world, which they have imagined in order to enslave minds by dominating imaginations. Thank God, the imagination is a faculty common to one and all! The second interpretation (Feuerbach's, which Marx repeats word for word in his early works) is more 'profound', that is, just as false. It, too, seeks and finds a cause for the transposition and imaginary distortion of people's real conditions of existence - in short, for the alienation in the imaginary of the representation of people's conditions of existence. This cause is no longer priests or despots or their active imaginations and the passive imaginations of their victims. It is the material alienation reigning in people's very conditions of existence. All these interpretations thus take literally the thesis which they presuppose and on which they are based: that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in an ideology is people's conditions of existence, hence their real world. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.181-183

[…] ‘people' do not 'represent' their real conditions of existence in ideology, but, above all, their relation to those real conditions of existence. That relation is at the centre of every ideological, hence imaginary, representation of the real world. To put this in Marxist terms, if it is true that the representation of the real conditions of existence of individuals holding posts of agents of production, exploitation, repression, ideologization and scientific practice arises, in the last instance, from the relations of production and relations deriving from them, we may say the following: every ideology represents, in its necessarily imaginary distortion, not the existing relations of production (and the other relations deriving from them) , but, above all, individuals' (imaginary) relation to the relations of production and the relations deriving from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations governing individuals' existence, but those individuals' imaginary relation to the real relations in which they live. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.183

'ideas', or representations and the like, which seem to make up ideology, have, not an ideal, idea-dependent [ideale, ideelle] or spiritual existence, but a material one. an ideology always exists in an apparatus and in the practice or practices of that apparatus. This existence is material. Of course, the material existence of ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving stone or rifle. However, at the risk of being called a neoAristotelian (let us note in passing that Marx held Aristotle in very high esteem), we shall say that 'matter is expressed in several senses' or, rather, that it exists in diff erent modalities, all rooted, in the last instance, in 'physical' matter. It accordingly appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination) : ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices regulated by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material acts of a subject acting in all good conscience in accordance with his belief. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.184-187

[…] our presentation reveals that we have retained the following notions: subject, consciousness, belief, acts. From this sequence, we shall immediately extract the decisive central term on which everything depends: the notion of the subject. And we shall immediately state two conjoint theses: 1) There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology. 2) There is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. […] In other words, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects (such as you and me) , and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: in other words, by the category of the subject and its functioning. We mean by this that, even if it appears under this name (the subject) only with the advent of bourgeois ideology, legal ideology in particular (Which borrows the legal category of the 'subject of law' and transforms it into an ideological notion: man is by nature a subject), the category of the subject (which may function under other names: for example, the soul in Plato, God, and so on) is the category constitutive of all ideology, whatever its (regional or class) determination and whatever its historical date - since ideology has no history. We say that the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but we also immediately add that the category of the subject is constitutive of every ideology only insofar as every ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete subjects (such as you and me). The functioning of all ideology exists in the play of this twofold constitution, since ideology is nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence of that functioning. Clearly to grasp what follows, we must bear firmly in mind that both he who is writing these lines and the reader who is reading them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects (the proposition is itself tautological). That is, we have to be aware that both author and reader of these lines live 'spontaneously' or 'naturally' in ideology, in the sense in which we have said that 'man is by nature an ideological animal'. As St Paul admirably puts it, it is in the 'Logos', in other words, in ideology, that we 'live and move and have our being?' It follows that the category of the subject is a primary 'self-evident fact' for you and me (self-evident facts are always primary): it is clear that you are a (free, moral, responsible, and so on) subject, and that I am, too. Like all self-evident facts, including those that make a word 'name a thing' or 'have a meaning' (including, therefore, the self-evident facts of the 'transparency' of language), the 'self-evident fact' that you and I are subjects - and that that is not a problem - is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. For it is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts […]. […] you and I are always already subjects and, as such, constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, unmistakable and, naturally, irreplaceable subjects. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.187-189

[Translator’s Note]: The verb interpeller and the corresponding noun are common words in French. In addition to the senses Althusser mentions - hailing to get someone's attention and, not infrequently, as a prelude to harassment such as disciplinary measures in school or police identity checks - interpeller is often used in conversation to mean 'to shake up', 'to really get to': ' Her report on our army's reliance on torture really got to me (m'a interpelle'')' . Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.187

Clearly to grasp what follows, we must bear firmly in mind that both he who is writing these lines and the reader who is reading them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects (the proposition is itself tautological). That is, we have to be aware that both author and reader of these lines live 'spontaneously' or 'naturally' in ideology, in the sense in which we have said that 'man is by nature an ideological animal'. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.188

As St Paul admirably puts it, it is in the 'Logos', in other words, in ideology, that we 'live and move and have our being?' It follows that the category of the subject is a primary 'self-evident fact' for you and me (self-evident facts are always primary): it is clear that you are a (free, moral, responsible, and so on) subject, and that I am, too. Like all self-evident facts, including those that make a word 'name a thing' or 'have a meaning' (including, therefore, the self-evident facts of the 'transparency' of language), the 'self-evident fact' that you and I are subjects - and that that is not a problem - is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. For it is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts […]. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.188-189

[…] you and I are always already subjects and, as such, constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, unmistakable and, naturally, irreplaceable subjects. […] That an individual is always-already a subject, even before she is born, is nevertheless the plain fact of the matter, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all. Freud shows that individuals are always 'abstract' with respect to the subjects they always-already are, simply by noting the ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a 'birth', that 'happy event'. Everyone knows how much, and how (a good deal could be said about that 'how'), an unborn child is expected. This comes down to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to leave aside 'sentiments', in other words, the forms of familial ideology (paternal/maternal/conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected, that it is certain in advance that it will bear its father's name and so have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, then, a child is always-already a subject, marked out [assi gne] as a subject in and by the particular familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected' once it has been conceived ('deliberately' or 'by accident'). There is no need to add that this familial ideological configuration is, in its singularity, terribly structured, and that it is in this implacable, more or less 'pathological' (if any meaning can be assigned to that word) structure that the quondam subject-to-be has to 'find' 'its' place, that is, 'become' the sexual subject (boy or girl) it already is in advance. It needs no genius to suggest that this ideological constraint and marking out, and all the rituals of family child-rearing-and-training and family education, bear some relation to what Freud studied in the forms of the pre-genital and genital 'stages' of sexuality, and thus to the 'take' [prise] of what he identified, by its effects, as the unconscious. […] Apart from the limit case of the 'prenatal child', this means, concretely, the following. When religious ideology begins to function directly by interpellating the little child Louis as a subject, little Louis is already-subject - not yet religious-subject, but familial-subject. When legal ideology (later, let us suppose) begins to interpellate little Louis by talking to him about, not Mama and Papa now, or God and the Little Lord Jesus, but Justice, he was already a subject, familial, religious, scholastic, and so on. I shall skip the moral stage, aesthetic stage, and others. Finally, when, later, thanks to auto-heterobiographical circumstances of the type Popular Front, Spanish Civil War, Hitler, 1940 Defeat, captivity, encounter with a communist, and so on, political ideology (in its differential forms) begins to interpellate the now adult Louis as a subject, he has already long been, always-already been, a familial, religious, moral, scholastic and legal subject … and is now, lo and behold, a political subject! This political subject begins, once back from captivity, to make the transition from traditional Catholic activism to advanced - semi-heretical - Catholic activism, then begins reading Marx, then joins the Communist Party, and so on. So life goes. Ideologies never stop interpellating subjects as subjects, never stop 'recruiting' individuals who are always-already subjects. The play of ideologies is superposed, criss-crossed, contradicts itself on the same subject: the same individual always-already (several times) subject. Let him figure things out, if he can… Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.189, 192-193

I like Althusser’s break with the conception of ideology as “false-consciousness” and the observation that we are constituted as subjects by ideology (there can be no position outside ideology). But I don’t understand how this is compatible with Marx’s base/superstructure framework, which he retains ([without this thesis] “nothing in the structure or functioning of a mode of production or social formation would be intelligible”). Why is that, really? We just have to abandon this framework and its reductionism/essentialism, like Laclau & Mouffe did in “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy”. It’s just that abandoning this framework moves us away from Marx (I still don’t get why Laclau & Mouffe are considered Marxists), which is fine. Besides, religion existed as ideology and was constituting subjects well before capitalism. It’s a mistake to believe that it exists to reproduce the capitalistic relations of production. Yes, it does reproduce relations of domination, but they are not necessarily capitalist. He also retains the ideology/science binary, which is paradoxical considering that he argues that ideology pervades all our thinking, and that should include science. Again, this requires the refutation of Marxist as science, which is the healthy point of view in my opinion.

[…] all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject. This proposition implies that we should distinguish, for the moment, between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although, at this level, there is no concrete subject that does not have a concrete individual as its support. We shall go on to suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way as to 'recruit' subjects among individuals (it recruits them all) or 'transforms' individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing. It can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace, everyday hailing, by (or not by) the police: 'Hey, you there!' If, to offer readers the most concrete sort of concreteness, we suppose that the theoretical scene we are imagining happens in the street, the hailed individual turns around. With this simple 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail 'really' was addressed to him and that 'it really was he who was hailed' (not someone else). Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.190-191

We may add that what thus seems to happen outside ideology […] really happens in ideology. What really happens in ideology thus seems to happen outside it. That is why those who are in ideology, you and I, believe that they are by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology. Ideology never says 'I am ideological'. One has to be outside ideology, in other words, in scientific knowledge, to be able to say 'I am in ideology' (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case) 'I was in ideology'. As is very well known, the accusation of being in ideology applies only to others, never to oneself (unless one is truly a Spinozist or Marxist, which, as far as this point goes, is to take exactly the same position). This amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but, at the same time, that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality). Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p.191-192