Ideological State Apparatus

Ideological State Apparatus
A term that was developed by Althusser in the late 1960s
and early 1970s in the context of his structuralist Marxism. The concept entered the
vocabulary of cultural studies at the moment when thinkers at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies engaged with structuralism and the question of
ideology.

For Althusser, our entry into the symbolic order, and thus our constitution as
subjects, is the work of ideology which, he argues, hails or ‘interpellates’ concrete
individuals as concrete subjects. According to Althusser, ideology exists in an
apparatus and its associated practices. Thus he designates a series of institutions as
‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs): namely, the family, the education system, the
church and the mass media. While Althusser regards the church as the dominant
pre-capitalist ISA, he argues that within the context of capitalism it has been
replaced by the educational system. Thus schools and universities are implicated in
the ideological (and physical) reproduction of labour power along with the social
relations of production that pertain to capitalism.

Althusser’s work was significant in elevating the debate about ideology to the
forefront of thinking within cultural studies. However, his influence waned not least
because the operation of ISAs as argued by Althusser is too functionalist in
orientation. That is, ideology appears to operate behind people’s backs in terms of the ‘needs’ of an agentless system. The Althusserian formulation of the question of
ideology is also too coherent. The educational system, for example, is the site of
contradictory ideologies and of ideological conflict rather than a place for the
unproblematic and homogeneous reproduction of capitalist ideology.
(The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Brown)