The Question of Ideology - Althusser, Pecheux and Foucault PDF
The Question of Ideology - Althusser, Pecheux and Foucault PDF
The Question of Ideology - Althusser, Pecheux and Foucault PDF
Abstract
1 Introduction
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think that the fact that these different problems appear to require
a general solution is itself a consequence of attempting to analyse
social relations by reference to a social totality. For this reason in
the second part of the paper we sketch out Foucault's analysis
which dispenses with the category of totality and eschews any
reliance on the notion of ideology.
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that this obviousness is in fact one of the effects, perhaps the effect
of ideology. Interpellation is the mechanism not simply of
constituting subjects but of installing in them a profound sense of
the obviousness of their position. Subjects are not frogs always
waiting to be kissed back into being princes.
How does interpellation work? Althusser relies upon two
traditional Marxist examples to stage it for us as a little theoretical
theatre: the police and God. A policeman shouts 'Hey, you there';
someone turns round. He believes that it is he who is hailed, that
the 'you there' referred to him. Or again, religion addresses
individuals as God speaking through it to You. Pascal's Christ says
'It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood.' The subject
may respond to this voice; in assenting to the voice of God it
recognizes that God has called out to it. It is the subject who has
been called. Now given the first example of the policeman,
interpellation might seem to involve the subject who is interpellated,
the subject who interpellates and the action of interpellation. But
God? So it must be ideology which interpellates. God is that which
the subject recognizesas hailing him. So the relation of interpellation
is what Althusser calls an imaginary relation, an imaginary relation
of God(S) to the subject(s). Yet this is more than just being
accosted by an imaginary being, and believing it to have
recognized one, and then to recognize it. We recognize, in this
case, that we are subjects through the Subject; we are thus
subjects to the Subject. We are made in His image after all. So
much so that in his turn, his Son was sent as a human subject to
enact the drama and promise which is given to human subjects -
that they may return and re-enter the Lord's bosom. To elucidate
this theatre with greater precision, Althusser abandons the voice,
and stages the drama in terms of the looking glass.
His task is to elucidate what he means by 'the duplicating of the
Subject into subjects and of the Subject itself into a subject-
Subject'. (Althusser 1971 pp. 180-1), which he takes to be a
theoretical account of the relation of God and believers. The
relation is what he calls speculary: in the glass (and not at all
darkly) they see the Subject to which they are subjected. But this
speculary relation is double; they also .see the subject which is
interpellated. It must be themselves, that is it must be us, of whom
I am one. Finally, they see what they see. There is no reason to
suppose that there is anything other than what they see, and there
is no reason to doubt what they see. Through this wonderful stage
effect Althusser claims that interpellation achieves four things.
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3 Foucault
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In one of his later writings (The Subject and Power), looking back
over his works, Foucault argues that his objective has always been
to write a history of different modes by which individuals in
contemporary Western societies are made subjects - that is,
endowed with certain attributes and capacities, turned into objects
of social practices and made fit to occupy particular positions.
Generally speaking, this process of subjectification is premissed on
the hypothesis that the individual inhabiting a society is not a
pregiven entity on which social relations come to bear and which is
seized upon by the relations of power. Among the diverse modes
of subjectification he identifies three as the main concern of his
case studies. The first is the emergence of discourses of man
(philology, biology and economics) around the turn of the
nineteenth century which assigned to humans the identities of
speaking subject, the labouring subject and a living subject. The
second refers to .'dividing practices' which classified humans into
the sane-mad, the healthy-sick and the law-abiding-law-breakers.
And, finally, the third concerns how diverse discourses and
practices came to construct the artefact 'sexuality' and endow it to
humans. These envelop all of Foucault's main works and it is
instructive to see how these operate in his analyses.
The loci of dividing practices to which Foucault refers are
obviously the asylum, the clinic and the prison - the subject matter
of three of Foucault's principal works. To begin with all three are
institutions of internment - semi-enclosed domains housing special
categories of individuals and governed by projects of reform, cure
and correction. These three institutions in their modern form are
all relatively recent: they emerged more or less simultaneously
around the turn of the nineteenth century. This, Foucault would
argue, has not been an accidental conjunction but an index of their
intertwined genealogies. For they all developed out of the
dissolution of the polymorphous regimes of succour, cure,
correction and punishment which traversed pre-modem institutions
of internment. From the point of view of the process of
subjectification their principal feature is that they house individuals
who have strayed away from the norms of reason, health or lawful
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conduct - they are all 'abnormals'. They are the sites of dividing
practices; by separating out the 'abnorrnals' they cast a grid of
binary classifications onto the whole population. Now, a thesis
which permeates all of Foucault's work is that starting from the
end of the eighteenth century reflections on adult normal humans
grew out of reflections on their converse - the 'abnormals' and
children. There was, as it were, a circular movement: the normal
adults examined the 'abnorrnals' and children as special species
and in time ended up using those investigations themselves as the
vantage point for their own analysis. To deploy the imagery of the
game of mirrors which figures so prominently in the discussion of
ideology and self-consciousness, it was as if these special species
formed the mirror in which normal adults came to recognise them-
selves. Foucault puts it thus: '... when one wishes to individualise
the healthy, and normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by
asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret
madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of
committing' (Discipline and Punish: 193). And, as we shall see, he
deploys a variant of the similar argument in his later The History of
Sexuality. Now the general argument is that practices bearing on
those at the margin of normal adult population and discourses on
them are an important component of the disparate configuration
which constitutes the process of subjectification in modern
societies.
As for the third mode of subjectification singled out by
Foucault, the argument is that starting from the eighteenth century
there was a profusion of discourses on sexuality, initially concerned
with hysteria, infantile sexuality and sexual perversions which in
time furnished the conceptual grid for the examination of adult
heterosexual behaviour. In the last two books published just
before his death, he shifts the focus away from sexuality to the
notion of the subject in discourses starting from the Greek
philosophy.
It is now clear that, in a general sense, Foucault's analyses imply
a critique of those theories which locate the human subject as the
source of all social relations, make it the fount of meaning,
knowledge and action. Thus far he could be said to share those
aims which underline Althusser and Pecheux's work on ideology.
This, however, is the limit of concurrence; the detailed texture of
their respective arguments is marked out by fundamental differences.
Rather than pose subjectification as a general problem of how
humans are made subjects, Foucault simply replaces it with two
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Note
This paper draws heavily on Mark Cousins: 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Mode
of Production', Economy and Society, Vol. 14, No. I, 1985, pp. 94-12.
References
Althusser, L. (1970): Reading Capital, NLB, London.
Althusser, L. (1971): Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB, London.
Cousins, M. and Hussain, A. (1984): Michel Foucault, Macmillan, London.
Foucault, M. (1970): The Order of Things, Tavistock, London.
Foucault, M. (1977): Discipline and Punish, Allen Lane, London.
Foucault, M. (1979): The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Allen Lane, London.
Foucault, M. (1980): Powerl Knowledge, edited by C. Gordon, The Harvester
Press, Brighton.
Hirst, P. (1979): Law and Ideology, Macmillan, London.
Lacan, J. (1966): Ecrits, Editions de Seuil, Paris.
Pecheux, M. (1982): Language: Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious.
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