English 2600

Worksheet on Althusser

1.What does Althusser mean when he says that “in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its own production at the same time it produces, and in order to produce” ?(1484).

2. What, besides the material conditions of reproduction, must be provided to have a capitalist labor force that can produce?

3. Where is this resource produced and how exactly?

4. What role do schools play? What does one learn there that makes one a good laboring subject of the state (see 1485 and 1494-1495) ?

5. What other institutions play a role in the “reproduction [of] submission to the rules of established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class “in words” (1485).

6. What does the above quote mean?

7. Read the last two paragraphs on page 1485. What do they mean? Interpret them slowly and carefully.

8. What, according to Althusser, is the state, and what is its function (see page 1487).

9. What are ISAs? Through what means do they function? Write down two different kinds of ISAs and explain how they function to create laboring subjects who serve the state that serves the ruling classes?

10. What in the Repressive State Apparatus? By what mechanisms does it work? Why are ISAs the site of class struggle?

11. What does Althusser say was the dominant pre-capitalist ISA? How was that ISA involved in the French Revolution?

12.What ISA has replaced the Church as the dominant ISA?

13.Read pg 1498-1501. What does Althusser mean in his statement that “Ideology Is a ”Representation” of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence” (1498)?

14.What are the “material” practices that anchor ideologies (see 1501)? How do they do so? What does Althusser mean when he says “This ideology talks of actions: I shall talk of actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it onloy a small part of the aapparatus: a small massin a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports’ club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc.”(1501).

15. What does Althusser mean when he says “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects”(1502)?

16.What does Althusser mean when he says “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of constituting concrete individuals as subjects” (1503)?

17.How do shaking hands and calling “Who’s there ”prove that “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, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects”(1503)?

18. How do we become “subjects”? Explain what Althusser means when he says all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject” (1504)?

19. How is it that we are “always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects” before we are born (1505)?

20.Give three examples of the ways Christian religious stories interpellate individuals as subjects (1505-1507).