Althusser, Louis (1918–1990)

Louis Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. After spending most of World War II in a German prison camp, he became a tutor in philosophy at France's elite École normale supérieure, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1948, he joined the Communist Party. Influenced in part by the structuralist movement, which dominated French thought in the 1960s, he published a series of highly influential studies of the philosophy of Karl Marx. Althusser suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life. In 1980, he killed his wife, who had been his companion for thirty years. He was declared unfit to plead to the crime on grounds of mental irresponsibility.

It is Althusser's theories of ideology that have proved most influential in the study of consumer culture. In Marxist tradition, ideology is the name given to all those discourses that misrepresent the reality of the exploitative economic relationships in which we live. It has traditionally been described as false consciousness of this reality. Althusser, however, argues that ideology is primarily an unconscious phenomenon. As he puts it in his 1963 essay, “Marxism and Humanism,” ideology is the “lived” relationship between human beings and their world. That is, as a person goes about his or her everyday life, he or she assumes and takes for granted all kinds of ideas, images, and narratives about the way the world is and how to act in it, which the person does not subject to critical reflection. These ideas, images, and narratives are what constitute the ideology in which he or she lives. Since consumer culture produces so many of the discourses that build up this pre-reflective sense of one's “world,” Althusser's theory of ideology has been used to study that culture. Take advertisements as an example. In ordinary life, we are surrounded by messages from advertisements that tell [Page 40]us about how to look, talk, dress, behave, buy, work, spend leisure time, relate to others, and so on. From Althusser's view, these messages are ideological. They contribute to people's sense that the world is a different kind of place than Marxism, with its analysis of the exploitative economic relationships by which society is constituted, shows that in reality it is. They contribute thereby to maintaining those exploitative relationships.

In a later essay published in 1969, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser develops his theory of ideology. Marxist tradition has always regarded the modern state as an institution that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. It defends these interests with what Althusser calls the “repressive state apparatus”—the police, the army, the courts, the prisons, and other forms of ultimately physical force. The state also perpetuates the rule of the bourgeoisie, however, by ideology as well as by force. It does so, Althusser argues, in “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs), such as the church, the education system, the legal system, the media, television, the cinema, sports, and other institutions that function primarily by means of discourse. Indeed, Althusser stresses in this later essay, ideology exists only in the material practices and rituals of which membership in an ISA consists. So according to Althusser, ISAs are institutions of consumer culture, such as the news media, the cinema, the music business, or television; and participation in their practices—whether reading the news, listening to one's football coach, or downloading music from iTunes—perpetuates discourse that serves to keep the ruling economic class in power.

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