Consciousness and ideology : reading Althusser through Marx

Abstract

In his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Louis Althusser criticizes the ideology-theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in <i>The German Ideology</i>. Althusser characterizes the ideology-theory as "non-Marxist" on the grounds that it operates with an empiricist epistemology incompatible with the principles of historical materialism. He therefore also attempts to develop an ideology-theory of his own, where ideology in <i>general</i> is understood as a process of interpellating individuals as subjects. I argue that Althusser's characterization of Marx and Engel's ideology-theory as betraying an empiricist epistemology is not supported by their work, and that his corresponding ideology-theory fails as a properly Marxist account of ideology in <i>general</i>. In its attempt to account for the subjective side of consciousness it slips into an idealist account of ideology, while simultaneously employing a structural account of the ideological subject, thereby creating a contradiction. A by-product of this project, however, is the development of a properly Marxian theory of ideology, which is ultimately compatible with Althusser's theory of ideology in <i>particular</i>. Thus, the merit of Althusser's undertaking is that it provides an accurate assessment of the dissemination and functional role of particular ideologies in society, notwithstanding the shortcomings of his reading of Marx and Engels or his theory of ideology in <i>general</i>.