I think we can go beyond these formulations, which form part of our
common sense, by turning to the second theory of ideology proposed by
Althusser, as formulated in the famous essay on ‘ideological state apparatuses’,
which I have already tried to interpret in terms of language in my book
Interpretation as Pragmatics.^29 We are familiar with the success of this theory
and the difficulties it creates (it refers to ideology in the singular, when the
term is usually declined in the plural; it argues that ideology has no history –
which is paradoxical coming from a Marxist; and so on). At the heart of this
theory is the concept of interpellation (ideology is what produces subjects,
in that it interpellates each individual as a subject). I propose to interpret the
Althusserian chain of interpellation in linguistic terms. This allows me not
only to assert that ideology is language, but to define this mysterious ideology
declined in the singular: it is the power that circulates across the whole length
of the chain of interpellation, the illocutionary force conveyed by utterances,
which does not only characterise some particular speech act, but has a material
effect in producing subjects.
This chain, at the end of which the individual is interpellated as a subject,
runs from institutions to rituals, from rituals to practices, and (in my
interpretation at least) from practices to speech acts:
Institution – ritual – practice – speech act – subject
The subject is, therefore, not only interpellated by ideology – which is the
core of Althusser ’s theory – but subjectified by the language that speaks it.
And at each link of the chain, ideology and language are indissolubly involved.
We therefore begin with the massive materiality of institutions as producers
of discourse. They are material in that their apparatus involves a certain
number of bodies (the bodies of the functionaries of the institution, the
buildings in which they operate, etc.). But they are also material in a broader
sense, in that they produce laws and decrees which assign places to the
subjects produced by their apparatuses. And they are, if I may risk the
expression, linguisticallymaterial in that they are the source of ready-made
(one should say: ‘ready-to-be-spoken’) discourses and expressions, which
speakers tirelessly repeat because they recognise themselves in them. By this,
obviously, I mean the clichés and dead metaphors which, in Lakoff and
Propositions (1) • 165(^29) See Althusser 1984 and cf. Lecercle 1999b.