Interestingly, it is not merely apparatuses of communication that are
important here, but also those of the structure of ideological processes
which occur in all institutional settings of power – religious, educational,
political and workplace. For Althusser, the growth of electronic broad-
casting institutions (particularly visual broadcasting) merely consolidates
the consensual integration of individuals that occurs in the structure
rather then the content of ideology.
In what follows, we shall investigate Althusser’s radical departure in
thinking on the nature of ideology from both the early Marxist and liberal
notions. His innovation involves questioning the very notion of what it
means to be an individual in a communication process, an innovation
which has been echoed ever since in the analyses of what today is called
‘post-structuralism’.Ideology as a structure of broadcast – Althusser
Althusser’s most striking point of departure from the humanist Marxists
is to question the categories in which ideology is thought. Ideology is not
found in the content of messages, nor is it adopted in the consciousness of
individuals; rather, it is nothing less than the mechanism by which the
individual experiences selfhood – as an autonomous knowing subject in a
world of knowing subjects.
Althusser’s account of ideology is almost a reversal of the conven-
tional humanist accounts. For Althusser, there is no such thing as ‘given’
individuals with an experience of the real; rather, the very idea of indi-
viduality is created in the communication process itself. By his account,
this process by which the individual is constituted only intensifies in the
age of ‘mass media’. Indeed it makes possible the ‘cult of the individual’
which Émile Durkheim first discussed at the turn of the twentieth century.
For Althusser, individuals (subjects) are never essential but are con-
stituted (an ‘effect’ of ideology). The centrepiece of his theory is his dis-
tinction between the individual and the subject. His major proposition in
this regard is that ‘the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology
in so far as all ideology has the function (which defines it)of ‘constituting’
concrete individuals as subjects’ (Althusser, 1971: 160). In other words,
Althusser is not denying the existence of individual ‘personality’; it is just
that such ‘personality’ is only possible in and through a communication
process. The mechanism by which this occurs he describes as ‘interpella-
tion’, where he says that ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete indi-
viduals as concrete subjects’ (162).
For Althusser, ideology only exists by the subject and for the subject,
and its function is to constitute people as subjects. While it may seem
‘obvious’ that individuals are unified, autonomous beings whose con-
sciousness and unique personality are the source of their ideas and beliefs,Theories of Broadcast Media 29Holmes-02.qxd 2/15/2005 2:04 PM Page 29