5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
What are the psychic mechanisms which underpin ideology? Echoing Lacan, Althusser
argues that ideology functions in and through mirroring. Like the Lacanian child in front of
its mirror-image, the ideological mirror implants received social meanings at the heart of
the subject’s world. Yet, as in the mirror stage, the constitution of social forms necessarily
involves a misrecognition, since ideology idealizes and distorts the intersubjective world
of society, culture and politics. Through a ‘subjection’ to ideological discourses of class,
race, gender, nationalism and the like, the individual comes to misrecognize itself as an
autonomous, self-legislating subject. Imaginary misrecognition occurs through a process
that Althusser terms ‘interpellation’. It is in and through ideology that society
‘interpellates’ the individual as a ‘subject’, at once conferring identity and subjecting the
individual to that social position. This interweaving of signification and imaginary
misrecognition, Althusser contends, is rooted in ‘ideological state apparatuses’, which
include schools, trade unions and the mass media, and whose function is to ensure the
subjection of individuals to different social positions in modern class-based societies.
That human subjects should come to overlook the nature of their real decentred
subjectivity, says Althusser, is precisely the function of ideology—thus serving to reinforce
the dominant power interests of late capitalism.
The theory of ideology developed by Althusser, with its implicit use of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, marks one of the major sources of stimulus in twentieth-century
social thought. It sets out an array of ideas about the relations between the personal
and social domains, the imaginary and institutional life. Althusser’s argument that
ideology is an indispensable imaginary medium for social reproduction is provocative
and important, and it did much to discredit traditional Marxist theories of ideology as
mere false consciousness. Like the unconscious for Freud, ideology for Althusser is
eternal. However, it is now widely agreed that there are many problems with
Althusser’s account of ideology. Most importantly, Althusser’s argument about the
mirroring distortion of ideology runs into the same kind of theoretical dead-end as
does Lacan’s account of the imaginary. That is, in order for an individual subject to
(mis)recognize itself in and through ideological discourse, then surely she or he must
already possess certain affective capacities for subjective response. From a
psychoanalytic angle, the psychical capacity for identification, representation and
reflection suggests that the relations between the personal and the ideological
spheres are extremely complex, and are certainly anything but a simple ‘implantation’
of culturally controlled and closed social forms—as Althusser’s work suggests. The
central problem in this respect is that Althusser’s theory implies an unsatisfactory
notion of cultural domination, one in which subjects are rigidly inserted into the
ideological process. (For detailed treatments of Althusser’s misreading of Lacanian
psychoanalysis see Barrett, 1991: chapter 5; Elliott, 1992: chapter 5.)