Defining Ideology, Part 1

‘Ideology’ is one of those words that can have an expansive or narrow definition and, as such, it is generally abused. I wish to write an article in which I define it more tightly for the purposes of serious political analysis. The loose, wide definition is something like ‘a set of beliefs about the world which determines a person’s behaviour’. This will not do because, first, people have many beliefs about the world upon which they do not act (stated vs. revealed preference) and, second, there are many actions and decisions people take on a daily basis that have no reference to their conscious belief system whatsoever. ‘Ideology’ is something more general, nebulous and all-encompassing and, at the same time, more narrowly specific in its real-world applications. My own definition of ideology would be something like: ‘a set of justifications for power which both manufactures consent in the public and reproduces itself at the level of individual subjects’. This is much more than merely a set of beliefs or guiding principles or religious practices: for ideas to attain the status of ideology, four prerequisites must first be met:

1.      It is backed by power.

2.      It serves to manufacture consent.

3.      It must physically manifest in the real world as codified in institutions, statues, symbols, buildings, and so on.

4.      It reproduces itself at the level of the individual subject such that they become its willing ‘carriers’ and unofficial ‘monitors’.

If any of these four are missing, you are not dealing with ideology but rather a set of ideas that have limited real-world impact or, at best, a set of ideas that one day aspire to become ideology. Ideology is not an ‘add on’, or something that can be picked off a supermarket shelf – now I’m a Marxist, now I’m a Fascist, now I’m a Classical Liberal, now I’m a Christian – this is how most people think about it, but they are wrong. Marxism, Fascism, Classical Liberalism and so on are just sets of ideas which were once ideologies and may aspire to one day again become ideologies, but in the here and now, for all functional purposes, they are dead ideologies. If history is the graveyard of aristocracies as Pareto once put it, then the history of ideas is the graveyard of ideologies. The better analogy for ideology is the relationship between a goldfish in a goldfish bowl and the water in which they swim. The goldfish is you; the water is ideology, specifically the dominant ideology of the epoch in which you find yourself. There are other goldfish: your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your friends, your schoolteachers, your government ministers, news anchors, the actors and producers of your favourite films and tv shows: everyone you know, everyone you love, are also goldfish, but everything they do and produce is to maintain the sanctity of the water in the bowl and to ensure that no one ever looks outside the bowl. Even if there are wild rumours among the goldfish sometimes that beyond the bowl is a room and a wider world, the other goldfish quickly work to ensure that the sanctity of the water is maintained and that the boundaries of the bowl are not breached. Okay, analogies aren’t my strong point, I’m not Moldbug, but I hope you get the idea.

I will write about all this at more length in the next article, but first I think it’s necessary that you all know where I am coming from and who influenced me on this topic. Speaking of Curtis Yarvin, he thinks I’m a crypto-Marxist. He’s wrong, of course, but as so often with him, he’s also partly right: a lot of my thinking about ideology does derive from a Marxist: namely, Louis Althusser, once the mentor of Michel Foucault, who is the crucial ‘missing link’ between Antonio Gramsci and the New Left of the 1970s. What follows is a lengthy excerpt from one of my books. I wrote this over a decade ago. Even though it was published in 2012, I probably originally wrote it in maybe 2008, in my mid-20s.  It was originally intended to be a student guide – which you can hopefully see from the level and tone in places – but somehow it has become my most widely-cited academic work to date. Some (leftist) reviewers claimed it was a polemic disguised as a textbook, as if yours truly would ever engage in polemic! In any case, Althusser is a difficult read (see his most famous essay here), so I think my version might make it easier to process. I will elaborate on the key parts of this ‘for us today’ in the next article. Hope you enjoy. The extract is from Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory, pp. 65-76, I have not reproduced the footnotes so please consult the original for those; I have also cut out significant portions of my own critiques and so on, just to present the ideas ‘raw’ so to speak.

Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who came to prominence in the 1960s. It is worth noting here that as well as being a Marxist, Althusser was also working within the framework of French structuralism from which he borrowed many concepts. For example, his analysis of ideology is almost exclusively synchronic, much like Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of language. He views history as a series of ruptures between discontinuous synchronic moments. It is possible to see the ghost of Saussure – refracted through the mirror of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – in his theory of ideology: ‘ideology’ is la langue and its individual subjects are instances of parole. As with Gramsci, Althusser’s work on ideology can be seen as answering the fundamental question as to why the uprising that Karl Marx predicted in The Communist Manifesto did not happen. Marx had predicted that it was only a matter of time before the exploited proletariat workers of the industrialized West would rise up in revolutions against the bourgeois ruling class: ‘the victory of the proletariat . . . [is] . . . inevitable’.What went wrong? Althusser’s answer is that the workers did not rise up because they were completely in thrall to capitalist ‘ideology’, which sold them the illusion of being free and autonomous individuals who perform their social functions out of choice. Althusser defines ‘ideology’ as a representation of ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. This relationship ‘has the function . . . of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’ via a process of what he calls ‘interpellation’: individuals are interpellated as concrete subjects so that they can recognize themselves as ‘concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects’. It is mainly through ideology that the state is able to keep its subjects subordinate and therefore prevent them from rising up in rebellion.

Althusser makes a distinction between what he calls the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), when the state is forced into action physically to apprehend or subdue its subjects, and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which is far more insidious in that it dominates its subjects through their own thought processes, making natural or ‘second nature’ that which has been learnt. As with Geertz and his cathedral, for Althusser, ideology has a material existence: the ISAs take the form of ‘Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures’. He talks about the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA and so on. His general observation is that capitalist society has moved from the point where the religious ISA was key in maintaining order to one where it is chiefly the educational ISA and the family ISA that is producing ‘labour power’. Which if you think about it is true: families raise their children to have the capacity to perform necessary social functions and schools and universities equip them with the necessary skills. In fact, the effects of these ISAs are so all-encompassing that ‘an individual is always already a subject, even before he is born’: in that a child will ‘always already’ have a name, a social context, an identity, a gender and a spectrum of social roles he or she will be expected to fill in the future. In the 1950s and 1960s when Althusser was writing, for some this range of roles would be rather narrow: it would be expected for men to take the same job as his father in the same coalmine or factory or dockyard. Thus, the state is able to reproduce the conditions of its own reproduction in its subject, and as long as this process takes place successfully, and it is difficult to see how or why it would not, its overthrow is virtually impossible. Ideology both constitutes political or cultural discourse and is its product: ideology begets ideology. Its chief function is to ensure ‘the reproduction of labour power’ so that the subjects ‘work all by themselves’ to maintain the conditions of the state. To use a ‘real life’ example, take yourself. Presumably, if you are reading this book, you are someone who has chosen to go to university. Why did you make that choice? Maybe you think that by getting a degree, you will further your chances in the job market. Why do you want to get a good job? Is it so you can have more money to be able to buy more things? The more money you have, the more choices you get, correct? Someone on a high salary can afford to choose between a great many things: different houses, different cars, different television sets, and so on. But for Althusser, all such choices are necessarily illusory – there is no real freedom in your choices. In each instance you have merely reinforced the ISA, merely replicated your ideologically-induced role as a Good Capitalist Citizen performing their social function. Your choice to go to university is scarcely a real choice but something that has been wholly determined. An economist, just by looking at the income of your parents could probably make a prediction on whether you would be someone who ended up at university or not. In a different set of circumstances you might not have gone on to university, but instead become a bin man, or a pub landlord, or a supermarket assistant or a hairdresser. ‘But I’d never want to do any of those things!’ You protest. But what of the people who fill those roles? Each of these roles exists, and each is always-already filled by someone who has supposedly chosen to fill that role. The hairdresser has convinced himself that he always wanted to be a hairdresser and that the other available roles – of doctor, lawyer, teacher, clerk, university student and so on – were not for him. For Althusser, this illusion of choice, the illusion that we have freedom, is ideology’s foremost tool of containment. Individuals do not rebel because they live in the belief that they are free and autonomous rather than subject and exploited – they ‘work by themselves’ without apparent coercion – and, as Terry Eagleton says, ‘unless we did so we would be incapable of playing our parts in social life’. This might seem mild and inconsequential when considering how you ended up becoming a university student and how the hairdresser became a hairdresser, but it is the same general principle that drives people to pick up guns in the name of a war that they had no part in starting, to support a government that routinely exploits them or to worship a god that would deny them pleasure. Think of the moment in the film The Matrix (1999) when Neo first wakes up in the vat and realizes that life as he has known it thus far has been a simulated reality: the matrix is an Althusserian ISA. The final stage of Althusser’s so-called quadruple system of ideological interpellation depends upon both individuals’ recognition of themselves ‘in ideology’ and their subsequent vocalization of it. This is a complex but nonetheless straightforward idea; it is worth quoting Althusser verbatim:

We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, that is a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning . . . The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:

·         the interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects;

·         their subjection to the Subject;

·         the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other and finally, the subject’s recognition of himself;

·         the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen – ‘So be it.’

Althusser has borrowed the idea of the ‘mirror phase’, in which an infant first recognizes its own reflection in a mirror, from Jacques Lacan. The important concept to grasp is that in order to be fully interpellated individuals have to identify themselves fully as being part of the ideology. This is not to say that they recognize that they are in ideology but that they recognize that they have become one with their role as ideological subject – so not ‘I am a capitalist lackey’, but ‘I am a university student. Amen. So be it’, or ‘I am a hairdresser. Amen. So be it’. This theory is explicitly anti-humanist. Althusser saw himself as cleansing Marx from the taint of the humanist ideology he had inherited from the German idealist philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. He saw Hegel’s project as:

The reduction of all the elements that make up the concrete life of a historical epoch . … to one principle of internal unity, is itself only possible on the absolute condition of taking the whole of concrete life of a people for the externalization-alienation of an internal spiritual principle, which can never definitely be anything but the most abstract form of that epoch’s consciousness of itself . . . its own ideology . . . its most abstract ideology.

For Althusser this is unsatisfactory; it is too close to the ‘crude’ eighteenth-century ‘simple solution’ that ‘Priests or Despots . . . “forged” the Beautiful Lies that so that, in the belief that they obeying God, men would in fact obey the Priests and Despots’. He also rejects the position of Ludwig Feuerbach, another German philosopher (‘taken over word by word by Marx’), which posits the existence of men in terms of material alienation. In fact, Althusser’s whole project is set up to demonstrate how ‘the reproduction of labour power requires . . . a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers’. This ideology manifests itself in a way that specifically doesn’t alienate the workers who must be content (or at least have the illusion of being so) to ‘work all by themselves’. This might appear to be a more sophisticated version of the ‘Priests and Despots’ argument, but what Althusser adds (which, note, is missing in Gramsci) is that the ruling class are themselves the subjects of the ruling ideology. It is not only labour power that needs to be reproduced but also ‘the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression’. He elaborates on this idea in greater detail later on in the essay:

Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children is ejected ‘into production’: these are workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically adapted youth carries on . . . until it falls by the wayside and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion reaches the summit, either to fall into the intellectual semi-employment, or to provide, as well as the ‘intellectuals of the collective labour’, the agents of exploitation (capitalists, managers), the agents of repression (soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.) and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced ‘laymen’ [the mass media, spin doctors, those in public relations, those in advertising etc.].

The sharper readers among you will immediately note the similarity here with Gramsci’s three-tiered model of society. However, the distinction between Althusser and Gramsci is clear: in Althusser even the top tier of society, ‘the agents of exploitation’ et al., are ideological subjects; they are merely performing a social function, a role that is ‘always-already’ there, that has to be there. In Gramsci, the people in the same position are ‘philosophers’ and ‘intellectuals’ rather than ‘professional ideologists’. Think of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984: Winston is a ‘professional ideologist’ who is paid to write and disseminate propaganda and to alter the historical record according to the Party’s interests; he is certainly not paid to be a philosopher or an intellectual. The point is that while Gramsci’s ‘priests and despots’ are free and consciously producing ideology with which to control the masses, Althusser’s are not free and not conscious of the fact that they too are caught in this ideological matrix.

In many ways, Althusser simplifies Gramsci’s notion of hegemony by referring all ideologies back to the state. We could see it as an inherent problem of Althusser’s theory that his model seemingly cannot account for ideologies that don’t work for the state. All ideologies have a material existence and further some end, almost always the state. He would account for ideologies that do not work for the current state as being those of bygone epochs (or old states), as being ultimately outmoded ideologies. This is an argument Althusser never makes but it is implicit in his system. For example, a man living in modern-day New York who still believes in and carries out the rituals of ancient paganism is a subject of an outmoded ideology (i.e. one that cannot be classed as an ISA). It is because the principal function of ideology in Althusser is to ‘reproduce the conditions of labour power’ (rather than to posit some ideal) that it is possible for an ideology to become ‘outmoded’ in this way. Unlike in Gramsci’s model, in which various ideologies compete for hegemony, Althusser sees them all working in the same direction. For Gramsci, achieving hegemony is the ultimate goal of the class struggle. Althusser, on the other hand, sees this idea as being tainted by Hegel and a dangerous path towards totalitarianism: ‘the hegemonic Stalinist philosophy [was] very precisely Hegelian . . . [I thus] sought to cleanse the Marxist tradition of any remnants of that ‘flirtation’ with the Hegelian dialectic’. In any case, for Althusser, the ‘struggle’ for which Gramsci fights is only ever illusionary because all the ISAs are all working for the same cause. Those ideologies that have become ‘outmoded’ have no clear function and therefore cannot tangibly affect anything. In this instance, it would appear that Gramsci’s model has more ‘common sense’; Althusser’s claim that we find apparently differing ideologies, which ‘in reality’ work towards the same ends, appears to be self-defeating, because it means nothing can be changed. John Fiske makes a similar point:

Indeed, [Gramsci’s] theory of hegemony foregrounds the notion of ideological struggle much more than does Althusser’s ideological theory, which at times tends to imply that the power of ideology and the ISAs to form the subject in ways that suit the interests of the dominant class is almost irresistible. Hegemony, on the other hand, posits a constant contradiction between ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makes this interface into an inevitable site of ideological struggle.

If all ideology has the function of reproducing ‘the state’ (i.e. the dominant ideology), it is impossible to see how its subjects – as the products of that state – can enact change. However, if all ideologies are constantly competing for hegemony and the dominant ideology is held accountable to them through checks and balances, as in Gramsci, then it is easy to see how tangible change can be brought about. Althusser’s model seems very static on this point. This echoes the critique of Althusser’s great rival, the socialist of the British New Left, E. P. Thompson, who famously attacked and dismissed the Althusser’s theory of ideology as ‘a structuralism of stasis’, which has ‘no adequate categories to explain contradiction or change – or class struggle’.

To be kinder to Althusser, this is simply not true if one looks outside ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus’. In For Marx (1965), there is an essay – admittedly, at times, a rather confusing one, strewn as it is with the liberal doses of italics and anti- Hegelian rhetorical typical of Althusser’s style – called ‘Contradiction and Overdeterminiation’. In this, he tackles the question of why the Russian Revolution of 1917 took place and Lenin’s explanation of Russia being the ‘weakest link’ in the imperialist chain.

. . . [T]he whole Marxist experience shows that, if the general contradiction . . . between the forces of production and the relations of production . . . is suffi cient to defi ne the situation when revolution is the ‘task of the day’, it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a ‘revolutionary situation’, nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. If this contradiction is to become ‘ active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ . . . [that] ‘ fuse’ into a ruptural unity . . . [to launch] an assault on a regime [against] which its ruling classes are unable to defend . . . an accumulation of contradictions. How else could the class-divided popular masses (proletariats, peasants, petty bourgeois) throw themselves together, consciously or unconsciously, into a general assault on the existing regime? And how else could the ruling classes (aristocrats, big bourgeois, industrial bourgeois, finance bourgeois, etc.), who have learnt by long experience and sure instinct to seal between themselves, despite their class differences, a holy alliance against the exploited, find themselves reduced to impotence, divided at the decisive moment . . . disarmed in the very citadel of their State machine, and suddenly overwhelmed by the people they had so long kept in leash and respectful by exploitation, violence and deceit?

One can almost hear the Soviet national anthem playing as Althusser becomes more and more excited here. When ‘contradictions’ converge into this unstoppable maelstrom they are said to be ‘overdetermined’. A single contradiction, or even multiple contradictions, alone are not enough to create these big moments of historical change or ‘ruptures’; there needs to be ‘a vast accumulation of “contradictions” . . . [at] play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous’. Althusser then makes the move of saying that all contradictions are in fact ‘overdetermined’ at any given time. William S. Lewis provides a marginally more lucid definition: ‘overdetermination . . . can be said to be the point at which the ensemble of contradictions that make up a “whole” system are reflected on an individual contradiction.’ As far as I can make out (this is Althusser at his most abstract and obtuse), under normal circumstances contradictions are ‘overdetermined’ into being neutralized and displaced, effectively lulled into banal ‘non-antagonism’, by the dominant ideology. The key is whether or not they are ‘fused’ together and activated – overdetermined by an exceptional set of historical circumstances – to become antagonistic towards the dominant power. While this seems a rather longwinded and complicated way to describe radical social change, E. P. Thompson’s charge that Althusser has ‘no categories’ for doing so is surely unfounded.

Elsewhere, in Reading Capital (1968), Althusser analysed ‘the currently widespread distinction between synchrony and diachrony’ and challenged the concept of ‘historical time as continuous and contemporaneous with itself’. Althusser posited an idea of history as a series of ‘presents’, ‘merely successive contingent presents in the time continuum’. For Althusser, history is fundamentally disjunctive; notions of the diachronic and synchronic become redundant in the face of a perpetual present that is consistently formed via a process of interpellation by ideology. In effect what he has done is dispensed with the idea of the diachronic and replaced it with a purely synchronic model that ‘has no history’. He has spatialized time. For the literary theorist Richard Lehan this move ‘drains meaning from history’. To ‘spatialize time’ is to ‘rob it of sequence, direction, and agency’. He thinks this locks history into ‘part of a tropological frieze’, which begs the question of ‘how . . . we get from frieze to frieze, or from what Foucault would call episteme to episteme’. Lehan argues ultimately for the recovery of ‘the diachronic nature’ of history and insists upon ‘the belief that meaning is built into time’ upon the fundamental logic of cause and effect. His solution is to re-establish ‘the idea of historical process’ by retracing ‘the connection’ between epistemes. It is important to grasp this idea of ‘ruptural’ or ‘epistemic’ breaks in history to understand both Foucault, who takes it almost wholesale from Althusser, and the new historicists and cultural materialists who follow him. Another problem that many commentators have seen in Althusser is that he seems to afford individuals very little autonomy: they are simply passive sponges who once interpellated by ideology have no choice but to fulfil their ideological function – hardly surprising for a militant anti-humanist. John Higgins offers a typical reading:

Althusser’s subject is a subject without an unconscious. He sees the moment of repression, that castrating moment of transition from pre-social to social existence, as one of successful and complete repression, inaugurating a homogenous and unbroken process of interpellation.

 Paul Smith puts it more succinctly: the individual subject ‘seems to exist as a unity which is dependent upon a supposed unity of interpellative effects’. Literary critics have inherited this view. Stephen Cohen notes that Althusser’s ‘Lacanian model of interpellation . . . has been critiqued as excessively totalizing and pessimistically inescapable’. It is difficult to defend Althusser against these arguments since his model is explicitly one of containment and not freedom, although some have tried. The most generous reading involves seeing ‘ideology’ not as an insidious tool of coercion but as a necessary (because there is no ‘outside’ of ideology) enabler through which to achieve social change. But this is a stretch because the status of ideologies outside of the state apparatus remains ambivalent at best in his works; it is underdeveloped. A further problem is that, even making allowances for the multiplicity of ideologies, the state and its ISAs in Althusser’s analysis are almost always repressive in character. The state is never a force of positive change. Nicos Poulantzas touches on this matter in State, Power, Socialism by positing the necessity of the political obligation of those in power to the people they rule and the prospect of ‘genuinely positive action by the State’. As we saw with Gramsci’s notion that the dominant power is always accountable, this is an idea that has its origins in Machiavelli: ‘In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check’. This prospect of a ‘positive’, socially obliged ruling class is also glimpsed in Gramsci, who speaks of ‘the entire positive, civilizing activity undertaken by the State’. In his later work, through his own reading of Machiavelli, Althusser does come to recognize some notion of political obligation in ‘a state rooted in the people, a popular state’. For this to happen, however, ideology would have to be sometimes not repressive in character and ‘non-state’ ideologies (e.g. those of ‘the people’) would have to both be possible and able to affect the state and the actions of the ruling class. If this follows, non-state ideologies must produce subjects who can recognize and assess the actions of the state and also, by extension, become openly critical of it to the extent where they are in a position to enact change. As Judith Butler argues: ‘the radicalization of the subject or its gendering or its social abjection more generally is performatively induced from various diffuse quarters that do not always operate as “official” discourse’. My feeling is that Althusser does not provide us with such a model.

We can summarize Althusser’s theory as follows:

1.      Ideology is the representation of the imagined relationship between individuals and the world around them, which serves to reproduce the ‘means of production’, that is the workforce required to keep the economy and the statue running in an orderly manner.

2.      Ideology has always already interpellated the individual, even from before the moment they are born, insomuch as they already have an ideological role.

3.      However, to be truly interpellated, the individual must accept their ideological role consciously and willingly. ‘Amen. So be it’.

4.      Ideologies have a material existence in ‘state apparatuses’ such as schools, families, churches, the media and so on; these are called ISAs.

5.      These ISAs help to interpellate individuals fully and maintain the illusion that individuals are free and autonomous persons actively choosing their own roles in life.

6.      In fact, they are not free, but as per 2, always already interpellated by ideology. This illusion of freedom means that individuals ‘work by themselves’ to perform their ideological function. For example, a coal miner goes to work every day believing he is doing it of his own accord and for reasons with which he agrees, probably for his own benefit or the benefit of his family.

7.      Between ISAs there are many contradictions that are typically ‘overdetermined’ by being displaced as if they were trivial and of little consequence.

8.      History is not continuous, but a series of ‘ruptures’.

9.      In order for one of these ruptures to take place, the many contradictions between ISAs and in ideology must be ‘overdetermined’ by becoming ‘fused’ together to create an irresistible force against which the ruling class has no defence.

Althusser has suffered a decline in reputation since his heyday. Partly, this is because he murdered his wife in 1980 and spent the last decade of his life in and out of a mental asylum. Partly, this is because he has never shaken off Thompson’s accusation of being ‘on the theoretical production line of Stalinist ideology’; not at all helped by Althusser’s coldly inhuman and theoretical account of Stalin, which as Tony Judt quips, is of a ‘man whose main crime was to pervert the course of Marxism (which is rather like saying that Hitler’s sin was to give physical anthropology a bad name)’. And partly, it is because his theory of ideology is seen as too rigid and static to serve. Nonetheless, apart from Michel Foucault, no figure has been more influential to Shakespeare studies and perhaps even literary studies more generally in the past thirty years. His statements on art are confined to two very short letters to André Daspre which call for a science of art, and contain one of his more famous lines: ‘I believe that a peculiarity of art is to “make us see”, “make us perceive”, “make us feel” something which alludes to reality!’ Althusser’s influence in criticism stretches beyond new historicism and cultural materialism. The early work of both Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, for example, owes much to Althusser and, more directly, to his student Pierre Macherey, ‘known primarily as [Althusser’s] . . . student or “disciple”’. Althusser and Macherey are also the principal starting points for Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who were influential in their own right in the 1980s and Slavoj Žižek in the 1990s and 2000s. Much of this criticism was interested in the way literary and cultural discourse ‘gives an implicit critique of its ideological content, if only because it resists being incorporated into the fl ow of ideology in order to give a determinate representation of it’. My feeling is that it is absolutely vital to read at least Althusser’s seminal essay on ideology to understand the cultural materialist project.