Louis Alhusser Ideology

Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and interpreter of Marxism, whose essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” had pioneered the concept of “ideological state apparatuses”, their relationships and their effects on society. His work is still considered very important, when one is trying to describe ideology as an imperative part of the culture. Nevertheless. it is highly questionable if the ideas described in his work are still applicable to the modern society. This essay covers the specific problems of Althusser 's worldview and aims to demonstrate that the general ideas described in Althusser 's “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” are still applicable to the modern pluralistic society, but do require some minor

According to Althusser a social formation consists of various interacting class structures and each of these class structures seeks to shape specific ISAs (e.g. schools, families, universities) in order to secure conditions that make its existence possible. It becomes very problematic if one were to apply it to the pluralistic type of society where various different class structures coexist with capitalist class structures. This would cause contradictions and tensions between different class structures and then, consequently, would likely result in contradictory effects upon those structures and their interpellations of individual subjects. However, these indubitably complex effects haven 't been explicitly analysed by

So even if one of them is blatantly dominant and oppressive, one still cannot ignore the influence of the other few. In fact it is possible for the ISAs within the same society to offer multiple competing ideologies. This contradicts Althusser 's theory, because he assumes that interpellations are offered to the subjects in a successive way(if one interpellation fails, then the other one succeeds in its place). This idea does not correspond to reality, due to the fact that interpellations are usually offered in parallel way and the success of one does not automatically mean the failure of the other, and vice versa.
In conclusion, Althusser 's theory of ISAs can still be applied to the modern social formations, but at the same time it needs more depth to accommodate the complexity of modern pluralistic social formations. Thus, one needs to avoid oversimplification of the thought-system behind the interpellation of individuals and ideology as a whole, and by doing so one might be able to improve Althusserian concept of ideology and bring it somewhat closer to reality of the Informational