Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser 1969-70
This is my last post, and it’s going to be a short one, but I want to offer a quick shoutout to an article that professor Meadows gave me at the beginning of the semester that shaped my thinking significantly and led me down the rabbit hole of Neo-Marxism and Black feminism that I have spent that past few months voraciously reading (to a fault, because I neglected a lot of other schoolwork reading [literally!] thousands and thousands of pages this stuff). Following in the footsteps of the ideas Marx set out in his Capital Volumes and the Communist Manifesto, Louis Althusser reexamined some of the more pressing aspects of Marx’s thought processes—namely the function of ideology in maintaining state power and repressing the minds of those falling within state control. Althusser’s arguments are far from perfect—for although he defines the apparatuses that self-confirmingly create and maintain power, he, like Marx, neglects some of the more pressing issues in our society—like race, gender, and sexuality—boiling his arguments down into economic frame of mind. However, his ideas are easily extendable to these other areas of thought, once a consideration is made with regards to function of ideology (namely Western ideologies of hegemony and hierarchy). So I leave you all with his piece, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. It’s dense, and I’ve had to devote hours and hours to trying to understand it—but it’s worth your while. I have plenty of recommendations for further reading after that, and I’m sure Professor Meadows has even more.
It was fun everyone, enjoy your breaks.