Page 100 - Critical and Cultural Theory

IDEOLOGY
redefining the base/superstructure relationship: the economic base
determines politics and ideology but, at the same time, it depends
on politics and ideology as the very conditions of its existence. For
example, the political regimes of ancient societies were the condi-
tions of existence of the slave economy, while religion and the
Church were the conditions of existence of the feudal economy in
the Middle Ages. Althusser attributes fundamental significance to
the notion of Ideological State Apparatuses. These are the institu-
tions - such as educational systems, religious groupings, political
parties, trade unions, the media, sport, art, the family - through
which capitalism goes on reproducing its relations of production -
i.e. the power structure based on the division between those who
own the means of production and those who do not. Those appa-
ratuses serve to integrate people into the system by subjecting
them to the ruling ideology (Althusser 1972). Althusser has been
criticized for replacing economic determinism with yet another
form of determinism by positing ideology as the all-pervasive and
inescapable determinant of social existence. However, Althusser
also draws attention to the possibility of challenging and resisting
ideology's omnipresence. Literature, amongst other forms of
creative production, is deemed capable of puncturing from within
the models of perception fostered by dominant ideologies. The
study of texts - and of their emancipatory and transgressive poten-
tialities - is based on an aesthetic mode that eludes categorization
and thus keeps our interpretive options relatively open. Indeed,
the aesthetic mode neither claims to offer scientific knowledge nor
panders to the misperceptions on which ideology pivots. If it
enables certain forms of understanding to emerge, these do not
crystallize into scientific laws but rather provide flexible methods
of inquiry. Concurrently, if it engages with fictions, this is not
done in order to support ideology's obfuscation of reality but
rather to encourage us to acknowledge the vital role played by
image-making and story-telling at all levels of our social existence.
One of Althusser's most vital contributions to the debate on
ideology lies with the assertion that ideology does not merely
reflect society's economic base but has its own material existence
as a practice or activity of production. Its main product is the
human subject. (Subjectivity is the theme examined closely in Part
II, Chapter 2. However, since Althusser's speculations on ideology
are inseparable from his views on subjectivity, the latter are

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