Page 119 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

duties of citizenship in the social, civil and political domains advances democracy
and provides the conditions for particularistic identity projects. This involves the
‘hegemony of democratic values’ developed in the public sphere so that citizenship
96 is a mechanism for linking the micro-politics of identity with the official macro-
politics of institutional and cultural rights.

Links Citizenship, cultural politics, hegemony, identity, ideology, post-Marxism

Identity project The idea of identity as a project refers to the ongoing creation of
narratives of self-identity relating to our perceptions of the past, present and hoped-
for future. Though cultural theory now understands identities as being fractured or
multiple, in everyday life we continue to describe ourselves in terms of a narrative
of the self. As modernity not only breaks down the traditional forms of identity but
also increases the levels of resources for identity construction, so we are all faced
with the task of constructing our identities as a project.
By this is meant that identity is something we create, something always in
process, a moving towards rather than an arrival. An identity project builds on what
we think we are now in the light of our past and present circumstances together
with what we think we would like to be, the trajectory of our desired future. Here,
self-identity is constituted by the ability to sustain a narrative about the self thereby
building up a consistent feeling of biographical continuity. The identity stories that
form a project attempt to answer the critical questions ‘What to do? How to act?
Who to be?’ and lead us to grasp identity as the self understood reflexively by any
given person.
Links Identity, multiple identities, narrative, performativity, self-identity, subjectivity

Ideological state apparatus A term that was developed by Althusser in the late 1960s
and early 1970s in the context of his structuralist Marxism. The concept entered the
vocabulary of cultural studies at the moment when thinkers at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies engaged with structuralism and the question of
ideology.
For Althusser, our entry into the symbolic order, and thus our constitution as
subjects, is the work of ideology which, he argues, hails or ‘interpellates’ concrete
individuals as concrete subjects. According to Althusser, ideology exists in an
apparatus and its associated practices. Thus he designates a series of institutions as
‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs): namely, the family, the education system, the
church and the mass media. While Althusser regards the church as the dominant
pre-capitalist ISA, he argues that within the context of capitalism it has been
replaced by the educational system. Thus schools and universities are implicated in
the ideological (and physical) reproduction of labour power along with the social
relations of production that pertain to capitalism.
Althusser’s work was significant in elevating the debate about ideology to the
forefront of thinking within cultural studies. However, his influence waned not least
because the operation of ISAs as argued by Althusser is too functionalist in
orientation. That is, ideology appears to operate behind people’s backs in terms of