Althusser...

      Althusser's essay is, as announced in its title, about “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses on the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production”. His essay consists on revising/revisiting Marxist tradition and places special emphasis on the production of means of production. He analyzes reproduction employing the same terminology used by Marx and shows particular interest in discussing the power held by economy and how it influences everything around it to the point of creating a deterministic system dependent on it (society, ideology...). Or on top of it, to use the analogy of the building he gets from Marx to refer to the dynamic between infrastructure, structure ad superstructure: “upper floors could not 'stay up' (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base” (135). This is a direct reference to the Marxist Dialectical Materialism and Marx's Levels of Culture Model. Infrastructure is represented, as Althusser clarifies, by “'the unity' of the productive forces and the relation of production,” that is, population, basic biological need, and resources (134). 

 

      He decides to “take the point of view of reproduction ” to analyze Law, State and Ideology to show “the point of view of practice and production on one hand and from that of reproduction on the other” and analyze their basic function (136). In the Marxist tradition the State is referred to as State Apparatus, which is formed by Government, Administration, Army, the Police, the Courts, Prison, etc. but the French philosopher decides to call this “Repressive State Apparatus”(143). And what Althusser calls State Apparatus Ideology (SAI) is “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialize institutions”: Religious ISA, Educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA, the cultural ISA (144). They all belong to the private domain in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus. It is through these 'realities' that the hegemonic ideology prevails and helps to maintain the State Power. By “ideology” the author means “the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (158).

…

Ideology has no history
Ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream

Ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious

• Ideology represent the imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence
  • they constitute an illusion
  • they do make allusion to reality
  • they need to be 'interpreted' to discover the reality
    • the is a cause to the imaginary transposition of the real conditions of existence: The cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the 'people' on a falsify representation of the world, which they have imagined to slave other minds by dominating their imaginations

I...Once one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream that is self awareness...” WL