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” . . . you must admit that whatever you and your civilization are, is
due to me—insomuch that if I had not had this dream you would have
had no existence whatever.”
—Julian Hawthorne, “June, 1993”
New technologies is a historically relative term. We are not the first
generation to wonder at the rapid and extraordinary shifts in the dimension of the world and the human relationships it contains as a result
of new forms of communication, or to be surprised by the changes
those shifts occasion in the regular pattern of our lives. If our own
experience is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern.
It starts with the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electrical
communications machines, as significant a break with the past as printing before it. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an
instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on
the telegraph’s original work.
In the long transformation that begins with the first application of
electricity to communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century
has a special importance for students of modern media history. Five
proto-mass media of the twentieth century were invented during this
period: the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema. This period is not the usual starting point for the social history
of Anglo-American electric media, which is generally assumed to begin only with the institutional birth of film and broadcasting and the
development of large audiences in the twentieth century. The present
study modestly attempts to push back those beginnings to the late nineteenth century, when Anglo-American culture was fascinated by the
communicative possibilities of the telegraph, the telephone, and the
incandescent lamp—choices that may come as a surprise to contemporary sensibilities focused on twentieth-century mass media.
When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late
3
Nineteenth Century. Carolyn Marvin, Oxford University Press (1988). © Oxford University
Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195063417.003.0005
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Introduction
4
WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW
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For media historians, the phenomenon of twentieth-century electronic mass media lies like a great whale across the terrain of our intellectual concern. Asked to explain what sort of phenomenon it is,
most of us will unhesitatingly point to the hundreds of millions of radio
and television sets that are bought by consumers and promoted by vast
industries. This artifactual notion is pervasive and not much debated,
for it seems simple, obvious, and convenient. But it has rendered invisible important aspects of electric media history, and perhaps of mediated communication generally. It does this in part by fixing the social
origin of electric media history at the point when media producers began to service and encourage the appliance-buying demand of mass
audiences. Everything before this artifactual moment is classified as
technical prehistory, a neutral boundary at which inventors and technicians with no other agenda of much interest assembled equipment
that exerted negligible social impact until the rise of network broadcasting. But a great deal more was going on in the late nineteenth
century. New electric media were sources of endless fascination and
fear, and provided constant fodder for social experimentation. All debates about electronic media in the twentieth century begin here, in
fact. For if it is the case, as it is fashionable to assert, that media give
shape to the imaginative boundaries of modern communities, then the
introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided the stable currency
of social exchange are reexamined, challenged, and defended.
The present study is not, therefore, an effort merely to extend the
traditional time line of electric media. It introduces issues that may be
overlooked when the social history of these media is framed exclusively by the instrument-centered perspective that governs its conventional starting point. It argues that the early history of electric media
is less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a
series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social
life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who
may not, and who has authority and may be believed. Changes in the
speed, capacity, and performance of communications devices tell us
little about these questions. At best, they provide a cover of functional
meanings beneath which social meanings can elaborate themselves undisturbed.
If artifactual approaches foster the belief that social processes connected to media logically and historically begin with the instrument,
then new media are presumed to fashion new social groups called au-
Introduction
5
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diences from voiceless collectivities and to inspire new uses based on
novel technological properties. When audiences become organized
around these uses, the history of a new medium begins. The model
used here is different. Here, the focus of communication is shifted
from the instrument to the drama in which existing groups perpetually
negotiate power, authority, representation, and knowledge with whatever resources are available. New media intrude on these negotiations
by providing new platforms on which old groups confront one another.
Old habits of transacting between groups are projected onto new technologies that alter, or seem to alter, critical social distances. New media may change the perceived effectiveness of one group’s surveillance
of another, the permissible familiarity of exchange, the frequency and
intensity of contact, and the efficacy of customary tests for truth and
deception. Old practices are then painfully revised, and group habits
are reformed. New practices do not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices
that no longer work in new settings. Efforts are launched to restore
social equilibrium, and these efforts have significant social risks. In
the end, it is less in new media practices, which come later and point
toward a resolution of these conflicts (or, more likely, a temporary
truce), than in the uncertainty of emerging and contested practices of
communication that the struggle of groups to define and locate themselves is most easily observed.
Electrical and other media precipitated new kinds of social encounters long before their incarnation in fixed institutional form. In
their institutionally inchoate manifestations, they inspired energetic efforts to keep outsiders out and insiders under the control of the proper
people. Chaotic and creative experiments with new media and thought
experiments with their imaginary derivatives attempted to reduce and
simplify a world of expanding cultural variety to something more familiar and less threatening. That impulse fixed on one-way communication from familiar cultural, social, and geographic perimeters as a
preferred strategy to two-way exchange, with its greater presumption
of equality and risks of unpredictable confrontation. Classes, families,
and professional communities struggled to come to terms with novel
acoustic and visual devices that made possible communication in real
time without real presence, so that some people were suddenly too
close and others much too far away. New kinds of encounters collided
with old ways of determining trust and reliability, and with old notions
about the world and one’s place in it: about the relation of men and
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WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW
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women, rich and poor, black and white, European and non-European,
experts and publics.
Discussions of electrical and other new forms of communication
in the late nineteenth century begin from specific cultural and class
assumptions about what communication ought to be like among particular groups of people. These assumptions informed the beliefs of
nineteenth-century observers about what these new media were supposed to do, and legislated the boundaries of intimacy and strangeness
for the close and distant worlds they presented to their audiences. How
new media were expected to loosen or tighten existing social bonds
also reflected what specific groups hoped for and feared from one another. Finally, concerns about how practices organized around new
media would arbitrate the claims of antagonistic epistemologies contending in the public arena were rooted in group-specific beliefs about
how the world could be known, and how other groups than one’s own
imagined it to be. Those who wrestled with these puzzles did not think
in terms of the articulated mass media we know, since these inventions
were still experimental and their exact shapes vague in the public and
expert mind. They thought in terms of devices doing duty in familiar
surroundings: the telephone, electric light, phonograph, cinema, wireless, and, always in the background, the telegraph.
This study focuses especially on two inventions on this list that
have been regarded as least relevant to twentieth-century media history. The first is the electric light, which is ordinarily not thought of
in connection with communication at all. The second, the telephone,
has not been considered a medium of mass communication. Nevertheless, the telephone was the first electric medium to enter the home
and unsettle customary ways of dividing the private person and family
from the more public setting of the community. The electric light was
the great late-nineteenth-century medium of the spectacle, dazzling its
audiences with novel messages. In much social imagination, it was the
premier mass medium of the future. Because the telephone and the
electric light were the most technically and socially developed communications devices in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, experts and laymen found them good to think, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss,
about what media systems of the future and the societies that supported
them might be like. They were also the most widely experimented
with.
It is impossible to separate public discussion of innovations in
communication in the late nineteenth century from public fascination
with the fruits of electrical possibility generally. This is partly because
Introduction
1
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“electricians” and their associates were the earliest users and closest
observers of electric media. Media historians have scarcely noticed this
convergence. Focused on the point of mass production, artifactual
communications history has failed to recognize that electricians were
as deeply involved in the field of cultural production as in the field of
technical production. Technological historians also have treated electricians exclusively as technical actors, accepting mostly at face value
the boosterism of their professional rhetoric. As citizens with attachments to families, communities, and social amenities as strong as any
that connected them to their profession, their role was somewhat different, however. The stamp of society on them was nowhere more
visible than in their uneasiness about the impact of new media on family, class, community, and gender relations. The ambivalence that so
much characterizes contemporary regard for electronic media did not
originate with twentieth-century radio and television, but in threats to
social interaction set up by their nineteenth-century prototypes.
The temptation to derive social practice from media artifact has
also supported another notion, common to media analysis, that separate media embrace distinct and self-contained codes, or spheres of
interpretive activity. Concrete arenas of communication are always more
complex than this. In the late nineteenth century, oral-gestural and
literate codes were both projected onto electrical devices and events
in the struggle to claim and label these new and important objects for
social consumption. In general, literate practices were the self-consciously exclusive domain of electrical experts. To be an expert was
to have knowledge based on technical texts. We can learn a great deal
about how electricians and other social groups constructed the social
world by observing their uses of texts, and their evaluation of others’
uses as well. Groups without recourse to special textual expertise approached the electrical unknown directly, learning with their bodies
what it was and what their relationship to it should be. Though deeply
distrusted by experts as an instrument of naive empiricism or folk wisdom, the body was a popular probe for making strange phenomena
familiar. Even experts found it difficult to resist.
Many of the stories that constitute the evidence for this study describe real events. Others do not, but were treated by contemporaries
as if they did. Still others are unselfconsciously extravagant media fantasies. This is as it should be, since fantasies and dreams are important
human products that define limits for imagination. Fantasies help us
determine what “consciousness” was in a particular age, what thoughts
were possible, and what thoughts could not be entertained yet or any-
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WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW
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more. The point frequently has been made that private dreams are systematic in content and impulse. Dreams and fantasies created, exchanged, and reworked in the public forum are systematic as well.
They develop their own traditions in the conversation society has with
itself about what it is and ought to be. Such dreams are never pure
fantasy, perhaps, since their point of departure is a perceived reality.
They reflect conditions people know and live in, and real social stakes.
This exercise in communications history is not, in sum, a history
of media in the usual Laswellian sense of the set of sluices through
which societies move messages of particular types. Media are not fixed
natural objects; they have no natural edges. They are constructed complexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elaborate cultural codes of communication. The history of media is never more or
less than the history of their uses, which always lead us away from
them to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate. New media,
broadly understood to include the use of new communications technology for old or new purposes, new ways of using old technologies,
and, in principle, all other possibilities for the exchange of social
meaning, are always introduced into a pattern of tension created by
the coexistence of old and new, which is far richer than any single
medium that becomes a focus of interest because it is novel. New media embody the possibility that accustomed orders are in jeopardy, since
communication is a peculiar kind of interaction that actively seeks variety. No matter how firmly custom or instrumentality may appear to
organize and contain it, it carries the seeds of its own subversion.
If new communications devices were vehicles for navigating social territory in the late nineteenth century, it is clear that some of the
maps constructed for them are fabrications we have sought to dismantle in the twentieth. It is useless to scold nineteenth-century engineers
for their failure to be twentieth-century feminists or champions of civil
rights, but it may be useful to understand how electrical experts and
their publics projected their respective social worlds onto technology
in the late nineteenth century, and what justifications and fears motivated them in this. It is also important to notice that communications
technologies that prepared the way for twentieth-century media were
built to uphold a scheme of social stratification that has attracted sustained contemporary challenge. This, as much as anything else, is a
measure of how we have changed.
6
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 79
Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes Towards
an Investigation)
Louis Althusser
Copyright © 2005. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
The State Ideological Apparatuses
In order to advance the theory of the State it is indispensable to take into account
not only the distinction between State power and State apparatus, but also another
reality which is clearly on the side of the (repressive) State apparatus, but must
not be confused with it. I shall call this reality by its concept: the ideological State
apparatuses.
What are the ideological State apparatuses (ISAs)?
They must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatus. Remember that
in Marxist theory, the State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what
I shall in future call the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the
State Apparatus in question “functions by violence” – at least ultimately (since
repression, e.g. administrative repression, may take non-physical forms).
I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present
themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. I propose an empirical list of these which will obviously have to be examined
in detail, tested, corrected and reorganized. With all the reservations implied by this
requirement, we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular
significance):
From Louis Althusser, “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 142–7, 166–76. Translated by Ben Brewster.
New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. © 1971 by Monthly Review Press. Reprinted
by permission of Monthly Review Press.
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80 Louis Althusser
– the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),
– the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private “Schools”),
– the family ISA,1
– the legal ISA,2
– the political ISA (the political system, including the different Parties),
– the trade-union ISA,
– the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
– the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.).
I have said that the ISAs must not be confused with the (Repressive) State
Apparatus. What constitutes the difference?
As a first moment, it is clear that while there is one (Repressive) State Apparatus,
there is a plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses. Even presupposing that it exists,
the unity that constitutes this plurality of ISAs as a body is not immediately visible.
As a second moment, it is clear that whereas the – unified – (Repressive) State
Apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain, much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion) are part, on the contrary, of
the private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most
newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc., are private.
We can ignore the first observation for the moment. But someone is bound to
question the second, asking me by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite
simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this
objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a
distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in
which bourgeois law exercises its “authority”. The domain of the State escapes it
because the latter is “above the law”: the State, which is the State of the ruling class,
is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point
of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in
which they are realized are “public” or “private”. What matters is how they function.
Private institutions can perfectly well “function” as Ideological State Apparatuses. A
reasonably thorough analysis of any one of the ISAs proves it.
But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive)
State Apparatus is the following basic difference: the Repressive State Apparatus
functions “by violence”, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function “by
ideology”.
I can clarify matters by correcting this distinction. I shall say rather that every
State Apparatus, whether Repressive or Ideological, “functions” both by violence and
by ideology, but with one very important distinction which makes it imperative not
to confuse the Ideological State Apparatuses with the (Repressive) State Apparatus.
This is the fact that the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily
by ideology. (There is no such thing as a purely repressive apparatus.) For example,
the Army and the Police also function by ideology both to ensure their own cohesion
and reproduction, and in the “values” they propound externally.
Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, and Douglas M. Kellner, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005.
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Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 81
In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they
also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is
very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely
ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to “discipline” not only their shepherds, but also
their flocks. The same is true of the Family. . . . The same is true of the cultural IS
Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.
Is it necessary to add that this determination of the double “functioning” (predominantly, secondarily) by repression and by ideology, according to whether it is a
matter of the (Repressive) State Apparatus or the Ideological State Apparatuses,
makes it clear that very subtle explicit or tacit combinations may be woven from the
interplay of the (Repressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses?
Everyday life provides us with innumerable examples of this, but they must be
studied in detail if we are to go further than this mere observation.
Nevertheless, this remark leads us towards an understanding of what constitutes
the unity of the apparently disparate body of the ISAs. If the ISAs “function”
massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity is precisely this
functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified,
despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the
ideology of “the ruling class”. Given the fact that the “ruling class” in principle holds
State power (openly or more often by means of alliances between classes or class
fractions), and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive) State Apparatus, we can
accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological
State Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions. Of course, it is a quite different thing
to act by laws and decrees in the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to “act” through
the intermediary of the ruling ideology in the Ideological State Apparatuses. We
must go into the details of this difference – but it cannot mask the reality of a
profound identity. To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period
without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological
Apparatuses. I only need one example and proof of this: Lenin’s anguished concern
to revolutionize the educational Ideological State Apparatus (among others), simply
to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power, to secure
the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism.3
This last comment puts us in a position to understand that the Ideological State
Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often
of bitter forms of class struggle. The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay
down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State apparatus, not
only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a
long time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find
means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.4 [ . . . ]
While discussing the ideological State apparatuses and their practices, I said that
each of them was the realization of an ideology (the unity of these different regional
Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, and Douglas M. Kellner, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005.
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82 Louis Althusser
ideologies – religious, ethical, legal, political, aesthetic, etc. – being assured by their
subjection to the ruling ideology). I now return to this thesis: an ideology always
exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.
Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices
does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a
rifle. But, at the risk of being taken for a Neo-Aristotelian (NB Marx had a very high
regard for Aristotle), I shall say that “matter is discussed in many senses”, or rather
that it exists in different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in “physical”
matter.
Having said this, let me move straight on and see what happens to the “individuals”
who live in ideology, i.e. in a determinate (religious, ethical, etc.) representation of
the world whose imaginary distortion depends on their imaginary relation to their
conditions of existence, in other words, in the last instance, to the relations of
production and to class relations (ideology = an imaginary relation to real relations).
I shall say that this imaginary relation is itself endowed with a material existence.
Now I observe the following.
An individual believes in God, or Duty, or Justice, etc. This belief derives (for
everyone, i.e. for all those who live in an ideological representation of ideology,
which reduces ideology to ideas endowed by definition with a spiritual existence)
from the ideas of the individual concerned, i.e. from him as a subject with a consciousness which contains the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e. by means of
the absolutely ideological “conceptual” device (dispositif ) thus set up (a subject
endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in
which he believes), the (material) attitude of the subject concerned naturally follows.
The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such
a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which
are those of the ideological apparatus on which “depend” the ideas which he has in
all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he goes to Church
to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (once it was material in the
ordinary sense of the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty,
he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices “according to
the correct principles”. If he believes in Justice, he will submit unconditionally to
the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions,
take part in a demonstration, etc.
Throughout this schema we observe that the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every “subject” endowed with a “consciousness”
and believing in the “ideas” that his “consciousness” inspires in him and freely
accepts, must “act according to his ideas”, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as
a free subject in the actions of his material practice. If he does not do so, “that is
wicked”.
Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a function of what he believes,
it is because he does something else, which, still as a function of the same idealist
scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his head as well as those he proclaims, and
that he acts according to these other ideas, as a man who is either “inconsistent”
(“no one is willingly evil”) or cynical, or perverse.
Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, and Douglas M. Kellner, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2005.
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Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 83
In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary
distortion, that the “ideas” of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist
in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to
the actions (however perverse) that he does perform. This ideology talks of actions:
I shall talk of actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the
material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports’ club, a
school day, a political party meeting, etc.
Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive “dialectic” for the wonderful formula
which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal
says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” He
thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but
strife, and in addition something hardly Christian (for woe to him who brings
scandal into the world!) – scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him stick
with Jansenist defiance to a language that directly names the reality.
I will be allowed to leave Pascal to the arguments of his ideological struggle with
the religious ideological State apparatus of his day. And I shall be expected to use a
more directly Marxist vocabulary, if that is possible, for we are advancing in still
poorly explored domains.
I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual)
is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his
material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are
themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of
that subject. Naturally, the four inscriptions of the adjective “material” in my proposition must be af
