From Interpellation to Recognition: Althusser, Hegel, Dahlberg

Althusser, Hegel, Shklovsky

If Louis Althusser counseled suspicion of ideological "obviousness," one might well be suspicious that his own theory of ideology has long enjoyed the status of obviousness. Althusser's theory gives an account of "ideological State apparatuses" (ISAs): the bourgeois institutions, notably family, education, and religion, that shape the subject to secure its "submission to the rules of established order" and accept a certain position in the socio-economic whole (1971, 132).¹ Althusser holds that all recognition is "misrecognition" or "interpellation" mediated by these apparatuses. Interpellation is the process of a subject being caught up in an "imaginary" relation to other people and to the social whole. This relation is imaginary because it is the stage on which a subject assumes an illusory freedom; in fact its actions are determined by the ISAs (1971, 182).

Althusser's Marxist theory stands Hegelian recognition on its head. While for Althusser the ISAs ensure the individual's "subjection," for Hegel analogous institutions of family, civil society, and state ultimately guarantee the freedom of the individual (Althusser 1971, 143). Hegelian freedom, to be sure, is not "negative" freedom from external constraint. It is rather a "positive" freedom of adherence to institutions that help one actualize one's potential as a rational being.² In contradiction to this, Althusser maintains that the purpose of such institutions is not freedom but subordination. Althusser avers that no one, not even "bad subjects,"—or those who try to resist subordination to institutions—are exempt from interpellation (1971, 181). There is no "outside" to ideology: all practices are ideological (1971, 175, 170).

Hegelian recognition, by contrast, is the network of mutual relationships that shape the subject within what Hegel calls the "realm of actualized freedom." Again, this freedom is positive, structured by the "ethical substance" that is society: family, civil society, and state. What for Althusser are ISAs are for Hegel the structures in which "the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny" (Hegel 1991, 35; emphasis original). Indeed, in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right the apparatuses of family, civil society, and state are the conditions of freedom rather than subjection. Axel Honneth explains that for Hegel "a subject is only truly free if it directs all its efforts towards finding itself in a world whose structure is an expression of the subject's own will" (Honneth 2012, 23). According to Honneth, the family is the source of love; civil society the realm of equality; and the state the bonds of solidarity (Honneth 1995, 25; see Hegel 1991, 64): love, equality, and solidarity are the conditions of possibility for freedom, the actualization of one's potential within society.

Althusser's and Honneth's accounts of subject formation, labeled respectively interpellation and recognition, and characterized by subjection and freedom, alienation and solidarity, pose a paradox. They appear like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit picture, an image in which the bill of a duck can also be seen as the ears of a rabbit, so that one can switch between seeing the same image as a different animal (Wittgenstein 1968, 194). The oscillation between seeing subject-formation as subjection and seeing it as freedom is analogous to the shift from seeing the picture as a duck to seeing it as a rabbit. Wittgenstein tries to debunk the inclination to attribute the process of perception or "seeing-as" to either subjective or objective factors with a characteristically paradoxical observation: "The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged" (1968, 196). If we insist on one alternative or another, language "goes on holiday" and leads to mysterious ontological implications: if the image changes, something "queer" must be going on in either the subject or the object or both (1968, 19)! For Wittgenstein, the duck-rabbit is only a picture that "holds us captive" (1968, 48). In the case of Althusser and Hegel, however, the stakes of captivity seem more momentous than a theory of perception. Wittgenstein seems to make a conservative point when he urges...