your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the 'external' ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation. ¹⁵

What we encounter here again is the 'regression' into ideology at the very point where we apparently step out of it. In this respect, the relationship between Althusser and Foucault is of special interest. The Foucauldian counterparts to Ideological State Apparatuses are the disciplinary procedures that operate at the level of 'micro-power' and designate the point at which power inscribes itself into the body directly, bypassing ideology -- for that precise reason, Foucault never uses the term 'ideology' apropos of these mechanisms of micro-power. This abandoning of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness of Foucault's theory. Foucault never tires of repeating how power constitutes itself 'from below', how it does not emanate from some unique summit: this very semblance of a Summit (the Monarch or some other embodiment of Sovereignty) emerges as the secondary effect of the plurality of micro-practices, of the complex network of their interrelations. However, when he is compelled to display the concrete mechanism of this emergence, Foucault resorts to the extremely suspect rhetoric of complexity, evoking the intricate network of lateral links, left and right, up and down . . . a clear case of patching up, since one can never arrive at Power this way -- the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power remains unbridgeable. Althusser's advantage over Foucault seems evident: Althusser proceeds in exactly the opposite direction -- from the very outset, he conceives these micro-procedures as parts of the ISA; that is to say, as mechanisms which, in order to be operative, to 'seize' the individual, always-already presuppose the massive presence of the state, the transferential relationship of the individual towards state power, or -in Althusser's terms -- towards the ideological big Other in whom the interpellation originates.

This Althusserian shift of emphasis from ideology 'in-itself' to its material existence in the ISA proved its fecundity in a new approach to Fascism; Wolfgang Fritz Haug's criticism of Adorno is exemplary here. Adorno refuses to treat Fascism as an ideology in the proper sense of the term, that is, as 'rational legitimization of the existing order'. So-called 'Fascist ideology' no longer possesses the coherence of a rational construct that calls for conceptual analysis and ideologicocritical refutation; that is to say, it no longer functions as a 'lie necessarily experienced as truth' (the sign of recognition of a true ideology). 'Fascist ideology' is not taken seriously even by its promoters; its status is purely instrumental, and ultimately relies on external coercion. ¹⁶ In his response to Adorno, however, Haug ¹⁷ triumphantly

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