reproduction of the relations of production needs no explanation because they 'go of their own accord' so long as they are left alone, the flaws and failures of the 'system' apart, is an eternalist and anti-dialectical illusion. In reality the reproduction, just as much as the transformation, of the relations of production is an objective process whose mystery must be penetrated, and not just a state of fact needing only to be observed.I have already alluded several times to Althusser's central thesis: 'Ideology interpellates individuals ax subjects'. The time has come to examine how this thesis 'penetrates the mystery' in question, and, specifically, how the way it penetrates this mystery leads directly to the problematic of a materialist theory of discursive processes, articulated into the problematic of the ideological conditions of the reproduction/ transformation of the relations of production.But first a remark on terminology: in the development that has brought us to this point a certain number of terms have appeared such as ideological state apparatuses, ideological formation, dominant or ruling ideology, etc., but neither the term 'ideology' (except negatively in the sentence 'the ideological state apparatuses are not the realization of Ideology in general') nor the term 'subject' has appeared (and even less the term 'individual'). Why is it that as a result of the preceding development, and precisely in order to be able to strengthen it in its conclusions, I am obliged to change my terminology and introduce new words (Ideology in the singular, individual, subject, interpellate)? The answer lies in the following two intermediary propositions --
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1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology; |
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2. there is no Ideology except by the subject and for subjects |
-- that Althusser states before presenting his 'central thesis': in transcribing these two intermediary propositions, I have emphasized the two ways the term 'ideology' is determined: in the first, the indefinite article suggests the differentiated multiplicity of the ideological instance in the form of a combination (complex whole in dominance) of elements each of which is an ideological formation (in the sense defined above); in short, an ideology. In the second proposition, the determination of the term 'Ideology' operates 'in general', as when one says 'there is no square root except of a positive number', implying that every square root is the square root of a positive number: in the same way, the signification of this second proposition, which in fact prefigures the 'central thesis', 6 is that 'the category of the subject . . . is the constitutive category of every ideology'. In other words, the emergence of the term 'subject' in the theoretical exposition (an emergence
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