This document provides an overview of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault regarding ideology and power. It summarizes that Althusser argued that Ideological State Apparatuses like education ensure the reproduction of societal relations of production by hailing individuals as subjects through ideology. Foucault shifted from studying epistemes to exploring how power produces domains of knowledge through discourse and determines regimes of truth, constituting subjects through diffuse matrices of power and knowledge.

1. Power and Truth:
Ideological Criticism
Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault

2. The Marxian Legacy
• Marx argues that for a given societal organization to remain
in place, the means of production need to be reproduced.
• Labor is reproduced when workers are given a means of
sustenance (i.e. wages). In the dialectic of Superstructure
and Infrastructure, the dominance of the Superstructure is
determined by the Infrastructure.
But how does this happen? What makes workers in a
democratic society contribute to their own subjugation?

3. Louis Althusser
• As a Structural Marxist, finds Marx’s theory too descriptive.
Proposes to focus on how the superstructure operates in
order to show that the relationship between the two
“floors” of the “house that Marx built” are reciprocal rather
than deterministic.

4. • Divides social institutions into two
categories:
• 1. The Repressive State Apparatus:
functions through violence (potential
or actual)
• 2. The Ideological State Apparatus:
functions through ideology (family,
religion, education, law, political
parties, trade unions, the arts, mass
media).
• According to Althusser, the ISAs
ensure the reproduction of the
relations of production.
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

5. According to “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses,”
the dominant ISA is the
educational system, which has
displaced the church as a site of
training that inculcates
“submission to the rules of
established order.”

6. Ideology has “no history,” no
location, no traceable origins;
like Freud’s unconscious, it is
a constant force that suffuses
all social practices. Since
there is no position outside
of ideology, it can only be
known through its effects
(but it cannot be demystified,
as particular ideas can).

7. Ideology interpellates or “hails” individuals
as subjects of and in this order, providing
identificatory positions that we believe
we have chosen freely. Ideology
functions through images and ideas that
lend a false sense of coherence, unity
and collectivity even as it props up the
individual’s sense of singularity and
originality.

8. Interpellation:

10. Power and KnowledgePower and Knowledge
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault

11. epistemes/discursive formations
• In 1966’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order ofThings),
an early Structuralist text, Foucault suggested that
ways of constituting knowledge can alter according
to shifts in “epistemes” (structures for organizing
knowledge). Transformations in knowledge occur
according to discontinuities and ruptures rather than
any linear progression.

12. • In The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),
Foucault is primarily concerned with the following epistemes as ways
of exploring major historical shifts in Western consciousness:
• 1. Renaissance: Governed by conjectures concerning the nature of
God; mystical relationship between signs and things, as well as
things and things.
• II. Classical (18th C.“Enlightenment”): Rationalism, governed by the
ordering of the relationships of words/things according to
taxonomic (classificatory) systems and binary oppositions.
• III. Modern: Governed by a new model of history (“In our time,
history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In
that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by
men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped,
made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities;
it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history
aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description
of the monument (Archaeology of Knowledge 7). This approach to
history and knowledge yields questions about rationalism and the
ability of signs to represent things.

13. • After The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),
Foucault shifts from the concept of the
“episteme” with the poststructuralist notion
of the “discursive formation” to express his
focus on the way in which power produces
domains of knowledge. Discursive analysis
would define all of his later work
DISCOURSE

14. DiscourseDiscourse
Discourses are systems of representation
Representation as a source for the production of social knowledge (rather than
“meaning”).
Power produces domains of knowledge that determine a set of privileged truths
through repression, exclusion, etc. of alternative forms of knowledge.
“Nothing has any meaning outside of discourse.”
The subject emerges from the matrices of power (the power to produce knowledge)
that define the coordinates of subjectivity.

15. Discourse, for Foucault, means ways of constituting
knowledge; coherent sets of statements, rules and
conventions that, in tandem with social practices and
power relations, determine the regime of truth of a
particular period and culture.

16. Discursive formations do not refer to “things,” as we might presume to be true of
language. Rather, discourse both constitutes its object and generates knowledge about
that object. For example, nineteenth century psychopathology:
• Constitutes (rather than “discovers”) mental illness as its object of
study, produces (rather than “reveals”) “scientific” distinctions
between the normal and the pathological.
• Defines and makes systemic the treatments of abnormality.
• Determines the arrangement of power roles (professor/student;
doctor/health administrator/patient) within the institutions it generates
(the sanitarium, the clinic, the university department, the
psychotherapist’s office).
• At every level of a given discursive formation, what is known is the
product of relations of force and power.

17. Power
• Consists in the practices that privilege and institutionalize certain articulations
of knowledge by excluding, silencing or otherwise marginalizing alternative
accounts.
• Determines the particular forms of knowledge (through discourse) at a given
time. In this sense, power does not simply repress, it produces.
• For Foucault, the old cliché that knowledge = power must be revised to:
power = knowledge, that is, power over something is expressed as the
power to make that concept, physical body, or material thing knowable,
classifiable.
• Power thus functions in much the same way as Ideology does for Althusser;
matrices of power and knowledge produce a governable subject.
• Not a top-down model, but diffuse, what Foucault calls a “capillary functioning of
power” that trains individuals to internalize the function of surveillance (to “police
themselves”). Foucault argues that this constitution of the subject as a subject-
position is at the core of the modern form of “biopower.”

18. The Panopticon