Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Althusserianism 71
level. Nevertheless, the practice that is dominant in a particular social formation will
depend on the specific form of economic production. What he means by this is that
the economic contradictions of capitalism never take a pure form: ‘the lonely hour of
the last instance never comes’ (113). The economic is determinant in the last instance,
not because the other instances are its epiphenomena, but because it determines which
practice is dominant. In volume one of Capital, Marx (1976c) makes a similar point in
response to criticisms suggesting definite limits to the critical reach of Marxist analysis:
[Marxism, so its critics say,] is all very true for our own time, in which material
interests are preponderant, but not for the Middle Ages, dominated by Catholicism,
nor for Athens and Rome, dominated by politics. . . . One thing is clear: the
Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics.
On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which
explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief
part. . . . And then there is Don Quixote, who long ago paid the penalty for
wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of
society (176).
Althusser produced three definitions of ideology, two of which have proved particularly
fruitful for the student of popular culture. The first definition, which overlaps in
some ways with the second, is the claim that ideology – ‘a system (with its own logic
and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts)’ (1969: 231) – is a
‘practice’ through which men and women live their relations to the real conditions of
existence. ‘By practice ...I...mean any process of transformation of a determinate
given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate
human labour, using determinate means (of “production”)’ (166). Therefore,
as the economic, the historically specific mode of production, transforms certain raw
materials into products by determinate means of production, involving determinate
relations of production, so ideological practice shapes an individual’s lived relations
to the social formation. In this way, ideology dispels contradictions in lived experience.
It accomplishes this by offering false, but seemingly true, resolutions to real problems.
This is not a ‘conscious’ process; ideology ‘is profoundly unconscious’ (233) in its
mode of operation.
In ideology men . . . express, not the relation between them and their conditions
of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions
of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation.
Ideology . . . is the expression of the relation between men and their ‘world’,
that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation
between them and their real conditions of existence (233–4).
The relationship is both real and imaginary in the sense that ideology is the way we
live our relationship to the real conditions of existence at the level of representations
(myths, concepts, ideas, images, discourses): there are real conditions and there are the