Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 4 Marxisms
Photo 4.3 Two figures on a beach.
In Althusser’s second formulation, ideology is still a representation of the imaginary
relationship of individuals to the real conditions of existence, only now ideology is no
longer seen only as a body of ideas, but as a lived, material practice – rituals, customs,
patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking taking practical form – reproduced through
the practices and productions of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): education,
organized religion, the family, organized politics, the media, the culture industries, etc.
According to this second definition, ‘all ideology has the function (which defines it)
of “constructing” concrete individuals as subjects’ (2009: 309). Ideological subjects are
produced by acts of ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellation’. Althusser uses the analogy of a police
officer hailing an individual: ‘Hey, you there!’ When the individual hailed turns in
response, he or she has been interpellated, has become a subject of the police officer’s
discourse. In this way, ideology is a material practice that creates subjects who are in
turn subjected to its specific patterns of thought and modes of behaviour.
This definition of ideology has had a significant effect on the field of cultural studies
and the study of popular culture. Judith Williamson (1978), for example, deploys
Althusser’s second definition of ideology in her influential study of advertising,
Decoding Advertisements. She argues that advertising is ideological in the sense that it
represents an imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. Instead of class
distinctions based on our role in the process of production, advertising continually