Week Seven: Louis Althusser

Analyzing the concept of the subject and how it pertains to the conditions of (re) production and (infra/super) structures

In the 1971 essay titled, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” by author Louis Althusser, the concepts of “reproduction vs. production” and “infrastructures of the ruling class” are introduced to the reader as a system of identifying cyclical labor processes within society. According to Althusser, this system allows the individual at the bottom of an infrastructure to gain skills in order to serve the ruling class. However, Althusser indicates that this often equates to the ruling class depending on the labor force beneath them since these individuals support the foundation.

Althusser opens his essay by discussing how reproduction occurs through the conditions of production through definite relations such as reproducing “the productive forces” and “existing relations of production.” By stating this Althusser explains that accountants who handle finances understand that reproduction occurs via production of expendable materials and conditions. From his perspective, Althusser states that the average economist is equivalent to the average capitalist that seizes every available opportunity to procure funds. This is an example that is often seen through business contracting where each raw material is accounted for within a work facility from machines to computer equipment to interior décor.

An amusing example that Althusser mentions includes three individuals: Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z. In their own society, these three men work for each other and vice versa based on concepts of supply and demand. Mr. X spins wool yarn at his mill while Mr. Y tends to his sheep flocks and Mr. Z is the industrial engineer who produces tools. These three labor positions prove that each individual requires the other to function in the cyclical process. Mr. Y must take of his sheep so that he can receive wages for providing wool to Mr. X who places it into a spindle to make thread, which also benefits Mr. Z because he provides the parts and repair maintenance for the spinning mill.

This continuous cycle describes reproduction and how the importance for another person to continue the process. One example could be for when tools were first made. In order to chop down a tree, an individual requires an axe. To obtain the axe, he must use wages to either import materials or laborers to create the sharp blade and provide a wooden handle. After these items come together, he is holding an axe ready to complete his task of chopping firewood. However, without the other two individuals, the first man would not be able to cut the wood or sell the wood to local lumber yards. With this example, without wages or collateral, the individual may break the cycle unless a replacement provides a better, faster, and more cost-effective service.

Althusser also states the importance of wages and other incentives to make working conditions comfortable enough for employees to return to work each day. He mentions how the reproduction of labor power occurs through the concept of wage capital, which includes “housing, food and clothing, etc.” He explains this further as not a “biological” minimum wage but rather going along with theorist Karl Marx’s concept of a “historical” minimum, which provides incentives based on different societies such as wine for the French and beer for the English. Althusser describes that this concept occurs because of a “double-class struggle” that the proletarian class enforces for the resistance against low wages and long work days.

Althusser also discusses that the labor power requires skills and knowledge to be able to perform their assigned duties each day. With the complex system of the process production the socio-technical division of labor arranges certain individuals in one capacity while the others perform another task and so on and so forth. In doing so, this process entails “diversified skills,” which Althusser makes clear are not reminiscent of feudal serfdom or slavery because there are no longer on-the-spot apprenticeships available. Instead, labor workers often attend the capitalist educational institutions and seek other opportunities in order to gain and prove their skill sets.

As a result, author Althusser notes that when children are younger in school, they are taught the specifics of the “literary culture,” which prepares them for life out in the real world as managers, hands-on personnel, technicians, and engineers. These positions are also pre-selected based on the education the children receive in accordance with the rules of the socio-technical society. With children, they learn proper demeanors that they take with them into their first jobs because these “rules of morality, civic, and professional conscience” often lead children to their “destined position” in the grand scheme of things.

Furthermore, author Althusser reiterates that a reproduction of skills takes place but also a reproduction of respecting authority occurs. In this situation, a child endures exploitation and repression for their skills in order to benefit the higher authority that in turn, requires these legions of workers to perform certain tasks. The production cycle therefore includes the functional high priests and then managers who are auxiliaries of the capitalist exploiters who take advantage of the exploited proletarians. With this process, the high priests pronounce their ruling ideology as a functional system for the rest of the classes to follow and all this information trickles down to the blue-collar working class.

Within his essay, Althusser states how ideology comes into play when discussing the relations of production on a society. He indicates that the infrastructure is the economic foundation while the superstructure is above it and it contains two levels of the State politics and aspects of the Law. These concepts intertwine with ideology that includes religious, ethical, legal, and political decisions that are made every day in a society.

According to Marxism, the economic base has a certain level of determination, which involves a “relative autonomy” that has respect for the base and also a “reciprocal action” that moves upward in the cycle. By analyzing this cycle, the reader understands that determination itself becomes critical because the “edifice” remains a descriptive element. Althusser states that the State has been a repressive apparatus since the 19th century with the bourgeois class because these wealthy landowners presided over the working class.

Another concept that Althusser mentions is the legal practice, which involves the courts, prisons, police, armies, government entities, and the administration. By having these systems in place, Marxist theory explains the State power and the State apparatus. The rules of this social theory include four main ideas such as “the State is the repressive State apparatus” and that the “State power and State apparatuses must be distinguished.” Furthermore, that the “objective of the class struggle concerns the State apparatus by the classes (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes)” and finally, that the “proletariat must seize State power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois State apparatus for a radical process with the destruction of the State.”

Towards the end of his essay, Althusser describes the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The RSAs function by managing over the public domain of the government, administration, army/police, prisons, and courts through “violence since administrative repression may take non-physical forms.” Furthermore, the ISAs manage the private domain, which includes various groups such as churches, educational and legal systems, families, political parties, trade unions and cultural activities.

An interesting concept that Althusser explains is that the ISAs use “methods of punishment, expulsion, and selection as discipline” for their shepherds and flocks. By reproducing this cycle of expected performance and behavior, the socio-technical divisions within society continues for centuries. By analyzing these concepts, author Althusser invites the reader to explore deeper concepts of reproduction through societal necessities of class infrastructures and discipline systems to create desired results. This is an intriguing method to compare to art students who receive educational in so-called capitalist institutions to perhaps obtain a job that they were destined for based on the skill sets earned. Are we just reproductions of the same cycle? Despite our free thinking, are we programmed to answer to a higher authority such as museums curators, design clients, and the general public audience?

Week Six: Craig Owens

Investigating the creative presence of the artist and writer in their works through the labor process

In the 1992 essay titled, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author?’,” by author Craig Owens, the reader acknowledges the mystique behind artists who create artworks and decides whether their presence is truly rendered within the work. By understanding the crisis of artistic authorship,
Owens discusses how the artist is not necessarily in control of the value of their work.

Owens states that the artist “becomes estranged to their own production,” which is an interesting concept because previous art critics have studied artistic authorship as well as censorship. He mentions how author Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay titled, “The Death of the Author,” claims the notion that the meaning and possibly the value of art is no longer based on the artist’s assessment.

By stating this claim, Owens discusses how postmodernist art appears to answer questions throughout history and that the actual artist disappears from most works. In one example, Owens states that the “broad, gestural brushstrokes” are often the symbolism for an artist and his or her presence and even this has disappeared or become “camouflaged” in certain portraits of the artists depicting themselves.


With this innovative technique, Owens mentions that the artist removes themselves as a form of “practice,” which prepares them for the move outside of realism such as photographical methods seen in landscape depictions and still life. In doing so, this move transfers the practice towards abstraction, which allows more monochromatic and gestural movements, according to Owens.


Throughout his essay, Owens notes that artists and authors alike must manage their conscious and unconscious desires in order to resolve their own thoughts. In one example, Owens discusses how the tension between documenting events and images through photography contains a tension against painting, which reveals less of the artist and more of the critic’s hidden narrative.