Althusser’s work “Ideology and ISAs” strongly hints to me a Marxist concern with movements of physical bodies. This is undoubtedly in line with Marx’s rejection of Hegel and Feuerbach, who for him dwelled too deeply in a world where Ideas occupy a certain privileged territory (such that from them arise physical realities), and also is touched on lightly when Althusser briefly engages with Aristotle, shirking the full potential of his ideas, but conceding that he gives some credence to “matter in its ‘physical’ modality”.

What I read from Althusser here is an assertion of how physical bodies (flesh and bone humans) articulated by social conditions (their daily “jobs” and acts of consumption) have the ability both to be constitutive of Ideology and, in equal turn, constituted by it. We are offered a jocular example by Pascal, who inverts a conception of a religious ritual, writing that one must “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”

A broad tradition of philosophical writing would hardly believe that thoughts sprout from actions, as opposed to the other way around. This particular idea, to consider it more loosely, is also one that young children are taught by their parents, who repeat the catechism of “Think before you act”—not that this is bad advice.

But if we buy Pascal, and similarly Althusser, it is hard to deny that habits in physical reality very seriously engender corresponding mental notions; these notions often give symbiotic life back to our habits, providing the comfort of Rationale and Reason for the seemingly sense impulses that guide our bodies through action.

When we engage Marxist vocabulary words of Practice and Ritual, it elucidates the quiet truth that even the most minute things humans do—the handshake is a good example here—can be chased up to reveal certain routines that make up systems whose functioning has become normalized. Some decades ago, where a white American sat on the bus everyday was part of a larger coded system of human relationships that explicitly denoted the subordination of black people. When you are avoiding the empty subway car because you suspect that there is a homeless person within it, you are not merely acting viscerally but also OK’ing (whether this guilt falls on you in full is up to you) the result of decades of racist housing policies. When you cross the street when the light is red, you are displaying an awareness of, how even though you are aware that Law permeates society, how law on the books is not always equivalent to law in the world. When you get a flu shot, you are consenting to the epistemological basis of the farcical Scientific Method and the lie of Medicine (just kidding). By spiking your Mohawk in the morning after getting dressed for school, you exhibit how thin the line is between conformity and deviance. By going to school, you are taking the carrot of meritocratic Education and drilling yourself in punctuality so that, to paraphrase Marx, you return to the office every morning at 9 on the dot.

To think like this is not too far a stone throw away from Marx, for whom the daily toil of human bodies is the point of departure for ascribing a complex world of both social topology and mental states.

The soldier for whom killing is no small issue does not only think that killing for a moral cause is normal. The soldier also goosesteps, loudly enunciates Hoo-rahs. The sonic and kinetic elements of the act are necessary for the Ideology to be concrete. Subjection is not merely “brainwashing”, mental conditioning—it is Theater.

At the beginning of the semester, we read “The Rise of English” by Terry Eagleton. In this essay we learn how literature replaced religion as the source of truth, values and ideals that nurtures the society and keep it stable during the 19^th century. It is a very interesting concept that I would like to discuss from the perspective of Marx and Gramsci’s theories. Literature is described as a positively influential phenomenon. Yet I would like to see literature from a darker perspective. Like religion, literature is an ideology used by the ruling class to keep the working class under control.

Religion, like many other disciplines, is an ideology (used by the clergy). But “literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology” (Eagleton 44). To further expand this statement, literature expresses truths and values that plant deep in human unconsciousness. Yet, Marx and Engels definition of ideology can be used to describe literature. Marx and Engels described ideology as following: “If in all ideology men, and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura…” (Marx and Engels 656). In other words, ideology is a set of beliefs that are a distorted or inverted image of the real world. Ideologies do not represent the world as it is but represent it as certain individuals perceive it. Since ideologies are strongly held beliefs, they can be used to control the lives of people. Literature is an ideology, and thus, it can be used for this purpose as it represent. From a Marxist perspective, literature does not represent the real world; it just gives society a distorted representation of the world that allows the ruling class.

But an ideology does not manifest in the society by itself neither does literature. There are individuals who are in charge of applying ideologies. According to Antonio Gramsci, these individuals are called “intellectuals.” Intellectuals “must have the capacity to be an organiser of society in general…because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class” (Gramsci 1002). These individuals are members of the ruling class and they are in charge of establishing the ideology and creating the education system and job positions in a society for the benefit of their own class. Gramsci talks about traditional intellectual who come from preceding economic systems. One example of this traditional intellectuals is the clergy. They had a monopoly in society that comes from centuries of history.

However, the power of the clergy started to fail during the 19^th century. In his essay, Eagleton says that “immensely powerful ideological form,” religion, was no longer accepted by the hearts of the people due to political and social changes and literature was wining the hearts of people. It means that non-ecclesiastic intellectuals were using literature as the ideology that keeps the society in the hands of the ruling class since religion was failing to do so.  This intellectuals can be “organic,” which means they were created in the society’s current economic system, or they can be traditional intellectuals. But regardless of their origins, this intellectuals are writers whose creation, literature, is an ideological form that adapts to the changes of the society since the 19^th century. Therefore, it has given the working class a distorted perception of the world. It keeps then hoping of a promising future, and consequently, doing what the ruling class wants.