Althusser’s great contribution is to move ideology from the sky of belief to the floor of reproduction. Ideology is not merely a false picture inside the head; it is a material choreography by which subjects are produced, trained, named and returned to the system as usable agents. The decisive question is not what people think they believe, but how institutions arrange bodies, rituals, habits, competences and recognitions so that social relations reproduce themselves. The force of the text lies in its architectural precision. Althusser distinguishes the Repressive State Apparatus from the Ideological State Apparatuses, but the distinction is not crude. The former works predominantly through force; the latter predominantly through ideology. Yet both are mixed. Schools punish, select and discipline; police and armies also educate themselves through values, rituals and internal myths. Power becomes stable by distributing its operations across different apparatuses: school, family, church, media, law, culture, political parties and communications. The most important turn is the materialisation of ideology. Althusser’s subject does not first hold an idea and then act. Rather, the subject is formed through repeated acts inserted into rituals: kneeling, studying, saluting, attending, voting, reciting, obeying. Ideology exists in practices before it exists as doctrine. The famous scene of interpellation gives this process its theatrical minimum: the subject recognises itself as the one being addressed. Power works when the call is accepted as personal truth. In this sense, ideology is a social acoustics: a voice calls, the body turns, the subject is born inside recognition.
