These notes concerning Althusser's ISA's essay may help with reading Teresa de Lauretis's "The Technology of Gender"

I have excerpted quotes from "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" by Louis Althusser (otherwise known as the ISA’s essay).

a. "Thesis 1: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

This idea is a fusion of Marxist notions of ideology and Lacanian theory. "Imaginary" here refers to the register of the Imaginary in lacanian psychoanalysis, as opposed to the Symbolic (world of culture and language) and the Real (what we live in but which is, at some level, outside our "experience" as we understand it—the real is what we do and how we live, but once we "understand" it our experience becomes part of the Symbolic). The Imaginary is the world of images and full meanings that we experience as infants before we enter the Symbolic as subjects (constituted through agency and subjection to authority). Ever after, images and their apparently full plenitude refer us back to that time, so we invest a particular kind of longing in Imaginary relations.

Althusser says, "what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations which they live."

b. "Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence."

Althusser says: "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material."

c. Althusser’s theory involves thinking about how people are brought into ideology as subjects—why are people complicit with the workings of ideology in a particular culture. He uses psychoanalytic theory to show how the economic structure inheres in the individual as a requisite part of their being. Interpellation is his theory of how this happens. This is what he says: "Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’"

He goes on to discuss the ways in which individuals are always already subjects, by which he means that no one exists outside the system of ideology. Infants are hailed into (interpellated into) the social system at the moment of birth, or even before. But what is a subject? Althusser says that the word denotes both "free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions" as well as "a subjected being who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission." He goes on, "This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e., in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’"

d. How can one see this process? Althusser argues that "those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology." He goes on to say, "It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. . . . ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."

Here is the point "outside ideology" in science that de Lauretis objects to so forcefully. Althusser seems to be claiming that from a position of scientific inquiry (marxist analysis) he can understand ideology by naming its hold on himself and others. But this position, at least in the ISA’s essay, is not really detailed in complete form, so we might give Althusser the benefit of the doubt and suggest that he offers an interpretation of the difficulty of being outside ideology. In the least, he argues that in order to have a chance of being able to critique it, one must be able to acknowledge one’s interpellation within ideology.