Knowledge and Its Affect on the Society and Its Spontaneous Essay

Knowledge and Its Affect on the Society and Its Spontaneous - Essay Example To answer this Althusser (1978) coined the term â€Å"Ideological State Apparatuses† and â€Å"Repressive State Apparatuses†, gives that necessary epistemological break, more analytically than Gramsci (1971), in his theory of social â€Å"hegemony†. In contrast to Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the Ideological State Apparatuses consist of social institutions like school, university etc that help spread a particular discourse of thought-process and archetypal pattern of understanding in a particular way (like Christian concept of good and evil). The Repressive State Apparatus are agents of repression, like the Police, that teach by force and thus maintain the necessary consensus. While the institutions teach through the medium of language that is itself coloured with discursive power to subjugate a subject in the given hegemony almost without any conflict or force. Lacan (1968) explains this linguistic paradox in his theory of language where he says that the stage when s subject enters the realm of the â€Å"symbolic† sphere, the self/consciousness becomes a complex site where one loses the capability to express beyond that given medium of language, which is finite and a complex site of power play. Language is not neutral, but an agent of defining this ideological and hegemonic base. Quite pessimistically, the answer has been given as no. Since the state is a billion-eyed monster keeping a watch on its subject (imagine Orwell’s 1984), the state apparatuses reach out adventitiously even to the furthest grass-root level and teach by force or by apparently ‘neutral’ force to form subjects who cannot escape this ‘interpellation’ (Althusser).