On Somnambulism and Structural Causality

By Ana Hernandez-Ferre

There is a figure that haunts the margins of ideological theory and has long fascinated me, rarely named and almost never examined on its own terms: the sleepwalker. The figure moves with unnerving procedural fluency, navigates the furniture, avoids the step that waking life routinely misses. No one is home, and yet the action is correct.

The dominant tradition of ideological critique has struggled with this problem since at least Mannheim, who understood ideology as a kind of socially conditioned distortion, a partial perspective mistaken for a total one. The correction was, in principle, available: the free-floating intellectual. Marx’s own formulations oscillate between ideology as inverted image and ideology as material practice, but the gravitational pull of the camera obscura metaphor is hard to resist. It suggests that if the apparatus were righted, the image would correct itself. Althusser’s intervention severs this possibility at the root.

For Althusser, ideology is not a distortion of some underlying truth that subjects might recover. It is, as he states in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), “a ‘Representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” The relationship represented is imaginary, but the representation itself is material. Ideology “exists in an apparatus, and its practice” which is to say it exists in institutions, rituals, behaviors, and gestures before it exists in consciousness at all. The subject does not hold ideological beliefs the way one holds a mistaken conviction that can be argued out of. The subject is constituted through ideology, called into existence by what Althusser names interpellation: “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”

What interpellation produces is a subject who recognizes herself in the hailing, who turns when called, and who experiences this turning as the free expression of her own subjectivity. “The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” This is the theoretical knot that the somnambulism figure is uniquely equipped to untangle, because it makes explicit what Althusser’s account implies, that the phenomenological texture of interpellated subjectivity is not confusion or distortion but a specific kind of wakefulness, attentive to its own cues, fluent in its own scripts, and systematically unavailable to the reflexivity that would allow it to read those scripts as scripts.

The concept of structural causality, which Althusser develops through his reading of Spinoza against both mechanistic and expressive models of totality, clarifies the stakes. A mechanistic causality would require an external cause that acts on ideology from outside, a shock that reveals the structure to the subject. An expressive causality would require the structure to be present in its elements as their inner truth, unfolding toward legibility. Structural causality refuses both: the structure is, in Althusser’s formulation borrowed from Spinoza, “absent” from its effects while being “nothing outside” them. The subject does not experience the structure because she is its effect, and effects do not observe their causes from a position of exteriority.

This is the precise sense in which somnambulism serves as more than metaphor. The sleepwalker’s movements are not caused by a decision she is unaware of making. They are caused by a state of the whole organism in which the decision-making apparatus is itself suspended, redistributed, or replaced by lower-order pattern completion. The structural analogy holds: ideological reproduction does not require that subjects decide, incorrectly or otherwise, to reproduce the conditions of their existence. The reproduction happens at the level of practice, which means at the level of the apparatus, before the decision arrives. When it does arrive, it confirms rather than initiates.

The application of this framework to contemporary conditions could be projected onto Mark Fisher’s analysis of capitalist realism, developed in his 2009 book of the same name, which extends the Althusserian problematic into the specific phenomenology of post-Fordist subjectivity. For Fisher, capitalist realism names precisely the condition in which the reproduction of capitalist social relations has become experientially indistinguishable from practical reason itself. The subject does not believe capitalism is the best system, she just cannot imagine the coordinates of an alternative. This is the sleepwalker’s condition rendered for us, the walk continues not because the destination is desired but because the pattern of the walk has become coextensive with the structure of desire.

Bernard Stiegler’s account of psychic and collective individuation adds a further layer. For Stiegler, the tendency of industrial technics is toward the short-circuiting of what he calls “long circuits” of attention, the sustained, effortful formation of individuation that constitutes genuine subjectivity. What the culture industries and later the attention economy install in their place are “short circuits”: automatic responses, proletarianized gestures, behaviors that mimic the form of individual expression while bypassing the process that would make expression genuinely individuating. If the condition of ideological reproduction is not ignorance but a specific organization of practical fluency, then the critique of ideology cannot take the form of information delivery. The consciousness-raising model, in which subjects are brought to see what they previously could not, remains attached to the mechanistic causality that Althusser discards. It assumes a subject capable of using new information to revise her relationship to the whole. But if the whole is structurally absent from its effects, no partial piece of information about the whole will produce the revision, because the subject is not positioned to receive it as information about her own situation.

Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping could be instructive here. Jameson argues that the political task of postmodernism is to restore to subjects the capacity to represent their position in the social totality, to produce something like a new spatial sense adequate to global capitalism’s complexity. The prescription is correct in its diagnosis, but the mechanism it imagines, a representational supplement that would restore the subject’s bearings, cannot address the Althusserian problem. The sleepwalker does not lack a map. She lacks the wakefulness within which a map would be legible as a map.

What would it mean, then, to think interruption? Althusser himself was not optimistic, and the pessimism was structural rather than temperamental. If ideology reproduces itself through the very subjectivities it constitutes, then the interruption cannot come from within those subjectivities as such. It must come, if it comes, from the encounter, from what Althusser, in his late and increasingly Epicurean work, calls the “aleatory,” the swerve that cannot be predicted from the trajectory of the fall. This is a thin reed for emancipatory politics, and Althusser seems to know it. The sleepwalker does not wake herself up. Something interrupts the pattern instead. This matters because the dominant forms of contemporary left pedagogy, from consciousness-raising to media literacy to the proliferation of “explainer” culture, remain structurally attached to the very model Althusser discredits. The assumption that subjects reproduce capitalism because they do not understand it, that the correct diagram of surplus value or the correct genealogy of neoliberalism will produce friction in the walk, is not a neutral pedagogical bet. It is a theoretical commitment, and it may be a losing one.