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Certain models of reproduction tend to privilege dyads as the basic units of interaction.  The dyad in turn is locked onto one sensory modality.  This structure generates a closed system and guarantees the model's explanatory power.  It makes an elegant story with perfect pretensions to scienticity.  No extraneous details or third parties to complicate matters.

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For example, the relationship between State and citizen-worker, in Louis Althusser's examination of social reproduction, is sealed in a structure of specularity.  Not all cases offer themselves so transparently.  Mary O'Brien, for one, does not foreground sensory modalities when she links reproductive and temporal consciousness.  However, her materialist account of biological reproduction does rest ultimately upon an insufficiently critiqued idealist moment of fusion.  That moment is cast in the idiom of a single sensory modality, the idiom of touch.  Since both the idiom and the moment are imported from Hegel, one could speak of discursive contamination.  However her susceptibility is not so much a function of insufficient critique of her German pretext as related to her rhetorical adoption of Christian myth.

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First, O'Brien reads differences in reproductive consciousness off differences in anatomy.  This incipient determinism is circumvented by an appeal to history.  According to her, developments in contraceptive technology have supplied conditions under which women's reproductive consciousness no longer differs from that of men.  This movement registers in her discourse as the story of a fall (n1). 

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If O'Brien's is a Miltonic pattern, Althusser's is Dantesque.  Movements of ascension mark Althusser's discourse on social reproduction.  In his paradigm case, schooling is designed so that at each level a number of students enter the workplace to occupy places in the hierarchy of class.  However, it is not only the analogy with a static series of circles that renders the comparison with the divine comedy model salient.  There is also the disposition of the argument.  Althusser carefully culminates his exposition if not with a beatific vision then with the solemnisation of a formal structure for all ideology.  The particular dynamic of the sensory modalities played out in this general structure owes much to Althusser's choices in the exemplification of the general form of ideology, in particular his recourse to Christian trinitarian dogma.

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A stark ascetic streak permits Althusser to arrive at this point.  He neglects relations of consumption.  He favours analysis of the reproduction of the relations of production.  His concern is the making of workers.  Hence, in Althusser's discourse, ideology is set the task of dominating bodily drives.  This design stems not only from Christian residues in his thought but also from a selective importation of psychoanalytic elements.  The project of the care of a child is envisaged by Althusser in his essay "Freud and Lacan" as a story of progress through repression.  For him, it is bringing an animal being into the human condition:  "the extraordinary adventure which from birth to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child" (Lenin and Philosophy 189).  Social reproduction has the form of a conversion narrative, a being called.

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Name giving and recognition become central to the workings of ideology.  The fluid operation of these functions relies on a synchronization of the senses.  The essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" assumes a congruence between hearing and sight.  As interpellation discursively shifts to specularity, the ideological game becomes one of namer naming the (already) named.  Althusser is of course highlighting the role of ideology in constraining heterogeneity, limiting options and naturalizing existing conditions.  This leaves little conceptual space for a counter-hegemonic ideology.  One place to begin is to question his projection of a visual dyad onto the hearing situation and to examine how such a visual dyad is constructed through his privileging of a mirror metaphor.

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Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" was first published June 1970 in La Pensée.  The piece consists of two sections.  The first and longer section is dated January-April 1969.  This section describes the two types of state apparatus, repressive and ideological (in that order) and explains the workings of interpellation and specularity (in that order).  The order contributes to the progressively deterministic tone of the presentation for if the activity of state repression is conceived as intermittent, ideology is not.  The ordering also facilitates movement from intersubjective to intrapsychic phenomena.  This sequence should not necessarily generate a greater degree of determinism.  However, as Althusser moves from examining groups, specifically classes in conflict and their interactions with state apparatus, to examining how an individual is constructed as a subject, his discourse skids on a static structure, a non- dialectical dyad.  Althusser's specular dyad derives from his particular understanding of the Lacanian mirror stage.  As such it partakes of the one-way vector found in the Oedipal narrative of psychoanalysis where it is axiomatic that a child seek to resemble a single parent.

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As well the deterministic tone and thrust of Althusser's formulations stem from the relationship his essay cultivates with the discourse of psychoanalysis:

If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans- historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud's expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. (Lenin and Philosophy 152)

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A post scriptum dated April 1970 contributes an important modulation of the deterministic pronouncements of the earlier section.  Rereading himself a year later Althusser highlights the schematic nature of his set of theses.  He points out that they are obviously abstract.  Criteria for abstraction vary.  In some regards Althusser's theses are insufficiently abstract for they do not translate specularity out of its sensory encasement.  To do so would reveal the circularity of the specular model and such a formalization would expose its tautological status.  However, Althusser does not view abstraction as a move to greater mathematical or logical formalism.  His focus is upon abstraction as a move away from, in his case, an underlying reality, a final instance, a first cause:

The total process of the realization of the reproduction of the relations of production is therefore still abstract, insofar as it has not adopted the point of view of this class struggle.  To adopt the point of view of reproduction is therefore, in the last instance, to adopt the point of view of the class struggle. (Lenin and Philosophy 171)

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