The Western Marxist Concept of Ideology Critique
Louis Althusser's essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which appeared English in 1971 as a chapter in his book entitled Lenin and Philosophy, reinvigorated Marxist literary criticism in the West. Before Althusser's essay was published, most Western critics held the. Hegelian view that ideas (including those expressed in literature) drive historical change. Traditional Marxist criticism presented the opposing view. Following the Marxist understanding of base and superstructure, it was assumed that the economic conditions and relations of production (base) were simply reflected in cultural phenomena such as literature (superstructure). Literature, in this view, was inevitably an expression of ideological "false consciousness" supporting oppressive political and economic relations. But Marx himself suggested that the simple "reflection" role was not adequate. If the Greek tragedies of Sophocles were simple reflections of the economic conditions of ancient Greece, he asked, why were they still popular? Building on Marx's materialist account of language and consciousness, Althusser makes two significant advances over the traditional understanding of ideology. First, he rejects as an oversimplification the concept of ideology as merely false consciousness. For Althusser, there is no unmediated access to truth; all consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscribed within ideology. Second, for Althusser, there is no clear dividing line between base and
superstructure. Ideology effectively "produces" social subjectivities and mediates the subject's experience of reality. On the one hand, this theory points to openings for revolutionary change. Since it is a corruptible material phenomenon, the superstructure can never perfectly reflect the base. On the other hand, since language and consciousness are material products, phenomena such as literature have real material effects. Ideology can be a "soft" insidious extension of the power of a repressive state apparatus. Constant, vigilantcritique of ideology is required in order to resistreactionary tendencies and promote emancipatory revolution.
