Ided ogy was the theme for which Althusser became celebrated in radical

literary and cultural studies; and the course of his thinking mar ked it as

his most ambiguous theo retica l venture. Ahhusser's view was in one

respect familiar: t he concept of ideology implied a determinate relationship

between cognitive deficiency and social interest; it was, in the authorized

wor ds of his English tr anslator, a mode in which 'the pracrico-social

predominates . _. over the theoretical, over knowledge'," But the disc repancy

between knowledge and the pracr ico-social had never been so insisted

upon. Ideology was pervasive, the spont aneous knowing-unknowing of

human experience in th is and all possible societies.n Without relinquishing

the first, more familiar sense of the concept, Althusser then pur sued his

elaboration of the second, The ' imaginary relation' of ideology was the

mode in which the ideo-a ffective life of humans assumed its socially viable

form as ident ity: ideology ' interpellates the individual as a subject .' In

arguing th us, Alth usser effected a drastic and damaging conflation of two

distinct problems: the funct ioning of ideology in its more familiar sense,

as a socially mot ivated different ial relation to knowledge, and the general

mechanism of human subject-formation. How, in this perspective, could

ideology be known or displaced? Althusser's established response was: by

science and an . But if ideology was now identical with th e anthropological

constant of ident ity-format ion, how could these be conceptualized as

ordinary historical practices? And if , con tra riwise, they could be retained
only as quasi-miraculous interventions in the imaginary - if, that is, they

could no t be reta ined at all . but must rather be discarded as rationalist and

romantic myst ifications - what would remain of ideology as a crit ical

concepts These and kindred objections came from sympathetic and hostile

commentators alike. a nd most influentia lly from post-stru cturalist qua rters.

where a counter-construction had alread y ta ken shape. Althusserian

'science' was implica ted in the character istic disavo wal of meta-discou rse.

which exem pted itself from the condit ions of existence that it stipu lated

for its objects. The account of subject-format ion was eith er false, and

hence inadeq uate , or vahd, and ther efore subversive of its own pretens ions

to final rationality. In either case, the ideal of scientificiry was unfounded,

as also was its put ative other, the suppo rt ing fiction of ideology. 'Science'

was a gambit in 't he politics of truth '. a power-pla y in the content ion of

discourses an d their subjects.