Ideology: Stronghold or Paradoxical Space?

154 the minnesota review Michel Pêcheux (trans. Eugene W. Holland) Ideology: Stronghold or Paradoxical Space? Introduction (by Warren Montag): Michel Pêcheux, 1938-1983 In a few decades we shall be cruelly labeled as products ofthe past millenium. All we had were compelling songs of the future; and suddenly these songs are no longer part of the dynamic of history, but have been transformed into historico-literary facts. When singers have been killed and their songs has been dragged into a museum and pinned to the wall of the past, the generation they represent is even more desolate, orphaned, and lost—impoverished in the most real sense of the word. —Roman Jakobson, "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets" (1931) In the ruins of the deserted city, specters wander, some silent, others chattering, sometimes idle, sometimes engaged in some eccentric task. If by chance they meet, they have nothing to say to each other: no evocation of the past can console them for the present but because on the contrary the misery of the present extends to the past and gives it its truth. No interpretation of the present is articulated or ifit is articulated by someone it cannot be understood by anyone else, for the present is nothing other than this impossibility itself. —Jean-Claude Milner, Les Noms Indistincts (1983) We once dreamt that the thought of an age was the expression of a single, essential great mind. We speak of the "age of Marx" or the "Freudian epoch" as if thought were diffused from a central great mind throughout the social whole, slowly perhaps, but with a fatal necessity. We now know better. Revolutionary thinkers, i.e., those who participate in the development of the theory that introduces a break in the established order and in so doing upsets the dominant conceptual regime, are truly unzeitgemassen: untimely, "out of synch," unrecognized or, worse, systematically misrecognized by the age that is said to be theirs. They live and work in a solitude proper to their philosophical and political position, a solitude that is not necessarily personal but rather theoretical. They are walled in by a silence that takes the form of either the (unconscious) parodies and caricatures of the "faithful" or the calumnies and denunciations that never seem to address what has actually been written or said by these untimely ones. For all too many the silence and solitude finally become unendurable. We know the results: madness, suicide, murder. It was of such men pêcheux 155 and women that Artaud spoke when he wrote that there are those who are "suicided by society" for "uttering certain unbearable truths." The theoretical project inaugurated by Louis Althusser and carried on by his colleagues was and continues to be a scandal and an abomination to the philosophies of consciousness and the various empiricisms and formalisms that dominate the philosophical field both inside and outside of marxism. Althusser himself recognized that the formula "history is a process without subject or goal(s)" had "everything required to offend common sense." Althusser and his group were alone in arguing that human subjects are constituted in and through ideology; and after Althusser, only Michel Pêcheux, in Language, Semantics and Ideology and a number of essays, seriously worked to develop the theory of ideology and the problem ofthe constitution ofthe subject. The essay "Ideology: Citadel or Paradoxical Space?" constitutes a further attempt to adjust and correct the initial theses advanced by Althusser in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." The theoretical novelty ofthis overall project insured that it would be carried on in isolation in the midst of a hostile environment. By 1979, as Pêcheux noted in his postscript to Language, Semantics andIdeology, France had come to its political winter. The signs of this were everywhere. Marxism was "exposed" as the cold dream of a new despotism, a cunning justification of a society whose most representative instance was the Gulag. This disillusionment required nothing less than a "new philosophy" finally capable of denouncing all the ruses of power. Similarly, psychoanalysis was "revealed" as just one more normalizing strategy in a disciplinary society, a technique of inciting dreams, fantasies and desires in order better to...