58 PAUL RICOEUR
anthropology; is it not only within this philosophical anthropology that the vocabulary of Althussees definiciorn - 'men', 'conditions of existence', 'demands', 'attitudes and behaviour' - makes sense? Is there_ not, therefore, a primitive connection betwet:n the lived and the imaginary that is more
radical than any distortion?
The point about A!thusser''s expressions is that they belong to the vocabulary of humanism. To speak of ideology we must rejuvenate the vocabulary of humanism. Even in the concluding sentence of his discussion - a sentence perhaps� though, a concession to the reader - Althusser resorts to this vocabulary. 'In a classless society ideology b the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of aU men' {FM, 236). Who would say more than this, that we are all dreaming of the kind of society in which the relations between human beings and their conditions of exis.tence are lived to the profit of all? But this is precisely the.discourse of ideology, We must assume at least part of the discourse of ideology fn order to speak of ideology: It seems as if we cannot speak of ideology in another language than its own. If we utilize the Althusserian language of science, then we can speak only of apparatuses, instances, structures, and superstrucmres and infrastructures, but not of 'conditions of existence', 'attitudes and behaviour', and so on. At least to a certain extent, therefore, only ideology may speak about ideology.
A few more points a:lso need to be made about Althusser's contention that the 'disproportion of historical tasks to their conditions' (FM, 238) justifies the necessity of ideology. This relationship must be
lived
in order to become a contradiction and to be treated scientifically. The relation of disproportion also reinforces the prestige of the concept of alienation. Althuss>er maintains [' . . .]
that this concept can be done away with, but arewe able to deny it theoretically and preserve it practically? Are not the lived contradictions the conditions for the so-called .real relations? Althusser responds that if we return to the language of alienation,. it is because we do not yet have a science of ideology. It is a provisory language in the absence of an adequate language. 'Within certain limits this recourse ro
ideology mighr indeed be envisaged as the substitute for a recourse to' theory' (FM, 240) or as 'a substitute for an insufficient theory' (FM,
241).
Althusser has accused ali Marxist thinkers of theoretical weakness, but he assumes a certain theoretical weakness for himself in order to speak about ideology in positive terms. Because of the present weakness of our theory, he says, we need the language of ideology in order to speak of ideology; one day, however, our theory will be strong enough to cast aside this vocabulary. This argument is for me the most questionable of Althusser's claims. The question is whether rhis alleged confusion of ideology and scientific theory is not required by the problem itself. Does not this 'con· fusion' in fact express the impossibility of drawing the line between theAL. THUSSER'S THEORY OF' IDEOLOGY 59
lived contradiction and the real basis? In order to speak in a meaningful way of ideology, do we not have to speak of the motives of people, of individuals in certain circumstances, of the adequate or inadequate relation between human behaviour and its conditions� We cannot eliminate as a problem the statUs of a philosophical anthropology if we want to speak
about these issues. [ . ..
]
A!thusser's most advanced attempt to provide- an inclusive concept of ideology appears in the Lenin tmd Philosophy essay titled 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'. The purpose of this essay, we should recall, is to argue that the fundamental function of ideology is reproduction of the system, training of.indi11idua\s in the rules governing the system. To the problem of production raised by Marx we must add the problem of -reproduction. On the basis of this reconceptualization, we must then re· formulate the Leninist concept of the state - defined only in terfns of coercion - by adding the notion of wbat Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses. Ideology is institutionalized and so appears as a dimension of the state. There is a dimension of the state which is not merely administ:Iative or po!itical but specifically ideological. The superstructure is related to reproduction through specific institutional apparatuses, and the problem of a general theory of ideology is proposed in conjunction with this reformulation.
In this text, AlthQ:�ser goes so far as to ascribe to ideology all positive functions which are not science. At the same time, he emphasizes more strongly than ever the illusory character of imagination. Here Althusser ·borrows from Spino:za the theme that the first kind of knowledge is merely a distorted conception of our relation to the world. He also and more importantly borrows from the distinction made by the French psycho analyst Jacques Lacan between the imaginary andrhe symbolic. Significantly, Althusser drops the notion of the symbolic to rerain the notion of the imaginary understood on the model of the mirror relationship. The imagin� ary is a mirror relation at a narciss.istic stage, an image of oneself that one has in a physical mirror and also in all the situations of llfe in which one's image is reflected by others.
In turning to the text, we shall focus particularly on the section of Althusser's essay called 'On Ideology'. Althusser begins hy contrasting his position to that of Marx in The
German
Ideology. Here, Althusser claims, Marx did not take seriously the paradox of a reality of the imaginary.In Ths German Ideology, . . [i]deology is'conceived as a pure illusion, a pure
dream, i.e. a.s nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus
thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exact!;- like the
theoretical status of the dream among writets before Freud. For these writ
60 PAUL AICOEUR
presented in an a:rbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even 'inverted', in other words, in 'disorder'. For them the dream was the imaginary, it was empty, null and arbitrarily 'stuck together' (bricole) (LP, 150�51).
Against this purely negative text Althusser maintains that ideology has .a reality of its own: the reality of the illusory. This statement seems to challenge another assertion of The German Ideology, that ideology has no history. rrhe argument, we remember, was that only economic history really exists. This became the framework for a!! orthodox Marxist approaches to history.) Althusser in fact agrees that ideology is non-histdrical but in a very different sense than that argued by The German Ideology,
(
Ideology is non�historica! not, as the orthodox approach would have it, �ecause its history is. external to it but bec:ause it is omni�hist��a� just hke Freud's unconsciOus. Once more the mfluence ofTrewt·-,s strongly reinforced. In his essay, 'The Unconscious', Freud said that the uncon- scious is timeless(zeitlos),
not in the sense that it is supernatural but because it is prior to any temporal order or connections, being prior to the level of language, of culture, and sa on. (An earlier, similar assertion appeared in the seventh chapter of Freud's The interpretation of Dreams.) Althusser's explicit. draws on this basis· a step further by rendering timelessness as the eternal: 'ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious' (LP, 15 2). Althusser suggests that in the same. way that Freud attempted to provide a theory of the unconscious in general - as the underlying structure of all the cultural . figures of the unconscious, which appear at the level of symptoms -similarly, ". he himself proposes a theory of ideology in general that would underlie the-. particular ideologies.
On this basis the imaginary features of ideology must be qualified and improved. Here I raise two points. First, what is distorted is not reality as� such, not the real conditions of existence, but our relation to these condit-
}
ions of existence. We are not far from a concept of being-in-the-world; it is our relation to reality which is distorted. 'Now I can return to a thesis which I have already advanced: it is not theil:; real conditions of existence, their real world, that "men" "represent to themselves" in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there' (LP, 154). This leads to a most important insight, becaus?>
what 5 a relation to the conditions ol existence if not already an inter·
pretation, something symbolically mediated. To speak of our relation to 1