Writing Is An Ideologically Constrained Set Of Practices Essay, Research Paper

Marxism has always

encountered a troubling tension when relating literature to ideology. The

Classical Marxist analysis of social mechanisms suggests that everything, in

the last instance, is determined by the economy. Therefore, it makes perfect

sense to see literature as another product of these mechanisms: like the

superstructure of which is it is a part, a reflex of economic currents. On the

other hand, Marxists have often been willing to grant art a certain autonomy ?

at least ?great? art ? in that it seems to operate to a different logic than

the rest of the superstructure. Indeed, they grant it can reach back and

critique the society from which it was produced, and art has often formed a component

of Marxist revolutionary agendas. Yet neither of these poles are particularly

attractive. The first leads to ?vulgar? Marxism, which sees literature as absolutely constrained ? not only by the

rest of the superstructure, but by the economic base underlying it. The second

seems to contain a remnant of Humanist wishful-thinking, in which ?great? art

is radically separated from ?non-canonical? art and positioned as so its

aesthetic qualities give it a pseudo-transcendental position of critique.The history of Marxist

thought on ideology and literature has been to systematically work through this

tension. A good starting point is the theorist Georg Luk?cs. He is under no

illusion that art is dependent on the ideological conditions in which it was

produced. Thus, he attacks Expressionism for merely reflecting the

?ideological? picture of a troubled surface. They fail to realise that crisis ?

despite the appearance of fragmentation – is actually a symptom of the

interdependent totality reacting when a single element is treated as

autonomous: as, for example, when money is given self-sufficient status. Also

relevant is his theory of reification, whereby the commodity fetishism (the

tendency to mistake exchange-value for use-value) is extended into all areas of

human activity. Reification is essentially, then, the annexation of life by

ideology (such as when workers see their abstract labour-value as their

intrinsic human value) and can naturally be assumed to extend into the artistic

domain. Expressionists mistake the discontinuous surface image presented by

industrial capitalism as a true indication of the state of society at deeper

levels. Their revolutionary convictions alone ?will not suffice to turn a

writer into someone who can truly anticipate future trends?[1]

such is the power of ideology to channel such energies into ?false

consciousness.?Yet Luk?cs remains

surprisingly confident, despite his own analysis of the extent of reification,

of art escaping ideology. However, he believes that the gateway is narrow. The

only way, Luk?cs argues, for the totality to be accurately assessed is mimesis. Thus realism, exemplified by

the Classical rigour of Balzac and Tolstoy, should provide the model for

revolutionary literature. The realist writer discovers the ?deep structure? of

reality intellectually, abstracts it, and then conceals that abstraction in an

impression of immediacy and ?life.? Only realism can avoid being dominated by

the subjective – purely superficial and ideological

? impressions of life in order to objectively portray the totality. And realism

also allows a truly popular art-form

which can be appreciated by people of all classes without the ?litism of

anti-realist trends. This process does not necessarily have to be fully

conscious ? realism can produce ideological blindness as well as insight ? but

Luk?cs sees realism very strongly as an authentic avant-garde through which

revolutionary commitment can be mediated in order to critique society.Luk?cs? contemporaries ?

Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht ? although they disagree fiercely over his

attitude to figurative and modernist art tend to agree with his analysis that

art has a revolutionary and critical capacity. This enables it to transcend the

dominant ideological configuration of the superstructure. For example, Bloch

says that Expressionism: ?undermined the schematic routines and academicism to

which the ?values of art? had been reduced. Instead of eternal ?formal

analyses??it directed attention to human beings.?[2]

By reflecting the transition from an old to a new reality, it was implicated

both in decadent decay and revolutionary dissolution. Thus, Bloch seems to say

Expressionism (and by implication all art) can operate within a liminal area

which falls partially outside the determinations of the dominant ideology.

Brecht also seems to identify a similar liminal position for art: ?time flows

on?methods become exhausted, stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and

demand new methods. Reality changes;? in

order to represent it, modes of representation must change.?[3]

This might also apply for a purely deterministic view of art, but Brecht?s

other writings show his commitment to how art can not only critique but

transform general ideology. This can be done primarily by engaging and

enriching the standpoint of the working classes, who contain within them the

potential to dissolve and overturn the dominant ideology.Of course, their emphasis on

the ?avant-garde? can be historically located to the period of Modernism, where

new techniques (shocking to the bourgeois) and new modes of production

(enabling distribution to the masses) seemed to offer a new wellspring of

revolutionary potential. In a way, their faith is no more grounded than Luk?c?s

neo-classical affirmation of realism: its sole justification is in the emerging

counter-ideologies of the masses. The subsequent resilience of bourgeois

capitalist ideology makes such a position problematic, and as Luk?cs has shown

the ?populism? of an avant-garde may actually be false. Theodor Adorno, however,

attempted systematically to show why this intuition (the relative autonomy of

art within the superstructure) was correct. It must be admitted that

Adorno?s work (unsurprisingly, since it is based in post-Kantian aesthetics)

also seems to contain a substrate of Humanism – the way he suggests that art

can articulate an essence and give voice to an era?s dispossessed, for example.

Nevertheless, his stance can be reduced to three inter-related philosophical

propositions. The first is that art, under its own laws, reconciles what

remains alienated in the real world. Thus: ?In the form of the image, the

object is absorbed into the subject instead of?persisting obdurately in a state

of reification. The contradiction between the object reconciled in subject?.and

the actual unreconciled object in the outside world, confers on the work of art

a vantage-point from which it can criticise actuality.?[4]

The second (arguably a mere elaboration of the first) involves the antithesis

between actuality and the work-of-art. The work-of-art uses its form to organise historical and

ideological materials in a configuration distanced from reality. In doing so,

it executes an immanent critique which points to the possibility of utopia

(ie.a critique from within a system which points out an aporia or contradiction

within the system?s principles: ?art is the negative knowledge of the actual

world.?[5])

This notion is rather unclear, but seems to rest on the idea that art

reformulates ideology and history in a new context (particularly the

formulation of the literal/cognitive/rational within the

fictional/mimetic/stylised) and hence reveals its insufficiency. The third is

Adorno?s theory of ?absolute commodity? in which a work-of-art?s perceived

status as an irreducibly unique entity challenges the classificatory thinking

of ideology. Jarvis writes: ?by persisting with its illusory claim to a

non-exchangeable dignity, art resists the notion that qualitatively

incommensurable can be made quantitatively commensurable.?[6]

In particular, then, art resists commodification, a trend Adorno uses to

explain the shift towards artistic abstraction as capitalism deepens.Hence, Adorno?s theories of

art and ideology posit a distancing brought about by the very nature of the

aesthetic which allows a negative critique. He locates this distance in art?s

ability to operate to a fairly autonomous logic: primarily in the ways its

materials are organised, and how is appears in relation to the marketplace.

However, Adorno?s scepticism must not be underemphasised. For a start, Adorno

is restricting art to a purely negative

critique: the aesthetic is not a para-ideological realm by any means. Secondly,

Adorno laments the inexorable pervasiveness of reification, the way that human

activity is commodified; ?pseudo-praxis?: ?at its bleakest the theory complains

that reification has already become complete. Were this true, not only would

critical thought no longer be possible, but human social life itself would come

to an end.?[7] This leads

to the problem of the ?culture industry? where a cultural item is identified by

its exchange-value, its hollow ?novelty? as pressed by advertising and the

media. Culture may aspire to the condition of art, but lacks any of art?s

autonomy from ideology: the culture industry is a reflex of ideology alone. ?Cross-over? may also adulterate

?authentic? art by commodifying it. Finally, Adorno is highly sceptical of

artists who implement a conscious political agenda. Art critiques society on

its own terms, those who attempt to use art as a political weapon usually

regress to ideology themselves: ?for the sake of political commitment,

political reality is trivialised.?[8]Throughout the period of

Marxism just described, the focus was on art?s critical function. It tended to

involve a firm distinction between ?authentic art? which had the autonomy to

turn back on the society it came from, and ?inauthentic art? which was merely a

vessel for ideology. However, as capitalism shifted ideological gear into the

postmodern and postindustrial age, Marxist thinkers began to reformulate

notions of ideology and ideological practice. Hence, the consensus on the

relationships between ideology and literature also had to be revised (Adorno,

here, represents a good bridge between the two eras, and his theories contain

elements of both stages.)Firstly, with the apparent

failure of the proletarian revolution, Marxism had to seek an explanation. They

found it by seeing that much of their previous thought has profoundly

underestimated the influence of ideology. This is somewhat strange since

Marxism ? as a rigorously dialectical mode of philosophy ? should have seen the

interdependence and inter-causality of abstract ideas and material forces all

along. In this reaffirmation of the dialectic, they turned to Antonio Gramsci

as a forebear. His notion of Hegemony rejected that ideology was merely a

ghostly effect of the economic base. Instead, it was something fundamental: it

was the very orientation of human experience, it was lived in and permeated every aspect of life. As such, Gramsci issued a

corrective to Marxist ?economic superstition?: in Hegemony, ideas had an

existence of their own, distinguishable from and yet interdependent on the

base. Ideas could cause revolutions and shape crises in their own right.Thus, the consensus became

that ideology was far more important than Marxists had been letting on. As

Williams writes: ?this notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the

consciousness of a society seems to me to be fundamental.?[9]

Williams himself represents a viewpoint which sees this new depth of ideology

to involve in it new levels of complexity. His model of hegemony involves a

dynamic ?central system? continually subsuming the future through incorporation

and revising the past through selection. Meanwhile, it has to deal with

residual and emergent forms of consciousness which may either be ?alternative?

(ie.separate from but encapsulated within the dominant ideology) or

?oppositional? (truly outside the

central system.) These marginal elements may be in the process of being

incorporated, resisted or simply neglected. This emphasis on marginality and

the dynamics of ideology seem to present a more accurate picture than the

somewhat stylized dual-model of uniform, dominant, static thesis and emergent

antithesis. The cultural materialist Alan Sinfield describes it well: ?dominant

ideological formations are always, in practice, under pressure, striving to

substantiate their claim to superior plausibility in the face of diverse

disturbances.?[10]Undoubtedly, this new emphasis

is partially due to a Post-Structuralist scepticism about the internal

coherence of any discourse: thus the emphasis falls on how an ideology manages

to conceal and repress its own contradictions. However, Post-Structuralism

(largely through the influence of Foucault) also bequeaths a rather more

cynical legacy. Foucault himself is suspicious of the term ?ideology.? His

model of power is the panopticon: a

mechanism whereby one can observe without being observed. In Foucault?s society

naked pr?l?vement[11]

has given way to a productive complex of power-relations, in which cells of

resistance are prevented by a careful attention to classification and

isolation; creating ?compact hierarchical networks? which form a ?continuous,

individualising pyramid.?[12]

Rationality goes hand in hand with a comprehensive exercise of diffused,

ultra-efficient ?microphysical? power at the level of individual bodies.

Essentially, there is virtually nothing that is not part of the ?web of power.?Foucault?s pessimism has

been reinforced by other currents. The first is Louis Althusser, who (although

he himself still believes in the relative autonomy of certain elements of the

superstructure) also posits a comprehensive pervasiveness of ideology. Ideology

is more than simply false-consciousness; ideas concealing material truths.

Indeed, Althusser abolishes ideas as such. Instead, it is rooted in

consciousness itself, the relationship of subject to real conditions, and

materialised in a chain leading from attitudes to actions to ISAs[13]?such as schools and churches. Althusser

notes ?every ?subject??must inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the

actions of his material practice.?[14]

In turn, these ISAs feed back the ideology to the people. The fact that

ideology is extant when we enter into it leads to the somewhat pessimistic

notion of interpellation: that we are

inserted into ideology, into an ideological subject-position, automatically. It

is this feeling of a closed-circuit of ideology and identity which leads to a

Post-Althusserian pessimism. Again, it must be noted that Althusser himself

balanced this with a firm belief in relative autonomy because ideology acts as

a partially independent constellation of determinants in a general overdetermination of any event or

process. A similar closed-circuit is

reflected in some variants of New Historicism which cynically reads the

Post-Structuralist maxim that aporia stands in the way of transcending the

system; that one can never reach a meta-paradigmatic, noumenal vantage point.

When combined with a Foucauldian analysis of power, this leads to the

conclusion that all attempts at resistance are incorporated by and ultimately

complicit with the dominant ideology. This, of course, leads us back to a

Adornian analysis of reification, how commodity-fetishism is slowly closing the

gap in which authentic art can thrive. This anxiety has become even more

intense in the postmodern era, when some have suggested reification is complete. As Jameson writes: ?the

increasingly closed organisation of the world into a seamless web of media

technology, multinational corporations and international bureaucratic

control?has a power to co-opt and to defuse even the most potentially dangerous

forms of political art by transforming them into cultural commodities.?[15]Parallel with this general

trend to reassess the pervasiveness of ideology, and its internal structure (be

it heterogenous, or panoptical) is a reaffirmation of literature as a process within ideology. Despite Adorno?s

scepticism, he still tends to give the impression that the aesthetic is a

special category, and holds to a version of Luk?cs ?reflection model.?

Certainly, his distinction between ?authentic art? and the ?culture industry?

is being challenged. Thus, Eagleton decides that art is to ideology as ideology

is to real history: a product and a representation, in a double-tension. Thus,

just as any part is determined by the whole and yet exerts an influence on the

whole, a literary text is determined by ideology but also (as an ideological

practice itself) exerts an influence on ideology. The text?s ?pseudo-real? (the

fictive world it creates) is ideological through-and-through; it ?negotiates a

particular ideological experience of real history.?[16]

Similarly, Williams (apparently in conflict with Adorno) asserts empirically

that most literature has not critiqued but conformed to dominant ideologies,

and theoretically that: ?we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds

of social practice, in such a way to make them subject to quite special and

distinct laws.?[17] We also see

a similar line taken up by Pierre Macherey and Etienne Bailbar. They describe

literature as ?one of several ideological forms within the ideological

superstructures.?[18]

Meanwhile, they indict literature not as a distanced critique, but as totally

complicit with bourgeois ideology. It uses aesthetic and linguistic tensions to

displace and repress ideological conflicts, it presents interpellated

ideological subjects for readers to identify with (projecting a hallucinatory

?pseudo-real?) and reinforces the linguistic and educational division which

they detect in bourgeois French culture.Hence, this generation of

Marxists are a good deal more wary of seeing literature or ?art? as a special

category with intrinsic revolutionary capacities. Naturally, nobody denied

previously that there was ideological or conservative art, but Eagleton,

Williams and Macherey/Balibar all underscore the point that literature is at

its heart ideological practice. In

fact, it is then primarily through forms of Adorno?s negative, immanent

critiques that literature possesses subversive potential (showing that Adorno

is actually far closer to these later thinkers than his rhetoric about the

?aesthetic? might suggest.) Such a critique can work in a number of ways. Many

Marxists utilise Adorno?s central concept of ?form? and suggest that this

provides sufficient aesthetic distance to enable a negative critique by

highlighting the incoherence of a certain ideology. Macherey?s elaboration of

such formalism makes use of deconstructionist and psychoanalytic insights. He

suggests that a text ? as a production rather than a reflection of material -

must necessarily include yet conceal repressed ?voices? and hence can be read

through absences and fractures: ?the work has its margins, an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its

birth and its productions.?[19]

Hence, these silences and absences force an aporia. This is similar to

Sinfield?s illuminating comment that although a text may attempt to give

closure, it may fail in this attempt: whilst a subversive text may slip

unwittingly into complicity, a complicit text may also slide into subversion.

The sword of textuality cuts both ways. Eagleton is suspicious of an

overly formalistic theory, and also thinks the relentless emphasis on absence overestimates the uniform

dominance of hegemony on the one hand, as well as the ways in which texts can

absorb dissonance and contradiction on the other. Thus ideology is potentially

both weaker and stronger than Macherey?s concept of it. Williams is another

thinker who is willing to see ideology as less than totalised, and shares with

Eagleton the idea that ideological sub-ensembles may come into antagonistic

contact. As mentioned above, he is under no illusions that literature is an

ideological practice: however, he notes that literature may come to be the

ideological practice of alternative or oppositional sub-cultures which exist on

the margins over the central system.Eagleton?s centrepiece,

however, is his theory of production to the second power. ?Production2? (to provide a shorthand) is related to the

formal theories, but focuses primarily on the question of representation not

form.? As ideology is already the

production of real history, and literature is the production of ideology, there

is an unusually high degree of pressure placed on the structures produced. This

concentration reveals conflict which is mediated between the aesthetic and the

ideological. Eagleton writes that ?Production2?

leads to ?a ceaseless reciprocal operation

of text on ideology and ideology on text, a mutual structuring and

destructuring in which the text continually overdetermines its own

determinations.?[20] The problem

essentially is that the text is feeding material through two modes of representation

? that of ideology, and that of the text ? and (although the latter are a

product of the former) they do not always provide a perfect fit. Sometimes a

degree of homology is attained ? the ideological perspective of the

?life-as-journey? and the aesthetic-technical perspective of a resolved realist

narrative ? but more often there will be an area which refuses to be

incorporated. Although Eagleton claims it is not, this does not seem dissimilar

to the Adornian theory of distance through aesthetic configuration.In conclusion, then, we can

identify three major points. The first is that the power of ideology cannot be

underestimated. A dialectical approach to society seems to be the most

sophisticated and flexible that comes to hand. Ideology is not simply a reflex

of materiality, but a ?lived-in? experience in its own right. Although given

material form in ISAs, ideology also seems to have a measure of independent

evolution in that its entirely abstract concepts can mutate, proliferate and

cause material events. Not only that, but ideology conditions and partially

determines the response of humanity to material events. However, it must be

noted that the terrain on which humanity employs ideology and concepts, and

their own evolution, are partially determined by material events and

conditions. They form two complex sets of interdependent forces, neither

reducible to the other.Secondly, a more flexible

conception of ideology must be assumed, instead of a uniform and static

?dominant ideology.? Williams? model whereby the central system is in continual

motion, orbited by alternative and oppositional systems is a good starting

point. A post-structuralist scepticism about the coherence of any single system

is also worth importing: a dominant ideology may be made up of sub-ideologies

which are continually repressing and patching up their own contradictions.

However, this must be balanced with some of the more pessimistic insights:

particularly those of interpellation

(inserting subjects into ideology), reification

(the pervasive commodification and levelling of all phenomena to one plane of

value) and the globalised mechanisms to distribute and sustain ideological

discourses. As Foucault and Adorno both might recognise, postmodern society has

a more sophisticated ideological capacity and a more totalized, reified

marketplace than ever before. However, it must be noted that just because the

mechanisms of ideology are more powerful, it does not mean the ideology itself

is more solid. In fact, as one dominant ideology attempts to embrace more and

more of human experience, it is going to have to work harder and harder against

more and more challenges to its coherence and stability. Moreover, it must be

recognised that ideology has several levels. Whilst some of these are

globalised, some are not. A more accurate model of ideology might have multiple

centres of power which synthesise their structures when they come into contact

against each other and the margins, and yet also contain profound (often

repressed) oppositions. Like a vast yet unstable molecule, ideology would hold

precariously together through a complex set of both positive and negative

forces. Meanwhile, the

interpenetration of control and resistance cannot be ignored. Dominant

ideological ensembles ? and certainly counter-ideologies emerging out of them ?

are going to be shaped by the forces which form the centre: how they see

themselves will be influenced by how the dominant ideology sees them. Thus,

resistance must define itself against dominance, and, to some extent at least,

dominance must define itself against resistance. Indeed, sub-cultures represent

minor centres of power disrupting the structures of the more powerful:

?sub-cultures constitute consciousness?in the same way that dominant ideologies

do ? but in partly dissident forms.?[21]

Finally, we must set the model in motion, with subjects interpellated, residual

and emergent ideological structures, and a process of incorporation and

selection. However, although we now see that there are conflicts and tensions,

marginal, fractured and liminal areas, we must not forget that late capitalism

is ? despite all its complexity ? a totalising process with astonishing ability

to co-opt and neutralise any resistance or counter-culture. Just as Macherey

argued that ideological contradiction was deferred on to linguistic conflict,

major tension may be disguised by a relatively minor one. The resourcefulness

of dominant ideologies and their capacity for tyranny must not be dismissed

just because there are ideological spaces in which their power is limited.Finally, texts do have some

capacity to ?escape? ideology. The central Post-Marxist theory is simply that

texts represent a configuration of material which can lead to negative critique

? as in Adorno and Eagleton, and partially in Macherey. Texts are where

ideological forms are so concentrated that they come under stress because of a

disjunction between aesthetic and ideological perspectives. This is the theory

of aesthetic-critical distance. A second, closely related theory is that texts

that by necessity take up absence and repressed elements, and thus contain the

seeds of their own dissolution. Hence, even if a text has minimal

aesthetic-critical distance, ideology itself is inherently unstable and may

slide into subversion. The post-structuralist aspect of this is clear. A third

possibility is that of Brecht, Bloch and Williams: texts can take up

ideological resistance from residual or emergent social groupings. Indeed,

Williams identifies artistic practice as one of those areas which has

traditionally been ignored by those in power, allowing it to flourish as a

truly oppositional mode of thinking. This idea has been given a new lease of

life by more complex, heterogenous and dynamic models of ideology. As a corrective

to this, Foucault reminds us of the way power can be fluidly and subtly applied

across apparently a-political realms and mechanisms. Finally, a possibility

which has not been much explored is the angle of reception theory. A text ?

particularly a text from another era ? may be naturalised by a dominant

ideology, but when read ?from the margins? ? ie.an interpellated position at

the edge of society, the text?s codes may reveal subversive potential which the

empowered group missed. Text can become increasingly free as it drifts

spatially and temporally from the conditions of its creation. This has obvious

affinities with Derrida?s ?criture as

well as being an essentially inverted version of Williams? ideas about creation at ideological points marginal

to the central system. Nevertheless, potential

ability is neither actual ability nor absolute ability. Writing is not just an

ideologically-constrained practice, but an ideological practice in itself, an

interdependent element within art, philosophy, education, ethics etc. Life

itself is emerged totally in ideology. It might be said that cultural and media

items are nodes in the network of ideology ? spreading and mediating,

reproducing and critiquing ideology. Literature itself has a complex relationship

with ideology which lets it be subversive or reactionary, radical or complicit.

If cultural history is ? as Catherine Belsey argues[22]

- the history of ideas, the archaeology of truth itself, then this relationship

is at the very heart of the literary critical enterprise.Bibliography Modern

Criticism and Theory: A Reader (2nd Edition), ed.David Lodge

(London, 2000) Literature

in the Modern World, ed.Dennis Walder (Oxford, 1990) David Hawkes, New Critical Idiom: Ideology (London,

1996) Aesthetics

and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Luk?cs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, ed. Ronald

Taylor (London, 1977) Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Oxford,

1998) Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, (London, 1977) Contemporary

Marxist Literary Criticism, ed.Francis Mulhern (London, 1992) New

Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, ed.Kiernan Ryan (London,

1996) The

Foucault Reader, ed.Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, 1984) Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester, 1995) Ann Jefferson and David

Robey, Modern Literary Theory: A

Comparative Introduction (2nd Edition) (?, 1991) [1] Georg Luk?cs, Realism in the

Balance (1938), collected in Aesthetics

and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Luk?cs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno,

ed. Ronald Taylor (London, 1977) p.49 [2] Ernst Bloch, Discussing

Expressionism (1938), collected in Taylor p.23 [3] Bertolt Brecht, Popularity

and Realism (1938/1967) collected in Taylor. p.81 [4] Theodor Adorno, Reconciliation

under Duress (1961) collected in Taylor. p.160 [5] Ibid. p.160 [6] Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A

Critical Introduction (Oxford, 1998) p.117 [7] Ibid. p.76 [8] Theodor Adorno, Commitment

(1965) collected in Taylor, p.185 [9] Raymond Williams, from Base

and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory (1980), collected in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A

Reader, ed.Kiernan Ryan (London, 1996) p.22 [10] Alan Sinfield, Cultural

Materialism, Othello and the Politics of Plausibility (1992), collected in

Ryan p.72 [11] A traditional exercise of negative

and repressivepower by the

sovereign: ?a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies and ultimately life

itself.? Michel Foucault, The Right of

Death and Power Over Life, collected in The

Foucault Reader, ed.Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, 1984) p.259 [12] Michel Foucault, Panopticism,

collected in Rabinow p.209 [13] Ideological State Apparatuses [14] Louis Althusser, from Ideology

and Ideological State Apparatuses (1971), collected in Ryan p.20 [15] Frederic Jameson, Reflections

in Conclusion (1977), collected in Taylor, p.208 [16] Terry Eagleton, Criticism and

Ideology (London, 1976) p.77 [17] Raymond Williams, from Base

and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, collected in Ryan, p.27 [18] Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, On Literature as an Ideological Form (1974) collected in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism,

ed.Francis Mulhern (London, 1992) p.37 [19] Pierre Macherey, The Text

Says What It Does Not Say (1966), collected in Literature in the Modern World, ed.Dennis Walder (Oxford, 1990)

p.220 [20] Terry Eagleton, Criticism and

Ideology, (London, 1977) p.99 [21] Alan Sinfield, Cultural

Materialism, Othello and the Politics of Plausibility (1992), collected in

Ryan p.69 [22] Catherine Belsey, Towards

Cultural History ? In Theory and Practice (1989), collected in Ryan