I

lulletin de la Socihe Americaine de Philosophie de Langue Franfais

Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2004
Donner avoir l'ideologie:
Althusser and Aesthetic Ideology
Thomas Albrecht
The past several years have seen a reinvigorated
interest in the work of Louis AIthusser. Even
though AIthusser has never been fully absent
from the intellectual debates on the left, he has
often been relegated into a Marxist problematic
deemed obsolescent. But oEall the 1960s Marxist
theorists he is undoubtedly the one who has best
withstood the fall of communism. New
generations of students are in the process of
learning about Althusser's writings, and the
publication of a great number of unpublished
texts from his posthumous papers makes it
possible for those who have long engaged with
him to discover new aspects of bis thought.
There is surely still much we can learn from
AIthusser.
-Chantal Mouffe
i
Even a cursorylook at recent publications will substantiate
Chantal Mouffe's claim about a renewed interest in the work and
legacy of Louis AIthusser. Last year alone saw the appearance of
THOMAS ALBRECHT
two new monographs on Althusser, alongside the release of The
Humanist Controver-!y and Other Writings, a translated collection of
posthumous essays originally from 1966-67, flrst published in
France in the mid-1990s.
2
The return to Althusser and
in such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary
criticism, critical theory, social science, and philosophy testifies,
among other things, to a sustained interest in Althusser's theory
of ideology as a tool for a critical engagement that would be able
to account for the ideological and political dimension of cultural
and literary works. In his new book on Althusser, for instance,
Warren Montagidentifies the current task for literary and cultural
studies as rejecting the notion of the author as origin, and as
analyzing "the historically specific ways in which individuals are
'recruited' and interpellated as authors by different ideological
and repressive apparatuses."3 ComplementingMontag's emphasis
onideological interpellation, Isolde Charimhas argued in arecent
book-length study of Althusser's famous essay on ideology and
ideological state apparatuses that the essay must be appreciated
as one of the foundational works for the discipline of cultural
studies.
In some instances, the applications of Althusser's writings
onideologyas ameans to examine literaryworks and other cultural
artifacts operate on the assumption that those writings are not
themselves texts that would flrst need to be read (in Althusser's
own strong sense of reading), but that their meaning is
transparent. I would like to put this assumption into question by
returning to one of Althusser's foundational texts on the relation
between art and ideology, his "Lettre sur la connaissance de l'art;'
and submitting it to the same rigorous reading that it itself
exemplifies. I will argue that the success of applying Althusser's
n10del of ideology critique to literary and cultural artifacts cannot
be assumed apriori, since that model itself demonstrates at each
point the difficulty for the critique to remain outside the very
ideological phenomenon it criticizes.
The "Lettre sur la connaissance de l'art" ["Letter on the
I<nowledge of Art'1, published in 1966 as a companion piece to
Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Iiterary Produclion, is Althusser's
2
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
most eategorical statement on the relation between works of art
and ideolog)T.4 In the essay, Althusser outlines the distinetions as
well as the paralleIs betweenwhat he ealls art, seienee, and ideology.
He argues that works of art are both produeed from, and
eontained within, ideology, but that they are not simply redueible
to ideolog)T. He also draws a parallel between art and seienee by
proposing that both give the critic access to ideology; though in
different forms. In the essay's most well-known formulation,
Althusser maintains that while seience (i.e., Marxist theory) gives
knowledge of ideologyby eoneepts, the "speeifieityof [authentie]
art" (222) is that it enables the eritie somehowto "see," "perceive,"
and "feeI" the ideology that produeed, and is reproduced by; the
work of art. Althusser's referenee to the specificity of an authentie
art was routinely eritieized by the Marxist literary erities who
followed Althusser, in partieular by British Marxists writing in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, as unrefleeted formalism. Aeeording
to its eritics, Althusser's essay privileges what it ealls authentie art
as having a eritieal, and even a potentially transformative, relation
to ideology.
5
Mosdy as a result of this eritique of Althusser's
supposed formalist understanding of the "specificity of art," the
essay has fallen into critieal disrepute and even negleet.
In the following pages, I propose that while a formalist
understanding of what Althusser means by the "speeifieity of
art" is eertainly justified, it is by no means eertain that the form
in question is that of the artwork. Any eritieal eommentary on
the speeifieity of art has thus far focused almost exelusively on
art (as a supposedly privileged formal eategory). For Althusser,
however, the specificity of art seems to have less to do with the
formal properties of the art objeet itself, and more to do with
the formal effect art has on its reader, viewer, or eritie: the effeet
Althusser eal1s a "pereeption" of ideology. This important
distinetion has been noted, for example, by Miehael Sprinker:
"The apparent privilege granted to art [in Althusser's essay] ean
readily be miseonstrued. The basic coneeptual opposition
governing the logie of [the essay] is not art/ideology, but
pereeption/knowledge [i.e., art/seience] ...The speeifieity of art
or aesthetic praetice lies in its perceptual features, its presentation
3
THOMAS ALBRECHT
of ideology in phenomenal forms."6 In the following essay, I will
concentrate on the perceptual features of art, "its presentation
of ideology in phenomenal forms." This critical shift of foeus
will help to underline the ongoing relevance of Althusser's work
to any theorization todayof the relations between cultural artifacts
and i d e o l o g ~ At the same time, it will make explicit howaccording
to Althusser, any critical practice is potentially susceptible to the
ideological phenomena it theorizes.
1. Ideology and/ as Ideological Effects
In the "Letter on Art," Althusser draws a distinction
between art and science on the basis of their respective relation
to ideology: "The real difference between art and science lies in
the specific form in which they give us the same object in quite
different ways: art in the form of 'seeing' and 'perceiving' or
'feeling', science in the form of knowledge (in the strict sense, by
eoncepts)" (223). The object given to us by art and by science is
ideolog)'. Althusser goes on to specify that what art gives us in
the form of "seeing," "perceiving;' and "feeling," andwhat science
gives us in the form of knowledge and concepts, is never an
ideology as such, but always "the spontaneous 'lived experience'
of ideology" (223). As is well known to readers of the essay on
ideology and the state, Althusser argues against distinguishing
between an ideology as such and ideology in its lived, material
practiees. This is because for Althusser, ideologynecessarily takes
the form of lived experience, and does not exist except as such:
''Whenwe speak of ideologywe should knowthat ideology slides
into all human activity; that it is identical with the 'lived' experience
of human existence itself" (223).7
At the same time that Althusser equates ideology with the
ideological lived experience of individuals, however, he also
distinguishes between the two, as in the following passage about
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which ostensibly elaborates the formal
distinction between art and science:
If Solzhenitsyn does 'n1ake us see' the 'lived
4
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
experience' ... of the [Stalinist] 'cult of
personality' and its effects, in no way does he
give us a knowledge of them: this knowledge is
the conceptual knowledge of the complex
mechanisms which eventually produce the 'lived
experience' that Solzhenitsyn's novel discusses.
If Iwanted to use Spinoza's language again here,
I could say that art makes us 'see' 'conclusions
without premisses', whereas knowledge makes
us penetrate into the mechanismwhich produces
the 'conclusion' out of the 'premisses'. This is
an important distinction, for it enables us to
understand that a novel on the 'cult', however
profound, maydrawattention to its 'lived' effects,
but cannotgive an understanding of it. (224)
According to AIthusser's defmition of ideology, an ideology's
'''lived' effects" (which art makes us see and which science allows
us to know) are that ideology. However, the word "effects" not
only designates the ideologicallived human experiences to which
Solzhenitsyn's novel draws our attention. Understood as the kind
of effect that follows an antecedent cause, it also sets up a causal
relationship between itself and aprior, distinct ideology (the cult of
personality). The causality in turn implies aseparation of cause
and effect. AIthusser makes such aseparation between a causal
ideology and its '''lived' effects" in the first sentence, for instance,
when he explicitly distinguishes the "cult" of personality from
"its effects." The subsequent reference to Spinoza similarly sets
up a causal relation ("the mechanism wmch produces the
'conclusions' out of the 'premisses"'), which again separates
ideologyandideological effects (in the analogy between premises
and ideologies, conclusions and lived effects). The claim that art
only shows us conclusions divorced from their premises, while
scientific knowledge encompasses both conclusions andpremises,
reiterates this separation. At several moments, therefore, the
passage on Solzhenitsyn seems to contradict AIthusser's own
argument that ideology and its lived effects are conceptually
inseparable and practicallyidentical. It posits a linear or expressive
5
THOMAS ALBRECHT
causalityinwhich the lived effects to which art draws our attention
are only a secondary effect of a prior ideology.8
Confronted with this apparent contradiction, Althusser
might respond that his separating ideology from its effects is
merely an expository necessit)T. This is the argument he makes,
for example, in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
about having to present ideology and the interpellation of
individual subjects (which to him are the same thing) in the form
of a temporal succession:
Naturally for the convenience and clarity of
n1y little theoretical theatre I have had to
present things in the form of a sequence, with
a before and an after, and thus in the form of
a temporal succession ... But in reality these
things happen without any succession. The
existence of ideology and the hailing or
interpellation of individuals as subjects are one
and the same thing.
9
The word "naturally" is one clue that what Althusser calls an
expository necessity is also a symptom of an ideological
necessity, specifically of an ideological necessity proper to
Althusser's scientific project. In the last instance, Althusserian
science, qua science, wants to theorize ideology as such or an
ideology as such, and not merely "see" or "know" ideological
effects. This is because science is for Althusser by definition a
knowledge of ideology. Any knowledge of ideological effects
attained by science therefore implicitly and necessarily looks
beyond those effects towards an ideological premise that
originally produced them and is reproduced by them. As a
scientific exposition, it cannot do otherwise, and so cannot
help reproducing the expository separation of ideology from
its effects, even while it also denies the tenability of any such
separation.
While the splitting of ideology and ideological effects
testifies to an underlying scientific imperative, Althusser's
statements about science in the passage on Solzhenitsyn also
deny to science any conceptual knowledge of ideological
6
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
premises as such, distinct from their effects. According to
those statements, what science allows us to know is precisely
the production of ideological effects: "[scientific] knowledge
is the conceptual knowledge of the complex mechanisms
which eventually produce the 'lived experience' that
Solzhenitsyn's novel discusses ... [It] makes us penetrate into
the mechamsm which produces the 'conclusions' out of the
'premisses'" (224). AIthusser makes explicit that scientific
knowledge is not a knowledge of ideology as such or of premises
as such, but of the mechanisms wmch produce "lived" effects
(i.e., "conclusions"). To the extent, therefore, that scientific
knowledge is a knowledge about the production of ideological
effects, it is a knowledge of those productions and those effects
as ideology. In other words, these formulations imply that ideology
is not a distinct and prior premise in itself, but is always already
the production of lived effects in material practices such as writing
and reading, aesthetics and criticism. Consistent with statements
Althusser makes elsewhere, ideology here does not exist distinct
from the production of its effects.
It seems then thatAlthusser's textis dividedinto statements
that disavow any separation of ideology and effects, and
statements that make precisely such aseparation (sometimes these
are the very same statements). I will be arguing in what follows
that this internal contradiction touches on the ideological double
bind in wmch Althusserian science fmds itself. On the one hand,
as a science of ideology, it wants to arrive at a knowledge of
ideology as such. On the other hand, the separation of ideology
and its effects is not only a philosophical error, but is a move into
ideology, specifically into an ideology proper to Marxist science.
This ideology is the scientific ideology that presupposes an
ideology that could somehowbe conceptually separated from its
lived effects. So the juxtaposition of the two contradictory strands
in Althusser's statements is in fact closely linked to the question
of ideology that is also posed thematically by those statements. I
will suggest that in the splitting of ideology and effects that is
prompted bya scientific imperative to knowledge about ideology,
Althusser's essay touches on the question of its own ideolog)T.
7
THOMAS ALBRECHT
Ideologyis conceived by science as a distinct entity because
the concept oE such an entity is an ideological knowledge-effect
of scientific texts like Althusser's essa)T. We can fmd a useful
example of one such knowledge-effect in the essay's English
translation. Privileging science over art and following science's
imperatives, Althusser's translator Ben Brewster makes the error
of separating an ideology from its effects in the following
sentence, alreadyquoted earlier, from the passage on Solzhenitsyn:
,ca novel on the 'cult', however profound, may draw attention to
its 'lived' effects, but cannot give an understanding oj it [ne peut en
donner I'intelligence]" (224). Brewster translates the French pronoun
"en" in the phrase "ne peut en donner l'intelligence" as "it;'
indicating he takes it to refer exclusively to the cult of personality.
His translation draws a definitive distinetion between the cult
andits lived effects. The distinetionin turn produces a knowledge-
effect. It makes possible in the English translation a knowledge
of an "it" (the ideology of the cult) that would be separate from
the cult's lived effects. In the French text, however, the pronoun's
referent remains aITlbiguaus since the ward "en" refers to either
or both "le culte" ("the cult'') and "les effets 'vecus' du culte"
("the cult's 'lived' effects").l
0
Brewster's error, framed here as a problem of translation,
is symptomatic of an ideology that Althusser's essay itself both
denounces and also perpetuates. To posit an understanding of
an ideology as such, as Brewster's translation does, is to produce
an ideologJ oj criticism, an ideology Althusser implicitly criticizes in
the very text Brewster is translating and trying to help out.
Brewster attributes to Althusser an understanding of an ideology
as such, an understandingAlthusser knows to be itself ideologieal.
In doing so, Brewster turns Althusser's text over into ideolog)T.
His errot is a move into ideology not because the splitting of
ideology and ideology's lived effects is contradicted by some oE
Althusser's statements about ideology. Rather, it is an ideological
interpellation insofar as it reproduces an ideology Althusser
specifically identifies with the science of arte It reproduces what
Althusser calls the aesthetic effect.
8
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
2. The "Aesthetic Effect": Donner avoir
l'ideologie
In the essay on ideology and ideological state apparatuses,
Althusser famously reminds us of the "material existence" of
ideology in "material practices": "the 'ideas' or 'representations',
etc., which seem to make up ideology do not have an ideal (ideale
or ideelle) or spiritual existence, but a material existence ... An
ideologyalways exists in an apparatus, andits practice, or practices.
This existence is material."ll In the realm of art and aesthetics,
ideology's material practices are the production by art of an
"aesthetic effect": "in order to answer most of the questions
posed for us by the existence and specific nature of art, we are
forced to produce an adequate (scientific) knowledge of the
processes which. produce the 'aesthetic effect' of a work of art"
(225). This statement does not mean that, for Althusser, art is
the same thing as the production of its aesthetic effect. Rather, it
suggests that a scientific knowledge of art (which for Althusser
is always, in the last instance, a knowledge of the relation between
art and ideology) would have to be a knowledge of the aesthetic
effect art produces. Therefore, if ideologyonly exists inits material
practices, and if the object of a scientific knowledge of art is the
production of art's aesthetic effect, then the material practices
of aesthetic ideology would have to be the production of that
effect.
The word aesthetic derives from the Greek aisthanesthai (to
perceive), so it would seem that the phrase "aesthetic effect"
designates the work's perceptual effect, the effect on the reader
of "perceiving" in works of literature the ideological lived
experiences of human individuals. According to Althusser, such
a "perception" may provide readers with a critical point of view
on a particular ideology that is reproduced through those lived
experiences: "Balzac, despite his personal political options, 'makes
us see' ['donne avoir1 the 'lived experience' of capitalist society
in a critical form" (224). Our critical insight into lived capitalist
ideology is the aesthetic effect of Balzac's art on us, the effect
9
THOMAS ALBRECHT
Althusser calls "donner avoir." By insisting it is precisely this
effect of which Marxist criticism is constrained to produce a
scientific knowledge, Althusser suggests our critical "perception"
of ideological effects is itself a form of ideological interpellation.
If art is the occasion for a critical insight that is also an
ideological interpellation, this may be because it positions the
critic in avantage point that would be in some sense outside of
i d e o l o ~ Althusser defmes the aesthetic effect not only as the
reader's perception of ideology, but also as a spatial distance
between the work and ideology, a distance that alternately places
the reader or the work somehowat avisible remove fromideology:
Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a 'view' of the
ideology to which their work alludes and with
which it is constantly fed, a view which
presupposes a retrealj an internal distantiation from
the very ideology from which their novels
emerged. Theymake us 'perceive' (hut not know)
in some sense [en quelque sorte] from the inside}
by an internal distance} the very ideology in which
theyare held. (222-23)
The fact that the content of the work of
Balzac and Tolstoy is 'detached' from their
political ideology and in some way [en quelque
sorte] makes us 'see' it from the outside} makes us
'perceive' it bya distantiation inside that ideology,
presupposes that ideology itse!f. (225)
In th'ese sentences, a distance or detachment becon1es visible
between the work and the political ideology fromwruch the work
was born; trus distancing enables the critic to "perceive" the given
ideology as discernibly separated from the work, fromits content,
or from him or herself.
12
Both of the above citations present us with a critical double
bind similar to the one in the earlier passages about the separability
and inseparability of ideology and ideological effects. At the same
time that Althusser posits the possibility of a detaching of the
umbilical relation between ideology and the work of art, he also
emphasizes that the work is always still insidei d e o l o ~ continually
10
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
being held by it and being fed by it. On the one hand, the work
affords a "retreat" or "distantiation" from the ideology out of
which it emerged. This distancing enables the critic to "see" that
ideologyin a critical form. On the other hand, the distantiation is
interna4 taking place "from the inside" of ideology. In the second
passage, for instance, the critical perspective onideology "in same
way ... from the outside' is due to a distantiation that takes place
"inside that ideology:" It seems these entangled statements are at
best ambivalent about the possibility of attaining through art a
critical vantage point on ideology that wou1d whoIly or even
partially be from outside of ideology:13
Like the manifest tension in Althusser's text between the
possibility and impossibility of separating ideology from
ideological effects, the tension in these passages between the
possibility and impossibility of seeing ideology from the outside
suggests that the ideology with which Althusser is concerned
here is not only the political ideology feeding the work of writers
like Tolstoy and Balzac. He is concerned with thepresupposition of
a political ideology that cou1d somehowbe seen from the outside.
As the text states explicitly, any detachment by art from a political
ideology "presupposes that ideology." This presupposition of a
detachable and visible ideology is itself an ideology, as Althusser
suggests when he teIls us that it is the work's aesthetic effect
(rather than the work as such) of which we must produce a
scientific knowledge. Itis the ideologywhicllpresupposesa potential
retreat or distance from a political ideology, and whichpresupposes
a political ideology that wou1d become visible through the reading
of novels. It is, in short, the ideology of the Marxist critic.
Althusser seems at once to reproduce this ideology and to
question it. He reproduces it at the level of his explicit statements
about the critical potential of art and the science of arte The
questioning, on the other hand, is more muted. Althusser indicates
in the above citations that any "seeing" of political ideology by
the critic is only a seeing in quotation marks, a seeing "in same
sense." The telling use of quotation marks and the qualification
"enquelque sorte" in both citations suggest that the critical insight
into ideologyis not to be taken literally, but designates the rhetoric
11
THOMAS ALBRECHT
of art criticism. Terry Eagleton, for one, has noted the emphasis
on rhetoric in Althusser's text: "[Althusser] can [redeem art from
ideology] only byresorting to a nebulousfyfigurative language ('allude,'
'see,' 'retreat') which lends a mere!J rhetoricalquali!J to the distinction
between 'internal distantiation' and received notions of art's
'transcendence' of ideology."14 Eagleton is correct that Althusser
evokes the figurative language and rhetoric of criticism. For
Eagleton, the rhetoric in question is Althusser's own rhetoric,
which aims (apparently unsuccessfully) to redeem art from
ideology, distantiation from transcendence. But in the statements
cited above, Althusser does not separate art from ideology; to the
extent that he posits a "distancing" between the two, he locates it
not in the artwork itself, but in the critical rhetoric that would
have art "allude to" and "retreat from" ideology. This is an
important distinction, one that Eagleton's indictment of
Althusser's alleged formalism overlooks.
15
As the quotation marks
suggest, the phrases "seeing," "retreating from," and "alluding
to" are the rhetoric of a kind of criticism that presupposes the
possibility of such seeing, retreating, and alludingin the first place.
For Althusser, this "seeing" of ideology from the outside is hardly
a transcendence of ideology, but is rather an ideological effect,
an ideological knowledge-effect of a critical ideology that reads
works of literature in order to see ideology outside of itselE It is
this ideological effect, Althusser insists, of which we must produce
a scientific knowledge. Even as he maintains that works of
literature can give us "perceptions" into political ideologies, he
consistendy takes care to identify such perceptions as a rhetoric
and an ideology of Marxist criticism.
Althusser repeatedly points to this critical ideology in his
discussion of the aesthetic effect: both the distancing and the
critical perception he associates with the phrase "aesthetic effect"
are effects the novelist's art has on the critic. The distance from
ideology and the perception of ideology are effects produced
not within the work itself, but within the critic's analysis of the
work. This distinction is specified in another important text by
Althusser on art and ideology, "Cremonini: Painter of the
Abstract," a 1966 reviewessay about the ltalian painter Leonardo
12
I ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
Cremonini: "Everyworkof artis bornof a project both aesthetic
and ideological. When it exists as a work of art it produces as a
work of art (by the type of critique and knowledge it inaugurates
with respect to the ideology it makes us see [donne ci an
ideological effect."16 AIthusser makes explicit here that a work of
art inaugurates a type of critique which sees a particular
He also makes explicit that the inauguration of such a critique is
an ideological eJfect, a kind of interpellation. On the one hand, the
work "makes us see" an ideology: this aesthetic effect is the
specificity of art, art's critical potential. But the aesthetic effect
simultaneously produces an ideological effect, namely the type
of critique that could or would somehow "see" ideology outside
of itselE
1
7
Both aspects ofthis double bind on the critic are inevitably
implicated in what AIthusser calls the "specificity of art": the
specific function of the work of art is to make visible (donner d
voir)J by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the existing
ideology (of any of its forms), thework of art cannotlailto exercise
a directly ideological effect."18 Althusser links the inevitable
ideological effect of art to the aesthetic form in which art "gives
us" ideology: the form of "making visible." He n1akes explicit
that art's perceptual effect is an ideological effect, and that Ws
ideology is inevitabfy implicated in the project of Marxist science,
in "the type of critique and knowledge [art] inaugurates with
respect to the ideology it makes us see." Marxist science strives
to make the reality of existing ideology visible by establishing a
distance from it. According to AIthusser, it thereby exercises a
direct andinevitable ideological effect. It reproduces the aesthetic
ideology that there exists an accessible point outside of ideology
that would provide a critical distance from, and aview
AIthusser insists the proper object for any scientific criticism
of art must therefore be not only the artwork itself, but the
production of the work's aesthetic effect, which is to say the
ideological aesthetic effect in art criticism: "in order to answer
most of the questions posed for us by the existence and specific
nature of art, we are forced to produce an adequate (scientific)
knowledge of the processes wl1.ich produce the 'aesthetic effect'
13
THOMAS ALBRECHT
of a work of art" (225). If "perceiving" ideology is the aesthetic
effect of wmch we are forced to produce a scientific knowledge,
that knowledge would have to be a knowledge of the type of
critique art inaugurates with respect to the ideology it makes us
see. For Marxist science, it would have to be a reflexive knowledge.
Althusser predicates such self-reflection on close and rigorous
reading. This is because he associates the aesthetic effect with a
failure by critics to read, and, conversely, because he associates
readingwith an attentiveness to the material practices and material
existence of i d e o l o g ~ in particular of aesthetic ideolog)T.
3. The Necessity of Reading
My contention that Althusser's essay on art is concerned
with the aesthetic ideology of Marxist criticism, no less than
with the insights into political ideology given to Marxist criticism
by art, derives not only from the specific statements discussed
above, but more fundamentally from Althusser's axiomatic
emphasis on the material practices and material existence of
ideology: In the "Letter on Art," the examples of art are notably
all works of literature: the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and
Solzhenitsyn. What strikes any reader of Althusser's essay is that
despite Althusser's repeatedinjunction to attend to the "specificity
of art," these novels are at no point discussed in terms of their
material specificity, which is to say in literary, verbal, or linguistic
terms. Instead, the specificity of what is fundamentally literary art
is discussed exclusivelyin terms of the perceptual effect the novels
in question have on the critic: the effect of "seeing" and
"perceiving" ideology. The specificity of literature, these
metaphors suggest, is above all else that it is not readby its critics.
No less than the separation of ideology and ideological
effects, of ideologyi and art, and of ideology and science, Marxist
criticism's failure to read is a fall into ideolog)T. This is because the
critics fail to attend to the material specificity of their object, the
novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn. At the most
fundamental level, the material specificity of those novels would
14
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
seem to be simply black marks on white paper. The critics, it
appears, do not read those marks or even acknowledge them as
such; rather, they see them as windows or mirrors through which
ideology could be "perceived" or "feIt." What Althusser calls the
aesthetic effect desigl1ates the critics' sensory access, via a
phenomenalization of linguistic marks, to a phenomenalized
ideology:19 The phenomenalization of ideology into something
tangible or visible implies that linguistic marks and language more
generally are somehow transparent to the critic. Yet Althusser
makes explicit in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
that to see language as transparent is itself an ideological effect:
"the obviousness of the 'transparency' of language ... is an
ideological effect, the elementaryideological effect."20 In the essay
on art, what Althusser calls "seeing" and "perceiving" designates
precisely this elementary ideological effect. These metaphors
suggest an assumed transparency of language, rather than
attention to the material existence and material practices of
ideolog)T. They are indicative of the critic's fall into ideologyinsofar
as they reveal his or her confusion of linguistic with material
reality; and of reference with phenomenalism.
21
If the critic's confusion of linguistic with phenomenal
reality is indicative of bis or her failure to attend to the material
existence of ideology, Althusser himself is by contrast attentive
to the material existence of the aesthetic ideology with which he
is concerned. Unlike the critics, he does not confuse writing with
phenomenal reali1:)r. What he calls "seeing," "perceiving," and
"feeling" are not literal sensory experiences, but are metaphors
designating the critic's rhetoric about a given novel. For Althusser,
this rhetoric is the material existence of the aesthetic ideology of
criticism, the veryideology of which he teils us we must produce
a knowledge: "we are forced to produce an adequate (scientific)
knowledge of the processes which produce the 'aesthetic effect'
of a work of art" (225).
Given the above, it is hardly surprising that Althusser
defines such a scientific knowledge of art's aesthetic effect as a
close and rigorous reading.
I believe that the only way we can hope to reach
15
THOMAS ALBRECHT
areal knowledge of art, to go deeper into the
specificity of the work of art, to know the
mechanisms which produce the 'aesthetic effect',
is precisely to spend a long time and pay the
greatest attention to the 'basicprincipks of Marxism'
and not to be in a hurry to 'move on to
something else', for if we move on too quickly
to 'something else' we shall arrive not at a
knowkdge of art, but at an ideology of art. (227)
Althusser insists that we must read the fundamental principles
of Marxism carefully and attentively. In the context of his critique
of aesthetic ideology, he also implies simply that we must read as
such, at least if our object is literature or literarycriticism. Marxist
critics must read the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn,
rather than hastening to move on to something else, namely the
"perception" of ideology through those novels. And we in turn
must read the texts and the rhetoric of Marxist art criticism, as
Althusser does when he qualifies the alleged "perception" of
ideology with quotation and with the phrase "en quelque
sorte." Through such reading, we can come to apprehend the
material existence of a given ideology, for example of aesthetic
ideologyin Marxist art criticism. if we fail to read, we
fall into ideolog)T. This is what happens to the critics in Althusser's
essay; who bypass the labor of reading in order to move quickly
on to "somethingelse" (a critical viewof ideology), thereby falling
into the ideology Althusser calls the aesthetic effect. This is the
ideology that presumes there exists "something else" beyond
the work for the critic to move on to. It is the ideology that
presumes a distinct and prior ideology that couldbe arrived at by
way of the transparent language of literary works. In order for
us to recognize this ideological effect in others and to avoid
perpetuating it ourselves, Althusser insists, we must read, and we
must not wish to move too quicklyon to "somethingelse" beyond
the text we are reading.
Ben Brewster's translation error, discussed earlier, is one
example of this kind of non-reading, of a moving on to
"something else" that culminates in ideology rather than outside
16
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
of ideology: Brewster translates the ward "en" in the phrase "un
lroman ... nepeut endonner l'intelligence" as "it," therebycreating
a conceptual distinction between an ideology (the Stalinist cult
of personality) and its lived effects. This distinction is an aesthetic
effect, since it allows Brewster to "see" an ideologyas such, distinct
from the lived ideologieal experiences portrayed in Solzhenitsyn's
novel. It is also an aesthetic (i.e., a perceptual) effect because it
occurs as a result of not reading a text, the original French version
of Althusser's essay. It is by not reading that Brewster is able to
see. Ta put it in the words of the passage discussed just above:
Brewster is in tao great a hurry to move on to "samething else,"
namely to the ideology of the Stalinist cult, and to a scientific
knowledge of it. He does not take the time to read Althusser's
text, and thus falls not into a knowledge of art, but into an ideology
of art.
22
4. Inside/Outside Ideology
For the critic to want to move on tao quickly from the
text to "samething else," Althusser writes, is for him or her to fall
into ideology. This statementimplies thatitis precisely bywishing
to move to a critical vantage point that would be somehowoutside
of ideology that we are ideologically interpellated. In one of the
more equivocal sentences discussed above, for instance, Althusser
writes, "The fact that the content of the work of Balzac and
Tolstoy is 'detached' from their political ideology and in same
way makes us 'see' it from the outside) makes us 'perceive' it by a
distantiation inside that ideology,presupposes that ideology itse!!" (225).
Here Althusser not onlylocates the outsideperspective on a political
ideology inside that same ideology. He also implies that any seeing
of a political ideologyfrom the outside takes place within a critical
ideologythat presupposes such a political ideology (and an outside
to it). In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Althusser
similarly takes up the question of a potential outside to ideology.
He concludes that to suppose oneself to be outside of ideology
is itself a moment of ideological interpellation:
17
THOMAS ALBRECHT
What ... seems to take place outside ideology
(to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place
in ideology. What really takes place in ideology
seems therefore to take place outside it. That is
whythose who are inideologybelieve themselves
by definition outside ideology: one of the effects
of ideology is the practical denegation of the
ideological character of ideology by
Althusser not only teils us that we are in fact in ideology when w
think of ourselves as being outside of He goes on to
insist that any point in ideology by definition believes itself to be
outside ideology, implying that any outside to ideology theorized
from such a point is always already within ideology. Ideology
takes place in the very act of negating ideology, i.e., in supposing
oneself to be detached or distant from ideology: "one of the
effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological
character of ideology byideolog)T." Any such negation of ideology
is a point in ideology that by defInition believes itself to be outside
of ideology. The negation reproduces the ideology maintaining
that ideology exists outside of itself:
In Althusser's essay on art, this ideological effect takes the
form of intermittent distinctions or movements between an
"inside" and an "outside" to ideology. Althusser reflects on the
critical ideology that presupposes an attainable vantage point
outside of a given political ideology, a point from which the critic
could "see" and "perceive" that He recognizes that to
make such aseparation between an inside and an outside not
only provides potential insight into political ideologies, but is also
the aesthetic effect that turns the critic over ioto aesthetic ideolog)T.
For Althusser, knowledge of the aesthetic effect must be a
form of se!f-knowledge. This is because the "Letter on Art" does
not situate aesthetic ideology outside of itselE It continually poses
the question whether, as a form of science, it escapes perpetuating
the error it calls "seeiog" and "perceiving." For one, it ostensibly
endorses a form of art criticism that would position the critic
outside of ideology. In order to be a science, it cannot do
otherwise. Yet it also knows that at the moment it posits an
18
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
ideology that could be "seen" or "feIt" from the outside, it turns
itself over into i d e o l o ~ This is the double bind of Althusser's
essay: on the one hand, it produces a "perception" and a critical
knowledge of ideology from the outside, and, on the other hand,
it knows that in doing so it reproduces the aesthetic ideology of
Marxist science.
24
The double bind raises the broader question
of whether Marxist science must be I?JI definition ideological because
its most fundamental imperative is to arrive outside of ideology.
1f scientific knowledge of an ideology is by defmition a point
outside of that ideology, and if any such point is an ideological
knowledge-effect produced by the ideological discourse of
scientific knowledge, can Althusserian science ever truly be
science? Can it ever be truly "outside" of an ideology; and know
that ideology from the outside? Or does Althusser leave us trapped
in an endless ideological aporia, insofar as any outside to which
we lay claim invariably inscribes us within ideology?
The passage from "ldeology and 1deological State
Apparatuses" cited above goes on to suggest that only through a
recognition of its own inscription in ideology can Althusserian
science paradoxically arrive at an outside to ideology:
Those who are in ideology believe themselves
by defmirion outside ideology: one of the effects
of ideology is the practical denegation of the
ideological character of ideology by ideology:
ideology never says, 'I am ideological'. 1t is
necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific
knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a
quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I
was in i d e o l o ~ As is weil known, the accusation
of beingin ideology only applies to others, never
to oneselE
25
The passage constructs the familiar opposition between ideology
and science ("lt is necessaryto be outside ideology; i.e. in scientific
knowledge ... "), but then abruptly coilapses it ("... to be able to
say: I am in ideology''). 1t is in science's paradoxical reversal from
outside to inside that Althusser locates the real difference between
science and ideology. For its part, ideology "never says, 'I am
19
THOMAS ALBRECHT
ideologicaL'" By Althusser's own defmition, it would say: I am
outside of And one thing it does say is just is
weil known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to
others, never to oneselE" Like ideology, science must say that
ideology is outside of itself. And in saying this, it invariably falls
into ideology: "one of the effects of ideology is the practical
denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology."
However, the difference between science and ideology is that
science takes this fall knowingly, for it also says, "I am in
By sayingthe latter, it falls "outside" of ideology; because ideology,
by definition, always believes itself to be outside of
Thus science occupies a paradoxical position: it is "outside of
ideology" insofar as it is knowingly "in 1ts place outside
of ideology is a self-conscious position in ideology that arrives at
an outside precisely through this consciousness. I<nowing itself
to be in ideology is a knowledge precluded by the inside, and to
this extent, science can be said to be outside of ideology. 1t says
more and knows more than those who only say, "I was in
ideology;" and who onlyapply the accusation of beingin ideology
to others, never to themselves.
This paradoxical outside to ideology, which science reaches
by means of recognizing its placement within ideology, is
qualitatively different from the outside to ideology discussed in
the essay on art, the critical vantage point that would be visibly
detached from The difference, briefly put, is between
what Althusser calls knowledge, on the one hand, and what he
calls "seeing" and "perceiving," on the other. Both knowledge
and "perceiving" are forms in which ideology is given to us, and
more importandy, both are forms in which we are given over
into Althusser endorses andidentifies with both modes,
and he recognizes that neither is outside of ideology. Yet he does
insist on a difference between them: "the form of 'seeing,'
'perceiving' and 'feeling' ... is not the form of knowing" (222).
The difference is due to a self-critical blind-spot in the eye of the
criticism that would "see" or "perceive" ideology through works
of literature. Such a criticism can only see ideology outside of
itself. Whereas what Althusser calls knowledge is foremost a form
20
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
lof self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is for Althusser foremost
the ability to say; "I amini d e o l o ~ " According to the citedpassage
from "1deology and 1deological State Apparatuses," such a self-
knowledge is the paradoxical condition of any outside to i d e o l o ~
Its reflexive quality is what distinguishes it from the ideological
blindness Althusser associates with "perceiving" and "seeing."
Besides the presence or absence of a self-critical element,
what distinguishes knowledge from "seeing" and "perceiving" is
the presence or absence of reading. As I have demonstrated, the
words "seeing" and "perceiving" in Althusser's text designate
acts of non-reading through which the critic, for instance Ben
Brewster, attempts to attain avantage point outside of ideology,
only to fall thereby into aesthetic ideology. I<nowledge, by
contrast, takes the form of reading. Reading is for Althusser an
attending to the material existence and material practices of
ideology, and specifically of aesthetic i d e o l o g ~ Althusser's use
of quotation marks and of the qualification "en quelque sorte"
around the words "perceiving" and "seeing" is one example of
this kind ofreading, since it points to the ideological assumption
that language is a transparent medium, an assumption that
underlies Marxist critical rhetoric about literature.
Althusser locates the idealagical errar he calls "perceiving"
and "seeing" not only outside of himself, but within his own
text. His critique of the aesthetic effect in the "Letter on Art" is
his way of saying, "I amin i d e o l o g ~ " It is his way of applying the
accusation of beingin ideology not only to others, but to himselE
In making this self-accusation, he sllpplements his "perceptions"
of political ideologies with a knowledge (i.e., a reading) of his
own scientific and aesthetic ideology. Althusser's self-knowledge
places him "in some sense" outside of ideology, preciselyinsofar
as it is a recognition of bis own inscription in ideology. 1t
distinguishes bis text from more spontaneous "perceptions" or
"feelings" of ideology, which is to say from "perceptions" that
are unaccompanied byknowledge. The distinctionis not between
beinginside or outside of ideology, but between beingknowingly
or blindly in i d e o l o ~ It is the distinetion between reading one's
own ideology, and merely seeing ideology outside of oneselE
21
THOMAS ALBRECHT
This distinction sets Althusser's critique off from the type
of criticismthat on!J "sees" and "feels" even as Althusser
necessarily identifies with the latter (he can only lay claim to a
difference from it insofar as he also identifies with it). 1ts self-
knowledge places Althusser's text into anirreducible undecidability
vis-a-vis its own ideology; an ideology from which it knows it is
unable to escape, and from which it escapes precisely through its
recognition of this impossibilit)T. This undecidability is not the
dead-end of an infinite ideological aporia inwhich anyideological
inside invariably turns into an outside (and vice versa). Althusser
teaches us that the first step towards any outside to ideology is to
come to know (byway of reading) one's own He arrives
at this self-knowledge by continually rereadinghis own text against
the reflexive implications oE its insights into ideology, a rereading
that is necessitated by nothing less than the text's most rigorous
epistemological and ideological imperatives.
Tulane University
Notes
1 This citation is taken from Mouffe's preface to 1solde
Charim, Der Afthusser-EJfekt: Entwurf einer Ideofogietheorie
(Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2002), 11.
2 See Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controver!} andOther
Writings, ed. Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New
York: Verso, 2003). The monographs are Warren Montag,
Louis Althusser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and
Andrew Levine, A Futurefor Marxism? Afthussetj the Ana!Jtical
Turn and the Revivalof Sociafist Theory (London: Pluto Press,
2003). For another revision of contemporary Marxist theory
in light oE Althusser's work specifically and poststructuralism
generally, see Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital Marx and
the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
3 Montag, Louis Althusser, 135.
4 Louis Althusser, "Lettre sur la connaissance de l'art,"
22
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
La Nouvelle Critique 175 (1966), 136-146. The essay has been
translated as ''A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," in
Lenin andPhilosopf?y and OtherEssqys, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 221-227. All references
to the translated version will be given parenthetically by page
number. For intellectual-historical background on Althusser's
essay and its place in Marxist literary theory, see Montag, Louis
Althusser, 38-42; Francis Mulhern, "Message in a Bottle:
Althusser in Literary Studies," in Althusser: A Critical Reader,
ed. Gregory Elliott (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 161-163;
James Kavanagh, "Marxism's Althusser: Towards a Politics
of Literary Theory," in Diacritics 12 (1982), 33-34; and Terry
Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1976), 18-19.
5 This critique is made, among other places, in Terry
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1982), 82-86;
Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, "On Literature as an
Ideological Form," in Unrying the Text:A Post-Structuralist Reader,
ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 79-80; Tony
Bennett, Formalism andMarxism (New York: Methuen, 1979),
120-149; Thomas Lewis, ''Aesthetic Effect/ldeolog1cal Effect,"
in Enclitic 7.2 (1983), 5-6; Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour
of Theory (London: Verso, 1987), 176; and Steve Giles, "From
Althusser to Brecht-Formalism, Materialism, and The
Threepenny Opera," in New Wqys in Germanistik, ed. Richard
Sheppard (New York: Berg Publishers, 1990), 274-275. For
helpful commentary on this line of critique, see Michael
Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory
of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1987), 101-102;
Kavanagh, "Marxism's Althusser," 34; and Mulhern, "Message
in a Bottle," 164.
6 Sprinker, Imaginary Relations, 102.
7 Althusser first equates ideology with the '''lived'
relation between men and the world" in the 1964 essay
"Marxism and Humanism," later republished in For Marx
J
trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 219-247. He
elaborates this argument in the essay on ideology and the
23
THOMAS ALBRECHT
state, where he famously identifies the subject as the
constitutive category of all ideology. See Althusser, "Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin andPhilosophy and
Other Esssqys, 127-186. On the relation between Althusser's
theory of ideology and bis theory of art, see Bennett, Formalism
andMarxism, 112-118; Kavanagh, "Marxism's Althusser," 26-
30; and Sprirlker, Imaginary Relations, 270-271.
8 This causality not only separates ideology and
ideological effects, but also joins them, insofar as Althusser's
definition of causality synthetically suspends any strict
distinction between cause and effect. In his essay "Freud and
Lacan," for example, Althusser writes, "If one understands
the term effect in the context of a classical theory of causality,
one will think it in terms of the actual presence of the cause
in its effects (cf. Spinoza)." See Althusser, "Freud and Lacan,"
in Writings on P.rychoana!Jsis) ed. Olivier Corpet and Fran<;ois
Matheron, trans. Jeffey Mehlman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 178n.8. The references to Spinoza
and causality echo the formulations in the passage on
Solzhenitsyn, suggesting that the passage does not clearly
separate premises and conclusions, causes and effects. The
locating of the cause in the effects recalls Althusser's model
of structural causality in Reading "Capita4 "trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Verso, 1979).
9 Althusser, "Ideology," 174-175.
10 Althusser, "Lettre sur la connaissance de l'art," 143.
11 Althusser, "Ideology," 165-166.
12 Tony Bennett finds in this argument the influences
of Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists, on the one hand,
and of Brecht, on the otherO(Formalism andMarxism, 122-123).
As regards Brecht's influence onAlthusser's essay, Steven Giles
points out that the word distantation is the standard French
translation of the Brechtian term Verfremdung ("From
Althusser to Brecht," 262). On Brecht and Althusser, see also
Montag, LouisAlthusser, 22-37; and Althusser's own essay, "The
'Piccolo Teatro': Bertolazzi and Brecht (Notes on a Materialist
Theater)," in For Marx.
24
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
13 See Michael Sprinker's reading of these passages in
Imaginary Relations: "The presentation of ideology in art places
the reader or spectator, for the moment and within the context
of the work's ideological materials, outside the particular
ideology or ideologies being presented" (282, my emphases).
Sprinker goes on to identify the clistance produced between
art and ideology as simultaneously an alienation effect and an
ideological effect: "The mode of presentation in art is
perceptual or phenomenal: in it we see and feel the lived
experience of ideology. Ideology thus appears in aesthetic
presentation, but at a clistance ... But the alienation-effect
can also serve as a means for ideological interpellation, so
that the work of art can therefore be said to function in two
different ways: as the distantiation of ideological materials
and as the production of a new ideology" (282). This
somewhat equivocal claim about art's double effect is in fact
based on a very close reading of Althusser's text, as my essay
will demonstrate.
14 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 84, my emphases.
15 In his commentary on the "Letter on Art," Tony
Bennett specifies that the aesthetic effect takes place not within
the actual artwork, as critics like Eagleton have maintained,
but within Marxist criticism of the work: "It is ... Marxist
criticism which, through an active and critical intervention, so
'works' upon the texts concerned as to make them 'reveal' or
'distance' the dominant ideological forms to which they are
made to 'allude.' The signification of ideology that [the texts
concerned] are thus said to have is not somehow 'natural' to
them; it is not a pre-given signification which criticismpassively
mirrors but is a signification they are made to have by the
operations of Marxist criticism upon them" (Formalism and
Marxism, 141). Bennett understands this point as a corrective
to AIthusser's alleged formalisn1. Yet what he says is quite
consistent with what AIthusser himself says. A slight difference
is that whereas Bennett is unqualifiedly optimistic about such
critical operations, Althusser is more cautious about the
advantages such operations are presumed to afford. This is
25
THOMAS ALBRECHT
why he speaks of an ideological effect, not only of a distancing
effect.
16 Louis Althusser, "Cremonini: Painter of the
Abstract," in Lenin and Philosop!?J and Other Essays, 241.
17 The quoted sentence from the Cremonini essay is
very explicit about equating the aesthetic effect with an
ideological effect. Nevertheless commentators on the essay
have focused exclusively on distinguishing between them.
Thomas Lewis, for instance, attributes to Althusser a
distinction between the two effects, and goes on to critique
Althusser for making the distinction (''Aesthetic Effect/
Ideological Effect," 6). According to Lewis, the distinction
upholds the problematic privileging by Althusser of art over
ideology. Michael Sprinker similarly finds a distinction between
aesthetics and ideology in Althusser's text, but unlike Lewis,
he endorses the distinction. For Sprinker's Brechtian reading
of the Cremonini essay, the aesthetic effect is not an
ideological, but an anti-ideological, effect. It is the production
by works of art of an "internal distance" from the ideologies
they present. Through the creation of such a distance, Sprinker
argues, ideologies are estranged from themselves. This in turn
creates the possibility for an auclience to attain knowledge,
the kind of knowledge it can use to transform the social
conditions that produced a given ideology in the first place.
See Michael Sprinker, ' ~ r t and Ideology: Althusser and de
Man," in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory,
ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
42-44.
18 Althusser, "Cremonini," 241-242.
19 The aesthetic effect is a phenon1enalization of
ideology insofar as the critic gains a spatial distance from
ideology, and can see ideology. See Sprinker, Imaginary Relations,
271; I<.avanagh, "Marxism's Althusser," 33; and Balibar and
Macherey, "On Literature as an Ideological Form," 79.
20 Althusser, "Ideology," 172. For the critic to see
language as transparent is to see ideology as similarly
26
ALTHUSSER AND AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
transparent. This mutual transparency is what Althusser calls
a fundamental ideological effect. According to Ellen Rooney,
it is also indicative of a defense by critics against doing the
very work that would bring them closer to a true understanding
of ideology, namely the difficult and tenuous labor of reading:
"The theory of ideology that could render transparent to the
critical intelligence any (and every) ideologieal operation might
also protect us from the uncertain work of reading." See Ellen
Rooney, "Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish
of Ideology," in Yale French Studies 88 (1995), 184.
21 My reference here is to Paul de Man's definition of
ideology from "The Resistance to Theory": ''What we call
ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural
reality, of reference with phenomenalism." See Paul de Man,
The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), 11. De Man's formulation complements
Althusser's critique of the aesthetic effect, insofar as what
Althusser indicts as an ideological effect is the critics'
phenomenalization of linguistic reality (i.e., their failure to
read), and their confusion of language with the phenomenal
world. Althusser indicates the critics' phenomenalization of
language in the metaphors oE "seeing" and "perceiving," and
indicates their confusion of linguistic with material reality in
the telling use of quotation marks. On paralleIs between
aesthetic ideology in de Man and Althusser, see Sprinker,
and Ideology," 32-42; J. Hillis Miller, "Ideology and
Topography: Faulkner," in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), 192-196; and Andrzej Warminski,
of Reference," in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology,
ed. Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 9-12.
22 In her essay on ideology and "symptomatic reacling"
in Althusser's work, Ellen Rooney establishes a connection
between the predominant critical emphasis on Althusser's
theory of ideology, on the one hand, and a simultaneous
resistance by critics to reading Althusser's text as such, on the
other. For Rooney, the critical "fetishization" of Althusser's
27
THOMAS ALBRECHT
theory of ideology and the accompanying refusal to read
Althusser are themselves "profoundly ideological." See
Rooney, "Better Read Than Dead," 185.
23 Althusser, "Ideology," 175.
24 This self-critical dimension, though explicit in later
texts such as Elements of Self-Criticism, is not always recognized
in Althusser's writings on ideology. Perhaps this is because
those writings are so often approached in view of their
potential application to literary and cultural artifacts. From
such a perspective, they have to be assumed to be impervious
to the ideologies they theorize. There are of course exceptions
to this tendency. According to Judith Butler, for instance,
own writing, he concedes, invariably enacts what
it thematizes, and thus promises no enlightened escape from
ideology through this articulation." See Judith Butler,
"'Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All,'" in Yale French
Studies 88 (1995),9.
25 Althusser, "Ideology," 175.
28