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INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 175

positioning of subjects within language. This theoretical approach will be dealt
with in much greater detail in Chapter 16.
We should point out here that the extract reprinted below represents only one
brief moment in a much longer and wider-reaching debate. Questions of
ideology, both in Cultural Studies generally and in Language Studies in
particular, have been widely debated in this country and abroad in the seventies,
both in and outside academic institutions. Theoretically, the debate has been
influenced, on the one hand, by Althusserianism and Marxism and, on the other,
by feminism. 18
Althusser’s influence stems from his theoretical challenge to economism, in
which he argues for a more adequate theory of ideology which would not reduce
it, in any simple way, to economic contradictions at the level of the mode of
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production. His model of the social formation, which specified the relative
autonomy of the ideological level, created the space within Marxism for serious
consideration of the importance of signifying practices. It also helped to bring
the question of subjectivity and its importance in the working of ideology to the
fore. Thus, for example, in his essay ‘On Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses’ Althusser introduced into his theory of ideology the concepts of
misrecognition and the interpellation of the individual as subject within
ideologies. These concepts were drawn from Lacan’s theory of the constitution
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of the subject in language. Whereas in Lacan’s work they are an integral part of a
full-scale theory of subjectivity, Althusser uses them to describe the mechanism
by which ideology functions. Subsequently they have been used in a similar way
by Laclau, in his analysis of popular-democratic ideologies. Although
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Althusser himself does not develop theoretically the question of subjectivity and
the process of internalization and rejection of ideologies by the individual
subject, he does point the way towards a serious consideration of psychoanalysis
in relation to these questions (see, for example, ‘Freud and Lacan’). Since
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Althusser’s essays were published psychoanalysis has been taken up as the
potential basis for a materialist theory of language and ideology—as, for
example, in the work of Julia Kristeva, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis. The
theoretical viability of such a move has been one of the key questions informing
the work of the Language Group.
The other important influence on the debate of theories of language and
subjectivity has been feminism. The Women’s Movement’s focus on lived
experience of oppression has encouraged feminists to attempt to theorize the area
of the subjective internalization of ideology. The problem of sexual ideologies
and their relation to the construction of individual identity has directed attention
to the question of subjectivity. Here again Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its theory
of the constitution of the gendered subject in language, seemed to offer a way of
theorizing this area. Thus, for example, psychoanalytic theory has been used as a
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basis for explaining the structures of femininity and masculinity, but it has also
been central to language theory, the question of masculine and feminine
discourses and women and language. Here Julia Kristeva’s work on different