Page 188 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

15
Ideology and subjectivity*

John Ellis

One development of semiology no longer deals with systems of signs; it deals
with the formation of the subject in language, with the internalization of social
contradictions and of their contradiction with the superstructure. It constructs a
science of human nature, surpassing the traditional division of Marxism between
humanism (advanced by those, with Markovic, who believe in a given human
nature) and anti-humanism (proposed by those, with Althusser, who account for
the individual as constructed by ideology and by social structures).
This work is being carried out in various ways by the ‘Tel Quel’ group
(Sollers, Kristeva, Barthes and others in Paris), the Screen group in England and
others. It owes much to Lacan’s seminal reading of Freud, which demonstrates
the social construction of the individual subject through the crucial medium of
language.
First, the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the work is briefly
examined, for the ideas and assumptions it mobilizes both on the Left and on the
Right. The way in which these coincide is fascinating; they reveal a common
way of reading texts and of thinking about the subjective, internal, psychological
moment of the social process. (The three repetitive adjectives are necessary to
show that this is no longer a question of ‘subjectivism’, ‘behaviourism’, ‘personal
politics’ and so on; it is a matter of the overdue politicization of psychoanalysis
and, equally, the encounter of Marxism with the concerns of psychoanalysis.)
The normal ways of thinking revealed in this section are ultimately deeply
damaging to any Marxist political movement. This the following sections
demonstrate.
The second section deals with certain crucial notions of the superstructure and
its relation to the base. It takes into account the way in which ideology is
concerned with the reproduction of the relations of production, the way in which
ideology enters into contradiction with economic and political practices. It then
examines the way in which subjectivity is constructed within this process, how
external social contradictions articulate themselves internally; and what the
effects of this process can be.