Page 189 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

178 IDEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

Misrepresentation
There are five major themes in the offensive against these recent developments
in semiology. The first is to dub it ‘structuralism’, and then to trot out the
traditional criticism which claims that it is incapable of dealing with process,
transformation or change (the diachronic). This still happens in the face of
almost a decade’s work from people like Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, whose
project has been to dissolve the distinction synchrony/diachrony (for example,
Barthes’s recently translated S/Z). 1
Second. this system of thought is then seen as anti-humanist, probably because
it is considered as dealing with structures at the expense of the human. It will be
seen that, far from doing this, the exact value of this ‘Marxism of the subject’ is
to interrogate what hitherto had remained hidden under the category of ‘human
nature’ or had disappeared in accounts of the operation of social structures. A
common problematic can be found in both Left and Right critiques of semiology
(besides the anti-French chauvinism often displayed). Seemingly disparate, they
all perpetuate the old division between subjective and objective. It is not possible,
according to this thinking, to treat both at once: it is assumed that the work
cannot be Marxist because it deals with the subjective (many Marxists also hold
this view, considering the subjective as a mere chimera, constituted entirely of
the objective, and insubstantial in itself). It seems more palatable for the Left to
accept the idea that individuals are caught within structures and simply produced
by them (crude Althusserianism) rather than the notion that a person and his/her
unconscious is formed at every point by his/her history in society, and that this
formation— particularly the unconscious—can operate according to its own
logic and come into conflict with economic needs. In the West this problem has
been opened on to by psychoanalysis in the form of Lacan’s reading of Freud, a
subject that interests many Marxists, including Althusser. In the East the Chinese
have faced this problem during the struggle between two lines and the Cultural
Revolution. These two developments are central for any understanding of
ideology, its specificity and its power. Without an account of the subjective
moment of the social process, Marxism is unable to account for Fascism or

*This extract was originally published in WPCS no. 9. It was written in reply to a reading
of Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by Charles Woolfson and his
application of this reading to the analysis of working-class speech (WPCS 9, pp. 163–98).
Given the object of this chapter, and the constraint of a tight word limit, we are reprinting
an edited version of John Ellis’s text, which concentrates on the theoretical approaches to
language, ideology and subjectivity, developed by the ‘Tel Quel’ group, and their
importance to Marxism. The edited text also deals briefly with Vološinov’s book, which
in some senses prefigures the ‘Tel Quel’ group’s later concern with the importance for
Marxism of a theory of subjectivity. The third section has had to be heavily cut, but we
hope it will stand as a brief statement of Volosinov’s position and the importance of his
critique of formalism.