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72 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
available in any culture that they appear to involve no intervention of coding,
selection or arrangement. They appear to reproduce the actual trace of reality in
the images they transmit. This, of course, is an illusion—the ‘naturalistic
illusion’—since the combination of verbal and visual discourse which produces
this effect of ‘reality’ requires the most skilful and elaborate procedures of
coding: mounting, linking and stitching elements together, working them into a
system of narration or exposition which ‘makes sense’.
This argument obviously connects with the classical materialist definition of
how ideologies work. Marx, you will recall, argued that ideology works because
it appears to ground itself in the mere surface appearance of things. In doing so,
it represses any recognition of the contingency of the historical conditions on
which all social relations depend. It represents them, instead, as outside of
history: unchangeable, inevitable and natural. It also disguises its premises as
already known facts. Thus, despite its scientific discoveries, Marx described even
classical political economy as, ultimately, ‘ideological’ because it took the social
relations and the capitalist form of economic organization as the only, and
inevitable, kind of economic order. It therefore presented capitalist production
‘as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history’. Bourgeois relations
were then smuggled in ‘as the inviolable laws on which society in the abstract is
founded’. This eternalization or naturalization of historical conditions and
historical change he called ‘a forgetting’. Its effect, he argued, was to reproduce,
at the heart of economic theory, the categories of vulgar, bourgeois common
sense. Statements about economic relations thus lost their conditional and
premised character, and appeared simply to arise from ‘how things are’ and, by
implication, ‘how they must forever be’. But this ‘reality-effect’ arose precisely
from the circularity, the presupposition-less character, the selfgenerating and
self-confirming nature, of the process of representation itself.

The ‘class struggle in language’
Later, within the framework of a more linguistic approach, theorists like Pêcheux
were to demonstrate how the logic and sense of particular discourses depended
on the referencing, within the discourse, of these preconstructed elements
(Pêcheux, 1975). Also, how discourse, in its systems of narration and exposition,
signalled its conclusions forward, enabling it to realize certain potential
meanings within the chain or logic of its inferences, and closing off other
possibilities. Any particular discursive string, they showed, was anchored within
a whole discursive field or complex of existing discourses (the ‘inter-discourse’);
and these constituted the presignifieds of its statements or enunciations. Clearly,
the ‘pre-constituted’ was a way of identifying, linguistically, what, in a more
historical sense, Gramsci called the inventory of ‘common sense’. Thus, once
again, the link was forged, in ideological analysis, between linguistic or
semiological concerns, on the one hand, and the historical analysis of the
discursive formations of ‘common sense’ on the other. In referencing, within its