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THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 29

simply and simultaneously reproduced correspondingly (i.e., ‘expressed’)
on all other levels.
Those who know the literature and the debates will easily identify the
main lines of the more specific revisions advanced, from different sides,
against these positions. They begin with the denial that any such simple
correspondences exist, or that the ‘superstructures’ are totally devoid of
their own specific effects, in Engels’ gloss on ‘what Marx
thought’ (especially in the later correspondence). The glosses by Engels are
immensely fruitful, suggestive and generative. They provide, not the
solution to the problem of ideology, but the starting-point of all serious
reflection on the problem. The simplifications developed, he argued,
because Marx was in contestation with the speculative idealism of his day.
They were one-sided distortions, the necessary exaggerations of polemic.
The criticisms lead on through the richly tapestried efforts of marxist
theorists like Lukács to hold, polemically, to the strict orthodoxy of a
particular ‘Hegelian’ reading of Marx, while in practice introducing a
whole range of ‘mediating and intermediary factors’ which soften and
displace the drive towards reductionism and economism implicit in some of
Marx’s original formulations. They include Gramsci—but from another
direction—whose contribution will be discussed at a later place in the
argument. They culminate in the highly sophisticated theoretical
interventions of Althusser and the Althussereans: their contestation of
economic and class reductionism and of the ‘expressive totality’ approach.
Althusser’s revisions (in For Marx and, especially, in the ‘Ideological
state apparatuses’ chapter of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays)
sponsored a decisive move away from the ‘distorted ideas’ and ‘false
consciousness’ approach to ideology. It opened the gate to a more linguistic
or ‘discursive’ conception of ideology. It put on the agenda the whole
neglected issue of how ideology becomes internalized, how we come to
speak ‘spontaneously’, within the limits of the categories of thought which
exist outside us and which can more accurately be said to think us. (This is
the so-called problem of the interpellation of subjects at the centre of
ideological discourse. It led to the subsequent bringing into marxism of the
psychoanalytic interpretations of how individuals enter into the ideological
categories of language at all.) In insisting (for example, in ‘Ideological state
apparatuses’) on the function of ideology in the reproduction of social
relations of production and (in Essays in Self-criticism) on the
metaphorical utility of the base-superstructure metaphor, Althusser
attempted some last-hour regrouping on the classical marxist terrain.
But his first revision was too ‘functionalist’. If the function of ideology is
to ‘reproduce’ capitalist social relations according to the ‘requirements’ of
the system, how does one account for subversive ideas or for ideological
struggle? And the second was too ‘orthodox’. It was Althusser who had
displaced so thoroughly the ‘base/superstructure’ metaphor! In fact, the