Already in the 1950s, in Mythologies, Roland Barthes proposed the notion of ideology as the 'naturalization' of the symbolic order -- that is, as the perception that reifies the results of discursive procedures into properties of the 'thing itself. Paul de Man's notion of the 'resistance to (deconstructionist) theory' runs along the same lines: 'deconstruction' met with such resistance because it 'denaturalizes' the enunciated content by bringing to the light of day the discursive procedures that engender evidence of Sense. Arguably the most elaborate version of this approach is Oswald Ducrot's theory of argumentation ¹¹ ; although it does not employ the term 'ideology', its ideologico-critical potential is tremendous. Ducrot's basic notion is that one cannot draw a clear line of separation between descriptive and argumentative levels of language: there is no neutral descriptive content; every description (designation) is already a moment of some argumentative scheme; descriptive predicates themselves are ultimately reified-naturalized argumentative gestures. This argumentative thrust relies on topoi, on the 'commonplaces' that operate only as naturalized, only in so far as we apply them in an automatic, 'unconscious' way -- a successful argumentation presupposes the invisibility of the mechanisms that regulate its efficiency.

One should also mention here Michel Pêcheux, who gave a strict linguistic turn to Althusser's theory of interpellation. His work is centred on the discursive mechanisms that generate the 'evidence' of Sense. That is to say, one of the fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to some self-evidence -- 'Look, you can see for yourself how things are!'. 'Let the facts speak for themselves' is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology -- the point being, precisely, that facts never 'speak for themselves' but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices. Suffice it to recall the notorious anti-abortion film The Silent Scream -- we 'see' a foetus which 'defends itself', which 'cries', and so on, yet what we 'don't see' in this very act of seeing is that we 'see' all this against the background of a discursively pre-constructed space. Discourse analysis is perhaps at its strongest in answering this precise question: when a racist Englishman says 'There are too many Pakistanis on our streets!', how -- from what place -- does he 'see' this -- that is, how is his symbolic space structured so that he can perceive the fact of a Pakistani strolling along a London street as a disturbing surplus? That is to say, here one must bear in mind Lacan's motto that nothing is lacking in the real: every perception of a lack or a surplus ('not enough of this', 'too much of that') always involves a symbolic universe. ¹²

Last but not least, mention should be made here of Ernesto Laclau and his path-breaking approach to Fascism and populism, ¹³ whose main theoretical result is that meaning does not inhere in elements of

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