practices that materialize ideology) -- the externality misrecognized by ideology is the externality of the 'text' itself as well as the externality of 'extratextual' social reality. Finally, this 'extra-textual' social reality itself is split into the institutional Exterior that dominates and regulates the life of individuals 'from above' (ISA), and ideology that is not imposed by the ISA but emerges 'spontaneously', 'from below', out of the extra-institutional activity of individuals (commodity fetishism) -- to give it names, Althusser versus Lukács. This opposition between ISA and commodity fetishism -- between the materiality that always-already pertains to ideology as such (material, effective apparatuses which give body to ideology) and ideology that always-already pertains to materiality as such (to the social actuality of production) -- is ultimately the opposition between State and Market, between the external superior agency that organizes society 'from above' and society's 'spontaneous' self-organization.

This opposition, whose first philosophical manifestation is provided by the couple of Plato and Aristotle, finds its last expression in the guise of the two modes of cynical ideology: 'consumerist', postProtestant, late-capitalist cynicism, and the cynicism that pertained to the late 'real Socialism'. Although, in both cases, the system functions only on condition that subjects maintain a cynical distance and do not 'take seriously' the 'official' values, the difference is remarkable; it turns upside down the doxa according to which late capitalism, as a (formally) 'free' society, relies on argumentative persuasion and free consent, 'manipulated' and fabricated as it may be; whereas Socialism resorted to the raw force of 'totalitarian' coercion. It is as if in late capitalism 'words do not count', no longer oblige: they increasingly seem to lose their performative power; whatever one says is drowned in the general indifference; the emperor is naked and the media trumpet forth this fact, yet nobody seems really to mind -- that is, people continue to act as if the emperor is not naked. . . .

Perhaps the key feature of the symbolic economy of the late 'real Socialism' was, on the contrary, the almost paranoiac belief in the power of the Word -- the state and the ruling party reacted with utmost nervousness and panic at the slightest public criticism, as if some vague critical hints in an obscure poem published in a low-circulation literary journal, or an essay in an academic philosophical journal, possessed the potential capacity to trigger the explosion of the entire socialist system. Incidentally, this feature renders 'real Socialism' almost sympathetic to our retrospective nostalgic view, since it bears witness to the legacy of the Enlightenment (the belief in the social efficacy of rational argumentation) that survived in it. This, perhaps, was why it was possible to undermine 'real Socialism' by means of peaceful

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