civil society movements that operated at the level of the Word -- belief in the power of the Word was the system's Achilles heel. ²³

The matrix of all these repetitions, perhaps, is the opposition between ideology as the universe of 'spontaneous' experience [vécu] whose grip we can break only by means of an effort of scientific reflection, and ideology as a radically non-spontaneous machine that distorts the authenticity of our life-experience from outside. That is to say, what we should always bear in mind is that, for Marx, the primordial mythological consciousness of the pre-class society out of which later ideologies grew (true to the heritage of German classicism, Marx saw the paradigm of this primordial social consciousness in Greek mythology) is not yet ideology proper, although (or, rather, precisely because) it is immediately vécu, and although it is obviously 'wrong', 'illusory' (it involves the divinization of the forces of nature, etc.); ideology proper emerges only with the division of labour and the class split, only when the 'wrong' ideas lose their 'immediate' character and are 'elaborated' by intellectuals in order to serve (to legitimize) the existing relations of domination -- in short, only when the division into Master and Servant is conjugated with the division of labour itself into intellectual and physical labour. For that precise reason, Marx refused to categorize commodity fetishism as ideology: for him, ideology was always of the state and, as Engels put it, state itself is the first ideological force. In clear contrast, Althusser conceives ideology as an immediately experienced relationship to the universe -- as such, it is eternal; when, following his self-critical turn, he introduces the concept of ISA, he returns in a way to Marx: ideology does not grow out of 'life itself', it comes into existence only in so far as society is regulated by state. (More precisely, the paradox and theoretical interest of Althusser resides in his conjugation of the two lines: in its very character of immediately experienced relationship to the universe, ideology is always-already regulated by the externality of State and its Ideological Apparatuses.)

This tension between 'spontaneity' and organized imposition introduces a kind of reflective distance into the very heart of the notion of ideology: ideology is always, by definition, 'ideology of ideology'. Suffice it to recall the disintegration of real Socialism: Socialism was perceived as the rule of 'ideological' oppression and indoctrination, whereas the passage into democracy-capitalism was experienced as deliverance from the constraints of ideology -- however, was not this very experience of 'deliverance' in the course of which political parties and the market economy were perceived as 'non-ideological', as the 'natural state of things', ideological par excellence? ²⁴ Our point is that this feature is universal: there is no ideology that does not assert itself by means of delimiting itself from another 'mere ideology'. An individual

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