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6
The Mechanism of Ideological
(Mis)recognition Michel Pêcheux
On the Ideological Conditions of the Reproduction/ Transformation of the Relations of Production I shall start by explicating the expression 'ideological conditions of the reproduction/transformation of the relations of production'. This explication will be carried out within the limits of my objective, which is to lay the foundations of a materialist theory of discourse.To avoid certain misunderstandings, however, I must also specify a number of points of more general import, concerning the theory of ideologies, the practice of the production of knowledges and political practice, without which everything that follows would be quite 'out of place'.
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(a) If I stress 'ideological conditions of the reproduction/ transformation of the relations of production', this is because the region of ideology is by no means the sole element in which the reproduction/transformation of the relations of production of a social formation takes place; that would be to ignore the economic determinations which condition that reproduction/transformation 'in the last instance', even within economic production itself, as Althusser recalls at the beginning of his article on the ideological state apparatuses. |
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(b) In writing 'reproduction/transformation', I mean to designate the nodally contradictory character of any mode of production which is based on a division into classes, i.e. whose 'principle' is the class struggle. This means, in particular, that I consider it mistaken to locate at different points on the one hand what contributes to the reproduction of the relations of production and on the other what contributes to their transformation: the class struggle traverses the mode of production as |
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