Ideologies thus situate individuals in time and space by reference to personal, positional and social characteristics.

Therborn sees ideologies as being materially determined, and the definition of materialism is deliberately and unusually broad to encompass 'the structure of a given society and . . . its relationship to its natural environment and to other societies' (p. 43 ). Materialism, in the classical Marxist usage of the economic structure, is used to explain the determination of one specific ideological set which appears to comprise those class ideologies required for the subjection and qualification of economic agents, though Therborn's presentation is not clear on this point. He states explicitly, however: 'Any given combination of forces and relations of production of course requires a particular form of ideological subjection of the economic subjects . . .' (p. 47 ).

It is noteworthy that Therborn does not accept the contention, familiar from many classical Marxist accounts of ideology, that the principal function of ideology is to incorporate subordinates, to act as 'social cement'. He argues, by contrast, that subordinates will adhere to alter-ideologies which are oppositional, and he attempts to specify the conditions under which those alter-ideologies may arise. There are three possible explanations. The first and most general explanation, which Therborn emphasizes, is that, by its very nature, every positional ideology must generate an alter-ideology in the process of generating differences between self and other, us and them. These ideologies have thus 'an intrinsically dual character' (p. 27 ), and the implication is that any ideology of domination must generate resistance in the very act of setting up a Self/Other opposition. Such an argument links Therborn's position directly to that of current structural linguistics in that language subsists on the play of differences. A difficulty with the notion that the imposition of knowledge/ideology produces resistance is to show exactly how this comes about, and, more importantly, under what conditions resistance prevails -- a difficulty manifest also in Foucault. Secondly, Therborn refers to the fact that class ideologies 'are inscribed in the relations of production' (p. 61 ). For example, feudalism involved a hierarchy of rights and obligations between peasant and landlord, and these were the foci of class struggle. Curtailment of peasant rights created alter-ideological conceptions of injustice that were the basis of peasant oppositions to the illegality of landlords' activities. In one place he also talks of 'the irreducibility of psychodynamic processes to complete social control', which creates 'a small margin of individual "misfits" (p. 43 ). Thus it would seem that interpellation can never really be effective, as ideologies have an inherently dialectical character, while complex social processes mean that 'ideologies overlap, compete and clash, drown or reinforce each

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