communication are textual blockages to be rectified by sensitive interpretation. Habermas, by contrast, draws attention to the possibility of an entire discursive system which is somehow deformed. What warps such discourse out of true is the impact upon it of extra-discursive forces: ideology marks the point at which language is bent out of communicative shape by the power interests which impinge upon it. But this besieging of language by power is not just an external matter: on the contrary, such dominion inscribes itself on the inside of our speech, so that ideology becomes a set of effects internal to particular discourses themselves.

If a communicative structure is systematically distorted, then it will tend to present the appearance of normativity and justness. A distortion which is so pervasive tends to cancel all the way through and disappear from sight -- just as we would not describe as a deviation or disability a condition in which everybody limped or dropped their aitches all the time. A systematically deformed network of communication thus tends to conceal or eradicate the very norms by which it might be judged to be deformed, and so becomes peculiarly invulnerable to critique. In this situation, it becomes impossible to raise within the network the question of its own workings or conditions of possibility, since it has, so to speak, confiscated these inquiries from the outset. The system's historical conditions of possibility are redefined by the system itself, thus evaporating into it. In the case of a 'successful' ideology, it is not as though one body of ideas is perceived to be more powerful, legitimate or persuasive than another, but that the very grounds for choosing rationally between them have been deftly removed, so that it becomes impossible to think or desire outside the terms of the system itself. Such an ideological formation curves back upon itself like cosmic space, denying the possibility of any 'outside', forestalling the generation of new desires as well as frustrating those we already have. If a 'universe of discourse' is truly a universe, then there is no standpoint beyond it where we might find a point of leverage for critique. Or if other universes are acknowledged to exist, then they are simply defined as incommensurable with one's own.

Habermas, to his credit, subscribes to no such fantastic dystopian vision of an all-powerful, all-absorbent ideology. If ideology is language wrenched out of true, then we must presumably have some idea of what an 'authentic' communicative act would like like. There is, as we have noted, no appeal open for him to some scientific metalanguage which would adjudicate in this respect among competing idioms; so he must seek instead to extract from our linguistic practices the structure of some underlying 'communicative rationality' -- some 'ideal speech situation' which glimmers faintly through our actual

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