privatized symbolic idiom which has become split off from public communication, whereas the 'pathology' of ideological language belongs fully to the public domain. Ideology, as Freud might have said, is a kind of psychopathology of everyday life -- a system of distortion so pervasive that it cancels all the way through and presents every appearance of normality.

Unlike Lukács, Theodor Adorno has little time for the notion of reified consciousness, which he suspects as residually idealist. Ideology, for him as for the later Marx, is not first of all a matter of consciousness, but of the material structures of commodity exchange. Habermas, too, regards a primary emphasis on consciousness as belonging to an outmoded 'philosophy of the subject', and turns instead to what he sees as the more fertile ground of social discourse.

The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is equally wary of the doctrine of reification, though for rather different reasons from Adorno's. ⁴² In Althusser's eyes, reification, like its companion category of alienation, presupposes some 'human essence' which then undergoes estrangement; and since Althusser is a rigorously 'anti-humanist' Marxist, renouncing all idea of an 'essential humanity', he can hardly found his theory of ideology upon such 'ideological' concepts. Neither, however, can he base it on the alternative notion of a 'world-view'; for if Althusser is anti-humanist he is equally anti-historicist, sceptical of the whole conception of a 'class subject' and firm in his belief that the science of historical materialism is quite independent of class consciousness. What he does, then, is to derive a theory of ideology, of impressive power and originality, from a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the less obviously historicist features of Gramsci's work; and it is this theory that can be found in his celebrated essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', as well as in scattered fragments of his volume For Marx. ⁴³

Althusser holds that all thought is conducted within the terms of an unconscious 'problematic' which silently underpins it. A problematic, rather like Michel Foucault's 'episteme', is a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive. A problematic is not in itself 'ideological': it includes, for example, the discourses of true science, which for Althusser is free of all ideological taint. But we can speak of the problematic of a specific ideology or set of ideologies; and to do so is to refer to an underlying structure of categories so organized as to exclude the possibility of certain conceptions. An ideological problematic turns around certain eloquent silences and elisions; and it is so

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