revolutions in conciousness; these revolutions, however, are not reflected at anything that Marx and Engels would recognize as 'the material level'. So it is easy to imagine Marx and Engels making the same kind of fun of a lot of contemporary feminist theory that they made of Hegel, Feuerbach, or Bauer. The feminist theorists, they might say, have made 'feminist' into 'a mere category'; nor can they hope to do more, as long as the term does not signify 'follower of a definite revolutionary party'.

These considerations lead one to ask whether feminists can keep the notion of 'critique of ideology' without invoking the distinction between 'matter' and 'consciousness' deployed in The German Ideology. There is a large and depressing literature about the equivocity of the term 'ideology', the latest example of which is the first chapter of Terry Eagleton 's Ideology. ³ Eagleton rejects the frequent suggestion that the term has become more trouble than it is worth, and offers the following as a definition: 'ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation'. As an alternative he suggests 'false or deceptive beliefs' that arise 'not from the interests of a dominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole'. ⁴ The latter formulation incorporates the material/non-material contrast central to The German Ideology. But it is difficult for feminists to appropriate this contrast, which got whatever concrete relevance it had from the explication of 'material change' by reference to Marx's eschatological history of changes in the organization of mechanisms of production. That history is largely irrelevant to the oppression of women by men. ⁵

If however, we drop the matter--consciousness distinction and fall back on the first of the two definitions of 'ideology' I quoted from Eagleton, we come into conflict with the philosophical views about truth, knowledge, and objectivity held by most of the contemporary feminist intellectuals who hope to put their gifts and competences to work criticizing masculinist ideology. For 'distortion' presupposes a medium of representation which, intruding between us and the object under investigation, produces an appearance that does not correspond to the reality of the object. This representationalism cannot be squared either with the pragmatist insistence that truth is not a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality, or with the deconstructionist rejection of what Derrida calls 'the metaphysics of presence'. ⁶ Pragmatists and deconstructionists agree that everything is a social construct, and that there is no point in trying to distinguish between the 'natural' and the 'merely' cultural. They agree that the question is which social constructs to discard and which to keep, and that there is no point in appealing to 'the way things really are' in the

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