Marxism, as a theoretical ethos, has, after decades of use, and through the reinterpretation of each successive generation of scholars using such, in the view of authors Bertellini and Sellors, gone awry. In their careful, and thorough, analysis of the state of contemporary Marxist thought, Bertellini and Sellors create both a thoughtful critique of neo-Marxists and the misuse of Marx and Engels' work, but also an impetus for a re-valuation of Marxism proper and its role in contemporary academia.

Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory [printable version]

Giorgio Bertellini and C. Paul Sellors

1. <1> In this essay we would like to sketch out a few notes outlining historical and theoretical trajectories of the confusing, and often confused, relationships between ideology, history and subjectivity in Marx, Marxism and post-Marxism. Marx and Engels' approach to ideology in The German Ideology (1845-46), spawned and influenced a variety of interpretations and philosophical positions from not only the numerous schools of Marxism proper, but also structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis up to the very raison d'être of discourse theory and new historicism. This reaching influence occurs only at the cost of contradiction, however, between Marxist factions -- disagreements which point back directly to the inconsistencies and ambiguities in Marx and Engels' assertions. Such trajectories, we argue, have constituted background philosophical tensions influencing the paradigm of critical discourses about cinema, conceived of generally as a linguistic practice and a cultural industry.

<2> Film theory and history, especially in such journals as Screen and Camera Obscura, and such disciplines as film semiotics and new historicism, though not the forerunners of these debates, nonetheless have proved to be crucibles, or microcosms, of the greater arguments which have been waged in philosophy and critical theory. These arguments rotate on differing interpretations of the epistemology supporting Marxist thought. On the one hand, those that gravitate towards the interpretation of ideology as objective knowledge (realists) have contested the relativism of historically determined foundations of ideology, while, on the other hand, anti-realists have chided the ahistorical model of transcendentalism which roots the realist's presupposition of an objective reality.

<3> The confusion of this debate should be recognized as the partisan appropriation and mixing of elements of epistemological arguments to fulfill various political agendas. Marxist-based theories of Otherness, for example, have often foundered on the contradiction of challenging the objectivity of so-called dominant historical analyses while presupposing an alternative set of essential objects. Likewise, post-Marxist feminist film criticism has demonstrated both the speculative difficulty and necessity of arguing against patriarchal constructions through a resilient notion of essence. Within current epistemically skeptical climates, formerly "fetishized" notions such as ideology and mass society are being somehow shattered into multiple and variable groups, communities, and peers. The end result of such processes has been to loose ipso facto the critical and political viability that motivated these notions to begin with.

<4> What is still highly debatable -- currently in both cinema studies and in critical studies, generally speaking -- is whether the obsolescence of ideology, with its related concepts of "truthful knowledge" and "social subjectivity," implies the abandonment of both the concept of universal knowledge and theories of general politics. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is the notions of "politics" and "society" rather than ideology that have somehow disintegrated. In his most recent study, entitled European Diaries (1996), German sociologist Ralph Dahrendorf suggests this when he correctly recognizes the difficulty of dealing with notions like "society" and Left/Right in an age in which political reformism -- that is, political change -- has lost its collective subjectivity and language.

2. <5> In 1960, American sociologist Daniel Bell published a book with a seductive title: The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties [1]. Referring to American social and critical scenarios, Bell's work was devoted to a problematic, crucial for the entire Western world: the declining significance of objective truth and knowledge as the intellectual preconditions for social utopia in post-WWII industrialized societies [2]. More interestingly, Bell underscored his analysis with an acknowledgment to the fading "elective affinities" between progressive intellectuals and the masses. These intellectuals, he asserted, had begun to interrogate their own capacities to truly grasp the meaning of reality and accurately represent both society's present and its future destiny. Philosopher George Steiner, recognizing in contemporary philosophy, literature, and art an epistemic and poetic crisis between signifier and signified, sign and referent, articulated that the "break of the mimetic contract" was bound also to mark intellectuals' vocations for objective knowledge [3]. With a move from a philosophical level to a critical one, Bell contended that America's exponentially expanding "dehumanized" mass culture evidenced the inability of the intellectual to radically participate, evaluate, and confront the changes of modernity.

<6> If among the French philosophes ideology, as a section of a theory of knowledge, was the very possibility of translating facts into ideas, or as Marxists put it, ideas into actions, today -- Bell writes -- it appears very hard to maintain a doctrine or a notion of political utopia through "social engineering." Concentration camps, Stalin's atrocities, the suppression of Hungarian workers, the successful advancement of capitalism through welfare states and the rise of mass culture and the culture industry -- especially in its "perfected" American configuration -- have exhausted nineteenth century elitist ambitions to produce radical social changes, modeled on the virtuous morality of the individual. The political rendering of ideas into actions endorsed by Marxists found a dead end.

<7> Thus, reviewing past and contemporary debates about ideology, mass society, and social change, Bell illuminated the evolution of social discourse caught between populist radicals and elitist romantics [4]. As the former was keen to welcome the formation of a mass society, regarded as the truest democratic and liberating event of modernity [5], the latter seemed equally ready to condemn mass society's products as uniform, aimless, and alienating [6]. While trying to open up a fetishized concept like mass into a variety of different social groups [7], Bell could not avoid concluding that the "end of ideology" exhibited the exasperation and slow fade of the aforementioned opposition between populism and elitism. Indeed, the positive concepts on which intellectuals leaned for their apocalyptic judgments -- namely, traditional valorizations of human values informing, for instance, the "subversive" products of high modernism -- were bound to grow old and obsolete. However, the aging of these traditions was not followed by another set of social values and standards, but instead compromised altogether former conceptions of social development, class-succession, and history [8].

<8> As a result, it appears that these arguments on ideology and history may be tied more strictly than is often entertained. For instance, Marx, Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians' impetus to translate ideas into actions was deeply entrenched in what euphemistically we may call an operation of historical revisionism: an attempt to battle and counteract social inequity by understanding the mechanisms of society and culture through analyses of historical traces and spiritual mystification. "For them, the function of philosophy was to be critical, to rid the present of the past. ("The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" wrote Marx.) Feuerbach, the most radical of all the left Hegelians, called himself Luther II. Man would be free, he said, if we could demythologize religion [9]."

<9> Although Marx and Engels agreed with Feuerbach's assertion that it is the primacy of the spirit in philosophy and its subsequent manifestations in class hierarchy which must be understood and expunged, they firmly disagreed as to whether the primacy of intersubjectivity in the process of subsistence was something to be proven, as Feuerbach attempted to do, or assumed fundamental. The difference is not merely the difference between proving a point and assuming a proof -- if it were Marx and Engels would have been on unsteady ground -- but of radically contrasting philosophies. Marx and Engels complained that Feuerbach deduced the correct conclusion through the very subject-centred philosophical assumptions and principles responsible for social inequity in the first place [10]. Instead, in The German Ideology they undertook a project of historical revisionism to point to the "illusions of an epoch" and the "real basis" underscoring not only Feuerbach's arguments, but also Western philosophy in general.

<10> However, debates among Marxists have questioned the nature of the critique that Marx and Engels produced. In their 1845-46 work, Marx and Engels did not explicitly assert or outline a general theory of ideology, but simply opposed the German speculative tradition, which they regarded as ideology, to a new "scientific" understanding of history. Several Marxists, most notably Lenin, Gramsci and Lukács, schooled in Marxism before the publication of The German Ideology in the mid-1920s, have often equated the status of Marx's discourse with one of a more humanitarian and civilized ideology, capable of taming the destructive dynamics of capital. Ideology is simply the relationship between ideas and praxis and can be used equally to dominate or liberate. It is within such a classical critical tradition of a crisis of ideology that the declining confrontations of labor and capital has brought more radical consequences. One such consequence has been the parallel announcement of an "end of history" with deep and circular effects on notions such as knowledge, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and human history.

2.1. <11> When, in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama published his controversial book The End of History and the Last Man [11], it was not the first time philosophers and cultural critics had heard such radical claims. Fukuyama embraced Hegel and Kojève's known theses on the dehumanized course of history, which were part of a 19th Century historiographic discourse commonly characterized as "historical sickness." Nietzsche, in his 1874 Untimely Meditations (especially "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life"), noted a decadent attitude which embodied an excess of historical consciousness blocking or clouding the path to the production of any truly new historical analysis [12]. Yet it was only in the 1970s that radical historians started thinking seriously in terms of an end of history, a posthistoire, not as a terminal state of humanity, but as the conclusion of both bourgeois history as we know it and a dialectical structure of social movements -- as Marxists and even the Frankfurt School were prone to employ.

<12> Although the term "posthistoire" sounds like a French neologism, it was mainly used within German Left intellectual life [13]. Theorists employing this term insisted that Marxist traditions were incapable of describing the surrounding society in a way that offered any guide to praxis. West German political thinkers in the 1970s repeatedly discovered and lamented the conclusion that the system of bourgeois capitalism could not be radically overthrown. Western civilization itself, they contended, functioned as a standardized, regulated system -- a sort of grand "normality" opposite to which an "appropriate Other [...] is beyond any great designs or grand organizations. The role of prophet also ceased to apply, and the intellectual is either shifted to the interpreter's balustrade or reduced to earning a living [14]."

<13> These conclusions, most forcefully developed by Horkheimer and Adorno and reflecting articulations by other German and European intellectuals (for instance Herbert Marcuse's "one dimensional man," Andre Gorz's "decadence of the working class" and Ernst Nolte's "inner immobility of the liberal system"), ended up condemning technological progress within the epistemology of capital societies as the structural cause of humanity's self-destruction, where humanity was still conceptualized through the philosophical and political notion of the individual. Symptomatic of a philosophical and cultural legacy of crisis, such considerations noted from within Marxism serious shortcomings and failures in classical Marxist thought; however the question remains open whether these failures are theoretically or historically contingent. Most notably, Marcuse's and Gorz's expressions illustrate the manifestations of Marxist praxis philosophy appropriated by commodity fetishism: the inversion of a proper impetus for production from consumption for human subsistence and social betterment to production for private capital gain, with little or no redeeming value for the human condition.

<14> However, neither Marx nor Marxism should be cast into the mold of some philosophy of minimal existence. Marx lamented neither industrial production beyond subsistence nor industrialization; the increased production possible with the use of machines not only reduces costs and minimizes labour in producing products, but also increases the requirement for skilled workers to produce new machines. Therefore, the problem is not with machines themselves, but with the employment of machines in capital societies [15]. Marcuse adopts this point and furthers it. Modern industrial practices and their subsequent commodity consumption, he argues, ends up individuating people rather than socializing them by raising luxury items to the status of necessity -- and thereby continually subordinating workers to the cycle of labour and consumption [16]. However, Marcuse's insistence on contingency in the rise of Fascism and the domination of the labourer in industrial society raises the question of whether Marx's theoretical and historiographical arguments about the ultimate subversion of the individual to capital in Capital are still tenable. "Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil. National Socialism is a striking example of the ways in which a highly rationalized and mechanized economy with the utmost efficiency in production can operate in the interest of totalitarian oppression and continued scarcity [17]." But for Marcuse, the individuation which exists in the mechanization of the modern world is illusory. "Individuals are stripped of their individuality, not by external compulsion but by the very rationality under which they live [18]." In other words, instead of a personal contemplation of the world characteristic of antiquity (Arendt), the 16th and 17th Centuries (as Marcuse points out following American philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford), or socialization brought about through labour production in the processes of subsistence, individuation in the modern age maps the individual onto a machinic rationality. But the situation, insists Marcuse, is even more dire than merely replacing the biological rhythm of humanity (characterized by Arendt) with the machinic "chug" of industrialization. Machinic rationality, nested within the positivist and empirical epistemologies of modernity, perpetuate complacency and dogmatism. "Rational behavior," Marcuse concluded, "becomes identical with a matter-of-factness which teaches reasonable submissiveness and thus guarantees getting along in the prevailing order [19]."

<15> Interestingly, German thinker Peter Brückner, in concert with Marcuse's arguments, elaborates on not only the broad sociological impact of industrialization, implicitly challenging the social categories of classical Marxism, but also the apocalyptic effect this development has had on historical consciousness. Brückner argues that it is within the development of bourgeois society that historical epochs started overlapping and gave rise to what we may call "posthistoire." The very mode of production of industrial society created a relative universality of living conditions, interests and value judgments for many castes, classes, and realms seen in labor and commerce, free time and communication, and the social organization of the family, sexuality, and death.

This one-dimensional reality, unlike in the slowly dying historical period, is no longer space and time for competing parties; it is itself a party.... Even in countries with a developed class structure, classes and their destinies come from the fringes into the shadow of the new version of the "fundamental contradiction" -- on one side, the forces preserving (technological) rationality and the administration or production of normality; on the other side, "non-simultaneous" revolts which encompass elements from pre-bourgeois and post-industrial critiques. Here is a potent source for that second paradigm of transformation: the resistance to the structures of posthistory. And this emerging population no longer allows us, who are in the "breach," to construct a synthesis around a "collective subject," at least not as a class subject [20].

Equating bourgeois society and history [21], Brückner argues that posthistoire exhibits the decline of master historical narratives in the form of historiographic secularizations in line with the modern crisis of metaphysical thought [22]. With this shift in historiography, other concepts beg reformulation. Mass society, formerly conceived of as the utopian agent of history, no longer appears to be easily co-optable into a revolutionary practice [23]. Could a political connotation of ideology still be maintained through a different, less monolithic notion of society? Would objective knowledge still hold its epistemic necessity within a conceptualization of intersubjectivity no more assembled through models of class and nations? These questions seem to be crucial problematics for contemporary Marxists and related schools of thought.

3. <16> Between Marx and post-Marxism, the philosophical nature of discourses of ideology have evolved a fundamental contradiction. Marx and Engels insisted on an anti-humanist discourse that took as its fundamental principle human interaction in the process of subsistence. However, Marxist thinkers typically attempted to understand the nature of this intersubjectivity in constituted social groups, either historically determined or essentially defined, through theories of agency and subjectivity. This transition from Marx to Marxism begs the question of human ontology, which recently has been productively engaged by Habermas' theory of communicative reason. Habermas distances communicative reason from subject-centered reason by raising a radical question: is a human individual, philosophically abstracted from a social environment, still human? This is not to doubt the historical foundation of human freedom and the definition of the human condition central to the work of Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, or Hannah Arendt. Instead, Habermas' challenge to epistemology questions whether an understanding of the abstract human tells anything fundamental about society.

3.1. <17> The failure of revolutionary social changes after the events of May 1968 betrayed a tendency to misconstrue the ideological deception that mass society inflected upon itself, thereby preventing any radical subversion of the status quo. Subsequently, other strategies were investigated. French Marxist Louis Althusser developed a fruitful theorization of the presence of ideology in society -- a line of inquiry that film theorists especially were quick to adopt for their own. His analysis of ideology as illusion yielded a procedure to analyze the form and power of the cinematic illusion along the line of a critical lignée that sought to unravel ideological pressures and promote social change through artistic practice. Critics of the 1970s and 80s employed Althusser's "scientific" analysis of ideology and re-directed it towards anti-illusionist artistic practices characteristic of those described by Bertold Brecht, György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and, in a different way, Theodor Adorno.

<18> Althusser's epistemological reading of Marx, his unique discussion of social phenomena, and his use of psychoanalythic conceptualizations of subjectivity deeply informed the practice of formalist film criticism throughout the 1970s and, in its more contemporary rejection, inflected the new cultural directions of the last two decades. First, Althusser attempted to clarify the epistemological status of Marx's theory by seeing it as an objective and realist notion of knowledge -- distinguishing Marxism as a science, dogmatically advanced à la Spinoza, from empirical observation -- able to illuminate bourgeois ideology as a deceptive problematic. Second, he granted social facts the rank of primary phenomena (that is, social formations with their various instances) which he claimed were more than "superstructurally" dependent on the economic base, thus enriching Marxism with the more complex conceptual apparatus of overdetermination to clarify the causality of social events. Insodoing, he demonstrated the material nature of ideology itself. Third, by adopting Lacan's structural theory of the subject and the subject's misrecognitions of reality, Althusser sought to explain the subjective dynamics of ideological deception. In his view, ideology could not be considered as a mere distortion of the economic base ("false consciousness"). Rather, in light of Freud's detailed analysis of the complex dynamics of dreams, Althusser attempted to understand the "imaginary relationships of individuals to their conditions of existence."

<19> The theoretical link between Marxism and psychoanalysis was not unprecedented in Western critical theory. Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse had already attempted psychoanalytically-informed versions of Marxist philosophy while seeking to explain both fascist and postindustrial regimes' cooptations of the masses and capital. Althusser's use of psychoanalysis, however, was speculatively cogent because it aligned with a wider range of popular structural theories of discourse and subjectivity in a time when intellectuals were urgently attempting to bridge critique and practice.

<20> As a result, Althusser became more widely recognized among cultural than Marxist critics. At first, French literary journal Tel Quel and British film periodical Screen promoted an artistic appropriation of the goals of Marxist criticism (à la Althusser) by investigating the process of literary and filmic signification mainly with reference to those reflexive artistic works exemplary of high modernism. Works by Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Robbe-Grillet, Godard, Straub-Huillet, and the American film avant-garde were hailed (and admired) as "modern works" due to their capacity to overtly foreground their own construction [24]. By depreciating the spectator's insidious pleasure and praising the cerebral gratification of an abstract competent spectator, early structural and formalist theorists soon realized that cinema could not be regarded simply as a "signifying system" ideologically subservient to a bourgeois construction of identity and reality. Both the text and the subject that the "cinematic apparatus" constructed, in fact, could not be bracketed from contextual and ontological specificities like gender, race, and sexual orientation. Ideology could not be suspended like a Husserlian epoché; instead it had to be approached through history.

<21> The transcendental unity of the semiotically self-sufficient text and undifferentiated spectator (or "mass") dissolved into a complex series of critical and discursive relations. The shift of focus within political modernism from conditions and aims of media production to media consumption had been first and most effectively articulated by feminist film criticism. Feminist film theory had recognized the limits of a cinematic-apparatus-centered theory and started questioning issues of film signification, spectators' gender positioning, and ultimately, their pleasure and desire. As a result, the very notion of "oppositional" intellectuals could no longer be aligned with supposedly objective, scientific, and transcendental discourses, and were now imbricated in the modalities of subjectivity they sought to unearth [25].

<22> The later developments of Cultural Studies and New Historicism may be read as disciplined and organized attempts to inquire into the topic of aesthetic representation by overcoming the traditional opposition between mimetic and modernist texts that has also divided popular arenas from intellectual circles. In such aesthetic reformulations, however, the general emphasis on subjectivity and difference has compromised the political heuristics of terms such as ideology and masses.

3.2. <23> In order to better clarify the debate, one may turn fruitfully to a crucial article written over a decade ago by Stuart Hall valorizing some of Althusser's earlier texts [26]. Discussing "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Hall contrasts its two very distinct sections. The first deals with the notion and problematic of ideology within the reproduction of social relations of production; the second investigates the "interpellation" of the subject within the realm of ideology. Hall succinctly and incisively argues that the evolution of Critical Studies (he does not refer explicitly to Cinema Studies debates) has concentrated on the second part of Althusser's essay and has lost sight of the way in which cultural mystifications and material processes affect society as a whole, and not just as the sum of individuals. Within such privileged epistemic and methodological concerns psychoanalysis, with its primacy of the subject, has become central. And yet, Hall contends, while the term "ideology" has lost its wider usage, its meaning is still present where a struggle for political visibility takes place: a struggle which does not necessarily need to contrast ideology with a form of truthful knowledge.

<24> Although theories of discourse have inevitably rejected the classical formulation of ideology by dismissing the epistemic legitimacy and existence of the "other of ideology," the term still demonstrates some usage (i.e. false representation, distortion) in discourses which claim the "visibility" of so-called new subjects (defined by race, sexuality, gender) and the articulation of their historical existence and value in terms that previously seemed to exclude them [27]. In other words, ideology is still somehow present with a polemical connotation no longer connected to truth claims but displaying political identities and affinities [28]. The recent emergence of scholarly directions in Cinema Studies like New Historicism, Cultural and Queer Studies has provided an expansion and a critique of previous psychoanalytic ideological concerns, with the result of often rejecting the notion of ideology as a trope whose heuristic value belongs to the 1970s. This extensive focus on the second part of Althusser's essay has made any notion of ideology obsolete -- and wrongly so, one may contend -- if for no other reason than the domination of public realms of discourse by the private interests of commercial communications media requires the persistence of tropes of mass illusion.

<25> Later in the essay, Hall develops another crucial point. The legitimate emphasis on "difference" has, to some extent, fractured the singleness of society. The scholarly practice -- again quite necessary and legitimate -- to develop the visibility of minority groups or underrepresented entities (microhistory) has ended up also reformulating the notion of ideology by dissecting it into multiple and isolated practices of discursive misrepresentations. As a result, no "telescopic" view of ideology seems possible, pertinent or relevant. Regional discussions in Western historiography, anthropology, and sociology have formulated various terms and notions in an attempt to capture miniaturized meanings of ideology: French Annales' mentalité, anthropology's "system of beliefs," sociology's "cognitive maps," Durkheim's "collective representations," and Bourdieu's habitus. The problem with these lexicons is that they all seem cognitively active, but politically neutral.

3.3. <26> But one must wonder how the genealogy of ideology has developed into a subject-centered philosophy strong in its epistemic articulations, but weak in its political claims. Jürgen Habermas suggests that this problem originates in an opposite short-coming rooted in Marx's misrecognition of his own epistemology. In his proclamations on modernity, Habermas, in effect, attempts to correct the letter of Marx and Engels' philosophy while maintaining -- so to speak -- its spirit. The spirit of their ideological criticism maintains that the fundamental principle of philosophy should recognize that humans must interact in the process of subsistence, and that communities are the irreducibly fundamental object of any correct philosophy. In principle, Habermas agrees. However, he contends that Marx and Engels made a fundamental error by proposing the utopia of social equality through praxis philosophy. "Praxis philosophy does not afford the means for thinking dead labor as mediatized and paralyzed intersubjectivity. It maintains a variant of the philosophy of the subject that locates reason in the purposive rationality of the acting subject instead of in the reflection of the knowing subject [29]." In other words, praxis philosophy requires an intentional thinker rather than an observer, and this mind dependency will never be able to release itself from the history of determined motivation it wishes to criticize. Undoubtedly such an epistemology contradicts the "bottom-up" model Marx and Engels proposed when they inverted Hegel's prioritization of Spirit.

<27> Habermas, in his theory of communicative reason, attempts to reinstate a coherent basis of intersubjectivity through communication and social awareness, not as an idealization of freedom defined as the necessary antithesis of class inequities in aristocratic and capitalist societies, but as an "unconstrained consensus formation in a communication community standing under cooperative constraints [30]." This problem of subject-centered rationality unintentionally at the base of Marxism, Habermas argues, has spawned a plethora of debates which, though still Marxist in their attempts to understand human plurality, tend away from the spirit of Marx by privileging either subject-centered reason, autonomy or essences. It is perhaps the Lacanian-influenced contemporary Marxists who are most susceptible to this criticism, since they aim to locate human intersubjectivity in linguistic practices, yet then attempt to articulate a foundation to intersubjectivity by attaching the possession-condition of these linguistic practices to an abstractly individuated philosophy of the mind. Although Lacananian-Althusserian Marxists are capable of elaborating sophisticated theories tying together language, intersubjectivity and domination, they have been unable to coherently illuminate what the subject "is", per se, before its hailing -- that is before or outside any practice of determination. For a theorist of intersubjective reason, this is not merely a theoretical difficulty for Lacananian-Althusserian Marxists, but a fatal error.

<28> However, this epistemic difficulty is not limited to the psychoanalytic-Marxists, but traverses virtually the entire field of Marxist and post-Marxist thought. The nature of the relationship between ideology and objective knowledge, on the one hand, and ideology and history, on the other, raises the question of whether the base of ideology is an objective social fact (realist) or dependent upon critical perspectives (anti-realist) [31]. Philosopher Michèle Barrett maps out this division extensively [32]. The most fundamental problem, she argues, hinges on ambiguities in Marx's definition of ideology itself. Although Marx explicitly offered a critique of ideology through the budding scientific epistemology of the Enlightenment, he also, with Engels, left the question open of whether this science is opposed to ideology or if science offered a correct model of ideology. Praxis-Marxists such as Lenin and Gramsci gravitated towards the latter, as we have already noted. If this was Marx's intention, then Habermas' critique would lose its force, since the historical base of economics, for instance, would be a motivated interpretation of the material traces of an historical development. This line of thinking has raised the question of the objectivity of economics as the base of Marxism in general, and has splintered into a number of discourses of domination either replacing or compounding capital, especially those of race, sexuality and gender. Although these discourses offer very strong and cogent political critiques, they are unable to distinguish themselves from the very same essential subjectivity underlining Hegelian philosophy that Marx had hoped to overturn. It should therefore not be surprising that Lukács turns to Hegel as often as Marx in his analysis of middle-class cultural objects.

<29> However, other philosophers including Barrett, Jorge Larrain, John Mepham and Althusser reinforce Marx's attempt to overturn Hegelian epistemology. Barrett refers explicitly to Marx and Engles for proof of this claim. "Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of life [33]." Barrett argues that this assertion "has considerable relevance to the debate on the so-called science/ideology distinction. What clearer statement could he make to indicate that he is an epistemological realist? [34]." The problem with the realist position, apart from Habermas' critique of its lack of epistemic self-awareness, is it maintains a strict correlation between ideology as deception or illusion, on the one hand, and knowledge on the other, without any sufficient argument detailing how one within society can simultaneously adopt the universal perspective characteristic of an Enlightenment objectivity.

<30> Foucault has probably been the most aware of this difficulty, Barrett argues, and tries to avoid it by dismissing the polarization of ideology with science and knowledge by "seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false [35]." However, by replacing the question of knowledge with the relativism of power, Foucault likewise separates the nature of the historical discourses he discusses from their own epistemologies. Habermas explains that "Foucault only gains this basis [of power technologies] by not thinking genealogically when it comes to his own genealogical historiography and by rendering unrecognizable the derivation of this transcendental-historicist concept of power [36]."

4. <31> In this essay we have tried to show the complex conceptual imbrications surrounding notions of ideology, subjects, social subjects and representations. The different theoretical developments occurring in film theory regarding issues of illusion and representation, false consciousness, and intellectuals' social roles seems to retain a long speculative lignée that we have only outlined. The fundamental tension between social matter (society, groups, individuals) and critical thought (ideology, science, utopia) underscoring most discussions has revealed the feeble equilibrium between epistemological articulations and political claims. Such a disparity present in Marx's own philosophical system has been passed not only to Marxists of different formations, whose theories of knowledge have oscillated between mere empiricism and sheer dogmatism, but also to sophisticated theories of the subject and discourse, both of which are surprisingly unable to indicate any possibility of radical social change.

[Read Giorgio Bertellini & C. Paul Sellors' "Ideology" and "Public Sphere": A Preliminary Bibliography.]

Notes:

[1] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960). The book, containing 16 essays published throughout the decade, addresses mass media, political and intellectual life, social classes and utopia in post-war America. [^]

[2] The raising skepticism about "facts of reality" was shared by other sociologists such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Edward Shils. Historians, instead, were unreceptive and polemical to the "proclamation of the end of ideology" as they had been to ideological discourses per se. See for instance H. Stuart Hughes "The End of Political Ideology," Measure 2 (Spring, 1951). On the remarkable differences between American sociologists and historians (and historiographers) see Peter Novick That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1988) 300-301. [^]

[3] Although Steiner's conceptualization is mainly focused on the "broken contract" between word and world in philosophical and linguistic phenomena, he also acknowledges similar tensions in artistic practices. See Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) especially ch.2. [^]

[4] On the articulation of such conflict see Fredric Jameson "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992) 9-34. Also, the year 1964 saw the publication of Umberto Eco's illuminating overview of the debates: Apocalittici e Integrati: Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa (Milan: Bompiani) never translated in English in its entirety. [^]

[5] Populist radicals were often the intellectual's anti-intellectuals: against established venues of critical thought (universities, institutions, societies...) and somewhat unwilling to discuss or critique cultural objects they had to blindly endorse. [^]

[6] "The epistemic sociological and philosophical paradigm for several (European) intellectuals has remained the individual, as opposed to the vulgarity of the masses (bureaucratized and mechanized society, undifferentiated mob, etc.). Little speculative effort has been spent to conceptualize a social subject. "[The theory of mass society] is central to the thinking of the principal aristocratic, Catholic, or Existentialist critics of modern society. These critics -- Ortega y Gasset, Paul Tillich, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Emil Lederer, Hannah Arendt, and others -- have been concerned less with the general conditions of freedom in society than with the freedom of the person and with the possibility, for some few persons, of achieving a sense of individual self in our mechanized society. And this is the source of their appeal" (Bell 21). [^]

[7] Without naming contemporary tropes like gender, race, and sexuality, opting instead for a more inclusive perspective, Bell denounced the dangerous and incorrect habit of generalizing the masses, especially with regards to media audiences: "What strikes one first about these varied uses of the concept of mass society is how little they reflect or relate to the complex, richly striated social relations of the real world. Take [the] example of the movie audience as 'separate, detached, and anonymous,' Presumably, a large number of individuals, because they have been subjected to similar experiences now share some common psychological reality in which the differences between individual and individual become blurred. [...] But is this so? Individuals are not tabulae rasae. They bring varying social conceptions to the same experience and go away with different responses. They may be silent, separate, detached, and anonymous while watching the movies, but afterward they talk about it with friends and exchange opinions and judgments. They are once again members of particular social groups. Would one say that several hundred or a thousand individuals home alone at night, but all reading the same book, constitute a 'mass'?" (Bell 25). [^]

[8] Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has showed how "postmodern becoming" is not analogous to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming, meant as a critical overthrowing of past facts and beliefs. Instead, such a process appears closer to what Heidegger has termed a Verwindung, that is a speculative movement that bypasses the mere succession of history (and its positivist fetish, ie. the "development") because it surpasses modern/traditional categories of truth, time, foundation or destiny. "Verwindung indicates something analogous Überwindung, or overcoming, but is distinctly different from the latter both because it has none of the characteristics of a dialectical Aufhebung and because it contains no sense of a 'leaving behind' of a past that no longer has anything to say to us. Precisely this difference between Verwindung and Überwindung can help us define in philosophical terms the 'post-' in 'post-modernism.'" Gianni Vattimo La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), English translation and introduction by Jon R. Snyder, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 164. [^]

[9] Bell 370. [^]

[10] Marx and Engels write: "Feuerbach's whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like other theorists, merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things. We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavoring to produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher...." The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur, (New York: International Publishers, 1970) 60-1. [^]

[11] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Free Press, 1992). The book is the elaboration and the extension of a previous article titled "The End of History," that Fukuyama published in The National Interest 16 (1989). [^]

[12] In this respect, historiography could be seen to be symptomatic of a philosophical decadence characterizing much of 19th Century thought. For two provocative analyses of this decadence see Matei Calinescu's critical and philosophical overview Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987) 151-224. and Barbara Spackman's literary tapestry, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 1-32. [^]

[13] For a detailed overview of the expression "posthistoire" and its intellectual history see Lutz Niethammer (in collaboration with Dirk Van Laak) Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso, 1992; originally published in Germany in 1989). Niethammer explains the different uses and appropriation of the term, from its inception with Antoine Augustin Cournot, a French philosopher of the Second Empire and originator of a technocratic programme for overcoming the limits of history manifested in daily existence. But the actual connotation came from two German intellectuals: Arnold Gehlen, "of the conservative revolution in the Third Reich and one of its last spokesmen in the Federal Republic -- a man who, in the early fifties, produced the preliminary formulations underlying the references to posthistory among postfascist intellectuals" (Niethammer 2), and Peter Brückner, a leftist radical figure of the "German autumn" in 1977, whose posthumous publications on posthistoire have been deeply influential. [^]

[14] Niethammer 9. [^]

[15] See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. II chapter XV., ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London: William Glaisher, 1909). [^]

[16] Likewise, Gorz's "decadence of the working class" reflects an affinity with Arendt's somewhat Marxist discussion of hobbies in her analysis of the consumer society. "The emancipation of labor has not resulted in an equality of this activity [playfulness, sport, art] with the other activities of the vita activa, but in its almost undisputed predominance. From the standpoint of 'making a living,' every activity unconnected with labor becomes a 'hobby'." The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 128. [^]

[17] Herbert Marcuse "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology" The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982) 139. [^]

[18] Marcuse 145. [^]

[19] Marcuse 145. [^]

[20] "Geschichte und Posthistoire," appendix to Peter Brückner, Psychologie und Geschichte ed. Axel-R. Oestmann (West Berlin, 1982) 264-266. Niethammer suggests that this essay was probably written in 1980. After Brückner's death in 1982, a folder entitled "Posthistoire" was found in his archive. It contained materials for a planned course of lectures including extracts from the works of Daniel Bell, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, and Claus Offe. [^]

[21] Interestingly, the German notion of history is expressed with the same term bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which assimilates "civil society" and "bourgeois society." [^]

[22] Vattimo also talked of secularizations with regards to a crisis of history. "[...] secularization/Verwindung would describe the course of history not as a linear progression or as decadence, but as a course of events in which emancipation is reached only by means of a radical transformation and distortion of its very contents. Thus, for instance, Nietzsche and Heidegger, or more recently Foucault, suggest that 'humanity' can be fulfilled in history only through a profound revision and transformation of the very notion of humanism. Or, to cite another example, is it not true that the scientific-technological society may be described as the absolute spirit imagined by Hegel, but in a distorted way, as Adorno has suggested? It is very likely that the idea of thought's progress and emancipation through 'critical overcoming' is closely related to a linear conception of history; when critical overcoming is 'distorted' into the notion of Verwindung, history itself can no longer appear in a linear light. History reveals its 'ironic' essence: interpretation and distortion, or dis-location, characterize not only the relation of thought to the messages of the past but also the relation of one 'epoch' to the others" (Vattimo 179-80). [^]

[23] "The irony, further for those who seek 'causes' is that the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved utopia, but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger" (Bell 374). [^]

[24] American avant-garde films often made it a point to undermine the narrative and photographic illusion embodied in mainstream film. The way in which contemporary film theory examines and reproduces this traditional dichotomy between high art and mass culture is discussed in Colin McCabe "Class of '68: Elements of an Intellectual Autobiography," in Tracking the Signifier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 11. For this reference, we are indebted to Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 156. [^]

[25] "Strategies of writing and of reading are forms of cultural resistance. Not only can they work to turn dominant discourses inside out (and show that it can be done), to undercut their enunciation and address, to unearth the archaeological stratifications on which they are built; but in affirming the historical existence of irreducible contradictions for women in discourse, they also challenge theory on its own terms, the terms of a semiotic space constructed in language, its power based on social validation and well-established that, paradoxically, the only way to position oneself outside of that discourse is to displace oneself within it -- to refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its words), even to quote (up against the grain).", Teresa De Lauretis Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 7. [^]

[26] Stuart Hall, "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2.2 (June 1985): 91-114. [^]

[27]Feminist film criticism, for instance, has had a hard time defining the female subject (initially formulated in white and heterosexual configurations) precisely because the "new subjects" claimed their own epistemic, political and aesthetic sovereignty. [^]

[28] On this point, see D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) especially ch.9. [^]

[29] Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) 65. [^]

[30] Habermas 295. [^]

[31] The question of realism and anti-realism hinges on determining the nature of truth. The realist argues that there is an objective reality that exists independent of any means to determine truth-value. Conversely, the anti-realist contends that truth cannot be determined without an ability to recognize something as true. In other words, the anti-realist relies on a relativism of sorts, whereas the realist does not. Michael Dummett, in a context quite different from ideology, offers a highly informative depiction of the stale-mate between realism and anti-realism. See "The Reality of the Past," Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978). [^]

[32] See Michèle Barrett The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) especially chapters 1 & 2. [^]

[33] Karl Marx, "Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1 vol. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973) 182, quoted in Barrett (12). [^]

[34] Barrett 13. [^]

[35] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 118. [^]

[36] Habermas 267. [^]