into, by examining the proximity – even the inseparable links – between
language and ideology.
In a passage of A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey suggests,
in the course of a sentence, that language and ideology are the same thing.^28
He does not linger over the point, doubtless because it is too general. I am
nevertheless going to try to give it a non-trivial meaning and ask how ideology
is linguistic in character and how language is ideological. The name of
Macherey cited here is not innocent. As Marxists are only too well aware, the
concept of ideology is highly polysemic and it is open to doubt whether
ideology constitutes anything outside of the theory that constructs its concept.
(This situation should not concern us: it is true of all ontological metaphors
and that also means ‘language’ and ‘human being’.) To speak of ideology in
non-trivial fashion is therefore first of all to state which theory of ideology
is being referred to. The one I am referring to here is the theory – or rather,
theories – of ideology to be found in the work of Louis Althusser (this
distinguishes my argument from Williams’s thesis ‘ideology is linguistic’ in
Marxism and Literature).
That ideology in the trivial sense is not only conveyed by words, but consists
in words, had already been apparent to numerous thinkers, from George
Orwell (to whom Chomsky refers in a passage I quoted in Chapter 2) to
Althusser in his first theory of ideology – the one formulated in For Marx
which suggests that ideology functions by playing on the meaning of words,
which are in a way political puns. We can even define the term in this trivial
sense by saying that it describes any situation where the words do not
correspond to the deeds or the facts. The history of colonialism and imperialism
abounds in manipulations of this kind, with colonial wars currently being
re-baptised ‘peace-keeping operations’, intervention to save a genocidal
government in Rwanda ‘humanitarian intervention’, and aggression against
Iraq and its occupation ‘liberation’ (which the ‘liberated’, out of sheer perversity,
resist with weapons in their hands), and so on. The commonest terms in our
political vocabulary, like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, are (as everyone knows)
the privileged sites of these ideological operations – a process that is not
unimportant in the current disaffection with politics in Western countries.
164 • Chapter Six
(^28) See Macherey 1978, p. 52.