image for the cover of the weekly, has something to do with what he calls
‘French imperiality’. The historical distance allows us to grasp the relevance
of his example with the utmost clarity. This image is informed by an implicit
slogan – ‘we must defend the French empire’ – which, on the eve of
decolonisation, is a dramatic irony. It might therefore be said that connotation
is the ideological aura of language: not a superfluous addition, but an essential
aspect of its functioning. We even come to suspect that the distinction between
denotation and connotation, like the distinction between the literal and the
metaphorical, is an ideological distinction.
The concept of ‘ideosphere’ features in Barthes’s course at the Collège de
France devoted to ‘le neutre’.^36 The term is created from ‘ideology’ and aims
to replace it, or, rather, to make explicit the idea that ‘all ideology for me is
only language: it is a discourse, a type of discourse’.^37 In Barthes, ideology
has a rather different meaning from Althusser ’s. For him, the term is declined
in the plural: there is not a single structure, outside of history; there are
systems of ideas and these systems are in no way independent of language.
The concept of ideosphere states this dependency. With this concept, which,
in reality, signals an exit from the Marxist tradition of thinking about ideology,
but which strongly suggests that there are no thoughts and no ‘ideas’ without
language, the copula that separates ‘language’ and ‘ideology’ in the two
aspects of my thesis becomes fully reversible: ideology is wholly linguistic
and language is wholly ideological. This becomes apparent when we consider
the characteristics assigned to the ideosphere by Barthes (the distance from
Marxism will likewise become apparent): the ideosphere is plural (there are
always several and the question arises as to whether reference to a ‘dominant
ideology’ still makes sense); it determines a doxa; it is eponymous, in that it
has an attributable author (Freud and Marx are the names of creators of
ideospheres); it ‘sets’ like mayonnaise and it sticks like chewing-gum, for it
is bound up with error (we see how this differs from the Althusserian theory:
the ideosphere is illusion, not allusion); it involves a pathos(it is the object of
an addiction); it passes itself off as nature (as did myth formerly); its action
is regulatory, constraining for the subject’s thinking; it serves as a relay between
power and the individual; it functions by violence and is transmitted by
170 • Chapter Six
(^36) See Barthes 2002, p. 122 ff.
(^37) Barthes 2002, p. 122.