Encyclopaedia, or: the Pragmatics of Literature

As the reader may have noted, I am a late follower of Althusser’s theory of ideology. But this position is paradoxical: the concepts of ISA and interpellation have survived (I am not alone in my predicament); not so the concept of ideology, which savours of the 1970s and is long past its prime. Indeed, my only use of the term, when I am not straightforwardly glossing Althusser, is as an adjective in the compound phrase ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’. There is, I think, good reason for this. The concept as used in our culture constitutively hesitates between two acceptations. On the one hand it denotes a body of belief, which is its original meaning in the works of the French ideologues and the banal meaning it still has in contemporary sociology — Althusser’s ‘system of representations’ (in Pour Marx) belongs to this acceptation.