Rancière, Ideology and Capital

Abstract

This essay was written in 1972 for the magazine Theoretical Practice. Originally it was to have been part of a general theoretical account of the relations between the economic and ideological instances in the different modes of production. This project was conceived in a ‘structuralist’ manner and was rendered obsolete by the implications of the criticisms of Rancière’s and Althusser’s theories of ideology which were to have been part of it. The text printed here omits certain portions of the original essay. In the original draft there was a long discussion of the conditions which a theory of ideology must meet. These can be summarised as follows:

• (i) That ideology must be conceived as a practice and as the product of a practice. This condition developed Althusser’s concept of ‘instances’ as the levels of articulation of a particular practice into the social totality of practices (‘practice’ was defined as the transformation of a definite raw material by the determinative action of definite means of production).

• (ii) That ideology consisted in signs and representations; these were conceived after Jakobson —; as characterised by the ‘sliding of the signifier under the signified’ — as having no originary meaning outside the process of signification in objects which that process attempts to represent.