Some topics need no introduction inasmuch as they are already everywhere the object of dispute or simply because their relevance becomes obvious as soon as they are identified. Others, like this one, require some preliminary account of their significance in the scheme of things, as well as an indication of how they can best be presented. Sometimes an author does this by describing his personal discovery of the subject and its importance: I will not do that here.
But as my starting point in the ideological will seem partisan for some, idiosyncratic for others, and for still others simply old-fashioned, I will need to say why Ideology is none of these things and why it subsumes everything else in culture and the superstructures, assuming the position that religion once held for the first historians and cultural theoreticians of the West. And this will initially require us to identify one of the fundamental obstacles to grasping the centrality of Ideology, namely the conviction that there are areas of life, areas of activity as well as of thought, which are nonideological.
It is an illusion most easily entertained in moments of historical stasis, or at least in places in which ideological or class struggle seems to have been contained and reduced to manageable proportions. There is a certain parallel here with the history of linguistics and in particular with that of the tropes and figures. The study of these linguistic deviations was first made possible by the seemingly obvious (and logical) fact of the existence of a literal language the distortions of which could easily be identified. As tropology advanced, however, and became more secure in the possession of its instruments and analyses, the conviction that there was such a thing as a literal language became shaken and at length disappeared, leaving in its place a more generalized conception of Representation as such which is still with us and which remains the central mystery of this field or problematic. Is it possible, then, that naïve realism should find itself confronting the same fate?
As for what will come to be recognized as ideology, the exploration of non-Western social formations produced an explanatory concept, that of Culture, generally identified with Religion, in terms of which the deviations from the norm of Western society could be described, if not exactly explained. But in the course of modernization and secularization, when the variety of social mechanisms became comprehensible in economic terms as modes of production (historical materialism), and when religions themselves became the object of secular analysis as cultural or superstructural formations, then it became possible to grasp the relationship of culture or religion with their economic context, by way of the concept of Ideology—as what the Marxist tradition called base and superstructure (terms whose relevance is not particularly affected by their overfamiliarity or their frequent misuse either).
The usefulness, then, of a generalized notion of Ideology lies in its dual capacity to combine, I will not say the dilemmas of subject and object, or soul and body, but at least the controversies between materialism and idealism that turn on the objective functioning and history of the socioeconomic mechanism on the one hand and the construction of subjectivity on the other. We must credit Louis Althusser for having made an extraordinary beginning on healing this rift, this incommensurability of explanatory codes, with his notion of ideology as a mechanism whereby the conscious (and unconscious) individual biological subject situates himself or herself within the collective social structure: ideology as a kind of unconscious cognitive mapping.1
He did not, however, pursue this investigation into the historical realm, that is to say, into the processes where the transformations of subjectivity can be seen to accompany those economic changes in the history of the modes of production; he did not, in other words, inquire into the dynamics of what we may call cultural revolution, having been chastened, perhaps, by Marx’s own explicit warning that “ideology … has no history.”2 But this famous remark, read in its original contort, can be seen to apply specifically to what we would today call the history of ideas—that is to say, a history of ideologies or other cultural symptoms studied in their own right as autonomous phenomena. Just as today we would not study capitalism without taking commodity reification and its attendant subjectivities into account, so also—except for the area of religions as such—few would undertake an examination of what we still call non-Western cultures without any consideration of the mode of production of which they are both symptomatic and constitutive at one and the same time. Ideology, however, is the watchword for resistance to such disciplinary reifications, and it stands for the unification of objective and subjective fields into a single project, which, from that standpoint of the humanistic disciplines which is ours here, can perhaps best be defined as the examination of the construction and constitution of individual subjectivities and their susceptibility to revolutionary change.
This is then the larger context in which I propose to explore allegory as a fundamental mechanism in that process, in a project that on the one hand deals with representation as such, and on the other with History. But from both these perspectives a new problem emerges, which is that of narrative (and with it, the question of literature itself).
I have elsewhere proposed that we think of the ideologeme—the “elementary cell” or smallest possible intelligible unit of ideology—as a dual structure that can be approached from either side with quite different analytic equipment.3 On the one hand, the ideologeme is an opinion (doxa is a favorite theoretical term for this cognitive or pseudocognitive version), while on the other hand it can be articulated as a narrative. Racisms are the crudest and most accessible examples of this duality: “opinions” about the races being thinly disguised fantasies that express the fears and envies of individual and collective subjects in narrative form. Political psychologists have never really been able to disentangle these twin dimensions of ideology by demonstrating the primacy of the one over the other; meanwhile, Enlightenment (insofar as one is permitted to evoke it historically as a tradition of some kind) has always presupposed the power of rational persuasion as a therapy for doxa in their cognitive forms. The roots of the narrative ideologemes in the form of this or that psychoanalytic primal fantasy have seemed a good deal less accessible, or at best, have seemed to take on purely personal and contingent forms. Althusserian analysis, however, drawing no doubt on Nietzsche fully as much as on Lacan, assumes a constitutive and well-nigh indissoluble link between the subject and narrative as such. The subject is somehow defined by its narratives of itself; and narrative in turn seems always to be wedded in one way or another to the presence of the subject, even when it is a question of the succession of “mere” objective facts.
This is where we find ourselves obliged to remember the classical opposite of the concept of doxa, namely episteme. To translate this second term simply as “knowledge” is to evade the whole confused and immemorial debate about science as such (its other possible translation). Marxism is certainly not the only philosophical system to have consecrated “science” as the way out of opinion, ideology, purely individual or idiosyncratic thinking, and the like. But I do like Althusser’s definition of science as writing that omits the place of the subject;4 and I appreciate the new representational problems to which this paradoxical formulation must inevitably give rise. Its great advantage is, of course, to have bypassed the question of truth (scientific or otherwise), or better still, to have delegated it to the existential realm, where it becomes a concept that can fight it out with older notions of “belief.”
The Althusserian formula has yet another advantage, which we can dramatize by returning to Freud’s notorious essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” an essay that most literary theorists deplore as the vulgar low point of psychoanalysis (literature as wish fulfillment) on a par with the most vulgar class-oriented Marxist criticism.
We can leave the matter of wish fulfillment, however, to the specialists in desire: what is most interesting in Freud’s thinking here is his astute observation that the writer’s fundamental problem lies not in his own wish-fulfilling fantasies, but rather in the reader’s reactions to those fantasies.5 Not only are we not interested in the wish fulfillments of other people, he tells us; the latter can strike us as positively repellent. (The relationship of this principle to political puritanism and the so-called “social issues” in American politics should be apparent.)
The author must therefore disguise his own wish fulfillments, his own personal stake in the story he is unfolding: and such mechanisms of disguise and concealment, of indirect forms of satisfaction, are at the very heart of the literary art, where they are generally obfuscated by questions of universalism, the human condition, the eternal story, and the like. The fact is, however, that this principle that Freud felt able to enunciate for literature is exactly the same as what Althusser formulated for science: the omission of the subject, the disconnecting of the individual subject from the narrative or the scientific–structural material.
Ideology is thus at the heart of all these issues: ideology not as the individual ideologeme or opinion, but rather as that intersection between the biological individual and the collective which is at stake in thinking, in literary expression, and of course in language itself (where the subject leaves its most visible mark in the shifter—the blank pronoun—that does double duty for both).6
Narrative analysis turns on the way in which ideology finds its fulfillment in temporal enactments of this dual subjectivity; what is called Ideologiekritik has for the most part concerned itself with the class content of its cognitive forms (as for example in Barthes’s classic Mythologies). But insofar as class becomes visible and is affirmed in a self-conscious way (as a class-for-itself), it is perhaps as repellent for other people (other classes) as the individual wish fulfillment was on the personal level. Both involve exclusions: the individual, by way of that brand he leaves on his psychological private property, on his ideational cattle (as William James famously put it),7 excludes everyone else by definition; collective self-definition (by gender and race as well as by social class) excludes the other collectivities. In much the same way, then, the secret of class or group identification must be concealed; and, finally (coming around to our central topic here), it is allegory that often achieves this concealment most effectively, for allegory delivers its message by way of concealing it.
It is a process that can initially be dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like—a whole materialist zone of that nonmaterialist collective dimension called language—offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (or ideologemes) are constructed.8 For just as words are not the basic units of meaning, but rather syntax and sentences, so also there are no such things as ideas, if one understands by that word distinct and unrelated ideational entities: ideas are rather always elements in more complex signifying systems, whose most obvious mechanism—the binary opposition—is only one of the relationships that organize that cluster of themes we call a meaning. We have become accustomed to the notion that definition is negation, that identity is called into being by difference (and vice versa), and that what looks like an individual or autonomous meaning or idea always somehow includes its opposite. But as the Greimas square teaches us, a term has two opposites: its most vital and antagonistic polar opposition, and then that more passive and all-encompassing, uninteresting opposite or negation which is simply everything it is not. But these two very different kinds of oppositional terms then return on their starting point to transform it in its turn into two distinct meanings; and with that the whole complex dynamic of an ideologeme or signifying system is set in motion.
Yet it remains a static and unproductive motion, turning on itself very much like the rotation of the Greimas square, producing its various terms and identities in a revolving sequence, which marches in place without moving. It is at this point that the other face of ideology demands attention, the narrative one, in which the ideologeme in question is pressed into service of a properly ideological narrative. Which comes first, the narrative or the ideological “concept”? It is a very ancient question, if not an unresolvable one: thus, the Talmudic alternation between Halakhah and Haggadah (the Law and the Example) distantly reproduces this opposition,9 as does the classic anthropological debate about the relative priority of myth or ritual; or indeed the more contemporary structural distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic. It is, however, a tension far more central to theology than to philosophy, insofar as the traditional vocation of the latter lies in the production of concepts as such, consigning narrative to such incidental uses as the Platonic myth or the contemporary ethical example or casus.
In theology, however, there is always a story to be dealt with—if nothing else, the story of Creation itself. The negotiation between this or that fundamental narrative or mythic history and its meaning of doctrinal content becomes therefore a far more significant field of debate and argumentation. This is why the allegorical process, which is in question here, receives its first impetus and its methodological development from the Talmudic tradition, and later on the Church Fathers, rather than from the philosophical schools that preceded them and on which they drew. My own use of the patristic and medieval system of the four levels10 (explained in more detail in Chapter 1) can therefore be justified by this Benjaminian priority of theology over philosophy in narrative matters; and it is a scheme that will serve us well in ideological analysis as well. For the four levels essentially exhaust the various terrains on which ideology must perform its work. The first, literal or historical, level stands as the matter at hand, the thing demanding analysis—whether historical event (as in the Scriptures), text, idea, political debate, personality, ethical problem—whatever draws us up short as individuals and demands reflection and commentary.
The second allegorical or mystical level is then the secret or hidden meaning of that initial text, and this meaning is at one with the allegorical method deployed in order to reveal it (in much the same way as for Ibn Khaldun the other religions have separated revelation and miracle; only in Islam is the revelation—the Quran—itself the miracle).11 We need not shy away from the use of the word mystical in this respect, for it can serve to remind us that Ideologiekritik is positive as well as negative and draws on a whole doctrine of group consciousness (asabiyya),12 which is as restorative and ontological as the practice of suspicion and deconstruction with which Paul Ricoeur originally associated it.13 The Marxist practice of ideological analysis is in other words also Utopian and draws up into the light not only all those features of class consciousness we wish to avoid thinking about, but also the thoughts and visions (wish fulfillments) that are designed to replace or displace them; it is a practice of allegorical enlargement rather than one of reduction, as its less consequential critics have always liked to maintain.
That enlargement will then, in the fourfold scheme of things, deploy the two prolongations of the initial interpretation, the two successive and related levels of individual and collective experience and history. What the medieval thinkers considered the moral level, or that of conversion and the salvation of the individual soul, we might well wish to interpret in terms of existential experience, the construction of subjectivity or the psychoanalytic. But just as in theology individual salvation is ultimately inseparable from collective salvation, so also for us today, and despite the distortions inevitably developed by an individualist consumer-oriented society, the very thought of the destiny of a biological individual is inseparable from that of the future of the species, in whatever collective form one chooses to imagine that. The final or anagogical level, therefore, classically reserved for the Last Judgment, is that of a kind of “political unconscious,” that is, an often unconscious or merely implicit narrative of History as such, a collective and political narrative always latent in conceptions of our own personal destinies.
The terminology of the levels is useful in more than one way. Its principal convenience lies, of course, in the graphic and well-nigh visual way in which it permits an inventory of possible interpretations and as it were a concentration of a swarm of options into a few basic categories or reference points. The gaps between these zones, however, merit their own philosophical comment, for they constitute the empty spaces across which the attractions and repulsions (or identity and difference) pass. Such gaps thereby offer a convenient figure (in the absence of figuration) for the identification of incommensurables, as well as their differentiation. This is then the place to deploy a terminology I will not use frequently in what follows, but which must always be kept in mind as an interpretive resource and possibilities. For the gaps between the levels are the place in which libidinal investment takes place (to use a term first developed by Jean-François Lyotard): this concept designates a transfer of vital energies and of an almost obsessional attention from its source to another, less richly nourished area; or, if you prefer, and as the case may be, a distraction of one form of libidinal immediacy from its initial object to a less threatening or dangerous one. Such are the strategies and tactics of desire, as it seeks its satisfaction in what Freud might have called indirect means and byways: and interpretation, as the appropriation of an object of desire, quickly relearns the methods of its original nature. For ideology can also without much difficulty be transferred into the currently popular language of desire, these complex interplays and energy exchanges themselves offering an allegorical system of their own:
terminologies of Ideology (the collective)
terminologies of Desire (the individual)
interpretive codes
textual objects
(It will be objected that the very terminology of “investment” binds this particular model to a distinct historical social system. No doubt: but its displacement from one level to another as greed or social status are systemically transformed into different functions, and as futurity itself is modified, serves to foreground the analytic and historical uses of the allegorical framework.)
That these four allegorical levels can harbor many more implicit narratives—those of the material institutions, for example—is unquestionable, particularly in a highly differentiated society like our own. That the levels interact with one another in what are sometimes surprising and unexpected ways must also be foreseen, and I have borrowed Felix Guattari’s term transversality14 to designate particular examples of this process. That the levels can change places, and the text shift position into that of its own commentary, while the commentary then becomes a kind of text in its own right—that is also to be expected in a secular society in which nothing is endowed with indisputable centrality, and a multiplicity of interpretive options is virtually guaranteed in advance, depending on what counts as an event, a reality, or a text. With transversality, then, Guattari rewires the loose ends of the Deleuzian rhizome.
(This would be a moment for a digression—which I will only partially resist—on the dependence of the concept of transversality on the Deleuzian notion of the sedimentary levels or rhizomatic strands or lines of flight: these outline the program for a multiple set of parallel histories without any “ultimately determining instance” and therefore ultimately find their source in that war on Marxism or totality declared by Jean-François Lyotard. The multiple, yet somehow parallel but unevenly dated layer-chapters of Mille plateaux, are an extraordinary exercise in this aesthetic solution, while Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History more openly betrays the parallelism, whose realization could not, however, be completed without the reunifying cross-flashes of transversality and reidentification.)
These allegorical propositions are hard to argue in any systematic way. The first chapter takes on the fundamental alternative to the fourfold system proposed here, namely the system of three allegorical levels that flourished in Alexandria around much the same time. This is not some mere numerological hobbyhorse but allows us to make some basic judgments on concrete interpretations as such, in particular, on those which promote what I would be willing to call the bad allegories of humanism and of the history of ideas (particularly when the latter is based on science). All are tripartite allegorical systems that with a little attention denounce themselves.
There follows a chapter on the historical concepts of the emotions, which are themselves allegorical systems and fundamental mechanisms in the construction of subjectivities: the essential theme here is, however, the relationship of such systems to the dimensions of their respective social formations and in particular to the forms of otherness to which they give demographic access: something particularly relevant in the era of globalization.
At this point, several chapters compare the multiple meanings of nonallegorical works (Hamlet, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony) with the operations of officially allegorical structures (in Spenser, Dante, and Goethe’s Faust). The aim is clearly not one of some liberal coexistence of interpretations but rather the structural mechanisms whereby the works either solicit multiple and incompatible readings or negotiate those already institutionally in place.
This is then the moment to offer a contemporary commentary on an older essay of mine that has raised a good deal of controversy: one dealing with national allegory as a form in which emergent groups find expression at the same time that they promote it.15 The central category here, and in a good deal of my work generally, is the one already alluded to above: what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya, or group or collective consciousness. It is to my mind the most basic political concept of all, both theoretically and practically; and allegory is one of the vehicles by which it can be tested and measured.
Finally, it becomes appropriate to confront the seemingly opposing realities of allegory as a literary structure (and even, in some cases, a literary genre) and allegoresis, as a conflict of interpretations that has no particular structural basis. The findings of our chapter on emotions will be useful at this point, in mapping an analogous transition from emotion to affect; while postmodernity itself determines a shift from personification to process-oriented allegory, which demands a parallel critical and theoretical reorientation.
But there runs through the following chapters another perhaps less apparent argument, which may also be obscured by their length and their heterogeneous content. That argument follows population as its materialist theme, and can be said to propose a correlation, if not exactly a causal determination, between number and genre or structure. Allegory is not exactly a genre, but its initial existence as a fourfold structure certainly reflects the multiple classes and strata of the Roman empire, just as the Greek system of emotions reflects the far more limited dimensions and class structure of the Greek city-state. One of the stories the second chapter, on named emotions, tells is then the adjustment of a local culture to the dimensions of a universal political form.
The chapter on Hamlet does not reflect that kind of transition, but rather the contradictions of monarchy and of its attempt to resolve the problem of succession, just as the chapter on Spenser suggests the bewildering overlap of different kinds of space in an emergent maritime system of colonial control. Dante’s fundamental structure is shown to project that attempt to think together the moral and spatial systems embodied in the struggle between pope and emperor implicit in that medieval alternative to kingship and the nation-state, which was the idea of empire itself: while Goethe’s work can be grasped as that unsuccessful alternative to a national capitalism that was the “enlightened despotism” of a disintegrating feudal system. Empire in all these contexts means a political program designed to house enormous and multiple populations. It is then not surprising that its current form, globalization, should have been rebaptized Empire by some of its leading theorists, or that its culture should bear the marks of an increasingly abstract and quasi-statistical exchange system which can only conceptualize according to quantitative categories (in our final chapter, maximalism and minimalism).
This underground theme—the pressure of population on form and thought—might well bear as its motto a remark of Peter Sloterdijk quoted in Chapter 5: “people today are not prepared to coexist consciously with a billion other subjects.”
I must finally thank Wendy Weiher and Eric Bulson for indispensable help in preparing Allegory and Ideology, which constitutes the second volume of the Poetics of Social Forms.