> And Marx was not only heard to talk about
> the sociohistorical nature of objectivity (is this what you mean by 'true
> ideology', Ange?), but also about being scientific in the right regard -
> where our reasoning is not complicit, such as within a system that
> self-organises by way of a relation
> (exchange) operating behind our backs.
yeah, that's more or less it. i've mentioned before the relation between changes in the mode of production and the emergence of postmodernism, so i won't go into that again here, but i think this is actually the more interesting discussion that should in fact be the preoccupation of marxists: discerning the truth of postmodernism instead of reducing it to (what was the phrase?) an 'academic war of position'.
postone's account, which i know you've read but i post it for jim, of the changes in the way marx developed a critique of capitalism is quite interesting, so a citation, since it goes directly to the issue of the relation between ideology and truth. (a distinction between ideology and science, otoh, seems to me to be a rather neo-kantian definition of the conflict of the faculties.)
the whole problem of epistemology is the problem of a the separation and relation between the subject and object, in this case, the subject and object of knowledge, so the below should be read with that in mind for this discussion -- to put it another way, as the response to kant and the response to the rise of capitalism as an historically specific split between subject and object.
"The nature of Marx's critique of Hegel is very different in his mature theory than it had been in his early works. He no longer proceeds in the Feuerbachian manner of inverting subject and object as he had in the _Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right_ (1843); nor does he treat labour transhistorically as in the _Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_ where he argues that Hegel metaphysicized labour as the labour of the Concept. In _Capital_ (1867), Marx does not simply invert Hegel's concepts in a 'materialist' fashion. Rather, in an effort to grasp the peculiar nature of social relation in capitalism, Marx analyses the social validity for capitalist society of precisely those idealist Hegelian concepts which he earlier had condemned as mystified inversions. So, whereas in _The Holy Family_ (1845) Marx criticizes the philosophical concept of "substance" and, in particular, Hegel's understanding of the "substance" as "Subject", at the beginning of _Capital_ he himself makes use of the category of "substance". He refers to value as having a "substance", which he identifies as abstract human labour. Marx, then, no longer considers "substance" to be simply a theoretical hypostatization, but now conceives of it as an attribute of labour-mediated social relations, as expressing a determinate social reality. ... [According to Marx in _Capital_, within capitalism] "value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own...".
Marx, then, explicitly characterises capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat or humanity [as he did in earlier works]. Rather, Marx analyses it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value)."
Moishe Postone, _Time, Labour and Social Domination_, pp. 74-75.
hence, ideology is both true and untrue. the organisation of this particular truth and untruth is homologous with the structure of capital. and, uncomfortable as it is, we don't decide to say 'yes' or 'no' to ideology any more than we can decide to think outside the world that we live in. it's uncomfortable, but only by denying a materialist dialectic would we insist that there is a choice, as a matter of will, between total complicity and absolute refusal. if absolute refusal appeals to people, i'd suggest they read deleuze -- he at least attempts to do so without abandoning antagonism and materialism and without reverting to a neo-kantianism, but not without certain problems emerging. but claiming the complicity of others in order to assert one's own distance from ideology -- well, i can't help anyone with that.
Angela _________