Karl Marx's theory of ideology is probably best seen as part of his more general theory of alienation, expounded in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and elsewhere. In certain social conditions, Marx argues, human powers, products and processes escape from the control of human subjects and come to assume an apparently autonomous existence. Estranged in this way from their agents, such phenomena then come to exert an imperious power over them, so that men and women submit to what are in fact products of their own activity as though they are an alien force. The concept of alienation is thus closely linked to that of 'reification' - for if social phenomena cease to be recognizable as the outcome of human projects, it is understandable to perceive them as material things, and thus to accept their existence as inevitable.

The theory of ideology embodied in Marx and Engels's The German Ideology (1846) belongs with this general logic of inversion and alienation. If human powers and institutions can undergo this process, then so can consciousness itself. Consciousness is in fact bound up with social practice; but for the German idealist philosophers whom Marx and Engels have in their sights, it becomes separated from these practices, fetishized to a thing-in-itself, and so, by a process of inversion, can be misunderstood as the very source and ground of historical life. If ideas are grasped as autonomous entities, then this helps to naturalize and dehistoricize them; and this for the early Marx is the secret of all ideology:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. - real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. This is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process—Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

The advance here over the Enlightenment philosophes is plain. For those thinkers, an 'ideology' would help to dispel errors bred by passion, prejudice and vicious interests, all of which blocked the clear light of reason. This strain of thought passes on to nineteenth-century positivism and to Emile Durkheim, in whose Rules of Sociological Method (1895) ideology means among other things allowing preconceptions to tamper with our knowledge of real things. Sociology is a 'science of facts', and the scientist must accordingly free himself of the biases and misconceptions of the layperson in order to arrive at a properly dispassionate viewpoint. These ideological habits and predispositions, for Durkheim as for the later French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, are innate to the mind; and this positivist current of social thought, true to its Enlightenment forebears, thus delivers us a psychologistic theory of ideology. Marx and Engels, by contrast, look to the historical causes and functions of such false consciousness, and so inaugurate the major modern meaning of the term whose history we are tracing. They arrive at this' view hard on the heels of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose The Essence of Christianity (1841) sought for the sources of religious illusion in humanity's actual life conditions, but in a notably dehistoricizing way. Marx and Engels were not in fact the first thinkers to see consciousness as socially determined: in different ways, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Condorcet had arrived at this view before them.

If ideas are at the very source of historical life, it is possible to imagine that one can change society by combatting false ideas with true ones; and it is this combination of rationalism and idealism which Marx and Engels are rejecting. For them, social illusions are anchored in real contradictions, so that only by the practical activity of transforming the latter can the former be abolished. A materialist theory of ideology is thus inseparable from a revolutionary politics. This, however, involves a paradox. The critique of ideology claims at once that certain forms of consciousness are false and that this falsity is somehow structural and necessary to a specific social order. The falsity of the ideas, we might say, is part of the 'truth' of a whole material condition But the theory which identifies this falsehood therefore under- cuts itself at a stroke, exposing a situation which simply as a theory it is powerless to resolve. The critique of ideology, that is to say, is arthe same moment the critique of the critique of ideology. Moreover, ir is not as though ideology critique proposes to put something true in place of the falsity. In one sense, this critique retains something of a rationalist or En- lightenment structure: truth, or theory, will shed light on false conceptions. But it is anti-rationalist in so far as what it then proposes is not a set of true conceptions, but just the thesis that all ideas, true or false, are grounded in practical social activity, and more particularly in the contradictions which that activity generates.

More problems then inevitably follow. Does this mean that true ideas would be ideas faithful to practical social activity? Or can their truth or falsehood be ascertained independently of this? Are not the illusions of bourgeois society in some sense actually true to its practices? If they are rationalizations of contradictions to which those practices give rise, are not such misconceptions indeed rooted in the 'real life-process', rather than idly autonomous of it? Or is the point that their very autonomy is itself socially determined? Is this autonomy merely apparent—a misperception on the part of human subjects—or is it real? Would true ideas be not just those which corresponded to actual practices, but those which corresponded to 'true' practices? And what would it mean to say of a practice, as opposed to a meaning, that it was true or raise?

There are several difficulties with the formulations in the passage quoted from The German Ideology. For one thing, the whole vocabulary of 'reflexes' and 'echoes' smacks strongly of mechanical. materialism. What distinguishes the human animal is that it moves in a world of meaning; and these meanings are constitutive of its activities, not secondary to them. Ideas are internal to our social practices, not mere spin-offs from them. Human existence, as Marx recognizes elsewhere, is purposive or 'intentional' existence; and these purposive conceptions form the inner grammar of our practical life, without which it would be mere physical motion. The term 'praxis' has been often enough used by the Marxist tradition to capture this indissolubility of action and significance. In general, Marx and Engels recognize this well enough; but in their zeal to worst the idealists they risk ending up here simply inverting them, retaining a sharp duality between 'consciousness' and 'practical activity' but reversing the causal relations between them. Whereas the Young Hegelians whom they are assailing regard ideas as the essence of material life, Marx and Engels just stand this opposition on its head. But the antithesis can always be partly deconstructed, since 'consciousness' figures, so to speak, on both sides of the equation. Certainly there can be no 'real life-process' without it.

The problem may spring from the fact that the term 'consciousness' here is being pressed into double service. It can mean 'mental life' in general; or it can allude more specifically to particular historical systems of beliefs (religious, juridicial, political and so on), of the kind Marx will later come to ascribe to the so-called 'superstructure' in contrast to the economic 'base'. If one is thinking of consciousness in this second sense, as well-articulated structures of doctrine, its opposition to 'practical activity' becomes rather more plausible. It belongs to the Marxist case that such superstructures are indeed estranged from their practical, productive 'base', and the causes of this estrangement inhere in the very nature of that material activity. This, however, will not entirely meet the point, since for all their alienated character such ideological discourses still powerfully condition our real-life practices. Political, religious. sexual and other ideological idioms are part of the way we 'live' our material conditions, not just the bad dream. or disposable effluence of the infrastructure. But the case holds even less if we keep to the broader sense of consciousness, since without it there would be no distinctively human activity at all. Factory labour is not a set of material practices plus a set of notions about it; without certain embodied intentions, meanings, interpretations, it would not count as factory labour at all.

It is necessary, then, to distinguish two rather different cases which The German Ideology threatens to conflate. On the one hand, there is a general materialist thesis that ideas and material activity are inseparably bound up together, as against the idealist tendency to isolate,and privilege the former. On the other hand, there is the historical materialist argument that certain historically specific forms of consciousness become separated out from productive activity, and can best be explained in terms of their functional role in sustaining it. In The German Ideology, it is occasionally as though Marx and Engels illicitly fold the latter case into the former. viewing 'what men and women actually do' as a kind of 'base', and their ideas about what they do as a sort of 'superstructure'. But the relation between my act of frying an egg and my conceptions about it is not the same as the relation between the economic activities of capitalist society and the rhetoric of parliamentary democracy. One might add that thinking, writing and imagining are of course just as much part of the 'real life-process' as digging ditches and subverting military juntas; and that if the phrase 'real life-process' is in this sense disablingly narrow in Marx and Engels's text it is also unhelpfully amorphous, undifferentiatedly spanning the whole of 'sensuous practice'.

At one point in their work, Marx and Engels would seem to conjure a chronological difference out of this distinction between two meanings of 'consciousness', when they remark that 'the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.' What they have in mind here is the momentous historical event of the-division of mental and manual labour. Once an economic surplus permits a minority of 'professional' thinkers to be released from the exigencies of labour, it becomes possible for consciousness to 'flatter' itself that it is in fact independent of material reality. 'From now on', Marx and Engels observe, 'consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.' So it is as though one epistemological case holds true for societies predating the division of mental and manual labour, while another is appropriate to all subsequent history. This cannot of course be what they mean: the 'practical' consciousness of priests and philosophers will continue to be 'directly interwoven' with their material activity. even if the theoretical doctrines they produce are loftily aloof from it. The important point, however, is that the schism between ideas and social reality explored by the text is, so to speak, a dislocation internal to social reality itself, in specific historical conditions. It may be an illusion to believe that ideas are the essence of social life; but it is not an illusion to believe that they are relatively autonomous of it, since this is itself a material fact with particular social determinations. And once this condition has set in, it provides the real material basis for the former ideological error. It is not just that ideas have floated free of social existence, perhaps on account of the hubris of a handful of intellectuals; on the contrary, this 'externality' of ideas to the material life-process is itself internal to that process.

The German Ideology appears at once to argue that consciousness is indeed always 'practical' consciousness, so that to view it in any other light is an idealist illusion; and that ideas are sheerly secondary to material existence. It therefore needs a kind of imagery which equivocates between seeing consciousness as indissociable from action, and regarding it as separable and 'inferior'; and it finds this in the language of 'reflexes', 'echoes' and 'sub- limates'. A reflex is in one sense part of what it reflects, as my image in the mirror is in some sense me, and at the same time a secondary, 'second best' phenomenon. Why Marx and Engels want to relegate consciousness to this second-hand status is dear enough; for if what we think we are doing is actually constitutive of what we are doing, if our conceptions are internal to our practice, what room does this leave for false consciousness? Is it enough to ask George Bush what he thinks, he is doing to arrive at a satisfactory account of his role within advanced capitalism? Marx and Engels see well enough that human agents are often for good historical reasons self-deceived as to the significance of their own actions; I have no unfailingly privileged access to the meaning of my own behaviour, and you can sometimes supply me with a more cogent explanation of it than I can produce myself. But it does not follow from this that there is something called 'what we do' which is independent of meanings altogether. For an action to be a human practice, it must incarnate meaning; but its more general significance is not necessarily the one the agent ascribes to it. When Marx and Engels speak of setting out from 'real, active men' rather than from what these 'men' say, imagine and conceive, they sail perilously close to a naive sensuous empiricism which fails to grasp that there is no 'real life-process' without interpretation. To attempt to 'suspend' this realm of meaning in order the better to examine 'real' conditions would be like killing a patient to examine more conveniently the circulation of her blood. As Raymond Williams has commented. this 'objectivist fantasy' presumes that real life conditions 'can be known independently of language and of historical records'. It is not, Williams observes, as though there is 'first material social life and then, at some temporal or spatial distance, consciousness and "its" products ... consciousness and its products are always, though in variable forms, parts of the material social process itself'. Marx and Engels's hypnotic insistence on terms like 'real', 'sensuous, 'actual', 'practical', briskly and scornfully contrasted with mere 'ideas', makes them a sound a little like F.R. Leavis on a bad day. And just as they cannot ignore interpretation in the case of the men and women they discuss, neither can they overlook it in their own case. For although they claim in empiricist vein to have no premises of their own other than that of starting from 'real men', it is of course clear enough that what counts for them as real is by no means innocent of theoretical assumptions. In this sense too, the 'real life-process' is bound up with 'consciousness': that of the analysts themselves.