ABSTRACT
The conception of the political unconscious developed in the preceding pages has tended to distance itself, at certain strategic moments, from those implacably polemic and demystifying procedures traditionally associated with the Marxist practice of ideological analysis. It is now time to confront the latter directly and to spell out such modifications in more detail. The most influential lesson of Marx-the one which ranges him alongside Freud and Nietzsche as one of the great negative diagnosticians of contemporary culture and social life-has, of course, rightly been taken to be the lesson of false consciousness, of class bias and ideological programming, the lesson of the structural limits of the values
and attitudes of particular social classes, or in other words of the constitutive relationship between the praxis of such groups and what they conceptualize as value or desire and project in the form of culture. In a splendidly argued confrontation with Marxism, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has attempted to demonstrate that it is by its very philosophical structure locked into an approach to culture which must thus remain functional or instrumental in the broadest sense.1 Given the Marxian orientation toward the reading or demystification of superstructures in terms of their base, or relations of production, even the most sophisticated Marxian analyses of cultural texts must, according to Sahlins, necessarily always presuppose a certain structural functionality about culture: the latter will always “ultimately” (if not far more immediately) be grasped as the instrument, witting or unwitting, of class domination, legitimation, and social mystification. Sahlins is untroubled by the paradox that Marx himself reserved his most brilliant polemic onslaughts for the classical form taken by an instrumental theory of culture in his own time, namely utilitarianism; nor does Sahlins seem aware that his own targets-economism, technological determinism, the primacy of the forces of production-are also those that have been subjected to powerful critiques by a range of contemporary Marxisms which regard them as deviations from the authentic Marxist spirit. It may, however, readily be admitted that what he calls the instrumentalization of culture is a temptation or tendency within all Marxisms, without, for all that, being a necessary and fatal consequence.
