ABSTRACT
Frank Kermode In the postmodern “history-like,” the ideological and the aesthetic have turned out to be inseparable. The self-implicating paradoxes of historiographic metafiction, for instance, prevent any temptation to see ideology as that which only others fall prey to. What postmodern theory and practice has taught is less that “truth” is illusory than that it is institutional, for we always act and use language in the context of politicodiscursive conditions (Eagleton 1986, 168). Ideology both constructs and is constructed by the way in which we live our role in the social totality (Coward and Ellis 1977, 67) and by the way we represent that process in art. Its fate, however, is to appear as natural, ordinary, common sense. Our consciousness of ourselves is usually, therefore, uncriticized because it is familiar, obvious, transparent (Althusser 1969, 144).
