“A Picture Held Us Captive….” Marx, Wittgenstein and the “Paradox of Ideology”

This paper is an attempt to rethink and reformulate Marx’s concept of ideology from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s critique of language. We find a classical formulation of Marx’s concept of ideology in German Ideology, in which Marx makes an analogy between ideology and camera obscura. I call a paradox of ideology a traditional difficulty related to Marx’s concept of ideology: on the one hand, it reveals a falsity (“reversion”) of the picture we see through ideology, and on the other, it postulates the idea of a pure (“not reversed”) view of reality that can be seen from the proletariat’s position. I use Wittgenstein’s concepts of “perspicuous representation” and “aspect change” to demonstrate the possibility of thinking about the critique of ideology that could be free of Marx’s dogmatic assumptions concerning the role of a privileged subject and economic reductionism. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how the critique of ideology can be still useful for critical education.