ABSTRACT
Orthodox or traditional Marxism has always tended to view ideology as a form of false consciousness, a great lie about the world within which people live out their lives of domination and oppression. The ultimate aim of a Marxist criticism remains, as always for Frederic Jameson, the isolation and dismantling of the strategies of containment embodied in literary works, the opening up of the individual text into that hors texte or unspoken ground of intolerable contradiction that it cannot acknowledge. Classical and neoclassical economics function as strategies of containment, then, not simply through their premature closure or even through their repression of history, but through the way they accomplish this closure and repression, treating the workings of an emergent capitalism as eternal and objective economic laws. The impossibility of grasping the workings of an economic system from the inside provides the ultimate warrant for Marxist social analysis as a mode of symptomatic analysis.
