Ideology and Subjectivity in Wordsworth, Althusser and Žižek

Abstract

‘The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet’, argues Jerome McGann, who sees Romantic aesthetics as the paragon of ‘false consciousness’ (91). This paper explores this critical conception in relation to William Wordsworth, showing how such a reading is influenced by Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation. Whilst Althusser insightfully develops an understanding of the dialectical relationship between subjectivity and ideology, his structuralist framework is limited. In The Prelude, Wordsworth reflects that ‘sometimes, when I think of it, I seem/Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself/And of some other being’ (2:31-3). His representation of this double consciousness, of subjectivity marked by internalised conflict, exposes the limitations of ideological totalisation in Althusser’s thought, a critique which is drawn out by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek sees subjectivity as the constitutive lack within the ‘symbolic’ order which ideology tries but necessarily fails to encompass. By reading Žižek in parallel to Wordsworth, this paper proposes that Wordsworth’s poetics, far from naturalising or reinforcing ideology, represents the structural incompleteness of ideological form, whose illusions and failures are made legible in the fractures of the poetic self. Wordsworth’s poetry is an immanent mode of critique; as he expresses in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ‘there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things’ (9-10).