action alone, that is abstract . . . the abstractness of that action cannot be noted when it happens because the consciousness of its agents is taken up with their business and with the empirical appearance of things which pertain to their use. One could say that the abstractness of their action is beyond realization by the actors because their very consciousness stands in the way. Were the abstractness to catch their minds their action would cease to be exchange and the abstraction would not arise. 12
This misrecognition brings about the fissure of the consciousness into I practical' and 'theoretical': the proprietor partaking in the act of exchange proceeds as a 'practical solipsist': he overlooks the universal, sociosynthetic dimension of his act, reducing it to a casual encounter of atomized individuals in the market. This 'repressed' social dimension of his act emerges thereupon in the form of its contrary -- as universal Reason turned towards the observation of nature (the network of categories of 'pure reason' as the conceptual frame of natural sciences).
The crucial paradox of this relationship between the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the 'consciousness' of it is that -- to use again a concise formulation by Sohn-Rethel -- 'this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence': the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants -- if we come to 'know too much', to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.
This is probably the fundamental dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality; it is, rather, this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' -- 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence -- that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological' is not the false consciousness' of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by false consciousness'. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom' only in so far as its logic escapes him -- the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.
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