Market ideology is generated by the economic system itself as its necessary afterimage.

Evidence

Linguistics has a useful scheme that is unfortunately lacking in ideological analysis: it can mark a given word as either “word” or “idea” by alternating slash marks or brackets. Thus the word market, with its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for trade and merchandise, is printed as /market/; on the other hand, the concept, as it has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed «market». One thinks for a moment that this would solve so many of our problems in dealing with a subject of this kind, which is at one and the same time an ideology and a set of practical institutional problems, until one remembers the great flanking and pincer movements of the opening section of the Grundrisse, where Marx undoes the hopes and longings for simplification of the Proudhonists, who thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons. These last, Marx observes dryly, would under ongoing capitalism simply turn back into money itself, and all the previous contradictions would return in force. … So also with the attempt to separate ideology and reality: the ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary afterimage; somehow both dimensions must be registered together, in their identity as well as in their difference. They are, to use a contemporary but already outmoded language, semiautonomous; which means, if it is to mean anything, that they are not really autonomous or independent from each other, but they are not really at one with each other, either. The Marxian concept of ideology was always meant to respect and to rehearse and flex the paradox of the mere semiautonomy of the ideological concept, for example, the ideologies of the market, with respect to the thing itself mdash; or in this case the problems of market and planning in late capitalism as well as in the socialist countries today. But the classical Marxian concept (including the very word ideology, itself something like the ideology of the thing, as opposed to its reality) often broke down in precisely this respect, becoming purely autonomous and then drifting off as sheer “epiphenomenon” into the world of the superstructures, while reality remained below, the real-life responsibility of professional economists. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 570

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the /word/ vs «concept» notation and the loaded term ‘semiautonomy’ as the precise meaning of ideology’s relation to economic reality.
• XREF: The semiautonomy thesis and Marx’s Grundrisse money-coupon argument connect to the reader’s interest in falsifiability of the ‘cultural dominant’ — and to how Jameson elsewhere treats ideology as constitutive rather than superstructural.