文章从话语“合法性”的理论视域入思，结合当代社会文化结构转型与话语生产机制的嬗变，考察审美意识形态理论从“合法性”生成、固化到陷入“合法化”危机的历史运演逻辑。审美意识形态理论形成于20世纪80年代，其话语结构、属性与功能均带有明显的“现代性”症候。随着80年代的终结、“现代性”的断裂、社会文化结构转型与话语生产机制的嬗变，审美意识形态理论作为一种“现代性”话语范式，最终陷入理论阐释的焦虑与贫困。文章在反思审美意识形态理论“合法化”危机的同时，亦对其做出了适度的话语修正。

This paper starts its investigation from the perspective of discourse legitimacy with respect to the structural transformation of contemporary social culture and the transfiguration of the mechanism of discourse production. It tries to trace the working logic underlying the historical development of the theory of aesthetic ideology and map out how its legitimacy is produced, ossified and trapped into crisis. The theory of aesthetic ideology was formed in the 1980s, and this paper takes its discursive structure, attribute and function as obvious symptoms of "modernity." Due to the fracture of "modernity," the transformation of socio-cultural structure and the transfiguration of discourse production mechanism after the 1980s, the theory as part of the discourse paradigm of "modernity" slipped into anxiety and poverty of theoretical interpretation. The paper reflects on the crisis of the legitimacy and offers some discourse modification to theory of aesthetic ideology.